I’m sure there’s a more elegant way to say this, but that man has been through some serious shit.
Some nice ladies decided to crowdfund his trip for the 75th anniversary of D-Day, and it was adorable hearing him tell the story, “When they told me they were gonna put that on the internet or some place […] I said, ‘I’m gonna get one of the chairs here and get a tin cup and sit out in front. And I’ll bet you I’ll pick up more right outside here than you will through– through that.’ I said, “Who is gonna pay money for me to go over there?’ Larson recalled.“
Here’s part of his story of landing on Omaha Beach:
“I stopped for a cigarette behind [a] berm, and my matches were wet,” he said. “I turned to– to my left, and not three feet from me there was a soldier. And I says, ‘Buddy, have you got a match?’ And he didn’t answer. I looked again, and there was no head under the helmet. The soul of that boy inspired me to [get] up at that instant and run for the cliff.”
“There was Camembert!” delights Jake. “Am I even pronouncing that right? It was delicious, that Camembert cheese, but I didn’t know how you ate that thing – I was just a farm boy from Minnesota! Then they gave us champagne! Wow! Man! Did you ever drink champagne?”
It was nice to see Saving Private Ryan was on both AMC and the BBC last night on the 75th anniversary of D-Day. I’m still pissed off that movie lost the Oscar to Shakespeare in Love.
My father died a month before the film was released in theaters. It bummed me out he never got to watch it.
I forgot Bryan Cranston was in the movie, he played a one-armed war department colonel and spoke 42 words.
When I was a kid and didn’t know any better, I thought war was a cool and glorified thing. I remember asking him if he was part of D-Day. His reply wasn’t very characteristic of his personality or at least not what I expected of the rough and tough-minded father I made him to be. It was a real grateful, “No, thank God I wasn’t.” I said something like, “Ah man, that would have been neat, why wouldn’t you want to be a part of it?” He went on to tell me how it was an unimaginable event and prayed I never had to experience anything close to it. Even though he wasn’t part of D-Day, he was a gunner on a plane (a PV-1 Ventura) that got shot down over the Atlantic and was lost at sea for a few days. I still have the telegram sent to his parents about being MIA somewhere.
Side rant: WifeGeeding says I’m tough to buy presents for, yet for over ten years I’ve hinted how I always wanted a model version of the PV-1 Ventura. Hmm, I wonder if any are still operational, that would be quite the experience to fly in one.
How did the History channel honor the 75th anniversary of D-Day? It aired a couple of episodes of a survivalist contest show called ‘Alone’.
An associate pastor at my church had to take a last minute flight to Brazil for a family emergency. The fastest way to get there was to fly from Dallas to CANADA and then a direct flight to Brazil. Man, that’s got to be brutal, and I think the way things worked out, he didn’t even stay in Brazil for 24 hours. I believe a family member was dying and it’s a custom to bury the deceased in less than a day after death.
The kids are so excited to see Hamilton this weekend they are dressing in period costumes to the show.
This picture and story on Jeff Bezos remind me of that scene in the movie Dave where the president says, “I once caught a fish this big.”
Visited the grave of my friend’s father and witnessed a remarkable ceremony. The letters on the white crosses almost disappear in the brightness of the stone, so a soldier fills the indentations with sand from Omaha Beach to bring the name forward. It sent shivers down my spine. pic.twitter.com/e2G8KvvALt
I finally got around to watching that Walter Cronkite interview with former President Dwight D. Eisenhower on the 20th Anniversary of D-Day at the Normandy American Cemetery which I posted recently. Ike provides a very interesting bit of trivia. On that very day, D-Day, June 6, 1944, his son was graduating from West Point.
It forms a latin cross and unintentionally happens to point to the United States, specifically between Eastport and Lubec, Maine.
It has a time capsule which will be opened on June 6, 2044.
This sealed capsule containing news reports of the June 6, 1944 Normandy landings is placed here by the newsmen who were here, June 6, 1969.
The cemetery contains the graves of 45 pairs of brothers (30 of which buried side by side), a father and his son, an uncle and his nephew, 2 pairs of cousins, 3 generals, 4 chaplains, 4 civilians, 4 women, 147 African Americans, and 20 Native Americans.
The last burial at the cemetery occurred just under a year ago:
On June 19, 2018, Julius H.O. Pieper was laid to rest next to his twin brother, Ludwig J.W. Pieper, and became the 9,388th servicemember buried at the Normandy American Cemetery.
The oldest active battleship at Normandy was the USS Arkansas, commissioned in 1912. After the war, it was elected for the atomic naval tests at Bikini Atoll. It survived the airborne atomic explosion but sank a month later during the second submerged atomic detonation from ninety feet below the water surface.
I thought that land was considered U.S. soil, and for all intents and purposes I suppose it is, but technically the land is considered a perpetual concession.
Like all other overseas American cemeteries in France for World War I and II, France has granted the United States a special, perpetual concession to the land occupied by the cemetery, free of any charge or any tax to honor the forces. It does not benefit from extraterritoriality, and is thus still French soil.
An overlooked fact, German’s also buried their war dead nearby.
La Cambe is a Second World War German military war grave cemetery, located close to the American landing beach of Omaha.
Initially, American and German casualties were buried in adjacent fields but American dead were later disinterred and either returned to the US or re-interred at the Normandy American Cemetery and Memorial.
After the war over 12,000 German soldiers were moved to the cemetery from approximately 1,400 field burials across Normandy. The cemetery is maintained and managed by the voluntary German War Graves Commission.
The sign in front of the cemetery reads as follows:
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.
Before this cemetery, a temporary one was established. I didn’t know the bodies had to be moved, which I imagine was a very solemn, unpleasant, and emotionally heavy thing to do for the people who actually disinterred and reinterred the bodies. Here’s the remarkable story about the Army’s graves registration soldiers.
“It was a job that had to be done in war; it was certainly no disgrace, but it was something you always thought about being done by someone else.”
When the bodies began arriving, he helped unload them—the first time he had touched a dead body. He fashioned shrouds out of discarded parachutes that littered the countryside and hired French workers to dig graves, paying them with freshly printed invasion currency.
Graves registration men had to go underwater to cut corpses entangled in landing craft propellers, something Private John D. Little of the 607th called “the worst experience I would ever encounter.” Time was of the essence; the sight of bodies would be damaging to the morale of the thousands of fresh troops coming ashore.
Prompt burial was necessary not just for morale; it was crucial for reasons of sanitation, especially in warm weather. The odor of decomposition was almost unbearable. “We stuffed our noses with cotton and wore cloth across our faces,” Private Dowling said. No matter how often they washed out the one-ton trailers used to transport bodies, the odor lingered.
They had to be careful, too, because the Germans sometimes booby-trapped bodies.
Dog tags, a pair of government-issued identification disks, were the primary means of identification. If they were missing, graves registration men would take prints of all 10 fingers and prepare a dental chart. If the body was in bad shape, they would inject fluid into the fingers to allow for usable prints or, in extreme cases, remove skin from the fingertips to get prints.
In 1946 Congress authorized the return of bodies, at government expense, for burial in the United States at an eventual cost of nearly $191 million. The families of 170,752 fallen servicemen chose this option, and graves registration units oversaw the return of these bodies.
