MAXIMUM respect is due to the troops from several countries that took part in the largest amphibious landing 70 years ago to launch the second front against nazi Germany’s occupation of Europe.

The courage shown by the 158,000 men directly involved in the Normandy landings was complemented by that of French Resistance forces doing all they could to tie down or impede the German troops.

At the same time, thousands of French civilians perished in the heavy Allied bombardment of northern France, overlaying national joy at liberation with episodes of personal tragedy.

The British, US and Commonwealth forces, reinforced by free French and Polish units, were united in the goal of destroying fascism.

The invading forces that arrived to liberate France still had another year to fight against fierce opposition before success was complete.

Yesterday’s moving ceremonies on the Normandy beaches, taking in 17 heads of state, marked the importance of the anniversary, with the presence of Russian President Vladimir Putin signifying that current problems over Ukraine should not take precedence over marking the wartime alliance that smashed the armies of the swastika in their tracks.

Events in northern France provided the lead item on Russia’s official RT network’s news programmes yesterday, as they ought to have done.

It’s a pity that much of the media in Britain has been less balanced, proclaiming D-Day as the turning point of the war and ignoring what was happening on the eastern front.

Many BBC programmes have adopted this one-eyed approach, as has Labour shadow justice minister Dan Jarvis, a former major in the Parachute Regiment.

“If it was the British victory at El Alamein in 1942 that marked ‘the end of the beginning’ of the second world war, it was D-Day that marked the beginning of the end,” he wrote yesterday.

As a career soldier, he should know that the great majority of German combat units were deployed for the invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941 and that many of the most decisive battles took place on the eastern front.

The previously unbeatable Wehrmacht was held at Leningrad, beaten back at the gates of Moscow and fought to a standstill at Stalingrad before being decimated at the Kursk Salient in the world’s biggest ever tank battle.

From 1943 the German armies were in retreat, operating a scorched-earth policy that expressed itself in huge civilian slaughter and countless atrocities.

Churchill had promised Stalin that a second front would be opened in 1942, but the hard-pressed Soviet people — not just Russians but all that vast country’s nationalities — had to struggle on against the cream of the German war machine for another two years.

Working people in Britain kept up a constant campaign to demand that the government redeem its second front pledge to bring the war to an end as quickly as possible.

When the two-pronged assault on Hitler’s 1,000-year Reich bore fruit, that was a victory not just for the British, US and Soviet peoples, nor simply for the nationalities liberated by the Allied armies, but for the whole world.

It led to the United Nations being established, the disintegration of European colonial empires and the discrediting of myths of racial superiority and other imperialist ideas.

The contribution made by all forces in this triumph should be recognised. 

History should not be rewritten or massaged to suit current political convenience or fashion.