June 6th

Eighty-one years ago yesterday, the Western Allies launched their long-awaited ground invasion of Normandy, opening a third front in the war against Nazi Germany. It wasn’t subtle or unexpected, but the specifics were nebulous- and masterfully protected by a massive counter-intelligence and subterfuge undertaking. D-Day was a triumph of courage, of arms, and of logistics. Ultimately, it was successful- but it was successful because of the collective effort of allies, not because of the martial prowess or vigor or inherent superiority of the United States. For the past eighty years, our government and institutions and popular culture have been steeped in the legend of D-Day; it’s become a trope of American success with Higgins Boats and Garands and an endless wave of Shermans and 30-06 and the Texas gangster-leaning to launch 14” shells beyond design limits to lay hate on Germans. America Uber alles, right?

Wrong. Very, very wrong. The D-Day invasion was the start of the beginning of the end for the Third Reich, but many Americans are quick to dismiss the hellish battle raging on the Eastern Front. It is not an exaggeration to point out that the Soviet Union’s absorption and destruction of entire German armies (at a staggering cost to themselves). Approximately 26 million Soviet citizens were killed or wounded in the course of World War II, from a population of 194 million. That’s approximately 13.7% of the population- the functional equivalent of a standard thirty-person class or platoon losing four people, or an NFL team losing nine players from a game-day roster. Their sacrifices turned the tide of the Axis invasion and made Hitler’s defeat inevitable. Likewise, Americans fought alongside British and ANZAC soldiers across Africa, Sicily and were actively engaged in battle at Anzio in the effort to liberate Italy; that campaign was an effort only possible because of the sacrifices of massive British forces to buy time for Americans to get involved. Yes, American logistics, technology, manufacturing, manpower and numbers were decisive in ultimately forcing victory upon the Germans (who were increasingly rendered prostrate by starvation, bombing, resource deprivation and the human toll of a total three-front war), but without our allies and their efforts, Hitler likely would have overcome his European foes singly.

Another June 6th to remember is 6/6/1942. The Battle of Midway. Seven months after Pearl Harbor, the U.S. Navy was reeling from a whirlwind campaign of stalemates that had cost us most of the Asiatic Fleet, the Philippines, the Marianas and Wake Island and one fleet carrier sunk (Lexington) with two more damaged, presumably knocked out of the war for months. American naval power had been tested and found lacking, American resources were strained, and the prospect of defeat hung over the entire Pacific theater. Japanese forces were technologically superior, generally better-trained, and were on a proverbial winning streak- stalemate at the Coral Sea aside, the Imperial Japanese Navy had landed some heavy blows on the Anglo/American forces, and they had no reason to believe they wouldn’t continue that trend.

Midway was a triumph of good luck, subterfuge, daring and sacrifice, with an emphasis on luck. Spotting the Japanese fleet was luck. The disorganized attacks by Midway’s land-based defenders and the American torpedo squadrons were ineffective because of technical insufficiencies, doctrine failures and training issues- compounded by bad luck and highly-competent, well-equipped opposition. Likewise, Wade McClusky’s sharp-eyed spotting of the Japanese destroyer Arashi led American dive-bomber squadrons to the Kido Butai. Courage, luck, and the cumulative stressors, failures and weaknesses of the Japanese campaign and action plan doomed the Japanese fast carrier force and ended the tide of success. From Midway on, even Japan’s deliberate sorties and master-planned assaults were inherently defensive.

Midway, however, was not a triumph of American technology. Comparatively, the Japanese Navy’s ships were just as good as ours; Japanese fighters were superior in some meaningful aspects to American Wildcats and were far superior to the anemic F2A Buffalos fielded by many of the Marines at Midway. Japanese submarines, torpedoes and bombers were quite good; Japanese crews were well-trained and adequately equipped. Victory at Midway showed that Americans could decisively beat Japanese forces; but there was a more subtle takeaway from that battle, one that bears remembering 83 years later.

When the sun set in the wakes of the Kido Butai on the night of June 5th, 1942, the Japanese Navy was arguably the most powerful, successful, dangerous and lethal naval force on the planet. The Americans were an upstart, admittedly a dangerous one, but Japanese cunning and elegance and detail in planning and courage and daring and perfectionism in execution had delivered nearly-flawless victories over whites for decades and there was no reason to anticipate that would change. The men of the Kido Butai and the battle line following had utter confidence in themselves, their Empire, their mission and their ships. The lessons were there, first shown to the crew of the Shōkaku and the pilots of the Fast Carrier Division at Coral Sea- but those were too recent and too expensive and too culturally-challenging to readily absorb, and the structure of any military is such that the news and lessons of defeat are fire-walled between units to prevent the spread of defeatism. Clinging to those assumptions ensured that thousands of those sailors would not see the sunset on June 6th and sealed the perception that the sun was going to set on their Empire.

How is this relevant today? Well, look at us Americans. We’re still riding the highs of our great-grandfathers and our fathers and our youth, memorializing the Highway of Death and Special Forces raids and A-10 gun runs on Taliban gunmen. We’ve enjoyed fifty years of unchallenged air supremacy and rewritten the rules of warfare to maximize our own technological advantages and minimize our exposures to casualties (with limited success). Today, though, warfare has evolved, and we’re staring at the prospect of being rendered functionally impotent at the sound of a quadcopter’s buzz. Mission-crippling a carrier with a cargo ship’s worth of drones, shattering Air Mobility Command or Global Strike Command’s aircraft fleets, or even simply disabling Internet and cellular communications networks (such as the uniquely-vulnerable Starlink constellation so many military thinkers are enamored with) are frighteningly feasible feats readily-available with commercial, off-the-shelf technology.

The time to come up with solutions to what-ifs isn’t when Bomber-Six is pushing over with their crosshairs on a meatball.