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Posted on 05/04/2005 10:02:16 PM PDT by SAMWolf
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 are acknowledged, affirmed and commemorated.
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| Our Mission: The FReeper Foxhole is dedicated to Veterans of our Nation's military forces and to others who are affected in their relationships with Veterans. In the FReeper Foxhole, Veterans or their family members should feel free to address their specific circumstances or whatever issues concern them in an atmosphere of peace, understanding, brotherhood and support. The FReeper Foxhole hopes to share with it's readers an open forum where we can learn about and discuss military history, military news and other topics of concern or interest to our readers be they Veteran's, Current Duty or anyone interested in what we have to offer. If the Foxhole makes someone appreciate, even a little, what others have sacrificed for us, then it has accomplished one of it's missions. We hope the Foxhole in some small way helps us to remember and honor those who came before us.
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Israel's greatest military commander since Judas Maccabeus -- David 'Mickey' Marcus -- was accidentally killed by one of his own troops.  Marcus was born on New York's Lower East Side on February 22, 1902. He was the fifth child of Mordecai and Leah Marcus, who had emigrated from Romania to escape the waves of antisemitism sweeping Eastern Europe at the end of the 19th century. Mordecai Marcus sold vegetables from a pushcart and eventually worked his way up to owning his own stall in the Washington Market. That enabled the family to move to Brooklyn, but then Mordecai died suddenly in 1910. Antisemitism was also very much alive in early-20th-century America. Michael, the oldest of the Marcus children, formed a self-defense group that protected elderly Jews from neighborhood street gangs. "Big Mike," as he was called, worked out daily. When young David started following his older brother around, and even sparring with him at the local gym, people started calling him "Little Mike," which soon was shortened to "Mickey." Mickey Marcus excelled in high school both as a student and an athlete. To his family's chagrin, he decided somewhere along the line that he wanted to go to the U.S. Military Academy. Marcus entered the academy in 1920, when Brig. Gen. Douglas MacArthur was superintendent. He became a standout athlete, winning letters in boxing and football, and graduated in 1924 as a second lieutenant of infantry. During his first assignment, on Governor's Island in New York Harbor, Marcus studied law at night school in the city and in 1927 married Emma Hertzenberg. His next duty assignment was to be Puerto Rico, but the newlyweds decided that they really did not want to live there. Marcus resigned his Regular commission and went to work as a law clerk in New York.  On a corridor wall in the Jewish Chapel of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point is displayed the above photo layout depicting Col./Commissioner David 'Mickey' Marcus at different stages in his military career. From left: Cadet Marcus, Class of '24. Marcus and roommate Lt. Charles Stevenson on Mickey's Wedding Day, 1927. Col. Marcus, February,1945. Marcus with Israeli Army, 948. A year after he resigned from the Regular Army, he received a doctorate from Brooklyn Law School. Between 1930 and 1934, Marcus was an assistant U.S. attorney in the Southern District of New York. One of his closest associates was future presidential candidate Thomas E. Dewey. When Fiorello La Guardia became mayor of New York on a reform ticket in 1934, he appointed Marcus deputy commissioner of corrections. One of Marcus' first actions was to personally lead a special police raid on the corruption-ridden and prisoner-controlled penitentiary on Welfare Island. In 1936, La Guardia appointed Marcus a temporary magistrate to help relieve the case backlog in the crowded Manhattan courts. That summer Marcus worked closely with Dewey in an operation that eventually led to the shutdown of Lucky Luciano's crime ring. Marcus had actually been running the department for five years when La Guardia finally appointed him commissioner of corrections in April 1940. Meanwhile, he had maintained a Reserve commission as a field artillery officer. In 1939, because of his legal experience, he was persuaded to transfer to the Judge Advocate General's Corps.  Then Chief of Department Edward Reilly and Parks Commissioner Henry Stern unveil a biographical plaque at playground ceremonies commemorating U.S. and Israeli military hero David 'Mickey' Marcus who headed Correction under Mayor LaGuardia. In 1940, Lt. Col. Marcus' National Guard unit, the 27th Infantry Division, was federalized and sent to Alabama. Marcus was then the unit's judge advocate. Although legal officers were not supposed to command troops in the field, Marcus managed to lead a unit of special troops during maneuvers in Louisiana in 1941. After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, the 27th Division deployed to Hawaii. There, Marcus organized and commanded a Ranger school, training some 8,000 men during the next year. Using his training experience as justification, Marcus tried to talk the Army into giving him a field command with a Ranger unit, but he was unsuccessful. In the spring of 1943, Marcus was posted back to the Pentagon to become chief of planning for the War Department's Civil Affairs Division (CAD), headed by Maj. Gen. John H. Hilldring. For most of the rest of the war, Marcus, now a full colonel, found himself on a whirlwind tour of the corridors of power. While at CAD, Marcus served as a legal and military government adviser at some of the war's most important Allied conferences. Those included Cairo in November 1943; Dumbarton Oaks, where the United Nations was born; and Teheran, Yalta and Potsdam, where the postwar world order was forged. According to the citation for his Distinguished Service Medal (an unusually high service decoration for a colonel), Marcus played a key role in the "negotiation and drafting of the Italian Surrender Instrument, the Instrument of Unconditional Surrender of Germany, and the international machinery to be used for the control of Germany after her total defeat."  Col. Marcus in Israel, 1948 Although locked into a general staff job, Marcus did figure out a way to make one trip to the front lines. In early May 1944, he convinced Hilldring to send him to London on temporary duty "to provide liaison and act as observer in the implementation of military government policies for France." At first Hilldring was pleased because Marcus managed to answer on the spot most of the civil affairs questions that usually wound up at the Pentagon. Then, in the second week of June, Hilldring realized that he had not heard from Marcus since the end of May. After a few transatlantic phone calls, Hilldring learned from Lt. Gen. Walter Bedell Smith that Marcus was "somewhere in France," having jumped on D-Day, June 6, with the 101st Airborne Division. Marcus used a very elastic interpretation of his orders from Hilldring, combined with the fact that he had been a fellow cadet at West Point with the 101st's commander, Maj. Gen. Maxwell Taylor (class of 1922), to get himself on a Curtiss C-46 in the first wave. Of all the soldiers who jumped with the 101st that day, only Marcus and one other had never jumped before. Once on the ground in Normandy, Marcus collected groups of the widely scattered paratroopers and organized them into patrols. He led several of those patrols himself, engaging in firefights with German units and, on one occasion, freeing a group of captured U.S. paratroopers. As the 101st regrouped over the next few days, Marcus finally bumped into Taylor, who asked him, "What the hell are you doing here?" Marcus characteristically replied, "Oh, just looking around." Back in Washington, a frustrated Hilldring finally had to issue the order: "Find Marcus. Arrest him if you have to--but send him back!" Shortly after that, Marcus was on a plane to the United States, still in his dirty field uniform.  Latrun Police Building Immediately after the end of the fighting in Europe, General Lucius D. Clay, commander of U.S. occupation forces in Germany, requested that Marcus be assigned to his staff. Clay's standing instructions at the time were that all senior officers in Germany were to visit the recently liberated Dachau concentration camp. As a civil affairs officer, Marcus was well-acquainted with Nazi wartime atrocities. But even that knowledge did not prepare him for the horrors he saw at Dachau. He had never been a Zionist, but now he started to rethink his position on a future Jewish state. During his tour in Germany, Marcus served as executive for internal affairs of the U.S. Group Control Council, then its acting chief of staff, and then the U.S. secretary general in occupied Berlin. Much of his time and energy was devoted to improving conditions for the vast numbers of displaced persons in Europe. Despite his anger over Nazi treatment of the Jews, at a White House conference Marcus argued strongly against adopting the drastic Morganthau Plan, which would have reduced postwar Germany to an agricultural state--one vast farmland. In early 1946, Hilldring managed to get Marcus back from General Clay, this time to head the Pentagon's War Crimes Division. Marcus was responsible for selecting the judges, prosecutors and lawyers for the major war crimes trials in Germany and Japan. He attended the Nuremberg Trials, where one of his main concerns was the complete documentation of Nazi atrocities for future generations. In 1946, the British government made Marcus an honorary officer of the Order of the British Empire, "in recognition of the distinguished service performed…in cooperation with British armed forces during the war." By then, he had been nominated for the rank of brigadier general five times. Nomination No. 6 came in early 1947, along with the offer of a coveted assignment as the military attaché at the U.S. Embassy in Moscow. He elected instead to return to civilian life and his law practice--but his respite from military service would be short.
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Afternoon! I found the bitty-Harley but, alas, she will have to wait on that. It is for children age 3 and up.
Well, remember, us Texas Women are sturdy. Bet she can ride at 1 - 1/2. How bout Christmas? :-)
So far, a couple of dozen of them have hit my filter. Must be nasty stuff.
Mostly sunny and 70 degrees in this foxhole. A perfect spring day.
On This Day In History
Birthdates which occurred on May 05:
1352 Ruprecht Roman catholic German king
1749 Jean-Frederic Edelmann composer
1813 Søren Kierkegaard Denmark, philosopher (founded Existentialism)
1818 Karl Marx philosopher (Communist Manifesto, Das Kapital)
1823 James Allen Hardie Brevet Major General (Union Army), died in 1876
1832 H H Bancroft historian, publisher (History of the Pacific States)
1833 Ferdinand von Richthofen German geographer/explorer
1846 Henryk Sienkiewicz Poland, author (Quo Vadis, Nobel 1905)
1849 Hambletonian Chester NY, greatest standardbred horse
1867 Nellie Bly [Elizabeth Cochran Seaman] journalist
1879 Symon Petlyura leader Ukraine (pogroms)
1883 Charles Bender only American Indian in baseball's Hall of Fame
1884 Wang Tjing-Wei premier China (1932-35)
1887 Lord Geoffrey Fisher of Lambeth archbishop of Canterbury
1894 Kit Guard Denmark, actor (El Diablo Rides, Kid Courageous)
1899 Freeman Gosden Richmond VA, radio actor (Amos-Amos 'n' Andy)
1900 Mervyn A Ellison British astronomer (spectrohelioscope)
1900 Spencer Tracy actor (Captians Courageous, Pat and Mike, Guess Who's Coming to Dinner....)
1903 James Beard US, culinary expert/author (Delights & Prejudices)
1907 Benny Baker St Joseph MO, actor (18 Again, Sting II, Thunderbirds)
1908 Rex [Reginald Carey] Harrison Huyton Lancashire England, actor (My Fair Lady, Doctor Dolittle, Cleopatra)
1910 William I Martin US pilot/Vice-Admiral (WWII)
1911 Phillip Edmund Clinton Manson-Bahr specialist in tropical medicine
1912 Alice Faye [Ann Jeanne Leppert] New York NY, actress (Barricade, King Kong, State Fair)
1913 Tyrone Power Cleveland OH, actor (Mark of Zorro, Alexander's Ragtime Band)
1922 Phil Gordon Meridian MS, actor/singer (Jasper-Bev Hillbillies)
1926 Ann B Davis Schenectady NY, actress (Bob Cummings Show, Brady Bunch)
1927 Pat Carroll Shreveport LA, comedienne/actress (Make Room for Daddy)
1930 Michael James Adams USAF pilot (X-15)
1938 Johnnie Taylor US gospel singer (I Believe in You)
1940 Eric Burdon Walker-on-Tyne England, rock singer (Animals-House of Rising Sun, War)
1942 Tammy Wynette Redbay AL, country singer (Stand by your Man)
1943 Michael Palin Sheffield Yorkshire England, comedian (Monty Python, Fish Called Wanda)
1944 John Rhys-Davies Salisbury Wiltshire England, actor (Sir Edward-The Quest, Sliders, Lord of the Rings)
1954 Peter Erskine jazz drummer (Weather Report)
1955 Robert Feld Nashville TN, National Scrabble Champion (1990)
1964 Heike Henkel German Federal Republic, world record indoor high jumper (1992)
1973 Tina Yothers Whittier CA, actresss (Jennifer-Family Ties)
1975 Christine Buschur Eagle River AK, Miss America-Alaska (1997)
Excellent read . . . and education on a fine Israeli Officer. What a contribution he made to the defense of Israel but to be struck down under such a simple security matter. An invaluable loss for their cause.
What they were so interested in, turned out, was a Navy LST, a Landing Ship Tank. Great huge ship, lots of American flags painted all over it, etc. Perhaps the Army did not know there was a US Navy.
Or maybe they did know.
Morning Glory
A certain talk radio host is doing one of his shills for Disneyland.
Oh boy
/sarcasm
[I had to erase my "caption" but I know you can well imagine what his thoughts are towards the RATs.]
I rarely do this but on my commute home, I had to switch to another channel (Larry Elder) as Hugh's show really tanked today . . . at least during the 4PM to 5PM segment. 50 rides on "It's a small World"? Gimme a break!
Thank you for your kind words. ;-)
That's the government for you!
78!? Cloudly and dreary here, mid 60's.
Good afternoon Mayor.
Great book and very good movie.
"You tell the men there are four ways of doing things on this ship: The right way, the wrong way, the Navy way, and my way. They do things my way, and we'll get along just fine."
Lt. Commander Philip Francis Queeg
We're getting a little busy since Mother's Day is this Sunday. Thanks for the heads up on the virus.
I have my own "holiday" to celebrate. ;-)
There are some really good books out about the 1948 war.
Good evening w.
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