Posted on 06/07/2014 6:05:23 PM PDT by ClaytonP
My grandpa had a bird’s eye view of the D-Day landings, seventy years ago today. He flew tactical bombing missions, watching the invasion unfold beneath him. Compared to his earliest missions in ’43, it wasn’t that dangerous. The Luftwaffe had already been reduced to hit and run attacks, and couldn’t challenge the US Army Air Force. Somehow, despite a long life enjoying cigars, scotch whiskey, martinis and huge amounts of beef, he’s still alive at 91, but he’s not all there anymore. However, I like to think some of those memories linger in his mind, as they do for an ever shrinking number of WWII veterans.
Forty one years after my grandfather, I visited Normandy’s beaches with my family as a ten-year-old boy. We lived in Brittany at the time, which borders Normandy, so it wasn’t all that far from our place. In fact, some of the fiercest fighting took place in Brittany, particularly around St. Malo. Evidence of warfare was still very common in France at the time. Many of the building still showed bomb damage, and occasionally one would run across discarded equipment. As a boy, I was fascinated by the bunkers, spent shells and rockets and crater-pocked landscape. The beaches and countryside were a sober monument in themselves; looking out over the vast fields of graves in Normandy gives one a sense of the reality of the sacrifice. It also filled me with a feeling of pride for my country and the brave men in my family, some of whom never came home, who fought in the war,
I won’t get into the horror of what happened there, because it’s easy enough to imagine it oneself after seeing the broken concrete, craters, twisted metal and sheer cliffs. But I would like to ask, given what the US has become today, whether those volunteer veterans, like my grandfather, would have chosen to make that sacrifice. I don’t think so. There’s no way FDR could have sold that war with feminism and multiculturalism. My grandfather told me he fought against tyranny, and the naked aggression displayed by Tojo and Hitler. It wasn’t so that his great grandchildren could grow up to be despised minorities in the country of their birth. It definitely wasn’t so that his male descendants would be subordinated to some feminist imperative. If this had been the goal of the US war effort, American men would have put down their guns and walked away from it.
Given what the US has become after emerging from WWII as the sole superpower, it’s fair at this point to ask whether the young American men who made the ultimate sacrifice weren’t cheated, used and betrayed. It’s also fair to ask whether they should have even fought the war in the first place. If it means accepting some version of Michael Kimmel’s ideal society, I’d have to say it was all a big mistake. Now, I look back at my youthful pride with a feeling of sadness.
What a damn shame…
Of course it was worth it. No one ever said that after WW2, the USA would stay moral and righteous and on the right course forever. Ronald Reagan said freedom is never more than a generation away from extinction, and he was right. Those young men who died and were maimed on the beaches of Normandy, and in countless other battles of WW2, earned the freedom their generation enjoyed.
It's now time for Generation X and Generation.com to earn our freedom, and help the next generation get started. They, too, in time, will have to earn theirs. So it will go until the day comes, maybe sooner rather than later, that some generation refuses to earn their freedom, and instead waits for someone else to do the job for them. When that happens, and it's happening as we speak, the tyrants will move in and steal our freedom.
Yes, the sacrifices made by thousands of brave Americans at Normandy, Khe Sahn, Inchon, Belleau Wood, Gettysburg, King's Mountain, San Jacinto, 73 Easting, Fallujah, and so on, were worth it. Because they bought, even if only for a generation, the freedom their kids needed to keep our Republic going.
Scouts Out! Cavalry Ho!
airway should be air war ~ sorry about the typo. The software doesn’t like it, keeps changing it back unless I put in a “space”.
The Seabiscuit movie started off heralding FDR and leftism, it was bad.
isn’t that the truth. And it’s a truth many are afraid to admit.
‘This isn’t the Britain we fought for,’ say the ‘unknown warriors’ of WWII
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1229643/This-isnt-Britain-fought-say-unknown-warriors-WWII.html
Nearly 400,000 Britons died. Millions more were scarred by the experience, physically and mentally.
But was it worth it? Her answer - and the answer of many of her contemporaries, now in their 80s and 90s - is a resounding No.
(read the rest at the link.)
Did you read the book? Never trust Hollywood to be faithful to facts.
I read that “Unbroken” will be made into a movie, and it will be interesting to analyze the difference between the book and the movie - what is emphasized, massaged, and highlighted, vs. what is left out, softened, or glossed over.
That said, I am going to head to the library, to re-read Seabiscuit, and see if “FDR and leftism is heralded” in the original.
Perhaps I missed it when I first read it. I do sometimes ignore what doesn’t suit my tender sensibilities, particularly when engrossed in a remarkable story.
I read “Unbroken” and loved it, but the brutality of the Japanese has been known for many years.
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Yup exactly.
Although I didn’t expect this to become a “President Palin” thread....that ship has sailed people.
I'm absolutely positive he's not all there anymore, because if he was, he would slap you right across your quisling face.
For in asking this question, are you not licking the very sandals of the feminists and multiculturalists you claim to be against? Are you not serving their defeatist agenda, are you not throwing away those sacrifices you claim to be cherishing? Are you not seeking to spread despair, and encourage surrender?
What an evil, evil thing to do. You're not your father's son, that's for sure. Thank God he doesn't recognize what you've become - it would break his heart.
He was: 11th Armored Division, Thunderbolts.
I knew he had been there and done that, but he never talked about it, except to occasionaly tell some small humorous anecdote.
When I got back to the world and out of the Corps in 72 (6 year hitch), we kind of got a little bit lit at the kitchen table one night and traded some war stories.
I thought we had some rough times in I Corps, we were just babes in arms compared to what those guys lived and died with every single day.
It was good scotch and I finally understood why my Old Man HATED snow.
I miss my Dad; and I can’t even imagine having to go through what he went through, especially the liberation of the camps. We never talked about it again and I understand why.
My Dad never talked much about the war, either. He fought in CBI.
I got back to the world in ‘72, also. We took over USMC facilities in I Corps as you guys left.
Welcome Home.
America spills its blood and fortune to free Europe from the Nazis and then it allows itself to be captured by bearded barbarians.
After that, America follows Europe’s lead.
without the US supporting USSR—Hitler would have beaten Stalin. He would have built his Germania Superstate that would of—with time—after the death of Hitler—maybe had morphed into a democracy of some sort. It is hard to say. BUT when it comes to the USA—we won the war but lost the peace. The Cold War demands bankrupted us of treasure and ideas. The movements from Civil Rights, to Feminism to Gay Rights—corporatism, Progressivism—have sapped the life blood from the nation as sure as it did in the Civil War. It will take generations for us to recover.
Are you serious?
Of course Obama and his cabal are leftists...and much more. Of course they have an anger and indeed, IMHO, a hate for American values.
But tell me...are millions of citizens being rounded up and gassed?
Are jackbooted thugs by the hundreds of thousands kicking in every single door that so much as disagrees with these cretins as they did in Hitler’s day?
Are vast areas of the world being conquered by this or any other American president and their people’s being annihilated so we can have more “Lebens Raum?”
We are not experiencing that...and there are reasons for it.
Yes we have problems. And yes there are occasions where Jack Booted thugs kick in doors. But they are on a miniscule scale when compared to what Nazi Germany did. Or what Tojo did...not only to their own people, but to all of those nations whop stood in their way and so much as surrounded them.
We have a very serious and a very bad situation. I have been speaking out against it and fighting it now for decades.
But to imagine that what we are experiencing now is anything close to what the Nazis were actually doing, is just a misrepresentation of history.
No doubt, IMHO, if these power mongers got the chance they would try.
No doubt that we are doing some things, like abortion, that are just as wicked.
But we personally are no where close to experiencing what went on in Nazi Germany...and before it ever happens, we would experience something more like Kosovo, or Lebannon... because there are tens of million of people who are armed that will not allow it to happen in the end.
And there also is a God in Heaven, who will, IMHO, stand by us in such hours...should it come to that...just as He did with our founders.
That’s my two cents on it.
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