Posted on 06/06/2012 10:53:12 AM PDT by SandRat
Normandy Speech: Ceremony Commemorating the 40th Anniversary of the Normandy Invasion, D-Day
We don’t expect anything from Obama.
2 things on the post
1 70th anniversary of the Battle of Midway has been largly ignored it was more significent than DDay IMO.
The Soldier is right. Actually the Russians were really the ones who defeated the Germans, they had already shattered the Grman Military by the time of the invasion.
We sped thing up but the Russians were going to defeat the Germans in any event.
If we had not invaded, the Germans could have withdrawn to a defensible line and held off the Russians for years. Plus their air force would not have been able to savage the German economy the way we did. Russians who reached Germany were astonished by the devastation of the German cities.
Here’s a beautiful tribute to D-day:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DdrvtiSmP1w&feature=em-share_video_user
My God, such a beautiful tribute.
We say “we will remember” and that “we will never forget”, but all too many do forget, all too many don’t even care.
If that tribute doesn’t make one pause and reflect on those that sacrificed, then they are not truly an American.
If that tribute doesn’t bring a tear to their eye, then they are not human.
That was incredibly beautiful... thank you for posting.
Thanks for posting
Casualties were actually comparatively light on D-Day. In the breakout campaign afterwards, most infantry companies suffered 100% plus casualties—some even exceeded 300%.
The fighting in the hedgerows afterwards was the real struggle, where the toughness of the Allied—and German (especially Waffen SS)—soldiers was truly tested. They came out pretty much evenly. The Germans ran out of infantry first.
And for the life of me, I can’t see the video-game and sports befuddled pansies of this rising generation taking on the equivalent of the Hitler Youth. Just no way.
This is a wonderful video you posted and the music and words are so touching. It even included 9/11.
I made a slideshow of D-Day a couple of years ago. The sky was black with aircraft and dark clouds, and the beach was covered with the wounded - and worse. May we never forget them.
Thank you for the awesome slide show! My father, David, served in CBI in WWII and served in the Korean War. These photos honor them all. May God bless our patriots and heroes past, present, and future. May We The People give our troops a new CIC in November. In my opinion, they certainly deserve better than what they have now.
I’m glad you liked the slideshow. Your Father was one of “The Greatest Generation” and I honor him too.
You make good points; in terms of casualties, etc. D-Day was insignificant in comparison to other battles. While the invasion of France is now touted as “getting a foothold in Europe”, the fact is that we had one a year before (in Italy), but couldn’t advance all the way up because of the high losses inflicted by “Smiling Albert” Kesselring’s defense (see Anzio, Monte Cassino).
The further we get from these events the more mythology replaces fact; today most Americans don’t know how the French resisted the invasion of their colonies in North Africa by Americans & the British. Hollywood portrayed it as the actions of a lone fanatical French officer, but the fact is they were a neutral territory with no interest in having the war in their backyard.
Seeing what this country has devolved into in the 70 years since that war, I wonder if the surviving veterans see any remnants of what they fought for.
“If we had not invaded, the Germans could have withdrawn to a defensible line and held off the Russians for years.”
By the time of the invasion Germany was done in the east; they were running out of men, ammunition, and supplies. Stalin wanted the invasion because he lost almost a whole generation of men; by 1944 the Soviets were advancing behind artillery barrages that leveled everything, and following up with ground troops increasingly made up of Far Eastern minorities - and even that was unstoppable for the Axis.
The armies in the West constituted a reserve that the Germans could have thrown into defending breakthroughs if their lines had been sufficiently shortened. Tactically the Germans were far superior to the Russians, as the defense on the Elbe showed.
Interesting to speculate how the war in Italy would have gone if Patton rather than Mark Clark had been in charge. Certainly the Texas Division wished he had been the commander.
The Germans were cooked either way, the reserves would have been chewed up certainly more Russians would have died but Stalin didn’t care. There were vastly out producing the germans and had gained control of the battlefield and the air over the battlefield.
Of course it helped that we supplied coupious amounts of trucks and soem airplanes (p-39) for ground attack to compliment the Il-2.
At best the war might have been prolonged. BTW Hitler was never inclined to give up territory to shorten up the lines that hastened the destruction of Army group center for example. See the decisions at the Kosun pocket and the Crimea for just 2 examples.
The German Army was destroyed at Kursk the rest was downhill from there.
“The armies in the West constituted a reserve that the Germans could have thrown into defending breakthroughs if their lines had been sufficiently shortened.”
The armies in the West were mostly the battered remnants of units that had been ravaged in the east. Even the Battle of the Bulge was a skirmish in contrast to Kursk, Stalingrad, Leningrad, or Kharkov. By the end of the war the Soviets had nothing but time; they were fighting on someone else’s land.
Patton achieved results with high casualties; in the end the geography in Italy was as much an enemy as the Germans, and I don’t know what else could have been achieved there.
Patton was a brilliant man; his autobiography was great.
The Wehrmacht was the best organized army in the war. Even with scrubs they were able to mount a winter offensive in the West. If those men and equipment had been available to use in the East, the Russian January Offensive would not have moved so quickly. Again, the Germans were better tacticians than we or the Russians, and detailed studies of their defenses on the Oder show this. It was a bit like Lee’s defense of Richmond .
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