Anniversary
Best D-Day remembrance I’ve seen yet today would be Captain Ed’s:
Americans, Brits, and Canadians, most just out of their teens, poured onto those beaches to rescue a world gone mad. They sloshed slowly through waist-deep water and the crossfire of machine guns to liberate France and to stop the German war machine, and to defend the Western concepts of freedom and liberty against the forces of darkness and genocide. The Americans, who had started the European theater of war badly in North Africa and roundly dismissed by the Brits (after Kasserine Pass, for understandable reasons), had proven that democratic republics can produce the kind of men needed to defend them.
We owe these men, and our allies, the deepest gratitude and unfailing admiration for their sacrifice.
Amen to that, always and forever. And to their stout, indomitable heirs in today’s armed forces, too.
Update! Okay, this one’s good too:
June 6, 1944. -NORMANDY- Three hundred French civilians were killed and thousands more wounded today in the first hours of America’s invasion of continental Europe. Casualties were heaviest among women and children.
Most of the French casualties were the result of the artillery fire from American ships attempting to knock out German fortifications prior to the landing of hundreds of thousands of U.S. troops. Reports from a makeshift hospital in the French town of St. Mere Eglise said the carnage was far worse than the French had anticipated and reaction against the American invasion was running high. “We are dying for no reason,” said a Frenchman speaking on condition of anonymity. “Americans can’t even shoot straight. I never thought I’d say this, but life was better under Adolph Hitler.”
The invasion also caused severe environmental damage. American troops, tanks, trucks and machinery destroyed miles of pristine shoreline and thousands of acres of ecologically sensitive wetlands. It was believed that the habitat of the spineless French crab was completely wiped out, threatening the species with extinction.
Kimball asks the obvious question: could we mount such an operation today — not as a strategic or tactical matter, but as a political one? in other words, would the liberal media allow it, and would the American civilian population as a whole — more liberal and obstinately ignorant of military necessity and the nature of the world as it exists, as opposed to how they’d like it to be — have the will to see it through? The answer, I think, is equally obvious — and every bit as ugly and discreditable.
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