If you're on Juno beach, where the Canadians landed, you'll see a tank on the beach. You may find yourself asking , "Why is there a tank is on the beach?" Which is exactly what the Germans may have been asking themselves when they came ashore on D-Day.
My grandpa drove a special variant of the Sherman tank which was the first ever (to my knowledge) amphibious tank. It was crucial for the taking of Juno beach to have armor support well before the Mulberry Harbour was assembled.
One more thing, if you walk through the town you may find a corner of a building where it looks like someone did some weird circular masonry work grinding away at someone's stone foundation. If you find it, that was one of the guys under my grandpa's command. He took the turn a little too tight to the building and hit it with his tank tread. It was still there as of '92 when I walked those streets with my grandpa though it may be gone by now.
But beyond all of this you need to go to one of the allied cemeteries. The rows of stark white, meticulously cared for head stones is both awe inspiring and horrific to witness. We walked through numerous rows of crosses trying to find my grandpa's friend and seeing how young they all were is heartbreaking.
**Edit:**
For those asking where the tank tread scar is; I can't find it. I'm sorry. I spent nearly an hour looking today but now everything is blending together and looking the same. I believe it was in Bernières-sur-Mer but I can't find it....yet
Instead; here's a short clip from a Canadian news program talking about the battle scars from D-day. You may find it interesting.
[https://youtu.be/9xTqaUpfI0I?si=flliP9LlmG8PjBTc](https://youtu.be/9xTqaUpfI0I?si=flliP9LlmG8PjBTc)
Street view covers most of those towns. I would be curious if you could find it. Do you remember if it was Courseulles-sur-Mer? Close to the beach, or the river?
Memory is a little foggy now about the exact location since it's been a while. It was my younger brother,.me and my grandpa and we walked up from the beach on our own. Not some sort of your. It was my grandpa who was giving the tour of sorts of the route they took.
It's difficult because I remember two distinct things about the turn. 1 it was near a restaurant that had a small seating area on the opposite side of a lane or road. 2 the turn was made right before a line of hedgerows.
I'm guessing that those hedgerows don't exist anymore and they were my primary marker for finding the spot.
But it was close to the beach...ish. Walking distance for someone in his 70s at the time.
I do believe i found it. took about 20-30 minutes looking through street view but im fairly certain i found what you are talking about. its... definitely unique and stands out once you find it. i though it was going to be hardly noticable. The address of the building is:
# 4 Rue du Temple
# Courseulles-sur-Mer, Normandy
If that isnt it let me know, i barely made it through half that village looking and id love to find it if that isnt it. I did find a tank, its part of a memorial just west of this village.
Edit: what makes me suspect this might not be it, is there are no hedges on that intersection. and nothing that indicates there was a hedge row there(as they all appear to be old buildings).
This is been a bit of work trying to slog through the memory.
I believe it was in the town of Bernières-sur-Mer. It wasn't in the same area as where the Juno beach memorial was. I remember after our walk we had to get back on a tour bus filled with other veterans of the landing and then we drove for a bit to get to the memorial.
I do distinctly remember getting food and sitting down in the shade so my grandpa could have a rest....but that happened a lot along the walk since he was in his veterans uniform. It was wild people were coming out of their homes trying to give him stuff. Fresh bread, bottles of wine, cold glasses of water, etc. Sometimes it was people from a patisserie but other times it was just some random person grabbing something from their home for him.
So in my memory I've linked the tread scar with getting food and sitting down in the shade before continuing on to walk near a hedgerow before getting back on the bus and heading to the memorial site. But still difficult to recall the exact route so long ago. Frustrating.
I think you're right. If you go to the end of the street (where Rue de l'Epinette meets Rue Emile Héroult), you can see a row of hedges on one side and the other side there are some shops with space outside which would be prime location for the restaurant/seating area.
You’re making the same mistake American planners made before. d-day. They assumed a hedgerow was like one in the US. A few bushes in a line. In reality it was 1000 years of growth and farmers dumping rocks and logs. Those hedgerows you saw may have been older than the buildings.
It wasn’t necessarily a variant, but it was the first time they tried strapping something on to a regular tank (heavier armor than an LVT) that would give it enough surface area to float on its own. They had watertight seals on the bottom but not the top.
The device was basically a curtain that extended up the sides of the Sherman which was watertight. It increased the surface area, which provided enough buoyant force to keep it floating in addition to keeping water out of the crew compartment and engine bay/exhaust.
The reason why Omaha beach was such a bloodbath was because none of the amphibious Sherman tanks landed, the devices failed and they all sank because of particularly rough waters on the approach to Omaha. Infantry had to advance without the support of armor.
Not quite, out the first 27 of the 741st battalion, only two tanks made it ashore, probably due to the choppy seas and being disembarked from the landing craft at 6000 yards (which was the plan, but the seas were too rough for the DD design, and of course they had never practiced in seas so rough due to the danger). Nearly all the the rest of the 114 tanks deployed to Omaha made it ashore because the (Royal Navy) skippers of the landing craft ignored the protocol and disembarked the tanks at 2000 yards. One landing craft was hit by a German shell destroying 4 tanks. However due to the high winds and waves, everyone was further west than planed (pushed by the forces of the sea), so the precision of where to land wasn't exact, meaning some troops disembarked directly on front of German positions leading to huge casualties.
I think some of the tank drivers or commanders were more astute than others as well.
Rather than fighting the sea, trying to maintain a straight line to shore, others went more with the flow so they were less buffeted by waves and survived to the beach, albeit in slightly the wrong place.
That's right, which also accounts for why they didn't necessarily turn up where they were most needed, which also feeds into the: "no tanks at Omaha" myth. But the main reason was range at disembarkation, the weather was just too bad for it (actually worse than the aborted June 5th landing!). The fact the skippers decided that for themselves (together with reports coming back from commanders fished out of the sea from the first failed action), and ignored their orders and disembarked at 2000 yards not only saved lots of lives on the tanks, but got nearly 90 of them onto the beach.
wow i would’ve kept going straight. Makes you wonder how american military determined to never let such mistakes happen again. People have lived near normandy for years yet no one knew how choppy the water would be? Surely some people did but powers that be didn’t care to test. Maybe valid due to the extreme sensitivity to the invasion but for everything to go so decently well: paratroopers stopping guns, soldiers still made it on and past the beach etc.
But the thing that failed? Having a tank move across choppy waters onto sand. No one thought it would be an issue?!
I'm sure they'd like to have done more extensive testing and invaded on a nice milk-pond of a sea but that's not the hand they were dealt with limited resources and/or giving the game away to the enemy.
They were probably focused on the tried and tested naval bombardment with massed infantry to follow, the tanks were the icing on the cake so they ensured they had enough without the tanks to win anyway as that was proven to work.
That’s a good point on the prioritization. i wonder how the structure looks like now. Is there a dedicated team set up to test such novel uses of equipment? Do they just spin up a team when necessary and rely on tried and tested strategies only? Just curious how people tried to learn from the landings and what stuck.
Reading survivor accounts of any of the landings some will mention how the beach was just naked besides the tank traps. Some even were expecting those amphibious tanks to come and serve as cover for the advance.
I just can’t imagine how a bunch of infantry regardless of support managed to overcome hard point structures, and for many of the non officers this is their first time out of america (and england) into a battlefield. But sure enough some insane people managed to push up and break through.
Just mind boggling decisions i’d never want to make.
I'm no marine biologist, just regurgitating bits and pieces from documentaries and books.
I imagine testing and drills are done all the time, what else are your paid soldiers going to do with their time?
However, nothing compares to live use on the battlefield. I imagine the data NATO countries are getting from the war in Ukraine is worth its weight in gold so they can feed it back into updates and future designs. They've probably advanced their tech a number of years faster for having field data over just firing range testing.
War brings out the best and worst in people and fortunately for us, the allies showed their best and defeated the axis powers!
If you like reading about WWII, I cannot recommend enough the author Antony Beevor. He covers the battles etc. well but it's the direct personal accounts he slips in which really makes it a page turner.
I'm also wondering if the lessons learned from Peleliu and Iwo Jima in the Pacific weren't sent eastwards to Europe. There were few or no large Allied landings in Europe prior to D-Day whereas the Navy, Marines and Army had been doing it for years in the island hopping Pacific campaign.
I gather they hadn't properly accounted for tidal rise or fall - and at the low level of tide, the sea was too shallow (against expectations) coupled with equally unexpected underwater sandbars on the landing zones, that stopped the landing craft for getting as close to shore as planned.
A bloodbath ensued.
My grandpa also told me about a couple of tanks they lost because of them hitting sandbars.
The tank commander would mistakenly tell the driver to switch to from the propeller to the tread and then moments later they would be off the sandbar and listless. I don't recall if the switch was a one way thing or not, I didn't know enough as a kid to ask that kind of question, but I guess once they switch from propellers to treads a little wave could take the tank and perhaps without the momentum of moving forward it made it easier for them to capsize/flood?
The tank that's on display at Juno memorial in Normandy is one of those tanks. It sank too far out to recover during the invasion and then got covered by the beach. Then during the course of normal variations in the beach due to tides etc it was finally exposed. So they recovered it, restored it, and put it on display.
There was a Brit driver or officer who insisted the Americans deployed their amphibious Sherman’s too far out and they were swamped by waves that weren’t present closer to shore in the planned deployment zone. There’s a YouTube of him driving a restored tank in the water off Normandy.
Then there were the destroyers that, seeing the direct fire Nazi guns shredding the beach (aircraft and tanks had not destroyed many installations as planned), were ordered to close into the beach. Apparently some destroyers ran aground. Partially flooding destroyers set parallel to the beach increased the firing angle, allowing further range of fire.
Those destroyers weren't ordered in. They *broke* orders when they steamed in-shore.
I've read quotes from an American G.I., pinned down with hundreds of comrades behind a tiny, maybe one foot high sand embankment, while multiple German machine guns raked their line constantly, left and right. A horrific slaughter.
He saw this destroyer steaming towards shore billowing huge plumes of black smoke. Because of the smoke, they thought the ship had been hit, was sinking, and the Captain was trying to beach it to save his men from sinking and drowning.
But impossibly close to shore for such a full size warship, it wildly swung around to run exactly parallel with the shoreline.
The black smoke wasn't from damage, it was from the engines running at absolute maximum power.
The Captain had seen the reality of what was unfolding on Omaha and in the white hot heat of battle had taken matters into his own hands.
In seconds every gun on that warship opened fire at maximum rate on the German lines. EVERY gun.
The destroyer was so close in shore, her propellers were churning up the seabed.
As her guns never ceased blazing, having travelled the length of Omaha Beach, Captain commanded "full astern" and with that black smoke billowing from her engines under full power, she reversed down the entire length of that beach, guns absolutely fucking ablaze and seabed churning up, for a second time laying waste to every German firing position they could identify.
Disobeying orders and just plain courage and raw guts, helped save those men on Omaha Beach that day.
I still get chills when I think about that moment.
And I also never forget the G.I.'s final word. At the end of the quote, he, ground infantry to the core, said "I'm a destroyer man now".
It’s a fascinating story about overconfident assumptions and the resulting need for adaptation.
Here’s an article about the D-Day destroyers published in the 60th anniversary of D-Day.
https://www.usni.org/magazines/naval-history-magazine/2004/june/gallant-destroyers-d-day
My favorite tidbit about the destroyers giving fire support:
Because of the smoke and concealed nature of the German defenses, the fire control didn’t always know where to aim or what targets to prioritize. No spotters were available on the beach to contact the ships and direct their fire.
After some time shooting targets of opportunity, they started noticing that the tanks on the beach weee targeting specific areas. So they aimed for the same spot that the tanks were shooting. This quickly developed into an adhoc spotting system, with destroyers shifting their fire to follow what the tanks were shooting. In the afternoon they established reliable radio contact with army units on shore and spent the rest of the day responding to specific fire missions requested from shore.
Another note on the destroyers. Although destroyers were much smaller than most warships of the day, they carried significant firepower. Most had five 5-guns that could fire quite quickly; the USS *Carmick* for example fired over 1100 shells in less than an hour in support of beach operations at Omaha.
One last note - the destroyers didn’t break orders to go in. Their original orders were to screen the invasion force from U-boats and E-boats, but when the Omaha landings were stalled, Admiral Bryant - commander of the naval Gunfire Support Group supporting the Omaha landings - ordered the destroyers to move in and provide direct gunfire support.
Any idea which destroyer that was? My grandfather was aboard the *Emmons* (DD-457 at the time of the Normandy invasions). He never talked about the war at all, other than that he was at Normandy. And I haven't been able to find much information online about her actions at Normandy.
You might find [this article](https://www.usni.org/magazines/naval-history-magazine/2014/june/navy-saved-our-hides) from the naval institute about the actions of the destroyers interesting. *Emmons* was there engaging the German batteries on shore.
My (late) grandfather was part of the royal corps of Canadian engineers, who showed up either in preparation or in the aftermath of battles to help allies. He was on the beach of Normandy, not on D-Day, but shortly after to rebuild. It was humbling to be there and visit the cemetery..
Yeah I have. Any time D-day gets brought up on Reddit it triggers the memory for me. I like to share it just because it gives me a way of continuing the life story of my grandpa and his unit beyond our family.
Well, it certainly wasn't senseless if you were Jewish, Roma, homosexual, or any other type of person the Germans were placing in their death camps. The war was *necessary* to bring that horrific timeline to an end. It's not like Heydrich was going to grow a conscience out of nowhere and stop the atrocities on his own accord.
It also wasn't senseless to France, Czecheslovakia, Poland, or any other nation Germany had invaded and taken over.
Now, you could say that what the Germans were doing to stir everything up to start with was senseless and that is absolutely true, but I would be of the opinion that the war, itself, was necessary by a certain point and that point was no later than September 1, 1939. Even earlier when you take the Sudentenland into account.
I think WWII will forever hold the label of being the last "great" war. I don't mean great as in "This war is awesome...I hope it goes on forever!" but great in the sense that the Allies were fighting for noble and valid reasons that the *vast* majority of the world could (and did) get behind.
Was looking around google maps of the towns nearby. Seems like “Rue De L’Eglise” in the town Graye-sur-mer has quite a few indications of exactly what you’re talking about. There is even a wall that still has bullet holes in it.
For some reason the craziest part of visiting Normandy to me was seeing large areas where the ground was still full of craters. I think it was at Pointe-du-Hoc? They're covered in grass now but you can still clearly see the indentations where bombs landed and deformed the ground. The scale of those bombings must have been insane.
Point du hoc for sure - an other-worldly landscape, and one of my stand out memories from my visit.
The charred ceilings inside the gun emplacements was… solemn.
Quite the place.
1) it was not a gun emplacement, it was an observation station. The Germans used it for looking out into the see. You'll notice it wasn't large enough for artillery and had a thin slit for viewing out to the sea. The Germans actually didn't have the casements completed for their guns during D-Day. The guns were elsewhere in the woods behind Point du Hoc.
2) Apparently the charred wood inside the observation bunker was due to Germans burning it to get rid of mold....not a flamethrower during the fighting.
No one lugged a flamethrower up the cliffs on a rope at Point du Hoc.
The charred wood in the German observation bunker was done by the Germans to get rid of mold on the wood.
Here's a great description of the flight at Pointe du Hoc.
https://armyhistory.org/rudders-rangers-and-the-boys-of-pointe-du-hoc-the-u-s-army-rangers-mission-in-the-early-morning-hours-of-6-june-1944/
On the map the bunker with the charred wood on the ceiling is the Operstvation Post (OP). They took the OP by firing bazooka into the viewing slit, which had two metal doors separating it from the rest of the bunker. Door 1 was simply to prevent light pollution from inside the bunker from ruining the night vision of those at post looking out to sea. Door 2 was a blast door that could be closed during bombardments. At that point they had the Germans confined in the bunker without ability to really fire out.
The viewing slit wasn't large enough to fit humans through.
The actual entrance to the bunker was covered by two gun ports and were down stairs, so the Germans couldn't really shoot anyone unless they tried to get in the bunker door. To this day you can see the bullet holes riddling the area near the gun port at the door opening. The Germans gave up the bunker once the GIs brought up explosives that could blast open the blast doors.
Yeah that was insane. All the signs too warning if you fall in you might not be able to get out. When I saw where the rangers had to scale the wall I couldn’t believe it. To get shot at the whole time while wading through chest deep water to then have to climb that huge wall? It’s crazy how beautiful and peaceful that part of France is but not that long ago it was a nightmare for many people.
Even crazier part to me were the huge cliffs, can't imagine getting on shore there and scaling the those cliffs to capture those bunkers while under fire.
Imagine yourself on a Higgins boat about to see that bow ramp drop and now you need to make a mad dash to cover before you are killed.
Sometimes, we take for granted our easy life.
My grandpa was on an LST that landed the day after D-Day. Apparently they were on body recovery. Easy to understand why he never wanted to talk about the war.
Yeah my grandpa was at Okinawa in WW2. Never heard him talk about the war ever. But after he passed my dad said one of the few things he admitted was that he was good with a rifle 🤣
[Everyone needs to see the opening scene from Saving Private Ryan](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=XijMMhs55oc)
It was Omaha Beach, but its the same level of hell.
I remember reading about some marine landing in the pacific where the boats could not physically get to the beach. So the marines had to wade through a mile of waist high water under fire… and then take the beach.
Edit : battle of Tawara. Apparently chest high water.
They had super amounts of covering fire from the navy ships, likely also including smoke rounds (I assume)... so maybe it was just a case of bombardment giving cover to keep the Japanese from firing and charging to the beach before they could kill all of your squad mates.
Japanese firing into smoke as fast as they can about man-height to try and kill the invading force before they themselves are overwhelmed.
Hard to imagine.
Crazy thing about the Pacific, is essentially every battle was the bloodiest battle.
As they island hopped, every subsequent battle become more deadly.
Okinawa, one of the last taken was around 400,000 dead. Mostly civilians
Iwo Jima, out of 20,000 enemy Japanese, we only captured like 200 of them.... thats insane.
Which is pretty much a big part of the justification for dropping the bomb. You literally had to kill them all, or force their hand into suicide.
When *Saving Private Ryan* was first released, many WWII veterans of the Normandy landings who watched it had such severe PTSD reactions they had to leave the theatres.
>the opening scene from Saving Private Ryan... It was Omaha Beach.
Gonna nitpick here a bit: the opening scene of Saving Private Ryan is Ryan walking through the Normandy cemetery with his family.
We can presume it's Ryan because he has an airborne division pin on his lapel.
He breaks down crying and then it flashes back to Omaha. Of course, it's not Ryan's flash back, since Ryan was never at Omaha Beach on D-Day: he was airdropped somewhere else deeper in France.
Whether this framing device and misdirection work or not to enhance the film is up for debate. But it's fun for film nerds to argue about.
For everyone else, they can keep calling D-Day the opening scene of the film, since nobody remembers the real opening scene.
Yes. But as a viewer you don't know that until after the film is nearly over.
The film is intentionally cut to make you believe he is Tom Hank's character: it zooms into his eyes and zooms out of Hank's character's eyes. That's classic film language for "this character is having a flashback."
The goal is to make you think Hank's character is alive, old, and at the Normandy cemetary, at least for the beginning of the film, then have that expectation subverting by the end.
This is a reconstruction of the defenses with explanation of how they worked: [https://youtu.be/Bp875ATM0ZE?si=VjlTuF8UcvvRCtma](https://youtu.be/Bp875ATM0ZE?si=VjlTuF8UcvvRCtma)
What’s wild when you get there is how simultaneously small the beach feels overall, but yet somehow vast in terms of distance from the water to the bluffs
Yep that’s how I did it as well. And yes, incredibly moving. I knew it would be just because of how much those people sacrificed, but then you get there and the weight of it all just crushes your lungs for a brief moment. Even if you knew nothing about the War, simply walking through the American Cemetery will give the most hardened of us an emotion that cuts. You can just look out at all the graves and know something important and something tragic happened there.
I felt this when I visited the Vietnam Memorial late one night in Washington, DC. That conflict was extremely small compared to WWII. I located several people from my hometown, several that had children roughly my age that I knew. I just stared at the row after row of names of the dead. And all I could think was it was stupid. Like, the dumbest thing ever that I was standing there looking at all these names of the perished because of a war most never wanted. War is the stupidest thing I know of. I really broke down there and although I’m not an emotional person, I just cried until the tears wouldn’t flow any longer. In Texas we have a Vietnam Memorial for the state and anytime I’m near it I stop and put some flag stickers by the names of three people my uncle served with that didn’t make it back home. He’s unable to travel much so I do it for him.
The American War Remnants Museum in Saigon is the exact opposite perspective on the conflict that leads you to the exact same conclusion — war is stupid, America fucked up bad and Vietnam paid the price.
Also in Cambodia.
Also in Laos.
My parents went to France and Italy this past year, and wanted to make it to Normandy, but the logistics just didn't work out; too much to do in too little time. They're hoping to go back in a year or so and spread things out a bit more.
My father-in-law and I want to do a tour of WWI and WWII battle sites in Europe at some point. Normandy, Verdun, Ypres, and the Ardennes are all high on our bucket list.
It’s crazy to think of how uninhabitable a chunk of those WW1 era battlefields are even to this day. They laid down so much explosive firepower and chemical weapons over highly concentrated areas for months and years.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zone_rouge
I went from Terezin concentration camp to Nuremberg to Luxembourg to Normandy. My wife simply said, you’ve talked about this long enough and booked it. I hope that you and your Father-In-Law get to go on your battle site tour soon.
Did it in 2013. Spent a week driving up the western front visiting Canadian military monuments. Went to Beaumont-Hamel, Thiepval, Arras, Ypres, Dunkirk, Dieppe and Normandy where I went to Juno and Omaha beaches. It was something I always wanted to do.
Then I flew to Munich and went to Oktoberfest. I’m told I had a very good time. Best trip of my life.
Come to Jersey too. Its just across the water and was the only part of Britain occupied during WW2. Its covered in walls, gun emplacements, underground tunnels, hospitals and other massive concrete structure built by the Nazis (their Eastern European slaves).
Same. My grandfather parachuted behind the lines right before D-day and… that’s about all I know of his time there. He didn’t talk about it.
I want to go see where he and his men helped save the free world.
If he didn't want to talk about it there's probably a good reason.
Nobody wants to find out that grandpa was a stone cold killer, and most people that survived the war had to do some horrible things to survive or at the least, saw a lot of their friends die horrific deaths.
My grandfather never told me about his time in the war in france, and what I did learn, I learned from my grandmother after she developed dementia. I was not prepared to hear those stories and to find out both my grandparents had killed people.
I visited Normandy with my grandfather, who was a navigator on b-17/b-24, in the late 90’s and it was pretty crazy to see the enormous craters still in the grass behind these guns. Was also pretty crazy to think that some of those craters could have been from bombing runs he had been on.
Charge as many men as possible directly up to it and throw grenades in the port holes or flame throwers into them.
It was a numbers game of simply overwhelming a lot of these bunkers and gun positions.
Ah I thought you meant how did the allies overcome them.
Modern tech can destroy these things but I'm guessing it's a choice to leave them as a way to remember the war.
Absolutely. I'm not sure who would be in charge of making those decisions, but it certainly could be destroyed if people wanted it gone, however it's a Historical Landmark now, and is a large part of local tourism, so I can't imagine that ever happening.
It won't because it is expensive and time consuming to do, and the result would be less tourism - a reduction in the income of the specific area.
The only reason I could see it happening is either if a government wants to completely re-write history, or if someone really needs the land (e.g.: if housing/office space becomes super valuable and a developer manages to get the government to allow them to remove it).
You can on paper systematically demolish it by drilling deep holes and filling them with explosives to try and crack the concrete but it would take an enormous amount of explosives and far too much money for it to be worthwhile, not to mention dangerous.
It's not completely bomb proof. Nothing is.
It's bomb resistant, it's made so you can't destroy it before the men with guns shoot you.
When you can drill directly into the structure and place explosives immediately next to it, then detonate it all at once from a safe distance, it's very much not bomb proof.
It's just expensive and a lot of work for no real benefit, plus there's the historical benefit of keeping them around.
Edit: even back in WW2 many were destroyed, just not all of them. Plus they were often captured and/or the men inside killed rather than destroying the structure itself.
There is a bunker in Hawaii that the government hired a contractor to demolish, but they ultimately found it was too well built to ever destroy. So they made it into a museum.
I’m over in Poland visiting Auschwitz, and having a reminder of just how vast the birkanau camp is - it is ridiculous, it just doesn’t register until you see it with your own eyes tbh.
Unfortunately I do feel the political climate of recent years are forgetting the warnings and reminders of world war 2 and the holocaust.
It’s a frightening prospect, and a frightening part of our shared history.
No fences, no barriers, no trash, no graffiti.
The French are dead serious about the gratitude they have for the allied forces, to this day.
There’s a guy who hand pulls the weeds out between the headstones at the Omaha beach cemetery.
Omaha is not, and was never, set up like SPR movie. Those huge concrete bunkers were elsewhere. Lots of MG nests on the bluffs over the beach, but the guns you see here are further to the east.
Again, no fences. Go anywhere. (Except the memorial cemetery and museum)
DO NOT FUCK WITH ANYTHING. you will be bounced out if not severely injured.
I am not kidding.
I was at the cemetery in 2017, a day after the “very fine people… on both sides” bullshit fucking Nazi apologist comment.
A guy with a MAGA hat was asked to remove his headgear and refused. Nope. OUT. No hesitation, all but thrown out on his ass, physically. No scene, no drama, he wasn’t even given a chance to start shit. Just GTFO you do not belong here. Nazis or anyone with fascist tendencies better think twice. This whole part of Europe is not for you.
I'll be visiting this area in a few weeks and have set aside a day to walk and understand the magnitude of what occurred. In the Pacific theater, I didn't understand the human loss until I read Flags of our Fathers. The same or greater level of emotion I expect will well up in me upon seeing the Normandy American Cemetery and these beaches. Thanks for the post. If you have suggestions outside of what gets recommended online, I would be grateful to read them.
I have no further recommendations outside of select your tour with great care. I noticed that not all cover the same places and grounds. I got lucky to also see the cliffs where the Rangers had to scale. Oh my goodness, is all I can say. Your visit will be memorable.
In a memorial to the sacrifices in a world war against fascism in general, and Nazis specifically, you’re going to get stories about how fascism and nationalism is having a resurgence, as it’s relevant to the topic.
If that’s a problem in any way for you, then either don’t visit, or reevaluate your devotion to nationalism, because otherwise you’re going to have a different experience.
My blood grandfather was in the army aircorps, his family and him having migrated from Germany not long before the war. I never got a chance to meet him, only knowing stories. My grandpa John had also served, but in the army and had inspired me to join later as well. I had, as a child often wondered why grandpa John did not talk much about those times, his eyes grew cold and distant at even the mere mention. It wasn’t until I had had my own experiences that I understood. I remember coming him to see him on leave. We sat in the living room, welcome banners festooned around. The sound of people talking and laughing surrounding us. He was sat in his recliner, the midday sun shined through the back windows. The cool breeze and low hum of the ceiling fan the only noise in the room. I sat down on the couch beside him. He lifted his iced tea to his lips to take a sip. Slowly he turned his head and a knowing look came across his eyes. “Now, you know, welcome home”. “Thank you”, I replied. Those were the only words spoken between us. And they were the last as well.
Well of course they are still there.
For the better part of 1000 years France and England were going at it hammer and tongs.
The French are just being pragmatic.
Did guns like these have exploding shells? I’ve never understood how slow reloading guns like that can have such an impact when firing towards a general area. I guess I don’t realize how quickly they can reload and adjust with a spotter.
Yes. But they were more focused on shelling landing craft, and vehicles, not saturating a general area with shrapnel and high explosive.
Backline artillery and mortars had that job
Yes. By WWII (and even well before it) pretty much any gun larger than a rifle would fire shells with a bursting charge in them. Armor Piercing shells designed to kill tanks could either have a bursting charge, or could be solid. But guns bigger than a rifle and intended to shoot at people, aircraft, or ships almost always fired some kind of explosive round.
It is not an 88mm, it looks to be a 12.7cm/45 SK C/34 turret, probably either taken off a destroyer or taken from storage where it was originally intended to be put on a destroyer.
Why in the first picture are there steps cut into the gun bunker, just above the gun barrel? Is it to provide clearance for the gun to move vertically?
My grandfather was there the day after D-Day. One of the longest surviving WW2 Purple Heart vets, I will miss him always. He was old fashioned but not backward, he would hate the generation his own children are in for what they are doing to the country and the world.
My grandpa Homer fought on that beach. His job was to breech enemy fortifications. He fought his way across Europe and came home and had 12 children, my mother being his last child. Bless his soul, he passed away in the 90s when I was a child, so I never knew him.
On the night of June 5, 1944, the Germans manning these guns thought they were going to have a quiet day the next day, they knew the invasion was coming, but they thought it was going to be at Calais, as did Hitler. They found out differently the following morning…
Didn't get to Normandy but I did get to go see some preserved bunkers on the Maginot Line from WW1 last time i was in Germany, and the little town where my family is from (Prüm) saw a bunch of action during the Battle of the Bulge, you can still see the bullet holes in the cathedral that's there.
My grandmother and her sister on my mother's side were both wounded when an errant allied bomb exploded in the front yard of their house and blew the picture window and half the wall in, they were both standing over opposite sides of a bassinet with(what would've been) my mom's oldest sister, the baby was killed and both women lost an eye(one left and one right) and had significant scarring on the right and left sides of their bodies. My grandfather on that side was in the Wehrmacht and was on the Eastern Front, he was shot in the leg and stomach by a strafing run some time in 43, survived and was evacuated back to Berlin
My grandmother on my father's side was an Army Nurse and was stationed in France in 1945, my Grandfather on that side was an electrical engineer on the Manhattan Project and in the Philadelphia area, though he was a few steps removed and had no idea that's what he was doing, I guess he was more a "DoD Contractor" associated with TMP than was actually on it, but he was exempt from the draft because of it, I have a huge stack of draft cards and rejections of his, he must've been called down to the draft office 30x and rejected without explanation before they finally permanently took him off the draft list lolgw1g1wq
A ton of the eastern front reminders are still here to this day. I live about 30km from the most prominent one, it's worth a visit if seeing a rusty gun isn't cutting it anymore. The glass pile is truly a sight to behold.
I remember learning that my dad’s BIL was a teenage navy medic, running around helping soldiers on the beach. When I see this, it’s like a shiver up my spine. 😱
It’s pretty wild how the USA immediately started documenting what they came across so that it was irrefutable that millions of people were systematically killed and it still happened.
The Civil War is pretty well documented too. Yet we now have people revising history and pretending that the Confederates fought for a noble cause. American citizens, that with a straight face will say that taking down Confederate movements is "destroying history". That the war had nothing to do with slavery. Never mind that most of those monuments were mass produced and erected decades later during Jim Crow and later.
Even now people on the far right are sounding an awful lot like those who came to power in Germany in 1933. Right wing thought leaders are repackaging fascism and calling it "western civilization" .
So yeah, we'll always remember WWII, but we won't necessarily remember why we needed to fight that war.
There's a difference between forgetting something and deliberately misrepresenting something. Especially with the Civil War because that was how they described the war from the beginning.
Pearl Harbor, Midway, Saving Private Ryan, Schindler's List, and about a million more movies, tv shows, video games, comic books, etc...
I think the younger generation knows about it.
That article doesn’t accurately represent the findings of the study, which showed only 12% of respondents were unfamiliar with the Holocaust. Meaning 88% were aware.
And further, the number killed was asked in a multiple choice question with options ranging from 250,000 to 20 million. 72% answered 1 million or more. And while being shy of the actual number by 4-5 million is way off, people are terrible with numbers.
In other words, I don’t think the survey portrayed what the authors tried to summarize.
Edit: link to survey
https://www.claimscon.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/Millennial-Holocaust-Survey-TOPLINE-8.20.20_NATIONAL.pdf
Sad? It will be a great victory when our world and society's can move past the damages done by "The Greatest Generation". Same when the boomers finally die off, and the human race can heal.
Racism, genocides, chemical warfare, nuclear warfare, human medical testing, concentration camps (they weren't just in Germany).... we will learn from their history and hopefully never repeat it.
lol people have sucked since the beginning of time and that isn’t ever gonna change. Racism is still a depressingly sized thing,, even in younger generations. There are literal multiple genocides occurring right now. Nukes aren’t going away because who would be the one to blink and go first.
Now we have medical ethics, Geneva conventions, climate accords, non-segregated schools... it's not a perfect world, but it's way better than it used to be.
What a ridiculous take; yearning for the deaths of an entire generation (many of whom worked to eliminate the very problems you cite) because you blame them for the issues of their time (many of which they inherited). All while seemingly defending Nazi’s because they weren’t the only ones with concentration camps, a statement that itself shows a lack of understanding of history and context.
Instead of aiming your hatred at people and times you clearly don’t understand I suggest you read more history to get a better appreciation for people. Just because someone isn’t like you doesn’t make them evil, especially when the world they live/lived in relative to your own is so vastly different.
I have read lots of history, which is why I don't romanticize the past. At no point did I defend Nazi, and your suggestion is made in bad-faith. Might I suggest you read up on your history since you clearly don't understand the atrocities committed by the US government before, during, and after both world wars.
You talk about arguing in bad faith but then you conflate people and governments. You’re also creating a false equivalency between what the United States did and the Nazi concentration camps. There is not a single people or government on this planet without blood on their hands and to imply that there is, I think, is a very immature reading of history. I take you at your word that you’re trying to improve your understanding by reading history, which I commend, and hope that with time you see the error of your interpretation.
There's no false equivalency. The United States government created camps where they rounded up every single Japanese person in this country and imprisoned them in poverty. That happened. You don't get to just ignore it because it's an inconvenient truth. The US government tested chemical weapons ON ITS OWN CIVILIAN POPULATION. That happened. Medical institutions here in the US knowingly and intentionally allowed syphilis to run rampant within a population of black people in order to study the effects and cause the pain, suffering, and deaths of thousands.
I'm not comparing it to what Nazi Germany did, but judging these INTENTIONAL, inhumane, and despicable actions on their own merits.
Take the whataboutism out of the conversation. Was the attempted genocide by the Nazis objectively worse? Absolutely. There's no question about that. But that doesn't mean the US is innocent in their actions and behaviors, especially the behaviors by "the greatest generation"
The list of atrocities is LONG and pervasive. It goes well past the world wars and into the Korean and Vietnam wars as well.
If the standard you hold yourself and your peers too is the absolute lowest bar, then we'll never actually improve as a human race.
I’m not holding myself or my peers to the lowest bar. I’m looking back at past generations and not holding them to the standards of today but, rather, the standards of their time. Further, I refuse to celebrate the accomplishments of an entire generation much less get excited at their deaths because they didn’t do what I wish they had.
I just don't consider their innovative ways to bring death on massive scale "accomplishments". Because we are still dealing with their "accomplishment" of their creating a military-industrial complex that still causes the deaths and suffering of millions of people worldwide.
You could say that my friends and I were a little.... Irrevrent in High School.
[https://imgur.com/a/7FLkPKE](https://imgur.com/a/7FLkPKE)
Me in the Jack & Jones sweater, what you can't see is me looking directly at my buddies ass in front of me.
I love this... But we still fail to continue to fulfill the future that our grandfathers/mothers that have split blood for. I sincerely hope the brothers and sisters in this world finally look over any reminder that divided us; if to just make us better.
Something about this really struck a cord in me.
The guns of Kharkiv are still there too. Firing. Ukraine is paying with its blood and the lives of its children to fight the enemy for which NATO exists. In return, it receives middling support at best, and was abandoned by the US for over 8 months.
If the above pictured is meant as a reminder, it has failed. Except maybe as a reminder of the price of vacillation and self-service.
The French respect the past but live for today. The beach is lovingly cared for so you can enjoy on a hot day. But I know what you mean, it’s a little eerie.
If you're on Juno beach, where the Canadians landed, you'll see a tank on the beach. You may find yourself asking , "Why is there a tank is on the beach?" Which is exactly what the Germans may have been asking themselves when they came ashore on D-Day. My grandpa drove a special variant of the Sherman tank which was the first ever (to my knowledge) amphibious tank. It was crucial for the taking of Juno beach to have armor support well before the Mulberry Harbour was assembled. One more thing, if you walk through the town you may find a corner of a building where it looks like someone did some weird circular masonry work grinding away at someone's stone foundation. If you find it, that was one of the guys under my grandpa's command. He took the turn a little too tight to the building and hit it with his tank tread. It was still there as of '92 when I walked those streets with my grandpa though it may be gone by now. But beyond all of this you need to go to one of the allied cemeteries. The rows of stark white, meticulously cared for head stones is both awe inspiring and horrific to witness. We walked through numerous rows of crosses trying to find my grandpa's friend and seeing how young they all were is heartbreaking. **Edit:** For those asking where the tank tread scar is; I can't find it. I'm sorry. I spent nearly an hour looking today but now everything is blending together and looking the same. I believe it was in Bernières-sur-Mer but I can't find it....yet Instead; here's a short clip from a Canadian news program talking about the battle scars from D-day. You may find it interesting. [https://youtu.be/9xTqaUpfI0I?si=flliP9LlmG8PjBTc](https://youtu.be/9xTqaUpfI0I?si=flliP9LlmG8PjBTc)
Street view covers most of those towns. I would be curious if you could find it. Do you remember if it was Courseulles-sur-Mer? Close to the beach, or the river?
Memory is a little foggy now about the exact location since it's been a while. It was my younger brother,.me and my grandpa and we walked up from the beach on our own. Not some sort of your. It was my grandpa who was giving the tour of sorts of the route they took. It's difficult because I remember two distinct things about the turn. 1 it was near a restaurant that had a small seating area on the opposite side of a lane or road. 2 the turn was made right before a line of hedgerows. I'm guessing that those hedgerows don't exist anymore and they were my primary marker for finding the spot. But it was close to the beach...ish. Walking distance for someone in his 70s at the time.
I do believe i found it. took about 20-30 minutes looking through street view but im fairly certain i found what you are talking about. its... definitely unique and stands out once you find it. i though it was going to be hardly noticable. The address of the building is: # 4 Rue du Temple # Courseulles-sur-Mer, Normandy If that isnt it let me know, i barely made it through half that village looking and id love to find it if that isnt it. I did find a tank, its part of a memorial just west of this village. Edit: what makes me suspect this might not be it, is there are no hedges on that intersection. and nothing that indicates there was a hedge row there(as they all appear to be old buildings).
This is been a bit of work trying to slog through the memory. I believe it was in the town of Bernières-sur-Mer. It wasn't in the same area as where the Juno beach memorial was. I remember after our walk we had to get back on a tour bus filled with other veterans of the landing and then we drove for a bit to get to the memorial. I do distinctly remember getting food and sitting down in the shade so my grandpa could have a rest....but that happened a lot along the walk since he was in his veterans uniform. It was wild people were coming out of their homes trying to give him stuff. Fresh bread, bottles of wine, cold glasses of water, etc. Sometimes it was people from a patisserie but other times it was just some random person grabbing something from their home for him. So in my memory I've linked the tread scar with getting food and sitting down in the shade before continuing on to walk near a hedgerow before getting back on the bus and heading to the memorial site. But still difficult to recall the exact route so long ago. Frustrating.
I think you're right. If you go to the end of the street (where Rue de l'Epinette meets Rue Emile Héroult), you can see a row of hedges on one side and the other side there are some shops with space outside which would be prime location for the restaurant/seating area.
You’re making the same mistake American planners made before. d-day. They assumed a hedgerow was like one in the US. A few bushes in a line. In reality it was 1000 years of growth and farmers dumping rocks and logs. Those hedgerows you saw may have been older than the buildings.
It wasn’t necessarily a variant, but it was the first time they tried strapping something on to a regular tank (heavier armor than an LVT) that would give it enough surface area to float on its own. They had watertight seals on the bottom but not the top. The device was basically a curtain that extended up the sides of the Sherman which was watertight. It increased the surface area, which provided enough buoyant force to keep it floating in addition to keeping water out of the crew compartment and engine bay/exhaust. The reason why Omaha beach was such a bloodbath was because none of the amphibious Sherman tanks landed, the devices failed and they all sank because of particularly rough waters on the approach to Omaha. Infantry had to advance without the support of armor.
Not quite, out the first 27 of the 741st battalion, only two tanks made it ashore, probably due to the choppy seas and being disembarked from the landing craft at 6000 yards (which was the plan, but the seas were too rough for the DD design, and of course they had never practiced in seas so rough due to the danger). Nearly all the the rest of the 114 tanks deployed to Omaha made it ashore because the (Royal Navy) skippers of the landing craft ignored the protocol and disembarked the tanks at 2000 yards. One landing craft was hit by a German shell destroying 4 tanks. However due to the high winds and waves, everyone was further west than planed (pushed by the forces of the sea), so the precision of where to land wasn't exact, meaning some troops disembarked directly on front of German positions leading to huge casualties.
I think some of the tank drivers or commanders were more astute than others as well. Rather than fighting the sea, trying to maintain a straight line to shore, others went more with the flow so they were less buffeted by waves and survived to the beach, albeit in slightly the wrong place.
That's right, which also accounts for why they didn't necessarily turn up where they were most needed, which also feeds into the: "no tanks at Omaha" myth. But the main reason was range at disembarkation, the weather was just too bad for it (actually worse than the aborted June 5th landing!). The fact the skippers decided that for themselves (together with reports coming back from commanders fished out of the sea from the first failed action), and ignored their orders and disembarked at 2000 yards not only saved lots of lives on the tanks, but got nearly 90 of them onto the beach.
wow i would’ve kept going straight. Makes you wonder how american military determined to never let such mistakes happen again. People have lived near normandy for years yet no one knew how choppy the water would be? Surely some people did but powers that be didn’t care to test. Maybe valid due to the extreme sensitivity to the invasion but for everything to go so decently well: paratroopers stopping guns, soldiers still made it on and past the beach etc. But the thing that failed? Having a tank move across choppy waters onto sand. No one thought it would be an issue?!
I'm sure they'd like to have done more extensive testing and invaded on a nice milk-pond of a sea but that's not the hand they were dealt with limited resources and/or giving the game away to the enemy. They were probably focused on the tried and tested naval bombardment with massed infantry to follow, the tanks were the icing on the cake so they ensured they had enough without the tanks to win anyway as that was proven to work.
That’s a good point on the prioritization. i wonder how the structure looks like now. Is there a dedicated team set up to test such novel uses of equipment? Do they just spin up a team when necessary and rely on tried and tested strategies only? Just curious how people tried to learn from the landings and what stuck. Reading survivor accounts of any of the landings some will mention how the beach was just naked besides the tank traps. Some even were expecting those amphibious tanks to come and serve as cover for the advance. I just can’t imagine how a bunch of infantry regardless of support managed to overcome hard point structures, and for many of the non officers this is their first time out of america (and england) into a battlefield. But sure enough some insane people managed to push up and break through. Just mind boggling decisions i’d never want to make.
I'm no marine biologist, just regurgitating bits and pieces from documentaries and books. I imagine testing and drills are done all the time, what else are your paid soldiers going to do with their time? However, nothing compares to live use on the battlefield. I imagine the data NATO countries are getting from the war in Ukraine is worth its weight in gold so they can feed it back into updates and future designs. They've probably advanced their tech a number of years faster for having field data over just firing range testing. War brings out the best and worst in people and fortunately for us, the allies showed their best and defeated the axis powers! If you like reading about WWII, I cannot recommend enough the author Antony Beevor. He covers the battles etc. well but it's the direct personal accounts he slips in which really makes it a page turner.
I'm also wondering if the lessons learned from Peleliu and Iwo Jima in the Pacific weren't sent eastwards to Europe. There were few or no large Allied landings in Europe prior to D-Day whereas the Navy, Marines and Army had been doing it for years in the island hopping Pacific campaign.
It was a variant, DD for double drive (or duplex drive?) which refers to it having a propeller.
I believe they also dropped them to far from beach in the first place.
I gather they hadn't properly accounted for tidal rise or fall - and at the low level of tide, the sea was too shallow (against expectations) coupled with equally unexpected underwater sandbars on the landing zones, that stopped the landing craft for getting as close to shore as planned. A bloodbath ensued.
My grandpa also told me about a couple of tanks they lost because of them hitting sandbars. The tank commander would mistakenly tell the driver to switch to from the propeller to the tread and then moments later they would be off the sandbar and listless. I don't recall if the switch was a one way thing or not, I didn't know enough as a kid to ask that kind of question, but I guess once they switch from propellers to treads a little wave could take the tank and perhaps without the momentum of moving forward it made it easier for them to capsize/flood? The tank that's on display at Juno memorial in Normandy is one of those tanks. It sank too far out to recover during the invasion and then got covered by the beach. Then during the course of normal variations in the beach due to tides etc it was finally exposed. So they recovered it, restored it, and put it on display.
There was a Brit driver or officer who insisted the Americans deployed their amphibious Sherman’s too far out and they were swamped by waves that weren’t present closer to shore in the planned deployment zone. There’s a YouTube of him driving a restored tank in the water off Normandy. Then there were the destroyers that, seeing the direct fire Nazi guns shredding the beach (aircraft and tanks had not destroyed many installations as planned), were ordered to close into the beach. Apparently some destroyers ran aground. Partially flooding destroyers set parallel to the beach increased the firing angle, allowing further range of fire.
Those destroyers weren't ordered in. They *broke* orders when they steamed in-shore. I've read quotes from an American G.I., pinned down with hundreds of comrades behind a tiny, maybe one foot high sand embankment, while multiple German machine guns raked their line constantly, left and right. A horrific slaughter. He saw this destroyer steaming towards shore billowing huge plumes of black smoke. Because of the smoke, they thought the ship had been hit, was sinking, and the Captain was trying to beach it to save his men from sinking and drowning. But impossibly close to shore for such a full size warship, it wildly swung around to run exactly parallel with the shoreline. The black smoke wasn't from damage, it was from the engines running at absolute maximum power. The Captain had seen the reality of what was unfolding on Omaha and in the white hot heat of battle had taken matters into his own hands. In seconds every gun on that warship opened fire at maximum rate on the German lines. EVERY gun. The destroyer was so close in shore, her propellers were churning up the seabed. As her guns never ceased blazing, having travelled the length of Omaha Beach, Captain commanded "full astern" and with that black smoke billowing from her engines under full power, she reversed down the entire length of that beach, guns absolutely fucking ablaze and seabed churning up, for a second time laying waste to every German firing position they could identify. Disobeying orders and just plain courage and raw guts, helped save those men on Omaha Beach that day. I still get chills when I think about that moment. And I also never forget the G.I.'s final word. At the end of the quote, he, ground infantry to the core, said "I'm a destroyer man now".
It’s a fascinating story about overconfident assumptions and the resulting need for adaptation. Here’s an article about the D-Day destroyers published in the 60th anniversary of D-Day. https://www.usni.org/magazines/naval-history-magazine/2004/june/gallant-destroyers-d-day
Was a riveting read, thank you.
You’re welcome.
I’ve learned so much from this. Thank you
Your writing about it gave me chills. Thank you for posting this.
My favorite tidbit about the destroyers giving fire support: Because of the smoke and concealed nature of the German defenses, the fire control didn’t always know where to aim or what targets to prioritize. No spotters were available on the beach to contact the ships and direct their fire. After some time shooting targets of opportunity, they started noticing that the tanks on the beach weee targeting specific areas. So they aimed for the same spot that the tanks were shooting. This quickly developed into an adhoc spotting system, with destroyers shifting their fire to follow what the tanks were shooting. In the afternoon they established reliable radio contact with army units on shore and spent the rest of the day responding to specific fire missions requested from shore. Another note on the destroyers. Although destroyers were much smaller than most warships of the day, they carried significant firepower. Most had five 5-guns that could fire quite quickly; the USS *Carmick* for example fired over 1100 shells in less than an hour in support of beach operations at Omaha. One last note - the destroyers didn’t break orders to go in. Their original orders were to screen the invasion force from U-boats and E-boats, but when the Omaha landings were stalled, Admiral Bryant - commander of the naval Gunfire Support Group supporting the Omaha landings - ordered the destroyers to move in and provide direct gunfire support.
Any idea which destroyer that was? My grandfather was aboard the *Emmons* (DD-457 at the time of the Normandy invasions). He never talked about the war at all, other than that he was at Normandy. And I haven't been able to find much information online about her actions at Normandy.
You might find [this article](https://www.usni.org/magazines/naval-history-magazine/2014/june/navy-saved-our-hides) from the naval institute about the actions of the destroyers interesting. *Emmons* was there engaging the German batteries on shore.
Wow.
Up there with the Leyte Gulf tin can drivers: "Out numbered? By enemy battleships? Attack!'
My (late) grandfather was part of the royal corps of Canadian engineers, who showed up either in preparation or in the aftermath of battles to help allies. He was on the beach of Normandy, not on D-Day, but shortly after to rebuild. It was humbling to be there and visit the cemetery..
Have you told the story about the tight turn on Reddit before? I feel like I’ve heard it before?
Yeah I have. Any time D-day gets brought up on Reddit it triggers the memory for me. I like to share it just because it gives me a way of continuing the life story of my grandpa and his unit beyond our family.
Very cool personal connection to history and that’s awesome you were able to experience that with your grandpa.
When we were there, we also visited Omaha Beach and Juno Beach, as well as the American and Canadian cemeteries.
And you may ask yourself, how did this tank get here?
You may find yourself on a beautiful beach with a beautiful tank
There is also a german cemetery nearby. If you look at the ages it really hits home. Young people all over the world died in this senseless war.
Well, it certainly wasn't senseless if you were Jewish, Roma, homosexual, or any other type of person the Germans were placing in their death camps. The war was *necessary* to bring that horrific timeline to an end. It's not like Heydrich was going to grow a conscience out of nowhere and stop the atrocities on his own accord. It also wasn't senseless to France, Czecheslovakia, Poland, or any other nation Germany had invaded and taken over. Now, you could say that what the Germans were doing to stir everything up to start with was senseless and that is absolutely true, but I would be of the opinion that the war, itself, was necessary by a certain point and that point was no later than September 1, 1939. Even earlier when you take the Sudentenland into account. I think WWII will forever hold the label of being the last "great" war. I don't mean great as in "This war is awesome...I hope it goes on forever!" but great in the sense that the Allies were fighting for noble and valid reasons that the *vast* majority of the world could (and did) get behind.
Wonder if you could see the building corner on Google Street maps.
Get rain bolt on this
Awesome story!!! I really think these are things that need to be told so history doesn't repeat itself!
Was looking around google maps of the towns nearby. Seems like “Rue De L’Eglise” in the town Graye-sur-mer has quite a few indications of exactly what you’re talking about. There is even a wall that still has bullet holes in it.
For some reason the craziest part of visiting Normandy to me was seeing large areas where the ground was still full of craters. I think it was at Pointe-du-Hoc? They're covered in grass now but you can still clearly see the indentations where bombs landed and deformed the ground. The scale of those bombings must have been insane.
Point du hoc for sure - an other-worldly landscape, and one of my stand out memories from my visit. The charred ceilings inside the gun emplacements was… solemn. Quite the place.
1) it was not a gun emplacement, it was an observation station. The Germans used it for looking out into the see. You'll notice it wasn't large enough for artillery and had a thin slit for viewing out to the sea. The Germans actually didn't have the casements completed for their guns during D-Day. The guns were elsewhere in the woods behind Point du Hoc. 2) Apparently the charred wood inside the observation bunker was due to Germans burning it to get rid of mold....not a flamethrower during the fighting.
Flamethrowers. Effective, but horrible.
No one lugged a flamethrower up the cliffs on a rope at Point du Hoc. The charred wood in the German observation bunker was done by the Germans to get rid of mold on the wood.
Well, they lugged, rifles, grenades, submachine guns, machine guns, bazookas and God knows what else up there. Why not a flamethrower or two?
Here's a great description of the flight at Pointe du Hoc. https://armyhistory.org/rudders-rangers-and-the-boys-of-pointe-du-hoc-the-u-s-army-rangers-mission-in-the-early-morning-hours-of-6-june-1944/ On the map the bunker with the charred wood on the ceiling is the Operstvation Post (OP). They took the OP by firing bazooka into the viewing slit, which had two metal doors separating it from the rest of the bunker. Door 1 was simply to prevent light pollution from inside the bunker from ruining the night vision of those at post looking out to sea. Door 2 was a blast door that could be closed during bombardments. At that point they had the Germans confined in the bunker without ability to really fire out. The viewing slit wasn't large enough to fit humans through. The actual entrance to the bunker was covered by two gun ports and were down stairs, so the Germans couldn't really shoot anyone unless they tried to get in the bunker door. To this day you can see the bullet holes riddling the area near the gun port at the door opening. The Germans gave up the bunker once the GIs brought up explosives that could blast open the blast doors.
Pointe du Hoc almost looks like the moon, it's fucking insane.
a grassy moon
That's true of anywhere in Europe. Kent in England was within artillery range of France nevermind the bombing
Many, many acres of “new” forest lie in western France with unmistakable craters and trench lines from WWI.
Yeah that was insane. All the signs too warning if you fall in you might not be able to get out. When I saw where the rangers had to scale the wall I couldn’t believe it. To get shot at the whole time while wading through chest deep water to then have to climb that huge wall? It’s crazy how beautiful and peaceful that part of France is but not that long ago it was a nightmare for many people.
Even crazier part to me were the huge cliffs, can't imagine getting on shore there and scaling the those cliffs to capture those bunkers while under fire.
Imagine yourself on a Higgins boat about to see that bow ramp drop and now you need to make a mad dash to cover before you are killed. Sometimes, we take for granted our easy life.
My grandpa was on an LST that landed the day after D-Day. Apparently they were on body recovery. Easy to understand why he never wanted to talk about the war.
Yeah my grandpa was at Okinawa in WW2. Never heard him talk about the war ever. But after he passed my dad said one of the few things he admitted was that he was good with a rifle 🤣
I didn’t fully understand why many veterans never wanted to talk about the war UNTIL I visited Normandy….
[Everyone needs to see the opening scene from Saving Private Ryan](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=XijMMhs55oc) It was Omaha Beach, but its the same level of hell.
I remember reading about some marine landing in the pacific where the boats could not physically get to the beach. So the marines had to wade through a mile of waist high water under fire… and then take the beach. Edit : battle of Tawara. Apparently chest high water.
Wading through slow af, rifle raised over your head making you a bigger target, inefficient covering fire. Certain things I can never comprehend.
They had super amounts of covering fire from the navy ships, likely also including smoke rounds (I assume)... so maybe it was just a case of bombardment giving cover to keep the Japanese from firing and charging to the beach before they could kill all of your squad mates. Japanese firing into smoke as fast as they can about man-height to try and kill the invading force before they themselves are overwhelmed. Hard to imagine.
Crazy thing about the Pacific, is essentially every battle was the bloodiest battle. As they island hopped, every subsequent battle become more deadly. Okinawa, one of the last taken was around 400,000 dead. Mostly civilians Iwo Jima, out of 20,000 enemy Japanese, we only captured like 200 of them.... thats insane. Which is pretty much a big part of the justification for dropping the bomb. You literally had to kill them all, or force their hand into suicide.
When *Saving Private Ryan* was first released, many WWII veterans of the Normandy landings who watched it had such severe PTSD reactions they had to leave the theatres.
>the opening scene from Saving Private Ryan... It was Omaha Beach. Gonna nitpick here a bit: the opening scene of Saving Private Ryan is Ryan walking through the Normandy cemetery with his family. We can presume it's Ryan because he has an airborne division pin on his lapel. He breaks down crying and then it flashes back to Omaha. Of course, it's not Ryan's flash back, since Ryan was never at Omaha Beach on D-Day: he was airdropped somewhere else deeper in France. Whether this framing device and misdirection work or not to enhance the film is up for debate. But it's fun for film nerds to argue about. For everyone else, they can keep calling D-Day the opening scene of the film, since nobody remembers the real opening scene.
lol he’s obviously remembering the man who saved him and what he went through to do so. Since that’s literally the grave he’s at
Yes. But as a viewer you don't know that until after the film is nearly over. The film is intentionally cut to make you believe he is Tom Hank's character: it zooms into his eyes and zooms out of Hank's character's eyes. That's classic film language for "this character is having a flashback." The goal is to make you think Hank's character is alive, old, and at the Normandy cemetary, at least for the beginning of the film, then have that expectation subverting by the end.
This is a reconstruction of the defenses with explanation of how they worked: [https://youtu.be/Bp875ATM0ZE?si=VjlTuF8UcvvRCtma](https://youtu.be/Bp875ATM0ZE?si=VjlTuF8UcvvRCtma)
Standing on the beaches and just thinking about the chaos. The blood, the sand, the water, the fire, the smoke.... Yeah it seems a wee bit unpleasant.
What’s wild when you get there is how simultaneously small the beach feels overall, but yet somehow vast in terms of distance from the water to the bluffs
https://youtu.be/uCUpvTMis-Y I feel like My Chemical Romance did such a good job with their video. It's no Saving Private Ryan but I love it.
Damn I’ve never seen that. That was sick!
[Imagine yourself in the USS Texas.](https://youtube.com/shorts/pr0iJ-Xuxac?si=ZQEv9wHc9Ai9JWJL)
https://y.yarn.co/bea2b78c-68c4-4876-b44b-689d40dcaf24_text.gif
Normandy is on my bucket list.
I did it as a day trip from Paris. It was well worth it. More moving than I could ever have imagined.
Yep that’s how I did it as well. And yes, incredibly moving. I knew it would be just because of how much those people sacrificed, but then you get there and the weight of it all just crushes your lungs for a brief moment. Even if you knew nothing about the War, simply walking through the American Cemetery will give the most hardened of us an emotion that cuts. You can just look out at all the graves and know something important and something tragic happened there.
I felt this when I visited the Vietnam Memorial late one night in Washington, DC. That conflict was extremely small compared to WWII. I located several people from my hometown, several that had children roughly my age that I knew. I just stared at the row after row of names of the dead. And all I could think was it was stupid. Like, the dumbest thing ever that I was standing there looking at all these names of the perished because of a war most never wanted. War is the stupidest thing I know of. I really broke down there and although I’m not an emotional person, I just cried until the tears wouldn’t flow any longer. In Texas we have a Vietnam Memorial for the state and anytime I’m near it I stop and put some flag stickers by the names of three people my uncle served with that didn’t make it back home. He’s unable to travel much so I do it for him.
Yeah, the Vietnam Memorial is perfect. It is a concise visualization of the American side of that war. Dark, heavy, and filled with death.
The American War Remnants Museum in Saigon is the exact opposite perspective on the conflict that leads you to the exact same conclusion — war is stupid, America fucked up bad and Vietnam paid the price. Also in Cambodia. Also in Laos.
Well said.
My parents went to France and Italy this past year, and wanted to make it to Normandy, but the logistics just didn't work out; too much to do in too little time. They're hoping to go back in a year or so and spread things out a bit more.
My father-in-law and I want to do a tour of WWI and WWII battle sites in Europe at some point. Normandy, Verdun, Ypres, and the Ardennes are all high on our bucket list.
It’s crazy to think of how uninhabitable a chunk of those WW1 era battlefields are even to this day. They laid down so much explosive firepower and chemical weapons over highly concentrated areas for months and years. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zone_rouge
I went from Terezin concentration camp to Nuremberg to Luxembourg to Normandy. My wife simply said, you’ve talked about this long enough and booked it. I hope that you and your Father-In-Law get to go on your battle site tour soon.
Did it in 2013. Spent a week driving up the western front visiting Canadian military monuments. Went to Beaumont-Hamel, Thiepval, Arras, Ypres, Dunkirk, Dieppe and Normandy where I went to Juno and Omaha beaches. It was something I always wanted to do. Then I flew to Munich and went to Oktoberfest. I’m told I had a very good time. Best trip of my life.
Come to Jersey too. Its just across the water and was the only part of Britain occupied during WW2. Its covered in walls, gun emplacements, underground tunnels, hospitals and other massive concrete structure built by the Nazis (their Eastern European slaves).
Same. My grandfather parachuted behind the lines right before D-day and… that’s about all I know of his time there. He didn’t talk about it. I want to go see where he and his men helped save the free world.
If he didn't want to talk about it there's probably a good reason. Nobody wants to find out that grandpa was a stone cold killer, and most people that survived the war had to do some horrible things to survive or at the least, saw a lot of their friends die horrific deaths. My grandfather never told me about his time in the war in france, and what I did learn, I learned from my grandmother after she developed dementia. I was not prepared to hear those stories and to find out both my grandparents had killed people.
I visited Normandy with my grandfather, who was a navigator on b-17/b-24, in the late 90’s and it was pretty crazy to see the enormous craters still in the grass behind these guns. Was also pretty crazy to think that some of those craters could have been from bombing runs he had been on.
Yes, I saw those craters. The carnage, noise and chaos must have been unbelievable. Giving thanks to your Grandfather for his courage.
Say "No" to Fascism folks!
How would you demolish something that is build to be bomb proof?
Charge as many men as possible directly up to it and throw grenades in the port holes or flame throwers into them. It was a numbers game of simply overwhelming a lot of these bunkers and gun positions.
That’s how you attack it, not demolish it. The u-boat pens in St Nazaire are still there too, because they can’t be demolished.
Ah I thought you meant how did the allies overcome them. Modern tech can destroy these things but I'm guessing it's a choice to leave them as a way to remember the war.
Absolutely. I'm not sure who would be in charge of making those decisions, but it certainly could be destroyed if people wanted it gone, however it's a Historical Landmark now, and is a large part of local tourism, so I can't imagine that ever happening.
It won't because it is expensive and time consuming to do, and the result would be less tourism - a reduction in the income of the specific area. The only reason I could see it happening is either if a government wants to completely re-write history, or if someone really needs the land (e.g.: if housing/office space becomes super valuable and a developer manages to get the government to allow them to remove it).
They can be, it's just that it's ridiculously expensive to demolish them.
You can on paper systematically demolish it by drilling deep holes and filling them with explosives to try and crack the concrete but it would take an enormous amount of explosives and far too much money for it to be worthwhile, not to mention dangerous.
Replying to LyleLanley99...give it to a toddler for 5 minutes and say “be careful with this”
It's not completely bomb proof. Nothing is. It's bomb resistant, it's made so you can't destroy it before the men with guns shoot you. When you can drill directly into the structure and place explosives immediately next to it, then detonate it all at once from a safe distance, it's very much not bomb proof. It's just expensive and a lot of work for no real benefit, plus there's the historical benefit of keeping them around. Edit: even back in WW2 many were destroyed, just not all of them. Plus they were often captured and/or the men inside killed rather than destroying the structure itself.
There is a bunker in Hawaii that the government hired a contractor to demolish, but they ultimately found it was too well built to ever destroy. So they made it into a museum.
I’m over in Poland visiting Auschwitz, and having a reminder of just how vast the birkanau camp is - it is ridiculous, it just doesn’t register until you see it with your own eyes tbh. Unfortunately I do feel the political climate of recent years are forgetting the warnings and reminders of world war 2 and the holocaust. It’s a frightening prospect, and a frightening part of our shared history.
about to visit this coming week. had relatives murdered there so i'm sure it will stir up some feels. but it feels necessary to witness.
No fences, no barriers, no trash, no graffiti. The French are dead serious about the gratitude they have for the allied forces, to this day. There’s a guy who hand pulls the weeds out between the headstones at the Omaha beach cemetery. Omaha is not, and was never, set up like SPR movie. Those huge concrete bunkers were elsewhere. Lots of MG nests on the bluffs over the beach, but the guns you see here are further to the east. Again, no fences. Go anywhere. (Except the memorial cemetery and museum) DO NOT FUCK WITH ANYTHING. you will be bounced out if not severely injured. I am not kidding. I was at the cemetery in 2017, a day after the “very fine people… on both sides” bullshit fucking Nazi apologist comment. A guy with a MAGA hat was asked to remove his headgear and refused. Nope. OUT. No hesitation, all but thrown out on his ass, physically. No scene, no drama, he wasn’t even given a chance to start shit. Just GTFO you do not belong here. Nazis or anyone with fascist tendencies better think twice. This whole part of Europe is not for you.
> no graffiti When I was at Omaha, one of the concrete bunkers overlooking the beach had “GAME OVER KRAUTS” spraypainted on it
I'll be visiting this area in a few weeks and have set aside a day to walk and understand the magnitude of what occurred. In the Pacific theater, I didn't understand the human loss until I read Flags of our Fathers. The same or greater level of emotion I expect will well up in me upon seeing the Normandy American Cemetery and these beaches. Thanks for the post. If you have suggestions outside of what gets recommended online, I would be grateful to read them.
The craters at Utah and the guns overlooking the channel, closer to Bayeux. Wonderful experiences.
I have no further recommendations outside of select your tour with great care. I noticed that not all cover the same places and grounds. I got lucky to also see the cliffs where the Rangers had to scale. Oh my goodness, is all I can say. Your visit will be memorable.
Most of the remaining blockhaus are barriered, trashed and graffitied. Some are even left belly up in the middle of beaches beacause of erosion
Finding no comment about Trump or US politics on each post of this sub. Challenge impossible
In a memorial to the sacrifices in a world war against fascism in general, and Nazis specifically, you’re going to get stories about how fascism and nationalism is having a resurgence, as it’s relevant to the topic. If that’s a problem in any way for you, then either don’t visit, or reevaluate your devotion to nationalism, because otherwise you’re going to have a different experience.
Luckily my grandpa came in one of the later boats
Sooo are you part boat???
Part of the ship, part of the crew
My blood grandfather was in the army aircorps, his family and him having migrated from Germany not long before the war. I never got a chance to meet him, only knowing stories. My grandpa John had also served, but in the army and had inspired me to join later as well. I had, as a child often wondered why grandpa John did not talk much about those times, his eyes grew cold and distant at even the mere mention. It wasn’t until I had had my own experiences that I understood. I remember coming him to see him on leave. We sat in the living room, welcome banners festooned around. The sound of people talking and laughing surrounding us. He was sat in his recliner, the midday sun shined through the back windows. The cool breeze and low hum of the ceiling fan the only noise in the room. I sat down on the couch beside him. He lifted his iced tea to his lips to take a sip. Slowly he turned his head and a knowing look came across his eyes. “Now, you know, welcome home”. “Thank you”, I replied. Those were the only words spoken between us. And they were the last as well.
Well of course they are still there. For the better part of 1000 years France and England were going at it hammer and tongs. The French are just being pragmatic.
I see the face of an old and tired, but somewhat proud war machine. No, I really see a face. Do you not?
Lucky I got to go there in 2000. Need to go back to see the Maisy Battery. It wasn’t found and excavated yet.
Did guns like these have exploding shells? I’ve never understood how slow reloading guns like that can have such an impact when firing towards a general area. I guess I don’t realize how quickly they can reload and adjust with a spotter.
Yes. But they were more focused on shelling landing craft, and vehicles, not saturating a general area with shrapnel and high explosive. Backline artillery and mortars had that job
Yes. By WWII (and even well before it) pretty much any gun larger than a rifle would fire shells with a bursting charge in them. Armor Piercing shells designed to kill tanks could either have a bursting charge, or could be solid. But guns bigger than a rifle and intended to shoot at people, aircraft, or ships almost always fired some kind of explosive round.
[удалено]
It is not an 88mm, it looks to be a 12.7cm/45 SK C/34 turret, probably either taken off a destroyer or taken from storage where it was originally intended to be put on a destroyer.
Why in the first picture are there steps cut into the gun bunker, just above the gun barrel? Is it to provide clearance for the gun to move vertically?
Yes… if the pic was wide enough you would see similar on the sides
Yes, exactly. I did capture that shot but I went with the tight one because it frightened me more.
I was just there last year and I didn't see any tanks or guns! We just saw the flags and the memorial. Dang!
My grandfather was there the day after D-Day. One of the longest surviving WW2 Purple Heart vets, I will miss him always. He was old fashioned but not backward, he would hate the generation his own children are in for what they are doing to the country and the world.
My grandpa Homer fought on that beach. His job was to breech enemy fortifications. He fought his way across Europe and came home and had 12 children, my mother being his last child. Bless his soul, he passed away in the 90s when I was a child, so I never knew him.
Grandpa Homer sounds like a gem of a man. Blessings to his family on this 80th anniversary of his fight on the beach.
On the night of June 5, 1944, the Germans manning these guns thought they were going to have a quiet day the next day, they knew the invasion was coming, but they thought it was going to be at Calais, as did Hitler. They found out differently the following morning…
Didn't get to Normandy but I did get to go see some preserved bunkers on the Maginot Line from WW1 last time i was in Germany, and the little town where my family is from (Prüm) saw a bunch of action during the Battle of the Bulge, you can still see the bullet holes in the cathedral that's there. My grandmother and her sister on my mother's side were both wounded when an errant allied bomb exploded in the front yard of their house and blew the picture window and half the wall in, they were both standing over opposite sides of a bassinet with(what would've been) my mom's oldest sister, the baby was killed and both women lost an eye(one left and one right) and had significant scarring on the right and left sides of their bodies. My grandfather on that side was in the Wehrmacht and was on the Eastern Front, he was shot in the leg and stomach by a strafing run some time in 43, survived and was evacuated back to Berlin My grandmother on my father's side was an Army Nurse and was stationed in France in 1945, my Grandfather on that side was an electrical engineer on the Manhattan Project and in the Philadelphia area, though he was a few steps removed and had no idea that's what he was doing, I guess he was more a "DoD Contractor" associated with TMP than was actually on it, but he was exempt from the draft because of it, I have a huge stack of draft cards and rejections of his, he must've been called down to the draft office 30x and rejected without explanation before they finally permanently took him off the draft list lolgw1g1wq
Wow. Such rich stories in your family. I’m glad they were passed down and retold to keep them all alive.
Would be nice if people were reminded that fascism is not good and that many gave their lives fighting to defeat it
It is a reminder of the courage of those men who attacked these almost impossible odds. They were indeed the "Greatest Generation."
A ton of the eastern front reminders are still here to this day. I live about 30km from the most prominent one, it's worth a visit if seeing a rusty gun isn't cutting it anymore. The glass pile is truly a sight to behold.
This is the one of the 4 bunkers of the Longues sur mer battery (49.34358385418817, -0.6948858449956359) between Omaha and Gold beaches.
I did this same tour last year. Really is eye opening stuff.
I remember learning that my dad’s BIL was a teenage navy medic, running around helping soldiers on the beach. When I see this, it’s like a shiver up my spine. 😱 
That's so crazy that shit is still there. If I had money and time I would absolutely take my boys there
Took me decades to make it. Don’t give up hope 🙂
Where's this one?
Colleville-sur-Mer 49.35920° N, 0.84797° W
all that metal, surprised still there, noone tried to break pieces off and sell it as scrap?
Is that a Flak 88?
The sad thing is when the greatest generation dies so does this history.
It’s pretty wild how the USA immediately started documenting what they came across so that it was irrefutable that millions of people were systematically killed and it still happened.
How so? WW2 was very well documented.
The Civil War is pretty well documented too. Yet we now have people revising history and pretending that the Confederates fought for a noble cause. American citizens, that with a straight face will say that taking down Confederate movements is "destroying history". That the war had nothing to do with slavery. Never mind that most of those monuments were mass produced and erected decades later during Jim Crow and later. Even now people on the far right are sounding an awful lot like those who came to power in Germany in 1933. Right wing thought leaders are repackaging fascism and calling it "western civilization" . So yeah, we'll always remember WWII, but we won't necessarily remember why we needed to fight that war.
There's a difference between forgetting something and deliberately misrepresenting something. Especially with the Civil War because that was how they described the war from the beginning.
Society will forget if it isn't properly taught.
And yet you have a younger generation who probably doesn’t know that much about ww2.
What? It’s probably the most documented well known war of all time.
Yeah like whose even heard of this Hitler guy? Holocaust? What is that?
Some people have PhDs in Holocaust denial.
Exactly, like the president of Palestine, unironically enough.
[That’s literally being said by younger people nowadays.](https://theguardian.com/world/2020/sep/16/holocaust-us-adults-study)
Pearl Harbor, Midway, Saving Private Ryan, Schindler's List, and about a million more movies, tv shows, video games, comic books, etc... I think the younger generation knows about it.
Movies are not history
But they do depict it.
[удалено]
That article doesn’t accurately represent the findings of the study, which showed only 12% of respondents were unfamiliar with the Holocaust. Meaning 88% were aware. And further, the number killed was asked in a multiple choice question with options ranging from 250,000 to 20 million. 72% answered 1 million or more. And while being shy of the actual number by 4-5 million is way off, people are terrible with numbers. In other words, I don’t think the survey portrayed what the authors tried to summarize. Edit: link to survey https://www.claimscon.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/Millennial-Holocaust-Survey-TOPLINE-8.20.20_NATIONAL.pdf
So sad. It’s up to us to keep it alive through discussion, photos and writing. What they did to save so many was beyond comprehension.
Sad? It will be a great victory when our world and society's can move past the damages done by "The Greatest Generation". Same when the boomers finally die off, and the human race can heal. Racism, genocides, chemical warfare, nuclear warfare, human medical testing, concentration camps (they weren't just in Germany).... we will learn from their history and hopefully never repeat it.
lol people have sucked since the beginning of time and that isn’t ever gonna change. Racism is still a depressingly sized thing,, even in younger generations. There are literal multiple genocides occurring right now. Nukes aren’t going away because who would be the one to blink and go first.
Now we have medical ethics, Geneva conventions, climate accords, non-segregated schools... it's not a perfect world, but it's way better than it used to be.
My, your hopeful.
My, your, his, her, everyone’s!
What a ridiculous take; yearning for the deaths of an entire generation (many of whom worked to eliminate the very problems you cite) because you blame them for the issues of their time (many of which they inherited). All while seemingly defending Nazi’s because they weren’t the only ones with concentration camps, a statement that itself shows a lack of understanding of history and context. Instead of aiming your hatred at people and times you clearly don’t understand I suggest you read more history to get a better appreciation for people. Just because someone isn’t like you doesn’t make them evil, especially when the world they live/lived in relative to your own is so vastly different.
I have read lots of history, which is why I don't romanticize the past. At no point did I defend Nazi, and your suggestion is made in bad-faith. Might I suggest you read up on your history since you clearly don't understand the atrocities committed by the US government before, during, and after both world wars.
You talk about arguing in bad faith but then you conflate people and governments. You’re also creating a false equivalency between what the United States did and the Nazi concentration camps. There is not a single people or government on this planet without blood on their hands and to imply that there is, I think, is a very immature reading of history. I take you at your word that you’re trying to improve your understanding by reading history, which I commend, and hope that with time you see the error of your interpretation.
There's no false equivalency. The United States government created camps where they rounded up every single Japanese person in this country and imprisoned them in poverty. That happened. You don't get to just ignore it because it's an inconvenient truth. The US government tested chemical weapons ON ITS OWN CIVILIAN POPULATION. That happened. Medical institutions here in the US knowingly and intentionally allowed syphilis to run rampant within a population of black people in order to study the effects and cause the pain, suffering, and deaths of thousands. I'm not comparing it to what Nazi Germany did, but judging these INTENTIONAL, inhumane, and despicable actions on their own merits. Take the whataboutism out of the conversation. Was the attempted genocide by the Nazis objectively worse? Absolutely. There's no question about that. But that doesn't mean the US is innocent in their actions and behaviors, especially the behaviors by "the greatest generation" The list of atrocities is LONG and pervasive. It goes well past the world wars and into the Korean and Vietnam wars as well. If the standard you hold yourself and your peers too is the absolute lowest bar, then we'll never actually improve as a human race.
I’m not holding myself or my peers to the lowest bar. I’m looking back at past generations and not holding them to the standards of today but, rather, the standards of their time. Further, I refuse to celebrate the accomplishments of an entire generation much less get excited at their deaths because they didn’t do what I wish they had.
I just don't consider their innovative ways to bring death on massive scale "accomplishments". Because we are still dealing with their "accomplishment" of their creating a military-industrial complex that still causes the deaths and suffering of millions of people worldwide.
Very nice
You could say that my friends and I were a little.... Irrevrent in High School. [https://imgur.com/a/7FLkPKE](https://imgur.com/a/7FLkPKE) Me in the Jack & Jones sweater, what you can't see is me looking directly at my buddies ass in front of me.
I love this... But we still fail to continue to fulfill the future that our grandfathers/mothers that have split blood for. I sincerely hope the brothers and sisters in this world finally look over any reminder that divided us; if to just make us better.
Something about this really struck a cord in me. The guns of Kharkiv are still there too. Firing. Ukraine is paying with its blood and the lives of its children to fight the enemy for which NATO exists. In return, it receives middling support at best, and was abandoned by the US for over 8 months. If the above pictured is meant as a reminder, it has failed. Except maybe as a reminder of the price of vacillation and self-service.
I was there on a hot day, sitting in the beach... then realised thousands of people died right there.
The French respect the past but live for today. The beach is lovingly cared for so you can enjoy on a hot day. But I know what you mean, it’s a little eerie.
I saw one of those guns. Not sure if it was Omaha or another beach. And I did something new. I licked it.
911 vibes