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It’s impossible to overestimate the centrality of D-day in Americans’ sense of ourselves, in our understanding of our role in the world, in a national nostalgia for a made-in-USA goodness that stands, guardian of our consciousness, in perpetual contrast to that worst evil—Nazi Evil. As a tourist in Europe in recent years, I have found myself reflexively aquiver with pride, empathy, and upset on coming across the unexpectedly familiar names of the towns in northern Europe marking the arc of war from France to Germany—from Bastogne to Malmedy to Monschau. Due to the triumphs and tragedies that long ago played out in or around these many towns—mainly American and British triumphs and tragedies—I discovered surprisingly proprietary feelings for the area. My European friends, meanwhile, draw on no such reserves of glory. That is, these were not Belgian or Dutch or other European battles; they were American and English, mainly, and they were German. The native peoples, French, Belgian, Dutch, and so on, were occupied; persecuted; conscripted; hungry. Theirs is mainly the lore of subjugation and collaboration, resistance and deprivation, the will to survive, and, eventually, the relief of liberation. Even the latter, however, wasn’t the climactic ending for them that it was for tens of thousands of American civilian-soldiers, my own father among them.

It could be that I feel the stab of my own theory a little more sharply as the daughter of a late veteran of the Normandy campaign. June 8, 1944—D-day plus two—was the day my dad walked ashore onto a secured Omaha Beach, a twenty-year-old GI from Brooklyn on “the Continent,” you might say, along with thousands of other very young American men, for the first time. As a member of the 102nd Cavalry Reconnaissance Squadron in Gen. Omar Bradley’s 2nd Army, Pvt. Elliot West’s shooting war would begin amid the French bocage at the Battle of St. Lô. Some of the shrapnel he took there in high summer became part of him forever, as did the war itself. He didn’t much mention it, not to me, until his seventies when he was writing what would be his final novel, an unfinished saga beginning in the cauldron of 1930s revolt and revolution that exploded into world war in the 1940s (his war) and continued to roil in struggles, cold and hot, and in revolution, open and clandestine, up until the 1960s (his political war as a conservative writer in Hollywood), by which time his book’s hero, a veteran of it all, becomes a professor at Berkeley (and boy, what happens then . . . ).

Not a day passed, he later said, without some fleeting thought of his youth at war. Even so, with everything he knew, had done and seen, and would read, including Nikolai Tolstoy’s The Secret Betrayal, whose research would inspire a novel of the forced repatriation—Soviet cleansing—of two million (rejected, as noted earlier, by Cass Canfield–like publishers as anti-Communist, anti-détente “axe-grinding”), I don’t think he ever came to think of this particular theory. I wonder what he would say.

A clear, tangible record exists attesting to Hopkins’s shepherding role in the decision to implement the cross-Channel invasion into northern France on June 6, 1944, the so-called second front, which we know and regularly commemorate as D-day. It shows up in his comings and goings as Roosevelt’s special emissary of the “second front”; it is less noticeable in official State Department wartime conference minutes, where his is a supporting role; it is very clear in Sherwood’s official biography, and, sometimes, most vividly of all, it comes into sharp focus from the unique vantage point of key witnesses to these same events who later set down their recollections in memoirs. These witnesses, by the way, sometimes seem as nonplussed or perplexed by Hopkins’s behavior as I am.

First, the obvious question, defensively. What could possibly be wrong with Harry Hopkins, or anyone else for that matter, pushing D-day in the first place?

I believe Hopkins’s role in the Allied decision to invade Normandy could very well be the ultimate influence operation of World War II, not only setting the European chessboard that became battle lines in what we know as the Cold War, but also enlarging the evil empire itself.

But isn’t D-day everything that was ever good about America wrapped into one hallowed date?

Not if you look at it this way: Reinvading Europe through both northern France (OVERLORD) and, often forgotten, southern France (ANVIL), rather than pressing on from the already established Allied front and bases in Italy, and expanding operations from the Adriatic and Aegean Seas into south central Europe, as Churchill repeatedly and quite desperately proposed, left Eastern and Central Europe wide open to millions of Red Army troops. Unopposed, unchecked, these Red Army troops would ride their Lend-Lease fleets of Jeeps and Dodges deep into a Europe that was being ethnically cleansed of millions of anti-Bolsheviks by U.S. and British troops.

All hail the true victor of World War II, a totalitarian regime with a freshly conquered empire. Russian historian Viktor Suvorov crystallizes this jaw-dropper of a paradox in his 2008 book, The Chief Culprit: Stalin’s Grand Design to Start World War II: “The world hated Hitler, and commiserated with Stalin. Hitler conquered half of Europe, and the rest of the world declared war against him. Stalin conquered half of Europe, and the world sent him greetings.”

What Suvorov describes is a world sick with fever. This was the contagion of Communism, a practically biological kind of warfare at a certain point in its psychological operations—its Big Lies, its dezinformatsiya, its deception, influence, guile, appeal, and heretofore unimagined predations and pressures. It was the age-old fever of masses, its lineage in the hysterics of Tulipmania and the zealotry of witch hunts, born gigantically anew in the enlarging scope of media, surveillance, and ease of movement in the twentieth century. “You could hardly say it was cold in Russia without being accused of being anti-Soviet,” Charles Bohlen had written, conveying the premature “political correctness” of the Washington cocktail circuit during the war. No wonder things turned topsy- turvy, as Suvorov describes:

To ensure that Hitler could not hold on to the conquered European countries, the West sank German ships, bombed German cities, and then landed a massive and powerful army on the European continent. To enable Stalin to conquer and hold on to the other half of Europe, the West gave Stalin hundreds of warships, thousands of war planes and tanks, hundreds of thousands of the world’s best war vehicles, and millions of tons of its best fuel, ammunition, and supplies.

Curious. Sickening, too. For what Suvorov is describing is a Big Lie we know as “the Good War.” It is a particularly stubborn narrative, as Suvorov himself discovered when he first defected in 1978, primarily, he said, to publish evidence of his groundbreaking theory that, far from being duped by Hitler, Stalin had supported and wooed Hitler as part of his own long-range strategy of Communist conquest; further, that history concealed Stalin’s responsibility for starting World War II. “It quickly became apparent that the Western academic community was as reluctant as the Communist apparatus to accept my new interpretation as the cause of World War II,” he wrote in the introduction to The Chief Culprit. “Instead of confronting my arguments the way the Soviets did, my Western opponents chose a different kind of confrontation—silence.”

Why? Maybe because even to entertain such a theory requires exploratory probing of the double standard that still exists regarding Hitler (enemy) and Stalin (ally) and “the Good War.” The term itself, quotation marks and all, comes from the 1984 book by the same title written by that lovable Lefty Studs Terkel. The book is called The Good War, Amazon explains, “because, in the words of one soldier, ‘to see fascism defeated, nothing better could have hap- pened to a human being.’ ” No word on what emotion said soldier-cum-human- being felt on seeing Communism triumph. In all likelihood, he didn’t notice.

Some people did, however. All-American, all-anti-Communist Martin Dies opens his 1963 memoir with this statement: “We lost World War II. It was not the brave men who offered and gave their lives who lost it for us; it was the politicians. Politics betrayed the 1,076,245 casualties of World War II, and the 157,530 casualties of the Korean War. Now we are losing the mis-called ‘cold war.’”

This completely confounded me at first. Of course, for all Martin Dies did know—and for all the nation knows because he personally investigated and exposed it—even he didn’t know the half of it. It was the secret Communist occupiers and the politicians—sometimes one and the same—who lost World War II for us, and won it for the USSR.

“We celebrated a victory when in reality we had not won the war,” Gen. Mark Clark, commander of Allied forces in Italy, writes in the final pages of his 1950 memoir, Calculated Risk. After reading Clark’s hair-raising account of an army decimated and a front stymied by the decision to reinvade Europe via northern and southern France, I understood where he was coming from. In fact, it may have been Clark’s book more than any other that suddenly convinced me something was very wrong with history as we know it.

More research yielded more chords of ambivalence and unease. Gen. Albert C. Wedemeyer called the concluding chapters of his memoir “The War Nobody Won,” parts 1 and 2. As noted earlier, William C. Bullitt published an early appraisal of the defeat the United States had suffered in Life magazine ti- tled “How We Won the War and Lost the Peace.” A new trope emerged, dividing victory into two parts, military and political. This split-screen vision allowed the United States to claim a clean military victory, as if “political” victory—the Soviet military occupation of half of Europe—were beside the point and somehow actually beneath our concern. Dwight D. Eisenhower famously seized on this dichotomy as something of a virtue in his 1948 war memoir, Crusade in Europe. Such semantic gamesmanship held the field for a time; at some point, however, the position eroded, and from the rubble a supreme, unalloyed American victory rose up, a concept pure and simple, a continuous loop of razzle- dazzle, didactically enforced to this day in grainy but authoritative black and white on the History Channel. Indeed, when it comes to World War II what endures is a rather bizarre emphasis on “pure.” But come now—we didn’t even save the Jews.

During the war and in its aftermath, the obvious parallels between Dictator Hitler and Dictators Lenin and Stalin were obscured by a new zealotry, a new orthodoxy. A Dies or a Bullitt, a Taft or a Hoover, a Kravchenko, a Krivitsky, a Valtin could speak up and point out that these two emperors of blood wore the same clothes, but in response Stalin’s courtiers by the score would turn on them and boo, yelling the magic word that turned dissenters into toads: “Red-baiter!” Then, suddenly, where once two emperors of blood had threatened each other in mortal combat, there was only one, bigger and more powerful than before, who threatened the world. After four years of “total” war in Europe—ensured by the disastrous Allied policy of “unconditional surrender”—there were no more natural rivals to hem the Communist regime in at the sides.

There was only us, from across the oceans. As first runner-up in the war, our main prize was the “Good War” legacy, wrapped in patriotic bunting, dressing up—disguising—our radical commitment to world governance and global economy that marked the postwar era of “interdependence,” which Lend-Lease kicked off back in 1941. This was, after all, the Kremlin dream, the Communist grail. Now it was real, its headquarters rising in concrete and steel over Turtle Bay in New York City, brought into existence by a bevy of Soviet agents lodged deep in the vitals of the United States and other Western governments. No kidding. Think about what Hopkins, Hiss, and White actually accomplished. Gregor Dallas observes:

Thus the world found itself in 1945 at the conclusion of catastrophe with a whole series of international institutions—ranging from commercial agree- ments, to exchange rates, to war credits and loans, to the administration of ter- ritories without governments, to an ambulating world without citizenship, to the United Nations itself—which had been imposed by the United States. But even more important was the fact that all the “charters” and constitutions of these world institutions had been composed by America’s leading Soviet agents [emphasis added].

And we call it the “American Century.”

If we can believe the road to hell is strewn with good intentions, can we believe the road to Soviet-occupied Berlin, the Eastern Bloc, world government, and global economy is, too?...

The rest here.