Thanks, Dear Yanks

In the German media, around pub tables and also in the smoker’s corner in German universities “the Yanks” are still being badmouthed. When individual American soldiers commit atrocities, U.S. politicians act impudently or American firms are successful due to superior technologies, we curse “the Yanks” in whose shadow we live and under whose culture our culture is disappearing, a particularly bad fate given that, as everyone knows, these “silly Yanks,” as opposed to the cultured Germans, have no culture whatsoever. That is something anyone can read on Google on an Apple computer. Cheers.

Those who talk and think like this should try to visualize the massacre of June 6, 1944. On this June day 70 years ago, the Western Allies positioned around 160,000 men at the top of the English Channel for “Operation Overlord” in order to free the world and Germany from its dictator, who was much loved by large numbers of the German population. With the opening of a second front in the West, the fierce fighting Soviets in the East were to be alleviated.

How the troops’ landing on the beaches in Normandy may have looked can be seen in Steven Spielberg’s masterpiece “Saving Private Ryan” from 1998. The film tells the partially true story of a young American soldier who is dragged into a war which he, having lived a simple life on his family’s small farm in the U.S.A., really had nothing to do with.

Nearly One in 10 Died Shortly after the Landings

In the 15-minute, epic opening sequence, Spielberg focused on the particularly brutal landing on the section known as Omaha Beach. In it you can see what happened on this June 6. After the landing boats’ hatches opened, the roughly 45,000 attacking infantrymen were covered by a hail of machine gun bullets and carpet of grenades which left almost every tenth soldier dead. The urban warfare in the areas behind the front was similarly fierce. The “Atlantic Wall” bunkers in which the German soldiers entrenched themselves can still be seen on the beaches of Normandy.

It was lucky that Adolf Hitler, the “best commander of all time” — as he was dubbed by his field marshal, Wilhelm Keitel — had been expecting an invasion one month later and not in Normandy, but in Calais. Therefore the German fortifications and troops on the beaches of Normandy were insufficient to stop the Allied onslaught.

The old SS cavaliers, many with experience in the Eastern Front and in the war of extermination, killed fiercely and used their predominant, elevated position on the edge of the Atlantic in an ice-cold fashion. The Western Allies’ “Operation Overlord” ended on Aug. 30, 1944 with the German troops’ retreat across the Seine. At the end of the summer invasion, approximately 88,000 dead Brits, Canadians and Poles and almost 125,000 dead Americans were being mourned. They were accompanied by 240,000 fallen German soldiers in France.

The Germans Sow the Wind of Decay

Why should we be thankful? In the Book of Hosea in the Old Testament we read: “For they have sown the wind, and they shall reap the whirlwind.” Germans brought death to other nations, sowing a wind of decay. As punishment the Germans did not receive a whirlwind but rather a gentle breeze.

We should be thankful that the Allies did not repay like with like, instead stopping the slaughter for the most part as soon as military groups surrendered. The numbers of German victims on the Omaha Beach section demonstrate this. Of 7,800 German foot soldiers, 1,200 died.

In hindsight, we should bow our heads in humility that the heavy casualty invasion of the Western Allies succeeded before the American atomic bombs were completed in Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. Otherwise, these bombs may not have fallen only on Hiroshima and Nagasaki but would have been flung at Hamburg and Frankfurt as well, in order to prevent casualties in their own ranks.

We should also not completely forget that it was the Americans who succeeded in mastering nuclear fission and not scientists from the German Reich. If Hitler’s driven and highly educated engineers, mathematicians and physicists had reached this goal before the Allies, it could well have spelled the end of the free world. There would have been no effective defense against atomic bombs dropped on New York, London and Moscow. Luckily, Hitler saw nuclear technology as rather unimportant and preferred to concentrate the material and scientific resources of the German Reich on developing tanks, missiles and jet planes.

European Recovery Program Instead of Punishment

Supporters of democracy should also be thankful that the Western Allies succeeded in reaching Berlin in collaboration with the Soviets. Otherwise, a democratic West Germany and a free, united Germany from 1990 on would have been unthinkable.

On June 6 we should remember the fact that the Western Allies’ invasion came too late to stop the Germans’ murderous activities at the start but was not, even at this late stage of the war, taken for granted . Hitler would have been better coming to an arrangement with the Brits who, in his racist ideology, he saw as his Aryan brothers.

It is due to the cigar-smoking man about town, Winston Churchill, that the Americans, who were weary after World War I, were brought on board and made to sacrifice their young men for a faraway war. In an exchange of letters with U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt which could almost be described as affectionate, the future Nobel Prize winner for literature, Churchill, managed to bring the Americans, who had been isolating themselves since World War I, into the war.

After 1945, punishment was not in the cards, though it would not have been extraordinary given Germany’s wartime atrocities; instead, the West received substantial remuneration as part of the European Recovery Program. Even East Germany quickly landed on its feet despite the removal of its factories. In comparison with countries within the Soviet area of influence, the standard of life in West Germany was constantly very high.

The Americans Are Not Really Without Culture

As far as the foreign political activities of the U.S.A. after World War II are concerned, opinion is divided. There were unfortunate alliances with Islamists in Afghanistan, failed invasions and wartime deceptions. But whether, for instance, Iraq would be better off waiting in the wings under a psychopathic Saddam Hussein and his even sicker sons is debatable.

Whether the liberation of Iraq from its dictator was really a mistake, as many observers now ascertain without a doubt, can only really be meaningfully evaluated in a few decades.

This leaves the supposed absence of culture among the apparently uneducated Americans. Those who possess the arrogance to utter this claim will hardly be won over by the evidence of the Americans’ scientific and artistic accomplishments. Maybe a little memory aid will help: The people who killed 6 million Jews must know what real absence of culture is.