What D-Day Still Teaches Us About Leadership Under Fire

At 12:16 a.m. French time on June 6, 1944, British glider troops began landing in Normandy. It was the opening act of the largest seaborne invasion in history—the beginning of the end of Nazi tyranny.

Nearly 160,000 Allied troops landed that day. Among them were men like Mr. Arthur Middleton, a British infantryman who landed in the first wave on Juno Beach. I was privileged to hear his story firsthand. With a faraway look and pain in his eyes, he described how friends fell beside him—some to enemy fire, others crushed by the tragic momentum of Allied tanks that couldn’t stop on the bloodied sands.