D Day

[onodera]

Thanks, guys. But could we have won without the D-Day?

[Joseph]

No, it was 65 years ago. (6 1/2 decades)

I was 2 months and 8 days old.

[Joseph]

Thanks, guys. But could we have won without the D-Day?

No.

[Jon Miller]

But the Russians could have.

JM

[KrazyHorse]

I had an old neighbor who landed at DDay. This was 2 decades ago.

JM

Most of them are dead now. In a few years all of them will be. But my gratitude will live on.

There are no better examples in history of a great, moral war than that of the western Allies' war against Hitler's Reich. Never was the contrast between two sides greater, nor the cause more just. This bears repeating, if only to remind people today how far we've come. 65 years ago Europe was in the grasp of a man who hated Jews so much that he'd killed 6 million of them, who believed that Germans and their cousins were racially superior and destined to rule the whole world and who longed to clear the globe of all others. This ethos was wiped from power in Europe by naked force, and the peace and basic justice with which the West has been governed since then is owed in large part to the men to whom I devoted this thread. This is their gift to us. I treasure it the more because I understand what it cost.

[SlowwHand]

But the Russians could have.

JM

That's reassurring.


I have to tell you KH, I think it's utterly refreshing to realize this side of you.

[Jon Miller]

Yeah, his wife had medical issues while we were his neighbor, and I think as we were moving (in late 90) he had medical issues.

I am sure he has been dead a while. He left us some of his old stuff, but I was just a kid and didn't take care of some of the old things properly (and I am ashamed to admit that my parents didn't either).

I think that when he was our neighbor is when I first started loving history though.

JM

[KrazyHorse]

That's reassurring.


I have to tell you KH, I think it's utterly refreshing to realize this side of you.

[SlowwHand]

But you readily jerk me back to reality.

[KrazyHorse]

I'm not going to play your little game here, Sloww. I'll unload on you in another thread if you'd like.

[SlowwHand]

No, I was serious. I think it's very cool that you feel this way. I'm sorry that you can't accept a compliment. They probably have therapists for it. They seem to have therapists for everything these days. Google it.

[Ming]

Feel the love...

[Dinner]

Obama called D-day "an improbable victory", but really the Germans had little hope of repelling the invasion.

Not true. They had a good number of panzers sitting at Calais waiting for the "ghost army" to arrive. The Allies tricking the German high command into thinking the Normandy invasion was just a diversion while the real one was going to come at Calais was actually a pretty key bit of skulduggery. If the Germans had moved fast with all their forces they could have pushed the allies off (even so the allies had a hell of a time on several beaches) but the Germans held their forces waiting for a mythical secondary invasion until it was to late and to many forces were ashore.

[Dinner]

It was good it was 5:1 or 10:1, that is what our armor doctrine called for!

JM

Tigers routinely got 11:1 kill ratios. Of course they were never fielded in large enough numbers and instead got integrated with lighter tanks but even so if they had moved fast and early they could have caused a failed landing just like the British raid in 1942 (I think that was the year).

[Drake Tungsten]

Dieppe was a Canadian operation.