EDITORIAL
D-Day: Its boldness remains staggering

Perhaps the most critical measure of the awesome amphibious invasion of German-occupied France 60 years ago today is this:

Wounded soldiers of the American 16th Infantry Regiment rest after storming ashore at Omaha Beach in the D-Day invasion. Associated Press

Failure was a distinct possibility as Allied commanders planned to move more than 150,000 soldiers ashore at Normandy in the face of a well-prepared defensive force. Worse weather might have drowned thousands of troops in their landing craft; better weather might have persuaded Field Marshal Erwin Rommel not to go home to celebrate his wife's birthday. Tank columns and the Luftwaffe should have arrived on time but didn't.

Had conditions or the German reaction been different, had the invasion failed, the measure of the calamity is this:

We would have had to do it again, only this time without the element of surprise. Or President Roosevelt could have decided to negotiate a peace with Hitler, ceding him control of most of Europe, ensuring the fall of Russia, and giving him time to develop nuclear weapons.

The carnage of the D-Day invasion was horrific: 10,000 casualties in a single day. The undertaking was staggering in its dimensions, with its elaborate deceptions, with its gliders and paratroops, its 1,500 landing craft and artificial harbors that were towed intact across the English Channel.

Sixty years later, it's appropriate that Europeans have begun to pay more attention to the 21,000 German graves at Normandy, many of them very young conscripts.

More recent American military undertakings have persistently been compared in one way or another with World War II, from Vietnam and Bosnia to Desert Storm and the present war on terror, mostly to make them more palatable. But no war has had anything to compare with D-Day.

President Bush is right to travel to Europe to commemorate the 60th anniversary of that awe-filled day. We hope he uses it primarily to mend fences with the allies we helped on that day.