“If they hadn’t come, where would we be today?’ said [Louis] Delevin, 77, who as a farm boy of 12 provided the pilots with apple cider between raids on the retreating German troops. “You don’t have to be a great scholar to understand that the freedom we enjoy today was decided in those days in 1944.”
I think the Canadians and Brits were there too….
If the Brits and Yanks had not landed then the French would have been speaking Russian for the next 50 years because they are the ones who really beat the Germans.
Not to mention the Royal Norwegian Navy, the Royal Australian Air Force, the Free French Navy, the Free French Air Force, and the Dutch, Czech and Polish squadrons of the RAF.
Oh, and the Belgians, too!
1,2,3: without the Americans (the bulk of the invasion force) the invasion would not have had a chance of success, and in all probablity would not have even been attempted.
What needs to be remembered that this was a multi-national invasion force led by an American. Each of the nationalities involved played a part from Danish and Polish flyers to American, British, Canadian, etc., who landed on the beaches. Blood was shed by tens of thousands so that Europe might be liberated and the Nazi tyranny destroyed. The pecking order is immaterial, because they succeeded. Oh, by the way, I am both an American and a British citizen.