Posted on 06/06/2016 4:39:03 AM PDT by MNJohnnie
NORMANDY BEACHHEAD, June 16, 1944 – I took a walk along the historic coast of Normandy in the country of France.
It was a lovely day for strolling along the seashore. Men were sleeping on the sand, some of them sleeping forever. Men were floating in the water, but they didn’t know they were in the water, for they were dead.
The water was full of squishy little jellyfish about the size of your hand. Millions of them. In the center each of them had a green design exactly like a four-leaf clover. The good-luck emblem. Sure. Hell yes.
I walked for a mile and a half along the water’s edge of our many-miled invasion beach. You wanted to walk slowly, for the detail on that beach was infinite.
The wreckage was vast and startling. The awful waste and destruction of war, even aside from the loss of human life, has always been one of its outstanding features to those who are in it. Anything and everything is expendable. And we did expend on our beachhead in Normandy during those first few hours.
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For a mile out from the beach there were scores of tanks and trucks and boats that you could no longer see, for they were at the bottom of the water – swamped by overloading, or hit by shells, or sunk by mines. Most of their crews were lost.
You could see trucks tipped half over and swamped. You could see partly sunken barges, and the angled-up corners of jeeps, and small landing craft half submerged. And at low tide you could still see those vicious six-pronged iron snares that helped snag and wreck them.
On the beach itself, high and dry, were all kinds of wrecked vehicles. There were tanks that had only just made the beach before being knocked out. There were jeeps that had been burned to a dull gray. There were big derricks on caterpillar treads that didn’t quite make it. There were half-tracks carrying office equipment that had been made into a shambles by a single shell hit, their interiors still holding their useless equipage of smashed typewriters, telephones, office files.
There were LCT’s turned completely upside down, and lying on their backs, and how they got that way I don’t know. There were boats stacked on top of each other, their sides caved in, their suspension doors knocked off.
In this shoreline museum of carnage there were abandoned rolls of barbed wire and smashed bulldozers and big stacks of thrown-away lifebelts and piles of shells still waiting to be moved.
In the water floated empty life rafts and soldiers’ packs and ration boxes, and mysterious oranges.
On the beach lay snarled rolls of telephone wire and big rolls of steel matting and stacks of broken, rusting rifles.
On the beach lay, expended, sufficient men and mechanism for a small war. They were gone forever now. And yet we could afford it.
We could afford it because we were on, we had our toehold, and behind us there were such enormous replacements for this wreckage on the beach that you could hardly conceive of their sum total. Men and equipment were flowing from England in such a gigantic stream that it made the waste on the beachhead seem like nothing at all, really nothing at all.
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A few hundred yards back on the beach is a high bluff. Up there we had a tent hospital, and a barbed-wire enclosure for prisoners of war. From up there you could see far up and down the beach, in a spectacular crow’s-nest view, and far out to sea.
And standing out there on the water beyond all this wreckage was the greatest armada man has ever seen. You simply could not believe the gigantic collection of ships that lay out there waiting to unload.
Looking from the bluff, it lay thick and clear to the far horizon of the sea and beyond, and it spread out to the sides and was miles wide. Its utter enormity would move the hardest man.
As I stood up there I noticed a group of freshly taken German prisoners standing nearby. They had not yet been put in the prison cage. They were just standing there, a couple of doughboys leisurely guarding them with tommy guns.
The prisoners too were looking out to sea – the same bit of sea that for months and years had been so safely empty before their gaze. Now they stood staring almost as if in a trance.
They didn’t say a word to each other. They didn’t need to. The expression on their faces was something forever unforgettable. In it was the final horrified acceptance of their doom.
If only all Germans could have had the rich experience of standing on the bluff and looking out across the water and seeing what their compatriots saw.
Pyle would be shocked by the turds we have running the show now.
Pyle’s generation had a vast storehouse of accumulated cultural and moral attitudes that have been used up, worn away, squandered and denegrated by the generations that have followed him.
The leftists of his era took most of Christian morals and ethics as a given, instead of a hard earned cultural heritage to be fostered, cherished, and built upon.
We have been reaping the rewards of using up that cultural accumulation of moral precepts, courage, and good will.
It is time to start to build it back up, but those who benefited most from it are working hard to destroy all of it.
I can’t think of anything to add to your observations.
I ask the Free Traitors™ who will make our “stuff” that is expandable in time of war after we de industrialize the USA? So wars are never going to be fought again like that? Really? Don’t count on it.
You read this piece and think ....
Obama and retinue will be gone some day but his voters will remain amongst us ...
What the hell happened?
“What the hell happened?”
100 years of “progressivem”.
100 years of attacks on Christianity.
100 years of worship of the State as the arbiter of what is good or evil.
100 years of attacking the Constitution as a dusty, archaic limit on the ability of “the government” to do good things for all.
100 years of “progressives” taking over the education system, the entertainment industry, the media, with the express purpose of advancing “progressive” ideals as a way to “make a difference”.
That is what happened, and why we are where we are.
Ernie Pyle was killed by enemy fire on April 18, 1945, while covering the invasion of Okinawa.
Pyle’s Generation (my father’s, too!) forgot what brought them there and what made them hard as nails: the discipline of poverty and faith. When they raised their children, too many forgot those lessons and spoiled their children, forgetting how to say “no” and believing that money and gifts were more adequate than time actually spent with their kids.
The “Greatest Generation” is greatly responsible for the excesses of the Boomer Generation and the things they spawned. Hope the Trump revolt reveals enough of us who were raised correctly by the “Greatest” and that we can prevail over the spoiled brat Boomers.
Yes, we are suffering the ills of affluence.
I read one of Ernie Pyle’s books about the war in Italy fifty five years ago. It was brutal, but true. It is an unforgettable book.
One of the stories was of the B-17 bomber crews who flew from North Africa over southern Europe. The crews completed their required number of missions and were being sent stateside. As soon as they had a plane load of several successful crews the plane takes of for the USA, crashes on takeoff, killing everyone on board.
read
War is not a “waste”. What is a waste is tyranny, the lust for power and control over others, the fanatical hatred of other races and religions than yours, and unbridled greed.
Thus it can be distilled into a simple thing: deploring war instead of the people that cause it is like blaming guns, instead of the criminals who misuse them.
If you just try to take away guns, you end up just disarming those who want to protect themselves from criminals, who can always get guns.
And if you try to “outlaw” war, as did the idealists in the modern iterations of the Geneva convention, you just force those people who defend themselves against tyrants and fanatics, to carry out war without calling it war.
I cannot accept the premise that WAR is a WASTE.
WAR has a purpose. It’s to set right the tyrants who try to destroy, manipulate, control and kill.
Without WAR .. what kind of world would we really be living in today ..????????
The takeaway is that FDR, while fully aware that the US was unprepared for war, was determined to get the US prepared for war, and to prevent the fall of Britain which, immediately after the Fall of France (May, 1940) and long afterward, seemed inevitable. The post-Dunkirk British Army was stripped of almost all its heavy equipment, and was short of small arms as well. And beyond that, German U-boats were grinding down the Royal Navy and merchant marine, threatening starvation in Britain.
- 1941: Fighting the Shadow War:
- A Divided America in a World at War
- Marc Wortman (2016)The isolationists were a very powerful influence in America. I had known that FDR blacklisted Charles Lindberg from service during the war, but had not known how very influential Lindberg had been in opposition to FDR’s policies. FDR’s policies, in fact, were impeachable offenses about as outrageous as Obama’s. His policies risked war with Germany when Germany was the dominant military power, and when Americans at large were no more enthusiastic about going to war than the British had been when they cheered - and they did cheer - Neville Chamberlain’s announcement of “Peace in our time.”
Upon Hitler’s June, 1941 invasion of the USSR, not just Hitler but everyone else but the Soviets thought that Hitler would dominate the USSR within a couple of months. This would mean Hitler’s access to oil in the Caucus, and to Ukraine’s wheat production. But FDR’s right hand man Harry Hopkins - the man actually lived in the White House - was sent to Britain, and from there he asked FDR if he should go to Russia to find out what was what. Stalin convinced Hopkins of the fact that the USSR was far tougher than anyone else was giving it credit for and, with American aid, would be able to fight for years. FDR went to where a shipment of P-40s and B-17s was about to embark for British use against Rommel, and ordered the planes to be uncrated, assembled, and flown northwest to Russia.
But the thing that struck me the most was the way the FDR Administration fell off the tightrope it was walking to help the British escort its convoys, check Japanese ambitions in the Pacific, and stay out of actual fighting until it had more military equipment - especially destroyers - to work with. The US had leverage over Japan in Japan’s need for imports of scrap steel and of aviantion gasoline. Japan had leverage over the US primarily in the fact that the US did not have enough military assets in the Pacific because of its commitment to the Atlantic. FDR wanted to pressure Japan, but not to precipitate Japanese military action. Foggy Bottom exceeded FDR’s orders, overplayed the US hand in the process, and put so much pressure on Japan that they acted. Acted in the knowledge that they were taking a long-shot gamble. The US ambassador to Japan knew full well that that would be the result - and that the Japanese would follow through to the bitter end, fanatically.
FDR wanted war with Germany - but not too soon. He did NOT want war with Japan at the same time, and was dismayed that painful military defeats in the Pacific were inevitable for some time, before a US military buildup could allow offensive operations in the Pacific while still aiding Britain and the USSR. The Axis pact between Japan and Germany (and Italy) was aimed at the US electorate, to make clear that we would face a two-front war if we attacked Germany or Japan. That was more slanted toward the Germans than the Japanese, in the sense that Japan feared a US embargo, not a US attack. Hitler was not obligated by treaty to declare war on the US, since the Japanese themselves attacked, not the US. But Hitler had bitterly resented US aid to Britain, especially US escorting of ships to Britain. And Hitler was not one to have war declared on him, which he would have considered inevitable.
And of course, the immediate result was the sinking of (unacknowledged at the time) 300 ships in US coastal waters by German U-Boats - for the loss, also unacknowledged by the administration, of zero U-boats.
War is the father of all things said the ancient Greeks.
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