The spy who saved D-Day
On 6 June 1944, President Franklin D Roosevelt solemnly declared, “You don’t just walk to Berlin”.
He was speaking at a White House press conference, where he had just announced that Allied troops had landed in northern France.
The gathering was a homely affair, with none of the bombast associated with similar events today. In fact, it was an occasion of masterly understatement. What he could have said was that the largest naval invasion in the history of the world was finally under way. But as he gave the assembled journalists the anodyne update, what he had no way of knowing was quite how successful the operation would be. Within a year, the war with Germany would be over, and Hitler would have a bullet in his head.
The long-awaited amphibious invasion of France was not a secret, and it came as no surprise to German High Command. Stalin’s armies had been scything ever deeper into Hitler’s forces in the east, where victories like those at Stalingrad and Kursk were definitively pushing the Germans west, out of Russia. But everyone knew that Hitler’s hold on most of mainland Europe was strong and not likely to be shaken. Stalin had therefore been urging the Allies to open up a second front in France to overstretch Germany’s war economy and troops. So Hitler and his generals knew it was coming.
A dear friend who passed away earlier this year was a Normandy beach survivor. I miss Fred
And this is an AWESOME story!!!!