Guest column: D-Day — Could America lead allies today if needed?

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By: Andrew Cohen

There’s a scene early in The Longest Day, Hollywood’s celebrated portrait of D-Day on June 6, 1944. Eighty years after the greatest amphibious invasion in history, it revisits the moment everything changed.

To the opening notes of Beethoven’s 5th Symphony, the camera alights on a concrete artillery bunker above Omaha Beach, where the Americans will attack, the Germans will defend, and thousands will die. It’s dawn — still, dim and foreboding.

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The Germans peer through the long, narrow opening. They scan the gunmetal waters with binoculars. This is the watch that ends the night — and ultimately, the war, too.

Maj. Werner Pluskat gazes out, steps away, rubs his neck. All routine. Then he looks again. He gasps. There, like the silhouettes of a developing photograph, he sees the shape of an armada. Through the mists, just over the horizon, steaming his way. Terrifying.

“My God!” he declares. “It’s the invasion! There must be 5,000 ships out there!”

The film, released in black and white in 1962, doesn’t convey the crimson tide washing Omaha Beach. For that, watch Saving Private Ryan, released in 1998, the most graphic portrayal of the chaos and carnage.

The Americans drove Operation Overlord. They supplied most of the arms and ships, led it, and took the highest casualties on Omaha and Utah beaches (Canada and Britain landed more soldiers on three beaches with fewer losses).

Without the Americans, though, the Normandy landings, the subsequent liberation of France, and the defeat of Germany in 1945 would not have happened. More than anyone, they were responsible for winning the war.

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The U.S. made loans and sent ships and foodstuffs to a beleaguered Britain, marking the end of Pax Britannica and the Age of America. It also provided a critical flow of arms to the Soviet Union. Here was “the arsenal of democracy.”

Winston Churchill could not win the war when Britain stood against Hitler in 1940. That required the Americans, which is why Churchill quietly welcomed Pearl Harbor. Japan’s Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto knew the consequences. “I fear all we have done is awaken a sleeping giant and filled him with a terrible resolve,” he reportedly warned after Pearl Harbor.

Hitler was less perceptive. He impulsively declared war on the U.S. shortly after Japan did, unencumbered by Yamamoto’s reservations. “The American is no soldier,” he assured himself.

Hitler was a misguided military strategist. His disastrous invasion of Russia in 1941, opening the eastern front, was his undoing. When the Allies landed in Normandy, he slept, delaying Germany’s armoured response.

Hitler underestimated the U.S. In 1941, its military had been among the world’s smallest. Yet with lightning speed the Americans were able to retool their economy, rebuild their armed forces and make new weapons, including the atomic bomb. This was critical.

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The U.S. was soon turning out Liberty ships in days (2,700 over four years), as well as guns, tanks, jeeps and warplanes in mushrooming plants. It had the advantage of being far from the front, where Russians were dying instead of Americans.

This raises the question: Could the United States mount such an effort today? Could it lead — logistically, morally — an enterprise as audacious as Normandy?

Few Americans questioned the legitimacy of the Second World War after Pearl Harbor, unlike their challenging of Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan.

Amid today’s divisions and disinformation, a legion of critics, on social media, seeded in bot farms, would wonder: Why fight for Europe? It’s not our war. America First! Secure our borders. Hitler is no threat. Democracy’s dead. The Holocaust is fake news. Blame the profiteers, the liberals, the warmongers.

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Donald Trump would be unmoved by the internationalism of Franklin Roosevelt. Let’s make a deal, he’d invite Herr Hitler. Do what you want with them, he’d tell the advancing Axis. Those poor bastards dying on the beach, he’d say, they’re losers!

Today’s fractured America would struggle to find the will and the unity to recognize evil of this magnitude and destroy it.

Of this we can be sure all these years later: on June 6, 1944, those who fought and fell in Normandy had no such doubt and asked no such questions.

Andrew Cohen is a journalist, commentator and author of Two Days in June: John F. Kennedy and the 48 Hours That Made History.

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