Posted on 06/06/2007 5:12:35 AM PDT by abb
Amazing...notice that the word “quagmire” doesn’t appear in the article..despite the 3,000 KIA, and the “failure” to land only half of the needed material.
I’m putting The Longest Day on when I get home tonight.
One day’s battle in WWI on the western front - OVER 1,000,000 (ONE MILLION) DEAD!!!! IN ONE DAY!!!!
For the people who have lost sons and daughters, yes it is a tragedy. But taken overall, in context, the casualty list is amazingly small.
I’m putting on The Longest Yard....ooops, the wrong longest!
That depends... is it the original Longest Yard, with Burt Reynolds, or the remake of Longest Yard, also with Burt Reynolds?
On this day in history, my dad was with Mark Clark and the 5th Army helping to liberate the city of Rome from the Axis powers
Not quite. The Battle of Somme in WWI on July 1st 1916, the British suffered 57,470 casualties, including 19,240 dead in 1 day. But by the end of the battle Feb 24 1917, their was over 1 million dead.
C'mon, I think that's a bit of a stretch.
Two of the deadliest battles of The Great War were Verdun and the Somme.
Verdun killed and wounded around a million, but that was over the course of nearly a year.
At the Somme, Britain's worst losses were 20,000 killed and 30,000 wounded on the first day. Ultimately, nearly a third of a million men combined (English, French and German) were killed and twice that many wounded.
The Great War was truly barbaric beyond words, but a million killed in one day? That's a stretch.
Channel 4 on XM is running their programming as if it was June 6, 1944, including breaking news interuptions, prayers by major religious leaders in the US and the like. Kind of amazing to hear the announcer talking about prayers, God, and NBC, all at once.
God bless your father - we owe him and his a debt that we can never repay.
My next-door neighbor passed away four years ago - on this day, 1944, he was in a landing craft, going ashore at Normandy. I made sure that my daughter got to meet him, got to hear some of his experiences, and got a better understanding of what that generation did for those of us that weren’t born yet.
You can listen to the day unfold as it did on the radio on June 6, 1944. My internet radio station is streaming the entire day's broadcast as it happened. Go to:
D-Day is what the first day of any amphibious landing was called.
The code name was Operation Overlord.
You'd think an educational channel would do the research to learn this.
I wonder how bad LBJ would have screwed this up if Pearl Harbor had happened and Churchill asked for help? For that matter, Eisenhower never would have been trusted to give the “go ahead” for the invasion. Probably the most important decision of the 20th century.
That said, it is a day to honor those who went ashore on that fateful day in 1944 and literally saved the world from the despotism and insanity of Hitler and the Third Reich. My Dad was among them, in the 79th Infantry that went ashore on Utah beach. As much as I'd ask him, he'd never talk about it, except once, when I asked him what he saw as he waded ashore in the choppy and chilly surf, he said "Debris and bodies." Not the kind of thing one wants to recall, I imagine.
BTT
Historic amnesia bump.
That's a strange and unhistorical comment. If the Free world was indeed resigned to defeat then it would have been defeated in 1940.
Half the forces at D-Day were Canadian, UK or 'Commonwealth' (India, Australia and many others). Half the forces in Italy on 6th June were Canadian, UK or Commonwealth, also Polish and French. Most of the forces in Burma were UK or Commonwealth. The only thing the Free World were resigned to was a long struggle.
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