- CRUSADE IN EUROPE

General Dwight D. Eisenhower,Supreme Commander of allied forces during World War 11, begins the reconquest of Europe under the nazis, by bravely storming the well defended beaches of Normandy, France on "D-DAY" - starts a costly allied lives fight investment for the liberation of Europe.

Bless them all, the long the sort and the tall - all heroes.....

R.I.P.

wow, God Bless them.

Yep, and even then it was a close call, so close that Ike went ahead and wrote a press release blaming himself for the failure. I wrote a short essay in my Blogger blog about ten yrs. ago.
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All day today the History Channel had several programs (three, I think, repeated) on D-Day. It's one of the most important days of the 20th century and arguably the most important of the war. It's a wonder the death toll wasn't much higher, almost a "perfect storm" towards success.

Churchill had all hospitals emptied because he feared the worst and according to one program, told his wife before she went to bed that night that "when you wake up, 20,000 men may have died while you slept."

There was Ike's decision to postpone the invasion for one day and immediately after the landings, the weather turned impossible again, absolutely no chance of postponing it again.

There was something like 5000 bombers that dropped their bombs well inland, killing nothing but cows and scaring only French farmers out of their warm beds.

There was Rommel, taking off for his wife's birthday because he thought there was no way the allies would attack in such weather and low tides.

Hitler was asleep and no one dared to wake him up...and no one else could give the order to move the Panzers forward.

The paratroopers were dropped all over the place, far from the intended drop zones....so many things that could've led to defeat.

The only thing I can attribute the ultimate victory to is the Hand of God.

I have a cartoon strip saved, but cannot find it to scan and post. I don't even remember what the normally funny and light-hearted strip was, but it was in '94, the 50th anniversary. A boy was asking his mother why the butcher looked so sad today and she told him he remembered his buddies who died that day 50 years ago and how he had to wade through their blood to get to the beach. To be honest, it made me tear up then and still does at this moment, thinking about all of those brave young men.

Do you remember then-President Clinton on Omaha Beach during the ceremony that year? That was when he was walking along the beach and when he saw the cameras on him, he quickly kneeled down in the sand and made a cross with some rocks. Whatever little respect I had left for him disappeared in that moment because I knew why he was doing it, not out of respect for the fallen, but merely for a photo-op.

I feel guilty bringing him up in a thread devoted to REAL heroes, God Bless them all.

There were thousands of allied troops killed during live fire training exercises leading up to D Day.

Yes, Exercise Tiger at Slapton Sands. The brass was worried b/c there were ten officers involved in the exercise that knew the details of the upcoming invasion and they were unaccounted for and it was feared that some had been picked up by the attacking German E-Boats, but they all were later accounted for in the wreckage of one of the troop ships.

The troops that too part in the training exercise were taken away and put into segregated camps where they stayed until after the invasion had begun; the brass were afraid they'd leak details and that the fiasco would be demoralizing for the rest of the invasion force.

The tragedies of war are endless and way beyond subtotal total body count - in the agreed allied plan regarding the necessity of a forced invasion of Normandy to liberate France, the total victory results demanded by Brigadier General Charles de Gaulle of the Free French Forces extracted a very high price for this freedom :-(