"The Dead and Those About to Die"
D-Day in Europe and in Belarus
[Editor’s Note: I’ve added some D-Day Broadcasts at the end of the article, including Pres. Roosevelt’s prayer.]
Imagine the Americans’ surprise when they learned, fatefully for them on 06 June 1944, that their sector of the Normandy beach codenamed OMAHA was home to the newly arrived German 352nd Infantry Division. Somewhere along the line communication from Montgomery’s 21st Army Group Intelligence to V Corps broke down. Word never reached them. Consequently, the Americans landing there came under withering fire.1
Their fellow soldiers landing at that section codenamed UTAH, on the other hand, achieved complete surprise. They faced the least opposition from the Germans that morning of all the Allied forces landing in France.2 The Brits over at SWORD and GOLD came under German fire but still managed to land over 30,000 men, 300 guns and 700 armored vehicles.3 That was all within 2 1/2 hours of the assault. The Canadians at JUNO had a bit of bad luck. It took nearly 2 hours before they could begin their advance.4
Still, the Americans at OMAHA took the brunt of the German defense. They sustained heavy losses for 6 hours, with only a strip of land separating the water from the steep bluffs, where the Germans holed up. The Germans had a magnificent view of the beach and used it to their advantage.5
The Americans took the brunt, but displayed extraordinary courage. Colonel George A. Taylor, of the 16th Infantry Regiment, led an attack against the Germans, saying, “Two kinds of people are staying on this beach, the dead and those about to die. Now let’s get the hell out of here!”6 He’d be awarded the Distinguished Service Cross for his actions.7
Most of the parachutists who jumped the night before the landings survived it, though many would drown in the flooded meadows, which went undetected by photograph and eye-sight.8 Eisenhower had spent the evening of D-1 (that is, the day before D-Day) with the troops of the 101st Airborne. One paratrooper recalled “the ‘terrific burden of decision and responsibility’ which showed on his face and by the sincerity of his effort to communicate with his young soldiers.”9 At the start of the war, Eisenhower had been a staff officer at Joint Planning with the Navy and Air Forces, but George Marshall chose him to head the War Plans Division. His earlier experiences in the Philippines, which was close to being overrun by the Japanese in December 194110, was especially important to Marshall.11 One reason Marshall and President Roosevelt would elevate Eisenhower to Supreme Commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force (SHAEF) in December 1943 was because of his deft personal touch, as exemplified by his visit to the 101st. That personal touch came in handy when dealing with sometimes prickly associates—from all Allied countries, including the U.S.
Interestingly, George Marshall was eager to invade Europe from the beginning. He believed that a frontal assault was the Allies best chance of defeating the Nazis. The British agreed, but demurred on Marshall’s timing, which was, incredibly, ASAP in 1942!12 Incredibly because the Allies were no where near able to muster the troop and matériel strength needed for the venture in 1942. The invasion of France was put on the back burner, in case of emergency only. The “American way of war” might have been to attack head on, but the British were wise to put the brakes on the timing. The “British way of war,” to paraphrase Weigley, was the indirect way. So Liddell Hart:
It helps us to realize that there are two forms of practical experience, direct and indirect—and that, of the two, indirect practical experience may be the more valuable because infinitely wider…Direct experience is inherently too limited to form an adequate foundation either for theory or for application. At the best it produces an atmosphere that is of value in drying and hardening the structure of thought. The greater value of indirect experience lies in its greater variety and extent.13
Whatever the merits of Liddell Hart’s argument, the indirect approach gave America wide berth to step up its wartime production of ships, guns, Higgins boats (or LCVP—landing craft, vehicle, personnel), ammo, etc. America’s military strength was low, also. In 1941 it stood at a mere 1,801,101 souls.14 By contrast, when Hitler invaded the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941, Stalin’s Army fielded more than 5 million souls, notwithstanding his military purges in 1937-1938.15 Clearly, the U.S. needed to time to build up its military strength.
After the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, the United States declared war on them, but were not obligated to fight the Germans. Hitler obliged by declaring war on the degenerate U.S. (as he viewed it) on 11 December. Though Germany and Japan were allies, Germany bore no special obligation to declare war on any country that did not first attack Japan.16 It wasn’t Hitler’s year.
Then neither was 1944. The major turning point in the European war was Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941. Though initially successful, a large part due to the Soviet Union’s lack of readiness, despite Allied warnings,17 Hitler’s Operation Barbarossa would ultimately bring the Soviet Red Army into Berlin in 1945, where Hitler and his bride, Eva Braun, would commit suicide. Declaring war on the U.S. was not only another blunder on his part, it rather sealed his fate, so it seems, though we must be careful not judge from hindsight.
The other European D-Day occurred a few weeks after the Western Allies landed at Normandy. Where the U.S., Britain, and Canada faced 60 divisions in France, the Soviet Union faced 156 German divisions when it launched Operation BAGRATION (pronounced ‘Bagrat-ee-on’).18 Really, the Soviet Union bore the brunt of Nazi fury. If the Nazis played mostly nice in Western Europe, they fought to exterminate in the East. So Geoffrey P. Megargee,
On August 22, 1939, [Hitler] called [his military leaders] together at his retreat at Berchtesgaden, where he held forth at length19 on the situation with Poland. According to anonymous notes from the conference, he revealed to them that he was close to concluding a nonaggression pact with the Soviet Union, which would remove the single most important obstacle to an invasion. He also stated that, for him, ‘the goal of the war [lies] [sic] not in reaching a certain line, but in the physical destruction of the enemy.’ He went on to say that he had SS units standing by to kill Polish men, women, and children; that only in that way would Germany win the Lebensraum it needed; that Poland would be depopulated and settled by Germans.20
As they went to work depopulating the East of most of its Jews, the Germans turned toward the West. Then, having subdued all but Britain, Hitler’s covetousness roused again, he set his sights on the Soviet Union, which he planned to also depopulate. The plans for Operation Barbarossa were set in January 1941.21 A total of four armored groups would make three rapid thrusts. Supporting these armored and motorized divisions would be “seven slower infantry armies. (Contrary to popular belief, most of the German army still relied on foot infantry and horse-drawn artillery and transport.)”22
It calls to mind that scene from Band of Brothers where David Kenyon Webster, played by Eion Bailey, cusses out the Wehrmacht as they march in formation in long columns while Webster and the U.S. troops drive by in their trucks and jeeps. (Language warning.)
If not strictly historically accurate, it conveys the sense of overpowering matériel support that the U.S. brought to the fight. Eisenhower held a typical American attitude toward technology: “Eisenhower’s decision making in war and peace was greatly influenced by technology. He had a strong measure of the culturally imbued American faith in technology, faith that technology would soon eliminate the need for man on the battlefield.”23 It was a faith that seems to have payed off during WW2, at least, as America supplied Britain, the Soviet Union, and itself with matériel in its two-theater war.
The Soviets decided in the Spring of 1944 to attack German forces in Belarus, in what they termed, Operation BAGRATION.24 The Soviets were able to fool the Germans into believing their next operation would be in Ukraine, all the while secretly building up “their forces against Army Group Centre: 2.4 million men, 5,200 tanks and self-propelled guns, 5,300 combat aircraft.”25 Soviet strategy was to use their own type of ‘blitzkrieg’ called the deep battle concept.26
The theoretical essence of deep battle was to attack the enemy using very fast-moving mechanised troops, air strikes, and parachute landings. Simultaneous blows were to be struck through the depth of the enemy's defensive system. Deep battle was also partly an attempt to integrate the newest military technology - tanks, self-propelled artillery, motor transport, attack aircraft.27
Operation BAGRATION was a complete surprise and left the Germans reeling. The Soviets were able to reach the Vistula before halting until January 1945, an advance of a staggering 300 miles.28 They halted within 60 miles of Hitler’s ‘Wolf Lair’ (or Wolfsschanze) headquarters in present-day Poland. Op. BAGRATION’s success can be measured by comparing it to the success of the Western forces in France:
Germany lost about 23,000 KIA and nearly 200,000 MIA (many POWs) in France
Germany lost 26,000 KIA and 263,000 MIA (an unprecedented amount of POWs) in Belarus alone
Losses followed the same pattern:
British and U.S. losses were about 55,000 combined in France
Soviet loses were 180,000 (with another 65,000 lost in the Lvov-Sandomierz operation)
Had Germany and the Soviet Union never gone to war, it’s quite likely that Hitler would have thrown his divisions at Britain and the U.S. Although the U.S. and the Soviet Union became rivals after the war, it’s worth remembering the price they paid in the overall Allied victory against Nazi Germany.
Nevertheless, Allied forces proved themselves brave and willing to fight to free Europe from Nazi domination. It’s not for nothing that citizens of the countries formerly under Nazi rule still honor those who died freeing them. Although the United States was the only country to repatriate bodies of the fallen after the war by the American Graves Registration Service,29 many of the fallen’s remains remained in Europe. Initially, nine temporary cemeteries were established in Normandy, near or within the bounds of a village, during the summer of 1944.30 In 1947, the grizzly process of disinterring the remains and placing them into government-approved caskets began.31 When buried, service members were given either a Latin cross or Star of David.
[T]he grave markers punctuate the vast and sweeping space of the cemetery with pristine, white austerity…The stones overwhelm visitors with undeniable yet countless figures, denoting the loss of life in war. The stones also aestheticize war death, wiping it clean of traumatic violence and replacing it with an aura of martyrdom.32
The most famous of the cemeteries is the Normandy American Cemetery in Colleville-sur-Mer, France, overlooking the cliffs where Americans died in their fight against Nazi tyranny.
Another site controlled by the American Battle Monuments Commission, which maintains American cemeteries and monuments, is the Pointe du Hoc Ranger Monument where President Reagan gave his famous “The Boys of Pointe du Hoc” speech on the 40th anniversary of the D-Day landings. It remains a fitting tribute to the dead of Normandy who gave their all to liberate Europe.
D-Day Broadcasts
President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s D-Day Prayer
HM King George VI’s D-Day Speech
NBC Radio Bulletin
Carlo D’Este, Decision in Normandy: The Real Story of Montgomery and the Allied Campaign, (London: Penguin Books, 2004), 113n.2.
D’Este, Decision, 113.
D’Este, Decision, 112.
D’Este, Decision, 112-113.
D’Este, Decision, 113, 114.
D’Este, Decision, 114.
D’Este, Decision, 114n.1.
John Keegan, Six Armies in Normandy: From D-Day to the Liberation of Paris, (New York: Penguin, 1994), 88.
Keegan, Six Armies, 79.
America’s first tank battle was in the Philippines, led by the Harrodsburg Tankers, a National Guard unit out of Harrodsburg, KY. See John Trowbridge, “Harrodsburg Tankers,” accessed 06 June 2025, https://kynghistory.ky.gov/Our-History/History-of-the-Guard/Pages/Harrodsburg-Tankers.aspx.
Keegan, Six Armies, 34-35.
Russell F. Weigley, The American Way of War: A History of United States Military Strategy and Policy, (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1973), 319.
B. H. Liddell Hart, Strategy, 2nd rev. ed., (London: Penguin Books, 1967), 3-4.
“Research Starters: US Military by the Numbers,” The National World War II Museum, accessed 06 June 2025, https://www.nationalww2museum.org/students-teachers/student-resources/research-starters/research-starters-us-military-numbers.
Evan Mawdsley, World War II: A New History, 2nd ed., (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), 116.
Brian E. Walter, Forgotten War: The British Empire and Commonwealth’s Epic Struggle Against Imperial Japan, 1941-1945, (Havertown, PA: Casemate, 2023), 45.
Mawdsley, World War II, 119.
Mawdsley, World War II, 309.
Nothing unusual there.
Geoffrey P. Megargee, War of Annihilation: Combat and Genocide on the Eastern Front, 1941, (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc, 2007), 15.
Megargee, Annihilation, 24.
Megargee, Annihilation, 24.
Adrian R. Lewis, Omaha Beach: A Flawed Victory, (Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 2001), 123.
Mawdsley, World War II, 309.
Mawdsley, World War II, 310.
Mawdsley, World War II, 311.
Mawdsley, World War II, 311, Box 43.
Mawdsley, World War II, 311, 312.
Kate Clarke Lemay, Triumph of the Dead: American World War II Cemeteries, Monuments, and Diplomacy in France, (Tuscaloosa, AL: The University of Alabama Press, 2018), 21.
Lemay, Triumph, 27.
Lemay, Triumph, 28.
Lemay, Triumph, 78.