Today your job is straightforward. First you must load 40 to 50 pounds on your back. Then you need to climb down a net of rope that is banging on the steel side of a ship and jump into a steel rectangle bobbing on the surface of the ocean below you. Others are already inside the steel boat shouting and urging you to hurry up.
Once in the boat you stand with dozens of others as the boat is driven towards distant beaches and cliffs through a hot hailstorm of bullets and explosions. Boats moving nearby are, from time to time, hit with a high explosive shell and disintegrate in a red rain of bullets and body parts. The smell of men fouling themselves near you
as the fear bites into their necks and they hunch lower into the boat mingles with the smell of cordite and seaweed.
In front of you, over the steel helmets of other men, you can see the flat surface of the bow’s landing ramp still held in place against the sea. Soon you are in range of the machine guns that line the beach ahead. The metallic dead sound of their bullets clangs and whines off the front of the ramp. And the coxswain shouts and the bullhorn sounds and you feel the keel of the LST grind against the rocks and sand of Normandy as the large shells from the boats in the armada behind you whuffle and moan overhead and the explosions all around increase in intensity and the bullets from the guns in the cliffs ahead and above shake the boat and the men crouch lower and yet lean, together, forward as, at last, the ramp drops down and you see the beach and the men surge forward and you step with them and you are out in the chill waters of the channel wading in towards sand already doused with death, past bodies bobbing in the surf staining the waters crimson, and then you are on the beach.
It’s worse on the beach. The bullets keep probing along the sand digging holes, looking for your body, finding others that drop down like sacks of meat with their lines to heaven cut. You run forward because there’s nothing but ocean at your back and more men dying and… somehow… you reach a small sliver of shelter at the base of the cliffs. There are others there, confused and cowering and not at all ready to go back out into the storm of steel that keeps pouring down. And then someone, somewhere nearby, tells you all to press forward, to go on, to somehow get off that beach and onto the high ground behind it, and because you don’t know what else to do, you rise up and you move forward, beginning, one foot after another, to take back the continent of Europe.
If you are lucky, very lucky that day, you will walk all the way to Germany and the war will be over and you will go home to a town somewhere on the great land sea of the Midwest and you won’t talk much about this day, or any that came after it, ever. They’ll ask you, over the long decades after, “what you did in the war.” You’ll think of this day and you will never think of a good answer. That’s because you know just how lucky you were.
If you were not lucky that day you’ll lie under a white cross on a large lawn 65 long gone years later. Weak princes and fat bureaucrats will mumble platitudes and empty praises about actions they never knew and men they cannot hope to emulate. You’ll hear them, dim and far away from the caverns of your long sleep. You’ll want them to go, to leave you and the others to their deep study of eternity. Sixty-five years? Seems like a lot to the living. It’s but an inch of time. Leave us and go back to your petty lives. We march on and you, you weaklings primping and parading above us, will never know how we died or how we lived.
If we hear you at all now, your mewling only makes us ask, among ourselves, "Died for what?"
Weak princes and fat bureaucrats, be silent and be gone. We are one with the sea and the sky and the wind. We march on.
Posted by Vanderleun at June 6, 2009 6:31 AM | TrackBack
Our fathers, our heroes....
Lest we forget.
My father was half a world away, and his day would be in September 1944, when MacArthur "I Shall Return" came ashore on Leyte.
"...that this country shall have a new birth of freedom, and that this government of the people, by the people, and for the people, shall not perish from the earth."
Lest we forget, that which was purchased with the blood and lives of long dead soldiers, who gave up all their tomorrows that we might live in freedom today.
Posted by: David at June 6, 2009 9:37 AMBeautiful. To not at least try to make oneself worthy of the sacrifice is to live as a scoundrel and thief. One can never repay the debt, but one must never stop trying.
Posted by: Gagdad Bob at June 6, 2009 10:19 AMOur (Western Chauvinist is my sis) father was on bloody Omaha at H+12. He was the platoon leader of an anti-aircraft battery. His mother knew when he was crossing the channel. She paced the hall outside her own parent's bedrooms with tears streaming down her cheeks. She knew.
Dad told us about the bodies stacked like cord wood - the mines that kept going off as some infantry veered from the 'safe' single column paths that lead from the beach.
We owe so much.
May those who stood above that beach, today - prove themselves worthy of the honor of representing these men and the country and freedom they fought and died for.
Posted by: Cathy at June 6, 2009 12:51 PM"...you rise up and you move forward, beginning, one foot after another, to take back the continent of Europe."
One of the most moving lines in a long time.
For Uncle Charlie. 17 years old, 5 feet 4 inches.
Posted by: Lance de Boyle at June 6, 2009 1:08 PMMy father-in-law (now deceased) piloted one of those landing ships at Omaha. He never talked about the experience, but my mother-in-law related that he filled up the landing craft with men, motored to the beach, dropped the gate -- and watched most of the men get mowed down, or drown. At times he had to pull his service revolver to force a terrified soldier to disembark. His craft was bracketed by shore artillery and missed annihilation by a few feet. Then he pulled up the gate, motored back to the troop ship, and repeated the whole process, time and time again.
My wife's mom said he was never the same after he came back from the war. Small wonder.
These were extraordinary men, to whom we owe a great debt. Their kind no longer lives, replaced by a weak, self-absorbed, arrogant generation and their like-minded offspring.
God help us.
Posted by: Dr Bob at June 6, 2009 3:32 PMAll of the comments here are so touching.
But I have to slightly disagree with Dr. Bob.
Our fighting men and women today are not weak, self-absorbed, nor arrogant. I have met them, and they are anything BUT.
It is the lazy, whining petulant generation that sit on their asses complaining about our military that are disgusting.
God bless all of those who sacrifice for our country.
They are the noblest of people.
Dr. Bob.
Your father-in-law's plight breaks my heart.
I beat at heaven's door for answers that a man should have to experience and do what he had to do.
May he rest in peace.
Posted by: Cathy at June 6, 2009 7:23 PMThe lucky men who fought that war and lived knew the high price of freedom. They came home and settled down, determined to live the lives their lost comrades would never know, the lives made possible by the sacrifices of the unlucky. Think about the way America took off in the 50's and 60's, a complete turnaround from the decades of the Great Depression and WWII. But shielding the next generation from the want of the depression and horrors of war made the boomer generation too childlike. If the times call for adults in the future will we find enough of them?
Posted by: Boots at June 6, 2009 10:02 PMMy father was in Europe and the Pacific. My son has been to Iraq twice. The Greatest Generation and the Next Greatest Generation, with us spoiled Boomers sandwiched in. Maybe for national survival all it takes is every other generation. God knows that's still a lot of sacrifice. We should be ever-grateful, they did it/do it for all of us.
Posted by: Patty at June 7, 2009 4:26 AMMy father served as a machinist mate in the Phillipines during WWII and I am as proud of him as I can be. I also served, as a fire control tech during the Viet Nam war. I served in one of the destroyers that blew those rivers open so that John Kerry could win his three purple hearts in forty days and then betray us all upon his return to America. He and the rest of the political prostitutes of his and our day told us we couldn't be proud of our service, and God help us, we believed them for a long while. I've come to realize that my motives were the same as my Dads' and so were the motives of the vast majority of the peoople I served with. Thanks for listening. I've wanted to say that for a very long time.
Posted by: Mike Melde at June 7, 2009 5:08 AMThey surely didn't die so that fat socialists could sell their country down the river...did they?
Posted by: thud at June 7, 2009 5:15 AMMy nephew from Arizona recently emailed me about his concern for the state of our union. I replied, "Our fathers gave us America, we gave it away."
I realized early on, that every step I took as a free man was on the bones of those who gave so much. Thank you, all of you, living and dead, then and now. God bless you all.
Gerard - Thanks for this - a few years back a roommate took up work as a traveling insurance salesman. Up in the Mt Vernon (WA) area he met an old guy who drove one of those amphibious tanks on Omaha beach that morning. The old guy told my buddy the following and my buddy passed it on to me when he got back to our house that evening.
The old guy told about hitting the beach that morning with him and his tank and crew getting stuck in the shallows; they couldn't figure out why they weren't getting blown up since everying around them seemed to be exploding. So they drew straws and the old guy (as a young soldier, of course) drew the short one. He undid the tank hatch and peeked out to see what was going on. Turns out their tank had stalled just beyond angle reach of the German guns (not sure which weapon - could have been the 80mm tank or the multiple barrel mortar). He said he could see from the flashes up on the bluff where the Germans were trying to get them but they couldn't. Meantime he said he saw the body body parts of American soldiers flying. Then the old guy started crying.
How do you begin to pay homage to such men?
Posted by: Doug at June 7, 2009 10:06 AMMy dad was one of the paratroopers (82nd Airborne) who went in behind the beaches before the D-Day armada arrived. I cannot imagine the raw terror of finding yourself in the dark in enemy territory over a mile from the place you should have been dropped, trying to locate your buddies, and avoiding drowning in flooded marshes with a fifty-pound load on your back. And being no adrenalin-fueled adolescent but a man in your early thirties with a wife at home waiting for you.
He took me to see The Longest Day the year before he died-- of a premature heart attack brought on by memories of the war, so the coroner said. I remember asking him after the movie whether he was afraid when he jumped out of the glider in the early hours of the invasion. He said, "Courage isn't not being afraid-- it's doing what you have to do anyway." I have never forgotten those words, and I have tried to live up to his gift. He gave me more than just my biological existence-- he helped to shape my soul and spirit.
Gerard, thank you for another splendid post.
Posted by: Connecticut Yankee at June 7, 2009 4:10 PMDr. Bob, Mike, everyone -
The tears spring to my eyes reading these accounts. I know I don't have a shadow of the courage these men had.
I wish I could tell them that they shouldn't be embarrassed that they were scared, soiled themselves, for had to be forced to do what they did. I'm just so grateful they were there.
So thankful.
Posted by: Deana at June 7, 2009 9:13 PMThank you, Mike Melde. God bless you. Surely your reward will be great in Heaven. lois
Posted by: lois in Indy at June 8, 2009 8:44 AMOver at The Belmont Club is this wonderful story of what two women burrowed in the French Underground were doing in preparation for D-Day:
http://pajamasmedia.com/richardfernandez/2009/06/06/waiting-for-d-day/#more-4335
Look at their pictures, and be struck by their stunning beauty. Look in particular at Violette Szabo because of whom she bears a striking resemblance to.
Posted by: Roderick Reilly at June 8, 2009 12:59 PMI have to concur with Tamara, Dr. Bob. There are many of the same caliber. They are out there right now as each reader reads this. In Germany, Italy, S. Korea, Okinawa, and a bunch of other places. Those countries know what would happen to this world without the US military keeping an eye on things. Like sheepdogs guarding the flock from wolves. As the saying goes: Freedom isn't free.
Or we can just let China run things more efficiently and cheaper..
Posted by: JD at June 11, 2009 4:46 PMOn another note...
I was stationed in Germany for three years and my biggest regret I have is not visiting the cemeteries at Normandy.
This one's for my Uncle Buck, who was the waist gunner in a B-25 in the South Pacific.
The plane broke in two at about his station when it got shot down. The front part, with a full bomb load, went down like a stone.
He and the tail gunner floated around in rafts for about a week until they were rescued.
Posted by: WWWebb at June 12, 2009 8:04 PMThis was indeed The Greatest Generation.
Posted by: cilla mitchell at July 2, 2009 3:13 PM"It is impossible to speak in such a way that you cannot be misunderstood." -- Karl Popper N.B.: Comments are moderated to combat spam and may not appear immediately. Comments that exceed the obscenity or stupidity limits will be either edited or expunged.
HOME