We were young once, and soldiers!

Every child needs a childhood! And every child needs love!

The soldiers buried under the neat white tomb stoned graves above the Normandy beaches were the children hardened by the years of the depression that gripped not only France, but also the rest of the world including the United States. If you look at their graves, or any grave of any soldier killed in almost any war, you will be struck, or you should be, at just how young they were when they died. But, then, there are the non existent graves marked by only memories of those whose ashes flew up the chimneys of the many places in Poland and across Eastern Europe where the atrocities took place that took the lives of so many Jews, gypsies and others that the cruelty that can be seen in mankind surfaces at times during our worlds history. Really, when one truly thinks about it, if General Dwight David Eisenhower had not sent so many soldiers through those concentration camps during the closing days of World War Two in Europe, those who would like for us to think that these things never occurred might have gained their triumph after all. To think that almost thirteen million souls would have died for really nothing except the whims of a group of cultists, which was really all that Adolph Hitler and his Germany from 1933 to 1945 really was, would be the mot unkind thing that could have happened to humanity, perhaps across its whole history. As we look at the recent arrest of the military leader in the old Czechoslovakia we realize that the possibility of more atrocities is always with us, and, in reality, always will be. There is always an endless supply of evil but a very limited supply of those willing to confront and give their lives to hold it down.

They always take the young to be soldiers because the old are too wise to allow themselves to be sucked into that vortex. But, when societies break down, it is always the old who find themselves most vulnerable because they cannot physically or mentally compete with others who are casting about for some new sense of normalcy.

It was on this date, on June sixth, 1944, that so many young men stormed the shores of a place called Normandy on the coast of France across the English Channel from England herself. Adolph Hitler knew that the invasion of France would occur elsewhere, so he gave no particularly important assets to Normandy. Still yet, being a apart of Hitler’s Atlantic Wall, the place was fortified to the teeth. The Russians had been pushing the Americans, the free French, and the British to open a second front on the Atlantic since they had been fighting the Germans alone in the east for three years and they felt the unfairness of that burden. The invasion had been in the planning stages for months and Hitler knew that it was about to occur. It is a testament to the tightness of the security involved that the German high command never learned of the true landing site until the dawn broke on June sixth and they stared out at the armada of ships that faced the Normandy beachheads. Three were several different landing sites on different beaches and the receptions that the invaders faced varied from place to place. In the end, well over ten thousand soldiers lay dead upon the sands and in the waters before a toehold was secured that would eventually lead to the end of Nazi Germany some eleven months later. Perhaps the invasion might have failed entirely if Adolph Hitler had not chosen to sleep for most of the day that day and his staff was to afraid of him to wake him up to what was happening on the coast of France. Hitler had left an entire armored division under his personal control that, if deployed early in the day, might have pushed the allies back into the sea. As it was, however, it was a very bloody and close call.

Acts of heroism and death were common on June sixth, 1944. The allies were bottled up on the beaches for hours and frustration began to mount as the enemy resistance was very potent. The American soldiers learned to respect their enemy early on and it was not until March and April of 1945 when they looked into the eyes of the living dead in the concentration camps that that respect finally dissipated amid the horrors of all that they saw there. It has been said that the young grow up very quickly in war and these young men who fought their way across Europe from those beachheads on the Normandy coast grew up particularly quickly and, in the end, took on a maturity that comes so seldom to those in any war. The Normandy invasion has been glamorized to some extent by Hollywood in films such as “The Longest day“. If you want to see a gripping and factual account of its horrors, simply look at the film “Saving Private Ryan“.
When we went to see “Saving Private Ryan, old soldiers could be seen slipping into seats in the theater to see what their fellows had told them about the film. Often, there were tears in their eyes as they left the theater at the conclusion of that film.

For many years after the end of World War Two, survivors of the Normandy invasion would make pilgrimages to France to revisit the site of the most significant event in their memories. What so many went back for was to walk the rows of graves in the cemeteries above the Normandy beaches to look for old friends and comrades who found their final earthly resting places there. As the years have passed by, the pilgrimages have slowed to a trickle as most of the once young are now to old to any longer make the trip. They are, individually and collectively, finding their own final resting places. With each death, the intimate and horrifying experiences that they experienced, go to their graves with them. So many of these now old souls never really spoke to family or friends about what they saw because there are no words in so many cases to cover the experiences that they had. This generation was a nation of doers and not talkers, and, we all suffer to some degree from that particular fact.

The generation that carried out what happened on this date so many years ago now has been called “The Greatest Generation�, and, there can be little doubt that might be true. What made them so great was the hardships and the evils that they faced and faced down at the cost of so many of their precious lives. They were young once and they were soldiers but they grew old so very fast. The wisdom that came from that aging has benefited this nation and this world. We are far the worse off for their passage from the scene and they will be missed far more than we will ever be able to comprehend because they comprehended so much of it for us and now we much do it for ourselves.

IOVHO,

Regards,

Joe

To say that "God exists" is the greatest understatement ever made across space and time.