D-Day: A vast plan built on a grand heritage
One cannot but acknowledge that the history of war knows no other similar undertaking as regards breadth of design, vastness of scale and high skill of execution. … Only the British and American troops succeeded in carrying out with credit the vast plan of forcing the Channel and effecting the mass landing of troops.
Joseph Stalin, June 13, 1944
For anyone who wants to know how we got where we are now, knowing something about World War II is essential. It laid the foundation for all the political and cultural changes that took place in the latter half of the 20th century and the first quarter of the 21st century.
There are many histories and memoirs you can read. Two excellent places to start would be Winston Churchill’s six volume history, The Second World War, as well as Dwight Eisenhower’s own memoir, Crusade in Europe. Churchill especially is very readable, entertaining, and incredibly informative.
Those books however give the grand picture. To understand the war on a more human scale, it is often worthwhile to read books about individual events, such as Richard Tregaskis’ Guadalcanal Diary or Gordon Prange’s Miracle at Midway. Both describe specific important battles on which the war turned, and in doing so give a larger picture.
The most important battle by far of World War II however was the invasion of Normandy on June 6, 1944. It attempted something no one had achieved since the Normans in France invaded and conquered England in the 11th century — an invasion across the English Channel. And what to me must be by far one of the best books about the D-Day invasion is Stephen Ambrose’s D-Day June 6, 1944: The Climactic Battle of World War II.
I generally have mixed feelings about Ambrose, especially after reading his history of the Lewis & Clark expedition, Undaunted Courage. I had I read it just after finishing the actual memoirs of the expedition, and found Ambrose’s analysis and criticism of certain decisions of Lewis to be unfounded and unreasonable. To me, Ambrose was badly applying modern sensibilities to those working beyond the edge of civilization, in lands that were unknown to them.
Nonetheless, I have found that when Ambrose writes about World War II, he almost always gets it right. And in the case of D-Day, he gets it very right indeed.
First, he makes the reader aware of the incredible scale of the invasion, the “vast plan,” as Stalin described it. Repeatedly he quotes the wonder and awe of participants — American, French, and German — in looking out over the Channel and seeing the entire ocean covered with ships of all sizes, and the sky above filled with planes too numerous to count. And before Ambrose even begins describing the actual events of June 6th, he spends ten fascinating chapters describing the epic planning required to make the arrival of that armada possible.
Second, he places the story in the context of the individuals who did it. In every case he tells the story from the point of view of the people involved. Ambrose has no interest in grand economic or social movements. His focus is to tell a human story, sometimes tragic, heart-rending, and horribly violent, and sometimes uplifting and joyful.
Third, in doing this so well Ambrose shows us the incredible and incomprehensible courage of the men who stormed that beach on June 6th. The first boats at every beach faced high causalities. At Omaha beach it was even worse, with the surviving soldiers pinned down for hours. Yet in every case, these men brushed themselves off and moved on. All followed the American way of war established by Washington and underlined by Grant: Never retreat, attack relentlessly, and demand unconditional surrender.
Storming the beach, under withering fire
For example, at Omaha it appeared before the day was out that the attack had failed. At one point Omar Bradley recalled the boats moving toward shore because the previous landings had failed to get off the beach and had left it jammed with the dead and the wounded, surrounded by damaged and destroyed vehicles, tanks, and equipment. Yet, the surviving troops on shore, huddled against the sea wall where machine gun fire couldn’t reach them, eventually marshaled the courage to climb that wall and get at German positions to silence them. By the end of the day the beach was taken, and the military was moving tens of thousands of troops into France.
The same courage was exhibited by the Americans, British, and Canadians at other beaches. They pushed on, despite seeing friends cut down around them. Some pushed on even when wounded. The invasion had to succeed. It was the only way Europe could be liberated from the Nazis, and the American dream of freedom and the pursuit of happiness could be secured for later generations.
This last point is the most important, considering the ignorance of too many younger people today about America’s honorable history, stained by the slanders of our corrupt and bankrupt leftist academia. All they know is the lie that America is evil and a oppressor, when in fact, when the U.S. invaded other countries it almost always came to liberate, not rule. It is why the French immediately celebrated. They knew their history, and they knew the Allied invasion would free them from tyranny.
So this is one book I recommend highly and without reservation. Give to your high school kids. Get them to read. Their lives will be enriched, because they will discover they come from a grand heritage.
On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.
The print edition can be purchased at Amazon or from any other book seller. If you want an autographed copy the price is $60 for the hardback and $45 for the paperback, plus $8 shipping for each. Go here for purchasing details. The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.
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I have read Churchill’s six volumes, and Undaunted Courage. Several about Midway including from the Japanese viewpoint (Fuchida). One written during the war about the Coral Sea battle. Citizen Soldiers, Band of Brothers, and several bios. Unfortunately, those books and many others were lost in various moves and storage. WW2 was a pivotal time in history with much of it misunderstood to this day.
To me, high value is gained by ready several accounts of the same event from various viewpoints, both during and well after those events.
What is not commonly known is that a carrier (Gambier Bay IIRC) was sunk by deck guns of either Kongo or Yamato herself–Kurita’s flagship.
Halsey was drawn offsides by a hard count, as it were ;)
There is yet to be a good movie on Leyte….
Most people reasonably familiar with WW2 know the Gambier Bay to be the only American carrier ever sunk by fire from enemy surface combatants. Every other US carrier loss was due to either bombing or torpedoes from aircraft or torpedoes from submarines or some combination of these.
That there are no longer many who are conversant with even the major points of WW2 history is a separate issue and one directly attributable to the leftist US educational establishment. Modern US pedagogy at every level about WW2 is almost entirely about womens’ role in the war effort and the travails of black Americans at home. The only references to actual fighting typically taught are the tale of Doris Miller at Pearl Harbor, the Tuskegee Airmen, “Pappy” Boyington, Ira Hayes and the Navaho Code Talkers. No mention of most of the major battles is made and no mention of American heroes who had the poor taste to be born white.
Anent your last two points:
Ozawa threw Halsey a head fake and Halsey went for it hook, line and Task Force 34. Sean Connery’s Ramius character in The Hunt for Red October had it right when criticizing the fictional Jack Ryan’s fictional book about Halsey – “Halsey acted stupidly.” Yes, he did.
Agree about no good movie about Leyte. In fact, I don’t think there has ever been any movie made about Leyte, per se. The only aspect of Leyte I’ve ever seen on film is MacArthur’s staged walk ashore in a couple of biopics about him.
Given how woke Hollywood is these days, the omission is odd. The real backstory of John Waldron and Torpedo 8 is also missing from both the 1976 and the 2019 versions of Midway. As a character, he’s barely present. Just another of the doomed airmen failing to torpedo any IJN carriers. But Waldron was, like Cmdr. Ernest Evans of the destroyer Johnston at the Battle off Samar, of mainly American Indian ancestry.
The Battle off Samar really needs a big-screen, big-budget treatment. Perhaps, if the MAGA right can get back enough of our cultural institutions, that will happen someday. Just, for the love of God, don’t cast Ryan Gosling in it.
In conversation, Taffy 3’s success triggered a debate amongst friends about small carriers vs big fleet carriers. Are todays super carriers used currently big targets? All the eggs in one (or few) basket(s). Or should we instead build carrier groups with several smaller, faster flat tops.
It was a fun discussion, with many good points on both sides. I am scratching the surface.
Those are interesting questions. I’ve given the matter of carrier warfare – and naval warfare in general – some thought over the past several years and have come to some conclusions:
1. The biggest vulnerability of carriers is all of those deck crewman running around up top. A drone swarm attack would make mincemeat of them in jig time and then the ship would be, effectively, out of action even if other damage was modest and she was still able to steam at full speed. That means the Nimitzes and Fords are both obsolete against a peer or near-peer opponent.
2. Carriers, like every other ship type in the Navy, should, in future be SWATH vessels with the submerged hulls being essentially smaller, unmanned versions of the engine and propulsion spaces of an SSN. These units should be standardized in two sizes and ships of various sizes built by putting purpose-built superstructures atop anywhere from a pair of small ones (frigates) to multiple large ones (CVNs). This would allow a straightforward way to build not just large fleet carriers, but analogs of WW2’s various classes of light carriers and escort carriers – all CVNs.
Future CVNs, of whatever size, should have enclosed launch decks with doors at each end and with two or more parallel electromagnetic catapults. The upper deck should be for landings only and robot tugs, rather than people, should unhook landed aircraft and hustle them onto elevators. Future carrier aircraft complements should include no manned aircraft, just UAVs. These should average being anywhere from half the mass, to a fraction the mass of manned combat aircraft so far more could be carried on a carrier of any given size.
This type of ship construction has a number of advantages. The biggest would be the radical reduction in down-time for refits and/or repair of battle damage. Just lift the superstructure off the propulsion units and plop a new one on top and the ship can be back in action quickly with a new topside, while refit/repairs proceed on the removed superstructure ashore. Repaired and refitted superstructures would go back into inventory. Both ship superstructures and propulsion units could be built in larger numbers than needed for routine operations and simply kept in storage against a need to surge a larger fleet for a conflict. Larger production runs will also reduce unit costs.
As for the “big fat target” issue, that will be true of any surface combatant of any size. But an enemy must first find, then send a suitable munition to take out any class of ship. SWATH vessels are, in general, faster than conventional hulls of equivalent deadweight tonnage. This makes attack via undersea means problematic. Attack with long-range missiles, even hypersonic maneuvering ones, has to be addressed with space-based active defenses, ala Golden Dome. The Space Force also needs the ability to destroy, in whatever fashion, an enemy’s space-based surveillance/targeting assets as early in any conflict as possible.
I fixed your tags so only what you wanted to be italicized is.
Rather doing it manually you should use the edit buttons. More reliable.
I’ve gotten too used to having to do my own tags on other sites and sometimes forget that this site has some recently added Mama’s Little Helpers.
Another excellent book on the Normandy invasion is Overlord: D-Day and the Battle for Normandy by Max Hastings.
https://www.amazon.com/Overlord-Battle-Normandy-Max-Hastings-ebook/dp/B0112OOOPE/ref=sr_1_3?crid=EM82GQHE8L9D&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.N5RQgc1iFexCKDD9uUSt81C9chqTx8gxdqHeFG4-cbXA2jjcZyD5xmztifXkKK3Y5NC9HT0j4vj-s6ftXmoo1aQRGjtu63SRst9-MJHtUMCtCF_njKKFGE38Os2elQSbfoTENhBSMKw7CCZRJcDqQ207rShV1WHhCTzKuxK3r-cdLjmgpgsPzv-MwS9Ker4UMlR2xZOUn2SSV3wvndZCmw5-ATdWEWf2uWUVdp0cj6s.bWt5ldQeltGk-cuMenlQ30FTNjDgw1BEoUpehM-TmEs&dib_tag=se&keywords=max+hastings+d+day&qid=1785196634&s=books&sprefix=max+hastings+d+day%2Cstripbooks%2C104&sr=1-3
I’ll have to add that to my list. Likely to be awhile before I can get to it. Just now, I’m wading through Jonathan Parshall’s toe-crushing new opus 1942 The Crux of War, which gives a “quick” 60-page overview of the lead-up to Pearl Harbor and America’s entry into WW2, then devotes 13 chapters to a month-by-month recounting of significant events from Dec. 1941 through Dec. 1942 on the major battlefronts. A riveting read. I’m especially looking forward to his coverage of Operation Torch as my late father was involved in that.
Another riveting read was his Shattered Sword book about Midway from 21 years ago. In that, Parshall corrected a lot of previously-published misinformation about Midway and went into considerable depth on certain sub-topics that other authors, for whatever reasons, failed to get into. This is a warts-and-all dissection of Midway and, anent warts, there were some doozies.
Added both to my future reading list. It may take a while.
Dick–
Are you familiar with:
“Unauthorized History of the Pacific War Podcast”
->Seth Paridon, Bill Toti and Jon Parshall.
https://www.youtube.com/@UnauthorizedHistoryPacificWar
I am familiar with that podcast. There are well over 100 episodes and each is about two or three hours long. I intend to watch it, but it’s a huge time investment and I fear I might start bingeing and be unable to stop. At a minimum, I need to get through the rest of Parshall’s new book before diving into the deep end of “Unauthorized.”
Dick–
Excellent podcast. They recently started a “new season,” and are currently covering the Guadalcanal timeframe.
Parshall’s books are fantastic. Detailed, well researched, readable. I cannot recommend them too highly.
“… invaded and conquered England in the 12th century”
1066 = 11th century.
Thanks. Fixed. I never claim math is my strong point.
I suggest Sean McMeekin, “Stalin’s War”. Also Timothy Snyder, “Bloodlands” if you can stomach it.
The real fight was in the east which, yes, was supplied from the west.
All of the fights were real fights. There has grown up a strain of Russo-philic revisionism that credits Russia alone for winning WW2. Complete balderdash of course. The Russians certainly did their part and suffered a huge fraction of the total losses, but the majority of those losses were due to the way Russian armies have always fought – with no regard for the lives of troops. Something we see being replayed every day in Ukraine. The Germans were very good at killing and the Russians were very good at dying.
Robert, thank you for another book recommendation!
“” Only the British and American troops succeeded in carrying out with credit the vast plan of forcing the Channel and effecting the mass landing of troops. “”
Unfortunately, there is now an invasion across the Channel the other way, into England. And no one seems interested in stopping it.
Tarawa was up there with Omaha Beach.
I am surprised Michael Bay didn’t do a film about the St. Nazaire Raid what with HMS Campbelltown loaded with explosives and going up like Grandcamp later did.
This was based on the St. Nazaire Raid although the details are fiction. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0062688/
I would like to see something about the failures of the Mark 14 torpedo.
I have heard of many dead-non hits that never caused the enemy harm.
The same on the Norden bombsight.
The impacts of these key items and others like them caused many extra days/weeks/months of fighting
You mentioned the scope of the D-Day invasion, but it is even more impressive when you realize on the other side of the world, there was a second invasion force of 500 ships and 300,000 men already at sea headed towards the Mariana Islands for the amphibious assault on the island of Saipan which had its D-Day on 15 June 1944.
The invasions of Leyte at Leyte Gulf and of Luzon at Lingayen Gulf a few months later weren’t exactly fraternity panty raids either.
Dick Eagleson
Could not reply directly to the thread.
Any vessel on the surface can be found by peer/near peer. They cannot hide. You can turn off AIS, but that does not hide the vessel from the enemy eyes. So “finding” is easy.
I agree the future if Naval aviation should be UAVs. However that will require overcoming bureaucratic inertia in the Navy.
My experience with vessels, however makes me doubt the practicality of “modular” vessels with snap on superstructures. It would be considerably harder than it sounds.
The basis of my argument was 5 to 8 small, fast UAV carriers instead of 1 supercarrier. If you lose 1 carrier, that is 5000 sailors. The effect is not just the loss of combat power. The damage that will do to the national will to continue the fight may end the conflict right away. And not in our favor.
“It attempted something no one had achieved since the Normans in France invaded and conquered England”.
Well, the Dutch did invade and conquer Britain in 1688. An embarrassed nation renamed the whole thing The Glorious Revolution.
Almost all books about WWII from before 1972 suffer from a lack of knowledge about ULTRA.
Ambrose includes it at length.
As you know, I am the farthest thing from an interventionist…and there are reasons why
My fear isn’t that they would get rid of the military.
I’d give them a haircut myself except for Space Force.
Rods from God could handle Pickaxe Mountain.
I am not afraid the Democratic Socialists would get rid of cops.
My fear is that they won’t.
There will still be prisons–for us…not gangstas
Re-engined B-52s are perfectly fine for laying waste to Red States and Red cities, and our nuclear arsenal good for attacking Israel and Europe.
Cops will be around..still allowing riots–but shooting Roof Koreans.
No cops means no one to put Bernie Goetz in jail.
No military means we don’t go on the all guns-no butter path we are currently on that is making the DS crowd more popular.
Ever since Obama and the Michael Brown riots….I too support reducing martial spending….just for different reasons.
I think the Russians would have said Stalingrad as the most important battle.