The anniversary of DDay is the spiritual resonance of the
greatest effort ever put forth by man.
Whew, that’s heavy.
Another thing it teaches us is that years of effort go into the big days
and that after the ‘grand opening’ there are still lots of long days of hard
work.
DDay was essentially conceived on the day after Pearl Harbor
in the sense that FDR and Churchill had a teleconference in which they
determined – despite Imperial Japanese aggression – the primary focus of the
Allied war effort would be to defeat Nazi Germany.
It would take another 11 months after the DDay landings to
defeat the Wermacht and receive a surrender from second Fuhrer.
The idea came to life the second week of December, 1941; was
executed during the first week of June, 1944 and culminated just after
Cinco-de-Mayo in 1945. Flash-to-Bang: 4 1/2 years.
As this article posts, it will be the 72nd anniversary of
D+2. The worst carnage of beaches was over but the hard slog had just begun. In
two days, two million troops had been brought ashore in Normandy. The regular
units were making contact with the far-flung paratroopers. The British had
begun there encirclement of Caen, the primary city of Norman France.
99,000 air sorties were performed in support of the ground
effort, destroying half the Luftwaffe in French forward airfields.
In the channel sea one of the greatest engineering efforts
in history was undertaken: The deployment of the Mulberry Harbours. The
Mulberries were massive precast, concrete blocks (caissons) that could be
fitted, like giant LEGOs, to form harbors capable of supporting shipping
traffic until a European deepwater port could be captured from the Germans.
The Mulberries used the physics of buoyancy and were tugged
across the channel and then sunk in place. Yep, each Phoenix Caisson, up to
6,000 tons of concrete, was towed across the channel and sunk in place.
Mulberry B, at Gold Beach, was in operation for 10 months
and facilitated the disembarkation of 2.5 million men, 500,000 vehicles and 4
million tones of supplies. Truly
monumental.
Just like the events of the film Saving Private Ryan, D+2 reminds us that while we spend years
preparing for the big day it is often just the beginning of the hard work to
come.
