"D-Day Reminds Us That Victory Has a Price" | June 7, 2026

June 6, 1944 is a date most of us can picture without opening a book, but why does Normandy carry so much weight when World War II included so many other invasions, fronts, and losses? In this episode, I start with the history we think we know, then pull back to show how “D-Day” went from a generic military label to a single moment that now represents sacrifice, courage, suffering, and national will in the American imagination. 

How do we speak about God’s providence in history without drifting into dangerous claims that God automatically endorses our side? I contrast the propaganda legend of the Angel of Mons with the sober truth that no angels are required to explain sacrifice, yet God is still Lord of all human life, even the grim responsibilities of defense in a fallen world. 

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Father Don Wolf is a priest of the Archdiocese of Oklahoma City. Living Catholic also broadcasts on Oklahoma Catholic Radio several times per week, with new episodes airing every Sunday.

Transcript

Welcome To Living Catholic

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This is Living Catholic with Father Don Wolf. Who deals with Living Catholic faith in our time? Discovering God's cousins in our lives and finding hope in his word. And now, your host, Father Don Wolf.

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Welcome, Oklahoma, to Living Catholic. I'm on Senior Don Wolf, pastor of Sacred Heart Parish and rector of the shrine of Blessed Stanley

Why D-Day Became The Symbol

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Rother. It was 82 years and one day ago that the soldiers of the armies of Canada, England, and the United States jumped out of the airplanes and stormed out of their landing craft onto the beaches of the Normandy coast to begin the invasion of northern Europe. This invasion was the beginning of the land campaign to defeat the German occupation of Europe. It lasted until the defeat of Germany, formalized by the signing of the documents of surrender on May 8, 1945. Armies of many other nations were involved, including forces from Poland, France, Czechoslovakia, and Norway, in the Western Theater, as well as the armed forces of the Soviet Union. The war that had begun amid different circumstances and with an alliance of different forces on September 1st, 1939, came to its end, highlighted by the opening of this front in Normandy all those years ago. It has collectively been known as D-Day since then and is instantly recognizable by this title. Technically, all of the U.S. Army invasion days had been described by this same term. It was simply the way the Army noted an invasion day, whatever the proposed or actual date. The descriptor was a way to describe the activity without assigning a calendar day. The same happened with the proposed hour of the invasion, whenever it was to be. Describing a planned landing, it would be at H hour on D Day, thus laying out the action without going into detail about times and dates. For the Normandy invasion, these generalities have solidified into specifics. We all know what D-Day is, what it is, and what it's supposed to represent, which is fine, as long as we all know we're agreeing to a specific congealing of a liquid concept. It was D-Day, June the sixth, all those years ago in 1944. The U.S. Army, in the course of World War II, had dozens of D-Days. There were many other invasions launched by the Army in its campaigns to defeat the forces of Nazi Germany and the Empire of Japan. Just in the campaign against the German armed forces, there were the invasions on thirteen different beaches and ports in North Africa in 1942. There was the invasion of Sicily in 1943. Several different landings in Italy at Salerno and then at Anzio also took place that same year, as well as a whole other separate invasion of France at that time on three different beaches in the south near the Riviera in that same year as the Normandy invasion, 1944. And those don't include dozens of landings and invasions by the army in the Pacific from 1942 to 45. The war was on a gigantic scale and on an extended timeline. I suppose there might be some resentments worked into the memories of those soldiers who'd been involved in these many other landings whose scale and scope dwarfed what happened on the western coast of France in 1944 by a great deal. But time blunts the sharp points of most resentments, and with the disappearance of the active memories of most of these participants, D-Day in Normandy becomes the highlight of most of our societal attention. The other invasions and campaigns of our army at that time come very much in second place, or at least they are in secondary position when it comes to our collective attention. The date, June 6th, has an engraved spot in our imagination. It's come to represent all of the sacrifice of World War II and the subsequent memory of suffering and triumph of this struggle in our national

Scale, Sacrifice, And National Myth

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imagination. Partly this is because of the scale and daring of the entire operation. It involved thousands of aircraft flying tens of thousands of missions on just that one day, as well as thousands of naval vessels all crowded into the waters off to the coast of western France on that date. Of course, no one person saw the entire flotilla as it formed up, and there was no one person who could account for every plane in the air as they made their way across the English Channel on that day. But simply knowing that the fantastic number of craft were involved makes the day into its own epic. The author John Updike said World War II was the dominant myth of the 20th century, a tale of Troy with its endless angles. The power and ingenuity of the U.S. and its allies were on display, especially during this invasion day. Because we were who we were, we were able to bring this armada to the shores of France and begin this invasion as part of our national will and the capacity we had to face up to the evil we had to confront and conquer. This day was the day in which who we were was revealed to ourselves and as to ourselves, to the rest of the world. And of course it was a day of suffering, one in which the price of war was exact. The days remembered because of all those men who had to move to their assignments and take on their parts of the attack in the face of frightful opposition. While the morning of the sixth of June was not the bloodiest day in the Army of World War II, it was a day in which much blood was shed and the American lives were lost at a stunning rate. When all of the technology and ingenuity of U.S. industry was added up and brought together off the coast on that morning, it still took the selfless bravery of each individual soldiers to charge across the beaches and to bring his arms to bear against those who opposed him in order for the victory to be won. That victory was bought at the price of those who bled and died on the sands there. Nothing grips the imagination of society like killing and dying. According to the insights of the cultural theorist Renee Girard, it's at the gathering around the graves and the honoring of those who have died that shapes the intuitions of peoples. It is especially true of those whose sacrifices brought all of society into the awareness of the new world being created by the death and the destruction of the war then. D Day symbolizes all these currents running under the foundations of our thoughts and policies. It's no wonder it has

Books And Films That Shaped Memory

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such a grip on our imagination. Several decades ago, the author Stephen Ambrose was afraid that our attention to World War II would fade with the passing of the years. As a young PhD, he'd worked on several notable projects in American history, especially focusing on the Lewis and Clark expedition and its symbolic place in the opening of the West. But he eventually turned his gaze to World War II. He feared his work might be in vain, though, given how saturated the market was and how mountainous the material concerning the war was. The public had been showered with books and movies over the decades. It was only natural to presume everyone had grown tired of hearing about it. He was afraid he'd be running over ploughed ground. And if you've done that, you know how hard it can be to walk over it and how useful it is if you keep cultivating it. He figured it was a story too often told. But he decided to tell it anyway. He published a good book about the U.S. Army in World War II and then another pretty good book about the campaign in Northern Europe beginning with the Normandy landing. Subsequently, he published a pretty bad book about a parachute company involved in the airborne aspect of the Normandy invasion and the subsequent battles it fought throughout the war. In fact, when I read the book, it seemed to me he didn't do much more than type up his note cards to get the book published, I think surfacing surfing on the popularity of his other two books. But this one struck gold when it was turned into the notable HBO series called The Band of Brothers, which I have to admit is probably the best portrayal of this kind on film. What had been a publishing backwater suddenly became a whole new landscape. Public interest and private focus were reoriented in almost every way. Dr. Ambrose became a publishing enterprise all his own and paved the way for many other authors and movie makers to find their way forward. This interest was piqued also by the movie Saving Private Ryan, which not only brought the Normandy invasion to everyone's attention, but also but also remade the landscape of movie making all over the world. The scale and the impact of this day have become irresistible to the imagination everywhere. And not just in our society, but in a vague but real way in all of society, precisely because of its place in the memory and awareness of one individual at a time. One of the most powerful comments on the power of this dynamic was given by the wife of a four-star general, disclosed in an interview she did about ten years ago. Her husband had been a junior officer on June the 6th and participated in the invasion on that day. She said she learned more about her husband in the first 30 minutes of the movie than she knew of him after 40 years of marriage. Power of cinema can be startling as it was in this case, but its capacity to center our attention on this moment in history cemented its foundational place in our national memory. Mention Normandy and virtually everyone will ask about the American military cemetery there, which is the opening and closing scene of Private Ryan. What had been the places and circumstances known only to a few of us of specialized reading became the property of the entire country. It's a study all its own, how it is that this one moment in history became an unforgettable cornerstone in the story of our country. But there's something deeper here for all of us than that. This moment in our history is something more than a story of battle joined and victory

A Catholic View Of Providence

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won. It's more profoundly our story than just an example of our ingeniousness and our capacity as a people and a nation. This quote unquote great crusade, in the word of Dwight Eisenhower, is also a testament to an element of the faith we share. This date is a testament to the work of God in the world. And before our imagination begins to trip into dangerous territory, I don't mean to claim we have a unique destiny or a special divine place in the world. Those things may be true, but they're not rendered to us by this battle or subsequent battles. We are the means by which the divine will comes to be displayed, but we're not to draw from this the conclusion that God has set us aside from all other places and peoples. Yes, God loves us, but he loves all people. God is at work among us, as the divine is at work in all things, but in the sufficiency of the day. In the mythology surrounding the opening days of World War I, for example, there grew up a story of the British Army's resistance to the German invasion around the town of Mons in Belgium. The Germans had swept away all of the resistance in front of it as it's in its sweep across the fields and orchards of the Luxembourg and Belgian countrysides. This included the British Army as it came up to occupy its portion of the front. It hurried to meet the tip of the spear of the German forces near the river Meuse at the town of Mons. They were able to take a stand there, solidify their lines, and resist the German advance for the first time. After a couple of weeks of confusion and humiliation, there was this bit of victory. It wasn't quite conquest, it was only that they didn't have to retreat at the moment. The Tommies held while the Lanzers crushed against them and spent their energy. Out of this event there grew up the legend of the angel of Mons, a spectre

Propaganda Myths And Spiritual Danger

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in the clouds above the spire of the cathedral and the tower of the city hall there, as of a divine messenger and sacred warrior sweeping his sword across the armies to strike down the invading regiments. Because of divine favor, it said, the British held there for a time, and the progress of the invasion was thwarted for a moment. So it was said. It was all propaganda, of course. The legend first appeared in a British newspaper some days after the battle, all based on vague reports of odd clouds and comments about the smoke of battle, turned it to gossip and glory. But it took hold, as these things do, even to the surprise of the publishers who fed the appetite of those who needed to hear such things. It gave substance to those who wanted good news, as well as the assurance of favor to those who were discouraged by the confusing need for their sons and nephews to be fighting in France in the first place. God's goodness, displayed in the noise of battle, must auger well for those on our side, they thought. We're doing God's work in fighting the godless and the bloodthirsty. It's a story still noted in Mons to this day, which is ironic to the extreme, given that both Belgium and Britain are as secular as North Korea at this point in their history. But the need to fill the vacuum of meaning could produce such drek as easily and as forthrightly as a Hollywood gossip magazine. And because it touched on the bloodshed and sacrifice happening in their time, it became the object of fascination and the subject of satisfaction for many who heard it and promoted it. It also provided the requisite assurances that the armed forces of the British Empire were doing God's work, which was no small contribution to the armory of public opinion. Diday's not like that, or at least it shouldn't be considered to be so. Very much has been made of the American purity and resolve that went into producing this product of Allied victory. The young men who went to war, prompted by the American response to German provocation, were indeed conscripted to fight in a worldwide conflict. The war pitted the forces of the free world against the armies of cruelty and census bloodshed. The contrast could hardly have been more pointed. But these same young men were also part of the politics of the day, which was like the politics of every day, a mixture of good and bad, of truth and error. They went prompted by the desire to assert their nation's rights and responsibilities, trusting in the goodness of their cause and assured by their leaders of their righteous commitment. And as they did, they were smaller parts of great forces and enormous currents flowing through the world, at work among them and among the other elements of the conflict all at the same time. Each young man was an individual soul, moved by his own heart, in participating in his own portion of the great moment. Simultaneously he was a cog in the complicated machinery of world war. No angels are required to apportion victory or to explain sacrifice. But God is the God of armies,

God, War, And Human Responsibility

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just as certainly as he is the God of graces and the Lord of salvation. We trust that the will of God can be accomplished by the organization of battalions and the equipping of divisions as certainly as it can by the founding of convents and the calling of saints. Not in the same way, but by the same dynamism. We're called to respond to the divine command to hear, to respond, and to do. This is accomplished in the entire panoplay of human activity. We all remember the prophetic promise that we will be able eventually to turn our swords into plowshares and our spears into pruning hooks, each an image of the certainty that God wants our prospering and desires the goodness of peace among us. But we don't often remember that other prophecies call for God's people to sharpen their plowshares into swords and to beat their pruning hooks into spears. The work of God can be brought to fruit in battle and not just in orchards and gardens. And we rejoice when the fruits of victory are ripened into peace and prosperity. The norm for human beings, at least in the promise of creation, is to be is to participate in the goodness of life and the greatness of peace. God did not bring the universe into being as the product of agon and domination, but by way of freedom and grace. Living that freedom and growing in the self-sustaining fruits of natural goodness is the gift of creation to everyone. But in a world fallen and sinful, struggle results. The contours of life include the challenges of rectifying evil and correcting error, of freeing the bound and ensuring the good of all. It includes the defense of right and the assertion of the powers of goodness over the despotism of conquest and the tyranny of falsehood. To live in the world of sin and sadness is to accept the responsibilities of enacting the will of God to the best of our abilities. We do this not by the power of angels, but by the power of armies. God's power is not defined by the number of chariots or the breeding of horses, as the Old Testament assures us, but it does include the drawing of the sword and the sweep of battalions. And when such an eventuality results, God's will is enact. National agenda and collective will are indeed part of the work of God in the world. Of course, we can be deluded and mistaken about our place in what God wants. There has been no end of foolishness brought about by those who were convinced that what they wanted was entirely what God willed. In Robert Massey's volume on the growing tensions between England and Germany that contributed to the outbreak of World War I, he quotes the German Kaiser as assuring his soldiers and sailors that he, the Kaiser, as an agent of God in the world, had the power and the responsibility to ensure God's will by his decision making, including his decision to go to war. It was, of course, a foolish and dangerous thing to say, and an even more dangerous opinion to hold. There was no guarantee that the Kaiser, as foolsome and open hearted a Christian leader as any in Europe at the time, was endowed with divine wisdom or even decent good sense when it came to his rational faculties. We read his exhortation to his soldiers and sailors, and we laugh at his presumption. But he wasn't alone in his presuming. President Wilson of the U.S. was not much different in his sensibilities, although they were not couched in such magisterial terms, and his pretensions concerning the fate of the nation and the future of the world, conditioned by his sublime confidence in his abilities and conclusions, were as blind and short-sighted as the Kaiser's and have held up about as well. There's a long tradition and a foolsome habit in every government and each nation to assure itself that the battle is righteous and the cause is just. Claiming God's mantle to be placed over the sweep of battle can be a dangerous thing just because it is so easily done and can be so blindingly obscuring. Which leads us ultimately to our only conclusion, especially as we look at the momentousness of this day. Battle is written into the DNA of our species. There has been little time and almost no space in which the contest between peoples and the struggle of armies has not been played out with all seriousness. When we come to D-Day, we're faced with the invitation to celebrate its sweat and to rejoice in its success, even as we sorrow in its necessity and mourn its losses in every aspect. But our participation in the work of God and the world brings us to the deepest humility and the most profound sadness. Even when the cause is righteous and the sacrifice necessary, they fall into the chasm of a world broken and fallen. G. K. Chesterton reminds everyone that the Christian does not do battle because of the hatred of the one in front of him, but because of the love of ones behind him, whom he's protecting. But even in this formulation, to go to battle is to divert the resources and to risk the future of everything we know in order to jump into the midst of the world's violence and fear. To love another is to defend them. But it in no way lessens the truth that the necessity of defense costs the defender mightily. In the history of Israel, when the nation was threatened, God called a leader forward and empowered him or her to lead the armies and to defeat the conquerors. When the peril was put down, the leader would go back to his previous life, and the people who put down their weapons would go back to their farms. It was the policy of God's people to disturb no one more than necessary to defend themselves and

Humility, Prayer, And Peace Today

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to keep themselves free. When they clamored for a king in order to bolster the defense and stiffen their identity and resolve, it was evaluated as a loss, a cost of living in the world of the time that Israel had to bear with grim determination. Going to war can affect everyone and bring what no one wants. Defeat is not just on the battlefield and not just the product of unfaithfulness. A broken world yields broken people. As we remember the gigantic sweep of the years gone by and what our forefathers did, all symbolized by this date, we should ask the Lord of battle on our knees to accept our humble awareness of our concerns and our point of view of the state of the world. In our petition, we should ask God's blessings on our desire to defend and to protect, especially because we are fallible and short-sighted and cannot know with all certainty what true freedom and absolute good might look like from the divine perspective. We have no choice but to cast our hopes on God's goodness and God's blessings, and do this knowing that God's plans are not our plans, his ways are not our ways. We pray there never be another time for such a battle, and we pray the growing destructiveness of war and its power to kill and maim, as well as its expense and its intensity, might not touch us as it did in this previous generation of our forefathers. But it takes only a brief look at the maps and reports on our media platforms to know such a thing has not grown outdated, but stands as a continued challenge to us now. May we approach these anniversary moments aware of what these men in their day accomplished, even as we remember what lies in store for us, as we search to do the sublime will of God in our world in our day. May God bless us with peace, and may He bless our striving for it. Back in just a moment.

A Lawsuit Scare And Calm Faith

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This may come as something completely new, but a while back in the course of things, I was sued. It was breathtaking to get the notice and the letter, advising me the law was at work and I had better respond and take notice of my new complicated status now that court and precedent were my life's new lattice. It was a suit for five million dollars in total sum. Caused me to blanch, seeing the figures. I was stunned, and then I laughed. Why not for fifty million, not just five? I had neither, nor could I get it, no matter how I tried. It was all a giant nuisance, really, a case I could ignore, and it never came to anything, a bust, a real snorer. But for just a moment, I tell you, at the end of that day, I thought my future had gone from bright blue to dull gray. The lesson, I guess, was a straightforward, simple one. Don't panic until all is provided and all is summed. Plus, millions matter, even to us common folk. And when you see fifty, it's God you want to invoke. That's the suit.

Keep Living Catholic And Learn More

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Hope in the days to come that you can continue to participate with us as we continue to explore what it means to be Living Catholic.

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