Posted on 06/04/2019 5:50:35 AM PDT by Kaslin
In my capacity as a certified, government-inspected old coot, I have taken particular interest in the bubbling excitement over the 75th anniversary of D-Day. It takes me back -- not to D-Day itself, when I was in knee pants, but to the 18th anniversary thereof in 1962. Darryl Zanuck's "The Longest Day" brought to stirring cinematic life on that occasion Cornelius Ryan's D-Day book of the same title.
I still find great satisfaction in Zanuck's film, but here's what I remember about 1962. We -- well, a lot of us -- who went to see it wore coat and tie or heels. It seemed the thing to do. As the house lights went down, the sound system roused us with "The Star-Spangled Banner" -- the real one, with trumpets and drums and no swaying hyper-inflected nightclub singers. We in the house rose as one, with hands over hearts. Many sang. It was a big deal, in keeping with the occasion celebrated and the sacrifice required to liberate Europe from evil.
By coincidence, the other day, I learned from The New York Times the present locus of evil in the world. Times columnist Maureen Dowd identified the attorney general of the United States, William Barr, as the "perfect villain" of the Mueller report saga. More than a mere villain, it seems: "devious-devising," "crooked-counseling" and, at the end of the day, "diabolical."
I stared at that last one. I continue to stare. Barr, by Dowd's account, is diabolical, as if glowering before a Salem tribunal. He revealed his horns, it appears, in his hourlong CBS interview with Jan Crawford last week. We were hungering -- weren't we? -- for an account of Donald Trump's knavery. What did we get? Barr's insistence that evidence didn't support unconstitutional behavior on the president's point. Grrrrrr. Snarl.
To this we have come in our national life since 1962. Honest differences of viewpoint are inherently dishonest: as viewed from at least one side. The rope -- get the rope! As Barr commented to Crawford: "We live in a hyper-partisan age, where people no longer really pay attention to the substance of what's said but as to who says it and what side they're on and what its political ramifications are." "The Star-Spangled Banner" -- who'd leap to his feet for it now?
Possibly more Americans than we would suppose. What I am inclined to call D-Day nostalgia has its heartening side. And why not? There was no fun in Operation Overlord. You were likely to get your head blown off. Many did. But many more kept coming and fighting in the face of it all. And they won! They won! Stephen Ambrose, in his own D-Day book, quotes Sgt. John Ellery of the 16th Regiment, 1st Division, after Omaha Beach: "The first night in France I spent in a ditch beside a hedgerow ... But I felt elated ... I was ten feet tall ... I had made it off the beach and reached the high ground ... I had walked in the company of very brave men."
It was once upon a time more natural -- say, in 1962 -- to applaud courage and sacrifice than, culturally speaking, it soon became. Many of us certified old coots are glad we were around then. We jumped to our feet for "The Star-Spangled Banner." America was beautiful. Ditto, freedom. Ditto, the idea of surrendering human existence for the well-being of others. The beauty was paradoxical: Death turned into life, suffering into fulfillment, battlefield noise into the quiet of peace. Something holy was in it -- something the very reverse of satanic.
Which is perhaps why D-Day nostalgia -- evidenced by all the excitement of the last reunion of the survivors -- finds, it would seem, a secure place among the victims of the fear and explosive emotions of the past half-century when it became necessary, seemingly, to hate and despise fellow Americans, to detect on their garments the fumes of sulfur.
Here's to the boys of Pointe du Hoc and Omaha Beach and the whole panoply of destruction that lives in an admiration that gives hope of eventual recovery from the wasting disease of hatred.
Oh, say, we can see -- never mind the barriers so many work to place in our sightlines.
You might enjoy D-Day Through German Eyes
Sorry to say, both Cornelius Ryan's book and Darryl Zanuck's The Longest Day film versions dropped the ball on Rudder's Rangers assault to silence the gun on the cliffs at Pointe du Hoc. While both the book and film showed the German cannons absent from the empty bunkers, they did not go on to the actual destruction of said by the Rangers who found them inland from the coastline.
So, when Fabian's Ranger character in the film says, "You mean... we come up all this way... for nothing?" it leaves the idea that the whole attack was for nothing. Not so, destroying those guns inland kept them from shelling our troops and possible making D-Day a disaster.
I read the book when it came out in 1959 and knew immeadiately that Ryan was wrong as my late father was friends with James Earl Rudder who commanded the 2nd Ranger Battalion assault troops on D-Day. So, while my father got the truth from the man on the scene, Ryan and Zanuck both dropped the ball in their efforts.
Otherwise the book and the film are great with few actual errors, but as they say, "You can't have it perfect all the time!"
The “Big Red One” also had some good D-Day scenes.
The rangers did in fact reconnoiter and find the guns. However the guns were in field storage and yet to be mounted for use.
At the moment the “we came all their way for nothing” was uttered, it was true.
Pretty good! But your dad was lucky for a few years. I was lucky for decades!
Still one of my favorite movies. My sixth grade teacher was in the 101st and he landed on D-Day. That Red Buttons character that hung on the steeple all night really happened as well as that guy who landed in the well.
I was born in 1960. DDay is to a child born today as the inauguration of Grover Cleveland was to me.
I will admit, I don’t know much about Grover Cleveland.
My point is the as time goes by these events which meant so much to my parents, and then to me through “contact” will mean little more than civil war battles to my grandkids.
I honor and respect those men. I have no possible way to imagine the terror of that day—and I have little desire to do so. However, I don’t expect my children to hold that same degree of reverence. They have their own war stories and moments of terror.
No one I knew who was on the beaches at Normandy (on either side) ever referred to it as “holy.” In fact, one or two of them made note of the absence of any sane God at the time.
Let’s not make it what it wasn’t. It was a brutal full frontal attack that was won with brute force. There wasn’t much choice. But I don’t think God had anything to do with it.
I know a lot of young men and women who have served, or are serving. Your estimation of the country’s young is distorted by the bullshit, one-sided stories you are reading on FR.
Sure they whine a lot...but who do you think are driving the ambulances and police cars you see? Who are flying the Jets you see overhead? Who are fighting those wars in the Middle East?
You cannot just look at a couple of dopes on TV or Facebook and make judgement.
Before that, the Commies loved Hitler, when he signed the Non-Aggression Pact with the Soviet Union. Many think only "right-wingers", like Charles Lindbergh were anti-interventionist, but many on the Left were as well, at least until Operation Barbarossa.
I know they didn’t think it was Holy. I was talking about the act, the act of sacrificing yourself for others. The British, Canadian and American soldiers believed they were doing this for their families, their countrymen and their country. If they had only been thinking of themselves, a few years in a jail cell for refusing orders would probably have been safer.
They were acting in a manner exactly as Jesus did for us.
Anyone interested in reading the Cornelius Ryan book The Longest Day the movie was based on can download a free Pdf version here:
https://www.bookyards.com/en/book/details/16305/Longest-Day-June-6-1944#
I tend to think more pragmatically. I think most of them would have traded their spots on the Higgins boats for a jail cell at the moment.
Bump
Ha!....my entire service was spent in Germany chasing Frauliens and drinking beer. Oh and sitting atop a tank on occasion. No one fired a shot so it was time to leave. Grenada happened two months after I left the army. I was a peacetime soldier. Heck, if I rotated out two months later, I could have joined the VFW! Hooyah!
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