I am fortunate to own a 1st Edition of the late Sir Martin Gilbert’s small history “D-Day”. It was written 20 years ago for the 60th Anniversary of a campaign in World War Two immortalised by that name.

In it Gilbert gives as preface, a unique premonition of what might have been had the Allies failed in the Normandy Landings of June 6 1944.

Most profoundly he believed that had the invasion of Nazi-held Europe not succeeded, he as a then 7-year-old Jewish boy might not have lived to record it or at best not have been free to voice his opinion of it decades later. Gilbert famously earned a knighthood as the official biographer of Winston Churchill and for prolific services to history in general.

As the 80th anniversary of the D-Day Landings approaches, at a time when existential wars of The Just by Israel and Ukraine are shunned by political weakness in the West, we need to remember that our freedoms from Islamist extremism, Russian autocracy, and Chinese authoritarianism are only due to those who sacrificed in 1944 on the land, in the air and on the seas that miraculous day, with the aim to rid Western Europe of what Islamism, Russia and China stand for today.

Tens of millions died in World War Two, a large portion of them non-combatant civilians, let alone six million Jews sent to death camps. Today we see in Gaza the same deliberateness in Hamas of Nazi Germany to sacrifice its population for political gain. We also see the same documented desire of Hamas to implement a new Final Solution aimed at exterminating Jews and others unwilling to accept its version of Sharia Law.

It is at times like these that we need a new D-Day to say “no”.

Joe Biden’s America, though, is pushing the line of appeasement that only encouraged Hitler to launch World War Two. This just days from memorial services that will honour the thousands of America’s dead, buried at military cemeteries across Europe once under the shadow of a Nazi swastika.

It is why history calls these moments, “turning points”.

D-Day, an unprecedented military venture, the largest amphibious invasion still, turned fascism on its head. What will the West do now?

© 2024 Adam Parker.

Picture Credit: “D-Day” by Sir Martin Gilbert sitting atop an intricate map of the Normandy landing sites taken from the military simulation “Normandy ’44” by GMT Games. Author’s collection.