77 years ago today, the Allied Expeditionary Forces of Britain, Canada, Free France, and the United States undertook the D-Day invasion of Normandy. The US landed its forces on beaches code named Utah and Omaha, the Canadians on Juno, the Free French on Sword, and the British on both Gold and Sword. For a more detailed description of the invaluable contributions of our British, Canadian, and French allies on D-Day, please see my post from 2018.
Her is the audio of General Eisenhower’s Order of the Day to the Allied Expeditionary Forces on 6 June, 1944:
And here is the audio of NBC’s radio broadcast coverage of the initial stages of the Normandy landings:
While he was not part of the D-Day operations, it is somehow fitting that the news of the passing of David Dushman, the last of the Red Army Soldiers who liberated Auschwitz, should be reported today. Dushman, who was Jewish, was a young tanker in the Soviet Army.
Open thread!
MontyTheClipArtMongoose
I believe he prefers to be called Elliot.
Captain C
This seems an interesting development:
Benw
Just amazing bravery and sacrifice.
Omnes Omnibus
I am glad someone else noticed.
David ? ☘The Establishment☘? Koch
What’s all this I keep hearing about Aunt Teapha? Who is she and what has she done?
HalfAssedHomesteader
Did a bicycle ride through that part of France in the mid-90s. Omaha Beech. Haunting experience. The Nazi fortifications are still there and it was… I can’t even describe how it hit me. These guys walked into a blender and pushed through.
Ohio Mom
When I was young, all of World War Two seemed far in the past. But now I do the math and D-Day was a mere eleven years before I was born.
Adam L Silverman
@Omnes Omnibus: I figured the naked Floriduh! Woman at the Outback restaurant could wait till tomorrow night.
Also, this gives BettyC a chance to come clean in her own post…//
dnfree
@Ohio Mom: it seemed like a long time in the past to me also, and I was born in 1946. My dad was on a ship headed for Japan when the bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, so he was able to return to the US in time for my birth.
HalfAssedHomesteader
@Captain C: Loyalty doesn’t seem to be Sinema’s strong suit.
rikyrah
He was willing to take responsibility if DDay had failed.
That is so inconceivable from any Republican today.
Citizen Alan
And just think! If Adolf Hitler hadn’t been dumb enough to declare war on us first after Pearl Harbor, tD-Day wouldn’t have happened because the Republicans of that era probably would have blocked FDR from entering the war in Europe.
Origuy
Antifa got started before Ike. The Battle of Cable Street was in 1936, in London’s East End.
The British archaeology show Time Team did a special on D-Day.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N0c5X_D_hQ8
rikyrah
@Adam L Silverman:
That was a crazy story??
Adam L Silverman
@Origuy: I know this is Balloon Juice, but how about we just play along with the attempted whimsy for a change?
Adam L Silverman
@rikyrah: BettyC’s got a lot of explaining to do!//
Another Scott
@Citizen Alan: There was a treaty involved. Tripartite Pact.
IIRC, Hitler was gleeful about getting involved with the Japan-US war because “Japan had never been defeated”.
Cheers,
Scott.
M. Bouffant
Who knew? Every year, French volunteers rub sand from the beaches at Normandy into the names of Americans killed during the invasion so that their names stand out.
jl
@Adam L Silverman: It’s long been known that Ike was a commie. The John Birch Society had his number long ago.
gene108
From the “Stars and Stripes” link. Damn.
Captain C
@HalfAssedHomesteader: No, and in this case, it may prove detrimental to her career.
Adam L Silverman
@gene108: Ni shagud nazad!
James E Powell
@Ohio Mom:
When I was watching Combat! on TV it was about 20 years after D-Day. About the same as from 9/11 till today.
HumboldtBlue
@M. Bouffant:
Now go look up the Dutch families that to this day have adopted the graves of Allied soldiers and perform the necessary upkeep. It’s literally a family tradition passed down from the WW2 generation to the present day.
HumboldtBlue
And for those interested in the war (I’m a bit over the top, I read about the war literally every day) here is an excellent podcast featuring Al Murray and historian James Holland.
We have ways.
Kent
Time is just relentless.
The start of WW2 (for Americans) was 80 years ago.
For Americans of the WW2 generation, the Civil War happened exactly 80 years earlier.
And for the Civil War generation, the British surrender at Yorktown had happened exactly 80 years earlier.
Mallard Filmore
https://ww2today.com/
Follow the war as it happened … Updated every day 80 years after the event…
frosty
@HumboldtBlue: WW2today.com? I’m on my second round through the daily blog of the war. It’s a really good site.
I’ve read WW2 history since junior high, starting with the POW escape stories like The Wooden Horse. We didn’t hear anything about the Russian Front until after glasnost in the 1990s, so there’s been a whole new history to learn now.
randal m sexton
As part of my retirement moving relocation stuff, I just moved two large trunks today – one labeled ‘WWI’ that has a lot of my Grandfathers gear from that war. He ‘went over the top’ a half dozen times in a few weeks, and then came back and raised my Dad. (Favorite thing in there is a spoon given to him by a belgium farmer). And another trunk labeled WWII, from my dad – He flew F6f’s and F8fs off carriers in the Pacific, and then came back. I -barely- missed Viet Nam. Its good to be lucky.
Thanks dad, and Gramps. Nice work.
-r
Ruckus
@Ohio Mom:
Just less than 4 yrs for me after Japan surrendered. My sister was born just over a year after they did.
@gene108:
Another story below the link was the story of how the Navy screwed the captain of the USS Indy because they screwed up and didn’t want to admit it. It took 50 yrs to correct the situation and the person that put it over the top was the captain of the sub that sank it. He testified on the captain’s behalf.
@Kent:
It often takes a complete generation to forget how fucked up war is. That’s harder now that we have a lot of information at our fingertips and we are seeing what shitty leaders of countries do. We’ve had our share of them, take the last one for example….
Chetan Murthy
@Ruckus:
“We’ll be greeted with flowers, as liberators …” *sigh
billcinsd
@Origuy: The American antifa start was probably the Abraham Lincoln Brigade during the Spanish Civil War
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XV_International_Brigade
Ruckus
@Chetan Murthy:
About 14% the number of Americans died in Vietnam that did in WWII, and the number of dead from the middle east war(s) is at this point about 12% of the number that died in Vietnam.
WWII 405,399 American service members dead
Vietnam 58,220 American service members dead.
Current middle east combat about 6,600 dead
A lot of that is medicine has improved dramatically, along with the helicopter which allowed people to get to medical care faster, or at all. Also we haven’t done as much naval battles with horrific losses since WWII.
So while we have far better communications about the cost of war, at least on the surface, by this one metric, the cost has gone down. Except there are a lot of people with stuff missing, like Tammy Duckworth. I didn’t list the numbers of the opposition sides to those wars, they are a lot larger numbers and they really aren’t known figures. War costs everyone, and in a more crowded planet wars will cost more innocent people far more than they have in the past. And yet we have a political party that thinks war is great, necessary and powerful, as long as they don’t have to go and die for it instead of making a profit off of it.
Origuy
@billcinsd: The Abraham Lincoln Brigade – John McCutcheon
For the Irish Antifa: Christy Moore – Viva la Quinta Brigada
opiejeanne
@frosty: Did you read either of the books about Colditz Castle? Those were amazing books also about the ingenuity of the prisoners of war, and they were building a glider when the war ended. Supposedly, the glider was still hidden there when the books were written
I don’t remember those books being as grim as The Wooden Horse, but I read them more than 50 years ago.
HumboldtBlue
@frosty:
Yup, there is something to learn every day.
HumboldtBlue
@opiejeanne:
The battle of Castle Itter is a helluva read as well.
frosty
@opiejeanne: Yes, I’ve read everything about Colditz that I could find. There was a documentary about the glider awhile back. They built one according to the POW’s plans and it flew.
Great idea the Germans had – put all the best escapers in one place!
frosty
@opiejeanne: I don’t remember The Wooden Horse being grim, though. It’s been at least 50 years for me, too.
Mary G
My mother’s younger brothers were 15 when Pearl Harbor was attacked and like so many other American men, went to the Army recruiting office the next day, lied about their age, and signed up.
They hero-worshipped their Congressional Representative, one Lyndon B. Johnson, who had spoken at my mom’s graduation from Austin High School the year before, and were sure he would want them to help. This changed abruptly in the early 60s, when he became a (insert “race traitor” or another worse epithet against whites supporting civil rights) and they were front runners in the great Southern switch to the Republican Party.
Both had medical issues but managed to bullshit their way through the physical.
Uncle H, shocked to be expected to live and train with Yankees and (insert disgusting epithet for Jewish people here), and exhausted from running and being shouted at all day, confessed all to his drill sergeant who switched from bad cop to good cop after a few days and was sent home.
Uncle B. made it through training and was on a troop transport to the Pacific when they discovered that he was as blind as a bat and dropped him off at Pearl Harbor. There are many versions of what happened, each more unbelievable than the last. My favorite was when Uncle B. said the Army had heard about Uncle H.’s confession and confronted him about it, but he managed to convince them that he and my mother were actually the twins and so he was 18. The doctor who’d delivered my mom at home was drunk as a skunk (this is true, he poked a hole in her head with forceps that left a big scar that would never grow hair on it) and had left him off.
He claimed that my grandmother was concerned he would be seen as a (insert racist epithet for an undocumented Mexican immigrant here) so when Uncle H. came along she had that doctor add Uncle B. to his birth certificate to straighten the record up.
He became a truck driver and “gentleman cattle rancher” and the only time I was allowed to ride in a car he was driving was when our plane had to divert to San Antonio and he raced down to pick us up first in his powder blue Cadillac convertible (Uncle H had actually been given the assignment and drove all the way to the airport only to find us already gone).
He drove one-handed while drinking his way through several six packs of beer beside him on the front seat. I didn’t think that much of that, but when he finished one he would throw the can overboard. Raised in California by proto-hippies and taught to never leave so much as a toothpick on the ground, I was shocked. The beer and drinking in the car were legal in Texas at the time. He and my mom had a screaming fight and I was shocked even more when she suddenly gathered up a six pack or two off the floor and threw them over the side.
Back to the WWII experiences, right. Once they were both home, they fought so much about which of them had chickened out and which had been betrayed that my grandmother wouldn’t let them eat meals together but made them take turns one on the boiling-in-the-sun-all-day front porch and one on the back shaded-under-trees-and screened-on-three-sides back porch.
They called themselves veterans for the rest of their lives and would’ve been MAGAts to the nth degree had they still been alive in 2015.
That’s the less crazy half of my ancestors. My father’s mother disinherited him when he left the Catholic church to marry my mom. She never acknowledged my existence once, not even to send a toothpick or kleenex like the Dursleys sent Harry Potter for his birthday. I had to do a family tree for school after she and my dad had both died; neither my mother or I knew what her first name was. We had a great time making up names and settled on “Ermintrude.”
My dad had always referred to my grandfather as “The Colonel” and after my dad died the Colonel insisted that my mother and I come to Kentucky to be forgiven. He said he would pay for our plane and bus tickets. (Reader, he did not.) It was a nightmare and more. Desperate to make conversation, I asked him which branch of the service he had been a Colonel in, not seeing my mother’s throat-cutting action behind him in time. Turns out Kentucky just makes random rich men Colonels, and like his friend Colonel Sanders, who sold chicken, he was made a Kentucky Colonel because he owned a string of ice cream parlors.
So no noble military service in my bio family.
Mary G
@Kent: And we got into WW2 exactly 80 years ago, so we’re due for a big one?
Robert Sneddon
@gene108: The Normandy landings in June 1944 were a minor sideshow compared to what the Red Army had been doing to the Nazis for years and at the cost of millions of lives. From memory, for every German division fighting the Allies in the West they had nine divisions facing the Soviets in the East.
Elizabelle
@Mary G: Now there is a story. Whoa. Colorful family background, no?
evodevo
@Mary G: Yep. ANYONE (white, in the old days) could be one…my husband is one only because a politically-connected woman wanted to reward him for working with her kid (he was a psych counselor at the time), back in the Seventies….it’s an honor without any honor….
Uncle Cosmo
@Robert Sneddon: Any Yank with half a brain understands who really kicked the living shit out of the Wehrmacht. (Hint: Their names were not Eisenhower, Patton, Bradley or Montgomery.)
Yah, yah, yah, Lend-Lease. We sent ’em trucks and jeeps and Aircobras for free – and they paid for them in blood. Twenty and more millions of bodies’ worth of blood.
H.E.Wolf
Here’s a photo said to be of US nurses disembarking on a Normandy beach in 1944 (I’d love to have a primary-source citation for this).
Embedding a link isn’t working for me: here’s the URL.
https://www.pinterest.com/pin/111534528246084220/
J R in WV
Adam,
A great history lesson for people too young or too uneducated to be aware of, well anything.
“Founder of ANTIFA”!!?
“Defeated Fascism in Europe”
also elected President.
So creative. Did you also study marketing? or is it just a natural gift?!!!
Just Chuck
@Mary G: A little kerfuffle called WWI sort of interrupts that neat regular chronology. So maybe we’re due for one now, in 10 years, in 15 years, in 18.5167 years, whatever. Let’s just say we’re not.
emmyelle
@David ? ☘The Establishment☘? Koch: In my family, we call her Auntie (pronounced anty) Pha.
Andrya
@Another Scott: I don’t know if this is historically attested or not (I’ve tried to investigate but haven’t found definitive evidence) but I believe the only way that Hitler’s declaration of war on the US can explained is this. The Japanese government must have led Hitler to believe that Japan would invade the USSR (relieving the pressure on the eastern front) if Hitler declared war on the US. If so the imperial Japanese government pulled a world class scam on Hitler. I think the only alternative is that Hitler was out of control and basically irrational by the end of 1941.