Anniversaries are important.
Today, the world commemorates Operation Overlord, the Allied landings on the Normandy coast on June 6th 1944, aka D-Day.
This was a huge undertaking of ingenuity, organisation, bravery and deception.
The Brits provided most of the latter.
This was the moment when Albion’s perfidiousness was, briefly, on the right side of history.
Rommell thought Normandy was always the likely landing spot because of its similarity to Anzio at low tide.
However, Hitler was convinced that the main force would use the shortest route, Pas de Calais.
The ruse worked.
As in many military operations, weather can be a crucial hinge factor.
Anyone who thinks that the Irish Free State was, in any meaningful way, “neutral” is historically illiterate.
D-Day was probably the last time that Britain was central to world events, and quite clearly, the operation couldn’t have happened without the island being the staging area for the invasion force.
The fact that the overall commander, Eisenhower, was an American wasn’t incidental.
He wrote the letter to the invasion force as FDR’s man on the ground.
The British were already junior partners in the emerging new world order.
By the end of WW2, there could be no doubt that the world had two superpowers, and Britain wasn’t one of them.
Today, any claim that the Brits are a major player in the world is about as authentic as the medals worn by Charles Saxe-Coburg Gotha.
Like all contests, resources are crucial.
Unsurprisingly, it is usually the side with the most stuff that prevails.
The scale of D-Day and Operation Iceberg, the invasion of Okinawa the following April, showed that the United States had unrivalled industrial power.
As the troops were landing on the Normandy beaches, the biggest army in the world was already well into Operation Bagration, but even the Soviet Union needed American help.
The Red Army could not have achieved its success on the eastern front without all those Chrysler trucks supplied by Uncle Sam.
After the war, Britain wasn’t a serious player.
It ended a period in world history where the neighbouring island was the centre of the first truly transglobal imperium.
Now, they’re the Sevco of Europe.
In the post-Brexit dispensation, their economy is self-harming, and they seem to go through Prime Ministers at a hilarious rate.
Liz Truss.
Really?
Today, their airborne forces are passport paratroopers being checked by French authorities.
You can’t be too careful these days…
Like the mythology around the Battle of Britain, the British political elite look back to WW2 with a deep sense of nostalgia because that was when Britain mattered.
It doesn’t anymore, and seventy years after its conclusion, it partly explains the Brexit vote among the children of VE night.
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