None of us front-pagers have put up a D-Day post, so I’ll try to find some of the best tweets.
D-Day: It was 75 years ago, yet still the memories, smells and horror of the Normandy landings are fresh in the mind of veteranshttps://t.co/KKY0VvI9GY pic.twitter.com/1hgMtjJ6Hs
— BBC Wales News (@BBCWalesNews) June 6, 2019
"In Normandy, gratitude and grief ahead of D-Day's 75th anniversary" https://t.co/I4JF3QRMxn
— Meme-Link (@BreslerAlex) June 6, 2019
IN HIS OWN WORDS: Frank DeVita was just 19 years old when he landed on Omaha Beach in Normandy on June 6, 1944. He traveled back to France to honor his fallen comrades 75 years after D-Day. Before he left, DeVita said he will never forget that day and what he experienced. pic.twitter.com/WnDVKsB6bn
— WHNT News 19 (@whnt) June 6, 2019
30 Dakotas dropping paratroopers over Normandy makes for an impressive sight in this video: https://t.co/bebmnLBFpZ
When you realise that, on D-Day itself, c.800 of them flew from Airstrip 1, yet another demonstration of the scale of Operation Neptune is made starkly apparent.
— Edward James (@EdwardAJames) June 6, 2019
It looks like Our President managed to read a speech all the way through, giving rise to shouts of joy among the media that he had finally become presidential. He dissed Nancy Pelosi and assorted others later. I’ll let you find all that for yourselves if you are so inclined.
The Mueller Report Book Club – Starting Out
ThresherK
Nice piece here on LCVP landing craft which really proved its mettle on D-Day.
debbie
One way Europeans will always be superior to Americans: They remain grateful after years and years, and they’re not afraid to show it.
Phylllis
The National WWII Museum in New Orleans, where the Higgins boats were built, is amazing.
Yutsano
My grandfather just missed getting into the military in time for D-day, but was involved in the Battle of the Bulge. There’s a ton of could have beens with him but even after cancer he’s still going (and finally telling his stories!) at 99 years.
Cacti
@debbie:
And one way they won’t:
Both world wars were a European creation.
DSC
D-Day was my Dad’s 20th birthday. He was a Tennessee Bull-headed red neck full of mischief. He enlisted right after Pearl Harbor, got on a train to upstate NY (he had never been out of the state), and trained for months. Then he got on the Queen Mary, and because he didn’t suffer sea sickness, got to clean up after those who did. They trained in Ireland for the Invasion. All around him were young men like him, he had played poker with them, bullshitted with them, slept in the same room with them for months. And they were slaughtered all around him.
My Dad was a high functioning alcoholic for years after the war. And he NEVER talked about it.
debbie
@Cacti:
The creation of the political leaders (esp. WWI), not the general public.
Kent
Something to think about.
WW-2 is now 75 years in our past.
For the generation of Americans who fought in WW-2, the Civil War and slavery were exactly 75 years in their past. Lee surrendered at Appomattox on April 9th 1865 which was exactly 75 years to the day when the German Army invaded Norway and Denmark on April 9, 1940 to launch World War 2 in Western Europe.
Similarly, for today’s generation, the Vietnam War is exactly 50 years in the past. For the Vietnam generation, World War I was exactly 50 years in the past: 1918 to 1968 is exactly 50 years.
Funny thing, my HS kids currently listen to a lot of 1960s rock music. I can’t imagine that the 1960s generation listed to very much popular music from the 1910s.
SiubhanDuinne
I can’t link photos, but my cousin put up one on FB a while ago: split-screen YOUR DAY AT THE BEACH (showing lots of lounging, sunbathing sybarites) BROUGHT TO YOU BY THEIR DAY AT THE BEACH (one of many iconic b/w photos of impossibly young soldiers storming Omaha Beach). Quite moving to see the contrast.
NotMax
Somewhat surprised Dolt 45 didn’t insist his spot on the program be on Gold Beach. //
Kent
@debbie:
If there were cemeteries full of French and British troops on the beaches of California or North Carolina who rescued the US from Nazi occupation then I’m sure we’d have a lot of annual military pagentry surrounding that as well.
By 1944 the Germans were already well on their way to being defeated by the Soviet Union. Whole German armies were being consumed and destroyed on the eastern front. What we really did was rescue France and western Europe from eventual Soviet occupation.
Jay
Ike wrote a wonderfull proclemation announcing the launch of the D-day landings, he really did acknoledge and thank everyone,
https://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/dwighteisenhowerorderofdday.htm
Ike also wrote another letter, in case it all went wrong,
It was quite a bit shorter:
“Our landings in the Cherbourg-Havre area have failed to gain a satisfactory foothold and I have withdrawn the troops. My decision to attack at this time and place was based on the best information available. The troops, the air and the Navy did all that bravery and devotion to duty could do. If any blame or fault attaches to the attempt it is mine alone.”
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Dwight_Eisenhower_in_1944#/media/File:Eisenhowerfailurenoticeoverlord.jpg
There arn’t many left with that level of integrity.
Judge Crater
Makes you want to weep.
The invasion, with all it’s heroism and tragedy, was led by General Eisenhower who later became one of our most underrated Presidents.
And now we have a vulgar, self-absorbed criminal as president who sits in front of the graves of 10,000 Americans and libels a fellow American who served with distinction as a Marine officer in a war that he (Trump) “wasn’t really into…”
The banality of evil was never clearer. And Trump’s accomplices, like William Barr, make a farce of the democracy that tens of thousands of Americans died to protect.
Appalling…
pat
I remember reading about this in Ike’s book, Crusade in Europe (highly recommended,)
The troops were on the ships and Ike was afraid they could not leave because of the weather, but if they stayed in port for another day or two they would have to let them off the ships and someone would spill the beans about the coming invasion, which up to that point was still unknown to the Nazis. But they had better weather prediction than the Nazis and knew that there was a window of good weather for the invasion, so they went….. the Nazis were not expecting it so the leaders were elsewhere when the invasion began.
(I’m remembering this from reading the book several years ago, and it still sticks with me.)
M31
the Bletchly Park historic site in the UK is tweeting out in real time decrypted German Enigma machine messages, it’s very cool
Betty Cracker
@DSC: Wow, that’s a helluva thing — D-Day on his 20th birthday! Glad he made it.
zhena gogolia
@Judge Crater:
It’s so depressing.
ThresherK
@Kent: I can’t avoid the music from the late 70s on the radio. But on the radio in the late 70s you really had to pick to find Benny Goodman, the Dorsey Brothers, Duke Ellington, etc. (There was always WNEW-AM in NYC, and very little after that. It wasn’t popping up on half the stations on the dial.)
Ohio Mom
@Kent: Yeah, I’ve had that same thought about the longevity of 60s music.
When I was a kid, WWII seemed to me to be something that happened long, long before, in the mists of time.
Now I think, Whoa, the War only ended a mere ten years before I was born! And I can see and understand the outlines of how the War and it’s aftermath shaped the world I grew up in.
It’s not ancient history to me anymore even as it is now much longer ago. Perceptions of time are tricky things.
NotMax
@Ohio Mom
“What a man knows at fifty that he did not know at twenty is for the most part incommunicable.”
– Adlai E. Stevenson II
SiubhanDuinne
@Jay:
This is why, from age 7, I LIKE IKE and always have. A good, decent man. This adjectives may sound rather bland, but I mean them as highest praise.
Kent
@ThresherK:
I grew up in the 70s so remember what you mean. You pretty much had to turn on the Lawrence Welk show on sunday evenings to hear any WW-2 era Big Band music. I remember my mother and aunts used to listen to it religiously and for us it was unbelievably painfully old and stodgy. I don’t think it would have been possible to even find any 1910s WW-I era music outside of a museum back then. But today my 13 year old daughter is teaching herself Beatles and Rolling Stones riffs on the guitar.
frosty
My dad’s oldest brother was a C-47 pilot in 9th Troop Carrier Command. All he ever told his family was that he “towed gliders over Normandy”. My brother and I started doing some research and found out that he dropped the 101st Airborne the night of June 5/6, and towed gliders with the 82nd on D-Day. Following that it was gliders and paratroops for Dragoon (Southern France), Market-Garden (Holland) and Varsity over the Rhine. Also resupply for Bastogne and part of the Flying Pipeline ferrying jerrycans of gas to Patton. And carrying wounded troops and repatriated prisoners back.
We also found two pictures of him in France via a Shutterfly site of other Troop Carrier decendents. None of his kids knew any of this and it would have been impossible for us to research it without the internet.
SiubhanDuinne
Does anyone have any special favourite D-Day movies? Two I love are The Americanization of Emily,and 36 Hours — both, coincidentally, starring James Garner.
Boris, Rasputin's Evil Twin
I heard Twitler make hash out of FDR’s D-Day Prayer yesterday, and had to listen to FDR to get the bleating noise of of my head.
Remember presidents who could speak English like it was their first language?
CarolDuhart2
@Kent: Well, there was little left that was recorded, and of course, there was no radio back in 1910 either. We are astounded when we find anything prior to say, 1910 that was on a cylinder or something..
Another thing was that the baby boom generation was so large that it left so much stuff and was so dominant culturally. And the music was so diverse that it left something for just about everybody from everywhere.
SiubhanDuinne
@DSC:
That is one helluva story. Can’t even imagine the psychic pain.
His story would be a terrific novel in the right hands. Not to trivialize his experiences, but to capture and enhance them for generations who won’t know.
CarolDuhart2
Poignant to me is that this is reallly the last big anniversary with living vets. Five years from now, the entire generation will be down to a handful of centenarians, largely female. And Trump is really spoiling their last hurrah. And speaking of that, will we still have these commemorations in 10 years? The Civil War doesn’t seem to have them anymore, and World War I has mostly played out now it’s been a century.
Sure, there will be re-enactors, and unclassified material to release, and old diaries, but will we gather again for anything but the 100th Anniversary Now?
CarolDuhart2
@Kent: Also the previous generation (or half-generation, the Silents) were so nasty about rock music that it turned off a lot of people from even trying to listen to 40’s music. It took the internet, and new Swing and Jazz in the 1990’s to even get people to listen to that stuff again. Thanks, Generation X…
Jay
@Kent:
As ususal, it was a lot more complex than that. Lend Lease was a godsend to not only Britian and the Soviet Union, but the Murmansk Convoys and the Archangle Convoys kept much of the Soviet Union Red Army in the War.
It wasn’t just tanks and aircraft, it was trucks, ammo, artillery, food, fuel, steel, other metals, raw material.
The Soviet Union sat out the first two years of the war ( other than to grab The Baltics and half of Poland, allied with Nazi Germany),
While the French, British, Commonwealth and other Allies fought the Battle of Belgium, the Battle of France, against the invasion of Yugoslavia, against the Invasion of Crete, the East Africa Campaign, Malta, the North Africa Campaign.
When the Soviet Union was invaded, the Western Allies (other than the US) were fighting in North Africa.
By the time the Soviet Union was getting stalemates on the Eastern Front , the US had entered the war, and we had won in North Africa and were preparing to invade Sicily and Italy.
By the time of the first major sucessful Soviet Offensives on the Eastern Front, ( the Liberation of Smolmensk), on the Western Front, Mussolini had been toppled and the Western Allies were halfway up the Italian boot, stalling up against the Winter Line.
Mike in NC
I was lucky enough to participate in the 50th anniversary commemoration held at Fort Story near Norfolk, VA. At the time I was XO of a Navy Reserve unit in Baltimore that operated landing craft not much different than those built in WW2, and we were all invited to be a part of the reenactment. Thousands of people attended from around the world.
HumboldtBlue
I thought this exchange was rather well done. Cornpone grifter has a ring to it.
I spent three hours with Don Harms yesterday going through his memorabilia. Don is 100 years old and hit Omaha Beach with the 5th Rangers on D-Day.
I could spend the next 100 hours talking with him.
My maternal grandfather left New Jersey in 1941 and didn’t return until 1946. Imagine that today, four and a half years gone from a family with four kids 10 and under left at home. He was an officer in the New Jersey National Guard and was a key member in the Ghost Army.
Funny, I’m the guy who has read nearly everything about American military history in the family and yet it was my older brother who made some key contributions to the Ghost Army Legacy Project.
M31
@CarolDuhart2:
In 10 years we’ll have commemorations of the Afghanistan war, which will still be going on, and there can be parent/child combat vet pairs skyping in from the field, boasting about who has seen the most presidents
SiubhanDuinne
@CarolDuhart2:
I was born in 1942, and when I was a kid the Pearl Harbor anniversary was taken very seriously. December 7, 1941 was still fresh in the minds of the grown-ups, and was always a very big deal commemoration in school. I think it started fading away, or at least becoming less publicly observed, starting in the mid- to late-1950s. Don’t know why.
NotMax
@CarolDuhart2
Actuarial chart of interest. Estimated that in 2020 the number of WW2 U.S. vets still living will fall to just below 300,000.
HumboldtBlue
@SiubhanDuinne:
These have always fascinated me.
NotMax
Linky fix.
@CarolDuhart2Actuarial chart of interest. Estimated that in 2020 the number of WW2 U.S. vets still living will fall to just below 300,000.
ThresherK
@Kent: Lawrence Welk has his fans, but his mitteleurope musette orchestra was not to be confused with jazz. My start was a few Glenn Miller and Dorsey records, from my mom, in the 70s. From there, the Milkman’s Matinee, and other stars at WNEW-AM. (I was an odd duck.)
@CarolDuhart2: UCSB (Go Banana Slugs!) has quite a collection of ancient cylinders if you’re curious.
Kent
@Jay: I agree entirely. But I do get tired of all the American reporting which suggests that the war in Europe started on D-Day and that’s how the Germans were defeated.
In the counter-historical where D-Day never happens we still wind up with the Soviet Union eventually rolling into Berlin.
NotMax
Third time’s the charm. Dunno what’s up with eye-hand coordination today.
@CarolDuhart2
Actuarial chart of interest. Estimated that in 2020 the number of WW2 U.S. vets still living will fall to just below 300,000.
opiejeanne
My dad landed a few days after D-Day, but his boat took them a little north and up a river to a place he remembered as Camp X. I haven’t been able to find out anything about the place or exactly where it was. He would be 100 right now if he were with us, 101 in July. He was in the Signal Corps, drove a radio truck. I have photos of right after the war, one of Ike coming out of a meeting in Nuremberg. He’s dressed very plainly and is wearing no medals or dress uniform. Ike
Dad with his truck, in need of a shower and shave: Dad near Nuremberg
HumboldtBlue
@Kent:
Me and my brothers and sisters were more fortunate. Our parents were just entering their teenage years when the war ended and dad had a deep love for the great bands of the era and mom cornered the market on the vocalists so we still enjoy the full run of the Big Bands today.
It’s the reason I played the saxophone for 13 years as well.
Baud
@SiubhanDuinne:
After all the casualties of WWII and Korea, I suppose Pearl Harbor seemed less interested in Pearl Harbor as a unique event to commemorate.
TaMara (HFG)
My great-Uncle died on D-Day (well actually, he succumbed to his injuries days later), as part of the invasion on Utah beach. His photo always hung over the dining room table in my grandparents’ house and a similar one hung in each of his siblings’ homes (my other great aunts and uncles). I knew he died in WWII early on, but it wasn’t until I was in my teens I realized he died in the D-Day invasion. RIP Uncle Shorty.
SiubhanDuinne
@HumboldtBlue:
Wow, thanks! Saved, to explore and share!
ThresherK
@CarolDuhart2: You know what fascinates me? The “fallow years” from about 1947 to 1954. Most all the big bands broke up in 1946-7 for financial reasons, and between that and “Rock around the Clock” you had novelties, kid vocalists, ex-band singers. Lots of splintering, the ending of network radio, the ex-jitterbuggers staying home and begatting and raising all the kids they put off having due to the Depression and the War.
Lapassionara
Thank you, Cheryl, for the post. I am interested in D-Day for a lots of reasons, but once I became interested, I had to read everything I could find about it.
Sloane Ranger
I don’t have any relatives who were in D Day. My Aunt was in the WRAF. She was one of those you see in war films moving miniature aircraft over giant maps so she might have had a supporting role. Her husband was in the Airborne and fought in Operation Market Garden. My maternal grandfather was in the Royal Artillery but died before D Day when my mother was 13 and my Aunt 11.
All my other relatives were either too young or too old to serve, although my other Grandfather, a WW1 veteran, was an NCO in the Home Guard and my Dad was a runner.
The local museum where I volunteer has had an exhibition of “Honour Boards ” from local businesses commemorating employees who died while serving in the armed forces during the war.
NotMax
@ThresherK
Used to watch The Joe Franklin show or listen to him on the radio?
Just looked it up – his TV show ran from 1951 all the way until 1993!
SiubhanDuinne
@Baud:
We’ve commemorated 9/11 at this point for more years than we commemorated 12/7,
Mike in NC
@Jay: Ike’s note taking the blame was preserved and can be seen in the National Archives.
CarolDuhart2
@NotMax: And they are reaching the age where a lot of them will be falling off that actuarial cliff.
I think America’s contribution to victory was both over and underrated. The Russians took the brunt of Hitler’s Army. On the other hand, that second front hastened the end of the war by not giving Hitler’s armies a chance to retreat and regroup somewhere in Europe, and by making defeat so total that it killed any chance for the Nazi regime to ever again reconstitute. Also we helped supply both the Russians and the Allied troops, making it impossible again for Hitler to regroup and try again.
Baud
@SiubhanDuinne:
That’s partly because of partisanship under Bush. And partly because all the American causalities from the “Global War on Terror” do not begin to approach WWII and Korea. (Or even just Korea).
Kent
@ThresherK:
My mother grew up during this era. Graduated from HS in 1956. When long ago I asked her what she listed to in HS she said “Pat Boone” because Elvis was really forbidden stuff in her small rural Pennsylvania town.
NotMax
@ThresherK
“And now, here’s Snooky Lanson singing Shrimp Boats.”
:)
Chris
@Kent:
And boy howdy, am I grateful for that.
Even after you account for all the mythmaking and whitewashing that went into creating the popular memory of World War Two, there’s a reason the French call it “the liberation” and the Poles… don’t.
opiejeanne
@DSC: My dad went over on the Queen Mary too, but he was turned down twice when he tried to enlist. He was a skinny little guy. He knew that eventually they’d come for him so he joined a training unit near Davis where they learned all about radar but not the name of it. Yes, one of the guys in his group went into town and bought a comic book and that’s how they learned the name of this new thing.
They did finally draft him and he was ready to go but had to wait 6 weeks while the other radio guys got trained. They sent them to England where they sat for a while before finally heading over a few days after D-Day. When I asked he said he never saw the terrible cost, he said he never shot anyone the whole time he was there but came close when a lieutenant refused to give him the password one night when he was standing guard duty.
He told only the funny stories, or the near-misses. He did not talk about the horrors he must have seen, didn’t talk about the war part of the war at all. He had tickets to the Nuremberg trial and refused to go. His dad was so angry with him because it was History, but he didn’t have the stomach for it. I think he saw some really bad things but he never talked about them.
ThresherK
@NotMax: I would watch Joe Franklin more than once in a while. Not totally my taste, but it made a lot more sense than the Uncle Floyd show, though!
ThresherK
@Kent: Well, Isn’t That a Shame!
Mom and Dad were out of HS in ’49. Too young for the real big band heyday, already married when rock ‘n’ roll happened.
germy
@ThresherK:
Be Bop. Charlie Parker, Diz, even Red Norvo was experimenting with it.
John Revolta
I’ve thought about this music topic quite a bit. I think a large part of it has to do with the introduction of electric instruments. Today’s contemporary music at least sounds similar to what was being played in the 60s, whereas a rock band in the 60s had practically nothing in common with the music just ten or twenty years previous- the instruments themselves hadn’t existed back then.
Chris
@Judge Crater:
Far worse than a vulgar, self-absorbed criminal. A fascist.
There’s been a lot wrong with some of the previous presidents who’ve taken part in these rituals, but I’m pretty sure this is the first time we’ve had a straight-up fascist, one who complimented his own homegrown Nazis as “very fine people,” represent us there.
Chris
@SiubhanDuinne:
The Longest Day, obviously, it’s a classic for a reason.
But I did recently discover 36 Hours and it’s a gem. (Love the Sergeant Schultz cameo at the end).
trollhattan
Speaking of “patriots” the Dems are giving Devin Nunes another go.
rikyrah
Lakota Man (@LakotaMan1) Tweeted:
“Nearly 500 Native Americans fought alongside Allied soldiers to dislodge German forces from the French coast at Normandy.
Some of them didn’t even have the right to vote in the U.S.”
#DDay75Anniversary
https://t.co/EEsufbPAGV https://twitter.com/LakotaMan1/status/1136698038179647488?s=17
CarolDuhart2
@germy: But BeBop wasn’t popular music. Sure WNOP (late lamented jazz station here in Cincy) played it during the day, but it wasn’t like kids danced to it or anything.
What you said also explained why rock made its breakthrough. Rhythm and Blues had a pathway now. The big networks could no longer censor the stuff to placate the racists, there was nobody out there that was even trying to appeal to the kids or anything.
C Stars
@HumboldtBlue: Wow, fascinating person and great article.
ThresherK
@germy: Yep. It was much more a record and live thing than radio broadcasting, wasn’t it?
Jazz got to bop from swing, say the experts, after not having to play for dancers. I mean, there were some bandleaders who never left the scene, like Goodman and Ellington and Basie, but the market simply didn’t exist for all the ones which were before. (See: Minor league baseball and the advent of TV.)
germy
@Chris:
TenguPhule
@CarolDuhart2:
The Russians were also Nazi Germany’s ally at the start of the war.
Always something to remember whenever the “Russia was the main cause of Germany’s defeat” is trotted out.
opiejeanne
@ThresherK: In Los Angeles there was a radio show called The Swinging Years hosted by Chuck Cecil. I think it ran on KFI in the 50s and 60s and my parents always had it on on Sunday afternoon. So I listened to a previous generation’s music because I was in the house. That and Polka Parade, with Frankie Yankovic and the Yanks. Dad would polka us from one end of the house to the other. It was hilarious.
debbie
@Kent:
You think better of our countrymen than I.
SiubhanDuinne
@Chris:
I wasn’t even counting The Longest Day and Saving Private Ryan. They are both deservedly great films but neither of them touched me personally, emotionally, the way Emily and 36 Hours did. So I guess I’m wondering if there are any of those more intimate movies out there, with D-Day as a key plot element.
oldgold
This is an excellent article from today’s NYT on Ernie Pyle’s reporting from Normandy Beach.
Ernie Pyle/ D-Day
Villago Delenda Est
Antifa is storming the beaches of an area that Nazis have permits to occupy! Stop them!
germy
R.I.P. Dr. John
rikyrah
TIME (@TIME) Tweeted:
He served with D-Day’s only African-American combat unit. His widow is still fighting for his Medal of Honor https://t.co/Ujrhl1Eapg https://twitter.com/TIME/status/1136414940959584256?s=17
Villago Delenda Est
@TenguPhule: Russia had a great deal of logistical support (logistics being something that war fans know nothing about) from the US in many forms, to include the Studebaker trucks that made mobile warfare possible.
SiubhanDuinne
@Kent:
I spend way too much time thinking about stuff like this :-)
Thanks for the thought-provoking comment.
Chris
@rikyrah:
Not to mention black soldiers, various immigrants, and oh Jesus, Japanese-Americans.
@germy:
Yep! I really liked that they made sure to give the Free French soldiers their moment in the sun. They were only a fraction of the soldiers who landed (177 men all told, if I recall correctly), but as it’s their country they were liberating, they deserved the attention.
CarolDuhart2
@TenguPhule: It still doesn’t negate the fact that the Russian Army took the brunt of the casualties. And Stalin certainly wasn’t the first to underestimate Hitler either.
Villago Delenda Est
@Chris: He desecrates the sacred ground with his presence. He is an abomination.
NotMax
@a href=”https://balloon-juice.com/2019/06/06/open-thread-d-day-75-years-ago/#comment-7306025″>SiubhanDuinne
TCM showed Breakthrough earlier today, which ain’t bad, even though it adheres to cliche Hollywood conventions. Utilizes actual war footage well.
NotMax
Arrgh. Fix.
@SiubhanDuinne
TCM showed Breakthrough earlier today, which ain’t bad, even though it adheres to cliche Hollywood conventions. Utilizes actual war footage well.
SiubhanDuinne
@Chris:
Also, too, Eva Marie Saint in a role nobody ever seems to remember.
And I’ve always had a mad crush on Rod Taylor, so there’s that.
SiubhanDuinne
@NotMax:
Have never seen. Shall remedy.
TenguPhule
75 years later and most of the heroes are dead.
But the monsters they fought are back and still very much alive.
Villago Delenda Est
@SiubhanDuinne: I asked my parents about this; my dad was 21 for Pearl Harbor and my mom was 16. There was no need to have a public wallow of “oh woe is us” when the first anniversary of Pearl Harbor rolled around. The country was busy fighting a war.
TenguPhule
@CarolDuhart2:
Understatement of the century.
HumboldtBlue
@C Stars:
Thanks. I was floored out how spry he was considering his age and although his hearing was very poor he certainly was able to describe in detail what he and others endured.
Mary G
@Kent: I was talking to my 15-year-old housemate yesterday and looking at his pieces from art class. He asked me if I had heard of Black Sabbath and I said “Yes, Ozzie. Iron Man.” I think they’re less cool to him now that he knows they were around when I was his exact age.
Kent
The Americanization of Emily and 36 Hours?
Where are you guys finding these? Are the available to stream on any service? I don’t see them on Amazon Prime or Netflix
HumboldtBlue
@Villago Delenda Est:
I saw a great photo on Reddit with some Yanks holding up a Nazi flag with a callout to the brave Antifa boys who stormed the beaches that day.
Omnes Omnibus
@CarolDuhart2: Part of the reason the Soviets had so many casualties is that they made no attempt to avoid casualties. If your infantry tactics are similar to those of the army of the dead in GoT, you are going to lose people.
Kent
@Mary G: My 13 year old daughter found my old record collection in the attic and drug it out. I dusted off an old turntable for her and hooked it up directly to some powered speakers. Now she plays all my old Clash and Who albums when her friends come over and they all think it is absolutely the coolest thing ever. I was never into metal so I don’t have any of that stuff.
SiubhanDuinne
@Villago Delenda Est:
True enough. My personal memories of PH Day start in 1947 or ‘48, when I would have been 5 or 6. I can well believe that the War itself occupied everyone’s attention from 1941-45 — I was too young to notice — but I do distinctly remember my grade-school teachers making note of it each year (as they also did each year on November 11 for Armistice Day).
Sloane Ranger
@Chris: The work done by the French Resistance shouldn’t be ignored either, despite various revisionist histories.
SiubhanDuinne
@Kent:
I have them on DVD and can see them any time I wish.
Yes, I like to watch things on DVD.
(EDITED to add an obnoxious observation.)
HumboldtBlue
@Kent:
Yes, and yes
Kent
@SiubhanDuinne:
When I was growing up in the 1970s, November 22, 1963 was the date all the teachers remembered and talked about with reverence.
Patricia Kayden
Great link to story about a Black heroic soldier.
https://mobile.twitter.com/NMAAHC/status/1136622603471339520
Good that he’s getting some recognition.
NotMax
@SiubhanDuinne
Also too, come around with some frequency on TCM.
schrodingers_cat
My Russian friend says that Russia has still not recovered from WWII, they lost so many people.
Kent
@HumboldtBlue: Thanks. On my computer when I searched them both I only found the DVD versions available for sale. Weird. But your links took me there and I have them both queued.
SiubhanDuinne
@Kent:
Well YEAH, considering both C. S. Lewis and Aldous Huxley died on that date.
Villago Delenda Est
@SiubhanDuinne: My mom insisted on flying the flag on 12/7. She never forgot Pearl Harbor, but she did not dwell on it the way post 9/11 Americans dwell on “The Twin Towers.”
schrodingers_cat
@rikyrah: And the contributions of the British Indian Army are discounted, like they were there just to die, like Jem Hadar soldiers. And they are always whitewashed out in the Hollywood retellings, even in those campaigns where their contributions were key, like Dunkirk.
debbie
@Omnes Omnibus:
Funny. The Czar they probably still hated had the same philosophy.
Omnes Omnibus
@debbie: Actually the Soviets had some good generals who learned their craft in the battles between the Red and White armies. A lot of them didn’t survive the purges.
Kent
@Villago Delenda Est: I teach HS and this year I remember looking around at all my HS students during the annual 9/11 thing and realizing that not a single one of them was alive on 9/11
My own daughter, who is a HS sophomore was born on March 20, 2003 which was the day we invaded Iraq. I remember sitting in the hospital room with my wife before her scheduled C-section watching the start of the invasion on TV.
Leto
This is from Balloon Juice, two years ago. Lots of videos, including President Obama’s address from the 70th anniversary.
https://balloon-juice.com/2017/06/06/the-73rd-anniversary-of-d-day/
Immanentize
@Yutsano:
My great uncle made it to D-Day. Then the Battle of the Bulge. Then Stalag 9B. Then he came home and drank himself to death at the Polish Club.
Patricia Kayden
@trollhattan: Go any Democrat who runs against Nunes!!! He needs to be on the unemployment line.
SiubhanDuinne
@Villago Delenda Est:
My folks were the same. Remembered, honoured, but didn’t get all maudlin about it.
Chris
@Villago Delenda Est:
Yeah. The ritual annual 9/11 death porn really has the stink of trying too hard to whitewash and justify everything that came after it. They hope that if we shout “9/11 NEVER FORGET!!!” loud enough it’ll drown out all the shit that was done in 9/11’s name.
No need to do that for Pearl Harbor, since the war that followed was actually conducted competently.
Kathleen
@SiubhanDuinne: The Longest Day. I read the book and saw the movie when it came out (1962 I believe.)
Kent
@Omnes Omnibus: During the same month as D-Day, the Soviets were conducting Operation Bagration which completely destroyed 28 German Army divisions on the eastern front and was numerically the biggest defeat in German military history. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Bagration How many Americans have even ever heard of Operation Bagration?
Chris
@Omnes Omnibus:
Another reason, IIRC, being that Stalin had spent the 1930s purging the Red Army of almost any officer who could use his head as something other than a hat rack.
NotMax
@Kathleen
Beginning on TCM … right now.
rikyrah
Lord have mercy. I can’t imagine having SIX children in a war???
https://twitter.com/MadisonSiriusXM/status/1136752794004836354
rikyrah
@Jay:
Always respected him. He is from another era.
Chris
@Sloane Ranger:
Nah, the French Resistance were great. Where the revisionism’s been needed is in the notion that they were broadly popular and representative of their population, a myth that was widely promoted in the couple decades after the war and only revised later.
Betty Cracker
@opiejeanne: Great photo! He looks somewhat dazed, as one would.
My paternal grandfather was at Utah Beach on D-Day, survived Battle of the Bulge after that and came home to be a loving husband and father and the most doting grandpa ever.
Similar to your dad, he only told the funny or self-deprecating stories about the war.
When I heard he was at D-Day and asked what it was like to wade ashore, he said, “Well, I had these cigars in my shirt pocket, and all I could think about was keeping them dry…”
rikyrah
@Judge Crater:
The banality of evil was never clearer
??????
Tell that truth
Chris
@Kent:
Every now and then I see magazines commemorating JFK’s death and roll my eyes and go “for fuck’s sake, can’t people get over it already?” And then I feel guilty knowing that fifty years from now, my generation will undoubtedly still be inflicting 9/11 death porn on youngers who will react to it much the same way.
Quinerly
@germy: Your steak ain’t no hipper than my pork chop
Your Cadillac ain’t no hipper than my bus stop
Your champagne ain’t no hipper than my soda pop
Your social life ain’t no better than my hot dog stand
Your edu-ma-cation ain’t no hipper
than what you understand
– Dr. John (Qualified)
Jay
@CarolDuhart2:
The Soviet Union signed the Molotov Ribbintrop Pact for the same reason Britain and France betrayed Czechoslovakia,
To buy time to get ready for war.
From 1934 to 1938, the Soviet Union desperatly saught an alliance with France, Britain and Poland, but the French and British were not really interested, sending only low level Diplomats, and Poland was adamantly opposed.
SiubhanDuinne
My Canadian friends remind us all that more than one country stormed the beaches at Normandy three-quarters of a century ago.
Here is something nice. Nancy SMASH Pelosi attended the Canadian event today. Love her. Good for her.
Amir Khalid
RIP Mac “Dr.John” Rebennack, 77.
NotMax
@rikyrah
Brings to mind the Sullivans.
Chris
@Villago Delenda Est:
Preach it.
Or as you might say, wipe him out, all of him.
@rikyrah:
He’s as close to a Republican I’d vote for as exists in the last hundred years, and one of the few that I could stand my candidate having lost to.
Immanentize
@SiubhanDuinne:
Not a D-Day movie per se (Saving Private Ryan has to be the best D-Day sequence ever) but
Rome Open City is the best WWII movie I’ve ever seen.
But Catch 22 with Alan Arkin is also great.
japa21
My father-in-law was in the second wave. Three days later he was back in England in a hospital bed having been shot in the neck. After a recuperation he was sent back to the states and given a medical discharge. He looked up his best friend’s girlfriend to talk about how the friend had died in the invasion. They ended up getting married (although my mother-in-law never forgot her first love). He died in 76 from a burst artery at the base of the brain. They suspect it was probably slightly damaged when he was shot and finally gave out.
Quinerly
@germy: I’ve read 5 articles on his death (I’m a huge fan, probably seen him 20 times, mostly at NOLA’s Jazz and Heritage Fest), imo this is the best article so far: https://www.theadvocate.com/new_orleans/news/article_a962e500-8877-11e9-991d-2f4782c02ae0.html
NotMax
@Immanentize
A Walk in the Sun.
Chris
@SiubhanDuinne:
Those are the guys I always feel bad for. They even had their own damn beachead at D-Day (Juno), yet everybody remembers the British and Americans and forgets them.
First time I visited the Normandy beaches I even made sure to request that we swing by Juno Beach. Not because there’s anything especially memorable there, just because the Canucks are the one group you never hear anything about and I wanted to see their part.
Brachiator
@schrodingers_cat:
BBC History Magazine devoted a full year of issues to World War 1, leading to an issue devoted to the centennial commemoration of the Armistice. A number of issues emphasized that it was a world war, and included articles on African and Indian troops, and to women and others whose contributions have been under-reported.
The coverage on World War 2 has not been as intense, but again, there have been attempts to be more wide ranging. There has also been some stories (though not enough) on Churchill’s despicable actions with respect to India, which you brought to many people’s attention.
Immanentize
@rikyrah:
Bad Day at Black Rock
For my favorite US post-WWII movie
Quinerly
@Amir Khalid: a favorite: https://youtu.be/AcK9h08B0xI
Kathleen
@CarolDuhart2: I’m sure you’re familiar with the history of King Records and its role in popularizing early blues/R&B/rockabilly, the foundations of rock n’ roll.
https://www.history-of-rock.com/king_records.htm
It’s interesting how his Appalachian and African American customers were ignored by big record companies until Nathan figured out there was a big market for the music they bought in his record store.
Quinerly
@Amir Khalid: another favorite: https://m.youtube.com/watch?feature=youtu.be&v=B2fqUt7KVjA
japa21
@Immanentize: My son was at Fort Lewis outside Seattle doing his final ROTC summer camp when Private Ryan came out. Mrs. Japa and I went out to see him there and Private Ryan was showing at the mall next to our hotel. He wanted to see it so we took him. My wife almost left during the opening scenes but hung in there through about half the film. Then she went outside and waited for my son and I to come out. She will never watch it again. Hits too close to home.
That was 20 years ago. Next year my son retires as a Lieutenant Colonel. I don’t know where the time has gone.
Kent
@Chris:
Don’t remember where I ever read it, but somehow along the way I picked up the notion that there were really various flavors of French Resistance and that it was the French Communists who really ran the most effective resistance networks, popular movies and mythmaking to the contrary. I’m sure the history is really very complex.
germy
– Charlie Chaplin
Quinerly
@Amir Khalid: @germy: stumbled on this this afternoon… That unmistakable voice: https://m.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=2221978437836584&id=349873098380470
Kathleen
@NotMax: Thank you, NotMax!!! (BTW, love your TCM alerts!)
Brachiator
@Quinerly:
The Variety obituary for Dr John is also quite good.
https://variety.com/2019/music/news/dr-john-dies-dead-new-orleans-musician-1203235395/
Kathleen
@Chris: I still haven’t gotten over it.
schrodingers_cat
@Amir Khalid: How was Eid?
J R in WV
@ThresherK:
My piano teacher dropped out of high school when a touring big band playing in my home town lost a trombone player to a fist fight our behind the club. He auditioned, got the job, packed his small suitcase and was outta there.
Les Brown, Harry James, I can’t even remember all the big bands he played in, learned arranging and wrote charts, ran music for the Tropicana in NYC for years. Came back to town with a former dancer from broadway to raise a family. So I got to learn how to read a cheat sheet with melody and chords and make a piano arrangement out of that.
Long time ago. He played for the troops during the war. So jazz was a big thing for me. First ticket for live music I bought myself was to Ramsey Lewis, First real big band I saw was in St Pete as a little kid, I begged the folks for days, finally they broke down and we saw Louis Armstrong and Pearl Bailey – I still remember how romantic it was, even from the very top balcony seats.
Most interesting to me is that big band swing music is still popular a hundred years later on! And the music of the Civil war lives on as well, because it was written down on paper. My grandma won the talent contest on a riverboat, the Delta Queen, on the Mississippi playing Sweet Georgia Brown in ragtime style on the calliope – it wasn’t steam any more, compressed air which was safer but still, imagine that!
NotMax
@Immanentize
If you’ve never seen it, Operation Amsterdam is available on Prime.
While perhaps not a top tier film, nevertheless a taut suspense story based on a real mission to obtain and whisk stores of industrial diamonds (at the time £10 million worth) out of Amsterdam and back to England at the same time the Germans were about to overrun the city. Peter Finch is always worth a watch.
germy
@J R in WV: Big Band music migrated to the Hanna-Barbera animation studios.
After the nightclub business dried up, those cartoon theme songs gave big band musicians paying gigs.
The Flintstones, Top Cat, Jetsons… Those old cartoon soundtracks could really swing (even if the animation itself was somewhat uninspired).
pattonbt
Like Cole – I was in the Army at the same time and in the same MOS (but at such a low priority post I never had any chance to see action – which I must admit I was not too unhappy about – greatest soldier in the world I was not). I happened to be on post duty one D-Day, and while I know my history and had respect, I was still young and learning. I was helping some evaluators in from the 82 airborne division who were on post to watch and mentor a national guard unit on their annual two week training exercise (many hilarious stories from that two week assignment of mine – hot mics, morons and so on). So I had to go to the post hotel to pick up this colonel to go downrange for the days monitoring. While waiting there was this old WWII veteran on base for some D-Day commemoration. I struck up a conversation with him, being raised to be polite and also curious of “what is what like”. I was raised with every advantage there was and even my time in the Army was pretty easy (never left my states-side post even though Desert Storm and Panama happened). So hardship was not a first hand knowledge concept to me. But just seeing that thousand yard stare and silent, heartfelt introspection from this Normandy veteran just hit me so hard. He just could not put into words what it was like – but his emotions and pain were all too impactful. So we mostly just sat in silence. It just hit me hard in that “I’ll never know” and “we can never forget” way. I think about that man at least once a week. I am sure he is no longer with us now, but his sacrifice, the sacrifice of those who were lost what was at stake and so on just cannot be understated.
Quinerly
@Brachiator: thanks! I missed that one. If you are on FB, his page is excellent, especially the photos tab. I spent about an hr on it today just looking at pictures.
Immanentize
@NotMax:
I watched that movie a dozen times at a kid. WPIX special?
But it had every American trope — down to the harmonica playing lovable hick.
I love that movie
Immanentize
@japa21:
Thank you for sharing that.
I hate and love the scenes about the hand to hand fighting and survival. I just got a chill. I understand your wife’s reaction.
Origuy
@ThresherK: The Banana Slugs are the mascot of UC Santa Cruz. The Gauchos are UC Santa Barbara.
Kelly
The only D-Day guy I ever met was a long time friend of my parents. Omaha Beach. Never made it past the beach. Was shot while burrowing into the sand. Was among the first wounded evacuated. End of the war for him, walked with a limp for the rest of his life.
Kent
@Immanentize:
For the sheer insanity and terror of the war, the Soviet movie “Come and See It” about the German occupation of the Ukraine is beyond belief.
J R in WV
@HumboldtBlue:
Before and after photos of the Allied invasion of Nazi ruled France – exact match of ruined cathedral then, rebuilt like new today, so many of them.
The one that hit me hardest was the Nazi officers with a big group of captured German soldiers, being led by a single Canadian farm boy with a rifle, fixed bayonet. The two Nazi officers were looking at the young man with the most peculiar expressions — like “This can’t be, we’re the ubermenchen, he’s just a farm boy~!!~”
The Canadian soldier looks like a young man who knows he’s with the winners. Trying not to grin, to look military. Leading those Nazi bastards to their prison camp.
But they’re all gold.
Immanentize
@J R in WV:
You win. I must now worship you and your progeny.
rikyrah
I needed this laugh ???
Hope you can ???? too
https://twitter.com/bloodhoundheart/status/1136036424149544962
Chris
@Kent:
I don’t know if they were the most effective or not, but it’s definitely true that the biggest chunk of resistance fighters were Communists, more so than the Socialists or Gaullists which were the other two biggish factions. A lot of effort was put into marginalizing them after 1944, but they still had a lot of prestige from their participation in the war – their tagline in the postwar 1940s was “the party of the 75,000 executed” – which took time to erode.
SiubhanDuinne
@Chris:
Thank you for that.
japa21
@Immanentize: For her it was a double whammy. First thinking of her father having been through some of that. Secondly knowing her son was going to be commissioned i just a few months. This was pre 9/11. If she had known what was coming it would probably have been even worse. Oh, and my son mentioned today in a FB post commemorating D-Day going to the movie. And for the first time that I recall, admitted it shook him too. Little did he know what he would end up seeing in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Chris
@J R in WV:
“VHAT MAKES YOU SO SPECIAL?”
“Nothing. I’m just a kid from
BrooklynSaskatchewan.”NotMax
@Chris
Strictly for the sake of humor, guess it is quasi-obligatory.
;)
Brachiator
I have a number of relatives who served during World War 2. They were all much older than me, and I was too young and too shy to ask them about those days. I think they all came back home, and some later tried to make America a better place.
Immanentize
@japa21:
But WWII seemed like a necessity. My Dad was too young but enlisted in the Navy as soon as he could in WWII. First generation Czech kid.
Your son’s choice honors us all. And I’m sorry he was in the shit.
And your wife was right to be worried. I like her.
Jay
@rikyrah:
Despite all my readings, and knowing about the Navaho Code Talkers in the Pacific, I only recently learned about the Mohawk Code Talkers. They were one of several Indiginous Groups used by the US Military as Code Talkers, all of whom had some how retained their Indiginous Tribal Languages through the Genocide of the Residential School System. Their last member died two years ago, shortly after being honoured in the House of Commons.
Raven
I figured if I went away a post would happen.
japa21
@Immanentize: I like her too. I really don’t deserve her, but don’t let her know I said that.
zhena gogolia
@Raven:
I was wondering where you were.
japa21
@Raven: Have you been gone?
Immanentize
@japa21:give me her email addy, coward!
Omnes Omnibus
A few random thoughts: TCM is showing The Longest Day and Majot John Howard’s glider troops just landed. There is no fucking way you could get me into one of those gliders.
My grandfather landed in Normandy a few days after D-Day, but he was in Normandy long enough and early enough that he had the Normandy battle star as one of the four on his Europe and North Africa medal.
Recently and not just today I find myself thinking about the woman who was the head of the local German American Club when I was in Wertheim. She was immensely fat and a horrible snob (she wouldn’t deal with enlisted soldiers no matter how good there German was), but she loved Americans – we could do no wrong in her eyes. One day, she explained it to me and another guy – we were the lucky ones who handled that liaison job. At the end of WWII, when American troops were occupying southern Germany, she was a young mother whose husband had not yet come back and she and her baby did not have enough food. She was afraid that her child would die until American troops rolled into town. They saw that she and the baby were starving and just shoveled food at them. The thing that she fixated on was the packages of powdered milk that kept her baby alive. A few months later, her husband came how and, using the skills he picked up as an Engineer officer, started clearing and repairing bomb damaged buildings. He turned that effort in a successful construction business with a specialty in renovating old buildings. I wonder what happened to the spirit that would just give succor to people in need and when our country became so afraid.
ThresherK
@J R in WV: Calliope? Huzzah! I spend more time listening to pipe organ and calliope music on YouTube than absolutely necessary to sustain life.
@Origuy: Dang. Thanx.
Raven
@japa21: Watching “Cold War” on the porch. We finished it and the saw that Dr John died. Rough week in the Easy.
I like Kent’s statement on time. I’m coming up on 50 years since I came home and thinking that it was only 25 between that and “D-Day” (my old man always bitched “I was in 25 D-Days in the Pacific”!
Chris
@NotMax:
I laughed.
“No!”
“Yes!”
“No!”
“Yes!”
“No!”
“Yes!”
“WILL NOBODY BELIEVE THIS WOMAN?”
Omnes Omnibus
@NotMax: The Madonna with the Big Boobies?
Caphilldcne
@germy: oh noes. Yes, RIP to the good doctor.
NotMax
@Jay
(Unrelated to the war topic.) Mohawk tribal members were greatly in demand to work the high steel.
r€nato
This book is highly, highly recommended. “D-Day Through German Eyes”
Two books consolidated into one. A German journalist interviewed several German soldiers who were there for the invasion, 10 years after it happened. The interviews were intended for a book or magazine article that was never completed. The journalist’s son published these books from his notes and his partially completed manuscript.
https://www.amazon.com/DAY-Through-German-Eyes-Hidden/dp/1539586391/ref=asc_df_1539586391/
kd bart
Dad use to joke that he hit the beach at Normandy but that it was 10 weeks after D Day and somewhat safer. He was infantryman in a Combat Engineers battalion. As he described it, he was the guy who carried the radio pack on his back that was used by the company commander. He was one of The Iron Men of Metz and helped secure the bridge across the Saar River at Saarlautern earning a Purple Heart along the way.
Ruckus
@CarolDuhart2:
The number of WWII vets I see at the VA has declined a lot in the last 5 yrs. And I didn’t see a lot then. It’s just gotten very rare at all to see anyone old enough or with a WWII vet hat on.
@Ohio Mom:
Born just less than 4 yrs after the end of WWII, it resonated with a lot of my early memories.
Immanentize
@germy: @Raven:
Iko Iko
NotMax
@Omnes Omnibus
IIRC, The Fallen Madonna with the Big Boobies.
:)
Chris
@Omnes Omnibus:
I recently read the book “Traitor To His Class” on FDR (been meaning to for about a decade). I made a note of one of the more inspiring (if also, in view of recent politics, sad) passages:
“Finally, there was the moral power the president wielded. America wasn’t perfect, but compared with the fascists of Germany and Japan, the communists of Russia, and the imperialists of Britain, Americans looked remarkably benign to the ordinary people of the world. Roosevelt’s reputation was especially compelling. He was known as the rich man who stood up for the common man, the president who put down the Big Stick in favor of being a Good Neighbor, the friend of China, the decolonizer of the Philippines (admittedly a work still in progress). Hitler’s Germany, Stalin’s Russia, even Churchill’s Britain – none of these served as a beacon of hope to the oppressed of the world. None provided a model other people would freely emulate. Roosevelt’s America provided just such a model, and Roosevelt knew it.”
I miss that leadership.
Omnes Omnibus
@NotMax: You are correct.
RAVEN
Band of Brothers D-Day is pretty good.
Omnes Omnibus
@RAVEN: A part of me cringes when they blow up the German guns.
Raven
@Omnes Omnibus: I watched those two episodes today. I was glad they said they were 105’s after getting sent to take out 88’s. I was hoping I could tell the difference.
Immanentize
@RAVEN:
Henry V pt 2:
Omnes Omnibus
@Raven: Did your unit have M101A1s or M102s? IIRC you were over there while the switch was ongoing.
kindness
My Dad & my Uncle both signed up as teens after Pearl Harbor. Both lied about their age and they took ’em. My father went to the Pacific in the Navy & my uncle went to Europe with the Army. The were great guys. Republicans but social liberals & fiscal conservative type. They’d have hated Trump & what the party has become had they still been alive.
raven
@Omnes Omnibus: M 102’s I think, my home movies show live fire at Camp St Barbara at about 11 minutes
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TTvlS21rqX0
Ruckus
@frosty:
Had a buddy I worked with while I was working professional sports events as a hobby before going full time. He was a C-47 radioman flying over the hump in Burma. For a number of events I would drive the truck with him after his wife of decades passed away. Took a while for him to open up even a small bit about his war memories but he did and they were fascinating to say the least.
@opiejeanne:
Dad refused to talk at all about his service in the navy. Even after I joined the navy.
Most vets who saw combat don’t talk about it unless with someone else who did see combat. And I know why. As I’ve said here before I sat with a lot of marines every day for 2 months, almost at the end of Vietnam and they would talk about it because that’s all they could do. Most of them had what we now know as PTSD, some with very severe cases. That experience has stayed with me more than I’d like ever since. Closest I ever got to combat was thousands of miles and the insides of those marine’s minds. Believe me it’s far closer than you want to get. Just thinking about it 46 yrs later is tough.
Shana
@Chris: 36 Hours was on TCM today.
MoxieM
OK, I cried. My dad was posted in the Pacific theater–mostly out of Kachulia AB in India, but as I recently learned (found more photos), spent the better part of a year on Galapagos, where his unit had a goat mascot. I have a picture of the goat in a jeep. Yeah, imagine the damage a goat would do on the Galapagos. OK, don’t. It was war… My other favorite picture–well, b/c he survived–everyone on board did, was the plane they flew the Hump in, but then, after losing 3 of the 4 engines in the Flying Fortress, it crashed. I have a photo of the crashed plane. Yikes. If I could post it without a Flickr or website or what-have-you, I would. Kind of mind bending what those guys did, and with what equipment. No internet! No cellphones!
It’s 30 years this April he’s gone, and I miss him every day. He defined integrity in everything he did and said.
schrodingers_cat
@Brachiator: The Indian Army’s contributions were forgotten both in the West and in India. In the West because I guess their lives were considered not as worthy, and in India because they fought to preserve British hegemony while Brits were starving millions of Indians.
Omnes Omnibus
@raven: Looking the film, it’s hard to tell.
J R in WV
@germy:
Oh, no!
I saw him tear up a small arena in Mobile AL back in the summer of ’72. A great live performer, he had the voodoo king outfit on, tall hat, walking stick with a glove on the head, throwing glitter as he marched onto the stage while the band vamped around him. Great girl back up singers, he played every instrument. What a showman!
77 years young… hell, I’m 68 already! I need to get started!!!
Jay
“Operation Manna and Operation Chowhound were humanitarian food drops, carried out to relieve a famine in German-occupied Holland, undertaken by Allied bomber crews during the final days of World War II in Europe.
Manna was carried out by British RAF units, as well as squadrons from the Australian, Canadian, New Zealand and Polish air forces, between 29 April and 7 May 1945.
Chowhound (1–8 May) was an operation by the U.S. Army Air Forces, which dropped, together with Operation Manna, a total of over 11,000 tons,[1] of food into the still-unliberated western part of the Netherlands, with the acquiescence of the occupying German forces,[2] to help feed Dutch civilians in danger of starvation.
After it was realised that Manna and Chowhound would be insufficient, a ground-based relief operation named Operation Faust was launched. On 2 May, 200 Allied trucks began delivering food to the city of Rhenen, behind German lines.”
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operations_Manna_and_Chowhound
In Forgotten Victory: First Canadian Army and the Cruel Winter of 1944-45, Mark Zuehlke covers off the relief operations for the starving Dutch, still under German Occupation.
He has in his personal collection a RCAF cartoon, from one of the Airmen’s Independent Newspapers, showing a mustached Pilot, in the ward room, using his hands to describe his flying feats, boasting:
“and then I dove down low, to just 200 feet, and dropped my load of 20,000 loaves of bread, bang on target!”
Amir Khalid
@schrodingers_cat:
Went as normal. Celebrated what I have come to regard as the return of daytime eating. Visited family, ate all the traditional Eid fare and chatted a lot, see you next year.
Ruckus
@Kent:
I remember sitting in the high school auditorium on that day in 1963, listening to the principle tell us the news. I still remember how shocked I was. Forty years later was in Dallas for work and saw the area of the shooting. It seemed smaller than the pictures from the time.
Matt McIrvin
@John Revolta: The big difference between today’s popular music and 60s popular music is elements from hip-hop… but even *that* is a 1970s innovation, not that much younger than rock in the grand scheme of things.
J R in WV
@Kent:
I was in science class in the 7th grade on 11/22/63 when they closed school early and announced the shooting over the PA. My fascist racist science teacher actually grinned with happiness over the murder of a Catholic president. Mr. Pugh. A real piece of work.
Not long — three days? — after I was in the living room when I heard my mom scream — she had just witnessed the murder of Lee Harvey by Jack Rudy on live TV, she was horrified and shakiing. We still don’t know, won’t ever know for sure what happened those days in Dallas TX, which was a sinkhole of racism, bigotry and hatred of Democrats. TX still is full of all that hate. Ya’ll bringing back memories!
Matt McIrvin
@Chris: We are never going to have that status again because even if we have a Roosevelt-level leader, everyone is going to know that monster America will come back someday and break every promise. Our word will collectively mean nothing.
Shana
@Kent: Ah, that point when your kids find out that you were, indeed, cool at an earlier point in your life.
While I was never really punk (too middle class to really buy in) I loved the music and one of my daughters will, somewhat inaccurately, tell her friends that her mom was a punk.
Immanenrize
@J R in WV:
I was a relative babe — 4. But I remember the horror in the house. The Admiral color TV (our first color set).
11 Miles an Hour. Was Not Was.
Ruckus
@pattonbt:
Met a Vietnam vet like that. Was in a group session and the bit was to sit for 2 minutes across from another vet and just look at each other. He didn’t blink for 2 minutes, his expression never changed, and the anger he was experiencing was so palpable, you could almost smell it. I did not enjoy those 2 minutes.
Combat affects everyone, some people never recover, even decades later.
Immanenrize
@Shana:
Instead of Shana (Shayna punim?) tell your daughters that back then you were known as “Sheena.”. #Livethedream
Chris
@Matt McIrvin:
A good point Abigail Nussbaum at LGM made a while ago; electing Obama after eight years of Dubya made America look like it was finally checking itself into rehab after a really bad episode. Electing Trump eight years after that made us look like a serial addict who may get back on the wagon from time to time but is incapable of staying there.
The other thing is, of course, you never get a second chance at a first impression. As far as a huge part of the world was concerned in the 1940s, we were still relative newcomers. It was possible for a lot of people to hope that we’d be different. Seventy years later, though, after all the crap done under the pretext of the Cold War and then the war on terror… not so much.
O. Felix Culpa
@HumboldtBlue: I knew one of the guys in the Ghost Army – Fred Fox – and it was cool to see his name on the list. Thank you for the link to the Ghost Army Project and for the article on Don Harms.
prostratedragon
@J R in WV:
Shana
@Immanenrize: LOL. I did see the Ramones in College – University of Illinois Auditorium. My ears rang for three day afterward.
Actually, I was originally Susan but there were so many other Susans in all my classes I started going by Shana and eventually changed it legally. Shoshana is generally considered the equivalent of Susan.
J R in WV
@prostratedragon:
OMG — thanks you profoundly!!
A completely different Dr John…
prostratedragon
@J R in WV: I owe that and much more to the good folks at WEMU radio, which is still hanging by a thread.
HumboldtBlue
@O. Felix Culpa:
Glad to have been of Help, OFC