A Near Run Thing

Sixty-four years ago today, American, British, and Canadian soldiers landed on the north coast of Normandy. It was an heroic feat of arms by any measure, but it was also, as Wellington said, of Waterloo, “a near run thing.”

Today, railing against the war in Iraq is in vogue. Derisive characterizations of the troops, their commanders, and the nation’s civilian leaders trip easily off the tongue of the hip generation at favorite fern-filled after-work watering holes.

Hack writers of mindless fiction make public sport of our nation’s soldiers, the most recent, “...if you learn to read, you go to college and are a success. If you don’t, you what - join the Army?”

The media picks and chooses those things they think are “news,” and that (to them) suitably demonstrate the incompetence of the war-fighters. They only demonstrate their own lack of knowledge of their own country’s history, knowledge that might – were they interested – provide some context to their ravings.

Victor Davis Hanson, writing in National Review a year ago, catalogued the failures of the campaign that began in June over a half-century ago.

We attacked places there was no enemy, dropped paratroopers miles away from their objectives, landed on the wrong beaches.

We were unprepared for ambushes from cover and concealment. Planners and commanders hadn’t expected the enemy’s resilience and strength.

Our weapons were mostly inferior. One of our best commanders had been relieved before the landings even took place.

We bombed our own troops, killing and wounding over 1,000. Friendly fire incidents were routine. Such errors were “covered up,” including the death of an American Lt. General.

By two months after D-Day, we’d won – after 30,000 Americans had died, part of a quarter-million allied casualties.Most who have the barest grasp of such things know that the history of wars is the history of failure as much as it is of heroism.

Those who believe that tactical errors and battlefield shortages are proof of unique perfidy or unusual incompetence prove only their own journalist incompetence or political perfidy. It’s not that such things are unimportant per se, but that they are so unavoidable – the historic norm – as to be irrelevant to the debate between war and peace.

We can elevate that debate if we accept war’s inevitable tragedies, and ponder, for instance, what our meaning was when we vowed after Auschwitz and Buchenwald, “Never again.” Was it that we would never again turn a blind eye to the suffering of a minority at the hand of a tyrant? Did we mean, perhaps, that we would not sit idly while a tyrant built great power to destroy? Or is that vow no longer relevant to our world?