D-Day

. . . is today. I thought I’d compensate for the deficiency in conservative manliness I displayed below by reminding you.

You could go the RCP and read Reagan’s very thoughtful—dense in the good sense—1984 speech.

You could remember how many casualties were expected as a matter of course in the various WWII invasions. The Normandy landings were a bloody mess, but our commanders were actually happy that fewer were killed than expected.

You could embrace the human agent/contingency theory of history: Consider the disaster for Europe that a D-Day failure would have been. But victory depended upon German stupidity at the top and rather stunning ingenuity on the spot by ordinary Allied—particularly American—soldiers. The Allies weren’t as ready as they thought they were with their plans, and, like all most all victories, this one was a mixture of courage, skill, and luck.

My dad actually got the D-Day medal. He was the commander of a unit of black firefighters. They (not surprisingly) put out fires that were caused by battles. So they were close to the action but rarely actually got shot at.