Today is the 70th anniversary of the Allied invasion of Europe, D-Day.

I hadn’t planned on writing about D-Day because so many others are commemorating it today … until I found something that I think well symbolizes D-Day specifically and the difference between Americans and others on this planet. It was written by Thomas D. Hazlett in 1999 about Stephen Ambrose’s D-Day: The Climactic Battle of World War II:

Even today we think of the Wehrmacht as a mighty force. Certainly, its well-trained, well-armed, battle-tested soldiers struck a fearsome pose at Normandy, the most heavily fortified coastline in history. The Allies viewed the Germans as an unforgiving piece of iron.

So doubts ran high as 175,000 Allied troops–Yanks, Brits, Canadians, and Aussies–traversed the English Channel. Could the children of democracy prove themselves warriors? Would they freeze in mortal combat? Adolf Hitler, who slept until noon on D-Day, believed the disciplined defenders of Third Reich would crush the soft soldiers of the liberal West.

Yet Ambrose shows that it was the rigid Nazi war command that fell apart on D-Day. The Allied soldier kept his head while all about him were (all too often) losing theirs. Such resilience proved necessary. The best-laid plans of the Supreme Allied Command were almost immediately rendered moot; the massive landing amounted to a chaotic dumping of troops into a very hostile environment. Allied forces landed out of position, units were a shambles, and radio communications were knocked out.

But Ambrose identifies a crucial difference between the German and Allied fighting men. The Germans were hamstrung by sweeping orders issued from far away. In contrast, the Allies relied on mid-level and junior-grade officers issuing impromptu commands based on facts gleaned first-hand.

There is no more dramatic example of F.A. Hayek’s seminal discovery: the importance of dispersed information–“knowledge of time and place.” Hayek, who was to win the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Science in 1974, published his memorable essay, “The Use of Knowledge in Society,” in the American Economic Review just the year after D-Day. It explained the motive force driving Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” by noting that great efficiencies resulted when millions of dispersed individuals, motivated by market incentives, utilized the information uniquely available to them to make decisions. It’s why a decentralized competitive system beats a top-down bureaucracy, even when the planners are “experts.”

The bloody beaches of France graphically illustrate the advantages. German soldiers had been commanded to defend every inch of coastline. They were rendered immobile by strict orders to stay put–why trust low-level soldiers to freelance when the High Command had it planned out already? But that strict Wehrmacht policy saved Allied troops even in places where they were extremely vulnerable. The ferocious Panzer tank divisions set aside for counter-attack were too precious to trust to field commanders; only Der Führer had the right to deploy those. As the military genius in Berlin snoozed, German positions were overrun. Even then, despite reports from the front, Hitler held back his elite motorized units, convinced the real landing was to come at Pas-de-Calais.

Meanwhile, Allied soldiers dodged mines and intense enemy fire. They were hopelessly ill-equipped–in the chaos of the landing, their best heavy equipment never made it to shore–but they improvised. Mid-level commanders–sometimes a sergeant was the highest-surviving rank–seized the moment, issuing orders and rallying soldiers. Empowered by a flexible command structure, leaders emerged instantly, spontaneously. Fighting units were reconstituted and assault plans redefined on the fly.

Perhaps the classic demonstration was the landing on Utah Beach at 6:30 a.m.–the first wave. Due to unexpectedly strong tides, landing craft deposited units over 1,000 meters from their pre-arranged positions. Heavy machine gun fire pinned down those who managed to survive long enough to reach the beach. Crouching for cover, U.S. infantrymen assembled and spread out their maps. They had no radio contact, and most of their commanders could not be located. What the hell to do? Should they get down the beach to where they were supposed to be, or attack the German artillery directly in front of them?

The ranking officer quickly made a decision: “Let’s start the war from here.” With that, brave Americans charged Nazi fortifications straight ahead, knocked out guns, scaled the bluff, and circled around to capture the ground they had originally been assigned to take.

While no lowly soldier in the Wehrmacht had the authority to revamp official orders, the Allied invasion consisted of little besides ad hoc heroism. Decentralized information stormed the beaches on June 6, 1944, and irreparably breached the Atlantic Wall by dusk. Pretty good theory for one day’s work. Pretty good work for one day’s theory.

That night (in the U.S.), Franklin Roosevelt, president and senior warden of his Episcopal church, led the nation in prayer:

Forty years later:

Sunday, meanwhile, is the 30th anniversary of one of the worst tornadoes in Wisconsin history, in Barneveld shortly after midnight, without warning:

I’ve written about Barneveld before here. The summer of 1984 was the summer after my grandfather’s death, so I was tasked with driving to Boscobel to pick up my grandmother for my brother’s graduation. I went down Thursday, stayed overnight, and we went back to Madison Friday morning. Iowa TV was reporting on severe weather to the west, but where I was all it did was thunder off in the distance.

The next morning, though, as we left, I flipped through the FM radio and heard some strange reports about civil defense and people saying they were all right. They made no sense given that we had heard nothing about a tornado the night before; no Madison TV had live coverage from Barneveld, and we hadn’t seen anything on TV about a tornado. Then we drove through Black Earth, where the tornado had gone after flattening much of Barneveld, and saw, on the east side of town, a huge tree uprooted.

The next day was my brother’s graduation. His graduation party was interrupted by a tornado warning, for a funnel cloud sighting one mile from our house. (I remain skeptical because that funnel cloud should have been visible from our house.) Three days later, another tornado warning was issued in Dane County.

Less than a year later, I did a journalism-class story on the one-year-later aftermath. I was struck then by the incongruous combination of brand new houses, empty concrete slabs where houses had been, and scrape marks on Barneveld’s water tower far higher than any vandal could have accomplished. And, of course, there were a group of gravestones in the Barneveld cemetery with the same date of death on them — June 8, 1984.