UTMC

If you meet a veteran of that, shake his hand and convey my gratitude, please. I mean it.

Any veteran of the allied side in that war, actually. But, today in particular, anyone who took part in Overlord.

Good pics here:
http://www.esquire.com/blogs/news/invas ... %3Fsrc=rss" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

Today, I'm going to compell my niece to first watch D-Day 360, then Saving Private Ryan.

They've had a bunch of D-Day veterans on the radio today. They all agreed. Saving Private Ryan, that's what it was like.

Its...interesting...to hear you say thank a d day vet. Not to take away anything from the awesome acknowledgement that today is getting, or to make you speak for a cultural generation, but what's your take on all this DG?

We Americans get to bathe in accurate self-rightiousness for once, I'd say to the point of national identity. We use how right we were on that one to write our own tickets to this day.

But what's the German perspective on it, if you could?

-Rench

Today at work I looked up and saw three P-51 fighter aircraft flying in formation over the city.

70 years ago, my uncle was flying one of that kind above North Africa.

Here are pictures of them.

http://www.komonews.com/news/local/Phot ... 67411.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

And video!

http://www.komonews.com/home/video/Watc ... 53001.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

Ah, those were P-51's! Thought they might be. We were down having a celebratory lunch with my cousin who just graduated from his residency as an Army doc at Madigan and saw them off in the distance.

She hasn't watched it yet. 360 showed her the naked physics of it...

Rench wrote:Its...interesting...to hear you say thank a d day vet. Not to take away anything from the awesome acknowledgement that today is getting, or to make you speak for a cultural generation, but what's your take on all this DG?

We Americans get to bathe in accurate self-rightiousness for once, I'd say to the point of national identity. We use how right we were on that one to write our own tickets to this day.

But what's the German perspective on it, if you could?

-Rench

According to much of the radio news, the entire celebration is only relevant because the occasion could be used to convince Putin to be nice. That it was about time that the French civilian deaths were finally commemorated, they made a point of noting that it was American planes that dropped the bombs that killed many. And that the idea that D-Day was the crucial turning point of the war in Europe is some kind of American hubris. They even dug out an American history professor who explained how it was really not important at all, the Russians were facing ten times as many German divisions, had more then 10 times the casualties, the real turning point was Stalingrad, and so forth.

I, for one, don't give a fuck about any or that. Any day the war ended quicker meant thousands and thousands got to live. The people who fought on the side of the allies and for the resistance, they literally saved the world when they defeated the Axis.
Opening the second front was crucial for that, actually. Even if the Russians were pushing the Wehrmacht back further and further, it was hard graft. The Nazis could still, possibly, have gotten a favorable peace accord, eventually.
And the guys who did it ran into the machine gun fire. Up into something designed to be a meat-grinder, with nothing but empty sea behind them to turn back to.
There was a lot of that during that war. But that doesn't make what these guys did on June 6th anything less. The people running up beaches aren't numbers, they're people.
It doesn't matter why they did it. They did it, and it was a big part of saving the world. They made it so Europe could become a place where people got to vote on their leaders and Germany, in particular, became a place where the weak, helpless and outcast wouldn't be stomped down just because.
I'm grateful for what the guys who did the fighting did.

I've pondered this a little.
I think some people feel the urge to minimize the events and the actions of the individuals involved. Like they also do when reporting about the war in the east. If you believe the mass media around here, if you pay attention, Soviet soldiers weren't heroic. Rather, they were helpless, driven into a meatgrinder like livestock by a bloodthirsty tyrant. Yes, German war crimes, the Soviet union wasn't just being invaded but being eradicated, indeed, tragic, tragic. But Stalin was a bad man, he knew his troops would get slaughtered, that's the important bit! At least that's the impression I got when I stopped watching TV shows about WW2.

The alternative to minimizing what the allied soldiers went through would be admitting that D-Day, for example, is an event worth commemorating, on that scale, and that it was a genuinely horrifying battle and the individuals involved actually acted selflessly.*
Admitting that would, of course, involve declaring that it was worth it. Something like that could only have been worth it in a conflict against genuine evil. Can't have that, now.
I don't think these people feel particularly close to our grandparents' and, by now, great-grandparents' generation that was around then. I don't think people watch war movies and root for the Germans, no.
I think it's the guilt. Feeling the guilt of what our lot did in those days, that's the way it should be. Feeling guilty about something is one of the ways our minds tell us not to do something again.
But for some, the guilt is a little too much, they don't like it. So anything that indicates that this is indeed something to feel guilty about, that Germany back then really was evil straight out of hell, it must be relativized, it's significance lessened. Some go so far in rejecting that guilt that they put on a brown uniform, others just don't want to be reminded.
That's entirely human, of course. But still is no better than a child hiding their head under a blanket. Dealing with stuff that's unpleasant is something that too many people have spent too many years practicing to avoid, and that too many in society have been telling us too long is fine and our damn right and so forth. Not just in this particular situation, but in general.



* I cannot count the number of different rationalizations why a soldier is really only looking out for himself when he runs into the other guy's gunfire. I like that this de-glamorizes war in general, but I hate how it devalues the genuine sacrifice these men made.

Well said.