Understanding the Enormity of D-Day

RUSH: Let me try another way of putting D-Day in perspective. Now, numbers are hard to remember on the radio. The number of soldiers landed on the beaches at Normandy on D-Day was 129,710. By the time you add the paratroopers and the pilots of aircraft that were flying over, bombing, transport, and all of the crew that were on the ships that crossed the channel, we’re looking at a total of 150,000 Allied troops who were part of the mission. 150,000. That number was outmanned and outgunned by the Germans. There was a lot of deception. I’m gonna get into this later, but there was so much deception. The Germans didn’t know if the attack was going to come at Calais, which is the point on the northern coast of France closest to Great Britain, which would be the shortest version of moving across the Channel.

There were others who thought that the invasion was going to happen in Northeastern Europe, in Norway, in that region, toward the Russian front, and it’s all because Eisenhower and his command planted units that were burning fires and running training missions that were spotted by spies. They were so unprepared, the Germans were, that Erwin Rommel, their number one tank commander, was at home on leave with his wife — it was for his birthday or anniversary or something — he was back in Berlin, and he got a frantic phone call on the morning of D-Day, “Uh, general, Americans are attacking.” And the invasion was put off for two days because of bad weather, cloud cover and fog. And it was cold, folks. Never mind June 6th, it was cold as it could be with the winds over the channel, the combination of humidity and the temperature. It was not beach weather in any way, shape, manner, or form.

Anyway, our landing force was outnumbered and outgunned. By the time you add it all up, it was 150,000 people, and they obviously pushed through, uprooted and forced them to retreat, the Germans. Now, to put this in perspective, yesterday officials from the CPB, Border Patrol, announced that agents encountered more than 144,000 undocumented illegal aliens at the border in May, in one month. Some might say an invasion force similar to that which stormed the beaches at D-Day. It was the same number of people, pretty much. Now, they’re not armed and it’s not a military invasion, obviously, but it nevertheless is an invasion. And you want to hear an even more powerful number? 1,072,000 illegals have crossed the border — illegals, not legal information — illegals, 1,072,000 a year to date.

There’s now a video of swarms of people just walking right through fences, and right around them, and so forth. And the people at the border have been saying for months now, weeks, that they’re just overwhelmed. I think it’s a fascinating way to put all this in perspective. I mentioned earlier the means by which United States was able to be victorious on D-Day. (paraphrasing) “In addition to the 150,000 plus or minus soldiers, airmen, naval officers, there were3,950 fighter aircraft, 670 gliders, 4,450 bombers, 1,370 air transport aircraft, 600 specialist craft…” These are naval numbers, now. “There were 250 minesweepers, 1,260 merchant vessels, 120 warships, destroyers and so forth. There were 3,500 trooper carrier ships, 500 cargo contemporaries, and 100 destroyers, sloops, and frigates. There were 23,400 airborne troops. There were 1,550 tanks. Overall, there were 12,500 vehicles, in addition to the 150,000 soldiers.” Who made this possible? We didn’t make the decision to get into this war much earlier than the necessity of ramping up this mass production.

There’s a reason the people who did all this are called the Greatest Generation. Because this wasn’t the only challenge they faced. These people also lived through the Great Depression. And many of them had experienced their grandparents with World War I. And here comes the Great Depression, then World War II, then Korea, then the Soviets and Nikita Khrushchev showing up at the United Nations in 1959, the famous banging the shoe on the podium and promising that America’s grandchildren that day would soon be communists. (impression) “We will bury you.” This generation had to grow up at age 15. They had to learn that there were things much larger than themselves when they were teenagers! They did not have time to think about I, me, my. They didn’t have time to worry about their inadequacies, or their self-esteem, or any of that.

They didn’t have the freedom to. They were constantly pressured, constantly under demand. And as far as they were concerned, their country was constantly under attack. They didn’t get a break from it until the postwar effort, the post-World War II effort, an economic boom that began, and Korea not long after that. Then here comes Khrushchev and the Cold War begins! They got not much of a break whatsoever. Then their kids started being born, us, the Baby Boomers, and as I’ve often, and as I’ve often said, we Baby Boomers had to invent our traumas because we haven’t experienced anything like our parents and grandparents did.

You talk about the Gen X today, the Gen Z, and the Millennials… What happened in the 1940s and World War II is incomprehensible to them, and it’s ancient history and irrelevant to a lot of them. And it will never happen again. That kind of warfare can never happen again. There were no satellite photographs, there were no satellites, period, in the 1940s. There was no way. There were no precision-guided bombs. There was no technology whatsoever. The Germans had this code machine called the Enigma. It took years to decipher it. We had our own coding system. But warfare that requires massive numbers of human beings to storm beaches and climb cliffs with rifles and shotguns, those days are forever gone. But back then, that’s all that was available. Massive bombing raids, but the bombs were not guided by anything smart. You just look down the scope, you dropped when you thought you were over the target, and you hoped. That’s why it took so damn many of them.

The industrialization that was necessary to get all that built… Interestingly, this is one of the reasons why Eisenhower later warned everybody about the military-industrial complex, because it must be said, in addition to all of these other things, that a lot of people learned how profitable war is. If you look around the world today, there are all kinds of wars going on. There is a TV series on Epix that you may have watched. It’s called Deep State. And the title is a takeoff on the current term being used to describe the Washington establishment out to get Trump.

But this season’s episode of Deep State — and it’s fictional — is all about a company that does nothing but lobby American government officials to go to war and then this company gets the contracts to build the weapons of destruction, and then it gets the contracts to rebuild what has been destroyed. And it’s a constant, never ending flow of money going to this one company that is hidden, that is secretive about what it does, except in its context, it’s at the highest levels of the United States military. It’s all fiction. But the point is is that it’s rooted in something that’s true: War is profitable.

So the more war taking place, the more people that need to be manufacturing the weapons and ammunition of war. I’m not trying to sidetrack here into something critical. It’s just that Eisenhower saw this massive industrialization effort that produced all of this that was necessary for us to win World War II. It’s phenomenal what this country did with Rosie the Riveter, women in the factories… It was phenomenal. And during that era it was when government sponsored, employer-provided health care got started and income tax withholding got started just because of the efficiency of it, because the focus had to be on the manufacturing.

And then we needed the fuel. We needed the fossil fuels to power all of this. We needed humanity, for human beings to be taught to fly, and to captain the ships, and to run the infantry divisions and so forth. It was a massive effort that took place over 10 years. It was the same group of people that built the Golden Gate Bridge in four years, and the Hoover Dam in four years, and the Bay Bridge. You couldn’t do any of that in that little span of time today. It was just an amazing industrial feat all made possible by Henry Ford and his automation process.

But regardless, all of this is just a standout, never before done in American history victory. And it will not happen again because this kind of warfare will never be fought again. Not to say lives will not be lost in as great of numbers… I mean, bombing runs and now the power we have with bombs is far greater than we had back then. I’m not talking about potential loss of life. I’m talking about actual tactics. We’re never gonna have to storm beaches anymore with overwhelming numbers of men and women to fire guns, shotguns, and so forth, somewhere climbing up cliffs against an enemy in pillboxes at the top of the cliffs firing their machine guns down. Those things happen now in movies theaters, but it will not be warfare like that anymore.

It’s totally different, which is why it’s really helpful to understand and learn what happened to make Normandy, D-Day, World War II possible and the people who did it. Because you talk about answering the call, Franklin Delano Roosevelt wanted no part of it. He didn’t want the United States in either of these wars, but it became… Well, one of the theories is that he actually did and engineered a couple of events. There’s a theory that Pearl Harbor was known, the attack on Pearl Harbor was known before it happened, that FDR needed something like that to rally the American people to the war effort. Because World War I’s memory was still very, very ripe, and people did not want any more part of it.

Top shelf as always.

Hats off to the greatest generation, who are disappearing by the hundreds every day.

May their Memory be Eternal.

Somebody needs to look up the definition of “enormity”.

I was thinking the same thing. Just as "apropos" doesn't mean "appropriate," and "penultimate" doesn't mean "the ultimate ultimate," so "enormity" doesn't signify something merely large in scope or scale.

Memory eternal to the souls of my parents. My mother had to leave both school and northern Maine potatoes farm to come to Connecticut to go to work in the factory. Father was in the Coast Guards.

The “FDR Knew” Pearl Harbor theory was not theory to family members who went on war patrol in mid-October1941 with full weapons load and authorization to attack “hostile” japanese ships (wide latitude of interpretation of “hostile” was given). But— that is detail that no-one, none of the current narrative, wants to hear. Including especially the flip flop Stalinist NY Times—who still pitch the “Good” War the communists love to massage to their advantage.

It is, however a fact, that top leadership knew there was to be an attack on Pearl Harbor- and that it had to happen.In view of family members— a criminal act of political expediency— but they served, with great honor, their country.

God Bless the memory and the sacrifice of all those who gave everything on D-Day, and defeated both kinds of tyranny, national socialist and globalist communist. May their memory live on through the ages.

As American pilots were flying American-made planes in China against the Japanese in the 1930s, the top leadership certainly should have expected an attack on Pearl Harbor.

Yes, they should have anticipated such an attack, as they anticipated an attack on the Philippines, the Panama Canal, Midway, and other targets. That doesn’t mean FDR or anyone else “knew for a fact” that the strike on Pearl Harbor was coming and let it happen. That leadership you referred to was convinced that the Japanese could not conduct two major operations at the same time and they DID know an attack fleet was headed towards Thailand. It was a major failure in preparedness but there is NO evidence that FDR or anyone else “knew.” The idea that ordering naval assets to attack “aggressive” Japanese vessels is somehow surprising is kind of ludicrous in light of the fact that everyone’s known since day one that the USS Ward sank a Japanese sub before the air attack even began.

I don’t know they thought an attack was imminent, and specifically targeting Pearl Harbor; they should have known, considering the oil embargo left Japan with no option but to attack foreign oil sources (primarily the Dutch East Indies). Since the oil embargo was in response to the invasion of China, it was certainly merited - but bound to force Japan into war.

Could we do anything different if we had no oil and nobody would sell it, or would we just accept that we’d go back to horses and wagons?

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