In 1943, Stanley Pisk of New Britain, Connecticut, was deployed to Europe. Pisk was a member of the Second Infantry Division, 38th Field Artillery. During his military service, he was in five major World War II battles, including Omaha Beach in Normandy on D-Day. Pisk battled the Nazi regime in Northern France, Central Europe, and the Rhineland. He spent 320 consecutive days in combat.

During the Battle of the Bulge in Belgium, Pisk and his fellow soldiers suffered through freezing temperatures and battle injuries. While on Elsenberg Ridge, Pisk spotted something embedded in the mud and snow – a catcher’s mitt.

Pisk carried the glove in his pack until the war ended. At that time, Pisk was in Pilzen, Czechoslovakia. Pisk spent time in Pilzen where he volunteered to help the Czechs recover from destruction of war.

Pisk returned home to his wife and young son, Ted. Pisk gave the mitt to his son. In 1961, Pisk died unexpectedly at the age of 46.

After my father got the diagnosis 2 years ago, he has been working at a factory for people with special cares. And this has been so good for him, just to have work to go to twice a week. I think it has kept him healthier longer then he would have been without. Anyhow – while working there he met, and fell in love with, one of the other workers. A very sweet girl with a slight braindamage, only a year older then me. At first we kinda laughed – thinking it would all pass. She was after all young and he was very sick. But 2 years passed and they are still together. Don`t get me wrong – I think she is very sweet, and she really loves my Dad and would do anything for him. And she has undoubtably been a great support for him. But she`s not equipped to deal with a man facing rapidly advancing alzheimers. She`s too fragile. She`s lacking a lot of the insight one need to handle this, and she gets stressed out when I tell her how things are to be done. This is only complicated by the fact that I am halfway across the country and only communicate with them by phone. And I can tell my dad is getting worse. Fast. A couple of months ago he would call me himself and ask about stuff. Sure, he was easily confused and didn`t always even remember what he called for – but he was still calling. Now, he leaves everything up to his girlfriend wich is not suited for the responsability (not for the lack of trying!) and it`s just not working.

So:

Wednesday is the D-day. For the first time we have made a decission completely above our fathers head, and on Wednesday we travel down south to tell him that the decision has been made. We are moving him.

I must admit, it is a huge relief to have made the descission. I have always known that the day would come, but I guess I have been pushing it in front of me. That will stop from now on. The pushing in front of that is. From now on I know what I have to face and I will do it with joy. Because this is my dad and he needs me! Thank God for my brother though…I do not know what I would have done without him, and I know he feels the same way. We are united and ready to face this dificult task together and I love him dearly!

The History Channel will air a program this evening titled “WWII in HD”. Rare footage, and personal accounts, will trace the stories of 12 soldiers throughout the course of the war. The program will be a 10-part series, airing from Sunday-Thursday. Given the fact that Veterans Day was just celebrated in America on Nov. 11th, and Armistice Day was celebrated all around the world (which technically commemorates the end of hostilities in WWI) it seems just as good a time as any to remember the sacrifices the Greatest Generation made for the sake of humanity during WWII.

Make no mistake, the Nazi war machine was the most formidable fighting force the world had ever seen. It took what would become two world superpowers (i.e. USA and USSR) and two well-established global empires (i.e. Britain and France) to defeat Hitler’s mechanized hordes and liberate virtually the whole of Europe from his iron rule. Hitler annexed the largest land empire ever seen in Europe, in the shortest amount of time. He conquered more land than Charlemagne, more than Napoleon, more than the Caesar’s, etc… and could have annexed even more had he not been such a self-destructive, hot-headed, stubborn, psychopathic, megalomaniac, prone to folly and blunder. Borders that had stood for centuries were smashed thru with ease, and countless age-old armies were completely annihilated in the course of weeks and months. Truth be told, the Nazi victories in Europe were some of the most remarkable victories in military history. To give you an idea, in about a month the whole of the Polish army was obliterated; 66,000 dead, 133,700 wounded, and 694,000 captured. In one month and 15 days, the French army, thought by many at the time to be the most powerful army in the world, was altogether wiped out; 360,000 dead and wounded, and 1.9 million captured. In 18 days of German Blitzkrieg, the Belgian army ceased to exist; 222,443 casualties, and 200,000+ captured. Over the course of roughly 6 months, 802,191 Soviets were killed, 3 million were wounded, and another 3.3 million were captured during Operation Barbarossa (translation: Operation Redbeard, so named for the charismatic Holy Roman Emperor Friedrich Barbarossa, who had fought many Crusades against the Slavic and Baltic peoples). These jaw-dropping numbers were only the results of single battles and offensives. In total, about 3.5% – 4% of the world’s population at the time was killed in the war that Hitler had started (62 mil – 78 mil), and the light of European Jewry was almost completely extinguished in the Holocaust. Victory was by no means a guarantee for the Allies. There were countless instances throughout the war in which world history could’ve turned on a dime (instances I will discuss in detail in later posts).

It may be a decades-old, silly-sounding cliché, but if it wasn’t for the Allied Forces who stormed the bloody beaches of Normandy, and snatched victory from defeat in the bombed out ruins of Stalingrad, we all would be speaking German right now, quite literally. The younger generations casually blow this saying off, as if it is an exaggeration, but the possibility was very real. In the post-war world, English, the language of the Western victors (i.e. USA and the UK), became the formal and informal language of the world. Everything from global trade to air traffic control is conducted in English, and had Germany emerged from WWII as the dominant Western power, there is no doubt international treaties would be dotted with umlauts and oil would be traded in Reichsmarks, rather than American dollars.

To give you an idea of the kind of enemy America faced, let’s take a look at the absolutely stunning casualty numbers. During America’s first major offensive against Germany in the previous war, WWI (i.e. the Battle of Argonne Forest), America suffered 117,000 casualties, in a little over two weeks worth of fighting. To put this into context, America only lost 172 men during the 2003 Invasion of Iraq, in roughly the same amount of time fighting. The German army was very well trained, equipped, disciplined, and technologically advanced, and could match, and even outmatch Anglo-American ingenuity and innovation in many aspects of warfare. Comparing Middle-Eastern despots, like Saddam Hussein, to Hitler doesn’t pay the respects due to the millions of men, women, and children who gave their lives to defeat him. Fighting Hitler, and Nazi Germany, was essentially like fighting an aggressive, ruthless, and sadistic version of ourselves; an industrialized, 1st world death machine, armed to the teeth, steeped in warrior culture, and hell bent on domination and dominion. On D-Day alone (i.e. a single day) the United States lost exponentially more men (2,499) than we’ve lost in the entire Afghan War over the course of 8 years (916). The Germans killed over 26 million Soviet citizens, military and civilian, throughout the course of the war on the Eastern Front. The USSR lost more men in WWII than America has lost in battle throughout all of the wars she’s ever fought, collectively, which includes both WWII and Civil War fatalities; soldier and civilian. Keep in mind, I am not trying to minimize the sacrifices of our current veterans serving overseas in any way. I am only using them as an example to embellish the achievements of the Greatest Generation and contrast the sheer, mind-boggling size of the sacrifice they made. Losing 2,499 Americans over the course of a day (8 hrs or so) is incomprehensible to most Americans today, yet that was the cost of establishing a single beachhead in France; a mere fraction of the cost it would take to break the Nazi stranglehold over Europe and loosen Japan’s imperial grip over Asia. 

Defeating Hitler cost the world a massive loss of life, unparalleled in world history, yet that was only one of the wars going on at the time. On the other side of the globe, the Allied Forces were embroiled in a vicious war against Hitler’s Axis allies in Asia, Imperial Japan. Imperial Japan was an advanced, militaristic, industrialized nation, much like Germany, that had built up a massive armed force in the years leading up to the war. The Imperial Fleet alone rivaled that of the legendary British Royal Navy, and the Japanese air force was just as advanced, if not more so, than any air force in the world, dominating the skies of Asia virtually unchallenged. Like Nazi Germany, Japan’s ground forces were known to be exceedingly brutal in their pursuit of conquest, and were seemingly just as fanatical in their cause as the Nazis were, routinely fighting to the last man, taking no prisoners, and launching suicidal attacks when all else had failed. A warrior culture had fomented in Japan for ages, and old traditions were hard to break on the isolated island country. Plus, one must keep in mind that fighting an archipelago empire such as Japan was all the more costly because it required multiple d-day landings on tiny island beaches where all of the defending forces were concentrated. Although the battle lasted for a little over six months, 7,100 Allied soldiers were lost on Guadalcanal, 6,821 on Iwo Jima in about a month, and 2,949 were lost on Saipan in about 3 weeks… and that’s just to name of few of the horrific battles in the Pacific. To avoid Operation Downfall (i.e. the Invasion of Japan), which would’ve required multiple d-day landings on multiple fronts, and islands, against a die-hard, desperate enemy fighting to protect their homes, families and honor, undoubtedly costing hundreds of thousands, if not millions of American lives, America became the first, and only country to ever drop an atomic bomb on another country. As ungodly as the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were, they were not anywhere near as costly as the fire-bombing of Tokyo. It is uncertain how many people were killed in the bombings of Tokyo but the city was one of the most densely populated in the world and was largely built of flammable wooden materials. Some estimates have placed the death toll as high as 1.5 million, whereas others have placed it as low as 150,000, but the latter number is highly unlikely given the fact that over 100,000 people were reportedly killed during the raid conducted on the night of March 9th-10th, 1945 alone. In total, over 50% of the city was destroyed, and keep in mind Tokyo was only one of the many cities Allied bombers were targeting in the country. In truth, the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which coerced Imperial Japan to lay down her arms, ultimately saved lives… which goes quite a ways to demonstrate the unmitigated madness and horror that had gripped the world. When a-bombs are saving more lives than they are taking, it is clear that humanity has suffered a cataclysm of unrivaled proportions. 

When commemorating the sacrifices of the Greatest Generation, remember that the men who fought the Axis Powers had no idea they were going to win the war when they left their homes and families to set out to fight the dark forces of tyranny. Hitler had controlled Europe for 4 long years when the Soviets defeated the Blitzkrieg at Stalingrad, and the Allies stormed the beaches of Normandy, and before either of those milestones took place, and even for some time after they did, Hitler’s dreams of a “thousand year Reich” seemed to be all but set in stone. Average Americans; teachers, doctors, lawyers, farmers, clerks, engineers, machinists, laborers, postmen, bus drivers, etc… left their simple and peaceful lives behind to combat a savage machine built of fire and steel and fueled by the blood of millions of innocent people. Grocers and retail salesmen suddenly found themselves in the hedgerows of France face-to-face with the ruthless, battle-hardened, fanatical, Waffen-SS, and accountants and stockbrokers abruptly took to the skies over the Pacific to engage the vastly more experienced and tested Japanese Zeros in dogfights. The entire country banded together to win the war. All able men were conscripted to fight, and the woman on the home front worked their jobs to keep the economy going while they were gone. Operations of entire industries were diverted to the war effort, and the civilian population was forced to ration food and other materials for the good of their fathers, sons, and brothers dying on the battlefields far from home. Total war engrossed the Western World, and our very livelihood depended on the outcome of the campaign. For some demographics, such as the Jews, Russians, Chinese, etc… their very survival as a people depended on the outcome of the war. 

No matter which way you look at it, WWII was the most pivotal, and catastrophic event in human history. The debt of gratitude we owe to those who gave their lives, and bodies, for the cause is unfathomable.

“Never was so much owed by so many to so few” — Sir Winston Churchill

In later posts I shall discuss certain aspects of the war in much greater detail, but for my first entry, I’d simply like to say thank you to all of those aging vets, and their deceased brothers-in-arms, who answered the call when the world needed them the most, and saved humanity from a new Dark Age. 

“Hitler knows that he will have to break us in this Island or lose the war. If we can stand up to him, all Europe may be freed and the life of the world may move forward into broad, sunlit uplands. But if we fail, then the whole world, including the United States, including all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science. Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves, that if the British Empire and Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say, ‘This was their finest hour’”. — Sir Winston Churchill

If Barack Obama, his commie wife, our commie politicians, the liberals, the muslim apologists, etc. REALLY loved America, they wouldn’t run around the word telling everyone how terrible they “think” we are.  They would be telling everyone how great we really are.

These are good

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JFK’S Secretary of State, Dean Rusk, was in France in the early 60’s when DeGaule decided to pull out of NATO.  DeGaule said he wanted all US military out of France as soon as possible.

Rusk responded “does that include those who are buried here?

DeGuale did not respond.

You could have heard a pin drop.

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When in England , at a fairly large conference; Colin Powell was asked by the Archbishop of Canterbury if our plans for Iraq were just an example of empire building by George Bush.

He answered by saying, ‘Over the years, the United States has sent many of its fine young men and women into great peril to fight for freedom beyond our borders.  The only amount of land we have ever asked for in return is enough to bury those that did not return.’

You could have heard a pin drop.

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There was a conference in France where a number of international engineers were taking part, including French and American.  During a break, one of the French engineers came back into the room saying ‘Have you heard the latest dumb stunt Bush has done? He has sent an aircraft carrier to Indonesia to help the tsunami victims.  What does he intended to do, bomb them?’

A Boeing engineer stood up and replied quietly: ‘Our carriers have three hospitals on board that can treat several hundred people; they are nuclear p powered and can supply emergency  electrical power to shore facilities; they have three  cafeterias with the capacity to feed 3,000 people three meals a day, they can produce several thousand gallons of fresh water from sea water each day, and they carry half a dozen helicopters for use in transporting victims and injured to and from their flight deck.  We have eleven such ships; how many does France have?’

You could have heard a pin drop.

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A U.S. Navy Admiral was attending a naval conference that included Admirals from the U.S. , English, Canadian, Australian and French Navies. At a cocktail reception, he found himself standing with a large group of Officers that included personnel from most of those countries. Everyone was chatting away in English as they sipped their drinks but a French admiral suddenly complained that, whereas Europeans learn many languages, Americans learn only English.  He then asked, ‘Why is it that we always have to speak English in these conferences rather than speaking French?’

Without hesitating, the American Admiral replied, ‘Maybe it’s because the Brit’s, Canadians, Aussie’s and Americans arranged it so you wouldn’t have to speak German.’

You could have heard a pin drop.

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AND THIS STORY FITS RIGHT IN WITH THE ABOVE….

Robert Whiting, an elderly gentleman of 83, arrived in Paris by plane.  At French Customs, he took a few minutes to locate his passport in his carry on.

“You have been to France before, monsieur?” the customs officer asked sarcastically.

Mr. Whiting admitted that he had been to France previously.

“Then you should know enough to have your passport ready.”

The American said, ‘The last time I was here, I didn’t have to show it.”

“Impossible. Americans always have to show your passports on arrival in France !”

The American senior gave the Frenchman a long hard look.  Then he quietly explained, ”Well, when I came ashore at Omaha Beach on D-Day in 1944 to help liberate this country, I couldn’t find a single Frenchmen to show a passport to.”

You could have heard a pin drop…

By Oliver Farrimond

FURIOUS Scottish World War Two veterans are demanding an apology from a renowned historical writer after he accused them of COWARDICE.

Anthony Beevor’s eagerly anticipated new work – titled “D-Day – The Battle for Normandy” – contends that Scottish troops failed in key objectives during the landing, badly letting down Allied forces.

And now livid vets are “disgusted” by the passages, and say that Beevor should have interviewed them rather than relying on secondary sources.

Quoting a Canadian major, Beevor wrote: “The thing that shocked me was the 51st Highland Division.

“The Scotties threw away their weapons and equipment and fled.”

Another quote from Field Marshal Montgomery describes the 51st Highland Division as “at present not battle worthy – it does not fight with determination and has failed in every operation it has been given to do.”

But surviving veterans of the Normandy landings have hit out at the claims, describing them as a “gross injustice”.

They say that the 51st Highland Division – which includes the Black Watch – played an important role in the fierce fighting that followed the amphibious invasion of the Normandy beaches.

Dr Tom Renouf, secretary of the 51st Highland Division Veterans Association, said that although the unit had suffered from poor leadership, the courage of the soldiers had never been in doubt.

He said: “This myth that the 51st Highland Division had lost its bottle must not be propagated.

“It is true our initial commander, Major General Bullen-Smith, had failed to inspire confidence and was replaced prior to the breakout.

Gross Injustice

“But to say we never fought with determination is a gross injustice.”

The group say that they are seeking a formal apology from Beevor.

D-Day landings veteran Ron Titterton, 88, added: “In Normandy, the fighting was ferocious.

“We were under attack by mortars constantly – 760 in one afternoon – but my regiment held the line for 10 days.

“Montgomery sent 10,000 cigarettes to be shared between the men, and he wouldn’t do that if he didn’t think we’d done a sterling job.”

The 62-year-old historian, who has written a series of popular histories of the Second World War including best-seller “Stalingrad”, defended the claims in his book.

He said: “The 51st Highland Division went through a bad patch, but its morale and fighting ability was rapidly restored in late July, as I emphasise in my book.”

Dear Nilanthi,

On this Remembrance Day, Obama’s administration is nearing its decision to increase troop levels in Afghanistan (three of his top advisors – Defense Secretary Robert Gates, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mike Mullen, and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton – support a proposal to send 30,000 additional U.S. troops overseas) and I’m wondering whether you — a specialist in IR — can shed some light on this decision. Will this be a repeat of the Vietnam War? I understand that it would be near impossible for the the US to surrender or pull out at this point, but won’t increasing the US presence in the region just escalate the Taliban’s resistance? Is there no other alternative besides sending more men and women to fight in what seems like a feckless war?

Recently, I’ve been dwelling in wars through my writing. In obits for the Globe and Mail, nearly all of my subjects have been touched by war in some way: a survivor of Nazi concentration camps, a lady who lived through London’s Blitz and met her (soldier) husband amid the shower of bombs, a Native Canadian soldier who fought in the first-wave invasion of Normandy on D-Day, one young mother who made the tough decision to leave her baby boy at home to join the Warsaw Uprising in Poland, acting as a messenger for the resistance by delivering verbal intelligence through the city’s labyrinth of sewers.

London after The Blitz

Their narratives were made more interesting by these brushes with death, and they were unquestionably more formidable people for surviving the Great War. It’s important to remember them.

But learning about their lives raised in my mind all the people who didn’t make it then, and those who are struggling now: the millions who perished in the concentration camps, all the civilians in Normandy who lived through and died by the horrendous WW2 attacks, or the civilians today in Northern Pakistan whose visits to the market are interrupted by suicide bombers, the  Canadian, British, and American soldiers who never come home, the Afghan villagers who leave home and don’t know if they will make it back in a day, whose siblings and children have been killed by either occupying troops or the Taliban. And when our soldiers come home, after two or three visits to war zones overseas, what kinds of lives do they have?

Last week, as you know, an Army psychiatrist was accused of massacre on a base in Texas, taking the lives of 13 people. We still don’t know what his motives were, but these murders raised discussion about the stresses soldiers endure. This piece in the New York Times discussed other tragedies on American military bases, which have arisen as a result of the wars overseas, and sending soldiers back again and again to fight in horrendous conditions. If they make it back, there is sometimes not enough support  to help their fragile mental states.

This war is unsustainable. It is costing so much — in dollars and human lives at home and abroad. Instead of allocating resources to send more men and women overseas, why doesn’t Obama think about how to bring troops home, and how to support them in their transition back to civilian life? Sending more troops to Afghanistan also seems paradoxical; as the US presence in the region grows, extremist groups will flex their muscles and rise up and kill themselves and their own people. (As we saw, Hilary Clinton’s visit to Pakistan was welcomed by a string of suicide bombings.) I have been interviewing Afghan asylum seekers here in Toronto, and they describe nightmarish conditions back home, the insecurity of their everyday lives in and around Kabul. As we have seen on this blog in first-person reports from Pakistan, the country is crumbling as a result of war seeping across its borders. This war is tarnishing and taking the lives of people here and abroad and there seems to be no end in sight.

What are your thoughts?

Love,

Julia

“To the living we owe respect, to the dead we owe only the truth.” — Voltaire

There are 28 military cemeteries in Normandy. Sixteen for British & Commonwealth troops, two American, two Canadian, one Polish, six German and one French. The best known is the American Cemetery and Memorial at Omaha Beach in Colleville-sur-Mer, featured in the opening and closing scenes of Saving Private Ryan. It is located just yards from Omaha Beach, one of three American landing areas in the D-Day invasion. The fighting here was the day’s fiercest, responsible for almost half of the nearly 6,000 Americans killed and wounded.

Today it is difficult to imagine a battle here. The German fortifications have been removed and the craters filled in, replaced with an official memorial and the graves of 9,387 American men and women who died in Europe during the World War II.

To get to the graves you walk on a path along the top of bluffs overlooking the beach. It is a serene view. Dense, green shrubbery runs down the hillside and ends at a wide, sandy shore. Two paved walkways make it easy to go from the beach to the heights. It is a beach you could take your family to and not once think of men at the top and bottom of the bluffs trying to kill each other and stay alive at the same time.

The path ends at the structures and statue formally designated as the memorial. The structure contains things better suited for a text book: Maps swarmed over by large red arrows showing the outlines of the battle at the most impersonal scale. The statue, Spirit of American Youth, is a highly polished bronze giant. It is rendered in a WPA/socialist realist style meant to embody Every Man and therefore reminiscent of no one.

Look out from the statue and you see the cemetery. It  immediately makes all the other construction superfluous. Row upon row upon row upon row of white headstones, crosses and the occasional Star of David, all perfectly aligned – as if still in military formation. Kneel directly in front of one and look down the row and they seem to curve over the horizon. This emphasizes the group over the individual. It is easy to be awed by the number of dead without a trace of the grief which comes from the loss of a person you actually know.

The largest German cemetery in Normandy is a few miles away from Omaha in the town of La Cambe. It gets far fewer visitors than Omaha, which is a major tourist attraction. The cemetery here is a muted, hidden place. It sits close to a highway but is screened from it by a high wall. Near the wall is a stone marker with this inscription:

The German Cemetery at La Cambe: In the Same Soil of France Until 1947, this was an American cemetery. The remains were exhumed and shipped to the United States. It has been German since 1948, and contains over 21,000 graves. With its melancholy rigour, it is a graveyard for soldiers not all of whom had chosen either the cause or the fight. They too have found rest in our soil of France.

Entering the cemetery all you see are groups of five small, dark crosses placed far from each other. They bring to mind small groups of people separated by vast distances who are not part of any greater cause or effort. Initially the lack of headstones is disconcerting. Walk a little farther in and you see the markers lie flat on the ground, filling the areas between the crosses. The multiple crosses are a reminder that many graves here contain several bodies. Because of this La Cambe has far fewer graves than Omaha but contains more than twice as many dead.

At the center of the graveyard is a large stone cross atop a circular mound. The mound is a memorial to some 300 unknown soldiers buried beneath it. At the foot of the mound are a number of wreaths, most donated by former foes.

At Omaha there is a memorial with this inscription: “This embattled shore, portal of freedom, is forever hallowed by the ideals, the valor and the sacrifices of our fellow countrymen.” This statement was made for the living, not the dead. The US cemetery is designed to console the survivors that those who died here did so for an important and worthwhile reason.

While losers of wars often make similar claims for their dead, in World War II the Nazis’ acts made this impossible. As a result the private group that built and maintain this German cemetery was free to ask a question their foes could not: Why do we still consider war to be just “a continuation of politics by other means?”

HEROISM
Being scared as hell and saddling up anyway. – John Wayne

(Omaha Beach, D-Day)

Picture by: dunno source Caption by: dunno source via Poster Builder

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D Day, Dooms Day, 9-11-01, 3 Tombstones of Democracy. What will happen if 9/11 truth & justice is not served? Everything points to a huge cover-up… Fiction clip based on facts by Mon Rasz.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VIeve1CG_GM

http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xar6ly_v01-video-clip-d-day-911_school

Tags: 9-11, 9-11-01, 9/11, 9/11 Truth, Alex Jones, Architects & Engineers, Jean Marie Bigard, 911 Blogger, Bilderberg Group, Charlie Sheen, corruption, D-Day, David Ray Griffin, deaths, democracy, dictatorship, Dooms-Day, drumbeat, end, Enron, Eric Laurent, fear, freedom, history, Hitler, illogic,  justice, lives, logic, Mathieu Kassovitz, monuments, Nazi, Neils Harrit, neocon, peace, police state, politics, society, Sept-11-01, SS, Trilateral Comission, terrorists, trust, truth, Twin Towers, war, World Trade Center, WTC7

Today is Veteran’s Day, a day to honor the heroes who so valiantly serve to protect our freedoms. It is important to remember that it is not just the soldiers themselves that we honor, but their families, their loved one’s, who sacrifice as well.

During a recent visit to the Midwest, we had the opportunity to visit with some friends of the family. We had met their patriarch in numerous occasions before, but on this visit, he shared with us a story that we had heard from his family, but that he himself rarely shared.

A member of the Greatest Generation, like every American during WWII, he left his family’s farm and headed off to war. He wasn’t a young teenager, instead a man approaching 30. Leaving for war, his mother handed him a small pocket Bible. Sixty-five years later, he reaches into his pocket, and pulls that Bible out.

Slowly displaying that Bible in our direction, he tells how he had arrived in Europe, how he stood up in a Jeep, how an enemy’s bullet pierced through that Bible, and how because of that Bible, the trajectory if the bullet was altered away from his heart! A mother’s gift and God’s Hand! That Bible is in his pocket every day, the bullet hole clearly visible to those he shows it to on rare occasions.

When we pay tribute today to our great veterans, we should take the time to remember the families of those Veterans for their great sacrifice as well.

Giving hug for my self, I love all this, I love my life..

Dear Allah,

terima kasih telah Engkau ciptakan aku,

terima kasih atas pemeliharanMu,

terima kasih Engkau menempatkan aku di Bumi ini

di Negri ini..

aku mencintai negri ini

Indonesia..

aku mencintai orang-orangnya..

aku mencintai alam ini..

selamat ulang tahun..

11 Nov 2009,

As a World War II soldier, Cyril Haworth took part in D-Day. Here Cyril tells his story as he recalls the D-Day landings and his return journey made possible through Big Lottery funding.

Today was the day my mother in law left and i was truly sadden…. I still cannot believe she has left i had a tremendous amount of help with everything when she was here. it was great fun while it lasted …thank you mom love ya. SEE YOU SOON NYC

D Day, Dooms Day, 9-11-01, 3 Tombstones of Democracy. What will happen if 9/11 truth & justice is not served? Everything points to a huge cover-up… Fiction clip based on facts by Mon Rasz.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VIeve1CG_GM

http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xar6ly_v01-video-clip-d-day-911_school

Tags: 9-11, 9-11-01, 9/11, Alex Jones, Architects & Engineers, Jean Marie Bigard, 911 Blogger, Bilderberg Group, Charlie Sheen, corruption, D-Day, David Ray Griffin, deaths, democracy, dictatorship, Dooms-Day, drumbeat, end, Enron, Eric Laurent, fear, freedom, history, Hitler, illogic,  justice, lives, logic, Mathieu Kassovitz, monuments, Nazi, Neils Harrit, neocon, peace, police state, politics, society, Sept-11-01, SS, Trilateral Comission, terrorists, trust, truth, Twin Towers, war, World Trade Center, WTC7

Sometimes, when travelling, I have been a little disappointed after finally visiting a place I had really looked forward to visiting after reading about it and seeing pictures of it for many years.  Normandy was not such a place. 

For almost my entire life I have seen pictures of the D-Day landings, seen movies about the battle, and read many history books on the subject.  Similarly, Mont St Micheal is so well-known that it seems as much an icon of France as the Eiffel Tower.  And finally, over the years I have read a great deal about the Bayeux Tapestry, seen pictures of it, and looked forward to visiting it.   In all three cases, however, visiting these sites in Normandy was thrilling, moving, and beautiful, in turns.

On our first day, after a very early morning drive off of the ferry in Ouistreham, outside Caen, we drove to Bayeux, less than an hour away (even allowing for one missed turn on the ring road around Caen).   After petite dejuener in the city centre, we were first in line at the museum which houses the Bayeux Tapestry.  An early start, coupled with the time of year, let us enjoy the tapestry at out own pace, with no crowds.  The tapestry is magnificent, stretching over 70 meters long, and still amazingly colorful after its creation over 900 years ago.  We were given an audio guide in English, which explains the story being told in each of the over 30 panels.  Although some describe the tapestry as “cartoon-like” because of its one-dimensional representation in embroidered wool, I was impressed by the level of detail in the pictures, and thought the artists were able to portray both movement and emotion quite well in the sewing.  Historians still debate the sponsor of the work, the location of its creation, and the identity of the artists, but there is no doubt that it gives a compelling and understandable telling of the events which led up to the Norman Conquest and a depiction of the climactic battle between the army of William from Normandy and the Anglo- Saxon army lead by King Harold.    The museum also contains interesting exhibits which describe the Norman influence in England.    in my history lessons at school we frequently had to address the question in history about how much one individual might affect history versus that person being merely representative of a particular time or mood.  In the case of William the Conqueror,  I think his influence in assembling and leading the invasion force, and then in governing after the Conquest, is tremendous cannot be overstated, his impact lasting up to the present time.

From the tapestry, we headed to the magnificent Bayeux Cathedral, which towers over the city in much the same way that the spire of Salisbury Cathedral towers over our city.  The cathedral is both Romanesque and Gothic, and the Gothic portion of the cathedral contains huge windows, making it one of the brightest cathedrals I have seen.  

The city centre contains many historic buildings, including many timbered buildings that in England we would call “Tudor”.  Thankfully, although the city is only 6 miles from the D-Day beaches, it was spared from destruction during the fighting, and is very beautiful.  Several of the streets had banners with French, British, and American flags flying on them.  On the way out to the edge of the city we walked into a pretty and historic little abbey.  Since we had recently seen the Sound of Music, we kept expecting to see Maria, but alas, we were the only ones about.

On the ring road around Bayeux we found the city museum to on the Battle of Normandy, and we enjoyed the movie and exhibits there.  Just across the street from the museum is the largest British cemetery from the Normandy campaign, and it was very moving to walk among the gravestones there.  The stones contain not only name, age and regiment of the deceased, but also a personal message from each soldier’s family.  These personal messages, such as “Our only child, now gone to a better place”, were especially touching,  as was being reminded by the youth of so many of the soldiers who died fighting for liberty and the destruction of the most terrible tyranny.  The cemetery contains over 4,000 graves, and across the street is a Memorial to over 1,800 Commonwealth soldiers who died in the Battle of Normandy and have no known grave.  The Memorial has a frieze with the following inscription (in Latin), “We, once conquered by William, have now set free the Conqueror’s native land.”   A moving end to a memorable day.

We set off early the next morning from our hotel in Caen for a full day of visiting the Normandy D-Day Landing Beaches.  We began at St.-Aubin, part of Juno Beach where Canadian forces landed, and worked our way westward, through the rest of Juno Beach, then Gold Beach (British), and on to Omaha Beach, with the large American cemetery, and out to the end of Omaha Beach at Pointe du Hoc.  We saw the remains of the huge artificial ”Mulberry” harbor, nicknamed Port Winston, at Arromanches.  We visited the huge German gun batteries at Longues-sur-Mer.  We came through the sand dunes at St.-Laurent, where the Americans made their first exit from the deadly fire on Omaha Beach.  We walked among the still pock-marked landscape of the forbidding Pointe du Hoc,  taken by the American Rangers at a large loss of life.  And we finished the day at the very sad German Military Cemetery in La Cambe.    

It’s difficult to describe my feelings about the day.  All day long I could feel the presence of all those soldiers, so far from home, and the tremendous sacrifices all of them made.  Walking among the beautiful marble crosses and Stars of David in the American cemetery above Omaha Beach,  I could barely speak, or even swallow.  It’s simply a very remarkable place, with a very tangible sense of recent history.  One author in America has labelled the generation that fought here as “The Greatest Generation.”  Seeing this landscape really proved the truth in that description.

On our last full day we headed to the southwest corner of Normandy to visit the fantastic Abbey at Le Mont St-Michel.  As I have already written, the setting of the abbey at the top of the rocky island, the surrounding bay, the small street leading up all the steps to the abbey, and the abbey itself, are all really amazing and beautiful, and to me even more impressive in person than it looked in pictures.  It was a really nice day and different in tone from the day before.

We did have a partial day before returning to England, and we spent that time enjoyably first visiting the Abbaye aux Hommes in Caen, and then touring the apple, cheese and Calvados-producing areas south and east of Caen.   We had a lovely picnic of locally produced apple juice, locally produced Camembert cheese, and a baguette.

We have wonderful memories of Normandy, and we hope to be able to visit again.

In a televised press conference, immediately following the attack at Fort Hood, it took this president almost two and a half minutes to acknowledge the tragedy. I guess discussing a meeting with Native Americans was more important than acknowledging that twelve people were killed and thirty wounded on a US Army Base.

To make matters even more unbelievable, this president gives a “shout out” during his opening remarks.

A “shout out.”

What world leader speaks this way? How can anyone expect to be taken seriously when they talk like this?

Could you imagine John F. Kennedy, George Bush, Bill Clinton, The Queen of England or any other world leader for that matter addressing the press and giving a “shout out” to someone?

Imagine FDR in his radio address following D Day. “I’d like to give a shout out to my man Dwight D. Eisenhower for a job well done.”

Imagine?

Is it me?

Once again this president shows his ignorance and his inability to act like a president.

He has no clue.

Way to go America. Hope this was the change you wanted.

I’ve been looking for a new book to read, and came across Antony Beevor’s “D Day” about, well, what you might expect it to be about.  That said, I was intrigued by the cover art – it depicts a knot of soldiers leaving the safety of a landing craft for choppy waters and an unknown future.  That said, I was under the impression that there was a lot of horrific violence that met the invasion force — and this photo suggests everything was pretty calm on this particular ‘day of destiny.’

Then it hit me — I’ve seen this photo before, in college, in  Stanley Lombardo’s excellent translation of The Iliad.

I thought this was a particularly inspired cover for the Iliad – the feeling of dread, of uncertainty about taking a hostile land from a determined enemy, the tight fear of an unpleasant demise- but for the D Day book, it oddly seems to lose some luster, some immediacy. Of course, it’s a perfectly fine cover for a perfectly fine book, but slapping text on a photo and calling it a cover does not inspire me to pick up the book from all the other tradebooks out there.

On the other hand, here are some inspired book covers.

Here’s a magazine-style essay piece I wrote about Saving Private Ryan. It’s kind of rambling (1198 words) and won’t make sense unless you’ve seen the film (maybe spoilers for the opening scenes and general plot later on), but I got an A* for it, so I don’t care what you think. The links and pictures are added, but nothing else only a typo has been changed.

Saving Private Ryan came at a crucial turning point in Steven Spielberg’s career. Previously reliably known for his perfect for children yet artistically-unfulfilling chain of blockbusters, this, along with 1993’s Schindler’s List, marked a change of direction into serious historical territory. While awards had always been forthcoming – E.T. was up against Gandhi for Best Picture Oscar® 1983 (Gandhi won, thankfully) – Saving Private Ryan was that rare blend, particularly seen in war movies, of critical acclaim and box offices success, mixing and matching the heady thrill of battles with moral theorizing, often at the same time.

Left to right foreground: Tom Sizemore, Tom Hanks as soldiers on the boats at D-Day

There’s little indication of this to start with. After a mercilessly long and pointless opening with some old dude, the movie proper begins. June 6th, 1944. The date is already ringing a bell. The beach is covered in iron anti-tank crosses. This is Omaha, and the Normandy beach landings are about to begin, now well-known as D-Day. Spielberg mentioned in an interview that his father, who fought in Burma during WW2, used to say, “Nobody ever makes a movie about my war except as an excuse to do action.” Perhaps it was this particular misrepresentation that Steven Spielberg wanted to correct for a modern-day audience with Saving Private Ryan.

The most striking and immediate way that this is achieved in the opening scene is with the camera. Hand-held photography, or “shaky-cam” in common parlance, is employed throughout, creating the feel of a Signal Corps cameraman. These dedicated photographers of still and moving film were there with the soldiers during the real landing at Omaha beach and other military operations, documenting all that transpired for the benefit of the people at home and in the future. Certain shots, where the camera falls over, ducks for cover, or hesitates before running alongside the actors, were deliberately edited into the final film, as well as brief moments when blood or sand cover the camera lens. This makes for a lot of disorientation, confusion, and ultimately the sense that we, the viewers, are there, fighting (or hiding at least) with the characters that we will come to know very personally by the end of the film.

The real D-Day

The whistle sounds. No more time for the little people, this is war on a grand scale. And yet we never lose sight of the individual. As they are shot, maimed, search for their own body parts, cry for far away parents, they are still people. Cut to the other side. The German soldiers are firing relentlessly, but they are all in silhouette. The landings are far away, not so much visually (an extra long lens helps fix that), but personally. We’ve lost the humanity. The enemy have no humanity. This, what propaganda has dictated for decades, is how you deal with the horrors of war. They are your enemy. Don’t get to know them, perhaps they are not even recognizably human. Of course, in reality, this works out very differently, as seen when the principal characters encounter a German later in the film, and no-one knows how to deal with him.

After the initial wave of dead bodies, the humanization of the soldiers continues. A shell explodes next to Tom Hanks, and for a few minutes, he is practically deaf, a hollow ringing in his ears (and in the audience’s through some inspired sound design and mixing). From his point of view, we see people carrying a flame-thrower being engulfed in flames and a soldier searching for his lost arm. He picks up his helmet, tipping out a large volume of mingled water and blood, and returns it to his head. Someone asks for orders. He can’t hear. He is helpless. And likewise, we the audience are helpless, unable to jump through the silver screen and re-assert a peaceful order of things. All we, Sergeant Miller and us, can do is watch, voyeurs to the brutal carnage around us, as our friends from beforehand and acquaintances from the brief time on the boat are cut down all around us. The slow-motion lends a sense of heightened senses and reality, making it all the more torturous being unable to help them.

Basically it’s saying upfront: this movie doesn’t mess around.

The rest of the film rides on the initial strength. For those who don’t know, it chronicles the story of Tom Hanks’ character Capt. John H. Miller, who recruits a rag-tag team of misfit US soldier after the D-Day landings to rescue one James Francis Ryan as he’s the last of three brothers left alive after the Normandy campaign in World War 2.

As the D-Day scene wraps up the loose ends, the weary viewer is unwillingly confronted with the same horrific sight as Tom Hanks; the dead, the dying, the futility of war; and as the sweeping emotional score interjects to yank at the heartstrings, the bloodshed and carnage recedes into the faded-sepia toned memory of the past – quite like history. Saving Private Ryan has a strange relationship with history. Scrawled from the perspective of fifty years later, this presents the movie as an artifact to spur remembrance, of veterans and their comrades’ sacrifices. Post-Vietnam, an unsuccessful and controversial conflict which spawned a whole glut of war movies and their own unique sub-genre, Saving Private Ryan is a constant reminder of a completely different generation’s sacrifice.

Tom Hanks, near the end of the movie.

Although it may not take as brave a stance as, say, Johnny Got His Gun or other examples of the genre, Saving Private Ryan still has a good deal to say about war, dissecting and criticizing the act of it, yet embracing what it stands for. It’s this paradox that somehow staves the characters through the traumatic experiences they are forced into, knowing that they are fighting for a higher cause which is never questioned. Even if the chain of command, the rescue mission itself is criticized, even by Capt. Miller, it’s always imperative that they remember this: their mission is to win the war. This logic jump neatly side-steps all the intrinsic problems that the characters might have with their premise.

The value of life is revisited often throughout Saving Private Ryan. On the face of it, the plot is one expression of this – forcing a group of eight people to risk their lives to save just one. However, it is a theme also befitting war, the backdrop to which this search-and-rescue mission takes place. In one lengthy scene nearing the middle of the movie, Tom Hanks absent-mindedly recollects how he’s always been able to reassure himself that when he was sacrificing men’s lives it was to save more lives than what it cost. In this way, life becomes quantifiable, unimportant, a game of numbers and chance – and pretty big numbers at that. It’s just another way war warps the outlook and perspective of people, including the audience, who are immersed in it. In other words, everything is quite FUBAR.

Saving Private Ryan is, put simply, one of the greatest war films of all time. It deals with all the familiar themes of loyalty, death, and sacrifice, but does so maturely, bringing World War 2, which had never previously been treated in such a way, to life, in all its gory glory.

As well as this one, I also recommend: The Bridge on the River Kwai, Johnny Got His Gun (see above link for DVD trailer), A Matter of Life and Death, The Longest Day as really good war movies.

12 October 2009, will from now on be known as Dylan Day..or D-Day (insert choir singing)

At exactly 8.24 am, baba Dylan unleashed his 3.4 kilo’s of awesome onto the world.

I was priviledged to be at Kingbury Hospital to welcome him and Iv’e been thinking how i could fit everything into one one post, but unfortunately it has proved impossible so i’ve decided to just make a timeline..if that’s ok with you guys. Dad gave me his notebook and after filtering through all the junk (its like the Da Vinci code for retards) i  managed to find the following:

6am: Arrive at the hospital in the pouring rain (lucky sign?)

6.15am: Deal with check in and go up to the maternity ward. ** (momma) is nervous as hell, but she is soon in those blue robes that show your ass cheeks and hooked up to a machine that checks the babies heart rate. Momma freaks when they take a blood sample from her toe. (not a good sign).

7 am: Anaethetist comes to explain whats gonna happen. Has a strange sense of humour that doesn’t translate well with momma, but i laugh anyway because he is really big.

7.30am: Momma wheeled towards surgery and i go get changed into scrubs. They only have them in green. They must be eco-friendly at this hospital.

7.45am: Its cold in the operating theatre. Moms nips are like bullets. She is starting to panic at the sight of all the needles and what not. The staff tell me to stand still and not touch anything after i walk around to inspect the equipment.

8am: The epidural injection has been moms greatest fear. Panic stations. I fully expect momma to stab the doctor in the neck with his own needle. Mom braces and the doc says “all done” before she can even blink. Mom felt sweet nothing. Nada. Zilch. All that drama for nothing.

8.10am: Mom’s says her legs are warm, but she can’t feel anything. Game on. I ask if i can help, but they decline the offer. Some slicing, some snipping ,some pulling apart of abs and voila.

8.24am: Baba Dylan enters the world bum first. They show him to mom and she cries. They show him to me and at that exact moment something flies into my eye.

8.30am: Dylan scores a more than respectable 9 out of 10 in the APGAR (heart,lungs,muscles,stimulation,colour) test. Go on my son. 1 point gets deducted because he is a little pale. I tell the pedaetrician that his mom is Canadian thats why he’s pale and she rolls her eyes. Makes sense no.

8.35am: They give him to mom for some skin to skin loving. Its all worth it to see them together.

8.45am: Dylan and i head for the maternity ward while they stitch up momma. I get my chance and officially welcome him with a solid “who’s the best baba in the world?”.

9.30am: Everyone together. All smiles, especially mom who had a pethidine injection and is now high as a kite.

What a great day..if ever there was to a time to say good times it would be now. Will fill you on the how the mom and dad (especially him) are coping with parenthood next week.

A bucket full of weeding, 'waste not, want not' signage from a wartime children's book and Spinach beet from the Newquay Zoo wartime zoo keepers' garden.

The wartime Squander Bug is back in Britain with a vengeance!

The change in hours with Daylight Saving Time (another hangover from wartime) meant I was awake for the farming news on the radio this morning . WRAP the food wastage and recycling thinktank reckoned that over five million potatoes are thrown in our household bins each day, with a similar number of tomatoes and 1 to 2 million apples a day (which would obviously keep away lots of doctors). You can find out more on their website http://www.wrap.org.uk/ and and their ad campaign Love Food Hate Waste http://www.lovefoodhatewaste.com/.  

This is obviously one very large wasted compost heap going into landfill! I wonder what wartime zoo keepers and families on rations for themselves and animals would have thought of this? What would Potato Pete (as sung by a young Betty Driver, later Betty Turpin of Coronation Street fame) have said?

The facts and figures of annual UK household food waste make alarming reading by wartime standards  http://www.wrap.org.uk/downloads/The_Food_We_Waste_v2__2_.dd97c529.5635.pdf 

Perhaps if we had to grow more of our own vegetables we might treat them with more value?

Weeding out grass from amongst the late autumn salad in the zoo veg patch over the weekend (my least favourite job) brought this home. Later on in the day came  the news reports of possibly the last Normandy Veterans commemoration service at Westminster Abbey  yesterday.  Many of these D-Day veterans, now in their eighties and nineties, left England for France from beaches along the West Country locally at Trebah Gardens, where a memorail now stands to them. GI troops from the USA encamped at our sister zoo in Paignton (and ate the peacocks)  or trained disastrously around Paignton Zoo’s now peaceful nature reserve at Slapton Sands and Ley (as mentioned in our earlier blogs with its own poignant Sherman tank memorial). One of these Normandy veterans Peter Dwyer, an old friend of the zoo and contributor of nature notes to the Zoo Newsletter Paw Prints in the past, has his own happier occasion plaque on a bench in the zoo celebrating his 80th birthday here a few years back.

Today the Poppy appeal is launched locally by the Royal British Legion and we will plan to plant poppies (alongside potatoes!) in next year’s wartime garden. Poppies will be there not for the eating nor the colour but to help us remember. To happily remember men like Peter Dwyer and sadly remember thousands of others, zoo staff included, who did not return or recover and who could not forget. Not forgotten …

World War Zoo

World War Zoo is about looking back and looking forward, learning from the past to prepare for our future. The project developed from a chance discovery that zoos were closed in the early weeks of World War Two, and even though they were re-opened and supported as a way to boost morale, they struggled throughout. This was a time when food was short, and animals didn’t get ration books. Staffing was low with keepers being called up to fight, and repairs were difficult.

‘‘Our Wartime Garden project reflects the Dig for Victory gardens that sprang up in unlikely places all over the country, including zoos. It will also act as a living memorial to the bravery of many ordinary men, women and children. Newquay Zoo already recycles, composts and think about food miles when sourcing food for the café, and now the Victory Garden will demonstrate how keepers would grow food for the animals.’’ Staff at the zoo are hoping for a good crop of vegetables before the weather turns!

 To bring the period alive for families and schools visiting the zoo, staff members have been collecting wartime memorabilia and evocative items from everyday life of keepers, families, evacuated children and zoo visitors.