The Patient Warrior

By David M. Kennedy

D-day came in the 58th month of the war in Europe, less than a year before Germany's surrender. Nothing on that day proved more essential to success than time. Not the time of tide and moon phase on June 6, 1944, but the much more consequential arc of the preceding 57 months. The nearly five years that separated D-day from the war's outbreak provided time for America the Unready to draft, train and deploy an invasion force of some 3 million men; time to season those untested civilian soldiers in North Africa and Italy; time to stockpile in Britain nearly 5 million tons of munitions, thousands of aircraft and an armada of 6,483 ships; time for British and U.S. bombers to cripple Germany's industrial plant and snarl its rail lines; time for the Soviets to bleed the Wehrmacht white on the ghastly killing fields of the eastern front; and, not least, time for Franklin Roosevelt to reassure the American people that their country's cause was just, its leaders prudent and its strategy sound.

Time was unarguably the U.S.'s most valuable ally in World War II. It saved the lives of countless soldiers who would surely have perished in an earlier assault on Hitler's Fortress Europe. It all but guaranteed victory when the colossal D-day operation was at last launched. As with so much else in World War II, the U.S. had more of it than any other belligerent. Winston Churchill tendered the U.S. its first gift of time by standing steadfast against the Nazi juggernaut in the Battle of Britain and the Blitz in 1940 and 1941. Thereafter, the U.S. had time in copious abundance, thanks mostly to the skill and cunning of F.D.R.--including, especially, his wily management of relations with Soviet leader Joseph Stalin, whose much abused people were plunged into unspeakable woe by the German invasion of June 1941.

The War Department's original plans for attacking Nazi Germany envisioned a major cross-Channel invasion in mid-1943, with the possibility of a smaller-scale landing at an earlier date if the Soviets were on the point of collapse. That seemed perilously likely. By mid-1942, more than 150 German divisions had overrun the Soviet Union to a depth of 1,000 miles, wreaking mayhem on a scale that John F. Kennedy later compared to "the devastation of this country east of Chicago." The fate of Britain and the U.S. alike hung on the Soviets' survival. "The prize we seek," said Dwight Eisenhower in 1942, "is to keep 8 million Russians in the war."

Roosevelt accordingly assured Soviet Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov in the spring of 1942 that he could "expect the formation of a second front this year." Stalin was momentarily mollified. But he was soon disappointed and then venomously embittered when it became clear that the U.S. would not open a second front in 1942 or even in 1943. As compensation, Roosevelt offered Stalin some Lend-Lease aid, vague assurances of a free hand in postwar Eastern Europe, and a pledge to accept nothing less than Germany's (and Japan's) unconditional surrender. The Russians fought on, but at horrendous cost. Stalin fulminated that Roosevelt was waging war with American money and American machines--and with Russian men. The accusation arose from anger and cynicism, but it had the sting of truth. For every American who gave his life in World War II, some 59 Soviets died.

Roosevelt delayed D-day for so long not to punish the Russians but to protect Americans--and to lay the groundwork for the U.S.'s postwar international leadership. He knew all too well that his isolationist countrymen had scuttled Woodrow Wilson's bid to claim that leadership after World War I. He was worried that demanding too great a sacrifice in World War II might once again sour the nation on assuming its international responsibilities. Then all his painstaking work to wean Americans from their provincial ways would be squandered and the world once again rendered unsafe for democracy.

To remember all this is surely not to disparage the sacrifice of the 1,465 G.I.s who died on the Normandy beaches or the more than 400,000 other Americans who gave their lives in the course of the war. But it is to recognize that those brave men and their comrades in arms fought in the context of a strategy devised by their President to achieve a lasting and legitimate victory at the least possible cost. No responsible President should ever do less.

The men who made up what Omar Bradley called the "thin wet line of khaki that dragged itself ashore" on D-day were the beneficiaries of a long and patient exercise in presidential education and artful diplomacy that sustained their belief in the righteousness of their cause, spared them an even more horrific fate, and gave them the time to do their job with dispatch and dignity. Franklin Roosevelt bought them that time. It was the Russians who largely paid the bill.

David M. Kennedy teaches history at Stanford University. His most recent book, Freedom from Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929-1945, won a Pulitzer Prize in 2000