At a time when America's relationship with France—and interest in Europe in general—is showing signs not only of strain but of outright hostility, it is worth recalling that for over 200 years France and the French, whether as a kingdom, a republic, or an empire, have always been our friends. Americans have often been shocked and dismayed by France, but France is still America's sister republic and oldest ally. We have been on the same side in every major war—without necessarily understanding each other at all. Nobody appreciated this better than Dwight D. Eisenhower, the former barefoot boy from Abilene, Kansas, who, as supreme commander of the Allied forces in Europe, led three million men during World War II (the largest international force ever assembled), engineered the two largest amphibious operations in history (nothing in warfare had ever been more audacious than Torch, in North Africa, and Overlord, in Normandy), and kept together by his prudence, tact, and fundamental fairness an alliance of nations whose interests diverged sharply. It was Ike—then a 53-year-old four-star general—who, in the summer of 1944, would come to France's—and Europe's—rescue. But, as his Allied forces began to make their advance from Normandy, it was also France that would form Ike as a great commander—and, in some ways, as a great European.

On June 12, 1944, six days after the triumph of the D-Day landings, Ike arrived in France, at Omaha Beach. He was, at last, in the combat zone, and everywhere he went the soldiers cheered him. But the invasion was now breaking down into a series of small, sharp, local attacks and counterattacks across a 50-mile front, and this was the kind of fight that Generalfeldmarschall Erwin Rommel—perhaps Germany's most brilliant soldier—might hope to win, or at least sustain for a very long time. The Allied forces not only needed to expand their Normandy beachhead but also needed to strike a knockout blow, and, as yet, there were no signs of such a possibility.

German armor, meanwhile, was coming up from the south, including the formidable Second SS Panzer Division, "Das Reich," which had paused on its way from Toulouse to Saint-Lô on June 10 to slaughter 642 men, women, and children at the village of Oradour-sur-Glane, herding them into barns and a church and burning them in retaliation for sabotage by the French Resistance of the railroad line on which their tanks were being moved to the front.

Throughout the first half of 1944, Resistance groups all over France—many of them with a British or American officer attached—had been sabotaging railways and roads to slow down or block the German armored divisions, whose prompt arrival on the beachhead during D-Day would have been calamitous. This was a whole other war, one fought by civilians, in which capture by the Germans meant prolonged torture by the Gestapo followed by execution; a war in which men and women were routinely provided with a cyanide capsule to bite down on in case they were taken prisoner or wounded, and were grateful for it; a war in which it was usual for the Germans to take hostages en masse at random from the French civilian population and shoot them in reprisal for acts of sabotage. The massacre at Oradour-sur-Glane was the kind of incident that should serve as an enduring reminder of how different the war was for those who had the misfortune to be occupied by the Germans.