Posted on 10/04/2013 8:51:48 PM PDT by Errant
Awesome pics! Thanks for the live, on-the-scene reporting. So the Park Police weren’t rude to the vets, huh? I’d love to know what they think about all this.
Looking at all your photos makes me want to be there!
Thank you so much for posting the great pics you took, and for being there for our Vets!
Do you know at what point the wires were cut?
just curious to know!
I got there at 930am and the wires were already cut.
Michele Bachman and Steve King might have been responsible — they were already there when I arrived.
Is the Maine Patriot Guard coming down next Sunday?
So the Park Police weren’t rude to the vets, huh?
Despite the show of force, they were very amenable to barriers being moved and people walking in. I thanked a few of them.
Come join us next Sunday.
For Combat_Boots —
103 posted on 10/5/2013 5:03:26 PM by combat_boots: “Normandy: Crosses and a star of David”
Great photo.
If a Jewish person had to die in 1944, it was sure better to die shooting the soldiers whose Nazi government built Auschwitz than to be dying in the Nazi death camps.
Does anyone know the story of PFC Richard Kunkel, the Jewish soldier whose “Star of David” tombstone is in that photo? I did a quick Google search and found that he was from the 501st Parachute Infantry Regiment of the 101st Airborne Division, was from New York, was killed in action June 6, 1944, in France at Colleville-sur-Mer, and was posthumously awarded a Purple Heart.
That info is here and several other places:
http://www.wwiimemorial.com/registry/cemetery/search/plaq.asp?HonoreeID=709869
There was also apparently a Capt. Richard Kunkel at Normandy, but this unit history from July 1944 indicates that Capt. Kunkel survived D-Day: http://www.oldhickory30th.com/30th%20DivArty%20June%20July%2044.pdf
There are a couple of online obituaries of people with the name “Richard Kunkel” who were World War II veterans, but all seem to have survived World War II. I haven't done my research but I'm guessing that one of them is the “Capt. Kunkel” referenced in that July 1944 unit history.
However, my guess is that photos of this Normandy memorial to PFC Richard Kunkel are some of the few things online memorializing his sacrifice — but it would be great if some World War II history organizations could do something to research and tell the story of a Jewish soldier who died fighting Nazi Germany. I know there were many Jewish people in the US military during World War II, but PFC Kunkel’s gravesite certainly gets a lot of photos due to the tombstone with the Star of David and it would be nice to be able to put a story with the stone.
Jews fought against Germany and Japan and died on those battlefields just like every other GI.
Many of these Jewish men were first generation born Americans while their folks were from the “old country” just like every other ethnic group.
That generation saw themselves as American first, without a hyphen, like Jewish-American, African-American, etc. That was the old “melting pot” concept, “E Pluribus Unum”.
Even Jews born in British Mandate Palestine (1917-1948) volunteered to fight alongside the British in WWII. The Arabs sided with the Axis powers don't ya know...
This is how to fight Obamacare and its attendant shut down. Go to a national park, and if blocked, go around, under or through the blockade to have a public event. The veterans show the way. TEA Party satyagraha.
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