The True Lessons of D-Day

For the next 44 years the Elbe River divided Germany and Europe between the far more prospering democratic West led by the United States and the small fractions nations of Eastern Europe largely led and directed by the Soviet Union. Then, in 1989 to 1991 the Soviet Union collapsed from within and peacefully disintegrated. US leaders solemnly assured their Russian counterparts NATO would never expand beyond the Elbe.

That historic meeting on the Elbe and the usually tense relationship between Washington and Moscow in the generations that followed, however imperfect, kept Europe and the world at peace and allowed the nations of Europe to recover at last from the 30 years of horrors that fell upon them through the two world wars and the dark years in between. And it all flowed from D-Day – and the even greater military confrontation, 1,400 miles away to the East.

On June 1, 1944, the Nazi German Third Reich still held virtually all of Europe, East and West in an iron grip. Its merciless rule extended from the Atlantic Ocean in the West to the forests facing Smolensk in the heart of Russia. Three months later that empire and the unprecedented military might that had conquered and crushed it, lay smashed.

The first of the hammer blows came, as we are about to be reminded on its 80th anniversary on June 6, was the Allied landings on D-Day in Normandy in the West.  But only 17 divisions of the still mighty Wehrmacht faced those US, British, Canadian, Polish and free French forces when they came ashore. No less than 223 divisions including Germany’s main strategic reserves were still committed to facing the Soviet armies in the East.

Two weeks after D-Day, on June 22, 1944, the second hammer blow fell, with far greater immediate impact than the first one.

While the western German forces under the skillful immediate direction of Field Marshal Erwin Rommel were still containing the initial Allied build up and thrusts in the hedgerows of Normandy, the Red Army smashed with several classic integrated combined forces thrusts through the forests and swamps of Belorussia – the current nation of Belarus. Some 100,000 Nazi troops were cut off, isolated and eventually captured in the pocket around Minsk alone, total Wehrmacht losses exceeded 350,000.

It was, as the great British Broadcasting Corporation correspondent Alexander Werth recognized and reported accurately at the time, a victory even greater than Stalingrad. It ensured the success of the Allied invasion in the West and made inevitable the doom of the Third Reich.

Because of the great battles in the East, remembered to this day in Russia as Operation Bagration and to the Germans, fearfully, as The Destruction of Army Group Center, all of Europe enjoyed peace for 46 years until the collapse of communism set off the disintegration of Yugoslavia in 1992. Until the start of the current Ukraine conflict in February 2022, ceaselessly fanned by US subversive intrigues, all of the rest of Europe has remained at peace since 1945: This was the lasting, blessed heritage of Elbe Day.

The success of D-Day was only made possible by the annihilation of Army Group Center in the East. That supreme Soviet victory did not just break the back of the still formidable Wehrmacht: It vaporized it. In the end nine out of every 10 German soldiers killed in World War II were killed by the Red Army, as Winston Churchill openly admitted.

When Operation Bagration was launched, Wehrmacht staff officers at their operational headquarters in the city of Minsk watched in disbelief and growing horror as the very blitzkrieg tactical concepts they had used with such devastating effectiveness from June 22, 1941, for 15 months to conquer vast swathes of European Russia were now turned around to be used against them. In the space of a month, Army Group Center, the great center of gravity and hard strategic rock on which Nazi German domination of Russia’s heartland had rested for three long, dark years, was annihilated. 

Because of the Battle of Belorussia, it was inevitable that all of Central Europe from Stettin in the Baltic to the borders of Greece would fall under Soviet control before the Anglo-American armies driving in on the Third Reich from the West could get there first. That was why the American Republican criticisms of the dying Franklin Roosevelt for “selling out” Central Europe at the 1945 Yalta conference were so unfair. There was nothing in practical terms FDR could have done otherwise.

In any case, FDR did not make the key concessions to Soviet dictator Josef Stalin on Central Europe at all. It was the British statesman who has become the icon-hero of American internationalist conservatives who made them: Winston Churchill.

For it was Churchill, at his meeting in Moscow with Stalin in October 1944 many months before Yalta, who initialed the famous agreement on the back of a scrap of paper that acknowledged the Soviet dominant role in all of the Balkans except Greece. For by then, Churchill knew that Poland, Hungary and most of the rest of Central Europe would fall to the Soviet armies, too. The Battle of Belorussia had made sure of that.

Nearly halfway through the third decade of the 21st century, it all seems so remote, so irrelevant, so long ago: But that history still holds the lessons to the Survival of the West and peace across the world to this day.

The formidable Russian people who smashed the Wehrmacht in the Battle of Belorussia in June 1944 have now decisively defeated the Armed Forces of Ukraine (AFU) thrown into suicidal conflict by the corrupt, reckless and criminally incompetent regime of Volodymyr Zelenskyy. Eighty years after the Destruction of Army Group Center, Russia, whose cooperation was central to the maintenance of peace in Europe and throughout the world ever since, has emerged from the Ukraine conflict stronger and more formidable than it has ever been. 

In the 1970s, the Soviet Union’s domestic economy was collapsing. But today more than 40 to 50 years on, Russia; agriculture and industry are emerging stronger and more successful than ever, even as the economies of the United States and Western Europe implode and collapse under the green environmental fantasies and mad kleptocratic Wall Street and City of London speculations.

The Lesson is Clear. The 80th anniversary of D-Day should indeed be celebrated with fireworks, parties, solemn parades and thanksgiving. But it should be done so equally with appreciation and gratitude for the extraordinary achievements and sacrifices of the Red Army and the peoples of Eurasia, led by Russia to the east, without which it could never have wo happened. That is the true secret to launching another 80 years of peace and growing happiness and prosperity for the peoples of North America, Europe and the rest of the world.