D-Day: 60Th Anniversary: The Greatest Day

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All great battles, including the victorious ones, go wrong in some way, and all plans are only a starting point because war changes the landscape as it unfolds and you need to keep checking your route if you hope to arrive at victory. Morale matters--and flexibility. On that day, as on few others in history, the valor of a few men altered history's course. They put their faith in both luck and faith. "Sometimes at night," recalled Matthew B. Ridgway, commander of the 82nd Airborne, "it was almost as if I could hear the assurance that God the Father gave another soldier, named Joshua: 'I will not fail thee nor forsake thee.'"

The food was so good the night before the invasion that the soldiers called it the Last Supper. For many, it was. We talk about how much America can stand, how many casualties the country is prepared to endure; the answer means nothing without knowing what we buy with those lives. The carnage of Dday, though horrific, was less than most planners had feared. Of the paratroopers in the first wave, some were shot as they dangled from trees and church steeples; some were dropped into the sea or so low that their chutes never opened. Of those in the 1,500 landing craft, at least 10 boats foundered, one losing 30 of 32 men. One company saw 96% die within the first 15 minutes. Of the first 32 Sherman tanks that landed, supposedly equipped with devices to help them make it to shore, 27 sank in the churning seas, drowning their crews. "Two kinds of men are staying on this beach," shouted Colonel George Taylor to the men of his regiment on Omaha Beach. "The dead and those who are going to die. Get up! Move in! Goddammit! Move in and die!"

"Every man who set foot on Omaha Beach that day was a hero," Bradley later wrote, remembering the carpet of corpses, men burned alive or blown apart or drowned. All told, by the end of the first day, at least 150,000 men had landed by sea and air, and there were 10,000 casualties. But by August the Allies were speeding toward Paris on their way to victory. The German surrender came 11 months later.

Sixty years later, the power of that day has, if anything, grown, the mythology swollen in movies and memory. We got to embrace an image of our place in the world and its wars that has shaped every fight that followed. The Americans are the ones who ride to the rescue, vanquish the enemy, get hailed as liberators, set everything right and then come home having left a place better than we found it. The facts are never that clean, but the expectation has its own power, and every President who sent soldiers abroad has followed a similar script. Ronald Reagan invoked the lessons of World War II as the reason for sending peacekeepers to Lebanon, Clinton did so in defending U.S. involvement in Kosovo, and another President named Bush likened a tyrant with a mustache and a taste for torture to the original in making his case for going to war.