Many months after D-Day General Dwight D Eisenhower visited a liberated German death camp. Shocked, he reflected on the fact that the American soldier did not really know what he was fighting for when he landed on the beaches of Normandy on June 6, 1944. “Now,” he wrote, “at least he will know what he is fighting against.”That captured the enduring significance of the invasion of France. Most battles are quickly forgotten but D-Day gave the Allies a sense of a higher cause: to break the will of a barbaric and dehumanising regime. The victory was remembered by Britain as the last operation of the war in which British commanders played a central role before the Americans assumed military supremacy.

Source: The Times June 05, 2019 23:02 UTC