The ...

"The Invasion"

• In his book The Faith, Chuck Colson has a chapter entitled "The Invasion." In it he describes the invasion of Normandy on D-Day, June 6, 1944.

• D-Day was the largest seaborne landing in history.

• More than 150,000 U.S. troops

• Employing 6,900 vessels, 4,100 landing craft, and 12,000 airplanes.

• Within two weeks the British deployed an additional 314,547 men, 54,000 vehicles, and 102,000 tons of supplies, while the Americans put ashore an additional 314,504 men, 41,000 vehicles, and 116,000 tons of supplies at Omaha. Ten thousand tons of bombs were dropped on German defences.

• French sabotage key bridges, railway lines, telephone exchanges, and electricity substations.

• Despite the Allies’ air superiority and hours of heavy bombardment against the beach defences by the warships’ guns, the Germans stayed intact as thousands of brave men in the landing craft motored toward shore. Nothing stood between these troops and the German guns but the morning air.

• At Omaha, Gold, Sword, Juno, and Utah beaches, the troops’ only chance was to run, swim, and crawl up the beach to the sea walls, where they could reassemble for assaults on enemy gun positions. In the first hours at Omaha, more than 2,400 died. Over the next few weeks, as the battle progressed inland, the U.S. would eventually lose 29,000 men and more than 100,000 wounded and missing, while the British gave up 11,000 of its finest, and Canada 5,000. And all this was just the initial set of invasions.

• The Battle of the Bulge and other potentially catastrophic reversals were still to come, but the invasion of Normandy was so massive and successful, that it allowed the Allies to turn every counterattack into another victory.

Colson writes, "As if preordained, the outcome was clear; the evils of Hitler and fascism would be conquered."

Colson then goes on to compare the invasion of Normandy with the invasion of God on Christmas Day. He writes:

In one sense, the great invasions of history are analogous to the way in which God, in the great cosmic struggle between good and evil, chose to deal with Satan’s rule over the earth—He invaded. But not with massive logistical support and huge armies; rather, in a way that confounded and perplexed the wisdom of humanity.

From a sermon by Andy Payne, The Invasion, 12/28/2009