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before planes launched off its deck severely damaged the Yorktown , which wassunk the next day. The battle was a decisive victory for the Americans and inflicted severe losses on the Japanese. It changed the course of the war in the Pacific and set us on the path to defeat Japan.
    IN THE SPRING OF 1944, Eisenhower had moved his headquarters from London to Portsmouth, on the southern coast of England, to be close to the main embarkation point for the Allied invasion of Europe. He had set D-Day for June 5, and had been meeting twice daily with his weather experts and his chief commanders. When the team gathered at 0400 on June 4 the weather report called for high winds, rough seas, and thick cloud cover. Eisenhower postponed the attack. Ships that had been loaded and launched had to return to port and make themselves ready to launch againin twenty-four hours.
    The next day, Eisenhower’s meteorologists told the assembled team that there appeared to be a small window of good weather beginning on June 6. Storms were likely to follow, raising Eisenhower’s concern, as he later wrote, that the Allies might land “the first several waves successfully and then find later build-up impracticable, and so have to leave the isolated original attacking forces easy prey to German counteraction. However, the consequences of the delayjustifiedgreat risk.” Among the consequences Eisenhower was particularly concerned about were the safety and morale of the troops already aboard ships, “poised and ready.” He gave the order to go.
    Successful amphibious landings in North Africa, Sicily, and Salerno had given the Allies valuable experience, but those coastlineshad been unfortified. The endeavor to land on the continent, breach Hitler’s Atlantic Wall, and establish a foothold through which to supply the invading forces was unlike anything that had ever been done. In the days after the invasion, Time reported that “the plan had grown to a complexity of detail incomprehensible to the civilian mind.” The Navy’s invasion plans were 800 pages long and a full set of naval ordersweighed 300 pounds. Yet the Allies’ objective was clear, as were Eisenhower’s orders from the combined chiefs of staff: “You will enter the continent of Europe, and, in conjunction with the other United Nations, undertake operations aimed at the heart of Germany and the destruction ofher armed forces.”
    If the Allies had been thrown back to the sea, the consequences would have been devastating. Millions of additional lives would have been lost, and there would have been a struggle for domination in Europe between Hitler and Stalin. In an interview in 1994, historian Stephen Ambrose explained the significance of D-Day:
    You can’t exaggerate it. You can’t overstate it. This was the pivot point of the twentieth century. It was the day on which the decision was made as to who was going to rule in this world in the second half of the twentieth century. Is it going to be Nazism, is it going to be communism, or are the democraciesgoing to prevail?
    The essence of what the Allies accomplished on D-Day is captured in two photos. The first was taken from inside a Higgins boatas American GIs disembarked, laden with their backpacks and weapons, heading through the surf toward Omaha Beach. The silhouette of each soldier reminds us that it was individual men whose heroism that day saved civilization.
    The second photo was taken from the heights above Omaha Beach at the end of the day on June 6, 1944. Thousands of Allied men, ships, trucks, and tanks fill the image, stretching to the horizon. The results of the massive American mobilization and production effort of the previous four years can be seen pouring onto the continent of Europe. In an oral history, John Reville, who was a lieutenant with F Company, 5th Ranger Battalion, recalled being on top of the bluff with his runner, Private Rex Low, at the end of that day