The advance from the bridgeheads was disappointingly slow. The tactical performance of allied troops was inferior. This review essay, which I first wrote back in 2017, seeks not to reconcile or synthesize the contending views, but to explore the logic of this perpetuum mobile of interpretation and reinterpretation.īeyond the triumph of the landings and the enemy defeated, the D-Day literature has never found complacency easy to come by. For all the solemnity and the weight of historical meaning loaded on the event, for military historians D-Day serves as a Rorschach blot, an open-ended, projective test of underlying assumptions and models of historical explanation. Not for nothing, the annual commemorations, now including the Germans, became for a while a fixture in trans-Atlantic diplomacy.īut why and how did D-Day succeed? The question has given postwar historians no peace. The New York Times’s commentary on the 50th anniversary The Terrible and Sacred Shore” is a remarkable period piece. The landings were as Churchill remarked to Eisenhower in awe-struck tones, “much the greatest thing we have ever attempted.” For those who honor the sacrifice and courage of the “greatest generation”, the beaches are a site of pilgrimage, the holy ground from which the “Great Crusade” for a new Europe was launched.
D-Day ranks alongside the Marshall Plan, or the Manhattan project as one of the signal demonstrations of the potency of the Western democracies. The successful Allied landings on the beaches of Normandy on 6 June 1944 stand as one of the defining events of mid twentieth-century history.
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