Max Hastings on why the D-Day landings are commemorated 80 years on

Already a subscriber?The former Western allies will shortly begin commemorating the 80th anniversary of their greatest World War II achievement, the June 6 landings in Normandy, forever famed as D-Day.and other national leaders are entirely justified by the magnitude of that endeavour. More than 40 years ago, while writing a book about the campaign, I had the privilege of meeting many veterans – American, British, Canadian, Polish, French, German.

British infantryman Wilf Todd wrote to his wife of the pre-dawn hours of June 6: “I prayed that night as I have never prayed in my life… My heart was beating like a triphammer.”When I look back as a historian, like most of my peers, I can see that the odds on D-Day overwhelmingly favoured allied success: the Americans and British deployed an awesome superiority of planes, tanks, warships and men.

But all this wasn’t known back then to allied warlords and their soldiers, so fearful of the huge prospective consequences of failure. “There was a moment of scrutiny, then the woman folded me in her arms. The tears streamed down her face, and in between kisses, she was shouting for her husband, for lamps, for wine…We found ourselves – an evil-looking group of camouflaged cutthroats – surrounded and overwhelmed by the pent-up emotion of four years.”Two hours after dawn the infantry stormed ashore, on five beaches across a 80 kilometre front.

French commando Robert Piage, 24, whose mother lived in the coastal town of Ouistreham, hurled himself into water that proved chest high, in his eagerness to lead.He had advanced only 10 yards up the beach when a mortar bomb exploded, killing his closest mate and riddling Piage with fragments which he carried to his grave: “I began to cry. Not out of sorrow for myself, nor because of my wounds, but at the great joy that I felt at being back on French soil.

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