Eighty years ago today . . .
My father was, at the time, in the process of returning from the Middle East to Britain after three years of fighting the Axis powers in the Western Desert and the Dodecanese campaign. My mother, as she had been for the previous several years, was manning fire watch and incendiary patrols on the so-called "Home Front". When I asked her, decades later, how she'd felt when the news broke that the Allies had landed in Normandy, she could only shake her head silently, while tears came to her eyes.
It was, for both of them, the sign that the war was now inexorably drawing to a close. It still had a ways to run, but the Germans had grown so weak that they could not keep the Allied landing forces out. Final victory seemed now to be assured. They knew many long, trying days lay ahead; both would lose friends and comrades in the last year of fighting . . . but the end was, at long last, in view.
Today, we remember.
Peter
Check out the illustration that Google chose to commemorate the 80th anniversary of D-Day .
ReplyDeleteI'd post it, but I'm not sure how to post photos in comments .
The war had been drawing to a close since Midway and Alamein, much like Antietam.
ReplyDeleteThey won the war so Islam could conquer Europe.
ReplyDeleteSo since this asinine war was supposedly about freedom and democracy where Eastern Europe was enslaved for half a century, what freedoms do I have no that a post WWII American had?
ReplyDeleteSo mustache man bad, but Joe Stalin, who murdered millions of White Christian Ukrainians was great.
People really should see Europa the last Battle, and look up material by David Irving and Leon DeGrelle.
We've been told so many lies about WWII. Thousands of good men on both sides died for nothing and so some banksters could make money.
If you think about it the war in Europe was basically over before we landed on D-Day. The Soviets were still rising in the East and Germany was strangled by the blockade and the lack of oil, finally. They were doomed to defeat by the Soviet armies and maybe the English Channel would have stopped them.
ReplyDeleteIn the end, would Europe be better off if left in Russian hands? Who can say. You can certainly tell at a glance how much more European the eastern European countries are today then their counterparts in the defanged socialist's worker's paradises they have created for themselves in France, Germany, Holland, Britain, etc.