June 5, 2018—Remembering D-Day . . .

D-Day, the allied invasion to free our allies in Europe from Adolph Hitler’s Nazi oppression, was originally scheduled to begin on June 5, 1944 — 74 years ago today. But because of bad weather leading up to that day, USA General Dwight Eisenhower, Supreme Allied Commander, decided to delay the invasion of the Normandy beaches for 24 hours — to June 6^th the day we celebrate as D-Day.

Highly secret plans for this day had been underway for months, part of a carefully constructed invasion game plan code-named Project Overlord. It included the combined operation of over 150,000 American, British and Canadian forces landing on five beaches code named Utah, Omaha, Gold Juno and Sword along a 50-mile stretch of French territory, as illustrated below. And of course the invasion was supported by allied naval and air forces in major preparatory and concurrent operations.

It was no small achievement that this complex operation completely surprised the German leadership. Key to the success of Project Overlord was a major deception operation, with the important involvement of the famed USA Lt. General George S. Paton. His reputation in leading the Army’s previous accomplishments persuaded the German leaders that he was to lead the main focus of the anticipated invasion across the narrowest point between France and Britain.

Click here for an interesting discussion of Patton’s “Ghost Army” and details of related deception activities preceding D-Day and a few references to Patton’s leadership of the Third Army after D-Day that led to victory and the end of World War II in Europe.

The overall deception plan succeeded so well that German Field Marshal Erwin Rommel, who no doubt was impressed by Patton’s reputation and had been charged by Hitler to protect France’s northern coast, did not return from leave until after the allied invasion was well underway. And other German Generals were so intimidated by “der Führer” that they did not awaken Hitler until the invasion was well underway.

But Rommel’s preparations with fortifications of bunkers, landmines, and underwater obstacles along the beaches posed significant challenges for the allied invasion, especially since mistakes were made in where the troops disembarked in the face of blinding enemy fire that claimed 2000 American lives on Omaha alone. More than 4000 allied lives were lost on D-Day, with thousands more wounded or missing.

Among the most memorable achievements was by “Rudder’s Rangers” who scaled Pointe du Hoc’s 100 ft. almost vertical rock cliff in the early morning hours to occupy that sniper/artillery post between Utah and Omaha. Click here for additional background on this extraordinary achievement and related activities on that fateful morning. The Pointe du Hoc Ranger Monument below was erected by the French to honor those Rangers and their heroic accomplishments on D-Day.

No one who has visited the American cemetery near the Beaches can forget the costs of being unprepared to deal with Hitler’s despotic regime. Those graves, and many others, illustrate the cost of ignoring the gathering storm that led to World War II — called the unnecessary war by Winston Churchill.

As we discussed last week, dare we repeat that tragic error? And remember, Normandy is only a token of those costs of failing to be prepared. Click here for that message that reflected my views of the meaning of Memorial Day.

At the beginning of World War II, we were totally unprepared. Our soldiers drilled with broomsticks and while their ranks swelled with volunteers, the young ladies, wives and mothers joined the factory work force as a “Rosie the Riveter,” to provide our troops with the weapons and delivery systems they needed to fight. See below a photo of women at work in 1942 at Douglas Aircraft Company in Long Beach, California.

These patriotic women were vital to enabling America, from a standing start in December 1941, to reach the stage of the beginning-of-the-end on D-Day in 1944 — just three-and-a-half years later. With their aid, America’s industrial base turned out weaponry at a record pace, which I doubt we can match today.

And these women not only enabled that war effort, but they also set the stage for today’s continuing women’s movement — equal pay for equal work.

Indeed, we all played a role with food from our farms, victory gardens in our cities, rationing of key materials to support the war effort and regularly engaging in Civil Defense exercises. I recall participating in my limited way as a young farm boy, listening with my family to radio reports of our progress in the overseas war effort and rejoicing as things began to turn our way.

Today, we confront new challenging threats — now with adversaries that have far more dangerous lethal weapons than confronted our troops on D-Day.

Moreover, we no longer have the inherent advantage of being an island nation — e.g., cyber threats have worldwide reach in the blink of the eye. Today’s weaponry includes orders-of-magnitude greater lethal potential, including by nuclear weapons that can be delivered within 20-minutes via intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs).

In turn, they could be used to deliver an electromagnetic pulse (EMP) that could shut down our electric power grid indefinitely, leading to the death of most Americans within a matter of months due to starvation, disease and societal collapse.

No wonder that employing such a capability is part of the military doctrine of Russia, China, North Korea and Iran. Still we dither in preparing effective countermeasures. President Trump should establish a position under the National Security Advisor to take charge of the dysfunctional federal government and counter this all too real existential threat.

We dare not continue to allow these threats to metastasize without a much improved response. To do so is to invite threats much more problematic than those that led to World War II, and without the inherent capabilities that permitted us to rapidly recover during the ongoing conflict.

And while we should be hopeful that diplomatic efforts, such as the anticipated historic meeting between President Trump and Kim Jong Un, we must take needed steps to underwrite the President’s Peace through Strength agenda. As part of that agenda, we should strengthen our industrial base to be less reliant on overseas capabilities — as is among President Trump’s objectives.

Moreover, it is also long past time that we remove the inhibitions that for decades have hobbled our best engineers and scientists in developing effective defenses against these most threatening now proliferating threats to our very survival.

In addition to hardening our critical civil infrastructure to the full complement of threats, we should again seek to meet President Ronald Reagan’s challenge that his Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) find ways to protect America and our allies and friends from ballistic missile attack.

He was adamant that this search include space-based defenses — Gorbachev’s demand that SDI studies be limited to the laboratory was why he walked out of the Reykjavik Summit. I was pleased to pursue his objectives, initially as his Chief Negotiator in the Defense and Space Talks with the Soviet Union and later as SDI Director under President George H.W. Bush.

We were well on our way to achieving President Reagan’s objective with the Brilliant Pebbles space-based interceptor concept — which the first four Directors of what is now known as the Missile Defense Agency believed was the most cost-effective defense produced by the SDI era: 1983-93.

But the Democrat-controlled congress undercut those efforts during my watch as SDI Director, and then President Clinton’s Defense Secretary and former Chairman of the House Armed Services Committee Les Aspin, as he said, “took the stars out of Star Wars” in early 1993.

That stalled state-of-affairs remained unchanged for a quarter century through both Democrat and Republican administrations. Time to “return to the future.”

Happily, there are some positive signs that maybe we at long last will be revisiting President Reagan’s agenda. For example, click here for my Newsmax article last week, applauding Senator Ted Cruz’s initiative in the Senate Armed Services Committee’s National Defense Authorization Act for 2019 (NDAA 2019), directing the Pentagon to include space-based interceptors in their acquisition plans and programs.

Hopefully, Senator Cruz’s initiative will be included in the Senate’s version of the NDAA 2019 and survive the conference with the House of Representatives.

Stay tuned…not only to that outcome, but also the Pentagon’s Missile Defense Review report, which is reportedly due in the very near future.

What can you do?

Join us in praying for our nation, and for a rebirth of the freedom sought, achieved and passed to us by those who came before us.

Help us to spread our message to the grass roots and to encourage all “powers that be” to provide for the common defense as they are sworn to do.

Begin by passing this message to your friends and suggest they visit our webpage www.highfrontier.org, for more information. Also, please encourage your sphere of influence to sign up for our weekly e-newsletter.

Encourage them to review our past email messages, posted on www.highfrontier.org, to learn about many details related to the existential manmade and natural EMP threats and how we can protect America against them. I hope you will help us with our urgently needed efforts, which I will be discussing in future messages.

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