5,333 ships and landing craft.

 

That number astonishes me.

 

As our nation remembers D-Day, the Normandy beach landings that began 75 years ago today, most stories and commentaries rightly focus on the bravery of citizen soldiers. What impelled men from across the Allied nations and right here in Iowa to swallow the bile of fear and came ashore against artillery and machine gun fire? We wonder, "Would I have been capable of so much?"

 

But to bring US troops to the English Channel required more than courage. It needed a collective national effort.

 

That such an effort succeeded was due in large part to a national attribute that too often today is vilified-our market economy.

 

The US was ill-prepared before the war began. In 1939, the year Adolf Hitler's troopers invaded Poland, this country's standing Army numbered just 174,000.

 

Yet just six years later: 5,333 Allied ships; 9,901 bombers and fighters. Materiel for 73,000 US troops.

 

The United States of America was responsive because our economy was responsive. It was entrepreneurial. Ownership belonged to millions of private decisions, so production decisions belonged to millions of private citizens. Thus, textile mills could shift from blankets to uniforms, automobile plants could begin making fighters. In 1939, the US produced just 3,000 planes. By wars end, it had produced 300,000.

 

And the same decentralization that allowed the US to become prolific also made it innovative.  Engines, weapons, communications, even health care: all experienced major advances during the war. One could contend that there were really two Americas in the 20 ^th century-an agrarian country before the war, technology's pathfinder after.

 

So, today, as we honor the citizen soldiers of the greatest generation, let's also acknowledge the citizen bankers, citizen industrialists, citizen scientists and citizen laborers. Together, they preserved the blessings of liberty for themselves and their posterity, to include the blessing of economic freedom.