Illuminati-R-Us

No, not the solstice.

June 6, 1944, the D-Day Normandy invasion

I can't even imagine...

Conan O'Brian gave Tom Hanks a painting of the astronauts storming the beaches at Normandy.

Enzo wrote:I can't even imagine...

Nope.

I've mentioned before that my Dad landed on D-Day, his tank was disabled on the beach and he was evacuated shortly afterwards so this is the day I consider my mortality and the possibility of my non-existence. As an aside my father bore the Germans no ill-will, even the SS he fought in France, since he realised that had he been German he would have grown up with the Hitler Youth rather than the Scouts so he might have been a believer. He didn't like the French though, he thought they were all collaborators so his empathy only stretched so far.

I'm spending today partly on a Spanish beach and partly on a balcony overlooking a Spanish beach. In half an hour I'm heading out to see a lovely German woman called Doris who runs a very good pizza restaurant. Europe is good and Brexit is fucking it all up. The cunts.

I was just a little kid, and I asked my father where he was in the war. He told me he fought in the Marshall Islands. I asked him if he had "killed any Japs?" He didn't want me saying something like that. It wasn't until much later I understood that.

My parental grandfather was in the merchant navy, and spent most of the war on the Arctic convoys. There weren't any of those runs between April - August 1944 though, so I don't know where he was on D-Day. My maternal grandfather also avoided it, by being in Iraq at the time.

Heid the Ba' wrote:In half an hour I'm heading out to see a lovely German woman called Doris who runs a very good pizza restaurant. Europe is good and Brexit is fucking it all up. The cunts.

Amen!

Very little to say about D-Day from this side of the former trenches, except that this is one of the dates my pro-American, pro-Atlantic and pro-European attitudes derive their fuel from. On that day, our liberation, too, began.

I had two uncles that joined the Navy right after Pearl Harbor. One served on the U.S.S. Curtis, which served as a flag ship a couple of times for various Pacific Fleet commanders. He was aboard during a kamikaze attack in 1945 but was uninjured.

The other served in the Pacific on several Landing Ship, Tanks (LST, a.k.a. Large Stationary Target). He never went into any details but I saw 3 Purple Heart medals he got. The only story he told about one was when he was helping an injured buddy to the sick bay after a bomb strike. They were in a corridor and another bomb went off, blowing the guys head off while in my uncle's arms. The family said he came back from the war different, and was never the same again.

Once again I’m on my Spanish balcony remembering my Dad and contemplating my mortality. I’m drinking and thinking of that day in 1944.

Thankfully we can't imagine it. And the weight of the decision of invasion, knowing that thousands would die that day. My dad was in the service at the time, but due to his parents being German immigrants, he was never going to be deployed to the European fight. Never deployed overseas at all, as it turned out.

And it's difficult for us to imagine not knowing about it. Like the clueless State Department spokesperson, who in trying to smooth the waters over the latest gaff from the Ambassador to Germany, cited that we'd had a long history with Germany, dating back to D-day...

They redefine stupid every day, and they LOVE their work!