BS: Normandy -- 68 years ago...

Subject: BS: Normandy -- 68 years ago...
From: Rapparee
Date: 06 Jun 12 - 09:21 AM

Here's a toast, in the best liquor, to those who went through Hell sixty-eight years ago today.

Subject: RE: BS: Normandy -- 68 years ago...
From: Will Fly
Date: 06 Jun 12 - 10:03 AM

I'll join you in that toast, Rap - cheers!

Subject: RE: BS: Normandy -- 68 years ago...
From: gnu
Date: 06 Jun 12 - 10:16 AM

Lest we forget.

Subject: RE: BS: Normandy -- 68 years ago...
From: fat B****rd
Date: 06 Jun 12 - 10:21 AM

I'm with you,gentlemen.

Subject: RE: BS: Normandy -- 68 years ago...
From: Charmion
Date: 06 Jun 12 - 10:54 AM

When the sun has passed over the yardarm in my neighbourhood, I'll make mine Calvados.

Subject: RE: BS: Normandy -- 68 years ago...
From: GUEST,Lighter
Date: 06 Jun 12 - 03:41 PM

I'm for that, but so many millions went through hell in the two world wars alone I'd have to stay drunk all the time to do them justice.

Subject: RE: BS: Normandy -- 68 years ago...
From: Mrrzy
Date: 06 Jun 12 - 04:23 PM

Ah, Calvados, fitting. They were heroes to me even if it was the Canadians who got to Mom's concentration camp first.

Subject: RE: BS: Normandy -- 68 years ago...
From: ChanteyLass
Date: 06 Jun 12 - 07:23 PM

I wish they had got there sooner, Mrrzy.

Subject: RE: BS: Normandy -- 68 years ago...
From: Big Al Whittle
Date: 06 Jun 12 - 07:45 PM

It was terrible thing - left my Dad with nightmares all the rest of his life.

The debt ofthis country - perhaps even the world, was incalculable. England should have changed afterwards. But the poxy snobs are still in charge. The police wouldn't even let my Dad play rugby for them after the war - because he'd been a professional playing for St helens. No red carpet for him, welcoming him home.

As for his comrades in the Irish guards - they didn't even dare go home on furlough in their uniform - not wearing an English uniform.

Sometimes I think the people they fought for didn't deserve the sacrifice. Really it was our duty to make the world they came back to, better. And I think in many ways, we failed him.

Subject: RE: BS: Normandy -- 68 years ago...
From: gnu
Date: 06 Jun 12 - 07:50 PM

Sad, Al.

Subject: RE: BS: Normandy -- 68 years ago...
From: Little Hawk
Date: 06 Jun 12 - 10:03 PM

Well, Al, war hurts a whole lot of people...those who serve as well as those who don't. Those who win as well as those who lose. It isn't a question of whether someone back home "deserves" the sacrifice. It just happens, and that's all there is to it. If you're there, you try like hell to get through it in one piece and you do the best you can...and that was true of those on both sides.

My hope is that it won't happen again...a world war, I mean. I fear that we are in considerable risk of it happening again...for a different set of reason, and with a different set of imperial adventures and major players. It's not the Germans, Italians, and Japanese this time who are playing the great imperial games. Fascism is a disease that kills the host eventually...but the disease itself doesn't die. It just goes and finds a new host somewhere else.

Subject: RE: BS: Normandy -- 68 years ago...
From: GUEST,DonMeixner
Date: 07 Jun 12 - 12:00 AM

Here Here

Subject: RE: BS: Normandy -- 68 years ago...
From: GUEST,.gargoyle
Date: 07 Jun 12 - 12:52 AM

And the toast should be made in Calvados...aka Liquid Norman Gold...

Sincerely,
Gargoyle

a delightful apple brandy common to the region.

Subject: RE: BS: Normandy -- 68 years ago...
From: alanabit
Date: 07 Jun 12 - 05:22 AM

To the brave men of the Normandy beaches and indeed to all of those who helped to bring that dark chapter of history to an end.

Subject: RE: BS: Normandy -- 68 years ago...
From: ollaimh
Date: 07 Jun 12 - 09:59 PM

i was pleased to see the cbc correcting a decades old snub of canadian forces at normandy. that famous war footage of soldiers in a landing craft nearing a normandy beach has been used by both americans and british as part of documentaries over and over, without asknowledging that that was canadians in that there boat landing an a canadian beach(juno). we had one of five, for our american friends and canadian soldiers were almost half the first attackers on the two british beaches.

my father was a member of the canadian medical corp attached to the north nova scotia higlanders regiment. he landed june 9th i believe. so he missed the worst but he followed them through caan--the bloddiest battle on the western front, right up to the first invasion of german soil through the reichwald forest. there is a great reel writen by dan r macdonald called "the reichwald forest" in honour of their achievements.

and in reference to another thread about telling lies about your war experience. dad almost never said a word about it. i learned what he did from veterans from the north novies who ran the militia regiment that i was a shooter for in my teens. some of those guys saw some of the firecest fighting in history. they are mostly gone now but they were brave men. of course they were highlanders

Subject: RE: BS: Normandy -- 68 years ago...
From: Big Al Whittle
Date: 08 Jun 12 - 02:54 AM

ollaimh. Thanks for that. Is that Caen? My father was there. I didn't know it was the bloodiest battle. You're quite right, ordinary guys didn't want to talk about it. Found their experiences totally inexpressible.

That generation....they never talked about anything that mattered...war, sex, love....you name it. It would have been so good to have thrown your arms around them and said....I understand, or even I'm trying to understand.


Well....too late now!

Subject: RE: BS: Normandy -- 68 years ago...
From: GUEST,Teribus
Date: 08 Jun 12 - 11:22 AM

Forces involved on D-Day

US 1st Army - 73,000 men assigned Omaha and Utah Beaches (number includes 15,600 Airborne Troops

British 2nd Army - 83,115 men (61,715 of them British the bulk of the remainder being Canadian along with Poles and Free French troops) they were assigned as follows:
6th Airborne Left Flank

Sword Beach - 1 Corps; 1st Special Service Brigade; 3rd Infantry Division; 27th Armoured Brigade; 41

Juno Beach - 1 Corps; 3rd Canadian Infantry Division; 2nd Canadian Armoured Brigade; 46 Commando RM & 48 Commando RM

Gold Beach - XXX Corps; 50th (Northumbrian) Infantry Division; 8th Armoured Brigade; 47 Commando RM & 79th Armoured Division

Only the Canadians fighting out from Juno Beach made their original D-Day objectives only to be ordered to retire because nobody else had made theirs and the line had to be consolidated.

Subject: RE: BS: Normandy -- 68 years ago...
From: GUEST,Lighter
Date: 08 Jun 12 - 12:27 PM

One saving grace about the movie "The Longest Day" was that it emphasized just how many Allied nations were involved.

Subject: RE: BS: Normandy -- 68 years ago...
From: Keith A of Hertford
Date: 11 Jun 12 - 02:45 AM

Yet on Wednesday, Francois Hollande made a gesture of reconciliation with 'Perfidious Albion'.

He became the first ever French president to visit a British cemetery in Normandy. In torrential rain, he shook hands with Parachute Regiment veterans at Ranville, where the 6th Airborne Division landed on June 6, 1944.

If that does not sound significant, remember that throughout the intervening 68 years, French governments have tried not to notice that the British were there on D-Day.
Paying their respects: French President Francois Hollande, right, joined Defence Secretary Philip Hammond, left, in the British war cemetery of Ranville, western France
Most French museums, not to mention school history books, make it sound like the Americans and the Resistance did it all. Millions of French people have seen Hollywood's D-Day epics; only about six recognise our part.

Paul Woodadge, a splendid tour guide who is himself British, but lives near Caen with his French wife. He told me sadly: 'Most British visitors nowadays know what Steven Spielberg has told them in Saving Private Ryan and Band Of Brothers, so they all want to go to the American sector. Some hardly get to our beaches at all.'.

Not just 1944, but our entire past, is seen by a new generation through a prism of celluloid myth and legend.

Our governments set a rotten example by their lack of interest in heritage, real history. Consider this: the centenary is fast approaching of the 1914 outbreak of World War I — one of the two largest and most terrible events in modern European history, which changed or destroyed the lives of millions. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-2156699/Turning-backs-Britains-fallen.html

Subject: RE: BS: Normandy -- 68 years ago...
From: Ebbie
Date: 11 Jun 12 - 11:52 AM

Keith A, surely a nation's history is best told by itself in the spirit it wishes itself to be remembered and recounted? Surely, that is what Spielberg and Hollywood, et al, has done.

Subject: RE: BS: Normandy -- 68 years ago...
From: GUEST,Lighter
Date: 11 Jun 12 - 12:07 PM

> surely a nation's history is best told by itself in the spirit it wishes itself to be remembered and recounted?

No one can reasonably fault Spielberg, an American, for choosing to tell a fictional story about Americans. "Private Ryan," of course, is fiction.

But surely a Nazi "history" of WWII in the "spirit" of Nazism would not be the "best," or a Stalinist history of the USSR.

Subject: RE: BS: Normandy -- 68 years ago...
From: alanabit
Date: 11 Jun 12 - 04:26 PM

I can take your point Keith, but I think that a lot of the way that the war was represented (or misrepresented) and ultimately remembered does come down to which films were made. From a British perspective, two very good candidates for films would be about the retaking of Burma (General Slim retrained a defeated army and then drove the Japanese out) and the Battle of Kleve and Wesel (which ultimately achieved the objectives of the original Market Garden campaign). They would probably appeal to a British public, but no British film company has the resources to finance that scale of film making. There would be no reason for an American company to finance such films. It does not diminish the achievements of the men in any way. Sadly though, it does mean that they are recalled less often than other events, which also involved enormous sacrifice.

Subject: RE: BS: Normandy -- 68 years ago...
From: Rapparee
Date: 11 Jun 12 - 10:00 PM

While we're at it, let's also remember August 19, 1942 -- the Dieppe Raid.

Subject: RE: BS: Normandy -- 68 years ago...
From: Keith A of Hertford
Date: 12 Jun 12 - 02:50 AM

That would make a good film!

Subject: RE: BS: Normandy -- 68 years ago...
From: Big Al Whittle
Date: 12 Jun 12 - 07:10 AM

t'wouldn't reflect very well on us ......

Subject: RE: BS: Normandy -- 68 years ago...
From: Keith A of Hertford
Date: 12 Jun 12 - 07:47 AM

Extraordinary courage.
The lesson learned was that it would have been too costly to attack a harbour or port for the invasion.

Subject: RE: BS: Normandy -- 68 years ago...
From: alanabit
Date: 12 Jun 12 - 07:55 AM

I think they learned a lot of lessons and it ultimately saved a lot of lives. It was a pretty horrible affair for the men involved though and at the time, it was seen as something of a propoganda coup for the Nazis.

Subject: RE: BS: Normandy -- 68 years ago...
From: GUEST,Lighter
Date: 12 Jun 12 - 08:17 AM

There's a little-known Canadian TV movie called "Dieppe." It's on DVD.

Not bad either.

Subject: RE: BS: Normandy -- 68 years ago...
From: Rapparee
Date: 12 Jun 12 - 09:59 AM

Seventy years ago this August...brave men.

Subject: RE: BS: Normandy -- 68 years ago...
From: GUEST,Lighter
Date: 12 Jun 12 - 10:27 AM

And while it was principally a Canadian operation, British and American forces also tooh part.

Subject: RE: BS: Normandy -- 68 years ago...
From: alanabit
Date: 13 Jun 12 - 03:37 AM

I believe that the Canadian troops performed the most impressively on D-Day. I wonder if this was in part because they digested and applied the lessons of Dieppe so well?

Subject: RE: BS: Normandy -- 68 years ago...
From: Rapparee
Date: 13 Jun 12 - 09:08 AM

Given what they were facing I think they all did excellently well. Utah, Omaha, Gold, Sword, Juno, parachutists, the Maquis -- all performed heroically. And while it might be incorrect to say it, the Germans fought tenaciously and well.

I must say, however, that no one has ever thanked my family. One of my relatives, General Friedrich Dollmann, had the good taste to die of a (probable) heart attack on June 28, 1944 -- he was the CG of the Wehrmacht Seventh Army on June 6, 1944. We understand that his mother had written him a very angry letter about the how mean he was being to "those nice British and American and other lads" and he should be ashamed of himself and go right out there and tell them he was sorry.

Subject: RE: BS: Normandy -- 68 years ago...
From: GUEST,Lighter
Date: 13 Jun 12 - 09:49 AM

You go, Mom!

Subject: RE: BS: Normandy -- 68 years ago...
From: GUEST,Teribus
Date: 13 Jun 12 - 10:58 AM

I don't know why it would not reflect well on us, it was after all a "raid" the purpose of which was to find things out and to see exactly what it would take to capture a French Channel port intact.

The Canadians in England basically said use us or we are going home, British, Indian, Australian and New Zealand troops were fighting in the Western Desert and in Burma, the Canadians far from home and feeling a bit left out of things wanted to get stuck in.

Lots of things were learned, but there again lots of things that were not done at Dieppe were omitted to reduce the likelihood of incurring unnecessarily high French casualties as the Torch landings were just about to take place in North Africa.

They reckoned that every life lost at Dieppe saved ten or twenty in Normandy and that Normandy would have failed had it not been for Dieppe. Two of the biggest "trumps" that came out of Dieppe:

- Mulberry, the artificial prefabricated harbour
- 79th Armoured Division (aka Hobarts "funnies") specialist armoured vehicles designed to overcome beach obstacles. The US First Army turned them down for Normandy, and that decision cost them dear.

Subject: RE: BS: Normandy -- 68 years ago...
From: Nigel Parsons
Date: 13 Jun 12 - 12:02 PM

For those who didn't survive the day:

"They shall grow not old,
As we that are left grow old.
Age shall not weary them,
Nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun, and in the morning,
We will remember them."

Subject: RE: BS: Normandy -- 68 years ago...
From: Big Al Whittle
Date: 13 Jun 12 - 12:46 PM

I guess we'll have to differ on that one Teribus. I think it was one of the desert generals who said, the whole point of military leadership is to make sure that ten thousand men don't find themselves confronted with five hundred thousand of anything - he was talking about the Italian campaign in Ethiopia.

How much research would have been necessary to ascertain that the odds at Dieppe were overwhelming. Dieppe was a reckless waste of a good fighting force. An abuse of the power of leadership.

Subject: RE: BS: Normandy -- 68 years ago...
From: gnu
Date: 13 Jun 12 - 06:39 PM

Research? Dieppe WAS research. Dieppe changed the war. Just like Vimy. Canucks got the job done in the spirit of sacrafice and cooperation with all the other allied troops who toed the deadly lines in various theatres. On behalf of the Canucks who died at Dieppe, Vimy, Juno, in the boot of Italy, on the road to Rome and elsewhere, yer welcome. The least you could do is say thanks to them. They lives were not wasted. No man who gave his life should be thought of that way.

I understand yer point in a way, Big Al, but I just don't think it's a good thing to say in hindsight.

Subject: RE: BS: Normandy -- 68 years ago...
From: Rapparee
Date: 13 Jun 12 - 08:23 PM

I thank 'em all: Canucks, Poles, French, Yanks, Brits, Norse...the lot.

Subject: RE: BS: Normandy -- 68 years ago...
From: Big Al Whittle
Date: 14 Jun 12 - 02:46 AM

Of course thanks and honour are due to all those who fought and resisted the nazis. They are our sacred dead.

I think however, if I'd lost a loved one in the Dieppe raid. I might be proud of him, but I still think I'd be bloody angry that the raid was ever undertaken in the first place.

My knowledge of history is shakey - but its a bit like Burnside marching his troops up the hill at Fredericksburg. Sometimes the bosses get it wrong.

Subject: RE: BS: Normandy -- 68 years ago...
From: alanabit
Date: 14 Jun 12 - 07:52 AM

It's not easy to call, is it Al? In war as in life, a series of sometimes risky decisions is called for. Very often it is better to make the wrong decision and learn from it than to make no decision at all. I believe that was the position that the chiefs of staff were in at the time.
In the case of Dieppe I think most historians agree that although it was an awful tragedy, the lessons were learned and applied in both the Torch landings and later at D-Day. We like to think that none of our men are lost in vain, but we can not guarantee it. It was the indecisiveness of the Allies which made Hitler so strong in 1940. The Wehrmacht was a magnificent army in its time and there was never going to be a painless way of learning what it would cost to defeat it.

Subject: RE: BS: Normandy -- 68 years ago...
From: Big Al Whittle
Date: 14 Jun 12 - 11:38 AM

I'm quite aware of the need for sacrifice. However the view of Churchill as the saviour of the nation wasn't a view universally held by the fighting men, who had to make good on his bluster and rhetoric.

And I think maybe that knowledge is the source of of my reservations.

Subject: RE: BS: Normandy -- 68 years ago...
From: alanabit
Date: 14 Jun 12 - 12:14 PM

I can certainly understand that there is plenty of room for criticism of Churchill and many of his decisions during and after the war. I am not an admirer of everything he did, but in his defence I will say that it is not possible to keep your hands clean when you are doing a dirty job. I am just very glad that someone was big enough to take it on. That doesn't imply any disrespect to your views Al.

Subject: RE: BS: Normandy -- 68 years ago...
From: Les from Hull
Date: 14 Jun 12 - 01:41 PM

I consider Churchill very over-rated, but like many of his type a great self-publicist. General Sir Alan Brooke, Churchill's chief of staff, wrote that "Winston had 10 ideas every day, only one of which was good, and he did not know which it was". Fortunately the Allies had people who could stop him, the Germans could not overrule Hitler.

My thoughts are with those who gave their lives 68 years ago, especially the two local regiments that assaulted the beaches that day, the 2nd Battalion East Yorkshire Regiment and the East Riding Yeomanry. My dad was a 'D-Day Dodger', fighting in Italy.

Subject: RE: BS: Normandy -- 68 years ago...
From: Rapparee
Date: 14 Jun 12 - 03:24 PM

In 1944 my father was in New Guinea, and then heading for the Philippines. He missed D-Day in Normandy but had his own later.

Subject: RE: BS: Normandy -- 68 years ago...
From: GUEST,Teribus
Date: 15 Jun 12 - 10:27 AM

"the view of Churchill as the saviour of the nation wasn't a view universally held by the fighting men"

Hardly surprising they had other things on their minds and I do not believe that they though about it. Canvass the civilian population and you would get a completely different answer. Even thirty-seven years after his death he came top in the poll for the greatest Briton ever. Ladbrookes and William Hill the bookmakers were so sure that he would win they had him as even money favourite right from the outset.

Besides apart from Churchill who were the alternative candidates at the time?? Cometh the hour cometh the man and thank Christ that he did, faults and all - right man, right place, right job.

Subject: RE: BS: Normandy -- 68 years ago...
From: Les from Hull
Date: 15 Jun 12 - 11:02 AM

Like I said - great self-publicist. All them great speeches that other people wrote for him and even read out. He even got a Nobel Prize for work that was largely done by others.

Subject: RE: BS: Normandy -- 68 years ago...
From: Les from Hull
Date: 15 Jun 12 - 11:59 AM

Further to the above Churchill represented everything that the working class hated about the ruling class. His 'decisions' were constantly overruled, like sending Spitfires to Norway and France, when Dowding knew they could be easily destroyed on the ground and would be needed later (as they were). Landing troops in Norway was equally disastrous. Fortunately the Royal Navy and the Norwegians sank or damaged about a half of the German surface fleet thus effectively preventing an invasion of Britain. The rest, as they say, is history.

Churchill's popularity owed more to Pathe News and the BBC, than anything he actually did. Like borrowing 50 antique destroyers from the USA that took ages to get into service and as fleet destroyers with a heavy torpedo armament and high speed were not really suitable as convoy escorts.

King George VI was probably better at waving to cameras and shaking hands than Churchill.

Subject: RE: BS: Normandy -- 68 years ago...
From: Big Al Whittle
Date: 15 Jun 12 - 12:21 PM

You hear more plaudits from civilians about Churchill than from the blokes who did the fighting and killing and watched their comrades being killed.

I fancy the rhetoric seemed divorced from the ugly facts of life on the front. just as much as it does nowadays.

Subject: RE: BS: Normandy -- 68 years ago...
From: GUEST,Teribus
Date: 15 Jun 12 - 12:27 PM

Had Churchill's Norwegian operation been carried out as orignally envisioned the war would have been over in 1940, or 1941 at the latest.

It was not just landing troops in Norway it was landing troops in Norway to occupy a strip of territory in both Norway and Sweden that would have cut Germany off from its only source of iron ore.

Had the Norwegian venture been executed with vigour and with the correct resources the Blitzkrieg that fell on the west in May of 1940 would never have happened, the Germans would have been far too busy fighting to the North. There their tanks would have been of no use to them, neither would their superiority in aircraft through lack of suitable airfields. There Army would have been split as they would still have to defend their own border with France.

Churchill, by the way wrote all his own speeches.

That being the case (as he never had a speech writing staff) his Nobel Prize in Literature awarded in 1953 was "for his mastery of historical and biographical description as well as for brilliant oratory in defending exalted human values". Pretty accurate I'd say and entirely his own work.

As I asked previously who were the alternative candidates who could have taken on the job in 1940??

"Further to the above Churchill represented everything that the working class hated about the ruling class"

With the Third Reich with all its evil hammering on the door who gives a rats ass about what the "working class", or any other class for that matter, hated.

Subject: RE: BS: Normandy -- 68 years ago...
From: Big Al Whittle
Date: 15 Jun 12 - 01:52 PM

I don't think anyone's arguing with Churchill's abilities. At least I'm not.He was clever with words. he was more prescient thatn most English politicians about Hitler. he did inspire the civilian population.

I just think that the men who had to supply the bravery - well they he stuck in their craw a bit. Can't prove this. But my Dad and the bloke next door, and several blokes who used to come to our house and were fighting men - they all found the high flown rhetoric distateful - all said so, quite independently.