https://pjmedia.com/richardfernandez/the-last-longest-day/
Emmanuel Macron will not attend the 75th anniversary of D-Day, “saying that French presidents only lead international D-Day ceremonies on round-number anniversaries such as the 60th or 70th. … critics argue that he should make an exception this year as it is likely to be the last major D-Day anniversary while veterans are still alive.”
To Macron, who was born in 1977, D-Day must seem like ancient history. The French president is currently more interested in preserving his alliance with Berlin than in commemorating the reopening of the Second Front against Hitler a full three generations ago.
It is probably hard for a man of Macron’s age to feel the emotional urgency of those distant days. Seventy-five years ago, the human impact of the invasion could scarcely be understated. Over 4,400 soldiers died in a single day, the Longest Day, so named in popular culture after Erwin Rommel’s prescient observation: “The first twenty-four hours of the invasion will be decisive. . . . For the Allies as well as Germany, it will be the longest day.”
It was an all-out throw of the dice. A maximum effort. There was no plan B if it didn’t work. Had it failed, Eisenhower would have said: “Our landings have failed and I have withdrawn the troops. My decision to attack at this time and place was based on the best information available. The troops, the air and the Navy did all that bravery could do. If any blame or fault attaches to the attempt it is mine alone.” The consequences of defeat would have been incalculable.
If an Allied repulse on D-Day did not actually lead to some form of victory for Hitler, at best it would have meant another costly year of war, ruinous for Britain, the extinction of the last remaining remnants of European Jewry through completion of the Final Solution, culminating almost certainly with the employment of the first atomic bombs in the summer of 1945 — on Germany, not Japan. Sweeping through a ‘nuked’ Germany, the victorious Red Army would have stopped nowhere short of the Rhine. Lost to Communism, Europe, and the world, would have been a very different place today.
