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

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Secretary Maurice Schumann, who waded ashore with a British unit on Dday. "That feeling remains."

Scarcely less important, though, was that the battered and backward Soviets had also won themselves a major role in the world. It was that prospect, in fact, that inspired some Western strategists to argue for a Normandy invasion as early as 1943, not only to help Stalin continue fighting but to prevent him from eventually dominating Central Europe. One such strategist was General Albert C. Wedemeyer, who helped draft the Overlord strategy later adopted by Eisenhower and Marshall. "The idea here," says Wedemeyer, now 87, "was to get ashore as early as we could, advance as fast as we could, and at war's end have Anglo-American troops in control." Churchill too had hopes of advancing into the Balkans and perhaps even reaching Vienna before the Soviets. The Big Three leaders agreed at the Yalta Conference of February 1945, however, that the advancing Allied armies should meet in central Germany, thus dividing the conquered land and consigning Eastern Europe to the Soviets.

To more idealistic observers, the Allied invasions demonstrated the power of international cooperation. It was the success of the wartime alliance that inspired the founders of the United Nations in 1945. The Marshall Plan was the victorious general's idea for international economic reconstruction. Even when the cold war destroyed all hope of global cooperation, memories of the wartime alliance inspired the birth of NATO and the Common Market.

Other changes that were inherent in the peace of 1945 took longer to become fully clear. When the Soviet army liberated Maidanek and Auschwitz and the other Nazi death camps in Poland, the birth of Israel in 1948 became an inevitability. The Middle East would never be the same.

More broadly, the end of the war permanently altered the imperial relations that had governed much of the world for about four centuries. Churchill, who once said he had not become Prime Minister to oversee the liquidation of the British Empire, lived to see it liquidated by others. India, Malaya, Kenya and other imperial outposts demanded and won the right to govern themselves. France's General De Gaulle, who had simply been notified of D-day rather than invited to help lead the attack, imperiously reasserted French claims to rule Lebanon, West Africa and Indochina. The Dutch vainly tried to cling to Indonesia. But the days of such European empires were irrevocably ending. A Third World was struggling to be born.

These were among the long-range political consequences of Dday, but all this was largely unknown to the men who bled on Omaha Beach. D-day was first of all a battle between two great forces, and the lessons that it teaches, 40 years later, are fundamentally the lessons that all great battles teach, over and over:

That even the most carefully prepared plans often go wrong. That lucky breaks are very important. That a small number of brave and determined men can make an immense difference. That some men fight with incredible courage under fire, and that some do not. That men usually fight better in a good cause, but that some fight just as well in a bad cause. That morale is essential to victory, and that nothing improves morale so much as superior firepower. That war is cruel and wasteful but sometimes necessary. That