Eighty year ago today, the largest amphibious assault in the history of man — the invasion of Normandy, D-Day, June 6 — was 48 hours into the history books. Yet what would be written in the history books we read today was still unknown.
While the Allies had established beachheads across the 50-mile stretch of coastline that made up the five invasion beaches, they were anything but secure. A coordinated German counterattack could still lead to disaster.
Thankfully, that counterattack never came, or else the history we read today would be of the Allies being pushed back into the sea. The sacrifice of the already thousands dead would have been for naught. D-Day would not be remembered as the amazing feat that it was, but rather Dunkirk 2.0.
One could think that given, the industrial might of the American Home Front, the defeat of Germany was still inevitable. Yes, the allies owned the air, but as formidable as it was it was nothing compared to hundreds of thousands of Allied troops attacking from the west along a unified front while Hitler desperately tried to hold off the Russians coming from the East.
We could debate for another 80 years the “what ifs,” but thankfully we don’t need to. The invasion of Normandy did not end in failure and though tens of thousands more would die in battles yet to be fought, the beginning of the end of Nazi Germany that started in the early morning hours of June 6, 1944, did indeed succeed.
And while we are able to look back in awe at what that Greatest Generation did and the freedom it secured, we would be remiss to not recognize the events that made it all possible — events that started over 250 years earlier in a harbor more than three thousand miles from Portsmouth and Southampton.
The year was 1773, the date was Dec. 16, and the harbor was Boston. The issue at hand was an English Parliament imposing its will upon American colonists via the recently passed Tea Act and three merchant ships — the Dartmouth, Beaver and Eleanor — carrying over 92,000 pounds of British East India Co. tea.
With the previous attempt by Parliament to tax the colonies via the Stamp Act of 1765 still fresh in their minds, this new act of “taxation without representation” was met with the same resentment and resistance — resistance that in 1765 had put enough pressure on Parliament to repeal the act a year later.
But thanks to the obstinance of lieutenant governor and chief justice of Massachusetts, Thomas Hutchinson, the option for a campaign of soft pressure to Parliament was off the table.
Hutchinson’s order that no ship could depart the harbor without a pass meant that the tax on the Dartmouth’s tea would have to be paid by midnight or the ship and all of its contents would be confiscated.
The next day, John Adams would write to his friend James Warren: “The Dye is cast: The People have passed the River and cutt away the Bridge: last Night Three Cargoes of Tea, were emptied into the Harbour. This is the grandest, Event, which has ever yet happened Since, the Controversy, with Britain, opened!”
Less than nine months later — Sept. 5, 1774 — the First Continental Congress convened in Philadelphia and the rest, as they say, is history.
Two events inextricably linked — without that little tea party in Boston, no United States, and without American industrial might to produce the weapons and the moral clarity to endure the pain of having hundreds of thousands of its own die that the world remain free, no D–Day.
It would take a yearslong war and thousands of lives lost before the name “United States of America” would go from a designation by the Second Continental Congress to a free and independent nation.
And it would not be until Sept. 17, 1787, when Benjamin Franklin would emerge from Independence Hall on the last day of the Constitutional Convention and find Mrs. Elizabeth Powell awaiting news from inside the hall.
Her inquiry: “Well, doctor, what have we got, a republic or a monarchy?”
Without hesitation, Franklin answered: “A republic madam, if you can keep it.”
In all the years I’ve been following our national politics, never have I contemplated Franklin’s warning more than I do today.
We are not just losing our connection to that generation of D–Day, we are losing our connection to the who, what and why of this nation’s very existence.
For far too many today, our founding principles are no longer pillars to be protected, but obstacles standing in the way of “progress.”
As Nov. 5, draws closer the question this election is simple: “Do we keep it, or toss it?”
