Why I fear this spoilt generation would lack the spirit for an epic endeavour like D-Day

The London Daily Mail ^ | June 2, 2014 | Dominic Sandbrook

[2ndDivisionVet]

Any standards, Mary Soames led a genuinely extraordinary life. She was born in 1922, the youngest daughter of Winston Churchill. In May 1940, when her father became Prime Minister, she was just 17.

As Hitler’s forces massed on the other side of the Channel, Mary was at her father’s right hand. She went with him to Quebec in 1943 to meet the U.S. president Franklin D. Roosevelt, and two years later she accompanied him to Potsdam, where she met Harry Truman and Joseph Stalin.

Her death on Sunday at the age of 91 closed another link with World War II, perhaps the most famous page in our nation’s history.

That it came days before we commemorate the 70th anniversary of the most audacious operation of that terrible struggle, D-Day, only made her passing all the more poignant.

As her son, the Tory MP Nicholas Soames, remarked, Lady Soames was ‘part of that generation which is passing’. The timing, he thought, was ‘extraordinary — just before the anniversary of the Normandy landings, Churchill’s last surviving child dies. It is the great swing of history’(continued)

[2ndDivisionVet]

Does he have a point? I've often thought that we couldn't fight a world war or even a Korean War size conflict with the society we now have. Don't get me wrong, many of today's youth would've done just fine, but enough of them? The sacrifices my late father and his cohorts endured for years at a time would surely be too much for this pampered generation.

[bandleader]

GOD Rest Her!Churchill’s last child!!We shall NEVER see the like of him again!!

[Jeff Chandler]

Instead of the Greatest Generation, we now have the Butt Humping Generation.

[BitWielder1]

There are still good people in the pampered generation, but we may very well end up throwing our top 5% of young men into the meat grinder. Again.

[Biggirl]

Sadly, it will take another 9/11 incident to scare this generation into REALITY.

[ansel12]

The last 9/11 didn’t do much, we never got the big enlistment ferver from that generation’s males, and nothing else really changed.

[Chgogal]

I have to admit that there are a lot of whiny superficial young people out there who panic when they don’t have their smart phones in their sweaty palms every second of the day. How the heck would they get past basic?

[AnnGora]

If the first 9/11 didn’t do it, another one won’t either. Complacency and appeasement is all this generation knows.

[cripplecreek]

Considering the fact that we haven’t tried to win a war since WWII, I wouldn’t back a D-Day style invasion either.

At the very least I want to see a couple weeks of carpet bombing first just to indicate that we intend to defeat an enemy.

[Biggirl]

I stand by my positon.

[2ndDivisionVet]

The “next 9/11” will be a nuclear detonation which will make the WTC & Pentagon look like an ice cream social.

[wetphoenix]

[Biggirl]

You got it and this 5 terrorists trade off is no help.

[varyouga]

There are plenty of young men (and women) today willing to fight and devote hours for a real cause.

Unfortunately, everything is corrupt and there is nothing left to fight for besides saving/feeding your own ass. This is far from the same country that it was in the 1940s.

Why would someone serve under idiots like Barry to be used as cannon fodder for special interests?

[SevenofNine]

I hate to say it I think it is true some in my generation Generation X are lazy perhaps millnauls and Y generation

[SpinnerWebb]

We shall NEVER see the like of him again!!

We are going to have to... or we will perish from the Earth.

[SkyDancer]

~ And If 0bama Was President On Dec. 7, 1941 ~

[pgkdan]

The majority of Americans today are as good and decent as any other generation but they’re in a stupor. I wish I knew how to rouse them...to pull them away from American Idol and make them face what’s happening to our country before it’s too late.

[Brad from Tennessee]

When I count the number of times our local Guard unit has been in war zones since 2003 I tend to believe Americans will still rise to the occasion. After D-Day and the liberation of France the rate of desertion of U.S. troops in Europe rose to unprecedented levels. As a young Vietnam veteran in the 1970’s and 1980’s many conversations I had with World War II vets invariably led to smug statements about how “Vietnam was not a real war.” One old vet told me any American who in the Vietnam war was a “fool and a sucker.”

The reason the 82nd Airborne found itself surrounded during the Ardennes Offensive of 1944 was because entire U.S. units were surrendering en masse. In one case 7,500 American soldiers lay down their weapons together and surrendered.

Every generation worries that their children and grandchildren, who in most cases have had an easier life, may not be up to dealing with a national emergency of epic proportion. But somehow they always rise to the occasion.

[2ndDivisionVet]