'He Had a Soldier's Heart'

“The D-Day invasion of Normandy (Operation Overlord) was the largest combined land and sea operation conducted since the invasion of Greece by King Xerxes of Persia in spring 480 BC.”

Leave it to a classicist to put so momentous an event in perspective. Victor Davis Hanson is a prolific author of military histories, including A War like No Other: How the Athenians and Spartans Fought the Peloponnesian War (2005). The passage at the top is from The Second World Wars (2017). On June 6, 1944, more than 160,000 American, British and Canadian troops, supported by a thousand warships, almost six-thousand supply vessels and landing craft, and 13,000 aircraft, landed on a fifty-mile stretch of German-fortified French coastline. Some nine-thousand Allied soldiers were killed or wounded in the operation. On Omaha Beach alone, the Allies suffered more than 2,400 casualties. Hanson continues:

“It dwarfed all of history’s star-crossed beach landing from Marathon to Gallipoli (April 1915). Normandy would serve as a model for large subsequent American seaborne operations from Iwo Jima (February 1945) and Okinawa (April 1945) to Inchon (September 1950). It made all prior iconic cross-Channel invasions in either direction—Caesar’s (55 BC), William the Conqueror’s (1066), Henry V’s (1415), or the 1809 British landing in Flanders—seem minor amphibious operations in comparison.”

On the first day, along with the Allied troops who landed on the beach, another 25,000 parachuted behind the German lines. Hanson reminds us that the nearly 200,000 sailors took part in the Normandy invasion, outnumbering all the troops who landed on June 6. Hanson writes:

“Within a month, a million Allied troops had landed and the vision of the original planners of the Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force entering Germany was now becoming clearer. It no longer mattered whether Hitler’s Panzer reserves were immediately deployed at the beachheads or sent in from the rear: Allied air superiority attacked them anywhere they moved, even down to the individual motorcyclist and foot soldier.”     

An eyewitness to the invasion was A.J. Liebling, who observed the landing on Omaha Beach from an LCIL (Landing Craft, Infantry, Large). An artillery shell killed three of its crew members. Of the ten landing craft in the group carrying Liebling, four were sunk before their cargo of one-hundred forty men each could be unloaded. Liebling remained shipboard and didn’t make it to shore until June 9. He describes the experience in “For Bunny Rigg -- Cross-Channel Trip” (Mollie and Other War Pieces, 1964). Writing of a sergeant named Angelatti from Cleveland, assigned to a tank crew, Liebling says:

“The tanks had been headed for that beach and should have helped knock out the pillboxes. It hadn’t been the tankmen’s fault that the waves had swamped them, but the sergeant said disconsolately, `If we hadn’t fucked up, maybe those other guys wouldn’t have been killed.’ He had a soldier’s heart.”