Posted on 06/05/2022 1:14:01 PM PDT by SunkenCiv
“I went on June 7, 1993, fifty years plus one day. There were a lot of people, but it was still accessible then.”
A good friend, who lost his Dad on D DAy on the beach. Was invited by a French cousin to visit on the 50 th anniversary.
He could speak French fairly well. He, his wife and his mother were treated like family by the French for several days.
There were a lot, and I mean a LOT, of signs in English that said, "Thanks to our liberators".
“Another famous D Day invader was the Beat Generation poet and City Lights bookstore owner and publisher Lawrence Ferlinghetti.”
I never would have guessed that. Kerouac served in the Merchant Marine and William S Burroughs briefly enlisted in the Army. Imagine going to war with a copy of Naked Lunch in your pocket.
“while saying he couldn’t personally defend the views and language of the book but sank thousands of dollars into fighting censorship of unpopular ideas.”
How times have changed, considering how the Left is now openly hostile to free expression.
I imagine that Ferlinghetti probably considered himself a man of the Left; but maybe not. Oddly enough Jack Kerouac admired Nixon and had other opinions that we’d associate with the Right. Kerouac was kind of a residual Catholic. These people were artists and their views didn’t always match the image that we have of them.
Close. You’re thinking of Bedford, Virginia.
“Bedford lost more residents per capita in the Normandy landings than any other American community. Nineteen soldiers from Bedford, whose 1944 population was about 3,200, were killed on D-Day. Three other Bedford soldiers died later in the Normandy campaign. Proportionally this community suffered the nation’s most severe D-Day losses.”
First Army commanded by Omar Bradley was the invasion force at Normandy. Bradley didn’t seek attention like Patton and MacArthur so he gets neglected in the popular mind.
My dad was in the 7th Army which was commanded first by Patton and then after Sicily by Alexander Patch. He preferred Patch.
The 7th invaded the French Riviera two months after Normandy. There weren’t enough LSTs and landing craft to do both at the same time.
Calling the Normandy invasion “D-Day” always rankled my dad.
It seems that “D-Day” is a place holder term in every operations order. A massive operation gets planned before the final decision of day and hour is made, so every OPORD uses “d-day” and “h-hour” as place holders for the time to be determined later. Anyway dad had to work with OPORDs in WWII, so he knew how this shorthand worked, and using D-Day as synonymous with June 6th and Normandy stuck in his craw.
It wasn’t U-boats. It was German “Schnellboots’’, heavily armed fast attack craft the Germans used that were almost like a small destroyer.
The place it happened was called Slappton Sands.
Patton wasn’t an attention seeker, he just got a lot of attention because he had a lively sense of humor and a smart mouth. As a consequence, Bradley was more to Ike’s liking than was Patton.
In “A Soldier’s Story” Bradley noted that he went along with SHAEF’s official line that there wasn’t anything brewing ahead of The Bulge, and still thought that it was the right line to take, which shows how over his head he was. He got his fourth star because Patton had to receive one for what he’d accomplished, and he couldn’t be outranked by someone he commanded.
You might find this paper by Nathan Jones interesting; I see some similarity in Trump and Patton’s persona in some of this. Chapter 2 is where to begin-
“In need of a hero? The creation and use of the legend of General George S. Patton, Jr.”
“The Patton legend began with Patton himself. He carefully crafted an iconic brand over the course of his career, fashioning himself after classical military heroes. His personal brand was flamboyant, easily recognizable, and audacious. As told by Patton’s personal secretary, “Patton went to war with the shining paraphernalia of the born martinet; with helmet polished, his four stars aglow,” and his “pearly pistols displayed for all to see.”
“It encompassed everything from his dress to his mannerisms, including a constantly practiced “war face” to mask his self-perceived weak jawline and the use of crass language to cover his high-pitched voice with its hint of a Southern aristocratic accent.”
“Private Joseph Rosevich, to whom Patton dictated nearly every piece of correspondence over the course of World War II, related the development of the infamous “Blood and Guts” speech.
Rosevich was “dazed by the contrast between the contents of the speech and the cultured, quiet poise of the man who created it,” a man he described more as an intellectual who reminded him of President Woodrow Wilson.
Patton explained to Rosevich that the performance he and others witnessed was exactly that: a performance, a “put-up show, a calculated and rehearsed act of bravado” that Patton viewed as a necessity to toughen up a generation of soft and carefree American men.
“For the last twenty years,” Patton complained, “our boys have been subjected to a steady diet of pacifist talk and doctrine. Now all of a sudden these ‘pacifists’ have to be turned into soldiers thirsting to kill the skilled, battle tested soldiers of a shrewd enemy.”
Finding himself in a “perfectly ridiculous” situation in which Patton felt he must shock these men out of their mental habits, he opted to use the crude vernacular of the common soldier in his speeches to accompany his crafted image.
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