Our Answer To Infamy

June 6. A date which should reside in history for all eternity. For those of you that received a public school education, June 6, 1944 is perhaps one of the most important days in American history, and today is the 65th anniversary of that day. The events of that day are immortalized in such films as The Longest Day and Saving Private Ryan, and in the graveyards that dot the Normandy landscape. Even nearly seventy years later, the lessons of D-Day reverberate through our lives.
By June 5, 1944, war had raged throughout the world for nearly five years (seven in Asia), and the legions of the fascists had faltered, but had not been utterly defeated. America's war had started in the Pacific, with the Date Which Will Live in Infamy, an event immortally described by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. We had pushed the Japanese back across the Pacific, engaging bloody battles across idyllic Pacific islands and massive naval air battles at Coral Sea and Midway. In Europe, our brave sailors had fought across an Atlantic red with our blood against Hitler's wolfpacks. We had pushed the Axis out of the sands of North Africa, smashed them in Sicily and General Mark Clark had reached the gates of Rome in our drive to liberate Italy. In the East, the German armies had been pushed west by hordes of Soviet troops and tanks and the great tank battle of Kursk and the siege of Stalingrad had gone in our favor. However, the Nazis had not yet been defeated utterly, and the outcome was still in doubt.
New German tanks and super weapons were being produced, things such as the King Tiger tank, and the V-1 Rocket, and the ME-262 Jet Fighter. Our bombing campaign had not destroyed the German's industrial base, and our forces in Italy were engaged with a master of defense in the mountainous terrain, General Albert Kesselring. The Nazi death camps operated at full capacity, and the German soldier remained confident.
This all changed the next day. With the landing of American, British and Canadian troops on the beaches of Normandy, Hitler's coffin had been built. The largest sea-borne invasion in history had begun. Unlike the Normans who left these shores in 1066, the Allies who returned came not for land and power but to drive out those who had done so. Great stories of heroism can be told about the actions of our brave men who stormed Hitler's Europe on that day. Many of them would never see home again. It was our Allied Troops that won the day, and the day after that, and the day after that and so on. General Dwight D. Eisenhower had written two letters that day, one for victory and the other if the landings had been turned back. He knew what could have gone wrong, but also knew that the spirit of the free soldier of the Allies cannot be resisted. Through our blood and grit we took Hitler's Europe, and freed an entire continent and world from the evils of Nazism.
Hitler had been doomed following D-Day. Even with his super weapons, he could not defeat the Allies on two fronts. His last gasp came in the winter of 1944, with the Battle of the Bulge. With Hitler gone Imperial Japan was doomed, and with the bloody conflicts Iwo Jima and Okinawa won we bombed Japan into dust.
Why do we still remember that day, all of these years later? The answer is simple. Without it, the light of freedom very well might have been extinguished. D-Day was quite simply America's finest hour. With our British and Canadian allies, we anted up, and decided to do something about the evil in our world, something permanent. In no way does this take anything away from any other soldier, sailor or marine who fought elsewhere in the war. There were bloodier battles, outcomes more in doubt, but D-Day serves as a symbol. This symbol is that the forces of democracy and goodness can and will save the world. Even to those who despise war, thinking it always as an unnecessary evil, and to those who despise America, D-Day cannot be tarnished. World War II presented the clearest representation of the dichotomy of good and evil. The forces of good consisted of America, Great Britain and their allies, and the forces of evil were Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy and Imperial Japan. Even Moral Relativists have a high level of difficulty in explaining away the Holocaust and Japan's treatment of captive populations away without using such moral terms. The Soviet Union makes this dichotomy muddled, as clearly being a force of wretchedness in the world, but the Cold War and the culmination of it finished placing the Soviets on the correct moral side and the victory of good over evil.
There are dates that will be remembered by a people for as long as they retain themselves as a group. For Americans three of these dates are December 7, 1941, September 11, 2001, and June 6, 1944. Even the ends of the wars are less important. The first two dates belong together, as they are the same event, the surprise attack on unassuming good people by the forces of evil. The third is our first day of our inevitable victory over those same forces. Could we have a second D-Day over our current vicious enemy? If it is to be so, such is our answer to infamy.