MOST Nigerians paid scant attention at the weekend when leaders of the Western Powers and Russia assembled on the beaches of Normandy, in western France, to mark the 65th anniversary of D-Day, June 6, 1944, which US President Barack Obama said was a day of "unimaginable hell." Obama may be a practiced rhetorician, but in this case, he put it rather mildly.

You ought to give it some thought. D-Day marked the launch of Operation Overlord, the aerial and amphibious Allied invasion of Nazi German-occupied France. On D-Day itself, 160,000 American, British and Canadian troops crossed the English Channel and breached Adolf Hitler's "Western Wall" of fire and fortifications. In the next 9 weeks, 3 million Allied troops landed in France, including units of the Free French, Polish, Czech, Belgian, Greek, Dutch and Norwegian Armies, all of whose countries were occupied by the Germans. By August 21, 1944 the Allies suffered 209,672 casualties, while German casualties were estimated at 450,000. Some 70,000 French civilians also died in the campaign.

That sounds very tragic, until you remember Operation Barbarossa, the German invasion of the Soviet Union beginning June 22, 1941. Barbarossa was the largest military operation in human history in terms of manpower, area traversed, and casualties suffered. Adolf Hitler deployed 4.5 million troops, 3,600 tanks, 4,389 planes and 46,000 artillery pieces, and invaded the USSR along a 2,900 kilometre front from North to South. Germany suffered 800,000 casualties, inflicted 3 million casualties on the Soviets and captured 3 million Soviet soldiers. And that was just the beginning.

Spare a thought for the Battle of Stalingrad, which took place between 17 July 1942 and 2 February 1943, adjudged by historians to be the bloodiest battle in modern history. The Russians launched a counterattack with 1 million men, 15,000 artillery pieces, 1500 tanks and 1100 planes. They killed 750,000 Germans and captured 90,000, while they suffered 1 million casualties of their own.

Spare another thought for the Battle of Kursk of July-August 1943, the largest tank and artillery battle in human history. The Germans deployed 3,000 tanks and 900,000 men while the Soviets deployed 3,600 tanks and 15,000 artillery pieces. There were 1.2 million casualties on both sides in this battle alone.

Think for a minute of Marshal Joseph Stalin's great operations to rid the USSR of the Nazi invaders----the Great Winter Offensive of 1943, the Great Spring Offensive of 1944 and the Great Summer Offensive of 1945. In each case, millions of troops and thousands of tanks and planes were deployed, with combined casualties on both sides in millions.

Spare a thought for the Battle of the Bulge of December 1944 - January 1945, fought in northern France, Luxembourg, Belgium and western Germany. Hitler deployed half a million troops, 500 tanks and 2000 guns, while the Anglo-American Allies deployed 840,000 men and 700 tanks. Some 91,000 Germans, 90,000 Americans and 1,400 Brits died in this battle.

Reflect for a minute on the Battle of Arnhem of September 1944, in which an Anglo-Polish paratroop division tried to seize bridges in northern Holland, and unexpectedly landed atop two German Panzer divisions. It was a big slaughter in a small place.

You may say all those battles were fought far away from here; think of the Battle of El-Alamien, which was fought in 1943 in the North African desert, 150 miles west of Cairo, between Field Marshal Erwin Rommel's Afrika Corps, which had 110,000 men and 500 tanks, and the British Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery's Eighth Army, with 200,000 men and 1,000 tanks.

During World War Two, mayhem reigned on the ground, but also in the air. Think of the Battle of Britain of July-October 1940, when the German Airforce, the Luftwaffe, waged a relentless air campaign against British airports, radar, factories and cities. With only 1,900 available planes, the Royal Air Force ["The Few"] was able to beat back the Luftwaffe despite its 4,000 aircraft.

Spare a minute's thought for Pearl Harbour, which brought the American juggernaut into the war. On December 7, 1941, the Japanese Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto led a secret Naval Task Force of 6 carriers, 2 battleships, 2 heavy cruisers, 1 light cruiser, 9 destroyers, 8 tankers, 23 submarines, 5 midget subs and 414 planes, sneaked up on the American Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbour, Hawaii and launched an attack [without a declaration of war] that sunk and damaged a dozen ships, killed 2400 Americans and wounded another 1300. That evening, President Franklin Roosevelt asked Congress to declare war on the Japanese Empire.

Spare a little thought for the many major naval skirmishes that followed in the ensuing 4 years. Think of the Battle of Midway of June 4-7, 1942, near the Midway Atolls, when the American Admiral Chester Nimitz came up against Yamamoto. Nimitz avenged for Pearl Harbour when he sank 4 Japanese aircraft carriers and several hundred planes, thereby crippling Japan's naval power in the Pacific. A month before Midway, there was the great Battle of the Coral Sea, fought between May 4-8, 1942, when carrier forces from the two sides exchanged airstrikes over two days and both sides suffered heavy naval losses.

After Coral Sea, there was the naval Battle of Guadalcanal in the Solomon Islands on November 12-15, 1942 when the American Admiral Charles Halsey beat back Japanese attempts to reinforce their troops in Guadalcanal. Both sides suffered heavy losses, but it was a strategic Allied victory.

Spare one small thought for the Battle of Corregidor, the May 5-6, 1942 battle when 75,000 Japanese troops defeated 90,000 US and Filipino troops to seize the island bastion of Corregidor, in Manila Bay, with its network of tunnels and formidable defensive armament.

A quick thought for the Invasion of Poland on September 1, 1939 by 60 German and 33 Soviet divisions, leading within days to 200,000 Polish casualties and 700,000 POWs, the event which precipitated World War Two. Another quick thought please for the Battle of France of May-June 1940, when 166 German divisions rapidly conquered France, Holland and Belgium and sent the British Expeditionary Force scampering to Dunkirk.

Shed a small tear for the Fire- Bombing of Dresden by the Royal Air Force (RAF) and United States Army Air Force (USAAF) between February 13-15 1945, when in four raids, 1300 heavy bombers dropped more than 3,900 tons of high-explosive bombs on the capital of the German state of Saxony. The resulting firestorm destroyed 34 square kilometres of the city centre, with an estimated 40,000 casualties.

Spare some thought for the Battle of Berlin of April-May 1945, when the Soviet Marshals Georgy Zhukov, Konstantin Rokossovsky and Ivan Konev led a combined force of 2.5 million troops, 6,250 tanks, 42,000 artillery pieces and 7,500 warplanes to take the German capital in one of history's bloodiest battles.

Now, to round up, shed another small tear for Hiroshima and Nagasaki, upon whom the US Air Force dropped atomic bombs on August 6 and 9, 1945, respectively. The bombs killed 140,000 people in Hiroshima and 80,000 in Nagasaki by the end of 1945, and many later died of radiation illnesses. Six days after Nagasaki, Japan surrendered to the Allied Powers, as had Germany three months earlier. It's all worth a moment's thought.