How the D-Day Landing Forged the Special Relationship

To fully understand just how remarkable the achievement of D-Day and the Normandy campaign that followed was, it is worth casting the net back four years to that darkest hour, June 1940.

Britain and France had declared war against Germany, confident that they had the resources, wealth, and global reach to stop Hitler and the tide of Nazism.

For all Germany's grandstanding and military drum beating, Hitler's Reich lay at the heart of Europe, with little access to the world's oceans, with neither a decent navy nor merchant navy and therefore lacked the resources needed to conduct a modern war.

Britain's Royal Navy immediately imposed an economic blockade while France mobilized its vast army of millions. Britain and France, admittedly apprehensive, nonetheless expected to prevail.

By June 1940, such hopes had been shattered. German shock and awe had delivered its Blitzkrieg, mighty France had crumbled, and the forces of totalitarianism and nationalism were sweeping across Europe and threatening to spread their tentacles even further. With it came oppression, a press that was no longer free, racism, secret police, and, as the British Prime Minister, Winston Churchill warned, a "descent into a new dark age made more sinister by the perversions of modern science."

The Nazi swastika fluttered over much of Europe, while the flags of Fascism spread even further. From the Arctic to the west coast of Africa, democracy was dead. For many millions of people, this cancer would bring untold misery, shattered lives, repression, appalling violence, and death.

Britain had evacuated its, admittedly very small, army from across the Channel but had left much of its equipment behind and now faced the prospect of a possible invasion.

Across the Atlantic, Franklin D Roosevelt elected back in 1932 on an isolationist ticket, was President of a united America. Emerging as the most modern and progressive country in the world but with armed forces that were woefully underdeveloped.

With a tiny air corps of a few hundred aircraft and an army that had almost no modern equipment at all, it languished as the nineteenth largest in the world, sandwiched between Portugal and Uruguay.

For both Roosevelt and Churchill, June 1940 represented ground zero. Britain still had much in its favor, and it is entirely wrong, as many have suggested since, that Little Britain stood alone, David against Goliath.

Rather, Britain ruled some 400 million people worldwide, had the world's largest navy, largest merchant navy, access to around 85 percent of the world's merchant shipping, the world's largest empire, vast extra-imperial assets, and a burgeoning Air Force.

The total shock of such a rapid and dramatic defeat on the continent, however, should not be underestimated. Furthermore, with the British Army so small, it had also depended on its ally, France, for land forces. Now that ally and the enormous military strength it possessed, had gone.

The challenge for Britain was to harness its global reach swiftly in a battle against time. Build a new, much larger, and mechanized army for which it had made no plans; Germany's military USP was rapid, overwhelming lightning strikes of force, in which its enemies were swiftly defeated. In June 1940, Britain needed to quickly recover from the shock and ensure Germany was consigned to a long, attritional war for which it was not equipped.

In America, meanwhile, Roosevelt understood that the U.S. needed to equally and urgently rearm on a massive scale too; as he was aware, in this modern age, the Atlantic was not necessarily the barrier it once had been. The isolationist lobby was still powerful, however, and to rearm on the scale he intended required a dramatic political volte-face with a presidential election just months away - an election he intended to fight for a historic third term.

That he was able to begin rearmament on such a big scale and win the November 1940 election was achieved in no small part by telling the American people he was doing so on behalf of Britain and the forces of freedom. That, in turn, required British cash - billions of it - and the start of an increasingly productive relationship between the two nations, whose leadership recognized that cooperation, compromise, and coordination were to be the watchwords if Nazism and Fascism were to be crushed.

And while it was true that the U.S. did not formally enter the war until December 1941, America's involvement had begun a lot earlier-with the acceptance of massive arms orders. Lend-lease, signed in March 1941, with the involvement of the U.S. Atlantic Fleet in escorting merchant ships from August 1941 onwards, and in the sharing of intelligence, science, and technology.

On June 6, 1944, a mere four years after the nadir of 1940, Britain and the United States together launched Operation OVERLORD, the D-Day landings that began the liberation of France.

The military growth from both nations and the totality of their respective war efforts had been exponential and quite astonishingly rapid. Much focus has been made ever since on the actual fighting - the tactical level and the coalface of war.