Friday, June 6, 2014

D-Day, June 1944: Evil Wins




On June 6, 1944, seventy years ago, evil won.

Here's what happened. The Allies launched a massive, successful amphibious invasion of German-occupied France in June 1944. For the next three months, the Allies were confined to a small, Anzio-type bridgehead on the Normandy coast. During that time, the American soldiers went on a rape and murder rampage, killing and raping hundreds of French women. French cities, such as Caen, were laid to waste by Allied aerial bombardment and thousands of French died. Finally, in August 1944, the Allies broke out and pursued the Germans across France and Belgium and back into Germany. After the 'liberation' of France, the French resistance (communists and petit-bourgeois Gaullist nationalists) killed upwards of ninety to a hundred thousand right-leaning French. German POWs, in Allied-occupied France and (later) occupied Germany were put in POW camps which were little more than barbed-wire enclosures; Eisenhower saw to it that the POWs were not protected by the Geneva convention and made feeding of the soldiers punishable by death. Hundreds of thousands of German POWs (not all soldiers - some were captured civilians) died of starvation, disease and exposure; some were used as slave labourers. Eisenhower and the Americans, after the defeat and occupation of the Western half of Germany, employed similar starvation tactics on the German populace as a whole; the result was that millions of Germans died in the hunger years of 1945-1949.

By the moral standards taught to me as a boy by American popular culture (the Star Wars movies, Batman, Superman, the Marvel comic books of Stan Lee and Jack Kirby (both WWII veterans), TV shows such as Six Million Dollar man and countless Saturday morning action-adventure cartoons) the American 'liberators' and 'heroes' of France qualify as evil. The veterans of Normandy on the Allied side men were brave - no doubt about that - but they were soldiers in the service of evil.

That's not the way our journalists, politicians and intellectuals see it, however. To them, the Germans ('Hitler', the 'Nazis') were the evil ones, because, during the war, they gassed six million Jews and an undefined, ever changing number of homosexuals, gypsies and Poles. The D-Day landings, the liberation of France and the Low Countries, were a victory for good, not evil. The liberal establishment holds to this line even though, explicably, the Allies themselves in WWII never held to it. One can search in vain in the memoirs of de Gaulle, Churchill, Eisenhower, Truman for references to the six million. Indeed, it was never made clear, during the war, why it was that 'we' (the Anglo-Saxon nations - the US, the UK, South Africa, Australia, New Zealand) were fighting the Germans and why we needed to wage a war of annihilation, of 'unconditional surrender', without negotiation and why we needed to be communism's best friend. Now, though, what happened has been retrospectively configured - or 'retconned', to use a slang term of comic book fans. History has been changed, so WWII is all about the Jews, racism and protecting ethnic minority groups. The Holocaust - the fulfilment of millennia-old Jewish religious prophecies contained in the Jewish religious text, the Talmud - is the prime justification for WWII and anti-Nazism.

WWII, the Allied atrocities against the European population, the occupation of Europe and the installation of liberal democracy against the will of the people - all this is justified, ex post, by the Holocaust. But there are is an unfortunate consequence of this: take the Holocaust away, and you are left with nothing - no stick to beat Hitler, the Germans, the fascist and Nazi movements of 1922-1945 with. Hitler and Mussolini weren't so bad after all. What a shocking conclusion! I often wonder what would happen if weapons inspectors were sent into Auschwitz and other German 'death camps' to look for traces of Hitler's weapons of mass destruction - the gas chambers - and the chemical residues left behind by the mass execution through gassing of millions of human beings. What would happen if the weapons inspectors came back empty-handed? How would your self-righteous, ignorant little liberal American or British or German or French person react? Would they experience some sort of psychological collapse?

One thing is for sure: the main argument against neo-Nazism would be taken away. The liberal establishment in Europe and the West would have nothing left to fight it with. They would need to resort to logic, argument for a change; they couldn't call upon those old stock photos of dead skinny people at Dachau or the bizarre anecdotes of the 'Wolf Woman of Auschwitz' and other Jewish Holocaust 'survivor' fakes and bores.

This would have terrible political consequences for the powers that be. Since 1945, the West has been in the control of an Anglo-Saxon, Judeo-Masonic elite. They rule the Continent with an iron fist. The outcome of the war - the defeat of Germany and Italy - and the ceding of Eastern Europe and half of Germany were, for this elite, a success of perhaps unprecedented scale; never before in history has one single power had complete, unchallenged control of all of Europe - the Continent, Scandinavia, the British Isles. The occupation of Europe in 1943-1945 was the turning point in their political fortunes, and the successful invasion of France was a turning in the point in the war. This is why the liberal establishment media gives so much prominence to anniversaries of the Normandy invasion; in contrast, it hardly pays any attention to the anniversaries of other significant events - the invasion of Afghanistan, the invasion of Iraq, the 1990 war in Kuwait, the Inchon landings in Korea, the first American battle in Vietnam in 1965... The Anglo-Saxon elite doesn't like reminding people of these battles because the wars were either outright defeats or were 'inconclusive'. The war in Europe in 1944-1945, however, was an out-and-out crushing victory, militarily and politically.

The reason as to why the 1944 invasion of France was such a success is, from a political perspective, an interesting one. The media attributes the success to military factors such as Allied superiority in air and naval armaments, the 'element of surprise', the skill and valour of the Allied soldiers, brilliant Allied deception plans and so forth; it also attributes it, as part of anti-Nazi, anti-Hitler propaganda, to incompetence, ineptitude on the part of Hitler and the Germans. This seems a reasonable thesis on the face of it, but it's actually skilful propaganda aimed at demoralising the Germans and the sympathisers of fascism and Nazism everywhere. The message is, 'You Germans are destined to always lose - sure, we lost Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan, but when we Anglo-Saxon liberals and judeophiles put our minds to it, to defeating evil, we always win! Because you are stupid and we are great...'. Such a propaganda line is extremely effective, in part because it's human nature to go with the winning side. We are more inclined to sympathise with those who are 'predestined' to win and less inclined with those who are 'predestined' to lose. No-one likes a loser.

Was the Allied victory in June 1944 predestined, however? Militarily, it was a near thing. The massive aerial and naval bombardment of the Normandy coastline, the presence of Allied paratroopers in the German rear, didn't 'take out' the German defenders. In essence, the invaders were lightly-armed men wading in water in the face of murderous fire. There was no body armour in those days, and one hit from a bullet or a piece of shrapnel meant you as a soldier were out of the war - for good. The invasion could have been thwarted had not things gone wrong on the German side - gone wrong deliberately; more or less, it only succeeded because of traitors in the German high command. We read in David Irving's classic biography of Rommel, Trail of the Fox: The Life of Field Marshal Erwin Rommel (1977), of how Rommel's Chief of Staff, Hans Speidel, prevented the 21st Panzer division from reinforcing the coastal defenders in those crucial hours of the invasion, thereby probably ensuring that the Allied waders weren't done away with. Speidel's actions on that day puzzled and upset Rommel, who was unaware that Speidel was part of a vast underground anti-Hitler network in the German military High Command - a network of pro-Allied, Atlanticist sympathisers (Speidel, in his post-war autobiography, openly admitted to help sabotage any German counter-offensive against the Allies on the day of the invasion and went on to a successful career as a NATO general). Speidel and the generals who participated in the abortive July 1944 military coup against Hitler were Badoglios - i.e., German versions of the Italian general who toppled Mussolini in the coup of September 1943 and betrayed him to the Allies. They, more than anyone else, made the invasion a success. (In August 1944, Hitler ordered a bold counter-offensive against the American armoured spearheads in Avranches - an offensive which went mysteriously awry. Irving records, without comment, Hitler's opinion that this failure was the result of betrayal by the Badoglios).

The Germans in June 1944 had advance warning of the time and date of the invasion, but didn't act upon it. Perhaps this could have been the result of not recognising, in time, the significance of this piece of intelligence - they were, most likely, overwhelmed with intelligence on Allied troop movements and invasion plans; but it could also have been because of betrayal at the highest levels. I tend to subscribe to the latter theory. As time goes on, I think, more and more evidence will emerge substantiating Irving's thesis. There is already a book called Verrat in der Normandie: Eisenhowers deutsche Helfer ('Betrayal in Normandy: Eisenhower's German Helpers') (2010) by Friedrich George, a liberal anti-Nazi author who takes the same position as Irving; more will come out in the future.

One can speculate and advance an alternative history: the traitors in the German High Command are purged before June 1944, the Allies launch the invasion anyway on June the 6th and find the 21st Panzer waiting for them - and are destroyed. This would have arguably changed the course of the war in Germany's favour. Irving recounts, in Hitler's War (1977), that by 1944 Hitler's strategic thinking had changed: Germany and its allies couldn't conquer the USSR, but could stop them in their tracks and prevent them from invading eastern Europe; this was on the proviso that an Allied invasion of France was soundly defeated. Hitler believed that the Allies only had enough materiel for one big invasion; were the Allies to fail, that would be it - the Allies would call off their war and perhaps 'Roosevelt will be sent to jail'. The scenario was: the Allies launch their big invasion, and are defeated by Germany's panzer divisions and its new jet bombers; then the panzer divisions in the West can be turned on the Russians. The Third Reich, then, would win a defensive victory.

The liberal establishment journalists and military historians scoff at such thinking. Hitler was overly-optimistic (to believe that he could win the war against the Allies is proof of his insanity); what's more, by that point, nothing could stop the colossus which was the 'superb' Red Army. But there are signs of a break in the narrative. The American historian John Mosier, in his Death Ride: Hitler vs. Stalin: The Eastern Front, 1941-1945 (2010) takes the line that the Russians could have been stopped if it weren't for the Normandy invasion - German combat replacements on the Eastern front could have increased by 40 to 50%. He notes that the Russians always launched a really big, successful offensive on the heels of an Allied one - Sicily and Italy, Normandy, the crossing of the Rhine.

Supposing that Irving and Mosier are right, two lessons emerge: one is, Hitler should have purged his generals; the second, Germany's defeat wasn't inevitable and neither was the Allied victory. Future generations of German and European nationalists should pay heed.