Posted on 06/05/2007 8:57:58 AM PDT by doug from upland
Doh. I have been corrected and should have paid better attention. The archive site from which I pulled the photo said Ike was talking to the Brits before they took off. I accepted that without looking very carefully. Actually, it would not have even taken careful looking. That photo is indeed of Americans — the patch is the 101st Airborne. Sorry, guys. I should have done better.
Market Garden never should have happened. It was a waste of good men. Montgomery was too timid - or war-weary - to take on an offensive like that.
I enjoyed BoB because of the accuracy. I watched the old 60s flick "Battle of the Bulge" with my Grandfather (who was actually there). I asked him what he thought and his comment was "It was a fine movie, but nobody looked cold enough". BoB got that part right, at least.
I still have a picture of Grandpa posing with his XO in thigh-high snow somewhere in the Ardennes. Both of the men have huge smiles on their faces, and I've always wondered what they were grinning about.
The New York Times?
And my favorite line of all from BoB, "How do I feel about being rescued by Patton? I'd feel real peachy about it, except for one thing. We didn't need to be f'ing rescued by Patton, you got that."
I suspect that *might* be a little bit of bravado, though. :-) If nothing else, Patton's breakthrough allowed them to get the wounded evacuated.
The other great line, “We’re paratroopers. We’re supposed to be surrounded.”
DDay..was the key to the securing of Germany...It isn’t
reported as much, but the DDay in the Pacific was the same
date..June 6, 1944. The invasion of Saipan and the
beginning of those Island hoppings culminated by the last
one, Okinawa...then the “Bomb”..and total surrender by
the Japs.....JK
November 14, 2006
The Smugness of the War’s Opponents
By Dennis Prager
In this week’s New York Times Book Review, a historian reviewing a major new work of 20th-century history, Oxford and Harvard Professor Niall Ferguson’s “The War of the World,” notes that “Ferguson argues that the Western powers should have gone to war in 1938, which would most likely have avoided much of the horror of World War II . . . . “
Imagine that. The New York Times publishes a favorable book review of a book arguing that a pre-emptive war in 1938 would have saved tens of millions of lives aside from preventing the Holocaust, “without parallel . . . the most wicked act in all history.”
You have to wonder if the Times’ editors and all their allies on the Left, who have spent the last four years mocking the very notion of pre-emptive war, read this review.
Whatever incapacity for self-doubt George W. Bush’s critics charge him with, it has been more than matched by his political enemies. They are as certain as human beings can be that the invasion of Iraq was wrong from the outset because no nation should ever engage in a pre-emptive war, since such wars, they contend, are inherently immoral, not to mention illegal.
They know that Saddam never had weapons of mass destruction, and they know that even if he were working on acquiring such weapons, he would never have used them or shared them with Islamic terrorists. They know this despite these facts:
Virtually every intelligence service believed that Saddam either had or was working on attaining WMD.
Saddam Hussein had already used biological weapons against his own people.
Saddam refused to allow UN inspectors unfettered access to Iraq, even when he had every reason to believe that America would attack him.
Saddam gave $25,000 to the families of Palestinian terrorists who blew up Israelis.
Saddam had already invaded two countries, attempting to eliminate one from the map (Kuwait) and killing a million in the other (Iran).
President Bush had very good reason to believe then, and we have very good reason to believe now, that Saddam was indeed seeking uranium from the African country of Niger.
Given these facts, George W. Bush believed that a pre-emptive strike was the moral thing to do, just as any moral person now understands it would have been moral to do against Hitler’s Germany in 1938.
Given the same facts, his critics were/are at least as certain that such a war has been wrong strategically and morally.
They now argue that obviously they are right.
But it is not so obvious. It is overwhelmingly likely that even if we had found WMD in Iraq, The New York Times, Michael Moore and nearly all college professors would have still opposed the invasion. After all, they would have argued, it was still a pre-emptive war and therefore wrong by definition; and besides, Saddam had nothing to do with 9/11.
Of course, the critics look right because we hardly seem to be winning the war in Iraq. But even here the critics are too smug. We have not won the war in Iraq because of something completely unforeseeable: widespread massacres of Iraqi civilians by other Iraqis and Muslims. We have never seen mass murder of fellow citizens in order to remove an outside occupier. No Japanese blew up Japanese temples in order to rid Japan of the American occupier. No Germans mass murdered German schoolchildren and teachers to rid Germany of the American, British, French and Soviet occupiers.
The level of cruelty and evil exhibited by those America is fighting in Iraq is new. Had Iraq followed any precedent in all the annals of resistance to occupation, America would likely have been victorious in Iraq. It may just be impossible, if one is morally bound not to kill large numbers of civilians, to fight those who target their own civilians and hide among them. But George W. Bush had no way to foresee such systematic cruelty.
With the election of a Democratic Congress and the reversion to the visionless “realists” of George W. Bush’s father’s administration, the critics are more certain than ever of their moral rectitude. But unless they disagree with Professor Ferguson’s assertion that a pre-emptive war in 1938 would have been the most moral thing the Western democracies could have done, they ought to show a little humility. Based on what was known at the time, George W. Bush made a moral choice. And he would have won were it not for something new in the annals of human depravity.
And would have helped their pal Uncle Joe dominate all of Europe.
THANK YOU AMERICA! Free Europeans don’t forget the heroes buried at Coleville-sur-Meer and St.James.
Nor the British and Canadian troops (the majority) who went ashore that day
Are you in France?
As a big history nut, my kids know all about things like this. On behalf of my entire family to the greatest generation:
Thank you from the bottom of our hearts!
THANK YOU is never eought to the brave men who fought and died so we can live today.
We just finished The “Longest Day”, and will watch “Saving Private Ryan” tomorrow. I will save ABTF and BoB for the weekend. Thanks for all the suggestions.
That is definitely the dumbest sentence that's been posted on this forum all week (but that's OK - it's only Tuesday)....beyond stupid.
(OK guys...hit the abuse button on this one also, if you like....sheesh)
If I weren’t computer illiterate, and had a scanner, I’d try it.
One thing I forgot to mention that has some historical interest is a German officer’s parade sword my Pop got near Cherbourg. The blade is inscribed, and on one side it refers to the “Kaiser Nicklaus II von Russland Chev. Regt” of, I presume, the Imperial German Army.
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