The Greatest Day

By NANCY GIBBS

Every war is born with hateful qualities, like the promise of waste and cruelty. So to be considered good and honored in memory, a war must overcome its very nature, leap past means to ends. World War II remains the model Good War, and D-day, its greatest day--one of those rare hinges of history that might have bent the other way. It had taken years for the U.S. to embrace its urgent necessity and hurl itself into the battle. The invasion plan, two years in the making, was still a mad gamble; though the force was overwhelming, the outcome was never assured. The 150,000 men who landed that June dawn carried a copy of General Eisenhower's "Order of the Day," which declared that they had embarked on "the Great Crusade." By the end of that day, thousands would be dead, yet by then few would question whether the price had been worth paying for the prize of Hitler's defeat.

America now finds itself in the middle of another war--or two wars, depending on how you count--allied once again with the British against an implacable enemy. When President Bush visited the 101st Airborne troops in March, he recalled how on the night before D-day, Eisenhower went down to the airfield where the troops of the 101st were preparing to load onto C-47s for their flight to Normandy. He told the men not to worry because they had the best leaders and equipment. One of them looked at him and said, "Hell, General, we ain't worried. It's Hitler's turn to worry." "That spirit," Bush told the soldiers, "carried the American soldier across Europe to help liberate a continent. It's the same spirit that carried you across Iraq to set a nation free."

This is Bush's own crusade, in which his faith remains steadfast. To critics who charge that he has dragged the country into another Vietnam, he responds that World War II is the more apt analogy. "America has done this kind of work before," he says. "We lifted up the defeated nations of Japan and Germany and stood with them as they built representative governments ... America today accepts the challenge of helping Iraq in the same spirit, for their sake and our own." Perhaps the greatest difference is that this time the actual invasion feels like the easy part. "While we can't be defeated militarily, we're not going to win this thing militarily alone," General John Abizaid told the Senate last week. "We have to get everything together: economics, politics, intelligence, you name it ... It's really one of the hardest things that this nation has ever undertaken in this part of the world or anywhere else."

On D-day, the battle was the hard part. Nothing that followed--not the bloody path to conquest through the Ardennes, not the fits and starts of rebuilding Europe from the ruins, not the forging of the postwar balance of power--surpassed in difficulty or cost the demands of that one day, when luck and fate and genius and nerve worked to give Freedom her victory. As we approach Memorial Day and another significant anniversary, as President Bush takes his turn honoring the memories on those haunted beaches, there's no avoiding the comparisons. To look back on that day from the middle of this new war, to see the Atlantic alliance under historic strain, see the U.S. feared and reviled in countries whose freedom was redeemed at such high cost, to hear embattled American soldiers wonder if they will return home to a parade or a protest, while politicians argue over whether we went in with a plan or just a prayer, is to envy that great generation its gifts: unity, certainty and the chance to inspire all who followed.

Where's the sacrifice? Senator John McCain wants to know in the midst of an argument over cutting taxes during wartime. If you do not live in a military town or have a cousin serving overseas, the Iraq war can feel far away, so long as the TV is off. World War II was much more intimate, and not only because any son could be drafted to serve. Women went without their nylons and saved their bacon grease to make explosives and planted victory gardens. People on the coastlines drove 20 m.p.h. after dark, their headlights partially blacked out, or volunteered as air-raid wardens or donated their rubber raincoats and tires and bathing caps, even though they couldn't be recycled for military use. It had the effect of pulling people together, uniting them behind the cause.

Now that we are tangled in a debate over how much manpower is necessary to achieve victory, it bears remembering that D-day was a day of overwhelming force. German Field Marshal Erwin Rommel and his fellow officers had 500,000 men stretched across 800 miles; many were middle-aged or conscripts from Eastern Europe. They would ultimately face 1 million men by July--not just Yanks and Brits but Canadian, French, Polish and Dutch troops swarming across the Channel from southern England, which had turned into a vast base163 new airfields, 2 million tons of supplies, 1,500 tanks, 5,000 boats. The Luftwaffe's 183 fighter planes that day faced 11,000 Allied aircraft.

And yet all that power brought no guarantees. No advocates of war sat comfortably on Sunday morning talk shows promising that the invasion of Europe would be a cakewalk. The plan was not obvious, not safe or certain. And it was a gamble for colossal stakes. However much the Allies had gained since the worst months of 1941, Hitler might yet have survived to cut a deal that left him in charge of most of Europe. After Eisenhower watched the first troop convoys preparing to depart, he scribbled a note to himself, what he would say if the worst happened: "Our landings ... have failed ... The troops, the Air and the Navy did all that Bravery and devotion to duty could do. If any blame or fault attaches to the attempt, it is mine alone."

Nor could the Allies rely on superior technology to win the day, though being able to listen in on coded German communications certainly helped. There was no Kevlar; there were no nightscopes, no cruise missiles or stealth fighters. Instead, Allied engineers invented artificial harbors to tow across the channel and moor once the beaches were won; sawtooth steel tusks were attached to the front of tanks to cut through the Normandy hedgerows; paratroopers used the little clickers that sound like crickets to find one another in the dark. Most of their radios and 60% of their supplies didn't survive the jump.

D-day's success depended on knowing the enemy, anticipating his reflexes, using his strengths against him. The Germans were nothing if not logical and disciplined. They knew an invasion was coming and calculated when and where; the Allies needed to throw off those calculations. Do you hit the easiest point, Pas de Calais, only 27 miles from Dover, where Rommel and his men sat waiting? Allied bombers kept shelling the Calais area as though softening it for an invasion, even building dummy landing craft in southeastern England, rubber tanks, fake warehouses and barracks. In Operation Fortitude, Lieut. General George Patton commanded a fake Army group, sending fake messages about the phony invasion to come. It all made so much more sense than doing what no invaders had managed in centuries: crossing the 100 miles to the Normandy beaches and plunging ashore; so only 70,000 German troops were waiting there.

As for June 6, that made no sense either, especially once God smiled by making the weather bad enough to convince Rommel and the Germans that no invasion was coming but good enough, during a crucial 36-hour window, to make it possible after all. It was raining sideways the day before, Eisenhower recalled, as the commanders listened to weather reports. Assured that the Allies would have to pass up this optimal alignment of tides and moon because of the impenetrable storm, Rommel got to slip home to celebrate his wife's birthday. Wars are won and lost over decisions big and small. "How stupid of me," Rommel said when he heard the news. "How stupid of me!"

And once word came, the Germans were fatefully slow to respond. Hitler jealously controlled the armored regiments, and his aides were reluctant to wake him up before 9:30. Had the Luftwaffe been there to rain fire on the beaches, had the weather turned worse rather than better, had Rommel stayed on the scene or had Hitler sent his tanks, it is entirely conceivable that the whole landing force could have died on those beaches or been forced to turn back. As it was, at one point Lieut. General Omar Bradley, hearing of the carnage of Omaha Beach, said he feared that "our forces had suffered an irreversible catastrophe" and considered sounding the retreat and waving off the reinforcements. The decision to press on through iron rain gave his forces the day.

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.

When Joint Chiefs Chairman General Richard Myers paid a surprise visit to Baghdad, the general quoted Senator Ted Stevens in his effort to lift today's soldiers into that hallowed company. "They've written about the World War II generation as being the greatest generation. But he said it's this generation right now that is the next greatest generation." Some soldiers, however, wonder whether he was telling them the truth or just what he thought they want to hear. Dispatched to Kuwait and waiting for the signal to invade in the winter of 2003, soldiers who heard about the millions of antiwar marchers in the streets wondered how they would be viewed when they came home. In the midst of the prison-abuse scandal, the concern emerges again. "Now we wonder what people back home think of us," a young officer in Karbala told the New York Times last week. "Will it be like Vietnam, where everyone who's fought there is labeled a baby killer?" If nothing else, Vietnam taught us the price of fighting wars whose original noble purpose itself becomes a casualty.

But the reactions then and since suggest the soldiers needn't worry. If many Americans of a certain age feel guilt about their failure to separate their opposition to the Vietnam War from the men who fought it, they have been determined ever since not to repeat that error. Sympathy for the soldiers is acute, even as opinion about the present war still divides and doubts begin to conquer even former supporters. Respect for the troops is the one thing Americans have in common when nothing else can be shared. Far from bringing shame on all soldiers, the Abu Ghraib scandal elicits fury on behalf of the thousands of soldiers whose lives just became harder. People are aware of the holidays missed and the family occasions postponed as tours are extended, and the only thing certain is that nothing about this war is certain.

It took less than a year after Dday to end that long war in Europe; we are now more than a year into the conflict in Iraq and have yet to pacify that country. The U.S. is divided at home and beleaguered abroad, and the continued fortitude of Americans on the ground in Iraq is all the more inspiring because the prospects of success seem to grow fainter in spite of their efforts.

For a war to be good, it must also be necessary, and it must be won; there is small solace in a glorious defeat. So while America presses ahead toward a vision of a new Iraq arising out of all that darkness, we're not even sure if the war has ended yet or when it will and whether we'll even recognize victory if we see it. Some have argued that Iraq's national pride and hope of moving forward depends on doing this themselves, on not having it done for them. We may want to give this great gift of freedom, but in the giving, the value is lost; it must be taken, won, earned. And so our victory can come only as a result of theirs.

If the memory of D-day and all that followed have provided 60 years of inspiration, they also set a trap. Anticipating the scene in Baghdad once the G.I.s rolled in was so easy; we remember Paris. Presuming gratitude for our generosity and sacrifice was only natural; think of the Marshall Plan. How much easier it was for war planners to ignore the warnings, dilute their planning with wishful thinking, when on the most fateful day in the history of modern warfare, so many wishes actually came true.