Today is the 74th anniversary of D-Day, which was the Normandy landing portions of Operation Overlord. The 82nd Airborne Division’s social media team, with, I would expect, an assist from the Division historian, are doing a historical reenactment via twitter of the All American Division’s part of the operation 74 years on.
#AADDayReenactment
We're in it, folks! This is our D Day Reenactment. For the next 17 hours we'll bring you an "as it happened" play-by-play of The Division's actions during D Day.
Follow along, ask questions, comment.
We're typing this as we go cuz we want to interact w/ u pic.twitter.com/G5oBQ7ui0s— All American Division (@82ndABNDiv) June 5, 2018
We're trying to balance between information overload and providing context. There will be periods of up to 10 minutes when we will not have updates. We'll be going until noon Eastern tomorrow. Once we get into the drops, we'll provide a more traditional "play-by-play" of events
— All American Division (@82ndABNDiv) June 5, 2018
Eisenhower’s letter to the troops:
Let's go back to June 5th PM. As our Paratroopers were boarding, they were read a letter from Ike. It read, in part: "You are about to embark upon the Great Crusade. The eyes of the world are upon you. The hopes and prayers of liberty-loving people everywhere march with you." pic.twitter.com/xrvx269ikv
— All American Division (@82ndABNDiv) June 6, 2018
And his letter taking responsibility in case it all went wrong:
But, there's another letter that Ike wrote. On July 5th, Ike drafted this speech in the event that the D Day invasion failed. "My decision to attack at this time and place was based on the best information available. The troops did all that bravery and devotion to duty could do." pic.twitter.com/T2nX9xNHMn
— All American Division (@82ndABNDiv) June 6, 2018
There is the occasional dig on their rivals in the 101st Airborne Division:
So why didn’t we blacken our faces like the 101st? Same reason we didn’t carry the stupid-ass cricket? It was ineffective. We know this from Gavin's memoir "On To Berlin." We blackened our faces for Sicily but not for Normandy. The 508th was the only unit that did these. pic.twitter.com/72JiPpCQpS
— All American Division (@82ndABNDiv) June 6, 2018
And there are maps of the battlespace!
The Pathfinders, The Division's first element in on D Day, lands in Normandy in "DZ O" on this map (just north of La Fiere). pic.twitter.com/Tr5du8CiPq
— All American Division (@82ndABNDiv) June 6, 2018
The second serial of our Pathfinders drops into Drop Zone "N" (south of Amfreville) pic.twitter.com/bNMffGF5Od
— All American Division (@82ndABNDiv) June 6, 2018
Some of y'all are asking about the drop pattern (actual drop locations vs. planned drop zones). This map shows how scattered our Paratroopers are all over Normandy. Only ~ 10% of all Paratroopers landed on their designated DZs pic.twitter.com/Nsuob5GY2v
— All American Division (@82ndABNDiv) June 6, 2018
4:11 AM – 3rd Battalion, 505th PIR under Lt.Col. Edward C. Krause captures Sainte-Mere-Eglise pic.twitter.com/JhxfzmKFGu
— All American Division (@82ndABNDiv) June 6, 2018
3/505 under Lieutenant Colonel Krause, flies the first American flag in Normandy. Ste-Mere-Eglise is the first town liberated in France.
— All American Division (@82ndABNDiv) June 6, 2018
They have about an hour or so left to go in their social media reenactment, so if you’re a World War II buff or just curious, click across and check out the whole thing.
All the way!
Open thread.
ETA: Ike’s letters.
PaulWartenberg
D-DAY!
https://youtu.be/jPoKQbkDcnY
…what?
Adam L Silverman
@PaulWartenberg: I was actually thinking of that when I wrote the post.
Patricia Kayden
And we still have Nazis (who are now praised as good people).
LAO
Not to ignore D-Day but, is the IG report on Comey dropping today?:
hedgehog the occasional commenter
Thank you for this, Adam. My uncles (maternal side) were both in WWII, one in the Pacific theater, one in Europe.
One of mr. h’s uncles (father’s side) was shot down over Belgium and is buried there.
trollhattan
IIRC the French have touching and heartfelt ceremonies honoring the allies who landed that day and made the yearlong slog that ended in Berlin. They also carefully tend to the many allied cemeteries, something that has persisted as the earlier generations have passed.
If we had WWII reenactments in the States it would be interesting to see how many fine Americans would enthusiastically join in on the Axis side.
schrodingers_cat
In all the WWII talk why is the Russian front ignored? Wasn’t it Stalingrad where the tide really turned against Nazis? Didn’t they lose more than 10 million. Could perhaps the Cold War been averted if Russia was treated better by the other allies, post war?
ETA: On topic, D-day landings finished the job that was begun at Stalingrad.
jeffreyw
D-Day
rikyrah
UH HUH
UH HUH
trollhattan
@schrodingers_cat:
WWII concern trolling is very 2018!
schrodingers_cat
@rikyrah: This is my shocked face.
rikyrah
Something else we can’t do….walking dog while Black.
Neighbor Snaps Photo of Black Man Walking Dogs, Makes Him Suspect in Criminal Manhunt
Michael Harriot
Yesterday 4:27pm
A California man discovered that his face had been plastered all over newspapers, local television stations and the internet after a woman saw him walking his dogs through her neighborhood, snapped a picture of him and gave it to police trying to stop a burglary ring.
According to the Los Angeles Times, on May 16, 55-year-old Ike Iloputaife walked his two dogs, as he does every morning. Unbeknownst to him, seven hours later, a home in his San Diego neighborhood was burglarized and several rifles and handguns were stolen. A week later, the San Diego County Sheriff’s Department released general descriptions of the men who were responsible, along with photos of the suspects. All of the photos were from surveillance cameras from burglarized homes, except one.
That photo was of Iloputaife.
The press release said that the photo was of “suspect 2” in the burglary. According to the police, the alleged burglar was 20 to 35 years old, between 6 feet and 6 feet 5 inches tall, and weighed about 260 pounds. Given that Iloputaife is only 5 feet 9 inches and weighs 195 pounds, it is understandable how the police and the media got the two men confused because the two men share one similar characteristic:
Black skin.
But if any of that seems preposterously white-people-ish, the story gets even more ludicrous. It turns out that the photo circulated to television channels, news outlets and the city’s Crimestoppers website came from one of Iloputaife’s neighbors, who secretly took a photo of him before the crime even occurred!
On that May morning, while Iloputaife walked his dogs, a woman who lived around the corner surreptitiously snapped a photo of Iloputaife because, according to investigators, he was a “stranger on her street.”
“Her street.”
schrodingers_cat
@trollhattan: I have been trying to find more about Russia since Putin won the 2016 election. I want to figure out what makes them tick.
Gravenstone
I was just thinking this morning how relatively lucky we are that today doesn’t mark a ‘landmark ‘ anniversary of the date so the moron is unlikely to beclown himself any more than usual in his ahistorical Tweets of commemoration. If it’s still squatting in the White House next year for the 75th anniversary…
sherparick
@schrodingers_cat: Well, because American and British forces carried out D-Day, we naturally focus on that event. But the decisive land battles fought against the Germans occurred in Russia (Stalingrad and Kursk). The bulk of the German Army was in Russia. But if the invasion had not taken place, there was a strong possibility that Hitler would have made a deal with Stalin. He had done it once before.
rikyrah
More phuckery:
Florida Man Sets Black Neighbor’s ‘Flashy’ Car on Fire, Calls Him Racial Slur: Report
Breanna Edwards
Yesterday 12:06pm
Jealousy is never cute, beloved … especially on a white man. But here we are once again in Florida, this time in South Daytona, where a white man called his black neighbor a racial slur before setting the neighbor’s “flashy” car on fire.
Florida, man.
Ronald Sweet was outside, washing and waxing his silver 2002 Mercury, when he was approached by 56-year-old Joseph Minor, who began to verbally attack him for no reason. Click Orlando reports that Minor told Sweet that he was “flashy” and tossed in a racial slur (because why not) before ultimately threatening that he would “take care” of him and his vehicle, warning him that his days were numbered.
“I hate you, nigger,” Minor said to Sweet, according to the Daytona Beach News-Journal.
After a verbal altercation, Sweet and his fiancee, Cecilia Jones, went inside their apartment for the night, I guess ignoring Minor, Click Orlando reports. About 10 minutes later, around 12:35 a.m. Sunday, Sweet heard an explosion and looked out to see his car on fire, and Minor walking away.
Sweet and Jones told police that this was not the first time Minor had made threats, adding that he often used racial slurs when talking to them and other residents.
Adam L Silverman
@LAO: Whether it drops or not today, I’m not sure that’s exactly news.
Adam L Silverman
@hedgehog the occasional commenter: My granduncle (mother’s mother’s brother in law) had his fighter shot out around him over the European theater. Luckily he managed not to wind up a POW. Never flew again after the war. Took Amtrack anywhere he couldn’t drive.
The Moar You Know
My Grandfather landed at Omaha Beach, second wave. Had he been in the first I might not be here today.
Jeffro
Thanks for this post and the reminder and perhaps most especially for the link to the Twitter thread, Adam! The digs at each other between the two airborne units are pretty funny ?
Elizabelle
Paul Ryan borrows a spine. Per the FTF NYTimes:
dmsilev
@rikyrah: I read the Times story this morning and it’s just appalling. We’ll start with that neighbor who apparently thinks that “black guy walking dogs” is in any way suspicious rather then being a normal thing that normal people do.
Adam L Silverman
@trollhattan: They do indeed.
Elizabelle
74 years.
I wonder how many D-Day vets are still around? I am sad for those who have been watching fascism rise again, that which they fought in their youth.
It’s our fight now.
Adam L Silverman
@schrodingers_cat: Americans write the history of the war one way. The Brits another. The Russians a third. It is what it is.
schrodingers_cat
@sherparick: I get the focus but don’t get the exclusion of everything else where Americans didn’t play a part. I have seen several miniseries on WWII on PBS and the like. The focus is entirely on D-day landings and the Pacific war and almost none on the eastern theater. As a result I don’t know enough about it. So I was shocked to find how many Russians died.
ETA: I am not criticizing this post or the contribution and the bravery of those that were a part of the landings. But MAGA President leads me to question everything including how stuff is and has been portrayed in the media.
pat
I’m confused. Why is France on the left in those maps?
Elizabelle
@schrodingers_cat: I agree with you. I did not learn about the Russian toll until college, at the earliest.
I suspect that’s not an accident. Cannot give those Russkies and Uncle Joe any credit whatsoever, no sir. A generation or two that was not taught the full story.
Adam L Silverman
@schrodingers_cat: Start here:
https://www.trumanlibrary.org/whistlestop/study_collections/coldwar/documents/pdf/6-6.pdf
Then give these a read:
https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2014/11/hidden-author-putinism-russia-vladislav-surkov/382489/
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01EUYN5HQ/ref=oh_aui_search_detailpage?ie=UTF8&psc=1
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00XM0WP6W/ref=oh_aui_search_detailpage?ie=UTF8&psc=1
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B001VB5DL8/ref=oh_aui_search_detailpage?ie=UTF8&psc=1
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00L01GHGY/ref=oh_aui_search_detailpage?ie=UTF8&psc=1
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B005GSZISA/ref=oh_aui_search_detailpage?ie=UTF8&psc=1
schrodingers_cat
@Adam L Silverman: True, that. But they all agree on white washing the contribution of so many like the Indian soldiers who fought for the Empire while Churchil was starving millions of their countrymen back home.
gene108
@schrodingers_cat:
U.S. soldiers didn’t fight in the Russian front. Sort of like how the war between China and Japan gets glossed over, when Americans discuss the Pacific front. China had the second highest casualty totals in WW2, after the USSR.
Stalingrad was a major loss to Germany, but Germany still occupied a large chunk of the USSR. The Battle of Kursk maybe a bigger turning point, with regards to Germany actually going into retreat on the Eastern front.
No.
The USA supplied a lot of material for the Soviet war effort. The USSR wouldn’t have been in the fight for as long as it was without support from the other Allies.
The Allies also accommodated Stalin in various peace talks, when it was clear the Germans were going to lose.
And Stalin was evil. He had no compunction about lying or dissembling to other allies what he actually wanted, and considered the lack of duplicity in other allied leaders (Roosevelt/Truman and Churchill) as a weakness to be exploited.
@schrodingers_cat:
I went through that phase several years ago. Start looking for books on Russian history. I found Anne Applaum’s “Gulag: A History interesting, also Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn “Gulag Archipelago” is worth reading. Found Orlando Figes “A People’s Tragedy: The Russian Revolution 1891-1924” a good read.
Elizabelle
@Adam L Silverman: Looking at front page: I wonder if some of your tweets (interesting as they are) should appear after a jump? Because it takes forever to scroll down the BJ front page if you are just checking out posts to see what’s up.
Smedley Darlington Prunebanks (formerly Mumphrey, et Al.)
What are they talking about when they say something about a cricket? I’m missing something here.
hedgehog the occasional commenter
@Adam L Silverman: Yikes! Luck, indeed. What a story! And i don’t blame him for taking Amtrak–I likely would do the same.
trollhattan
@schrodingers_cat:
Operation Barbarrosa is as good a place to start as any. Basically history’s largest and most deadly military campaign.
Jager
@schrodingers_cat: Stalin was “good old Uncle Joe” while waiting for the invasion of Europe to begin, then reverted to the real Stalin. Read about the Big Three discussions on Poland and his position on the Polish government in exile. Things might have been different if Roosevelt hadn’t died, but probably not.
Adam L Silverman
@Jeffro: I’ve done some operational support for the 101st over the years, so I’m used to seeing it go in the other direction.
Ian G.
So as an American, I’ve learned about the meat grinder that was Omaha Beach, but I’ve started to understand more about how brutal Juno Beach was for the Canadians who landed there. Adam, or some other WWII buff, do you have more details about that?
Bringing up the forces that Canada committed to D-Day also reminds me of how enraging I find it that Shitgibbon is trying to wreck our relationship with our peaceful, prosperous northern neighbor. Not a lot of countries have a huge border like that with a model neighbor, we’re goddamn lucky to have Canada.
schrodingers_cat
@trollhattan: @gene108: @Adam L Silverman: Thanks for all your suggestions. My reading list for the summer is complete!
The Moar You Know
@rikyrah: San Diego is a bad town to be black in. Really bad.
Adam L Silverman
@Elizabelle:
Stan
We have MANY WW2 re-enactments in the USA; they’re pretty easy to find.
Gin & Tonic
@Elizabelle: Part of the problem is that the leader you jovially call “Uncle Joe” was arguably as evil as Hitler. So, yes, millions of Russians and other Soviet subjects died fighting the Nazis, but millions of Soviet subjects also died before WWII because Stalin was evil personified.
Adam L Silverman
@schrodingers_cat: The Cold War influenced the historiography.
Adam L Silverman
@pat: Operational security. This way if the maps fall into the enemies hands, they’ll be confused as to which way the country they’re occupying is and instead of advancing towards the US and British troops wind up retreating instead!//
More seriously, I have no idea.
JPL
@LAO: He was the chain of command, since Lynch recused herself, or so I thought. According to ABC News Lynch was criticized for meeting with Bill Clinton. If that is the entire report, I don’t think it should be a major story, since there is no new information. Maybe I’m missing something.
The Moar You Know
@Elizabelle: Not many. My grandfather checked out a few years back at age 91. Very certain he would have voted for Trump if he’d had the chance.
Ruviana
@schrodingers_cat: I’ve been reading The Long Hangover which I’m finding very informative. Like yourself I’m reading more about Russia for background. Man without a Face, about Putin is good. I’m sure others have good suggestions as well.
Steve in the ATL
@gene108:
Start taking antidepressants at least a month before you read this book
schrodingers_cat
@Elizabelle: America was immensely important to winning the war against Axis powers but they did not win singlehandedly or because Churchill gave rousing speeches (RWNJ narrative, in short).
Adam L Silverman
@Elizabelle: In the spirit of this post’s spirit. I have occupied the terrain and will hold it…//
JPL
@Elizabelle: It is our fight, that’s why voting is so important.
Adam L Silverman
@Smedley Darlington Prunebanks (formerly Mumphrey, et Al.): Here you go:
boatboy_srq
@sherparick: WH spoxbot has already discussed the Ambassador to Germany’s comments about Der Reichwing and used D-Day as an illustration of the US’ long history with Germany. The current maladministration is developing an epidemic, incurable case of athlete’s tongue.
Elizabelle
@Gin & Tonic: That is true. However, it does not justify omitting the very real sacrifices and terrible loss of the Soviet soldiers and civilians during the war. I was never a WW2 buff, but attended a pretty good high school and the Russian front was never covered in any detail. We got a lot more information about WW1 than WW2, and at the time, very little about Viet Nam at all.
In fairness, it always seemed we spent so much time covering colonial and Civil War history that the teachers speed-walked us through the 21st century. We did get the Depression and FDR and the New Deal, for sure.
James Powell
@Smedley Darlington Prunebanks (formerly Mumphrey, et Al.):
A cricket clicker. Makes a noise that was supposed to identify friendlies in the dark.
Elizabelle
@boatboy_srq: You cannot make this shit up.
How long until Idiocracy 2: The Recap?
Mike in NC
My Navy Reserve unit from Baltimore was invited in participate in the 50th anniversary D-Day reenactment held at Fort Story, VA. We operated three LCM8 landing craft and the active duty Army and Navy pitched in with about a dozen more. Hundreds of people from around the world showed up. It was quite an amazing occasion.
Stan
Omaha was, by far, the deadliest of the five D-Day beaches. Utah (the other US beach), for example, was virtually unopposed. The reason was pretty simple: the German defensive strength on Omaha was far greater than any other beach. There is a lot of amateur history that claims the problem was the lack of specialized armored fighting vehicles (tanks and suchlike) with engineering adaptations (the “funnies”) but that’s a minor factor. The major problem was simply that there was a high-quality German unit defending the beach. That wasn’t generally true on the other beaches, at least not to any great extent.
The campaign after the landings, through to the liberation of Paris in August, is fascinating. That’s where the Canadians really took some beatings but dished out a lot more than they got. The Canadians frequently clashed with the German 12th SS Panzergrenadier division “Hitlerjugend” (“Hitler Youth”). This was a unit formed from experienced eastern front veterans in the leadership positions, but with the lower ranks filled with teenagers who had only known Hitler as their national leader. They executed a lot of Canadian prisoners of war. After that the Canadians did the same to them.
Ultimately the Normandy campaign is a brutal, vicious, but in some ways inspiring story of amateurs from the USA, UK, Canada, France and Poland knocking the stuffing out of the professionals from Germany.
I cannot recommend highly enough Carlo D’Este’s “Decision in Normandy” as a source.
James Powell
@pat:
Because the Cotentin peninsula is north and west of the Normandy invasion beaches. See map.
Adam L Silverman
@Ian G.: I’ll put a post up about the other landings – Juno, Gold, and Sword – later today, but here’s some stuff to get you started:
Video documentaries:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F8TAQFzrBNo
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EPL_r0daTTw
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jhAgcHguqSY
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3A8BldxVckI
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nQbJRaGZqKc
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LaE3YD7eNb0
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xrhpw77Ej5Y
Non video:
https://www.dday-overlord.com/en/d-day/beaches/juno-beach
https://www.junobeach.org/
https://www.junobeach.org/events/ceremonie-commemorative-du-jour-j-2/
Raven
My old Man always said, “shit, I had 28 fucking d- days in the Pacific! On another note 5i years ago today I dropped for the first time!
The Ancient Randonneur
@Adam L Silverman:
Indeed. I’m old enough to remember when the 82nd was referred to as the Jumping Junkies.
Adam L Silverman
@JPL: Actually he wasn’t. Yates should have taken over as she was the Deputy Attorney General. The reporting seems to indicate that Comey bypassed Lynch because of the recusal and then just basically blew off Yates. And I see seems to indicate because I’ve seen little reporting that ever deals with the question of why didn’t Comey just report it up to Yates as the DAG and let Yates take it from there. That question never seems to get asked.
GregB
I am putting on my conservative historic revisionist hat:
WWII was when the conservative American army rallied by FDR fought the liberal fascist Nazis and ushered in America’s greatest era of low taxes, no commie unions, conservative values while proving liberalism, multi culturalism, and forward progress for civil rights and women’s lib belonged in the ashbin of history.
Please grade this thesis.
The Midnight Lurker
Stand up! Hook up! Shuffle to the door!
PJ
@schrodingers_cat: Now you sound like Trump – if only Stalin had been treated “fairly”, we would have had world peace!
I don’t know if you’re being ironic, or what, but Stalin was intent on controlling as much of Europe as possible, and, in addition to gobbling up part of Poland (his motivation for starting WWII with Hitler), the Baltics, and part of Finland, had no intention of ever allowing free elections in Poland, Hungary, Bulgaria, Romania, Albania, or Yugoslavia (though Tito got out from under his yoke). Then the Communist coup in Czechoslovakia in February 1948 solidified the view that Stalin was going to do everything he could to undermine democracy in Europe.
opiejeanne
@The Moar You Know: My dad landed with his radio truck a couple of days after D-Day, up one of the rivers in the area at a place he called Camp X. I’m not sure where that was and he didn’t remember the name of the river or the nearby town. He was in Bradley’s army at that point. Later he was in Ike’s army and we have that patch. Dad would be 99 today, just short of his 100th birthday if medical incompetence hadn’t taken him from us at age 94.
Adam L Silverman
@Mike in NC: I love Ft. Story. Was there for an OPT/conference of all the Army cultural advisors (my colleagues) and some others. Beautiful place. Traffic in Virginian Beach sucks, but I don’t think that’s exactly breaking news to anyone.
rikyrah
@Elizabelle:
Yes, it is our fight.
gene108
@Steve in the ATL:
Good advice. Also read it during the light of day or in a bright room. You don’t need any ambient darkness to add on to what’s in the books.
No Drought No More
I highly recommend the book On To Berlin by General James Gavin of the 82nd. As he worked in the months and weeks before D-Day in preparation, Gavin noted that nothing chastens a commander than knowing he will personally take part in the operation. Another great autobiography, this one by a 101st trooper, is entitled Curahee. The trooper who wrote it went all the way with the 101st, from Normandy to Bavaria, and when he got home to Cleveland a bartender refused to serve him a beer because he was underage.
Betty Cracker
I had no idea James Doohan was a D-Day hero.
Gin & Tonic
@Steve in the ATL: My father plowed his way through it when it was first published in the West. He was made of sterner stuff than I.
rikyrah
I’m not a WWII buff, so I ask this in earnest…
Was this the one big shot?
Go big or go home?
Was it assured that we would win D-Day?
JPL
@Adam L Silverman: Thank you for the information.
Adam L Silverman
@opiejeanne: I have no idea. The only Camp X I know of was the training center the Canadians put together on Lake Ontario so the US could work with the Brits prior to FDR being able to bring the US into the war.
http://www.camp-x.com/historyofcampx.html
rikyrah
Where was Eisenhower stationed while overseeing this?
England?
??? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ??
@schrodingers_cat:
Doubt it. The SU’s leadership was paranoid and for good reason. They were the only communist country in the world for a long time and the capitalist world didn’t much like that. With a guy like Stalin in charge, the Cold War was practically inevitable.
rikyrah
@Elizabelle:
Lips pursed.
Don’t trust the ZEGK
Adam L Silverman
@Betty Cracker: Yep, which is why you never see any clean shots of his right hand on Star Trek, with the exception of one shot in one scene. He was very self conscious about it. It is also why you’ll see him in scenes holding a phaser as if it is a M1911 pistol. There’s one episode where he’s trying to use a type 2 hand phaser (phaser pistol) to burn through a bulkhead to get to door controls and he’s holding it as if he’s aiming an actual pistol as opposed to the one handed, point and shoot from the hip used by all the other actors in scenes where they have to use this type of phaser.
cintibud
@rikyrah:
Pretty sure he was in England. He supposedly had prepared a statement taking full responsibility for a defeat
Adam L Silverman
@rikyrah: It was not assured. If you go up top I added a hand written draft of a letter Ike wrote taking full responsibility for the failure of the D-Day invasion and Normandy landings, as Supreme Allied Commander, if they had failed. They didn’t, so he didn’t have to formalize it. It was not a foregone conclusion. No assault ever is.
rikyrah
D-Day: How technology helped win the Normandy invasion and World War II
By Michael S. Rosenwald
June 6 at 6:00 AM
“I have full confidence in your courage and devotion to duty and skill in battle.” – General Dwight D. Eisenhower, in a message to troops before D-Day.
Courage. Devotion. Duty.
They are the words most often used to describe the brave Allied troops who landed on Normandy 74 years ago and helped win World War II.
Not to be forgotten, though, is this word: Technology.
World War II was won not just with courage, devotion and duty, but with American and British technological advances that gave Allied troops the upper hand in many facets of battle.
The most famous and fearsome: the Manhattan Project atomic bombs that led to the surrender of the Japanese in 1945. But there were many others.
Radar helped the Allies know what was coming at them from the enemy.
Bombsights employing complicated gyroscope technology allowed planes to pinpoint bomb attacks. Before World War II, pilots simply dropped bombs by hand and hoped for the best.
Nylon, the synthetic material invented by DuPont for women’s stockings, was used to make parachutes, glider tow ropes, aircraft fuel tanks and flak jackets, according to Smithsonian magazine. Some people dubbed it “the fiber that won the war.”
But one of the most crucial bits of technology, the one that helped the Allies launch the surprise attack on Normandy, was the hull of a boat — the Higgins boat.
You have probably seen pictures of this hulking nautical miracle, the one that carried troops right onto Normandy’s beach.
It was built by a wily, hard-drinking inventor named Andrew Higgins, the man Dwight D. Eisenhower once credited with winning World War II.
“It is Higgins himself who takes your breath away,” Raymond Moley, a former FDR adviser, wrote in Newsweek in 1943. “Higgins is an authentic master builder, with the kind of will power, brains, drive and daring that characterized the American empire builders of an earlier generation.”
Adam L Silverman
@rikyrah: Allied Command HQ was at Southwick House on the Southwick Estate in East Hampshire.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/concrete-traces-reveal-eisenhowers-d-day-hq-historians-have-found-the-site-of-the-allies-wartime-1435551.html
opiejeanne
@schrodingers_cat: I read a fascinating/horrifying article about the extreme hunger during the siege of Stalingrad and how they dealt with it. The very old died first, were allowed to die in an effort to save the youngest. Women were tasked with finding food because most of the men were gone to the war, and they starved themselves while feeding their children. One woman described licking the wallpaper in her kitchen, another talked about eat the dirt from the site of a syrup factory where the waste had been dumped. I’ll see if I can find it.
There’s a movie that we found interesting because of the view we seldom get: Enemy at the Gates.
NotMax
A tip of history’s hat, too, to British Admiral Ramsay, who coordinated naval operations of Operation Neptune (D-Day invasion).
And to the French resistance, who had carried out acts of sabotage (damaging rail lines, cutting communication cables, etc.) which mostly isolated Normandy.
??? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ??
@??? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ??:
Hilariously enough, in the Right Stuff, at an experiment for supersonic flight in 1947, one man remarks to another about Soviet spies. The other credulously exclaims, “The Soviets? They’re our allies!”
During the war the SU was viewed more favorably and this popular attitude carried over in the very early Cold War
Adam L Silverman
@cintibud: I posted that up top as an ETA. Had meant to post it as part of the original post, then realized I hadn’t, and went back and added it.
Amir Khalid
@schrodingers_cat:
There is a widespread belief among Americans that WWII began in 1941, when the
GermansJapanese bombed Pearl Harbor (the way the Great War only began in 1917 when America came in three years late). The British believe it began in 1939, when the Germans (and their friends the Soviets) invaded Poland. It actually began in 1937, when the Japanese invaded China.AliceBlue
@rikyrah:
I’m not a WWII historian by any means, but I’ll take a stab at some answers:
Yes
Yes
No
Jager
Having read a few books about the relationship between the Allies in WWII and the amount of planning and preparation that went into the meetings and the length of the meetings and the meetings after the meetings. I can’t imagine trump preparing for weeks, listening to advisers and experts, then flying halfway around the world to spend a week or more spending day after day, prepping for a meeting, spending three or 4 hours in a meeting, debriefing after the meeting then prepping for a dinner meeting, then having a 3 or 4 hour post dinner meeting discussion? Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin put in days like that every time they met over the course of the war.
lgerard
Kim Kardashian is now America’s most effective advocate with trump
http://www.tmz.com/2018/06/06/kim-kardashian-alice-marie-johnson-sentence-commuted-pardon/
Ian G.
@Steve in the ATL:
An easier read in terms of the weight it will put on your soul is “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich”, which is short like Elie Wiesel’s “Night”. The last paragraph of the book is one of the most haunting things I have ever read: “the extra three [days] were for leap years.”
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@gene108:
There is a bit more than that to it. Before the war the Soviet Union felt under siege by the rest of the world – that’s why Stalin’s purges weren’t resisted. After the war the Soviets were in the same mind set as the US was – the victory gave them a mandate to rule the world and the Soviet century was at hand.
Also another thing is overlooked is the Soviet victory over Imperial Japan in 1945. Considering how tenacious the Japanese were on the defense during WWII that was remarkable how fast the Red Army overrun Manchuria and it also erased the shame of the defeat of the Russo-Japanese war from the Russians. A Russian at that time would have seen the Communists as something new and superior to anything else.
zhena gogolia
@schrodingers_cat:
I’d also recommend Nadezhda Mandelstam’s memoir, English title Hope Against Hope, for an extremely powerful depiction of what life was like in Stalin’s Russia. Solzhenitsyn for the gulag, Mandelstam for everyday life. (Revisionism says it wasn’t so bad, but I’m with Nadezhda, she’s absolutely believable.)
Adam L Silverman
@opiejeanne: The NKVD, in an attempt to keep order in the ranks, shot (executed) 15,000 or so of their own Soviet troops at the Battle of Stalingrad. The cry was “ni shagu nazad”/not one step back!
Stan
Whatever you may think of the Stalin regime, which was without doubt one of the worst in all of history, there are a few facts to keep in mind about WW2:
1. The USSR repeatedly sought to form a defensive alliance against the Germans during the 1930s, reaching out to the UK and France many times and being ignored or rebuffed every time. If you read the diplomatic history of the 1930s you will see how many opportunities were lost to stop the nazis. Munich is rather well-known in the west, but it was only one chapter in a series of events.
2. The USSR inflicted at least 80% of all German casualties and engaged almost all of the German army from June 1941 until the last year of the war, when they ‘merely’ engaged two-thirds of the German army.
3. Most of the Lend-Lease support to the USSR didn’t arrive until 1943 or later. The support was very important, but, the critical period when the outcome of the war was hanging in the balance had already passed before L-L became much of a factor.
None of this is to denigrate the participation of millions of courageous western soldiers in WW2. Nor is it in any way an excuse for the soviet regime. Just a little orientation to who did the heaviest lifting.
opiejeanne
@schrodingers_cat: I was wrong, it was the siege of Leningrad (duh!)
Article about the book
Stan
OMG me too….haven’t heard that one in 35 years.
HumboldtBlue
My maternal grandfather didn’t land on D-Day but he followed soon after as an officer in the Ghost Army.
He was gone for four years.
But her emails!!!
@PJ:
Russia has a bit of a complex as it regards building a buffer zone to its West. It’s like the 2nd driving factor after securing a warm water port with access to the Mediterranean and beyond. Russia has been invaded multiple times across the European plain, which is why they are so interested in securing Finland and more importantly Poland as buffers and areas they can concentrate defensive forces before enemy forces gain access to the broad, flat region that runs all the way to the Ural mountains.
schrodingers_cat
@PJ: Not Stalin but the Russian people. Stalin was as big a monster as Hitler. But even defeated Germany got the Marshall Plan. My Russian friend says that Russia never did recover from what it went through in WWII. That makes it ripe for despots like Stalin and now Putin.
different-church-lady
Twitter: making the internet ever more unreadable is our goal!
zhena gogolia
@opiejeanne:
Whew, I thought you were talking about Leningrad. I never heard such stories about Stalingrad.
HumboldtBlue
And for those who want a broader overview of the American involvement in the European Theater you can’t go wrong with the Liberation Trilogy by Rick Atkinson. That’s some of the finest work on the war I have read.
Adam L Silverman
@Amir Khalid: Actually it began in 1914. World War I historiography has now shifted and is arguing that World War I never really ended. What ended was the interstate war portion. However, dozens of smaller, low intensity wars continued off and on for another fifteen years or so until they reignited into interstate war once again with World War II. This view looks at the two world wars as one extended continuum of interstate war with low intensity wars in between the interstate portions. I highly recommend Gerwarth’s The Vanquished.
https://www.amazon.com/Vanquished-Why-First-World-Failed/dp/0374537186/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1528303469&sr=8-1&keywords=gerwarth+vanquished
Stan
With all due respect, that is not remotely true. As I posted earlier, the USSR was seeking a defensive alliance *against* Hitler in the 1930s, and sought french and British participation in this scheme. fear of communism and, frankly, dismissal of Soviet military strength led the west to ignore the USSR.
Soviet foreign policy from the time Stalin took power until 1939 was very conservative and frankly defensive in nature. They weren’t trying to take anything; they were trying to hang onto what they had.
Stalin didn’t start WW2, Hitler and the Japanese did.
Jay
65 years ago this month Julius & Ethel Rosenberg were put to death for colluding with the Russians. The lawyer that pressured the judge to make it happen was il Douche’s mentor Roy Cohn. Someone should remind him of that little tidbit.
Adam L Silverman
@Jager: There are contemporaneous news reports that he gets up and wanders off during bilateral meetings with visiting heads of state at the White House because he gets bored after a few minutes.
NotMax
@Jager
Pictures of FDR at Yalta are always a bit shocking. So haggard, wan and drawn. Stalin is alleged to have confided to his staff that if he’d known what shape FDR was truly in, he would have agreed to the original suggestion to have the conference in Malta in order to spare FDR the additional ardors of travel.
Jeffro
@GregB:
How about a gentleman’s D- ? You got “American army” right. ;)
Stan
The Normandy campaign was a gigantic effort that had been in the planning stages for years; meanwhile the German army had been weakened massively by the Red Army and was a shadow of its former strength. The German air force had been basically eliminated as a tactical force by the USAAF in early 1944. So, the short answer is it was very, very highly likely to succeed. But nothing is ever certain. For example, at mid-morning of June 6, Omar Bradley was considering shutting down further landings on Omaha and diverting all US units to Utah instead. But he was a pretty cool customer and held off that decision – as it turned out, of course, even on Omaha the allies were successful.
Amir Khalid
@rikyrah:
I remember seeing a 12th century version of the Higgins boat in Russell Crowe’s Robin Hood movie. It was being used by a French invasion force to land in England. Yes, it looked really silly.
catclub
@trollhattan:
Um, Civil War re-enactors give a big hint. EVERYBODY ( in my neck o the woods) wants to be on the traitor side.
PJ
@Stan: Uh, you may want to check your history books for the Molotov/Ribbentrop pact, which involved the Soviet Union and Germany agreeing to invade and divide Poland together.
different-church-lady
@different-church-lady: Ah, wait, I get it now, they’re doing a minute-by-minute virtual reenactments of events — Twitter’s actually a good choice for that. Snark retracted.
Jay
@Stan:
The Soviets even tried for a Mutual Self Defense Treaty with Poland in the 1930’s, despite all the post WWI conflicts.
Stan
You are almost certainly thinking of Leningrad, which was under close siege by the Germans for about 900 days. About a million civilians died in that one city. The Germans made no attempt to take the city; they figured they could starve it out, and they very nearly succeeded.
Make no mistake, the germans planned and executed a genocidal war. Our current crop of neo-nazis don’t seem to take this seriously enough.
Jeffro
@rikyrah: The tech was helpful and fascinating, absolutely.
I’ve always heard that the #1 factor was the sheer numbers of men and amount of material the Allied forces were able to get onto those beaches in the first 12 hours, with the #2 factor being the long-running deception campaign about when and where the attack would be coming, and #3 (somewhat related to both #1 and #2) being the Germans’ decision to not rush in and reinforce their Normandy-area units (fearing that the ‘real’ attack was coming somewhere else).
Gin & Tonic
@Stan:
Corrected for you.
Stan
Executions were pretty common in the Red Army and the German Army. Tens of thousands in the German army for example.
One US soldier was shot for desertion in combat.
Calouste
@rikyrah: The purpose of D-Day was to distract the Nazis from the Eastern front so the Soviets could speed up their advance there. If D-Day had failed, the war would have lasted longer, but it was pretty much already won at that point. Keep in mind that Italy had already surrendered in September 43, and even though the Nazis were still fighting there, the Allies entered Rome 2 days before D-Day.
PJ
@schrodingers_cat: The Marshall Plan was offered to all of the countries of war-torn Europe, including the Soviet Union and its satellites, but Stalin refused to let any of the countries under his control accept the aid, and forced Czechoslovakia (which was then partly under Communist control) to rescind acceptance of the aid after they had agreed to it.
LAO
O/T: Goddamn, this pisses me off:
TenguPhule
Donald Trump lies about every fucking thing. EVERY. FUCKING. THING.
The Midnight Lurker
I remember reading a book (once), I can’t recall the title or the author, but it was by a Russian historian. Before the start of hostilities in Europe, Stalin had invested heavily in a tank called the T-3 Christie. Christie was an American inventor who revolutionized tank suspension, but then Cole knows this. The T-3 was a pretty shitty tank all thing considered. It was light, under armored, and had a small gun. It did have one interesting feature though, if you you took the treads off, the T-3 was capable of speeds up to 60 mph on paved roads. At the time, there wasn’t twenty miles of paved road in all of Russia. Then there was Stalin’s paratrooper force, the largest in the world at the time. Speaking from some small experience, you don’t usually use paratroops to defend. Food for thought. Now I’ll crawl into my hidey-hole and await the inevitable.
Stan
Atkinson makes a lot of mistakes. If you want good rigorous history on WW2 try Richard Overy, Carlo D’Este, David Glantz, and believe ti or not the US Army official history , sometimes called “the Green Books”, which is all available online.
schrodingers_cat
@PJ: I did not know that.
PJ
@schrodingers_cat: Stalin came to power in the mid-1920s, long before WWII. The Soviet Union was ripe for despots in part because Russia had always been ruled by despots (except for a brief period after the February 1917 revolution), but mainly because it had been specifically designed as a dictatorship of the Communist Party, so whoever controlled the Party controlled the country.
Stan
Agree 100%; it’s a mind-changer.
Ian G.
@Adam L Silverman:
Americans never learn about the history of Eastern Europe 1914-1941. We learn about the futile fighting on the Western Front, but not the massive battles between Russia and Austria-Hungary, for instance. Then we don’t learn about the wars to establish nation-states in the wreck of the empires in Eastern Europe (Lithuania, for instance, where half of my ancestors came from, fought wars with Poland and the Soviets to establish its territory. Poland won its war with Lithuania and occupied Vilnius in the interwar years). We also don’t learn anything about the ethnic cleansing of Germans from Eastern Europe immediately after WWII. Once again, ancestors help me know this, as I have ethnic German ancestors from the modern Czech Republic (“Bohemians” is what they called themselves).
No Drought No More
Great knowledge about James Dolan of Star Trek. Another Star Trek actor served with the 82nd (I believe, maybe the 101st)- William Windom, who guest starred in the episode where his star ship crew had been stranded and destroyed by a giant, ice cream cone shaped planet eater while he sat on the bridge and listened to them die. It was a role, I imagine, that didn’t require much acting on his part to perform, if any at all.
Other well known actors saw combat in WW2, and they’ve always intrigued me. The fine actor Eddie Albert (of Green Acres notoriety) was a naval hero at Tarawa, for example, which I found shocking for no good reason than he was married to Eva Gabor and cracked corny jokes). And David Niven (who was a graduate of Sandhurst, believe it or not) was a member of select unit of British officers that served General Montgomery’s headquarters by roaming freely throughout American and British lines and reporting their impressions (from Normandy till the end of the war), Niven wrote in his autobiography that 24-48 hours prior to the commencement of the Battle of the Bulge, he asked a U.S. major in a farmhouse for his appraisal of the current situation and was told (I paraphrase): “You see those hills? Well, on the other side there are German panzers massing, and one of these mornings they’ll come charging down and through that door, and they’ll leave through the door on the other side of this house, and there’s not a damn thing we’ll be able to do to stop them”. Niven said he laughed, and then asked the major if he’d reported that information up his chain of command. The major replied that it had been his one-and-only appraisal for the past few days, and each time he had been told to relax.
ruemara
@rikyrah: Boy, do they hate us. Especially when we’re doing well for ourselves. I said it elsewhere, these folks are lying when they claim they want a whites-only paradise. When they get to have it, they then hate the POC town over there that manages to thrive. So they go destroy it. They want an integrated community, where POC are visibly kept in degraded, humiliating positions and can be abused at will by any white person. They want a world where the rape of black women as an afternoon’s fun is back on the menu. Where attacking a black man or an Asian man or a Latino because you’re bored or you want to feel like you’re a big man – hey, you can do that again. You could give them all the whites-only space in the world & they wouldn’t be happy about it.
lgerard
If you wanted to listen to contemporaneous news coverage of D Day
you could here
TenguPhule
@schrodingers_cat:
The Russians only turned on the Nazis after Hitler managed to betray them first. Stalin was no Gorbachev.
Enemy of my enemy.
schrodingers_cat
@PJ: What the Communists replaced was pretty terrible too.
Yutsano
@LAO: I can’t see any of them signing admissions of guilt since they don’t believe they did anything wrong.
TenguPhule
@Elizabelle:
How many times are we going to this same old tired act in 3 parts?
Part 1: Paul Ryan takes bold verbal stance.
Part 2: Paul Ryan actually does nothing to back up his words.
Part 3: Republicans fall in line.
PJ
@Ian G.: To be fair, and I say this as a graduate of public schools, Americans don’t really learn much about American history either.
ruemara
@No Drought No More: It’s kinda amazing how many stars served honorably & funny how many who played “patriots”, didn’t.
JPL
Georgia Congressman Tweets D-Day Tribute Featuring Nazi Troops
http://time.com/5303119/congressman-drew-ferguson-tweets-nazi-troops-d-day/
LAO
@Yutsano: Trump is not following standard procedures. I doubt any one he pardons is required to re-admit his/her guilt.
Stan
I agree with your second point completely. On a strategic level, the Germans were defeated by mid-1944 (probably before that of course but we could discuss that all month) and it was just a question of how much longer it would take and who was going to die making it happen.
On your first point, with all due respect, the purpose of the Normandy campaign was absolutely not to make anything easier for the Soviets. That would of course be one of the effects, but, the reason for the operation was simply to get the western armies into combat with the germans. Since the fall of France in June 1940, there had been no theatre in which the US and the British empire could really put the hurt on the germans. The point was to get into the fight again. Eisenhower’s orders were to enter the continent and destroy the German army.
PJ
@schrodingers_cat: From what I’ve read, it seems the Kerensky government would have had difficulty surviving as long as it continued the war against Germany (Russia was exhausted but the Allies refused to allow the Russians to sign a separate peace), but it was democratic and would have been a damn sight better than what Lenin had in mind.
James Powell
I’ve read more books about D-Day than I can recall. There are so many memoirs it’s hard to pick just a few to recommend. I like Burgett’s Currahee and the three books after that. Ambrose and the books he wrote have taken a lot of beatings, but memoir’s aren’t history and as memoir Pegasus Bridge and Band of Brothers are very readable. The memoirs from the German side are also interesting. I’d recommend Paul Carrell’s Invasion: They’re Coming!
As Adam noted above, everybody writes his own version. Every country and every generation. Authors respond to earlier works, they often conflict, but more often just emphasize different aspects of the whole operation. Someone upthread recommended Carlo D’Este’s Decision in Normandy I wholeheartedly agree. I’d also recommend Overlord, Max Hastings and Six Armies in Normandy, John Keegan. Have maps handy.
Stan
@The Midnight Lurker: Stalin purchased exactly one T3 Christie. The US Army bought three of them.
The Christie had a number of innovative features but huge defects as well. The US never built a production tank based on Christie’s ideas. The Soviets did, most famously the T-34, which was the Red Army’s most important tank and which is still occasionally encountered in the third world. The British built some cruiser tanks using Christie’s suspension.
In the mid-1930s, before the great purge, the Red Army was certainly the avant garde of armies.
afanasia
@Elizabelle: http://www.historynet.com/women-warriors.htm
Women aircraft gunners at Stalingrad. Look up the Night Witches, too.
TenguPhule
@schrodingers_cat:
To be fair, Stalin was responsible for a large number of those deaths.
He killed most of Russia’s capable leaders in the military in the middle of the fucking war. The results on the battlefield were brutal.
His orders to dig in and no retreats allowed, while resulting in overall victory at the end, were a meat grinder on par with the trenches of WW I, relatively speaking.
TenguPhule
@ruemara:
Actually its not funny, more like infuriating. All of those chickenshits don’t deserve burial in American soil.
Mnemosyne
@schrodingers_cat:
The Russian leader I find really interesting is Khrushchev. He was Stalin’s vicious enforcer while Stalin was alive and did his share of killing, but once Stalin was dead, he took over and then tried to expose at least some of Stalin’s crimes. To me, he’s a very interesting and contradictory figure that the US probably could have handled better.
The Midnight Lurker
@Stan: I’ll take your word for it, Stan. Although I’m pretty sure I’ve seen old newsreel footage of more than one. Maybe that was another tank(s). And it doesn’t address the paratroops, of which I’m absolutely sure Stalin had a shitload.
Villago Delenda Est
Antifa is cool. This is proof.
Ceci n est pas mon nym
@rikyrah: Don’t know, but at least one general, Theodore Roosevelt Jr, was actually on the beach.
Stan
Yep, thanks for the insult my friend, I’m familiar with it. We’re all good libruls here right? If you have time for more reading, I urge you to look deeper at the history of the Soviet efforts to form an alliance years before Molotov-Ribbentrop. You’ll see one of the many tragedies of the 1930s was that the really hair-on-fire fear of domestic and international communism led the west to rebuff what could have been a war-preventing alliance with the USSR.
I’m not trying to paint the soviets as good guys by any means. Just pointing out the facts.
After their attempts were rebuffed and in recognition that war was going to come no matter what, Stalin initiated the deal on Poland. Let us not forget Poland was a right wing military dictatorship at the time; that France was sitting in a purely defensive stance and wasn’t going to help anybody, and finally that its pretty hard to see much moral difference between Munich in 1938 and Poland in 1939…..humanity was not well served by its leaders in the 1930s.
trollhattan
@opiejeanne:
Mine was on a flattop in the Pacific during the later part of the island-hopping campaign and then part of the occupation fleet. He made it only to 65 because of the tobacco habit he acquired during his excellent Iowa kid Navy adventure. 2020 will mark his hundredth.
Aviators from his carrier were among the first to hit the Yamato the day it was sunk to the great relief of everyone on a ship in the Pacific campaign.
TenguPhule
@schrodingers_cat:
Our contributions to the Allies actually did win it. American production of supplies, ammunition and weapons pretty much steamrolled the Axis on all fronts. We supplied Russia, Great Britain, China and still managed to rebuild and expand our Pacific fleet while expanding our army for a war on two fronts.
JPL
According to the sources, Trudeau pressed Trump on how he could justify the tariffs as a “national security” issue. In response, Trump quipped to Trudeau, “Didn’t you guys burn down the White House?” referring to the War of 1812.
https://www.cnn.com/2018/06/06/politics/war-of-1812-donald-trump-justin-trudeau-tariff/index.html
trollhattan
@JPL:
Holy shitballs, that’s bad. “Some were very fine people.”
Stan
You got it right, 1st battalion, 508th Parachute Infantry regiment, 82nd Airborne Division.
schrodingers_cat
@Mnemosyne: I have read that even the Russian economy improved under him.
zhena gogolia
@No Drought No More:
I just saw William Windom the other night in a D-Day story, The Americanization of Emily.
TenguPhule
@Stan:
Uh no. Stalin was pretty intent on invading his neighbors as soon as he had the manpower and supply lines available. His only interest in alliances was to buy time to rebuild what he’d wrecked in the military.
zhena gogolia
@trollhattan:
I’m no expert on WWII, but I can recognize those helmets from “Hogan’s Heroes.”
Yutsano
@JPL: *headdesk repeatedly*
Now you have to wonder who told him that right before the meeting. No way he retained that knowledge on his own.
JPL
@trollhattan: If he gets negative feedback, the White House will release a statement saying it was a joke. When Trump leaves office, universities won’t be knocking down the door to have him give lectures.
A Ghost To Most
To Richard Lenker, who died on the beach, and his brother Ray Lenker, a B-24 pilot wounded over Ploesti two weeks later.
trollhattan
Speaking of supreme leaders, which city will Trump rename Trumpingrad and when will this occur–before or after the midterms?
Jager
My dad was a glider pilot, he didn’t get overseas until just after the Invasion of Holland. The lessons learned using gliders on D Day and in Holland were put to good use, my Dad and his fellow pilots were trained as Infantry and once they were on the ground they formed up as an Infantry Company and went to work. The old man flew the 2nd Glider across the Rhine in Operation Varsity and participated in a battle called Burp Gun Corner. He and his fellow pilots stopped a German counteroffensive at a crossroads just outside of Wesel. One of his buddies won a Silver Star for taking out a Tiger tank and blocking the road. He never said much about it, I had to read about the battle in a book. On D Day and in Holland the Glider pilots were for the most part were useless and in the way after they landed.
Yutsano
@JPL: *cough* Liberty University *cough* I really think the Evangelicals are counting on Dolt45 to reverse all the social progress of the last 70 years. Hell they would even accept him as a leader of their dreamed of Christian theocracy.
Stan
Your first point is without doubt correct. if you follow Soviet-era historiography closely you’ll see, for example, how they often kinda skipped from June 1941, when the Germans invaded, right through to the battle of Moscow in December 1941, omitting everything in between. The “in between” was a series of history’s biggest military disasters, with millions of men killed or captured and 40% of the pre-war Soviet population under German occupation.
Your second point is a little off. The purge of the Red Army’s officer corps happened in 1937-38. That hurt the Red Army a lot, although its true that some dead wood needed to be cleared out. The US Army had a purge in 1939-41 also, but when we purged people, we just sent them into peaceful retirement. We didn’t shoot them.
On your third point, I’d say Stalin did a better job listening to his military professionals than Hitler did. here in the west we have a very stereotyped view of the red army, but, by 1945 there was no better ground combat force in the world than the Red Army.
TenguPhule
@Elizabelle:
Most of which were caused by their very own leaders. Trying to explain that in class would be an interesting experience.
trollhattan
@TenguPhule:
Yeah, being nicer to “Uncle Joe” would not have ameliorated what occurred postwar.
Mnemosyne
@ruemara:
It’s been removed from modern editions of The Martian Chronicles, but IMO Ray Bradbury’s story “Way In the Middle of the Air” is about exactly that — all of the Black residents of a segregated Southern town emigrate to Mars, and the white residents panic, because who are they going to look down on and abuse now?
Stan
@Mnemosyne: I agree completely on Khurschev. He could have been the Gorbachev of the 1950s.
rikyrah
Lucretia is caught up in the Russian mess
https://twitter.com/kylegriffin1/status/1004401301491417088?s=19
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@TenguPhule:
This is Trump land – The Democrats did 69% better so obviously those voters were pro-Trump since by definition, Trump is always the winner in his mind.
Stan
There is a LOT of photographic evidence of the three US Army T3s. The soviets bought one, then proceeded to build thousands of BT2, BT5 and BT7 tanks that were based on Christie’s design. That may be what you’re thinking of.
The Red Army was an innovator in a lot of areas including Airborne forces.
PJ
@Stan: You can’t blame the Baltics or Poland for being suspicious of the Soviets after the wars they fought with them (and the mass executions of their leaders and soldiers by the Soviets during WWII), but the Soviets were not as isolated as you make out. The Soviet Union had a pact with Czechoslovakia, but it was contingent on France holding its end of its mutual assistance pact with Czechoslovakia, which, as we know, the French did not. Still, if the Soviet Union had said it would defend the Czechs during the Munich talks, things would have turned out very differently. Stalin was determined to extend the borders of the Soviet Union and did so whenever he had the chance, which Hitler gave to him in 1939.
James Powell
@Adam L Silverman:
Eric Hobsbawm’s argued it was one war in two parts in Age of Extremes.
I read Vanquished last year. It was very good. David Stevenson’s With Our Backs to the Wall is also good in explaining the details of the way the war ended and why it ended when & how it did.
No Drought No More
@TenguPhule: Uh, no. I recommend you read Churchill’s war memoirs that plainly tell of Stalin’s gross ineptitude in his pre-war dealings with Hitler. Too, recall the reason why the King of England refused safe harbor to the Czar and his family after the abdication. The oligarchs of Britain feared their own working class far more than the Red Army, and far and away more than they did Hitler.
Stan
The one-sentence version of WW2 is that it was won with Soviet blood and American gear. I highly recommend Richard Overy’s “Why the Allies Won” for a book-length treatment of this exact question. It’s terrific and eye-opening.
ruemara
@Mnemosyne: I have an edition from the 80’s (a birthday present that actually seemed to be for me!). I should see if it’s in there.
Stan
I respectfully differ. The USSR had the largest army in the world in the mid-1930s, with more tanks that the rest of the world *combined* and didn’t invade anybody. The alliances were sought *before* the purges happened. And during.
TenguPhule
@Stan:
One place they really shined was improvising vehicles and scrounging. Their engineers were the unsung heroes who built and rebuilt battle units out of boxes of scrap metal and plywood. And they didn’t even have luxury of a cave to do it in.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@GregB:
While it a REAL American FACT that the Nazis were notoriously multicultural. it was General Douglas MacArthur who rallied the wussy liberal crippel FDR. So, back to reeducation.
The Moar You Know
@Mnemosyne: Removed? What the fuck?
That’s seriously one of the better stories in the entire book. And Bradbury nails everything in it dead-on, which was not always the case for him. Removing that’s a damn crime.
BC in Illinois
On D-Day, my Mom was a WAC, at the Allied Headquarters in London. (She was basically a typist, but she made E-5, so my father (Army Air Corps, Captain) always said it was important that my brother and I make E-5.)
From Mom’s handwritten notes, which I got a few weeks ago:
You can sort of picture the sequence of events that day. Mom (22) and an older lady with two sons in the war. She thinks the lady is quiet because of the momentous events. It takes a while before the woman says what she has lost.
I can picture it the moment . . . but I really can’t.
Then multiply that by thousands.
D-Day, I always think of Mom.
Mnemosyne
@ruemara:
It should be in there — they didn’t start removing it until 2000.
To contexualize it, the story takes place in a universe where the Civil Rights Movement never happened, because it was written before that time. It was first published in July of 1950, 5 years before the Montgomery bus boycott.
Adam L Silverman
@Stan: I’m still working through it on something I’m trying to professionally suss out. Because I see lots of parallels with our Mess-O-Potamia project. Previously I’d looked at what we were looking at was like the 30 years war, but after reading Gerwarth I’m leaning towards his continuum concept. Especially as I think we need to seriously rethink how to secure the peace, not just achieve a successful battlefield termination, so we’re not going back to Iraq or Syria or Afghanistan or places in Africa, etc every 10 to 20 years until we finally figure it out. I’d already been working on this securing the peace stuff as a result of something I had done in work for XVIII ABN Corps to get them ready to go to Iraq in 2016 and Gerwarth’s argument has reoriented my understanding of the problem. I’m still trying to figure it out.
TenguPhule
@Stan: They had the manpower but not the logistics. Rubber, steel and oil, not to mention being able to feed any large amount of troops deployed outside of Russia was a no go with what they had at the time.
rikyrah
The Queen invites Meghan Markle to do something no other young royal has ever done
hello 9 hrs ago
The Duchess of Sussex is set to experience another royal ‘first’ when she visits Cheshire next week. Meghan will join the Queen for a day of engagements on Thursday, with the pair travelling up north using the monarch’s personal train that is only reserved for senior royals. Prince Philip, Prince Charles, the Duchess of Cornwall and their staff are the only people who are entitled to use the royal train; Prince William is only believed to have used it once in 2003 on his birthday tour, when he traveled to Wales, while Prince Harry and the Duchess of Cambridge are not thought to have ridden it before in an official capacity.
Described as Buckingham Palace on wheels, the lavish train is only used a handful of times a year. In 2017, it was used just 14 times at a cost of £900,000 to taxpayers. While it is very costly, it does provide a more comfortable ride for the 92-year-old monarch, especially when she travels overnight. The train, which was first used by Queen Victoria in 1842, has a luxurious smoking room, bedrooms with en-suite bathrooms and a 12-seater dining room.
Next Thursday, Meghan and the Queen will spend the day in Cheshire. They will open the Mersey Gateway Bridge before opening the Storyhouse Theatre – a fitting engagement for former actress Meghan, who was best known for her role in Suits. The pair will then attend a lunch at Chester Town Hall.
The Duchess’ day out with the Queen marks a milestone in her royal life. It is the first time she will carry out official duties without her husband Prince Harry, and will also be her first engagement with just the monarch. Meghan has previously accompanied the Queen on other engagements, such as at the Commonwealth Day service in March, but she was joined by other members of the royal family.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/lifestyle/royals/the-queen-invites-meghan-markle-to-do-something-no-other-young-royal-has-ever-done/ar-AAyiaaU?ocid=ientp
WereBear
@opiejeanne: A great book is The 900 Days: the Siege of Leningrad.
mike in dc
By mid-1944, Germany had sufficient stockpiles of nerve gas that, in theory, it could have been used to repel invasions such as D-Day. The Allies had gas masks in case of mustard gas use, but since nerve gas only requires skin contact, they would have been effectively defenseless against it. Fortunately, Hitler had a personal aversion to chemical weapons, having been exposed to mustard gas in the trenches in WW1. Also, greater efforts would have been needed to weaponize the gas into battlefield ready form(i.e., artillery shells, bombs and rockets).
Mnemosyne
@The Moar You Know:
Apparently people complained, the same way people complain about The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn because it uses the n-word.
It’s still an incredibly powerful story, so I suspect some of the complaints came from white snowflakes who didn’t want to have to see that depiction of what 1950s America was really like.
Adam L Silverman
@No Drought No More: Mel Brooks, Carl Reiner, etc…
https://www.pbs.org/show/gi-jews/
Mnemosyne
@BC in Illinois:
I suspect it was both — the woman was thinking about how many other mothers would soon be suffering the same losses she did. ?
Adam L Silverman
@ruemara: It’s sort of like with anti-Semitism. If Jews didn’t exist, they’d have to be invented so some people could hate them. And, unfortunately, in the US in 2018, since Jews are now considered white, they’ve been replaced by Muslims. And those American Jews that engage in that are embarrassments to the rest of us.
Origuy
@schrodingers_cat:I can recommend The New Russians, by Hendrick Smith. It’s a little dated (2012), but covers the Soviet mentality and the changes since.
I should re-read it, since I read the earlier edition before I started learning Russian and visited Moscow.
Mnemosyne
@rikyrah:
I keep telling you guys — grandma-in-law LOVES Meghan and is so happy that she married her favorite grandson Harry. It’s really adorable.
Adam L Silverman
@JPL: Given that the President did something similar during the campaign, or, more specifically Scavino who handles his social media did, I’d like to say I did NAZI that coming, but I did ZI that coming.
Adam L Silverman
@Stan:
The rest have been taken to a farm out in the country so they can frolic with the other tanks…
Amir Khalid
@No Drought No More:
So the British Royal Family betrayed their own kin? They do have a well-documented, centuries-long history of doing that.
Mnemosyne
@Adam L Silverman:
Brooks was a combat engineer — he would go out ahead and disarm/blow up land mines. And he was like 20 years old!
You’d have to keep your sense of humor through something like that.
On the British side, Christopher Lee was a spy, in part because he was fluent in several languages including Italian.
Adam L Silverman
@afanasia: Nacht Hexen!!!!!
schrodingers_cat
@Amir Khalid: Lovely people. I don’t know much about their deeds in Malaysia but I am sure they were wonderful.
PJ
@Adam L Silverman: I’m no expert on these things, but, going back to the Peloponnesian War, you can see these intermittent peace attempts followed by outright war over decades, until one side defeats the other in a way that the defeated side cannot rationalize away (no “We were stabbed in the back by the Communists and the Jews!”), and at the same time the victor actively works to ensure that the causes of war are not triggered again (sometimes brutally, as with Rome and Carthage). I’m not a fan of the politics of any of the Kagans, but Donald Kagan’s On the Origins of War is worth reading for his analysis of the Peloponnesian War, the Punic Wars, WWI, WWII, and the Cuban Missile Crisis as to what it takes to create a lasting peace.
Jay
@The Midnight Lurker:
Nope. Form/Function resulted in a lot of tanks looking like they were influenced by Christie, but wern’t.
The influence of WWI, the “Colour Wars”, the Baltic Wars lead to the Soviet concept of “Deep Battle”. Basically mobile warfare in 3 layers, on a “front” 150km wide and 150 km deep, to avoid the stalemate of positional warfare.
That required fast, light tanks to plunge into “Deep Battle”, and in the 1920’s, 1930’s, trackless tanks were “popular”, because tracks were crap. The metalurgy wasn’t there and every track pin, ( 65 per side on a BT Light Tank) had to be greased 3 times a day, to keep the track from seizing and falling apart. Everybody was playing around with the “same” ideas to deal with the technological short falls.
Deep Battle is where the paratroops come in. Soviet Para’s however, deployed from the wings, descended uncontrolled, and completely lacked heavy weapons to withstand anything more than light infantry. The one time massed paratrooper assaults were used in WWII, they were slaughtered. In WWII attempts by the Soviets to used Deep Battle, horse Cavalry proved more effective than fast tanks and paratroopers.
A lot of pre-war ideas simply wern’t practical because the technology just wasn’t up to par.
If you are interested, Nicolas Moran, aka “The Chieftain” covers a lot of this in his You Tube talks and essays. Unlike most “tank chats”, Moran is a tanker, and a historian, so he spends time on things most historians ignore, like how to adjust track tension, how to actually drive and fight a tank, how to get out of a burning tank.
SiubhanDuinne
@No Drought No More:
You’re conflating events that happened almost two decades apart. King George V denied sanctuary in England for his cousin Tsar Nicholas in World War I (Nicholas and his family were murdered in July 1918 by the Bolsheviks). George’s son, Edward VIII, abdicated the throne in December 1936. He was indeed a Nazi sympathiser.
Adam L Silverman
@James Powell: I need to work my way through both of those to further flesh out my thinking on what I’m working on.
Adam L Silverman
@Mnemosyne: Moe Berg, who was not covered in the documentary because he was OSS:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/venona/dece_berg.html
http://www.espn.com/classic/biography/s/Berg_Moe.html
Adam L Silverman
@PJ: Yep. I’ve read the Kagan book. It is well written.
The Midnight Lurker
@Jay: Thank you. I’m curious why Stalin was investing in these things rather than more defensive type systems.
Captain C
@schrodingers_cat:
Basically yes, though Kursk was where they finally destroyed the Nazis’ ability to conduct offensive operations in the east.
Well over. More like 20 million.
Doubtful, as Stalin was happily grabbing up all the land and neighboring countries that he could.
Jager
@Adam L Silverman: @Adam L Silverman: Not an actor, but there’s also PFC Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism
@opiejeanne: I was hoping someone would suggest Enemy at the Gates. The battle sequence at the beginning is worth watching closely.
Wargamers in the 70s and 80s often wanted to play the Germans in Eastern Front scenarios. Some of the early player vs computer wargames didn’t have an option to play the Soviets; it was assumed that no one would want to.
The Midnight Lurker
@Jager: Slaughter House Five is based on his experiences as a POW.
azlib
@schrodingers_cat:
There are quite a few good books on the Eastern Front. I particularly enjoyed “Stalingrad – the Fateful Siege” by Antony Bevor. It gives a good ground level view of the campaign interspered with personal anecdotes.
It is interesting to read histories before and after the fall of the Berlin Wall. The Russian archives paint quite a different picture of the Eastern Front. Before they were opened, histories of the campaign had quite a German bias. Any of the David Glantz books are a good start on understanding the miltary campaigns. A good overview is his “When Titans Clashed” He had access to the Russian archives for a lot of his material. You can compare it with Alan Clark’s “Barbarossa” which was written without access to the Russian archives and shows its German source bias.
Sadly, the Soviets were offered Marshal Plan aid after WW II, but Stalin’s paranoia prevented that from happening. Given what the Germans did to the Soviet Union, it was inevitable the iron curtain fell and Germany was divided. Stalin rightfully wanted his empire and buffer space from any potentially hostile neighbor. Our own paranoia about communism did not help the mix at the time. It would have taken great diplomatic skill and the taking of a lot of political risks to reach any kind of detente with Russia at the time. We did well to avoid a nuclear holocaust, although the Cuban missle crisis was a near run thing.
Captain C
@schrodingers_cat: For modern Russia, Putin’s Kleptocracy by Karen Dawisha, Putin Country by Anne Garrels, and Nothing is True and Everything is Possible by Peter Pomerantsev are good places to start. For life during the post-war Soviet period, Hedrick Smith’s The Russians is still a classic. And for a broad history, the book A History of Russia by Nicholas Riasanovsky is an excellent place to start.
Jay
@The Midnight Lurker:
Deep Battle was both defensive and offensive. It finally “came together” for the Soviets at Kursk.
Stalin was trying to take what had been a feudal, medieval society into the 20th Century in short order. People forget that in 1917, the Tsar and 400 families “owned” a Russia that included Poland, Finland, the Baltics. There was almost no middle class.
Arms expenditures subsidized technology, science, industrial growth, the Army and other State Institutions created technocrats and a Middle Class. Tankograd, aka The Cheblansk Tractor Factory, built both tractors and tanks.
TenguPhule
@Jay:
Some of which are more important then others.
trollhattan
@Mnemosyne:
And the beagle. Don’t forget the now-royal beagle.
Captain C
@schrodingers_cat: World War II in Color, which plays a lot on the American Heroes Channel, does a decent job of covering the Russian Front, devoting 2 or 3 (IIRC) full episodes to it, in addition to giving a fair amount of time to the final Russian conquest of Eastern Germany.
Jager
@The Midnight Lurker: Ever read his first letter home after his repatriation? In the letter he wrote , because he could speak a little German, the “Supermen” made him the leader of his group of prisoners, he continued, after complaining about the food for two months, I finally told them what I’d do to them after the Russians arrived. “They beat me up a little and demoted me.”
Jay
@TenguPhule:
He destroys a lot of tank myths and conventional wisdom in his talks, articles and tank reviews.
Yuri Pashook at TankArchives does the same. A lot of the post war “histories” of the Eastern Front Battles in the West, were basically “haliographies” of lying German War Criminals. He run’s an occasional feature called “lying at statistics” which uses both German and Soviet Regimental archives. German Commanders spent a lot of time creating mythical battles that never happened to keep the German High Command “happy”.
HumboldtBlue
@Stan:
I enjoyed The Dead and Those About to Die. Focused on the Big Red One on D-Day.
I have the green Books bookmarked and there is a book on D-Day logistics I found very informative but I can’t recall the title.
Villago Delenda Est
@Yutsano: They want to reverse the social gains made since the Renaissance.
Stan
May I refer you to the very, very, veeery large scale operations of the Red Army in Manchuria in August 1945? It was a massive, state-of-the-art blitzkreig equal to any other operation of WW2. Or Operation Bagration in June/July 1944, in which multiple army groups destroyed 20-plus German divisions? They had the logistics. They had the troops, equipment, and know-how. They learned in a very harsh environment.
Stan
The allies also had pretty huge stockpiles of chemical weapons and much better means of delivering those weapons to their targets. Imagine, for example, the USAAF sending a few hundred heavy bombers to Berlin, dropping thousands of gas bombs instead of high explosive. And then some other city a few days later, and so on……The aircraft existed; the bombs were stockpiled ready to go; all they needed was the orders to do it.
THAT’S why the Germans didn’t gas anyone who could shoot back.
Jim
Read “The Gulag Arch…” @ Camp Picket on reserve duty. Was the Col’s driver Remember telling him how the Soviets marched free Russian POWs right off the battlefield into the Gulag.
Stan
@Jay: Well said, agree 100%
Chet Murthy
I read an interesting article by Adam Tooze about the logic of America’s (and the Allies’) military strategy and tactics on the Western Front. It focused on the strategic decision to expend enormous resources on artillery (esp.) and close air support. It made me think of Omnes, and so I thought I’d share it. The link is to an excerpt at Brad Delong’s place but I think the referenced essay by Adam Tooze is wel-worth reading, esp. on this day.
I appreciated on Memorial Day reading the memorializations of the soldiers who didn’t make it back, who had such a great influence on the lives of those soldiers who survived, and who all made it possible for me to sit here typing away in the sunshine. And so today I’m thinking of those soldiers: it’s chilling to think of those tip-of-the-spear units — men who knew they were going to near-certain death, and they went anyway. Not just the distinct possibility of death, but the near-certainty of it.
Stan
Mmmm….sort of, yes, but with a skeptical eye. Very few war movies show anything remotely resembling actual combat, and the tactics shown are almost always wrong. Which is fine – they’re just movies meant to entertain.
Something worth pondering is that every single army that went up against the Germans in WW2 got their butts kicked in the first battle, and sometimes in quite a few battles. Some got the time to learn and some didn’t. The Red Army survived – barely – 1941 and 1942, and emerged in to 1943 as a much higher-quality force than what had come before. It should not be stereotyped as a massive horde of illiterate peasants charging into German machineguns….even though there were times when it did just that. Although they never quite got to the german level of small-unit tactical proficiency, they got a lot better than they were in 1941. On the operational and strategic levels they just wiped the floor with the germans.
Stan
Yes. I second the recommendation. If you only have time for one book on the Soviet-German war, “When Titans Clashed” is the one to read.
Stan
Here are all the Green books, read to read online: http://history.army.mil/html/bookshelves/collect/usaww2.html
Even though they’re “official history”, they are very, very highly regarded. They pull few punches on US mistakes. Excellent source if you want to get into US participation in WW2.
On the logistics (that’s army-speak for “supplies”) alone, there are two volumes just for the ETO (European Theatre of Operations) called “Logistical Support of the Armies”. Sounds as boring as accounting, but its exactly as important as money to a business, and fascinating stuff. The section on how we got over 20 million 5-gallon fuel and water cans (“jerricans”) supplied to the US forces in 1944-45 alone is a fun story.
Stan
He is indeed a tank officer in the US Army National Guard (California), and a terrific human being, but he is not a trained historian…he’s an IT guy who works on tank games.
HumboldtBlue
@Stan:
This was one aspect of the war I was wholly ignorant of until I stumbled across a book and an episode of Battlefield.
What an extraordinary endeavor.
Jay
@Stan:
I think TenguPhule was referring to the Red Army of the late ’20’s and early ’30’s, when the Soviets were seeking Mutual Defence Treaties with the West.
As many non Soviet Communists discovered to their dismay, the Soviets, while greatly interested in controlling Communism abroad, wern’t at all interested in using the Red Army to expand Communism.
Both Spain and Mao are prime examples. Soviet support for the Republicans was tiny compared to the Facists support for Franco, and Mao “starved” until 1941.
HumboldtBlue
@Stan:
Craig Symonds: Operation Neptune.
I found it very accessible and an interesting read.
Stan
@Jay: Yup.
Ruckus
@Enhanced Voting Techniques:
Communists might actually have been an inprovment over the previous leadership in the SU. Of course it didn’t really work out all that much better for most people.
Steve in the ATL
@Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism: it was fun to play the Russians in “squad leader”—stock up on cheap tanks and don’t worry about losses!
opiejeanne
@rikyrah: My dad was a skinny little runt, about 5’4″. He weighed less than Sinatra, who was 4F during the war as was my dad the first two times he tried to enlist, but Dad knew they’d eventually decide he was 1-A so he joined an outfit at a camp next to Davis, CA that was supposedly a radio unit. I’ve never understood how he did that but it was a group of volunteers who had yet to be drafted. His draft letter came while he was there, right at the end of the 6 weeks training, so they had to wait until the rest of their unit was finished with the same course. They walked and hitched into Davis to find stuff to read, and something to do, and one of them brought back a comic book that described the nameless technology that they were being trained in: radar. I’ve heard other people relate this as apocryphal but Dad could name the guy in his unit who bought that comic book.
TenguPhule
@Stan: That was after the Allies had established the supply lines to Russia. Prior to that, during the 1930s, Russia’s force projection was limited in scope to localized regions simply because they couldn’t support large scale actions over any significant distance for an extended campaign.
TenguPhule
@Stan:
Anyone who survived the brutal fighting was either very good, very lucky or both. They had to be sharp.
opiejeanne
@Adam L Silverman: I’m not surprised. It must have been terrifying for the Russian troops and very difficult to get them to hold their positions.
Dad said when he finally sailed for England there were some soldiers who threw themselves over the rails into the water as they left the port. He was shocked and not just that anyone would do that but that he saw about 30 men do this.
Jay
@TenguPhule:
The Red Army from 1918 to 1936 fought extended campaigns across the lenght and breadth of the Soviet Union and Manchuria. In the pre-WWII period, they were focused on restoring and maintaining the borders of what had been Russia.
They had the logistics to support expeditionary forces abroad.
Keep in mind the changes in Militaries between WWI and the end of WWII. Hay was actually more important to the invading German Army in Poland than gas.
opiejeanne
@Adam L Silverman: Yeah, I haven’t found any record of where he landed and your Camp X is certainly not the place. As far as I know Dad was never even near Lake Ontario except maybe after he retired.
I have looked at maps of the deployments and dates and haven’t yet identified where he and his truck were delivered. I should have hauled out a map of France ca. WWII and had him show me. I know he pointed it out to me once when I was a little kid. When he knew he was going to Europe he bought his parents an atlas so they could understand where things were happening that they might read about in the papers. He wrote home from France and Germany but any mention of location were removed from his letters. I think my sister has those because she kept his house when he died. I should snaffle the atlas next time I’m at her house.
HumboldtBlue
@Steve in the ATL:
And go Berserker!
opiejeanne
@Mnemosyne: mr opiejeanne read an interview with Kruschev where he spoke about being at Stalin’s side when he was dying, along with several other pols. He made the ominous comment that when Stalin died they made sure.
opiejeanne
@zhena gogolia: Ha! I was remembering that German helmet on Arte Johnson on Laugh In.
I already knew what the helmet looked like because I’d asked questions when I was younger about why it was shaped so oddly. It’s kind of like being able to identify the flat dish known as a doughboy helmet from WWI.
opiejeanne
@Mnemosyne: I remember that story. Martian Chronicles was on our required reading list in my sophomore year, so that would be 1965-66. Bradbury came to my HS and we were privileged to hear him speak on writing in general and his books in particular. I think he had finished Leviathan 99 the year before, so 1966-67. He talked about being stopped by the police when he was walking one warm evening in Santa Monica with his wife. Just going for a walk. He was enraged by it the more he thought about it.
columbusqueen
Lee never discussed the details of his war service, but he did correct the direction of his death scene in LOTR:ROTK since he knew how to stab a man in the back. It wasn’t much of a stretch for him to play assassins.
columbusqueen
@Ceci n est pas mon nym: And his son Quentin II was at Omaha–the only father & son pair in the D-Day landings. I imagine TR was beaming proudly in the afterlife.
J R in WV
@Adam L Silverman:
Because she wasn’t a he? Almost certainly Comey didn’t regard himself as subordinate to a woman, ever. Just look at his body language in interviews pushing his book… misogynist to his toenails.
He’s still in the mid-1960s, when men were men and women were absent. Really!
J R in WV
@ruemara:
Jimmy Stuart flew a bomber over Nazi Europe, and he did it so well he wound up commanding a bomber wing by the end of the war, still flying a bomber. Was in the Air Force Reserve for many years after the war.
He had serious PTSD afterwards, had a really hard time adjusting to the movie business because of that.
opiejeanne
@Stan: Have you actually seen Enemy at the Gates or are you generalizing? It’s based on real events, two people involved in a sniper duel.
Yes, l know about movies; my grandpa was making them in 1913. I know that the “based on a true story” ones are usually fictionalized versions of events. Duh. Thanks for the condescension.
Adam L Silverman
@opiejeanne: I’ve emailed a friend and former colleague who is a retired armor colonel with a PhD in military history. He’ll either know or he’ll be able to find out.
SiubhanDuinne
@rikyrah:
That is a sign of GREAT approval! Thrilled to see how warmly the Queen is welcoming Meghan into the family (family firm).
opiejeanne
@Adam L Silverman: Oh, thanks! That’s nice of you. If I dig around on Flickr I might be able to find his army info, what company, etc.
Stan
I’ve have the movie and love it, it’s very entertaining. I’ve read the book.
It is NOT a factual account of anything, though. Although Vasily Zaitsev was indeed a very real Red Army infantryman and sniper, the entire plot of the movie (and the corresponding portion of the the book) is entirely fiction.