![]() They waged a multiform war on and under the seas. and the British Commonwealth fought almost everywhere. The Western Allies and China fought the Japanese in the Pacific, Burma and China. They were bogged down in brutal fighting in Italy. They had taken North Africa and Sicily from the Germans and Italians. The Western Allies had hardly been idle before D-Day. Hitler’s Panzers were aided by Russians in Poland and overran Western Europe fueled by supplies from the Soviets. In 1939, he signed a foolish non-aggression pact with Hitler that allowed the Nazis to gobble up Western democracies. Yet for all the sacrifices of the Soviet Union, Josef Stalin was largely responsible for his war with Nazi Germany. Their Herculean efforts by war’s end would account for 2 out of every 3 dead German soldiers - at a cost of 20 million Russian civilian and military casualties. The impatient and long-suffering Russians had demanded of their allies a second front commensurate with their own sacrifices. It weakened Nazi resistance to the Russians while robbing the Third Reich of its valuable occupied European territory. The western front required the diversion of hundreds of thousands of German troops. Within 11 months, the war with Germany was over. Within a month, almost a million Allied troops had landed in France and were heading eastward toward the German border. Seventy years ago today, the Americans, British and Canadians stormed the beaches of Normandy in the largest amphibious invasion of Europe since the Persian king Xerxes invaded Greece in 480 B.C.Ībout 160,000 troops landed on five Normandy beaches and linked up with airborne troops in a masterful display of planning and courage. ![]()
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