Eighty years ago, the fascist forces of Nazi Germany had occupied France, Belgium, and Luxembourg since June 1940. Four years later, on June 6, Allied forces led by Gen. Dwight Eisenhower landed on the beaches of Normandy in northern France, beginning the massive effort to roll back the armies of Hitler back into Germany.
D-Day, as it is called, was all about penetrating the Nazis’ “Fortress Europe.” On the eve of the invasion, Eisenhower wrote to the troops of the Allied Expeditionary Force. In his message, Eisenhower declared, “You are about to embark on the Great Crusade.”
In calling D-Day a crusade, Eisenhower did not mean to reference the negative connotations of imperialism and religious strife. Instead, he meant that the invasion of occupied France meant much more than a power struggle between competing world political and military forces. It was nothing less than a contest between good and evil. The allies strove for a just cause of great magnitude. The Nazis and their Third Reich allies strove for a deeply evil cause.
Eisenhower went on to note what made this coming effort a crusade in the moral sense. “The hopes and prayers of liberty-loving people everywhere march with you,” he said. The Allies fought for liberty. Liberty, they believed, was a good that transcended time, place, and people. They did not contest merely for an abstract concept. The Allies believed liberty to be a basic human good and sought to restore it to those who had had it violently wrested from them. They wished men, women, and children to be treated with the dignity owed by all to human beings.
Eisenhower further elaborated on these points by pinpointing the real, live enemy to human freedom. The Allied goal included both “the destruction of the German war machine” and “the elimination of Nazi tyranny over the oppressed peoples of Europe.” The two goals, of course, were closely linked. Eliminating tyranny required destruction of the means by which that tyranny had been established and maintained. Tyranny operates on fear and fear on the abusive exertion of power.
Europe had been tortured under this tyranny for too long. That tyranny had been, as all tyrannies are, the enemy of liberty. Ending that tyranny, and its otherwise ever-expanding threat, was the crusade on which these men embarked on June 6.
Eisenhower gave one more goal. What would happen if the Allies succeeded and the Nazis were completely defeated? In victory, they sought “security for ourselves in a free world.” Not only must these armies roll back the tyrants. Not only must the reestablish liberty — a free world. They must create means to sustain this defeat of tyranny and refounding of freedom. They must have security to guard and perpetuate.
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The Allied forces succeeded, though not without great cost. We rightly celebrate them for the heroism they showed on the beaches of Normandy and every step of the march into Germany. These men were not, in the main, professional soldiers but instead normal citizens. They fought not because they loved war but because they loved their country, its freedoms, and each other. They fought, not because they were fearless but because the threat of tyranny was more frightening. They fought not because of some race-based ideology but to better realize the principle that all men are created equal.
Eighty years later, we still reap immense benefits from their sacrifices. Eighty years later, we must dedicate ourselves, as also did our country’s founders, to furthering the security of liberty to ourselves and to our posterity.
Adam Carrington is an associate professor of politics at Hillsdale College.