Canada Ping!
Posted on 11/08/2013 4:22:12 AM PST by Squawk 8888
MONTREAL — Maj. Gustave (Guy) Bieler blew up munitions trains, disrupted communications and generally sowed chaos among the German forces in the critical months preceding the D-Day invasion of France that led to the liberation of Europe in the Second World War.
But the Allied saboteur was a mystery for many years to his own daughter. She had no memories of him growing up. As a child, she only knew him as an ever-present picture in the family home, a pile of medals that included some of France and Britain’s highest decorations, and the solemn declarations of dignitaries such as the Governor General that her dad was a hero.
Jacqueline Bieler was little more than three years old when her father parachuted into wartime France to wage war from the shadows as a member of the Special Operations Executive, an elite outfit that then-British prime minister Winston Churchill ordered to “set Europe ablaze.”
“We didn’t get much information,” Jacqueline Bieler recalled in a telephone interview from her Ottawa home. “We had certain generic stuff, like ’your father was a hero.’ That didn’t satisfy me. I wanted to know who this man was.”
It took her much of her life to gradually piece together a portrait of her father, who has streets and plaques in his honour in Europe, as well as a lake in his name on Baffin Island.
What she discovered in research that eventually led her to write a book was a man of intelligence, culture and principle who delighted his friends with his mischievous sense of humour and love of lively debate. Years after he died at the hands of the Nazis, people would still swell with emotion as they talked of him.
(Excerpt) Read more at news.nationalpost.com ...
Canada Ping!
Wow.
I am speechless.
Thank you Lord for men like Major Guy Bieler and those who served with him.
If Hollywood had two brain cells to rub together they’d make films about people like this. And there are hundreds more if they’d just get off their collective dead a$$e$ and go find them. Comic book remakes (with literally unbelievable special effects) just don’t cut it anymore with me.
But there’s no one left in Hollyweird with the CREDIBILITY to portray such people. It’s why war films were so good half-a-century or more ago, because many of the actors had served. Today, you just have these shallow, pampered pretty boys with attitude and nary a clue.
That might encourage people to rise up in America. Can’t have that happening, can we?
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