From Normandy to Kyiv: History's costliest lessons are being ignored
- David Bruns
- Jun 4
- 3 min read
Updated: Jun 6
June 6, 2026, marks the 82nd anniversary of the D-Day invasion at Normandy
Historians tell us the operation was a masterclass in logistics and subterfuge as the Allies coordinated the largest landing force in history, all the while deceiving the Germans about the true target of the invasion.
And it was a massive, costly effort. Some 7,000 ships and landing craft put 133,000 Allied troops on multiple beaches. In a single day, there were over 10,000 casualties, including over 4000 deaths, of which 2500 were Americans. (To put that into perspective, US military deaths in the entire Iraq War were ~4400 personnel.)
Even as Two Guys with military backgrounds who write fiction for a living, we find it almost impossible to wrap our minds around what that day must have felt like. Everything was on the line, the future of the free world balanced on a knife-edge.
Imagine you were a soldier in the first wave hitting the beach. Can you even fathom climbing into a landing craft, knowing that your life span might be measured in minutes?
In the safety of hindsight, it’s easy to read history (or watch the movie) and rest secure in the knowledge that everything worked out in the end.
Hitler was defeated. The era of Pax Americana became the global order for the next seventy-five years. Good triumphed over evil. That’s how it’s supposed to be, right?
As we mark this momentous day in history, let’s step back and ask a question:
Could a global conflict on the scale of WW2 happen again?
Here are a couple of guys who know the right answer.
That’s WW2 veteran Melvin Hurwitz, 99, of Frederick, MD, meeting Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. The connection between them is immediate and touching.
What you are witnessing is two veterans who know the cost of fighting fascism at a cellular level. This is not an intellectual exercise for them. This is a fight they have lived and they measure the cost in lives.
For them, it already is happening again. Mr. Putin’s Unnecessary War is in its FIFTH year. People are dying in Ukraine today because an autocrat with a big military (and nuclear weapons) decided he wanted more. More territory, more prestige, more whatever. He exercised the Autocrat’s Creed:
What’s mine is mine, and what’s yours is mine, too.
Thanks only to the initial incompetence of the Russian military on the battlefield and the resilience of the Ukrainians, the Russian blitzkrieg was stopped.
But suppose the Russian invasion had unfolded like all the experts predicted and Ukraine had fallen in days. Can you imagine what the 2026 map of Europe would look like if the modern Russian military had been as devastatingly competent as Hitler’s forces were in 1939?
If you prefer, we imagined it for you in Order of Battle. In our version, the Russian military is competent and for Vitaly Luchnik, our Putin stand-in, the invasion of Ukraine is just the first stop on a long list of countries he’d like to own.
Our book is fiction, of course, but as our readers know, we base our stories in reality. It’s not a major intellectual leap to see what might have been in Ukraine.
Remembering the lessons of history
As we say goodbye to the last of the Greatest Generation, we risk forgetting their hard-won lessons of history.
It’s easy to watch a movie about World War 2 and see the outcome as some preordained triumph of Good over Evil instead of what it really was then and is now: a massive expenditure of blood and treasure in the fight for freedom.
Today, in the United States, the brutal reality of Mr. Putin’s Unnecessary War too often gets lost in red-blue politics and a sea of disinformation—exactly what Mr. Putin wants.
Ukraine is a European Problem, we tell ourselves. Let them fix it.
Hilter started out as a European Problem, too. And on D-Day—five years after Hitler invaded Poland—2500 Americans died in a single day of fighting.
Watch the Zelensky video again. A veteran of the fight against Hitler and a veteran of the current fight against Mr. Putin have a common understanding.
Same fight. Different day.
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