D-Day plus 53 years

[thedrifter]

June 06, 2007
D-Day plus 53 years
John B. Dwyer

June 6 is a sacred anniversary, the commemoration of one of the greatest invasions in human history, D-Day at Normandy. Brave Allied troops waded ashore amidst withering machine gun fire and artillery, dying by the thousands in order to secure the beachhead and lay the basis for the western front and the drive into Germany. It was incomparably bloody beyond anything we have encountered in Iraq.

There is so much for us to remember about this act of mass heroism. Fortunately, there is a vast array of information available to those who wish to learn more.

Here are links to information about the D-Day contributions of the Army, Army Air Force, Navy and Coast Guard.

www.worldwar2history.info/

www.d-daymuseum.org/educa...story.html

www.history.navy.mil/faqs/faq109-1.htm

www.aero-web.org/history/...ay/toc.htm

www.uscg.mil/history/h_normandy.html

www.uscg.mil/history/Normandy_Index.html

All but the Army Air Force sites contain oral histories, though I'm sure that with further searching those most compelling accounts can be found. It may come as news to some that the Coast Guard participated in the Normandy landings. USCG crews manned big attack transports and LCI(L)s, large infantry landing craft, who put men & equipment ashore.

Twelve Amy men earned the Medal of Honor on that day, 8 of them posthumously (see this link). To honor them all, we should read and learn as much as possible about their valor and sacrifice, even as WW2 veterans are dying in great numbers - and to never forget them.

Ellie

[thedrifter]

Remembering D-Day
By Kerry Byrne

Over the past 1,000 years, only two military men have successfully crossed the English Channel. One is called the Conquerer. The other is called Eisenhower.

Maybe that's why I've been utterly fascinated by D-Day -- 63 years ago today -- ever since I was a small child. I was there, on June 6, 2004, at St. Mere Eglise, the French village liberated by American paratroopers on D-Day and immortalized in the book and movie "The Longest Day." The entire town today is a shrine to the lost, confused and heroic American boys who took the economy flight on their first trip to Europe. Monuments and markers signify the spots where many of them fell -- and many of them died. An effigy of an American paratrooper hangs from the church bell tower, a constant reminder of Pvt. John Steele, who was caught in that precarious position on the day the town was freed from the Nazis. The French have not forgotten, folks, certainly not in Normandy.

Everything about D-Day blows my mind: the organization, the creativity, the deception, the overpowering industrial might, the sheer logistics -- hell, they laid a gas pipeline under the channel to power all the tanks and trucks landing on the other side -- and, mostly, the humanity and inhumanity of it all, the horror and, yes, the heroism. I can barely juggle a few writing gigs. Eisenhower organized the largest invasion force and logistical enterprise ever assembled and ordered millions of men into battle. One historian or politician (who it was escapes me) described D-Day as the most unselfish act in the history of man. Tossing a buck to the guy panhandling outside Starbucks just doesn't compare.

Hundreds of thousands of men (and women, too) from the world's great freedom loving nations risked imminent death to breach Fortress Europe and free it from the grip of a ruthless, racist, bloodthirsty military dictatorship. (It's become trendy in recent years to compare certain American politicians to Nazis. But show me the ovens, the gas chambers or the factories where the skins of ethnic minorities are turned into lampshades and maybe we can talk. Otherwise, zip it, donkey.)

Let's not forget that Americans did not do it alone. Hardly. Citizens of the world rose from the sea and fell from the sky that day, too. Citizens of nations with whom our friendships were forged in bloodshed and in the crucible of the most trying times in humankind: our friends in the U.K., Canada and, yes, even France, a nation that suffered more than a half million dead in World War II. Dozens of other nations participated in D-Day, too. Bravery does not have political borders.

I had lunch the other day with a diplomat from the French consulate in Boston. He made a very interesting point: for all the animosity between the two countries, France is the only major European country with which the U.S. has never been at war. I'm no Francophile, but the French were there when our nation was forged and has ceded land to the U.S. so that we can honor our dead (our French cemeteries, such as the famous one at Omaha Beach, are sovereign American soil). The guest books at the cemetery are filled with moving tributes from Europeans to the dead of D-Day. Grown French men drive around the Norman countryside in American World War II Jeeps dressed as American paratroopers. As one Frenchman told me, the irresponsibly anti-American Le Monde does not speak for the French people.

The true miracle of D-Day is that the entire effort was pulled off just two and a half years after the tragedy of Pearl Harbor, an event that sent the nation reeling militarily and psychologically. Americans quickly steadied themselves, banned together and launched the greatest and most important industrial and military crusade, perhaps in human history. A mere 30 months after the humiliating blow of Pearl Harbor American industrial and military might cracked the walls of Fortress Europe. It's amazing what can be done, and how quickly it can be done, when the nation's very survival is at stake, and when the nation is united.

There's never been anything like D-Day in human history ... and, hopefully, there will never be a need for anything like D-Day again.

Kerry J. Byrne is publisher of Cold, Hard Football Facts.

Ellie

[thedrifter]

D-Day Remembered
By Doug Powers
June 6, 2007

Almost lost amid important stories such as Paris Hilton's jail stint, Larry David apparently giving off so much greenhouse gas that his environmental activist wife Laurie decided a split was in order, and the indictment of William "frozen assets" Jefferson, is the not-so-small fact that today is the 63rd anniversary of one of the most important days in American, not to mention world, history: The invasion of Normandy - or D-Day as we know it.

There's no better way to help us remember than with the speech that Ronald Reagan spoke to D-Day veterans on June 6th, 1984, on the 40th anniversary of the invasion - a speech that contained these words:

"You all knew that some things are worth dying for. One's country is worth dying for, and democracy is worth dying for, because it's the most deeply honorable form of government ever devised by man. All of you loved liberty. All of you were willing to fight tyranny, and you knew the people of your countries were behind you."

Those words are as necessary as ever these days, but, unfortunately, are far more rare coming from many of our politicians who are all-too consumed by sucking up to despots and playing politics with the lives of our military.

Remember the story about The London Daily Telegraph's crossword puzzle on one day in May of 1944 that, by coincidence apparently, had answers containing five code-words being used by those organizing the Normandy invasion? Well, unfortunately, these days, papers such as The New York Times wouldn't have even bothered to hide them in a crossword puzzle.

Ellie

[thedrifter]

June 07, 2007, 0:00 a.m.

Lessons from Normandy
War is by nature horrific, fraught with foolish error — and only won by the side that commits the least number of mistakes.

By Victor Davis Hanson

Sixty-three years ago this week, we landed on the Normandy beaches. As on each anniversary of June 6, 1944, much has been written to commemorate the bravery and competence of the victorious Anglo-American forces.

All true. But as we ponder this achievement of the Greatest Generation that helped lead to the surrender of Nazi Germany less than a year later, we should remember that the entire campaign was, as Wellington said of Waterloo, a near-run thing.

Our forefathers made several mistakes. They attacked nonexistent artillery emplacements. Planes dropped paratroopers far from intended targets. Critical landing assignments on Omaha Beach were missed.

Once they left shore, it got worse. Indeed, D-Day was soon forgotten in the nightmare of GIs being blown apart in the Normandy hedgerows by well-concealed, entrenched German panzers.

Apparently, no American planners — from Army Chief of Staff Gen. George Marshall down to the staff of Allied Supreme Commander Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower — had anticipated either the difficulty of penetrating miles of these dense thickets or the deadliness of new German model tanks and antitank weapons.

So we landed in Europe with the weaponry we had — and it was in large part vastly inferior to that of the Wehrmacht.

The most brilliant armored commander in U.S. history, George S. Patton, had been sacked from theater command for slapping an ill soldier the prior year in Sicily. Gens. Omar N. Bradley and Bernard L. Montgomery lacked his genius and audacity — and tens of thousands of Allied soldiers were to pay for Patton's absence at Normandy.

We finally broke out of the mess after using heavy bombers to blast holes in the German lines. But again, these operations were fraught with foul-ups.

On two successive occasions we bombed our own troops, altogether killing or wounding over 1,000 Americans, including the highest-ranking officer to die in the European theater, Lt. Gen. Lesley J. McNair. The nature of his death was hidden from the press — as were many mistakes and casualties both leading up to and after Normandy.

When the disaster in the bocage near the Normandy beaches ended over two months after D-Day, the victorious Americans, British, and Canadians had been bled white. Altogether, the winners of the Normandy campaign suffered a quarter-million dead, wounded, or missing, including almost 30,000 American fatalities — losing nearly ten times the number of combat dead in four years of fighting in Iraq.

News from the other fronts during the slaughter in Normandy was no better. Due to blunders by American generals in Italy, the retreating German army had escaped the planned Allied encirclement — and would kill thousands more Allied soldiers in Italy during the next year.

Disturbing reports spread about the simultaneous advance and brutality of Stalin’s Red Army on the Eastern Front. Some in the American government began to worry that a war started over freedom for Eastern Europe might end up guaranteeing its enslavement — Stalin’s storm troopers merely replacing Hitler’s.

While we were ground up in the hedgerows, thousands of American amphibious troops in the Pacific theater were lost during the Marianas campaign. True, we kept winning gruesome amphibious assaults, but we didn’t seem to learn much from them.

Instead, far worse carnage lay in store at places named Peleliu, Iwo Jima, and Okinawa. All these bloodbaths near the end of the war were characterized by the sheer heroism of the American soldier — who suffered terribly from intelligence failures and poor leadership of his superiors.

What can we learn, then, on this anniversary of the Normandy campaign?

By any historical measure, our forefathers committed as many strategic and tactical blunders as we have in Afghanistan and Iraq — but lost tens of thousands more Americans as a result of such errors. We worry about emboldening Iran by going into Iraq; the Normandy generation fretted about empowering a colossal Soviet Union.

Of course, World War II was an all-out fight for our very existence in a way many believe the war against terror that began on 9/11 is not. Even more would doubt that al Qaeda jihadists in Iraq pose the same threat to civilization as the Wehrmacht did in Europe.

Nevertheless, the Normandy campaign reminds us that war is by nature horrific, fraught with foolish error — and only won by the side that commits the least number of mistakes. Our grandfathers knew that. So they pressed on as best they could, convinced that they needn’t be perfect, only good enough, to win.

The American lesson of D-Day and its aftermath was how to overcome occasional abject stupidity while never giving up in the face of an utterly savage enemy. We need to remember that now more than ever.

Ellie

[thedrifter]

REMEMBERING D-DAY
Vet will say a prayer for buddies who fell

By REBECCA McCARTHY
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
: 06/06/07

His blue jeans have a crease in the leg he ironed himself. His shirt is white and wrinkle free. And his posture as erect as that of much younger men.

Ed Mariott left the U.S. Navy almost 60 years ago, but the habits he developed as a shipman have never left him. He experienced World War II on the front lines, on Omaha Beach during the Normandy invasion and in the South Pacific when the U.S. Marines were dispatched to Okinawa.

But this year, Mariott and his wife, Betts, won't be joining the 20 or 30 other D-Day survivors in his 6th Beach Battalion Association at a reunion in Roanoke, Va. Her poor health won't permit them to travel far from their home in Buford.

Mariott, 82, plans to say a prayer for the eight sailors from his platoon who were killed during the Normandy invasion. And he will think about the events of the day — June 6, 1944 — he said, thanking God once again that he survived. He isn't sure why he survived, Mariott said, "but I believe there are reasons for what happens."

During the invasion, his job was to function like a traffic cop on the beach, he said. "We showed people where to go and were a sort of clearing house to get stuff into shore."

With bullets whizzing around him and mortars exploding, Mariott stood on the sand using large flags to guide ships to shore. There was a lot of smoke and confusion. He remembers an ensign from his ship who threatened to shoot a soldier if he didn't get out from under an immobile tank at the water line. The soldier was using the tank to protect himself from gunfire.

"We were all pretty much afraid," Mariott said.

Before the invasion, he had seen — at a distance — ships being blown up in the South Pacific. But in Europe, he saw men dying and dismembered, close at hand. He didn't talk about his experiences for years, especially not to Betts or their four children, "because I didn't want them to be burdened by what I saw."

Mariott returned to England and then to New York for two weeks of leave. He went home to Moberly, Mo., and then reported for duty in Oceanside, Calif., where he was assigned to the USS Rawlins, which was responsible for unloading supplies for the U.S. Marines on Okinawa.

When the ship was in the harbor, there was no hostile fire because the Japanese had retreated into the jungle, Mariott said. The Rawlins was one of three ships bearing supplies. Men in small boats who were unloading the ships and transporting supplies to shore were supposed to go first to one ship, then to another, then to the third. But the Rawlins stores officer started giving out cases of beer with the supplies, Mariott said. So all the boats came repeatedly to the Rawlins. When it was empty, the ship left.

"We were empty and gone," Mariott said. Over the radio, they heard the other two ships being attacked by kamikaze pilots.

After he left active service when the war ended, Mariott stayed in the Naval Reserves for four years. His career in the tire and retread industry took him to Wisconsin, Virginia, Tennessee and, finally, to Georgia, in 1979. The Mariotts lived in Loganville before moving to Buford a year ago.

In 1994, the Mariotts traveled to France for the 50th anniversary of the Normandy invasion. It was difficult, but it was also wonderful, he said. The beach is serene and beautiful and the cemetery above Omaha Beach at Colleville-sur-Mer is "clean and shipshape."

"You break down and bawl like a baby when you go through it," he said.

Ellie

[thedrifter]

D-Day: On the Beaches, Over the Cliffs, and Behind the Lines
Posted by: Mary Katharine Ham at 12:45 PM

I watched "Band of Brothers" this weekend. All 10 hours of it. It was just about the perfect thing to spend a weekend doing, especially the weekend between Memorial Day and D-Day. I would recommend it to anyone. I had read the book years ago, but the miniseries is well worth your time. In fact, once you start, you probably won't be able to stop.

I am often at a loss for words when writing about a time when we were at no loss for heroes. They volunteered for missions impossible and accomplished feats unimaginable. They were war-torn and trench-footed and twenty years old. And, there were so, so, so many of them.

http://www.townhall.com/blog/g/5939e...1-1684142c326b

Ellie