D-Day: Every Man Was a Hero A Military Gamble that Shaped History

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Falaise. When Von Kluge's offensive hit the American lines near Mortain, it hit hard. But the Americans held until reinforcements could reach them. "What a sight they were, coming off the hill!" one lieutenant said, recalling that moment toward the end of the six-day battle when the relief troops arrived.

Then Bradley began to close his pincers. Patton's forces reached Argentan on Aug. 12, and Bradley ordered Patton to halt there and wait for the British to reach Falaise. But it took another week before Canadian forces finally closed the trap.

During that time, a sizable number of German troops managed to escape through the unclosed pincer, but a good many more failed. Within the trap, ten German divisions were taken prisoner, and bodies lay everywhere, some 10,000 in all. "It was literally possible," said Eisenhower, "to walk for hundreds of yards at a time, stepping on nothing but dead and decaying flesh." Bulldozers were called in to sweep away the carnage.

And so the battle for Normandy was over, and when it was, the end of the war was in sight. "If by the coming winter you have freed beautiful Paris from the hands of the enemy," Churchill had said to Eisenhower shortly before Dday, "I will assert the victory to be the greatest of modern times." Said Eisenhower: "Prime Minister, I assure you that the coming winter will see the Allied forces on the borders of Germany itself." It took less than a week after the closing of the Falaise gap, until Aug. 24, for the Allies to reach the gates of Paris. There was lots of hard fighting ahead—the Battle of the Bulge, Arnhem, not to mention Iwo Jima and Okinawa—but the Allied victory was now inevitable.

But what if it had all gone differently back there on the beaches of Normandy? What if the Luftwaffe had been there to bomb and strafe the invaders? What if the panzers had moved in quickly for a counterattack? What if the storm had suddenly worsened? What if the whole landing force had been destroyed on the beach?

Hitler once indulged in some sanguine speculations. "Once the landing has been defeated, it will under no circumstances be repeated by the enemy," he told aides. Roosevelt would be defeated in the 1944 elections, "and, with luck, he would finish up somewhere in jail." Even Eisenhower, a natural optimist, thought a defeat on D-day "might mean the complete redeployment to other theaters (i.e., the Pacific) of all United States forces."

More probably, the consequences would have been somewhat less apocalyptic. The Allies were all deeply and emotionally committed to the destruction of Nazism, and American industrial power was already more than making up for the depletion of British and Soviet resources. The odds are that the Allies would have reorganized their forces and invaded all over again, perhaps aiming at southern France or the Balkans. And the atomic bomb was well under way. The war had to be won.

When the fighting ended, both victors and vanquished found themselves in a world that had been changed forever. Most important, perhaps, was that the U.S., long a second-rank power primarily concerned with its own affairs, was now the world's unique superpower. "The U.S. became conscious of its world role and of its duty toward the world," says former French Foreign