Reflecting on D-Day

I am writing this on June 6, 2026, 82 years after Gen. Dwight Eisenhower ordered Operation Overlord. That order – and the operation’s success – guaranteed the defeat of Nazi Germany. It’s possible that Germany could have defended itself from the Russian counterattack in the east, but with U.S. and British forces also attacking in the west, Germany was fated to fall.

Operation Overlord’s success was important, of course, but there was an earlier and even more critical decision that guaranteed Germany’s inevitable defeat: Hitler’s decision to declare war on the United States. Germany might have been able to stop the Soviets and the British, but declaring war on the U.S., just four days after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, ensured Hitler’s downfall.

Like most Europeans and Japanese, Hitler did not understand the United States. Isolationism seemed to them to be an eternal American principle. After World War I, the American reaction against Europe was profound. Hitler interpreted this as weakness. At one point, he met with Charles Lindbergh, who was both a determined isolationist and a Hitler admirer. The meeting reinforced the Fuehrer’s belief that Americans would not go to war or, if they did, would not do so with the requisite determination to win.

Japan made the same mistake. Franklin D. Roosevelt was concerned with Japan’s imperial ambitions, but he knew he could not initiate war. Instead, he blocked the flow of oil, steel and other resources Japan needed but could not produce domestically. That led to the attack on Pearl Harbor, the purpose of which was to force the U.S. to enter negotiations and end the embargo. Instead, the U.S. declared war on Japan.

There was another element to Japan’s calculations. Germany had approached Japan to join in the attack on Russia from the east. Tokyo apparently intimated to Hitler that it would, but only after dealing with the Americans. The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor stunned and enraged the American public, and isolationism dissolved within hours. The idea of negotiating with Japan was seen as treason. But, as promised, Germany declared war on the U.S. days later, incorrect in its belief that Washington would avoid battle at all costs.

Germany’s decision goes down in the annals of stupid geopolitical moves. The U.S. was less interested in entering a simultaneous war in Europe than it was in avenging Pearl Harbor. I am not sure what the U.S. would have done in the long run, but I believe Roosevelt would have had a hard time declaring war on Germany had Germany not declared first.

Its declaration was predicated on the assumption that the U.S. would quickly capitulate to Japan, which would then be free to attack Russia from the east. Whether Japan would have done that is unknown, but what is known is that Germany’s declaration of war on the U.S. ultimately led Hitler to blow his brains out in a cellar in Berlin and to the nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

The bottom line is that Germany and Japan fundamentally misunderstood anti-war sentiment in the U.S. as a permanent feature. It was a fatal mistake. They also miscalculated how quickly the U.S. could leverage industrial development, which created enormous military power, and failed to understand the unity and collective rage Americans felt when the stakes demanded it.

It’s unclear whether the Soviet Union and the U.K. could have defeated Germany alone. Bringing the Americans into the war made defeat certain. The military brilliance of the Normandy invasion, the solidarity of Britain and the U.S., and the bravery and competence of American soldiers and sailors – not to mention the nature of American culture, dispensing with disagreement when danger appeared – should not be forgotten.

I was born in Europe and brought to the U.S. as an infant but raised in a household of Europeans. On the anniversary of D-Day, I reflect on how profoundly the rest of the world, which I have travelled widely, still misunderstands the nature of the United States. We periodically engage in the luxury of internal discord and even rage. That’s part of our culture. The world should think of Normandy when evaluating the nature of America. I urge my fellow citizens to do the same.