(Mis-)Remembering D-Day

By Ulli Diemer


The June-July 2024 issue of Canada’s History magazine carried an item on the 80th anniversary of D-Day which called the Normandy invasion of June 1944 “the first phase” of the campaign to liberate Western Europe. This letter questions this framing of how Nazi Germany was defeated, noting that most of the fighting was done by the Soviet army.


As a magazine devoted to Canadian history, Canada’s History naturally highlights the role that Canadians played in world events. That is as it should be. But the D-Day Anniversary item in the June-July issue, which states that the Normandy Campaign was “the first phase of a nearly year-long operation to liberate Western Europe from Nazi occupation,” comes perilously close to crossing the line from blowing our own horn to historical misrepresentation.

The campaign to defeat the armies of Nazi Germany began in the East, and was primarily waged by the Soviet Union. The Soviets did the lion’s share of the fighting, suffered most of the casualties, and inflicted the bulk of the losses sustained by the German army. Operation Bagration alone, launched by the Soviets in the same month as D-Day, mobilized more than 1.6 million men in the initial phase. Their campaign destroyed 28 German divisions, inflicted hundreds of thousands of casualties, and took a huge number of prisoners. If these forces had been available to the Germans on the western front, the 150,000 Americans, British and Canadians who came ashore in Normandy would not have had a chance.

Without the Soviet Red Army, the D-Day invasion force would never have made it off the beaches, and not an inch of Europe, east or west, would have been liberated from Nazi occupation.


Ulli Diemer
June 10, 2024



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