The anniversary of D-Day, June 6, was billed by the French government as an American-French event. This is tantamount to the British and Iraqis celebrating the end of Saddam Hussein's rule and calling it an Anglo-Iraq event. One can imagine the outrage in Washington if such a thing occurred.
The facts of D-Day are that 62,000 British troops landed, along with 58,000 Americans and 5,000 Commonwealth troops, mostly Canadian. Sixty-six percent of the warships supporting the landing and 75 percent of the landing craft were British, as were most of the planes. All of the technical innovations that aided the landings were British.
As far as performance is concerned, the Americans advanced 1Łmiles (2.4 km) that day; the British and Canadians, 6 miles (9.5 km), despite the fact that they were counterattacked. Yet Queen Elizabeth was not invited to Normandy for the anniversary. The Americans have for decades been trying to edit the British out of the history of World War II, and it would seem the French have become weary of showing gratitude to the main contributor to the achievements of this most important event in 1944.