< PREVIOUS ] [ 1994 Index ] [ Ed Quillen HOME ] [ SEARCH ] [ NEXT >
It's hard to realize that D-Day is a Historical Event, that 50 years have passed since American, British and Canadian soldiers stormed the beaches of Normandy.
When I was a kid in the 1950s, it was as though D-Day happened yesterday. Men talked about it often, we heard plenty about it in school, and when we kids weren't playing cowboy-and-Indian, we played soldier, converting a vacant lot into Omaha Beach.
And in all the forced study of D-Day this year -- it's impossible to read, listen or watch without encountering an account of the battle or its commemoration -- one fact seems left out.
It was one of the nicest things America ever did. In geopolitical terms, a Normandy invasion wasn't necessary to defeat Hitler. The huge Red Army, a juggernaut rolling west by 1944, would have accomplished that sooner or later.
D-Day was necessary to close the Nazi death camps sooner rather than later, to relieve Europe of German tyranny sooner rather than later, and to make sure Stalin stopped somewhere short of the Straits of Dover, thus insuring that part of Europe wouldn't replace one brutal regimen with another.
So the courage and heroism that will be celebrated tomorrow is the result of altruism -- Uncle Sam doing something nice.
Perhaps there are other lessons in the contemplation of D-Day. For instance, one wonders how the leaders of the time would fare in today's political climate.
Winston Churchill, with his youthful use of opium and cocaine, as well as his ever-present cigar and brandy -- despite his oratorical talents, he'd last about 20 seconds after the Purity League got hold of him.
Franklin D. Roosevelt, martini in hand and Camel in jaunty holder -- pre-occupied with worries that Republican operatives would find Lucy Mercer and get her to talking about his continued pattern of sexual harassment.
Dwight Eisenhower, devoted to squashing Kay Sommersby rumors rather than planning the invasion, which he couldn't concentrate on anyway because every time he lit one of the 80 Chesterfields he smoked each day, a subordinate politely reminded him that the Army required smoke-free workplaces.
But Adolf Hitler, by contemporary standards, would do pretty well. His Nazi party encouraged exercise and the appreciation of nature, he was a vegetarian who hated smoking, and his public statements, at least, were no more anti-Semitic than those of some Nation of Islam speakers who appear on American campuses.
Hitler gained power by appealing to patriotism in a proud nation that had been humiliated by the Versailles treaty imposed after World War I.
And you wonder about World War I. If America had stayed out, the Central Powers and their opponents would likely have stalemated and negotiated a peace. No humiliated Germany, and so no World War II. The only thing World War I accomplished, aside from butchering a generation in Europe, was to create World War II.
But America got into World War I, largely because all our news of the Great War passed through cables that passed through Britain. The British Foreign Office thus had brutal Huns raping nuns as they pillaged innocent Belgium -- recall the Iraqis ripping Kuwaiti babies out of incubators in 1990, and you get the idea.
Public pressure grew on President Woodrow Wilson, who
had gained re-election in 1916 because he kept us out of
war.
Just why Wilson is beloved of liberal historians is
beyond me. He fought women's suffrage every way he could,
he imposed racial segregation on the District of Columbia,
and once war came, he suppressed Americans' liberties
ruthlessly by ignoring the Bill of Rights. One wonders how
a reactionary could have been worse than a
progressive
like Wilson.
Anyway, Wilson's decision to Make the World Safe for
Democracy in the War to End All Wars was one of those
pivotal events in history, because so much followed:
Communism in Russia, Hitler, World War II, the Cold War,
vast expansion of federal power inside the United States
and the transformation of an agrarian republic into an
industrial state devoted more to national security
than to its own principles.
This should mean something today because we are constantly exposed to brutalities and atrocities throughout the world -- Haiti, Rwanda, Somalia, Bosnia -- and there are those who say we should also consider East Timor, Tibet and Yemen, among others.
The President now gets public pressure to do
something
about these horrors, just as Wilson was
pressured after Americans of 1917 were exposed to a steady
diet of British propaganda.
And whenever President Clinton doesn't immediately do
something,
he's accused of being weak and vacillating,
of not having a real foreign policy.
In retrospect, the invasion of Normandy was right and proper. But it was necessary because America had done the wrong thing 27 years earlier, and intervened when it shouldn't have, thanks to public pressure created by press accounts.
Unfortunately, we don't appear to be learning what could be the most important lesson of D-Day.
< PREVIOUS ] [ 1994 Index ] [ Ed Quillen HOME ] [ SEARCH ] [ NEXT >