Victor Davis Hanson: We Owe American Security to Those Boys on the Beaches of Normandy

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
Welcome to The Daily Signal Podcast, where we provide intelligence for the intelligent. Now, without further ado, here's today's take.

**Victor Davis Hanson** (0:18)
Hello, this is Victor Davis Hanson for The Daily Signal. This past week was June 6th, 2026 That's the 82nd anniversary of the D-Day landings in World War II that took place on June 6th, 1944
It was the largest amphibious invasion since Xerxes' invasion of Greece. It might have been much larger even. Some 300,000 British, Canadian and American troops landed on five beaches in Normandy. Probably about 150,000 on the land and over 160 various naval personnel, airborne personnel.
On that single day, over 10,000 British, American, and Canadian troops were wounded or missing, or killed. 4,400, we know, Americans. 4,400 were dead on all allied armies. Probably most of those were Americans.
What was the strategy behind it? The Russians had been pressuring us for a second front. Remember that Stalin had been in league with Hitler since August 23rd of 1939, and that Devley's diabolical relationship had benefited both sides until Hitler turned on Stalin on June 22nd, 1941 And then Stalin all of a sudden became our friend and wanted help. And at war's end, it is true, the Red Army, the Russian Soviet Red Army killed three out of four German soldiers. That's where most of the bloodletting was.
Twenty million Russians died on the Eastern front, probably five million, three to five million. We don't really know the exact totals of Germans were killed there. But Stalin felt that if the United States had a second front, that is they landed on the beaches of France, then Germany would have a two front war. That was the strategy. The problem was that the United States, once Hitler declared war on us and we then declared war back on December 11th, just a few days after Pearl Harbor, we were in no position to fight a European war. Our army was the 19th largest in the world. Portuguese had a bigger army than we did. We were in rapid mobilization and rearming.
The British knew that, the Russians knew that. But the problem was, we were very confident that we, to end wars, would go straight to Berlin. No fooling around in peripheral theaters. So George Marshall, the Army Chief of Staff, demanded that in 1942 or early 1943, we land on the beaches of France and go straight to Berlin. We were not capable of doing that. To do that, you had to have absolute air superiority. We did not have that. You would have had to have absolute naval superiority in 1942 We did not quite have that. More important, we didn't have veteran troops. The people who were stationed in France on D-Day turned out to be some of the most vicious infantry and panzer divisions in World War II. The Panzer-Lehr Division, Doss-Reich Division, they had a lurid history, second and third panzer divisions in Russia of committing atrocities, but also being very well equipped with panther and tiger tanks, close air support, very deadly. So we were not up to that. The thinking was we had landed two million troops in World War I on the beaches of France and the ports of France, and we thought we didn't lose more than 50 in the transit. So we said, we'll just do the same thing and go right to the German border. But of course, France wasn't occupied in World War I. It was in World War II. So we had to get on the beaches and then form an army and then not be pushed off as the British had been in Dunkirk. Churchill was against the idea because he said we were surrounded on Dunkirk and we had to evacuate over 300,000 troops. We almost lost our entire army. It's very deadly dangerous to have an amphibious landing against cracked veteran German troops. Nonetheless, we decided then to hit the periphery of the German Third Reich. So we in November of 1942 landed in North Africa, the next summer in Sicily and Italy, and we gained enormous experience in amphibious landing. So some of those commanders, many of those troops were the veterans that helped school us, along with the British who had been fighting the Germans much longer to land on D-Day. So the idea was we were going to have five beaches.
Gold and sword would be the British, Juno would be the Canadian, and we would have to the Americans, Utah and Omaha Beach. It's not the closest route from England across this channel to France. It would have been better to land at Calais, but the course of Germans were expecting that, and they had fortified it heavily. Normandy was a huge beach, 50 miles long. It gave us chances to spread out. We would not be confined to a peninsula and cut off. It was pretty good ground for armor, and the idea was we could take off to Paris, and we might be there in a week or two. It was a great success, and in some ways a failure. The first day, the British and Canadian beaches were very lightly defended in comparison with the Americans that had high cliffs, and the wind had blown the Americans off course. The seas were rougher. Many of our tanks that were supposedly floatable sank. We didn't have the ability to knock out German artillery and machine guns on the first day. And more than half the casualties and fatalities on the entire D-Day were at Omaha Beach. Nonetheless, in a series of waves, pretty young kids that had no prior battle experience, 18 and 19, charged right off the beach, right across it, and eventually up over the seawall and captured Germans. And by the end of the day, they had in their possession Utah and Omaha Beach, and the British and the Canadians had made successful landing. Part of our luck was that Erwin Rommel, who had the tactical command under Von Rundstedt of the German defenses, was not allowed to release the Panzer or the armor divisions. Hitler only could make that decision, and we had a lot of very successful decoy operations and intelligence operations to fool the Germans into thinking we were going up to Calais, and the result was he did not release enough German armor to push us off. However, we really didn't break out from June 6 all the way to the end of July. We found the Americans in particular, that the land on the other side of the beaches was what we call hedgerow or bocage, thick, dense brush with one acre, tiny little fields, perfect cover for German machine gunners and mortar teams. And that took a lot of casualties. By the time we, six to eight weeks later, finally got all of the armies united and we had reached the major cities of Cannes and St. Lo and we were ready to break out, we had lost about 80,000 casualties. And we only broke out because finally the US. Army Air Force had to come in and bomb the German Army with heavy B-24 and B-27 bombers and blast a corridor. And of course, one of the tragedies of the entire campaign was that George S. Patton, the most gifted of all American generals in the field, had been under discipline for slapping two soldiers, two occasions he slapped soldiers who he felt were dogging it. One was sick, one was suffering from shell shock, so to speak. And he was reprimanded. And for one year, he was relieved of active command in the field. And he was stationed in Britain as a decoy. Army group Patton, the Germans thought, wherever he went, the actual invasion would occur. And he stayed in England. And so they didn't commit fully their troops to Normandy, thinking Patton would go to Calais. But there was an irony to it.