D-Day . . . . . . Allied invasion of the European Continent. We take it for granted today. It happened, it was successful, so it must have been a no-brainer. Not quite. There were plenty of things that could have gone wrong. A lot of things did go wrong, but not enough things, and not so wrong that it caused the failure of the operation. DDE put his career, the war, his reputation, and the lives of a bunch of Americans, English, Canadian, and other Allied troops at risk. The landing scene from Saving Private Ryan is one of the most emotional things I have ever seen on a screen. I have only seen it once, because it isn't any fun to watch. The scene where the German machine-gunner kills every soldier who disembarks from the landing craft is one of many that sticks in my mind.
Casualty figures are all over the place, depending upon what source one uses. A recently published figure, revised sharply upward from the old "official" numbers, is about 4400 Allied dead, of which about 2500 of those were Americans. The exact number isn't so important, I guess.
What is important is that the free nations of this world were willing to put it all on the line to preserve that freedom. Would we/they do it today? Then, the enemy was well defined and easy to identify. Fascism was the ideology, and Germany represented that ideology. The Japanese were not like us, and anyhow, they attacked us first. It was an easy thing to see, the "enemy." Things are much more nebulous today. The enemy isn't nearly as easy to identify. Is it a religion, an ideology, a race, a country, or a region? I think I know, but it seems that it isn't nearly so easy to convince enough Americans and other Western nations, "people like us," so to speak, who the enemy is. We have to be tolerant as well as politically correct, don't you know.
Anyhow, here is a salute to that generation of Americans and our Allies who knew the enemy, searched them out on their own soil, and defeated them.
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