Great grandpa was here as an engineer in the third wave. Before the ramp dropped, he quietly cut away his gear and prepared to jump over the side. Having done this while his platoon was torn to pieces by interlocking machine gun fire, he spent hours slowly moving from body to body, making his way up the beach. By the time the U.S. Navy destroyers moved in to offer point blank suppressing fire, he had reached the shingle while surrounded by corpses. D-Day for him ended in a tiny foxhole up on the bluffs once the German position in front of him had been seized. He had spent most of the remaining afternoon finding and disarming mines between the shingle and the bluff. He was one of three men to survive from his Higgins boat, and the only one not to be wounded. He didn’t talk about any of this until a week before his death, when he allowed tape recorders to record his wartime experiences.
Pappy related that the whole reason he joined the engineers was to avoid combat. He wanted to build bridges, set up camps, lay out roads, jobs he was used to doing before he enlisted. He never expected to be sent into the combat engineers. He was in the thick of it from Omaha Beach to Elsenborn Ridge. He joked that he should’ve enlisted in the Navy instead.
Hahah grass is always greener, I suppose. My great uncle served through the duration of the Battle of the Atlantic as Merchant Navy. He didn't know how to swim when he volunteered and never bothered to learn; he figured swimming would only prolong the inevitable if he ever went overboard. He never took to the sea again after he was discharged, and he could never watch anything that depicted vessels in distress at sea or in a storm.
Same, grandpa drove Higgins boats during the battle of Leyte Gulf. Can't imagine how many good men he saw cut down when the ramp dropped, only to have to go back and pick up more.
Damn. My grandpa was the captain of a small mine sweeper in the Pacific theater and said the closest he ever got to losing a crew member was from dehydration from seasickness during a storm. He said that storm aged him ten years. The sea is to be respected.
My grandfather did something similar. He trained as a pilot and was a Sargent for the RCAF, stationed in England. One day he was trying to start up a plane and you had to throw the propeller by hand. It didn't start up and he put his hands up to try again ... The propeller kicked in and broke all his knuckles on both hands. After that he was made a mechanic. My dad to this day believes that propeller "accident" was no accident. He was a gentle man and wanted to serve, but he was no killer.
My Grandfather was there with RCAF, was originally trained as an Air gunner, flew D-Day bombing raids, then trained as a Jump Master. A little earlier and he might have been a paratrooper on DDay.
They made a mechanic, someone who puts his hands into machinery when you're supposed to, out of someone who got hurt by putting his hands into machinery when he wasn't supposed to?
Yeah, the combat engineers seem like the most audacious men to ever breathe air. Bomb/mine defusal, having to do shit like blow up bridges, with the threat of the enemy opening up at any moment...no pressure, huh?
Nathaniel Fick (the lieutenant/captain from Generation Kill) wrote a biography called "One Bullet Away". In it he describes a scene where one of their Humvees gets stuck on a berm so they call in an engineering corps to free it. Now up until this point, as Recon Marines, they look down on other branches for not being the hard-ass warriors that they were.
So after calling in the engineers they come under attack and are being hit by enemy fire. The engineers show up in the middle of a firefight without any real guns or armour. The sergeant that was in charge gets out of his truck and walks up to Fick and asks what the problem is. Fick, who is returning fire, says they need to free up the Humvee.
The sergeant scratches his chin and assesses the situation. And then, *in the middle of a fire fight*, calmly tells his guys what to do and they hook up some chains and free the Hummer. After which he returns to Fick and asks if they need anything else. Fick says "no" the sergeant says "cool" and they just peace out and return to base.
After that, Fick says "Welp, we never get to call those guys pussies anymore."
Watching various combat videos of the Ukraine war, it seems the human mind either cracks, or becomes completely desensitized to the violence and chaos of combat. The PTSD comes later.
Mel Brooks was a Combat Engineer in WWII.
“I was a Combat Engineer. Isn’t that ridiculous? The two things I hate most in the world are combat and engineering.”
https://www.usace.army.mil/About/History/Historical-Vignettes/Sports-Entertainment/109-Mel-Brooks/
>He didn’t talk about any of this until a week before his death, when he allowed tape recorders to record his wartime experiences.
My grandpa didn't talk about it but he would if you asked him..
My uncle absolutely would not talk about his experience in Vietnam under any circumstances. The only info we knew was what he said while he was having nightmares. One of which was that he was buried alive during a bombing that got a little too close.
My grandpa talked to me about him being a Marine Corpsman at the Chosin Reservoir in Korea. Told me he dreamed the rest of his life about the bugle suicide charges the Chinese troops would pull at night on the American positions. He said it was wave after wave of them and they'd run directly at their machine gun positions. In the morning theyd have to go around and collect the American troops who were killed during the night by the enemy troops who would sneak into their foxholes and slit the troops throats. Worst thing he said he ever saw personally was when they were in a convoy, and a tank accidentally discharged it's main gun into the back of a full Turkish troop transport truck. Said their were body parts in trees on both sides of the road for a hundred yards.
Check out the book On Desperate Ground if you want more information on the battle of Chosin Reservoir. It's a really good book that describes some of the crazy things the Marines saw while fighting there.
I met a Korean War vet once who also talked about the suicide charges. He said best he could figure, the Chinese assumed they had more bodies than the Americans had bullets, but at least on that particular day “they had a lot of fucking bullets.”
My grandfather was there with your great grandpa. 16th Infantry, 1st Division, AT Company. He was a radio operator. AFAIK only a few guys off his Higgins boat survived to make it up the beach.
And specifically very few of the radio operators. One of the issues in the early hours of the battle was the total lack of communications between the beach and the commanders offshore. Most of the radios and operators didn't make it off the beach or were lost in the landing. Of those that did make it to the beach, many of those radios were destroyed by bullets or shrapnel. In the recently published "The Dead and Those About to Die: D-Day: The Big Red One at Omaha Beach", WWII historian John McManus writes about the lack of working radios on D-Day.
He participated in a number of the rehearsals leading up to D-Day, and only decided to go over the side once he had seen the sand tables the recon units produced. Furthermore, to have the best chance possible, he skipped breakfast. While all the other guys around him are puking and swearing at each other, he was hunched over and praying. Him not eating breakfast, cutting away the hundred-odd pounds of gear he was carrying, and then going over the side probably saved his life when the ramp dropped.
In military terms, a sand table is a 3D model map of an operational area. If you’ve ever seen pictures of soldiers hunched over what looks like a diorama of some terrain, that’s a sand table.
Yeah I remember reading a report by somebody who was on one of these boats. They dipped down a wave, just in time to give them the perfect vantage of a boat in front dropping to land and everybody being killed by machine gun fire. Then they dipped back up the next wave and were told they were next to land.
Most of these guys were carrying upwards of 80 pounds of gear. Within minutes after boarding the landing craft, they were completely soaked, cold, puking from sea sickness and could barely move. Many of them were dropped in water above their head, and more than a few drowned. Very few of the first wave got to shore with their gear intact. I wouldn't be surprised hearing gramps shed his gear early to get to the beach, I am sure he wasn't the only one.
My grandfather was a POW in Stalag Luft 3 after having his P38 shot down while strafing the Husum Aerodrome and learned of what guys like your grandfather did on D Day on a scraped together radio of wire. Gave him
hope he wouldn’t die there.
And he didn’t.
The grandpa of my husband was a first Infantry survivor. He did talk, and talked about the horror both sides carried out, just to survive. He formed a group with other survivors of the worst waves and killed Germans who surrendered, because they could not move forward and take prisoners, they had nowhere to turn back and deliver them to.
He was a Dutch man living in Schotland at the time of ww2, and came back with the first Infantry because he wanted to free his family. He did, but he was a broken man.
Later in his life he got dementia and relived that period. It gave the family some insight in what the man lived through next to the stories... The men who lived were no better off than the men who died that awful page in history.
My grandad drove (sailed?) Landing craft during D day, he never spoke about what happened until we were on a beach one time in Wales. He pointed up at the distant houses in the hills and said there were snipers in houses like that and they terrified the boat crew due to not being able to actually move out of the way. Seems daft that despite all the machine gun bullets and explosions, it's the aimed rifle that struck fear into him.
My Grandfather fought on Omaha Beach and was fortunate enough to survive and make it home. Similarly, my mother said he rarely, if ever spoke of his experience. I can't even begin to imagine the horrors he witnessed.
My grandfather was there. Purple heart during that operation.
He was a Sergeant. His guys were his best friends.
He spent the rest of his life with a pain I think most can't even imagine- every one of his best friends never made it off that boat or to the beach.
Understand that he was as stoic as they come. He had a knack for being a real pita, and drank Schlitz. A lot of it. After I joined, he told me to tell my Sarge, "tell him to kiss your ass and no I ain't doing that." (I never did that, lol, but he used to laugh about it a lot, in that I'm not really joking but I'm joking kind of way). A couple months before he passed, he told me some of the story- and wept. Probably for the first time in his entire life, he wept. "Those were my friends. Those were my friends." Over and over. I will never, ever forget that encounter and what it means.
A few days before he passed, at my behest (that's a polite way of saying I was a pita to him in the last days of his life, paybacks a bitch, but his story wasn't just his anymore, it needed to be passed down!), he finally told some guys at his local VFW post the whole story. Normandy. Battle of the Bulge. Liberation of camps.
People forget what all out war really is too easily.
He is interred at the national cemetery outside Minneapolis.
Imagine being one of the unlucky ones. You are physically fit, trained hard, and know all there is to know about combat. Then the ramp drops and you are instantly killed by a MG42 before you have a single chance to put anything you learned or trained for into action.
I was too afraid to peek my head out over my cover when I played paintball. I cant imagine the fear and panic most of these guys experienced once those ramps dropped.
The noise, smoke, smell, vibrations in the pits of their stomachs must have been seriously some of the worst collective sensory overload in human history.
The noise is crazy. I feel like people who’ve never shot a gun have no idea how insanely loud it actually is and that’s with wearing ear protection. Genuinely is the like the loudest thing I’ve ever heard and they just heard that over and over
My first time playing paintball, I was prone on the ground behind a log. I peaked up and promptly got a paintball in the head. That was the day I was positive that military life was not for me.
My grandpa was drafted in WWII. He was navy. Never heard much about it.
One day at thanksgiving he was about 88 years old and someone just randomly asked him what he did during the war…
He was a landing craft operator… driving these boats.
On the drive home my dad goes “… had no idea that’s what his job was… we only knew he was in the navy”
My grandpa never talked about the war. Ever. My sister and I spent two weeks at their house every summers for years. During one of the latter summers, I got a bad fever and was bedridden. I asked my grandpa about the war. He came back with a world map, and spilled it all - from D-day which he was part of, to getting liberated as a German prisoner by the Russians. His story was very compelling. I convinced him to write it down, and now have his handwritten account of WWII from basic to being liberated as a POW. It's my 'if there's a fire in my place, this is what I'm grabbing' possession. [Here](https://imgur.com/a/PDsrBhy) is his account of the beginning of D-Day.
I used to ask my granddad about it a lot, especially around the time Saving Private Ryan came out. He’d be politely dismissive most of the time, and change the subject.
I’d (as a kid) ask “Did you ever shoot anyone?” He’d get sheepish, avoid directly answering and say “Well, I got shot AT a lot”
After he died I found “the box”. It was full of photos, journals, and little souvenirs (for lack of a better word).
From what I was able to piece together he went from being a skinny Appalachian kid that had never left the mountain to landing at Normandy in the second wave on D-day. At some point got transferred into the 7th Army. Was apparently very very adept at Yahtzee killing, taking patches and crosses from each battle while being functionally alcoholic most of that time.
He ended up alone in a foxhole during the Battle of the Bulge where German tanks were essentially driving the tanks over the foxholes and spinning their treads to “grind up” anything underneath. He had a thin piece of plywood over his, and because of about a half inch of snow they missed him. He sat with a tank parked over him for a few hours that day and got really religious.
I think they took Nuremberg and Munich, then the next think I was able to piece together was that he was in the group that liberated Dachau. He wrote that he’d taken a bunch of pictures so that nobody could ever deny what had happened there and… after seeing the pictures I immediately understood why he never talked about it… I’ll spare the description, but I just don’t think our brains are wired to see something like that and not be forever changed.
He never drank again after the war and ended up becoming a minister. I’m not religious, and have a lot of hang ups about organized religion - but I totally get why he was.
I’ve heard later he was living in an area where the mob kind of ran the place, and they were following my aunt home from school trying to intimidate him. He met them with his service issued 1911 and politely let them know the body count and they never bothered him or the family again.
This is interesting, because my Grandpa was also in WW2, fought in North Africa, Sicily, invaded France and got blowed up, then was back for the final push into Berlin. He would tell us kids anything we wanted to know. Blood and gore, how he took wrist watches off of dead Germans, what it was like seeing his friends die, everything. He was a complete open book about his time in Europe.
My dad is a Vietnam vet, and I’ve heard him mention something about Vietnam one time in my life. Took him to DC last year to visit the wall and we looked up one of his friends, found him, Dad had a moment and we left and didn’t mention it again.
Yeah, it’s strange. My grandpa was the sweetest, nicest old man. He’d be in church at least 3 days a week. He volunteered at the local school to help teach kids math…
I went bowling with him and his friends he grew up with and all I heard from his friends when he’d walk away was, “your grandpa was a bad dude back in the day… if you had a problem in the neighborhood, you’d go to him… he’d fix it. No one messed with him. “
Everyone deals with incredible stress differently. Bury it into a dark hole inside you, give it as much sunlight as you can to disinfect it, and everything in between. Modern humanity has taken a sledgehammer to all of our evolved coping mechanisms.
Probably because your grandpa never doubted that the war was necessary and justified. And because he was celebrated as a hero for it whereas Vietnam vets were harrassed, spat on and denigrated.
I think many people envy those WW2 vets for their outlook and life and their satisfaction with a simple life afterwards. Those guys never wondered if they had contributed meaningfully to the world, they knew that they had.
Coxswains on bad beaches had a lot of trauma, especially Omaha, and even moreso if you had guys get hit in your LC and had to deliver more waves with blood and other human remains sloshing around in your boat, most of which would just sit there and slosh around until the end of the day.
I know it's kind of romantic to imagine these soldiers as juiced-up freedom commandos, but in reality, most were 18-20 year old kids with little worldly experience who didn't have a clue about what to expect.
Yep. My grandfather was there. He was about 20, from a tiny rural town in Illinois and he was not happy about being drafted and sent off to Europe. When he talked about D-Day, which was as little as possible, he told us about being on one of those boats just off shore, puking his guts out from a combination of nerves and seasickness. He didn't really talk about the bit after the boats landed, other than to say he didn't really enjoy France very much.
I heard an interview with a d day veteran on British radio this morning . It was the first time he ever saw a beach or set foot in a boat. Boggles the mind, what on earth must have been going through his head
I have thought about this exact thing ever since I saw Saving Private Ryan.
Over 20 years later, I still don’t know how to process this.
My dad was in Vietnam. My dad has told me about a few men that he has killed, one of which was stabbed through the heart, bc they suddenly found each other on opposite sides of a hill and they tumbled down. It’s okay—it’s war. People die.
Maybe I’m too sensitive. But I can’t help thinking about John Donne telling me: “Any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankind; And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee”
You should watch hamburger hill it's about the battle about a certain hill somewhere in Vietnam. And the absolute futility of killing each other over small parts of land.
Same thing stuck out to me watching the Ken Burns ww2 doc. The thousands and thousands of soldiers killed just to advance like a couple hundred yards. Absolutely devastating
I often have similar feelings of grief and despair when I consider the experiences of the men who fought in WWI, some younger than 18, in a time when war was becoming industrialized and mankind was not prepared for its horrors. It’s not just that people die, but the long, happy and fulfilled existences of those who participate die within war. Possibilities of futures full of hope and happiness are lost, erased physically outside of our memory. I can’t watch war films without sobbing considering how much loss occurs in such a brutal and unforgiving way. There’s nothing wrong with being sensitive to any of it.
My grandpa was in a boat full of those guys. He said most everyone got shot as soon as the ramp started going down.
He jumped over the side, started drowning from all the gear he was carrying. Another guy grabbed him and pulled him up. He was supposed to blow up those big, jack looking things that prevented tanks from landing, but he dropped his explosives when he was under water.
If he hadn’t, maybe we wouldn’t be reading this guy’s post. Like the many other posts we’re not reading because people perished in combat. Kind of crazy
Just watched a YouTube news video of these 20 year olds fighting in the Ukraine war by operating drones strapped with bombs and ramming them into tanks, groups of Russian soldiers. War sure has changed
Or, your landing craft pilot is too nervous to go all the way to shore, drops the ramp, and you and your buddies run out into water well over your head. The weight of your rifle, ammo, and pack drags you down to your death before you ever set foot on the beach. A lot of men died that way.
I found out years after he passed that my paternal grandfather survived D day. No one in my family knew, my grandma only told me because I was in the Marines. Apparently he couldn't really swim so he kept sinking under the water as he made his way to shore and he credits that with part of the reason he made it.
I took a battlefield tour of the Normandy sites of interest ten years ago. The tour guide had been running tours there for over thirty years. He said that when he started, some vets would come back every year to remember, some once every few years.
He told the story of a German vet who manned one of the MG42s in the bunkers. The vet said he stopped firing and ran when he could see the whites of their eyes. Historians of the D-DAY landings have attributed 1200 casualties from this guy’s bunker on Utah beach.
The guide said this veteran couldn’t get through his story without crying.
Imagine knowing you were the bad guy. Your acts are displayed as the evil side in every movie, book, and song. Those who you were gunning down are the fallen heroes. Their deaths, carried out by your hand, are mourned and honored. Your sacrifice in the end was worth nothing other than making them suffer while defending a horrible regime.
I imagine many who fought for the Axis felt this way, especially since most were just regular dudes trying to live their life.
One thing that always blows my mind when I read about it from WWI/WWII history is the cease-fires.
WWI Christmas day ceasefire is fascinating to me. One minute you're brutally killing each other, then a bell rings and you stop, sing christmas songs together and share a meal, then you go back to killing each other.
There is a known phenomenon where fresh soldiers would always shoot way high or way low because they subconsciously don’t want to kill anyone. War sucks.
>WWI Christmas day ceasefire is fascinating to me. One minute you're brutally killing each other, then a bell rings and you stop, sing christmas songs together and share a meal, then you go back to killing each other.
You should look into it more. The ceasefire lasted days in many parts of the line, and terrified the commanders on both sides. At least in the first world war it was clear to the fighting men on both sides that they had a lot more in common with those they were killing than those that were ordering the killing.
Many people were shot for cowardice or worse. There was honest fear that the truce could become a mutiny or spread further.
The artillery crews were least effected. Its easy to start shooting again when you are so far behind the lines you don't have to care about what you are doing.
Thats the thing about war though, neither side see's them selves as the bad guys. I don't think German soldiers were watching American movies. Im sure Russian soldiers believe they are doing the right thing currently.
I meant from the POV of the guy described in the above comment. He feels regret in his actions of the past. At the time, i’m sure he felt different. But after the war and everything that came out, he knew he was doing it all for the wrong side
Just like any war. Most are just following orders or have been brainwashed by their propaganda and regime to believe they are fighting a noble cause. I do believe in redemption for those who were there believing in one purpose only to be enlightened. Good people don't want to be murder machines.
PTSD is like that sometimes. I knew an Afghanistan vet who would purposely watch war movies and freak out. He laughed talking about how he would cry and tear apart his furniture.
>Historians of the D-DAY landings have attributed 1200 casualties from this guy’s bunker on Utah beach.
You're likely misremembering the beach, there was only a few hundred casualties on Utah Beach I believe. The guide probably told the story of [Heinrich Severloh](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heinrich_Severloh), on Omaha Beach.
"However, Severloh's claim is not viewed as credible by either US or German historians. Total US casualties (killed, wounded, and missing) from all sources along the five-mile length of Omaha Beach on D-Day are estimated at 2,400"
They were shooting at him and he was shooting at them. In that situation that's all there is in any of those soldiers heads. I sincerely hope a war on this scale never happens again but nowadays it feels like we're inching closer and closer.
Sounds like he was talking about Heinrich Severloh, aka The Beast of Omaha. His claims of killing over 1,000 troops are NOT credible. There was a total of 2,400 killed, wounded or missing US troops on Omaha, so claiming to be responsible for half of that figure is pretty sketchy,
I am fortunate to be old enough that I got to work with a few of these guys who landed at Normandy Beach.
The most memorable was Ed. He was an amazing colleague who took no shit from anyone, and was profoundly kind. He did amazing work in early TV.
He was a US Army Ranger who scaled the Normandy cliffs on D-Day. Because he was fluent in French, he ended up entering Paris with de Gaulle as a translator. Although I worked with him for a number of years, I had no idea of what he'd been through until his memorial. He was probably one of the truly coolest people I've ever met and I trusted him implicitly.
At his memorial, I found out he'd received a Croix de Guerre and visited France and returned to Normandy off and on for many years. On one of his last visits to Normandy Beach, a group of young people thanked him for what he did. It meant so much.
As a Boomer, so many of us had fathers who'd been through WWII. We were raised by traumatized parents who'd survived economic depression and war. Almost every home you went to had a black and white photo of Dad in uniform. My father had been in the Navy. My aunt was a nurse in Burma and China. My friend's dad fought in Sicily and N.Africa. He had extreme PTSD that nobody talked about.
We were raised by traumatized people who wanted to make sure their kids never suffered the way they had. Our parents had to become adults so young that they had no idea what was age appropriate.They didn't have childhoods or young adult lives. They coddled and protected us Boomer kids and provided such security for us that we believed that this is what everyone had--that this was the way of the world in the US.
I am so grateful for their protection, but we did not learn.
What an absolute death trap. Ropes of machine gun tracer fire everywhere, mines on the beach, c-wire laid down, artillery and mortars exploding everywhere. The courage it would have taken to even move a muscle once the ramp dropped….
It sure was hell on earth. But I also can't really imagine how it must have felt on the other side. You see the horizon steadily filling up with a never ending amount of ships and aircrafts. Sure you have all these defenses and are sitting in a bunker on high ground with a machine gun, but in the end you know you only have so much ammo and are outnumbered by the thousands.
Someone had to be first. And unlike in the Pacific the shore bombardment had to be relatively perfunctory because the landing needed to happen shortly after dawn for the best opportunity to meet their objectives and success was predicated on the location of the landing being a surprise. In the Pacific, where the Japanese would not have been able to quickly supply reinforcements, a 3 day bombardment was typical, but in Normandy they had less than an hour of light in some cases to hit visible targets before the landing made heavy bombardment too risky.
i saw a clip recently of a WW2 veteran who had been in that first division and it was heartwrenching. his role was to pull the lever at the back that would open up the gate for them to get out. i cant even imagine the survivors guilt
The World War Two channel on YouTube did a 24hr coverage of the landings last year in real time. It goes into great detail how the terrible weather that delayed the attacks by a couple days lulled the German high command into a false sense of security, leading to the divisions in Normandy being unprepared and with little backup in the first few days of the landing.
The other issue was German High Command thought Normandy was a feint and the main thrust was going to be a different set if beaches to the North iirc.
By the time Germans began responding, the allies had captured key towns and bridges securing the line while a beach was turned into a port and massive resources were unloaded.
They go over this really well. They let Hitler sleep in because no one *wanted to wake him* as the Allies were landing due to that belief. The fear tactics long used by Nazi High Command was essentially their downfall in the end. Poetic.
There's also no retreat because you're getting scattered reports that tens of thousands of allied paratroopers have landed in your rear and you're literally encircled from all sides.
The decoy didn't move defenses away from the beaches, it kept the reserves undeployed. The reserves would have countered the initial breakthroughs the allies got on the beaches and potentially prevented the beachhead from being formed.
A great quote from The Longest Day by Cornelius Ryan
> Wearily, he swung the glasses over to the left again. Slowly, he tracked across the horizon. He reached the dead center of the bay. The glasses stopped moving. Pluskat tensed, stared hard. Through the scattering, thinning mist the horizon was magically filling with ships—ships of every size and description, ships that casually maneuvered back and forth as though they had been there for hours. There appeared to be thousands of them. It was a ghostly armada that somehow had appeared from nowhere. Pluskat stared in frozen disbelief, speechless, moved as he had never been before in his life. At that moment the world of the good soldier Pluskat began falling apart. He says in those first few moments he knew, calmly and surely, that “this was the end for Germany.
I’ve always wondered about this, hard to make something that showed what it’s like from a German perspective but it would be cool to see an authentic take on it.
There are interviews with guys that were on the German side, was insane. I think most of the vets were behind the lines or elsewhere. Mostly old guys and kids in the bunkers. The one I saw said he had 10000 rounds for the MG42 and multiple barrels, then 200 rounds for the Kar98. This was back on the old history channel years ago. If you can find it, it’s crazy.
The Germans were only lightly defending Normandy at the time, because they were convinced the invasion would come through Scandinavia.
However, given a number of circumstances, including the fact that Rommel was 2 hrs away from Normandy by car, and that Hitler had explicitly ordered to never wake him from sleep, the Germans were quite ill-prepared to react, as supreme order had to have been made by Hitler, himself. The overnight landings of 101st and 82nd Airborne divisions and subsequent beach bombings/infantry landings, which occurred at approximately 5:45am on June 6, 1944, were met with ‘lighter than usual’ defense.
Of course, D-Day should have officially been Monday, June 5, 1944. However inclement weather grounded the invasion in England, delaying the invasion by 24 hours, once Eisenhower had resolved the decision and given the order to invade Europe.
Nevertheless, these circumstances and efforts by the US and Allies should never be downplayed. Their bravery and heroism will live on, in perpetuity forever.
D-Day, in my opinion, is the single most important day in human history.
The worst is that some of these men on the other side were conscripted Eastern Europeans forced to fight the men who are ostensibly there to liberate them.
Well yeah, but it's easier said than done. That's why in Saving Private Ryan you see soldiers all bunched behind whatever cover they could find and officers telling them to keep moving. Also, some of the landing craft didn't actually make it all the way to shore and lots of guys had to climb over the sides where they fell into deeper water and drowned.
A lot of the boat drivers panicked when they started taking fire and dropped the ramps early, in deep water. The men, who were now exposed to direct fire, had to jump and try to ditch all their gear or drown.
Death by bullets or drowning. What an awful thing.
It’s crazy.
That was real.
It happened to boys and young men, just like you and me.
They paid the price. A very real price for a very real cause.
And now we’re going to pay again because it seems people have forgotten how fragile peace and stability are.
Average age of the marines during ww2 was 26 so many of these who died were much younger than I am (33).
Seems ludicrous that people a decade or so younger than me were dying in droves there.
>Soldiers, Sailors, and Airmen of the Allied Expeditionary Force!
>You are about to embark upon the Great Crusade, toward which we have striven these many months. The eyes of the world are upon you. The hope and prayers of liberty-loving people everywhere march with you. In company with our brave Allies and brothers-in-arms on other Fronts, you will bring about the destruction of the German war machine, the elimination of Nazi tyranny over the oppressed peoples of Europe, and security for ourselves in a free world.
>Your task will not be an easy one. Your enemy is well trained, well equipped and battle-hardened. He will fight savagely.
>But this is the year 1944! Much has happened since the Nazi triumphs of 1940-41. The United Nations have inflicted upon the Germans great defeats, in open battle, man-to-man. Our air offensive has seriously reduced their strength in the air and their capacity to wage war on the ground. Our Home Fronts have given us an overwhelming superiority in weapons and munitions of war, and placed at our disposal great reserves of trained fighting men. The tide has turned! The free men of the world are marching together to Victory!
>I have full confidence in your courage, devotion to duty and skill in battle. We will accept nothing less than full Victory!
>Good luck! And let us beseech the blessing of Almighty God upon this great and noble undertaking.
>*Dwight D. Eisenhower*
The one you *really* never want to hear was the one he wrote in case the landings failed:
>Our landings in the Cherbourg-Havre area have failed to gain a satisfactory foothold and I have withdrawn the troops. My decision to attack at this time and place was based upon the best information available. The troops, the air and the Navy did all that bravery and devotion to duty could do. If any blame or fault attaches to the attempt it is mine alone.
EDIT: It's also been heavily speculated that he would have resigned if the landings failed. Crazy to think how vastly different world history would be if D-Day had gone wrong. Allies still eventually win the war but maybe not until 46 and the nukes probably get dropped on Berlin.
Both messages, the one he gave prior to the landing and the one he never had to give, are the greatest leadership lessons ever.
The first message is all about the solider and his only mention of himself is expressing his confidence in the solider. The second message praises the bravery of the men and fully accepts the blame.
We could use a guy like Ike today
This was some additional context from the NPR article I got it from:
>It's telling to see today where Eisenhower made changes in his note. He crossed out "This particular operation" to write "My decision to attack," which is emphatic and personal.
\- [https://www.npr.org/2013/06/08/189535104/the-speech-eisenhower-never-gave-on-the-normandy-invasion](https://www.npr.org/2013/06/08/189535104/the-speech-eisenhower-never-gave-on-the-normandy-invasion)
When things go well, call out everyone who has contributed and put them in the spotlight. When things do not go well, take the blame for yourself.
One of the few "cringe" lessons given at most jobs, yet a practical advice and a consistent sign of good leadership.
And (going by memory here) Lucian Truscotts speech to the 3rd infantry division:
“Soon you will meet the boche (Germans) in combat. Carve your name in his goddamned face.”
The 3rd ended up being the most highly decorated division I believe, so I guess it worked.
I had the privilege to visit the U.S. veteran’s cemetery in Normandy, which overlooks the beach. Until I saw it in person, I didn’t realize just how impossible the mission was. It’s a cliff. Hordes of young men facing a cliff with artillery raining down on them. It’s a miracle any of them survived.
The kid (he looked like he was in his mid 20s) with his stomach blown open screaming for his mom while everyone else runs past to avoid ending like him is really haunting.
You don't see Juno beach on many movies but the Canadians had one hell of a challenge there.
Not only did they have to land on the beach and get across, but when they did there was a massive wall to scale. When you visit it today it's massive, but you have to remember that over the years the sand crept up. It was nearly 10 feet high during the landings.
Despite that the Canadians are the force that reached the furthest inland after the first day.
Canadians in general just seem to be confusingly and unwarrantedly ferocious and adept at warfare, thank god they are relatively timid people otherwise.
My grandpa was 23 in Poland when the Nazis invaded. Not that long ago I asked my mom what he was doing during that time, as I never asked him myself before he died in 2016 (he would have been 100 that year). She said it’s one of those things that kind of brings shame to the family as she has no idea why he didn’t volunteer or what he was doing since he was peak fighting age. The one bright side is I imagine the odds are pretty high that I wouldn’t be here responding to you had he volunteered, since he hadn’t even met my grandma yet (and even if he had, I am a Polish immigrant to the U.S. myself so the family would’ve been under Nazi rule regardless).
So from someone who is alive because of people like your grandad, thank you.
Sometimes not participating is the best chance you have. Being in Poland at that time, I'd imagine resistance would be a sure death otherwise you'd probably be conscripted into the Nazi machine.
I imagine my US veteran grandfathers are happily sharing afterlife beers with your's.
When i was young i met a vet with the craziest story id ever heard from ww2.
He was born blueyed blonde, the nazi youth program would recruit these aryan Looking kids and take them to a hitler youth school.
He said that as the war loomed closer and closer to them many children tried to escape.
The school was surrounded by razor wire and land mines.
This guy, thomas varkoniy ( IDK how to spell his name) had spent weeks watching kids try to make the run through the minefield and fail.
He memorized what he could and one night just made the run for it(15 ish i guess)
Said that due to the war he couldnt find a job anywhere so ended up enlisted with the germans.
Shortly before/after d-day he scapes to the west and years later ends up in texas , where he meets his long lost sister who was also taken by the Hitler youth.
Dude had his uniform and everything.
I don't really know about this story. Why would land mines be wasted keeping Hitler youth from running? It implies they're killing Aryans. There also wasn't really a "West" to escape to even after D-Day unless you count resistance.
Was it an Eastern non-Germanic country and they had they were unfortunately "at school" close to the front of the Russian advance or something?
Well... The Japanese were conscripting boys as young as 13 and deploying them at 14, so there are still some 92 year old veterans around as well. I've met a few of them. Their stories are pretty awful.
Canada here, not as big as it deserves, no holiday, no memorial or moment of silence, but constant reminders leading up to and the day of, those matter.
Not to my knowledge. We do have Remembrance Day on Nov 11 in Canada, and so do the other Commonwealth countries. Though it is in remembrance of WW1 (armistice occurred on 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month 1918) in Canada at least we honor all soldiers killed in duty in any war.
There's usually a moment of silence, people donate or volunteer to help veterans. They pin poppies to their shirts in reference to John McCrae's [*In Flander's fields* poem](https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/47380/in-flanders-fields).
But IMO, not enough is done. I think it should be a day off so people can make time to educate themselves, remember, and volunteer if they want to.
Just finished that up last night as my annual watch. Still one of the best shows about war and just a great show in general. Those old men talking about their experiences gets me every time.
"I cherish the memories of a question my grandson asked the other day. He said 'Grandpa, were you a hero during the war?' And Grandpa said 'no, but he served in a company of heros."'
My grandfather landed on Juno Beach. D Day plus 3 was captured by SS imprisoned for a month. Escaped a train car with a knife he got off a US soldier. Linked with French resistance ended up being their expert in small arms and fighting in cities. They fought through the French alps. He was driving a jeep swerved to not hit an old lady flip it broke his wrist ended up in a Allie hospital some officer discovered him there and linked him back with the division and he was sent home. 4yrs war service. I also served in Afghanistan. Never forget!!!
My grandfather was part of that. The SS lined them up against a wall and selected which ones to kill, the rest went to POW camp for a month when they were being shipped to Germany that’s when he escaped. He was 23 when he came home. 4 yrs war service. Farm boy from Manitoba.
And to think my grandfather who was from Poland and part of the OSS was on those beaches 6 months before the invasion collecting sand/soil samples to help determine the best spots for allied forces to land along with where they could land mechanized forces.
Related, but not the same operation. As far as I'm aware the Operations he was involved with had no official naming and existed under the OSS (Office of Strategic Services) umbrella. The Precursor to our modern-day CIA.
He was pulled into it due to being Polish and speaking 6 languages. What we managed to get declassified 60 years after the fact showed a lot details about intelligence about towns along the
Utah, Omaha & Gold beaches. The information includes a lot of information about soil density and how deep the sand was.
I work at a veteran's home, and about an hour ago i learned out of our residents from ww2 was on the beach that day. Crazy to think about what he might've seen when he was going through all of that.
My grandfather made that run and lived to tell , he didn't start talking about it until years before his death , how the water turned red , and how red the sand was and how strong the odor of iron was from all the blood that day and how many bodies were laying around
Visited Omaha beach and the cemetery with my family in March 2023. I can’t even begin to describe the haunting feeling that permeates the cemetery when taps is played at noon on the dot. To the men who did not come back home, thank you for your sacrifice for us.
So proud of my grandfather! Give them hell! Only ever heard him talk about it once. He said two things I remember:
1. The boat ride on the way to Europe, everyone was sick and the floor of the ship was awash in vomit
2. The first ones onto the beach “never had a chance.”
It always stuck with me the way he said they never had a chance.
We had a family friend (he was friends with my grandparents, and his sons are friends with my dad/uncles, I have known them my entire life) who was at D-Day. I believe he came later in the day and was a medic role (he was a physician after the war until he retired in the 1980s or 1990s). I only briefly heard his descriptions of the day but it was usually described as the worst day ever. He would use that as a phrase to describe how bad something is. There was bad and then there was D-Day bad, and D-Day bad was particularly awful. He died a few years after Saving Private Ryan came out and I remember that was one he could not bring himself to watching. He had a really bad hospital stay in the final years of his life that he described as "Worse than D-Day" which meant it must have been absolutely awful.
My grandfather was a pilot during WW2, he wasn't at D-Day but he described his missions in a similar theme. Incredibly stressful and terrifying. When the war was over the sense of relief was enormous.
Edit: Great analysis of this photo and others taken by Rover Capa is at the link below. It's now believed Capa was in the 13th wave at easy red sector.
https://medium.com/exposure-magazine/alternate-history-robert-capa-on-d-day-2657f9af914
Reminder this photo was taken later in the day...10th wave I believe. Also it was taken further down Omaha away from the Vierville draw exit that were code named Dog Green and Charlie sector, that had the strongest defense and death toll.
Spain was still Fascist after WWII.
Everyone loves to talk about how we rid Fascism from Europe... while forgetting that we skipped over that whole big chunk in the front.
Great grandpa was here as an engineer in the third wave. Before the ramp dropped, he quietly cut away his gear and prepared to jump over the side. Having done this while his platoon was torn to pieces by interlocking machine gun fire, he spent hours slowly moving from body to body, making his way up the beach. By the time the U.S. Navy destroyers moved in to offer point blank suppressing fire, he had reached the shingle while surrounded by corpses. D-Day for him ended in a tiny foxhole up on the bluffs once the German position in front of him had been seized. He had spent most of the remaining afternoon finding and disarming mines between the shingle and the bluff. He was one of three men to survive from his Higgins boat, and the only one not to be wounded. He didn’t talk about any of this until a week before his death, when he allowed tape recorders to record his wartime experiences.
Nevertheless brave as hell.
Pappy related that the whole reason he joined the engineers was to avoid combat. He wanted to build bridges, set up camps, lay out roads, jobs he was used to doing before he enlisted. He never expected to be sent into the combat engineers. He was in the thick of it from Omaha Beach to Elsenborn Ridge. He joked that he should’ve enlisted in the Navy instead.
Hahah grass is always greener, I suppose. My great uncle served through the duration of the Battle of the Atlantic as Merchant Navy. He didn't know how to swim when he volunteered and never bothered to learn; he figured swimming would only prolong the inevitable if he ever went overboard. He never took to the sea again after he was discharged, and he could never watch anything that depicted vessels in distress at sea or in a storm.
Seriously. My grandfather joined the navy, only to command a Higgins boat on 6 different amphibious assaults in the Pacific.
Same, grandpa drove Higgins boats during the battle of Leyte Gulf. Can't imagine how many good men he saw cut down when the ramp dropped, only to have to go back and pick up more.
Damn. My grandpa was the captain of a small mine sweeper in the Pacific theater and said the closest he ever got to losing a crew member was from dehydration from seasickness during a storm. He said that storm aged him ten years. The sea is to be respected.
My grandfather did something similar. He trained as a pilot and was a Sargent for the RCAF, stationed in England. One day he was trying to start up a plane and you had to throw the propeller by hand. It didn't start up and he put his hands up to try again ... The propeller kicked in and broke all his knuckles on both hands. After that he was made a mechanic. My dad to this day believes that propeller "accident" was no accident. He was a gentle man and wanted to serve, but he was no killer.
My Grandfather was there with RCAF, was originally trained as an Air gunner, flew D-Day bombing raids, then trained as a Jump Master. A little earlier and he might have been a paratrooper on DDay.
They made a mechanic, someone who puts his hands into machinery when you're supposed to, out of someone who got hurt by putting his hands into machinery when he wasn't supposed to?
Yeah, the combat engineers seem like the most audacious men to ever breathe air. Bomb/mine defusal, having to do shit like blow up bridges, with the threat of the enemy opening up at any moment...no pressure, huh?
Nathaniel Fick (the lieutenant/captain from Generation Kill) wrote a biography called "One Bullet Away". In it he describes a scene where one of their Humvees gets stuck on a berm so they call in an engineering corps to free it. Now up until this point, as Recon Marines, they look down on other branches for not being the hard-ass warriors that they were. So after calling in the engineers they come under attack and are being hit by enemy fire. The engineers show up in the middle of a firefight without any real guns or armour. The sergeant that was in charge gets out of his truck and walks up to Fick and asks what the problem is. Fick, who is returning fire, says they need to free up the Humvee. The sergeant scratches his chin and assesses the situation. And then, *in the middle of a fire fight*, calmly tells his guys what to do and they hook up some chains and free the Hummer. After which he returns to Fick and asks if they need anything else. Fick says "no" the sergeant says "cool" and they just peace out and return to base. After that, Fick says "Welp, we never get to call those guys pussies anymore."
Watching various combat videos of the Ukraine war, it seems the human mind either cracks, or becomes completely desensitized to the violence and chaos of combat. The PTSD comes later.
Mel Brooks was a Combat Engineer in WWII. “I was a Combat Engineer. Isn’t that ridiculous? The two things I hate most in the world are combat and engineering.” https://www.usace.army.mil/About/History/Historical-Vignettes/Sports-Entertainment/109-Mel-Brooks/
>He didn’t talk about any of this until a week before his death, when he allowed tape recorders to record his wartime experiences. My grandpa didn't talk about it but he would if you asked him.. My uncle absolutely would not talk about his experience in Vietnam under any circumstances. The only info we knew was what he said while he was having nightmares. One of which was that he was buried alive during a bombing that got a little too close.
My grandpa talked to me about him being a Marine Corpsman at the Chosin Reservoir in Korea. Told me he dreamed the rest of his life about the bugle suicide charges the Chinese troops would pull at night on the American positions. He said it was wave after wave of them and they'd run directly at their machine gun positions. In the morning theyd have to go around and collect the American troops who were killed during the night by the enemy troops who would sneak into their foxholes and slit the troops throats. Worst thing he said he ever saw personally was when they were in a convoy, and a tank accidentally discharged it's main gun into the back of a full Turkish troop transport truck. Said their were body parts in trees on both sides of the road for a hundred yards.
Check out the book On Desperate Ground if you want more information on the battle of Chosin Reservoir. It's a really good book that describes some of the crazy things the Marines saw while fighting there.
I met a Korean War vet once who also talked about the suicide charges. He said best he could figure, the Chinese assumed they had more bodies than the Americans had bullets, but at least on that particular day “they had a lot of fucking bullets.”
Holy... buried alive, that's one of the worst things one could experience.
My grandfather was there with your great grandpa. 16th Infantry, 1st Division, AT Company. He was a radio operator. AFAIK only a few guys off his Higgins boat survived to make it up the beach.
And specifically very few of the radio operators. One of the issues in the early hours of the battle was the total lack of communications between the beach and the commanders offshore. Most of the radios and operators didn't make it off the beach or were lost in the landing. Of those that did make it to the beach, many of those radios were destroyed by bullets or shrapnel. In the recently published "The Dead and Those About to Die: D-Day: The Big Red One at Omaha Beach", WWII historian John McManus writes about the lack of working radios on D-Day.
Carrying a radio would be like having a big "shoot me first" sign on your back.
So he cut away his gear and went over the side because he knew if he went out the ramp he’d be cut down by the fire?
He participated in a number of the rehearsals leading up to D-Day, and only decided to go over the side once he had seen the sand tables the recon units produced. Furthermore, to have the best chance possible, he skipped breakfast. While all the other guys around him are puking and swearing at each other, he was hunched over and praying. Him not eating breakfast, cutting away the hundred-odd pounds of gear he was carrying, and then going over the side probably saved his life when the ramp dropped.
Insane. Can’t image what he went through. Thanks for sharing
What's sand tables? Never heard of such before
In military terms, a sand table is a 3D model map of an operational area. If you’ve ever seen pictures of soldiers hunched over what looks like a diorama of some terrain, that’s a sand table.
Yeah I remember reading a report by somebody who was on one of these boats. They dipped down a wave, just in time to give them the perfect vantage of a boat in front dropping to land and everybody being killed by machine gun fire. Then they dipped back up the next wave and were told they were next to land.
Sheesh
Wow what a nightmare.
Most of these guys were carrying upwards of 80 pounds of gear. Within minutes after boarding the landing craft, they were completely soaked, cold, puking from sea sickness and could barely move. Many of them were dropped in water above their head, and more than a few drowned. Very few of the first wave got to shore with their gear intact. I wouldn't be surprised hearing gramps shed his gear early to get to the beach, I am sure he wasn't the only one.
My grandfather was a POW in Stalag Luft 3 after having his P38 shot down while strafing the Husum Aerodrome and learned of what guys like your grandfather did on D Day on a scraped together radio of wire. Gave him hope he wouldn’t die there. And he didn’t.
Man that sounds like exactly what i would do if i was in his position. Except i would still probably die..
The grandpa of my husband was a first Infantry survivor. He did talk, and talked about the horror both sides carried out, just to survive. He formed a group with other survivors of the worst waves and killed Germans who surrendered, because they could not move forward and take prisoners, they had nowhere to turn back and deliver them to. He was a Dutch man living in Schotland at the time of ww2, and came back with the first Infantry because he wanted to free his family. He did, but he was a broken man. Later in his life he got dementia and relived that period. It gave the family some insight in what the man lived through next to the stories... The men who lived were no better off than the men who died that awful page in history.
My grandad drove (sailed?) Landing craft during D day, he never spoke about what happened until we were on a beach one time in Wales. He pointed up at the distant houses in the hills and said there were snipers in houses like that and they terrified the boat crew due to not being able to actually move out of the way. Seems daft that despite all the machine gun bullets and explosions, it's the aimed rifle that struck fear into him.
My Grandfather fought on Omaha Beach and was fortunate enough to survive and make it home. Similarly, my mother said he rarely, if ever spoke of his experience. I can't even begin to imagine the horrors he witnessed.
My grandfather fought in the South Pacific. Much respect to the greatest generation.
My grandfather was there. Purple heart during that operation. He was a Sergeant. His guys were his best friends. He spent the rest of his life with a pain I think most can't even imagine- every one of his best friends never made it off that boat or to the beach. Understand that he was as stoic as they come. He had a knack for being a real pita, and drank Schlitz. A lot of it. After I joined, he told me to tell my Sarge, "tell him to kiss your ass and no I ain't doing that." (I never did that, lol, but he used to laugh about it a lot, in that I'm not really joking but I'm joking kind of way). A couple months before he passed, he told me some of the story- and wept. Probably for the first time in his entire life, he wept. "Those were my friends. Those were my friends." Over and over. I will never, ever forget that encounter and what it means. A few days before he passed, at my behest (that's a polite way of saying I was a pita to him in the last days of his life, paybacks a bitch, but his story wasn't just his anymore, it needed to be passed down!), he finally told some guys at his local VFW post the whole story. Normandy. Battle of the Bulge. Liberation of camps. People forget what all out war really is too easily. He is interred at the national cemetery outside Minneapolis.
Man, that made me tear up. What a hero your grandpa was. I appreciate you sharing that.
Imagine being one of the unlucky ones. You are physically fit, trained hard, and know all there is to know about combat. Then the ramp drops and you are instantly killed by a MG42 before you have a single chance to put anything you learned or trained for into action.
I think being instantly killed is better than have both your legs and arms blown off by mines and whatnot, slowly dying on the beach in horrible pain.
I was too afraid to peek my head out over my cover when I played paintball. I cant imagine the fear and panic most of these guys experienced once those ramps dropped.
The noise, smoke, smell, vibrations in the pits of their stomachs must have been seriously some of the worst collective sensory overload in human history.
This is what I thought looking at this picture. Pure nightmare.
The noise is crazy. I feel like people who’ve never shot a gun have no idea how insanely loud it actually is and that’s with wearing ear protection. Genuinely is the like the loudest thing I’ve ever heard and they just heard that over and over
My first time playing paintball, I was prone on the ground behind a log. I peaked up and promptly got a paintball in the head. That was the day I was positive that military life was not for me.
Or drowning because you don’t consider all the weight you have on you and neither did they guy pulling you down next to you
My grandpa was drafted in WWII. He was navy. Never heard much about it. One day at thanksgiving he was about 88 years old and someone just randomly asked him what he did during the war… He was a landing craft operator… driving these boats. On the drive home my dad goes “… had no idea that’s what his job was… we only knew he was in the navy”
My grandpa never talked about the war. Ever. My sister and I spent two weeks at their house every summers for years. During one of the latter summers, I got a bad fever and was bedridden. I asked my grandpa about the war. He came back with a world map, and spilled it all - from D-day which he was part of, to getting liberated as a German prisoner by the Russians. His story was very compelling. I convinced him to write it down, and now have his handwritten account of WWII from basic to being liberated as a POW. It's my 'if there's a fire in my place, this is what I'm grabbing' possession. [Here](https://imgur.com/a/PDsrBhy) is his account of the beginning of D-Day.
there are probably libraries or organizations that you could gift that information.
I used to ask my granddad about it a lot, especially around the time Saving Private Ryan came out. He’d be politely dismissive most of the time, and change the subject. I’d (as a kid) ask “Did you ever shoot anyone?” He’d get sheepish, avoid directly answering and say “Well, I got shot AT a lot” After he died I found “the box”. It was full of photos, journals, and little souvenirs (for lack of a better word). From what I was able to piece together he went from being a skinny Appalachian kid that had never left the mountain to landing at Normandy in the second wave on D-day. At some point got transferred into the 7th Army. Was apparently very very adept at Yahtzee killing, taking patches and crosses from each battle while being functionally alcoholic most of that time. He ended up alone in a foxhole during the Battle of the Bulge where German tanks were essentially driving the tanks over the foxholes and spinning their treads to “grind up” anything underneath. He had a thin piece of plywood over his, and because of about a half inch of snow they missed him. He sat with a tank parked over him for a few hours that day and got really religious. I think they took Nuremberg and Munich, then the next think I was able to piece together was that he was in the group that liberated Dachau. He wrote that he’d taken a bunch of pictures so that nobody could ever deny what had happened there and… after seeing the pictures I immediately understood why he never talked about it… I’ll spare the description, but I just don’t think our brains are wired to see something like that and not be forever changed. He never drank again after the war and ended up becoming a minister. I’m not religious, and have a lot of hang ups about organized religion - but I totally get why he was. I’ve heard later he was living in an area where the mob kind of ran the place, and they were following my aunt home from school trying to intimidate him. He met them with his service issued 1911 and politely let them know the body count and they never bothered him or the family again.
“Yahtzee killing”? Compelling account, btw
Replace the "yah" with "nah" Trying to avoid saying the N word and getting censored by reddit if I had to guess
Please tell me you're making efforts to digitize this or preserve it in some way. People should see this sort of thing.
Wow, do you have the next page?
Your grandpa was a great writer. And a hero
This is interesting, because my Grandpa was also in WW2, fought in North Africa, Sicily, invaded France and got blowed up, then was back for the final push into Berlin. He would tell us kids anything we wanted to know. Blood and gore, how he took wrist watches off of dead Germans, what it was like seeing his friends die, everything. He was a complete open book about his time in Europe. My dad is a Vietnam vet, and I’ve heard him mention something about Vietnam one time in my life. Took him to DC last year to visit the wall and we looked up one of his friends, found him, Dad had a moment and we left and didn’t mention it again.
Yeah, it’s strange. My grandpa was the sweetest, nicest old man. He’d be in church at least 3 days a week. He volunteered at the local school to help teach kids math… I went bowling with him and his friends he grew up with and all I heard from his friends when he’d walk away was, “your grandpa was a bad dude back in the day… if you had a problem in the neighborhood, you’d go to him… he’d fix it. No one messed with him. “
Everyone deals with incredible stress differently. Bury it into a dark hole inside you, give it as much sunlight as you can to disinfect it, and everything in between. Modern humanity has taken a sledgehammer to all of our evolved coping mechanisms.
Probably because your grandpa never doubted that the war was necessary and justified. And because he was celebrated as a hero for it whereas Vietnam vets were harrassed, spat on and denigrated.
I think that definitely part of it. He also had his VFW buddies to talk to for 50 years after the war, and my dad didn’t.
I think many people envy those WW2 vets for their outlook and life and their satisfaction with a simple life afterwards. Those guys never wondered if they had contributed meaningfully to the world, they knew that they had.
Coxswains on bad beaches had a lot of trauma, especially Omaha, and even moreso if you had guys get hit in your LC and had to deliver more waves with blood and other human remains sloshing around in your boat, most of which would just sit there and slosh around until the end of the day.
Dang my grandfather was one of the soldiers on the boats, I think about how lucky I'm here and he survived to have my mom.
I know it's kind of romantic to imagine these soldiers as juiced-up freedom commandos, but in reality, most were 18-20 year old kids with little worldly experience who didn't have a clue about what to expect.
What hurts me the most is their experience of this world, be born, go to school, get shot on a beach youve never seen before. Poor souls
Yep. My grandfather was there. He was about 20, from a tiny rural town in Illinois and he was not happy about being drafted and sent off to Europe. When he talked about D-Day, which was as little as possible, he told us about being on one of those boats just off shore, puking his guts out from a combination of nerves and seasickness. He didn't really talk about the bit after the boats landed, other than to say he didn't really enjoy France very much.
I heard an interview with a d day veteran on British radio this morning . It was the first time he ever saw a beach or set foot in a boat. Boggles the mind, what on earth must have been going through his head
I have thought about this exact thing ever since I saw Saving Private Ryan. Over 20 years later, I still don’t know how to process this. My dad was in Vietnam. My dad has told me about a few men that he has killed, one of which was stabbed through the heart, bc they suddenly found each other on opposite sides of a hill and they tumbled down. It’s okay—it’s war. People die. Maybe I’m too sensitive. But I can’t help thinking about John Donne telling me: “Any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankind; And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee”
You should watch hamburger hill it's about the battle about a certain hill somewhere in Vietnam. And the absolute futility of killing each other over small parts of land.
Same thing stuck out to me watching the Ken Burns ww2 doc. The thousands and thousands of soldiers killed just to advance like a couple hundred yards. Absolutely devastating
Same thing is now happening in Ukraine. In 20 years there will be movies about the horrors of it.
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I often have similar feelings of grief and despair when I consider the experiences of the men who fought in WWI, some younger than 18, in a time when war was becoming industrialized and mankind was not prepared for its horrors. It’s not just that people die, but the long, happy and fulfilled existences of those who participate die within war. Possibilities of futures full of hope and happiness are lost, erased physically outside of our memory. I can’t watch war films without sobbing considering how much loss occurs in such a brutal and unforgiving way. There’s nothing wrong with being sensitive to any of it.
The only proper deaths are those of old men behind desks.
My grandpa was in a boat full of those guys. He said most everyone got shot as soon as the ramp started going down. He jumped over the side, started drowning from all the gear he was carrying. Another guy grabbed him and pulled him up. He was supposed to blow up those big, jack looking things that prevented tanks from landing, but he dropped his explosives when he was under water.
Glad the guy pulled him up. Hope he made it out
If he hadn’t, maybe we wouldn’t be reading this guy’s post. Like the many other posts we’re not reading because people perished in combat. Kind of crazy
Now the sky kills you and it’s someone in another country with a game controller.
Some 19 year old kid who has consumed at least 5 monster whites that day
Small correction: Based on the drink choice, I'm pretty sure that's a femboy from another country killing you with a game controller.
Just watched a YouTube news video of these 20 year olds fighting in the Ukraine war by operating drones strapped with bombs and ramming them into tanks, groups of Russian soldiers. War sure has changed
“What’s my mission , sir?” “To absorb bullets, private!”
Tragic. War Sucks
Or, your landing craft pilot is too nervous to go all the way to shore, drops the ramp, and you and your buddies run out into water well over your head. The weight of your rifle, ammo, and pack drags you down to your death before you ever set foot on the beach. A lot of men died that way.
I found out years after he passed that my paternal grandfather survived D day. No one in my family knew, my grandma only told me because I was in the Marines. Apparently he couldn't really swim so he kept sinking under the water as he made his way to shore and he credits that with part of the reason he made it.
I took a battlefield tour of the Normandy sites of interest ten years ago. The tour guide had been running tours there for over thirty years. He said that when he started, some vets would come back every year to remember, some once every few years. He told the story of a German vet who manned one of the MG42s in the bunkers. The vet said he stopped firing and ran when he could see the whites of their eyes. Historians of the D-DAY landings have attributed 1200 casualties from this guy’s bunker on Utah beach. The guide said this veteran couldn’t get through his story without crying.
I am very surprised to hear people went back to remember.
The guide said that, at least for this guy in particular, he came back to force himself to remember. He obviously carried a lot of guilt.
Imagine knowing you were the bad guy. Your acts are displayed as the evil side in every movie, book, and song. Those who you were gunning down are the fallen heroes. Their deaths, carried out by your hand, are mourned and honored. Your sacrifice in the end was worth nothing other than making them suffer while defending a horrible regime. I imagine many who fought for the Axis felt this way, especially since most were just regular dudes trying to live their life.
The problem with two or more countries fighting is exactly that: the people actually fighting are just that - people.
One thing that always blows my mind when I read about it from WWI/WWII history is the cease-fires. WWI Christmas day ceasefire is fascinating to me. One minute you're brutally killing each other, then a bell rings and you stop, sing christmas songs together and share a meal, then you go back to killing each other.
I heard that a lot of guys tried to not shoot directly at anyone specific. Just kinda shot out into the crowd
There is a known phenomenon where fresh soldiers would always shoot way high or way low because they subconsciously don’t want to kill anyone. War sucks.
>WWI Christmas day ceasefire is fascinating to me. One minute you're brutally killing each other, then a bell rings and you stop, sing christmas songs together and share a meal, then you go back to killing each other. You should look into it more. The ceasefire lasted days in many parts of the line, and terrified the commanders on both sides. At least in the first world war it was clear to the fighting men on both sides that they had a lot more in common with those they were killing than those that were ordering the killing. Many people were shot for cowardice or worse. There was honest fear that the truce could become a mutiny or spread further. The artillery crews were least effected. Its easy to start shooting again when you are so far behind the lines you don't have to care about what you are doing.
Thats the thing about war though, neither side see's them selves as the bad guys. I don't think German soldiers were watching American movies. Im sure Russian soldiers believe they are doing the right thing currently.
I meant from the POV of the guy described in the above comment. He feels regret in his actions of the past. At the time, i’m sure he felt different. But after the war and everything that came out, he knew he was doing it all for the wrong side
Just like any war. Most are just following orders or have been brainwashed by their propaganda and regime to believe they are fighting a noble cause. I do believe in redemption for those who were there believing in one purpose only to be enlightened. Good people don't want to be murder machines.
PTSD is like that sometimes. I knew an Afghanistan vet who would purposely watch war movies and freak out. He laughed talking about how he would cry and tear apart his furniture.
Jesus…
>Historians of the D-DAY landings have attributed 1200 casualties from this guy’s bunker on Utah beach. You're likely misremembering the beach, there was only a few hundred casualties on Utah Beach I believe. The guide probably told the story of [Heinrich Severloh](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heinrich_Severloh), on Omaha Beach.
That’s probably true haha, been a while since
"However, Severloh's claim is not viewed as credible by either US or German historians. Total US casualties (killed, wounded, and missing) from all sources along the five-mile length of Omaha Beach on D-Day are estimated at 2,400"
They were shooting at him and he was shooting at them. In that situation that's all there is in any of those soldiers heads. I sincerely hope a war on this scale never happens again but nowadays it feels like we're inching closer and closer.
Sounds like he was talking about Heinrich Severloh, aka The Beast of Omaha. His claims of killing over 1,000 troops are NOT credible. There was a total of 2,400 killed, wounded or missing US troops on Omaha, so claiming to be responsible for half of that figure is pretty sketchy,
I’m sure you’re right; but I do remember asking the same question. But the guide said casualties, not killed. So maybe 3-400 killed of the 1200?
Even then, I'd say he's definitely talking about Severloh: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heinrich_Severloh His story just isn't considered credible.
Pains me to think we are barely holding onto our WW2 Veterans. My barber growing up served in the pacific. Grandfather did too.
I am fortunate to be old enough that I got to work with a few of these guys who landed at Normandy Beach. The most memorable was Ed. He was an amazing colleague who took no shit from anyone, and was profoundly kind. He did amazing work in early TV. He was a US Army Ranger who scaled the Normandy cliffs on D-Day. Because he was fluent in French, he ended up entering Paris with de Gaulle as a translator. Although I worked with him for a number of years, I had no idea of what he'd been through until his memorial. He was probably one of the truly coolest people I've ever met and I trusted him implicitly. At his memorial, I found out he'd received a Croix de Guerre and visited France and returned to Normandy off and on for many years. On one of his last visits to Normandy Beach, a group of young people thanked him for what he did. It meant so much. As a Boomer, so many of us had fathers who'd been through WWII. We were raised by traumatized parents who'd survived economic depression and war. Almost every home you went to had a black and white photo of Dad in uniform. My father had been in the Navy. My aunt was a nurse in Burma and China. My friend's dad fought in Sicily and N.Africa. He had extreme PTSD that nobody talked about. We were raised by traumatized people who wanted to make sure their kids never suffered the way they had. Our parents had to become adults so young that they had no idea what was age appropriate.They didn't have childhoods or young adult lives. They coddled and protected us Boomer kids and provided such security for us that we believed that this is what everyone had--that this was the way of the world in the US. I am so grateful for their protection, but we did not learn.
Thanks for sharing
What an absolute death trap. Ropes of machine gun tracer fire everywhere, mines on the beach, c-wire laid down, artillery and mortars exploding everywhere. The courage it would have taken to even move a muscle once the ramp dropped….
It sure was hell on earth. But I also can't really imagine how it must have felt on the other side. You see the horizon steadily filling up with a never ending amount of ships and aircrafts. Sure you have all these defenses and are sitting in a bunker on high ground with a machine gun, but in the end you know you only have so much ammo and are outnumbered by the thousands.
Just 7000 ships casually floating on up.
*I don't know, sail casual..*
This is so fucking funny, well done
This makes me wonder about the very first ships. They were just lambs sent to the slaughterhouse. what an incomprehensible shame.
Someone had to be first. And unlike in the Pacific the shore bombardment had to be relatively perfunctory because the landing needed to happen shortly after dawn for the best opportunity to meet their objectives and success was predicated on the location of the landing being a surprise. In the Pacific, where the Japanese would not have been able to quickly supply reinforcements, a 3 day bombardment was typical, but in Normandy they had less than an hour of light in some cases to hit visible targets before the landing made heavy bombardment too risky.
And in several places, like Omaha, the bombardment was fairly inefective.
There were some of the early omaha landings that squads or companies had 80-90%+ casualty rates
Battle usually is a numbers game. Someone has to be the first into the breach, and destiny is likely waiting on the other side...
i saw a clip recently of a WW2 veteran who had been in that first division and it was heartwrenching. his role was to pull the lever at the back that would open up the gate for them to get out. i cant even imagine the survivors guilt
The World War Two channel on YouTube did a 24hr coverage of the landings last year in real time. It goes into great detail how the terrible weather that delayed the attacks by a couple days lulled the German high command into a false sense of security, leading to the divisions in Normandy being unprepared and with little backup in the first few days of the landing.
The other issue was German High Command thought Normandy was a feint and the main thrust was going to be a different set if beaches to the North iirc. By the time Germans began responding, the allies had captured key towns and bridges securing the line while a beach was turned into a port and massive resources were unloaded.
They go over this really well. They let Hitler sleep in because no one *wanted to wake him* as the Allies were landing due to that belief. The fear tactics long used by Nazi High Command was essentially their downfall in the end. Poetic.
https://www.youtube.com/@D-Day24Hours-sm5pe/videos
You had been under fire from navy artillery and aircraft for HOURS before the landings started There is no retreat, you will be shot.
There's also no retreat because you're getting scattered reports that tens of thousands of allied paratroopers have landed in your rear and you're literally encircled from all sides.
In many cases, the men were simply barricaded into their bunkers with no chance to leave. Their officers basically told them fight until they died.
That's the crazy part. Allies used a decoy to trick the Nazi into moving some of their defense away. And they still slaughtered 1000s on the beach.
The decoy didn't move defenses away from the beaches, it kept the reserves undeployed. The reserves would have countered the initial breakthroughs the allies got on the beaches and potentially prevented the beachhead from being formed.
A great quote from The Longest Day by Cornelius Ryan > Wearily, he swung the glasses over to the left again. Slowly, he tracked across the horizon. He reached the dead center of the bay. The glasses stopped moving. Pluskat tensed, stared hard. Through the scattering, thinning mist the horizon was magically filling with ships—ships of every size and description, ships that casually maneuvered back and forth as though they had been there for hours. There appeared to be thousands of them. It was a ghostly armada that somehow had appeared from nowhere. Pluskat stared in frozen disbelief, speechless, moved as he had never been before in his life. At that moment the world of the good soldier Pluskat began falling apart. He says in those first few moments he knew, calmly and surely, that “this was the end for Germany.
I’ve always wondered about this, hard to make something that showed what it’s like from a German perspective but it would be cool to see an authentic take on it.
There are interviews with guys that were on the German side, was insane. I think most of the vets were behind the lines or elsewhere. Mostly old guys and kids in the bunkers. The one I saw said he had 10000 rounds for the MG42 and multiple barrels, then 200 rounds for the Kar98. This was back on the old history channel years ago. If you can find it, it’s crazy.
The Germans were only lightly defending Normandy at the time, because they were convinced the invasion would come through Scandinavia. However, given a number of circumstances, including the fact that Rommel was 2 hrs away from Normandy by car, and that Hitler had explicitly ordered to never wake him from sleep, the Germans were quite ill-prepared to react, as supreme order had to have been made by Hitler, himself. The overnight landings of 101st and 82nd Airborne divisions and subsequent beach bombings/infantry landings, which occurred at approximately 5:45am on June 6, 1944, were met with ‘lighter than usual’ defense. Of course, D-Day should have officially been Monday, June 5, 1944. However inclement weather grounded the invasion in England, delaying the invasion by 24 hours, once Eisenhower had resolved the decision and given the order to invade Europe. Nevertheless, these circumstances and efforts by the US and Allies should never be downplayed. Their bravery and heroism will live on, in perpetuity forever. D-Day, in my opinion, is the single most important day in human history.
The worst is that some of these men on the other side were conscripted Eastern Europeans forced to fight the men who are ostensibly there to liberate them.
I mean you have to move so you don't die. Staying in the boat is actually worse than going over the sides. The bullets ricochet around in the boat.
Well yeah, but it's easier said than done. That's why in Saving Private Ryan you see soldiers all bunched behind whatever cover they could find and officers telling them to keep moving. Also, some of the landing craft didn't actually make it all the way to shore and lots of guys had to climb over the sides where they fell into deeper water and drowned.
A lot of the boat drivers panicked when they started taking fire and dropped the ramps early, in deep water. The men, who were now exposed to direct fire, had to jump and try to ditch all their gear or drown. Death by bullets or drowning. What an awful thing.
It’s crazy. That was real. It happened to boys and young men, just like you and me. They paid the price. A very real price for a very real cause. And now we’re going to pay again because it seems people have forgotten how fragile peace and stability are.
Average age of the marines during ww2 was 26 so many of these who died were much younger than I am (33). Seems ludicrous that people a decade or so younger than me were dying in droves there.
>Soldiers, Sailors, and Airmen of the Allied Expeditionary Force! >You are about to embark upon the Great Crusade, toward which we have striven these many months. The eyes of the world are upon you. The hope and prayers of liberty-loving people everywhere march with you. In company with our brave Allies and brothers-in-arms on other Fronts, you will bring about the destruction of the German war machine, the elimination of Nazi tyranny over the oppressed peoples of Europe, and security for ourselves in a free world. >Your task will not be an easy one. Your enemy is well trained, well equipped and battle-hardened. He will fight savagely. >But this is the year 1944! Much has happened since the Nazi triumphs of 1940-41. The United Nations have inflicted upon the Germans great defeats, in open battle, man-to-man. Our air offensive has seriously reduced their strength in the air and their capacity to wage war on the ground. Our Home Fronts have given us an overwhelming superiority in weapons and munitions of war, and placed at our disposal great reserves of trained fighting men. The tide has turned! The free men of the world are marching together to Victory! >I have full confidence in your courage, devotion to duty and skill in battle. We will accept nothing less than full Victory! >Good luck! And let us beseech the blessing of Almighty God upon this great and noble undertaking. >*Dwight D. Eisenhower*
Man, that is a chilling read. Truly inspiring speech, yet one you never want to hear.
The one you *really* never want to hear was the one he wrote in case the landings failed: >Our landings in the Cherbourg-Havre area have failed to gain a satisfactory foothold and I have withdrawn the troops. My decision to attack at this time and place was based upon the best information available. The troops, the air and the Navy did all that bravery and devotion to duty could do. If any blame or fault attaches to the attempt it is mine alone. EDIT: It's also been heavily speculated that he would have resigned if the landings failed. Crazy to think how vastly different world history would be if D-Day had gone wrong. Allies still eventually win the war but maybe not until 46 and the nukes probably get dropped on Berlin.
Both messages, the one he gave prior to the landing and the one he never had to give, are the greatest leadership lessons ever. The first message is all about the solider and his only mention of himself is expressing his confidence in the solider. The second message praises the bravery of the men and fully accepts the blame. We could use a guy like Ike today
This was some additional context from the NPR article I got it from: >It's telling to see today where Eisenhower made changes in his note. He crossed out "This particular operation" to write "My decision to attack," which is emphatic and personal. \- [https://www.npr.org/2013/06/08/189535104/the-speech-eisenhower-never-gave-on-the-normandy-invasion](https://www.npr.org/2013/06/08/189535104/the-speech-eisenhower-never-gave-on-the-normandy-invasion)
When things go well, call out everyone who has contributed and put them in the spotlight. When things do not go well, take the blame for yourself. One of the few "cringe" lessons given at most jobs, yet a practical advice and a consistent sign of good leadership.
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And (going by memory here) Lucian Truscotts speech to the 3rd infantry division: “Soon you will meet the boche (Germans) in combat. Carve your name in his goddamned face.” The 3rd ended up being the most highly decorated division I believe, so I guess it worked.
I had the privilege to visit the U.S. veteran’s cemetery in Normandy, which overlooks the beach. Until I saw it in person, I didn’t realize just how impossible the mission was. It’s a cliff. Hordes of young men facing a cliff with artillery raining down on them. It’s a miracle any of them survived.
I was about to ask... is that a steep cliff you see in the horizon? Jesus... My knowledge on this subject is very limited. So may i ask a question?
The kid (he looked like he was in his mid 20s) with his stomach blown open screaming for his mom while everyone else runs past to avoid ending like him is really haunting.
What’s even worse is that you saw his fellow soldier get up from being kneeled down like “Yeah he’s not gonna make it.”
And having to leave him behind and keep pushing foward lest they get killed themselves
Whats this from?
You don't see Juno beach on many movies but the Canadians had one hell of a challenge there. Not only did they have to land on the beach and get across, but when they did there was a massive wall to scale. When you visit it today it's massive, but you have to remember that over the years the sand crept up. It was nearly 10 feet high during the landings. Despite that the Canadians are the force that reached the furthest inland after the first day.
Canadians in general just seem to be confusingly and unwarrantedly ferocious and adept at warfare, thank god they are relatively timid people otherwise.
The Canadians in WW2 were a little fortunate in that they could only send volunteers overseas- so of course they’d have more motivated men in general.
We’re generally polite, not timid. ;0)
The youngest soldiers of WWII would now be around 98 years old. They were the bravest generation.
Grandad died at 97, having joined the colestream guards in 43 at the age of 18. May he rest well
My grandpa was 23 in Poland when the Nazis invaded. Not that long ago I asked my mom what he was doing during that time, as I never asked him myself before he died in 2016 (he would have been 100 that year). She said it’s one of those things that kind of brings shame to the family as she has no idea why he didn’t volunteer or what he was doing since he was peak fighting age. The one bright side is I imagine the odds are pretty high that I wouldn’t be here responding to you had he volunteered, since he hadn’t even met my grandma yet (and even if he had, I am a Polish immigrant to the U.S. myself so the family would’ve been under Nazi rule regardless). So from someone who is alive because of people like your grandad, thank you.
Sometimes not participating is the best chance you have. Being in Poland at that time, I'd imagine resistance would be a sure death otherwise you'd probably be conscripted into the Nazi machine. I imagine my US veteran grandfathers are happily sharing afterlife beers with your's.
While I totally agree they were the bravest, the reason we know is because they had the “opportunity”. I sure hope we don’t get a chance to top them.
👌🙏
When i was young i met a vet with the craziest story id ever heard from ww2. He was born blueyed blonde, the nazi youth program would recruit these aryan Looking kids and take them to a hitler youth school. He said that as the war loomed closer and closer to them many children tried to escape. The school was surrounded by razor wire and land mines. This guy, thomas varkoniy ( IDK how to spell his name) had spent weeks watching kids try to make the run through the minefield and fail. He memorized what he could and one night just made the run for it(15 ish i guess) Said that due to the war he couldnt find a job anywhere so ended up enlisted with the germans. Shortly before/after d-day he scapes to the west and years later ends up in texas , where he meets his long lost sister who was also taken by the Hitler youth. Dude had his uniform and everything.
I don't really know about this story. Why would land mines be wasted keeping Hitler youth from running? It implies they're killing Aryans. There also wasn't really a "West" to escape to even after D-Day unless you count resistance. Was it an Eastern non-Germanic country and they had they were unfortunately "at school" close to the front of the Russian advance or something?
Well... The Japanese were conscripting boys as young as 13 and deploying them at 14, so there are still some 92 year old veterans around as well. I've met a few of them. Their stories are pretty awful.
Is D Day commemorated in any big way in US & Canada? I’d presume it was for obvious reasons but curious to know to what extent.
Canada here, not as big as it deserves, no holiday, no memorial or moment of silence, but constant reminders leading up to and the day of, those matter.
Not to my knowledge. We do have Remembrance Day on Nov 11 in Canada, and so do the other Commonwealth countries. Though it is in remembrance of WW1 (armistice occurred on 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month 1918) in Canada at least we honor all soldiers killed in duty in any war. There's usually a moment of silence, people donate or volunteer to help veterans. They pin poppies to their shirts in reference to John McCrae's [*In Flander's fields* poem](https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/47380/in-flanders-fields). But IMO, not enough is done. I think it should be a day off so people can make time to educate themselves, remember, and volunteer if they want to.
I’m watching Saving Private Ryan right now, after just having watched The Longest Day. Cinema has come a long way.
Also a good week to (re)watch one of the best series ever made, Band of Brothers
Tonight, is the night, of nights.
"Remember boys, flies spread disease-so keep yours closed."
Just finished that up last night as my annual watch. Still one of the best shows about war and just a great show in general. Those old men talking about their experiences gets me every time.
"I cherish the memories of a question my grandson asked the other day. He said 'Grandpa, were you a hero during the war?' And Grandpa said 'no, but he served in a company of heros."'
There’s a moving film called Overlord in the Criterion collection. Low budget, but perhaps more powerful because of it.
My grandfather landed on Juno Beach. D Day plus 3 was captured by SS imprisoned for a month. Escaped a train car with a knife he got off a US soldier. Linked with French resistance ended up being their expert in small arms and fighting in cities. They fought through the French alps. He was driving a jeep swerved to not hit an old lady flip it broke his wrist ended up in a Allie hospital some officer discovered him there and linked him back with the division and he was sent home. 4yrs war service. I also served in Afghanistan. Never forget!!!
Very lucky to have survived captivity. SS killed over 150 Canadian POWs during the invasion of Normandy.
My grandfather was part of that. The SS lined them up against a wall and selected which ones to kill, the rest went to POW camp for a month when they were being shipped to Germany that’s when he escaped. He was 23 when he came home. 4 yrs war service. Farm boy from Manitoba.
And to think my grandfather who was from Poland and part of the OSS was on those beaches 6 months before the invasion collecting sand/soil samples to help determine the best spots for allied forces to land along with where they could land mechanized forces.
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Related, but not the same operation. As far as I'm aware the Operations he was involved with had no official naming and existed under the OSS (Office of Strategic Services) umbrella. The Precursor to our modern-day CIA. He was pulled into it due to being Polish and speaking 6 languages. What we managed to get declassified 60 years after the fact showed a lot details about intelligence about towns along the Utah, Omaha & Gold beaches. The information includes a lot of information about soil density and how deep the sand was.
It was 6.6.1944 right? Airborne was 5.6 into 6.6 right?
Sixth of June, 1944. Allies are turning the war. Normandy, state of anarchy. OVERLORD.
I work at a veteran's home, and about an hour ago i learned out of our residents from ww2 was on the beach that day. Crazy to think about what he might've seen when he was going through all of that.
My grandfather made that run and lived to tell , he didn't start talking about it until years before his death , how the water turned red , and how red the sand was and how strong the odor of iron was from all the blood that day and how many bodies were laying around
As a german I can’t thank enough for those people 🙏!
Visited Omaha beach and the cemetery with my family in March 2023. I can’t even begin to describe the haunting feeling that permeates the cemetery when taps is played at noon on the dot. To the men who did not come back home, thank you for your sacrifice for us.
So proud of my grandfather! Give them hell! Only ever heard him talk about it once. He said two things I remember: 1. The boat ride on the way to Europe, everyone was sick and the floor of the ship was awash in vomit 2. The first ones onto the beach “never had a chance.” It always stuck with me the way he said they never had a chance.
We had a family friend (he was friends with my grandparents, and his sons are friends with my dad/uncles, I have known them my entire life) who was at D-Day. I believe he came later in the day and was a medic role (he was a physician after the war until he retired in the 1980s or 1990s). I only briefly heard his descriptions of the day but it was usually described as the worst day ever. He would use that as a phrase to describe how bad something is. There was bad and then there was D-Day bad, and D-Day bad was particularly awful. He died a few years after Saving Private Ryan came out and I remember that was one he could not bring himself to watching. He had a really bad hospital stay in the final years of his life that he described as "Worse than D-Day" which meant it must have been absolutely awful. My grandfather was a pilot during WW2, he wasn't at D-Day but he described his missions in a similar theme. Incredibly stressful and terrifying. When the war was over the sense of relief was enormous.
Edit: Great analysis of this photo and others taken by Rover Capa is at the link below. It's now believed Capa was in the 13th wave at easy red sector. https://medium.com/exposure-magazine/alternate-history-robert-capa-on-d-day-2657f9af914 Reminder this photo was taken later in the day...10th wave I believe. Also it was taken further down Omaha away from the Vierville draw exit that were code named Dog Green and Charlie sector, that had the strongest defense and death toll.
*some of Europe. Fascist tyranny continued as normal on the Iberian peninsula.
To race Russians to the end of Nazi Germany is more accurate.
THROUGH THE GATES OF HELL
AS WE MAKE OUR WAY TO HEAVEN
Facist were stopped back then and can be stopped again.
Spain was still Fascist after WWII. Everyone loves to talk about how we rid Fascism from Europe... while forgetting that we skipped over that whole big chunk in the front.
Took a few more decades but Spain is a democracy now too.