‘I t was a sight so paralyzing that tears came to my eyes,” Iain Macleod recalled in his lyrically penned recollection of emerging on deck of the ship that would transfer him to the landing craft set to deposit him on the shores of “Gold” beach during the D-Day invasion. “It was as if every ship that had ever been launched was there, and even as if the sea had yielded up her wrecks. It was as if every plane that had ever been built was there, and, so it seemed in fantasy, as if the dead crews were there, too.”
“There had never been since time began such a rendezvous for fighting men: there never will be again,” Macleod concluded optimistically.
The rich life Macleod led after the war brought him into politics and, eventually, into government. He practiced statecraft before serving as editor of The Spectator, where he published his first-hand account of the events of June 6, 1944. He passed away in 1970 after embarking on a brief return to politics. Throughout those post-war years, he bore witness to his share of crises — any one of which could have upended his sanguine prediction.
Macleod saw the implementation of the Truman Doctrine in Greece and Turkey, the Soviet-backed Czechoslovakia coup, the blockade of Berlin and the subsequent airlift, the Korean War, the Suez Crisis, the Hungarian revolution, the Bay of Pigs invasion, the Berlin Wall crisis, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the spiraling Vietnam War, the crushing of the Prague Spring, the Sino–Soviet split, and dozens of other conflicts that threatened to become flashpoints in the contest between the superpowers. Through it all, deterrence held.
The advent of nuclear weaponry imposed a terrible circumspection on the great powers that emerged in 1945. War was not a thing of the past — indeed, the prospect of another great conflict of the sort that once consumed Europe loomed terribly large. Now, however, it seemed more likely that great waves of men at arms like those that crashed upon Normandy’s beaches would be carbonized in a blinding flash when they crossed the Fulda Gap. Throughout the Cold War and its immediate aftermath, the probability of sub-nuclear great-power conflict appeared remote and the prospect of nuclear exchange unthinkable. This dynamic held the balance in check.
That may be changing. Not only is a shooting war between irredentist powers like China and Russia and the Western alliance that does not cross the nuclear-exchange threshold thinkable; it is being thought about and planned for. Such an eventuality is not inevitable or imminent. Hyperbolic commentators who view the West’s commitment to Ukraine’s defense as a prelude to something far more destructive dismiss the fact that there was proxy warfare between Moscow and NATO countries throughout the Cold War. Indeed, they dismiss the fact that such a proxy war has been ongoing since 2015, following Russia’s intervention in the Syrian civil war. Nor are China’s territorial ambitions destined to spark a conflagration in the Pacific into which the United States will inevitably be pulled.
And yet, the contours of a conventional war between the great powers are clearly visible on the horizon. If such a horrible outcome materializes, it would be an outgrowth of the West’s failure to discourage aggression via a credible willingness to risk the worst of all possible eventualities in defense of its interests.
Today, America and its allies are sending the wrong signals to their adversaries. Readiness and logistics are substandard. Domestic budgets are spread too thin. Overly bureaucratized and hyper-politicized procurement standards have eroded Western defense-industrial bases. The enemies of the post–Cold War status quo are steadily chipping away at the covenant that has kept the peace, and the West can only summon the will to confront them with half measures. These are symptoms of a broader malady: The lessons of June 6, 1944, are being forgotten.
What might have been if Britain and France had not stubbornly continued along a course of mutual demobilization even as the Nazis consolidated support for their stated program of rearmament and expansionism? What would history look like if the French government had contested Germany’s remilitarization of the Rhineland in 1936? “If the French had marched into the Rhineland, we would have had to withdraw with our tails between our legs,” Hitler later confessed, “for the military resources at our disposal would have been wholly inadequate for even a moderate resistance.”
What would the German navy have looked like in 1939 if the British hadn’t caved to Berlin’s demands in 1935? What if the confrontation with Germany had occurred not over Poland but over Czechoslovakia? “Bring me back certain proof that England will fight if Czechoslovakia is attacked and I will put an end to this regime,” said German chief of staff Ludwig Beck to a German politician en route to London, as Paul Johnson relates in his majestic opus Modern Times. No such proof was in evidence, and Beck resigned his post.
As Johnson notes, absent the Munich conference, an Anglo–French bloc in support of Czechoslovakia’s 40 well-armed divisions and French-made defenses along its periphery could have put up a stalwart resistance. Instead, Czechoslovakia was traded away.
What amounted to defensible prudence at the time looks in retrospect like the most reckless cowardice. By the summer of 1944, the judiciousness of Hitler’s appeasers had been discredited. “Free nations had fallen,” Ronald Reagan began on this day 40 years ago. “Jews cried out in the camps. Millions cried out for liberation. Europe was enslaved and the world prayed for its rescue.” The scale of the disaster that befell Europe is hard to imagine now, and its replication is inconceivable. But so, too, was the bloodletting of the early 1940s in the interwar period.
We know what must be done. It is unfulfilling work, but the peace will not be preserved otherwise. It is the obligation bestowed on us by those who sacrificed themselves to rectify the peacemakers’ mistakes. Fulfilling Macleod’s prophecy is the great labor to which all subsequent generations will be called. His generation’s legacy is a gift. Pray we keep it.