Posted on 05/31/2014 6:39:51 AM PDT by rktman
If I asked you, as we mark the 70th anniversary of D-Day, to sum up that battle in one word, what would it be? For me, it would be “courage.”
Courage means going forward, into the unknown, with no guarantee of success. It means moving out of your comfort zone and being willing to act boldly when the situation requires it. Without it, you couldn’t storm the beaches in France, or accomplish your mission in the face of terrorist attacks.
Courage is built into the DNA of the American character.
(Excerpt) Read more at townhall.com ...
A visit to Omaha Beach several years ago was truly an eye opener. How any soldier got off that beach is a miracle. The German vantage point above the wide beach was superior. Determination, faith and grit got our guys to safety. They never quit. It is a shame now that the politicians on the left have a builtin inclination to quit and take the easy way. Could you fathom Barry Obama in charge on June 6, 1944??
I got to thinking the other day that I don't recall reading much about Allied airpower being used to suppress the Krautenheimers atop all those high points. I'd think that constant strafing runs would have forced their heads down.
Also Courage is not hereditary as this author implies. Courage is an individual trait not a collective trait.
The article runs so far off base that you forget at the end what his point was at the beginning.
You can't compare the courage of a soldier under fire with any other human action. Maybe the courage of going into a burning building to rescue someone you don't know, but not much else in this world can be compared to what the soldiers on the beaches of Normandy faced.
Kinda felt that way too. The title and first couple of paragraphs are maybe where it should have ended. I’m pretty sure that not everybody going ashore was being “courageous”. Some had no choice but performed well despite the overwhelming position and field of fire the opposition held. Bless them anyway because they did do what they did. I’m sure the fear factor and the pucker factor were off the scale.
While I am not an overall fan of Eisenhower I applaud the courage it took for him to give the “GO” signal in spite of all the negatives he faced. The troops were magnificent, all of them. Mostly 18-20 year old fresh from basic training and without any combat experience, so to speak. America and the allies finest hour.
Most of these "men" were just out of high school and some had dropped out of high school and lied about their ages just for the privilege of going to war.
These days you are still considered a "child" until you reach the age of 26. This metrosexual millenium generation has no idea what it means to grow up. My parents generation had to grow up really fast and under horrible circumstances.
The courage of the WWII generation had nothing to do with this virtue being built into their DNA. That is preposterous. It was drilled into their character by hard work and hard times. It was instilled in them by their churches and the faith and the morals they were taught at church and in the public schools.
Unfortunately, the allied bombing prep of the beach defenses went largely perpendicular from the coast-inland instead of parrallel along the beaches.
Courage means going forward, into the unknown, with no guarantee of success. It means moving out of your comfort zone and being willing to act boldly when the situation requires it. Without it, you couldn’t storm the beaches in France, or accomplish your mission in the face of terrorist attacks.
Courage is built into the DNA of the American character. It took courage for millions of immigrants to leave home and come to America in search of a better life. It required courage to move west, to face the open frontier, to risk lives and families to acquire a piece of the American Dream.
And it takes courage to stand up for what you know is right. For example, on Oct. 18, 1986, President Ronald Reagan was meeting in Reykjavik, Iceland, with Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev. The purpose: to broker an arms-control pact that would end the deadly standoff of mutual assured destruction between the United States and the Soviet Union.
But just as the deal was about to be struck, Gorbachev looked across the table at Reagan, smiled, and said, “This all depends, of course, on you giving up SDI” (the Strategic Defense Initiative). Well, missile defense was one thing that Ronald Reagan would never give up.
“Reagan had everything to gain everything in the eyes of the world if he had accepted the Reykjavik deal,” Peggy Noonan wrote in “When Character Was King,” her Reagan biography. “He would have been celebrated by history, known the pleasure of having given the world a gift of extraordinary and undreamed-of progress. … But he wouldn’t do it. He didn’t think it was right. And because he didn’t do it, the Soviet Union finally fell.”
Now, leave Iceland and turn the calendar back 31 years to the evening of Dec. 1, 1955. We’re in Montgomery, Alabama. Buses are carrying people home from work. On one bus all the seats are filled, including the section behind the rear doors, the only place blacks are allowed to sit.
Four white men board. The driver calls out to the four black passengers seated behind the white section. “Get up,” he tells them. “Let the white man have those seats.” Three do as they’re told. But the fourth doesn’t budge. The other passengers turn and stare in stunned silence.
Rosa Parks is defying the unwritten, centuries-old code of racial subservience. She is also defying Alabama law. The driver summons a policeman, who arrests Parks.
Viewed from one perspective, Ronald Reagan and Rosa Parks couldn’t have been more different. He was the most powerful person in the world, commander in chief of the armed forces of the United States. And she was one of the least powerful, an unknown seamstress working in the back room of a department store in the Deep South before the Civil Rights Act.
But in a more fundamental sense, they couldn’t have been more like. All the political power on earth couldn’t move Reagan to do the wrong thing. And all the indignity and intimidation of racism couldn’t keep Rosa Parks from doing the right thing.
It was courage that made Reagan get up and leave. It was courage that kept Rosa Parks in her seat. And in these seemingly simple acts, each began building a bridge that would deliver millions of oppressed people to their God-given birthright of freedom and dignity -- in Reagan’s case, the people of Central and Eastern Europe; in Park’s case, all citizens of the United States.
You demonstrate courage any time you set goals, especially when the probability of success is low. In fact, courage seems to be closely related to commitment. Courageous people make total commitments to the families, friends and other people. They commit completely to their work, company, career and business.
Without the courage of our troops, building and sustaining a great nation would be impossible. And without the courage of ordinary citizens, there would be no great nation to defend. That’s something worth celebrating on D-Day … and every day.
I asked him about it one time. He choked up and all he would say was "Those damn bastards slaughtered us".
Thanks for posting the entire article.
I was watching a documentary about Saipan the other night. (Had read one of my Dad’s old WWII letters where he talked of spending some time with a Marine that had just returned from Saipan).
The part the always gets me, and mentioned in the documentary was something like “And our boy’s did it. Going up the same small break in the beach where their buddy had been shot just before, and the one before that. And they did it again the next morning.”
I met a guy in the nursing home living there with his wife. I noticed a navy tattoo and said
“Oh you were in the Navy in WW II?”
“Yep.”
“My dad was in the Navy in the Pacific.”
Wife: “Harry drove a “Higgin’s Boat”
Me: “Oh - a landing craft!”
Harry: “Huh. Not many people know their name.”
Wife: “Harry was at D-Day.”
I could tell he was not the talkative type about it. I just got up, shook his hand again and said thank you. Then asked the wife about the new flowers she had in the room.
But it was amazing to sit there knowing what this guy must have been through. He talked plenty about the kids he had raised, the companies he had worked at, ran, etc. All of the WWII vets that I had known (relatives and my parents friends) never talked about it. Too bad in a sense - but looking back it seems the attitude was “now it is over and time to get back to life”.
That was true of my dad, an infantryman who was part of the Normandy Invasion. He returned home with 2 Purple Hearts, a Bronze Star, and a 1000 yard stare that would last for his entire, short lifetime. He rarely slept more than a few hours without waking up in a cold sweat, from which he would come up swinging and yelling at anybody in the vicinity. He had his first heart attack at the age of 39, and was dead at the age of 44. He never spoke of the war.
Hindsight is 20/20, but I wonder why the D-Day planners didn’t just bypass the “Omaha Beach” section and use those forces instead to invade at Sword, Gold or Juno. They HAD to know that those imposing cliffs were going to be festooned with Krauts wielding MG-42’s.
True.
You don’t think about fear, about courage, about anything else, but “I CAN’T let my buddies down.” It comes down to just that, just “what will my buddies, my squad leader, the gunny think if I let them down?” Then you go and do, that’s it. That’s the Marine Corps way, anyway, and I suspect the doggies in Europe felt pretty much the same that day.
Besides, the Army in Europe only had to do it once. In Normandy. A FEW might have made one of the three other landings, North Africa, Sicily or mainland Italy, whereas only SIX Marine Divisions made opposed landings on Guadalcanal, Tarawa, Iwo Jima, Guam, Pelilou, and numerous others before joining the Pacific Army troops in taking Okinawa.
I am not trying to imply that these guys at Normandy lacked anything, like guts, courage, whatever, but the Pacific guys made DOZENS of opposed landings and proved the concept of amphibious assault beyond anyone’s WILDEST expectations, long before Ike said “Go!” Most of the credit goes to Major General H. M. Smith (aka “Howlin’ Mad”) in the years before the war. With the debacle of WWI’s Gallipoli very much on everyone’s minds, it took lots of courage to propose amphibious warfare again, but he did, and he and other Marines and sailors took point to make it happen. Guadalcanal was the acid test and we made it work. We even managed to make it look EASY, then taught the Army folks.
Sorry for the history lesson, I guess I got swept up in the moment. ALL the guys who made opposed landings, mostly under ferocious fire from a well entrenched enemy, are my heroes. And there are fewer and fewer left as the days go on!!!
LOL! No problem. Semper Fi devil dog. :>} When you’re in the thick of it, you gotta thin the enemy down.
The Army has always conducted amphibious operations, including in WWII.
“In the summer of 950, when the North Korean Army attacked South
Korea, a US Army infantry battalion landing team was conducting an
amphibious landing exercise in Japan. Over the previous 5 years, the
Army and the Marine Corps had struggled bitterly over which Service
should have the responsibility for amphibious warfare. During the 1920s
and 1930s, both Services had grappled with the problem of transporting
and landing ground forces from the sea, but the Marine Corps systemati
cally developed doctrine, tactics, techniques, procedures, and equipment
for assault landings against defended shores. During World War II, both
Services made use of those techniques and developed improved methods
for conducting amphibious operations. In Admiral Chester W. Nimitz’s
Paciic Ocean Areas (POA), both Marine and Army forces carried out
landings against Japanese-held islands in the South and Central Paciic,
culminating in the seizure of Okinawa and the Ryukyu Islands by forces
of Tenth US Army under Lieutenant General Simon Bolivar Buckner Jr. In
the Mediterranean Theater of Operations (MTO) and European Theater of
Operations (ETO), the Army, working with the British who had pioneered
their own approach to amphibious operations, had developed doctrine and
capabilities for continental assault landings and had carried out some of
the largest amphibious operations in history in North Africa, Sicily, Italy,
Normandy, and Southern France. In the Southwest Paciic Area (SWPA),
General Douglas MacArthur used predominantly Army and some Marine
forces to carry out a series of landings along the coast of New Guinea
and the nearby islands before conducting the amphibious invasion of the
Philippines, which included several landings of various sizes. MacArthur’s
ground forces were transported in these operations by Rear Admiral Daniel
E. Barbey’s Seventh Amphibious Force and other Navy amphibious ele
ments and by the very versatile engineer special brigades that, unique to
SWPA, included engineer boat units operating landing craft. By the end of
the war, more amphibious operations had been conducted in MacArthur’s
theater than in any other theater of war.”
Yes, the army has done amphibious ops. They learned how from us. During the 1920s and 30s, the Marine Corps developed the amphibious operations manual. We wrote the book, the same book the army used also. We developed the doctrines and the tools for forcible entry on defended beachheads and the army also uses it.
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