D-Day has become a proxy for the remembrance of the entirety of World War II, a great crusade ”to set free a suffering humanity” by men who fought not for conquest, but to end conquest, in the words of FDR’s D-Day prayer.
It’s customary to celebrate the citizen soldiers who fought, died, and secured victory. That is just, but not sufficient. It is also important to recognize the gargantuan feat of turning a relatively small government and depression-shrunken economy into the most powerful military-industrial-governmental combine in history, leaving us the strongest country in the world.
When war was declared in December 1941, it suddenly became necessary to enlist, train, arm, manage, feed, clothe, and transport a huge force to places around the country and eventually to 55 theaters of war around the world. Bases, barracks, mess halls, airstrips, ports, hospitals had to be built. Factories had to be retooled.
In 1939, the isolationist United States had the 39th largest armed forces in the world. Anticipating the chance of war, in 1940 a draft began, requiring all men 18 to 45 to register. When war came, fifty million were registered, ten million were inducted, and another six million volunteered before the draft caught up with them.
Nine months before Pearl Harbor, the Lend-Lease program began manufacturing arms to aid the embattled British. It jump-started the defense economy. By 1945, a mind-boggling transformation had taken place. In 1941 the auto industry produced three million cars. After Pearl Harbor, the entire production for the duration was 136 vehicles. Across the economy, the conversion to a war economy as total.
As more men entered the military, industrial manpower evolved. Soon, the plants employed men exempt due to specialized skill, those too old or otherwise unfit for the draft, and millions of women who armed the soldiers, sailors, and airmen thousands of miles away. For many it was the most important job they would ever have.
In the three years, eight months from Pearl Harbor to V-J Day the country produced two million trucks, 297,000 aircraft, 197,000 artillery pieces, 86,000 tanks, 55,000 ships, not to mention small arms, ammunition, uniforms, rations and the invention of radar, sonar, the famous Norden bombsight, the proximity fuze, and two atomic bombs.
My father was 31 when he enlisted in the Army Air Force five moths after Pearl Harbor. His route through the war is a reminder of the immensity of the undertaking. His training took him from Ohio to the deep South for basic, and then for specialized training to Kessler Field, Mississippi to Ypsilanti, Michigan, to a stop in Kansas, then embarkation from California, a stop in Hawaii, before fetching up in the Marshall Islands on the tiny atoll of Kwajalein, 6.300 miles from Ohio.
All of this was achieved in order to transform him into a Technical Sergeant, a ground crew line chief responsible for maintaining the newest addition to the great arsenal of democracy — the B-29 Superfortress which would fly huge distances to bomb the empire of Japan. By the time the final year of the war began, Kwajalein was said to be the busiest airport in the world. A glance at a Google image of the atoll shows the surreal absurdity of that idea, and of global war.
Flights of B-29s from the secret 509th Composite Group on August 6 and 9, 1945 dropped the atomic bombs that brought the war to an end. Shortly thereafter the millions of men and women scattered around the planet were on their way home to a world dramatically changed. Like so much else about the war, the gigantic task of rapidly repatriating eight million personnel had been anticipated and planned for, beginning as early as 1943.
Operation Magic Carpet began in June 1945 in Europe and October 1945 in the Pacific and continued until mid-1946 using hundreds of warships, Liberty Ships, Victory ships, troop transports, ocean liners and hospital ships which carried half a million wounded warriors home.
In my father’s case, when V-J Day arrived on August 14, 1945, he was on an atoll six feet above sea level. Forty days later he was mustered out of the military at Camp Atterbury, Indiana after three years and four months of service.
He, like most of his contemporaries, did not regard himself as heroic, but perhaps as a responsible citizen. There was a job to do. It was their duty to do it. They did it. Then they went home, got a job, had a kid and watched baseball on the weekend. They may have only fleetingly appreciated the feats of organization required to pull it off.
A D-Day vet in his nineties was interviewed walking along a placid boardwalk overlooking a Normandy Beach during the recent commemoration. When asked what the present generation should take away from those events, the veteran gave an answer my father might have seconded: “Don’t let it happen again.”
By “it,” I suspect he meant what Roosevelt described as “the scheming of unworthy men,” the rise of “apostles of greed and racial arrogances” and the triumph of those who oppose “a peace that will let all of men live in freedom, reaping the just rewards of their honest toil.”
Today’s generation might also want to recall that the victory was made possible by their democratically elected government, in cooperation with the private sector, which planned, organized, managed and voted the taxes that paid for the victory. That is how such important civic feats are accomplished.
The present generation is facing big challenges, maybe bigger than those in 1940. Democratic capitalism and self-determination are under attack. China seeks global domination. Cyberwar offers a new asymmetric threat that is difficult to counter. Long-standing alliances are crumbling. The existential threat of climate change is downplayed by those who profit from causing it. Our infrastructure is crumbling. And elected democratic governments that once had the foresight and courage to see the necessity of the costly effort that saved Western civilization now timidly refuse to act on a host of issues.
The actors may change, but the nature of the danger does not. The oligarchs, the autocrats, the demagogues, the enemies of democracy, free speech, free thought, equal justice under law may be found in Moscow, Beijing, Pyongyang and Saudi Arabia, but also can be heard hawking their neo-fascist poison in London, Paris, and even Washington, DC.
Some new and even more alarming and deadly “it” can happen again, and it can happen here, if we fail to remember the bitter lessons our fathers and grandfathers learned the hard way. That some problems are so big as to require the cooperation of an entire country. D-Day, and all that led up to it and followed from it, showed the United States and its allies were capable of what FDR called “a mighty endeavor.” Can today’s peoples and their governments say the same?