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Presidents and generals and ordinary folk will come to pay homage in Europe this week, to remember a great battle in a good cause. Bill Clinton, who begins an eight-day visit, will meet the leaders of the other Allied nations who share credit for the victory and dine with Queen Elizabeth II in Portsmouth, then sail on an aircraft carrier for a sunrise ceremony off the Normandy coast on June 6. Some may question his credibility as Commander in Chief of the U.S. armed forces because he avoided military service during the Vietnam War. But if past anniversaries of the invasion are any indication, the emotion of the moment will carry the day. "That war," Clinton told the , graduating class at the U.S. Naval Academy last week, "marked the turning point of our century, when we joined with our Allies to stem a dark tide of dictatorship, and to start a flow of democracy and freedom that continues to sweep the world." While peace is far from universal even in Europe, Western Europe is more prosperous and more unified than it has ever been. The cold war proved to be only a temporary faltering. The success of the wartime alliance gave birth to the United Nations and NATO and made America a permanent leader of the global community.
If the war was the century's turning point, the turning point of the war was D-day. The Normandy landings might have been thrown back if the German command had not been so thoroughly surprised or so unusually slow to counterattack. But once the Allied forces were successfully ashore, Hitler was doomed, caught between armies advancing against him from the west and the Soviet east.
After those first tense 24 hours, the Allies knew they had reached the beginning of the end. British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, whose anxiety about the attack never completely subsided, was jubilant. "What a plan!" he raved to Parliament. The Soviet dictator, Joseph Stalin, who had been demanding the opening of the second front for years, paid tribute: "The history of warfare knows no other like undertaking from the point of view of its scale, its vast conception and its masterly execution."
That same extraordinary undertaking reverberated into American politics, securing the reputation of an indifferent student from Kansas as a great military leader and propelling him into the White House eight years later. This was Eisenhower's invasion, the one he had planned and argued for and believed in wholeheartedly. He meant every word of the order of the day he addressed to the servicemen he was sending into Hitler's Festung Europa: "Soldiers, Sailors and Airmen of the Allied Expeditionary Forces: You are about to embark upon the Great Crusade toward which we have striven these many months . . . "
On the morning of June 6, Eisenhower carried in his wallet another message he had written, to be issued only if the Allies failed to gain a foothold in France. "My decision to attack at this time and place was based upon the best information available," it read. "If any blame or fault attaches to the attempt it is mine alone." For several hours after the landings began, some of the commanders feared that statement might have to be released. &