The latest in my specific history reads and another one with a specific year in its title. Normandy ’44 by James Holland, a prolific WWII historian, deals with D-Day and the immediate aftermath in the province of Normandy France. As with all his books, this one is very detailed and displays an excellent sense of military strategy and the realities of ground combat in that era. Brutal to say the least. Once more the overwhelming lesson I take away is that somehow humanity has to figure out a different way to resolve conflicts. The waste of human and material resources is tragic and absurd.
As Holland points out frequently, the war was won in part because Democracies were better able to marshall resources and make decisions than the totalitarian regimes they faced. The US in particular was a manufacturing powerhouse that turned out simply astounding numbers of planes, ships, tanks, trucks and other equipment and weaponry. A far cry from our where we are today. And we created a logistics support team that was able to replace lost equipment and keep troops fueled up, fed and taken care of medically. The Germans had been battered by Allied air power and simply could not match the logistics or manufacturing capability of the Allies.
The descriptions of the carnage caused on both sides by the intense fighting on the D-Day beaches and inland are heart-rendering, particularly as Holland interweaves some individual stories. And the civilian population of France suffered as well, watching whole towns be destroyed by bombing and shelling. And as with Putin today, all this ultimately occurred because of one man’s delusional belief that he could conquer the world and the susceptibility of an entire population to that delusion. Germans ultimately paid a horrific price for what they bought into, particularly the ones who ended up in East Germany under the Soviet domination. We have to keep people like Hitler, Mao, Putin, Stalin, et al from ever being near any form of power.
