D-Day took place a bit over four years before I was born. My generation grew up revering those who fought there…the Greatest Generation, our parents’ generation.
Today, we are witnessing the passing of the last of that generation. They taught us the importance of fighting evil and the futility of denying its existence. They taught us the importance of being ready to fight before the need to do so manifests itself. Today, I was reading “Hell In The Pacific,” Jim McEnery’s 2012 memoir with Bill Sloan of the Pacific campaign, and “Into the Valley” by John Hersey, written in 1943 when he was TIME-LIFE’s war correspondent in that theater. The Hersey book ended with a plea for readers to buy war bonds and help win this thing. Both men recounted that the Marines landed on Guadalcanal with World War I vintage 1903 Springfield bolt action rifles. Not until he was en route to the next island was McEnery issued the semiautomatic M-1 Garand, which General George S. Patton would later call “the greatest battle implement ever devised,” even though the M-1 had come out in 1936.
About the only homage I can pay today is carrying a Parkerized 1911-A1 .45, reading about the great American heroes…and remembering both their sacrifices, and the lessons they have bequeathed our nation, and us all.
Well said, Mas. It would appear that now more than ever, we -America- need to learn from our history, lest we are condemned to repeat it.
Hubby and I love your Patriotism and love of Country.
We are kindred spirits!
Every veteran is worthy of respect and honor. Combat veterans are worthy of double honor.
I read somewhere that around 1 in 9 WWll veterans ever fired their weapons in combat, but those that did, fought continuously, battle after battle, campaign after campaign, for the duration of the war. I would guess those numbers have not changed much, but when you joined up or were drafted for WWll, it was for the duration of the war, not for a 2-4 year hitch, with a 13 month tour in a combat zone like Viet Nam. Some of these guys fought almost continuously from N. Africa to Italy, and across France and Germany to Berlin.
D-Day and the horror of the carnage inflicted upon Allied troops on the beaches is to be remembered forever. Their courage, bravery, and sacrifice must be forever honored. If not, our nation has lost its soul and is no longer worthy of their sacrifice.
Very well written Mas
Just was out at http://www.ddaymuseum.co.uk/d-day/d-day-and-the-battle-of-normandy-your-questions-answered The total count of casualties for the Normandy campaign starting with D Day and going thru the summer: 425 THOUSAND DEAD AND WOUNDED ON BOTH SIDES.
It was a slaughter house. God Bless all those brave kids of that generation.
My late father was a D-Day vet, Utah beach. He never spoke to me about his experiences on that day. However, he often mentioned how thankful he was that we dropped the “Bomb” on Japan. At the time his unit was back in the states from victory in Germany training for deployment to the pacific theater. The Bombs and Japan’s subsequent surrender precluded that deployment and saved many lives. And now we have president on the verge of apologizing for that bombing; who, if not for fear of backlash probably would have done so.
My, how the country has changed in the past 72 years.
In the early 2000s, while pursuing a graduate degree in history, I had the pleasure of interviewing quite a few WWII veterans from the Pacific and European theaters of war about their experiences. That was a much different war than what Americans face today, of course, as well as a much different society that subscribed to much higher standards of conduct, honor, integrity and manners. All the old veterans whom I interviewed demonstrated those qualities to the highest degree.
My Dad was in the battle of the bulge. He didn’t talk about it until we reminded him that we wanted to know, and didn’t want his experience to go with him as he left the land of the living. He was unstoppable, and didn’t know the meaning of “I don’t know how to do it”. He and the can-do generation taught us much. I for one will not forget those lessons and have a special place in my heart for their generation. May Yahweh bless them.
There was a WW2 GI on one of those crummy islands in the Pacific who posthumously got the Medal of Honor because he was found by the Japanese surrounded by several dozen of their dead comrades. His .45 was empty, having used the last bullet on himself. They admired his death so much they did not interfere with his body. That’s as I remember the account.
My Dad fought in WW II but I wasn’t born for another 18 yrs, I am the youngest of 7. He died November 11th, 1967 and I turned 6 on the 26th of that month. Even being so young I remember the reverence of the Men that fought in that war.. I also carried a 1911 today but in 10mm not 45acp.
All of the comments and the original blog are excellent & relevant as usual.
I shoot a Colt 1911 manufactured in 1918 several times a year, most recently at 8 am on Memorial Day. I had a newbie shoot it also (after instruction & starting with .22 LR, working up through 9mm and .40 S&W).
A true changing of the guard. And sadly, the political & social developments leave me missing the WW2 gets more every year. My father, my uncle and so many more. I worry for my children & grandcild.
The best I can do is mix it up with people to spread the knowledge, history and culture. I seems to be helping, if not a winning strategy. I have brought many out of the closet, to use a current phrase in a non standard way. My family has put a 10 minute watch on me at gatherings … no more than 10 minutes in my socio-political evangelist mode with any one individual! That is how I try to honor veterans, living and past. I tell their stories, discuss the issues & history, apply it to current events and such.
Dave in Nasville … I will be using your dad’s story. I never heard that perspective put in specific context by a vet before. My father never talked much about his experiences in the Pacific.(1943 to 1945, having left his high School senior year in January to enlist in the Marines).
Mas, you are correct about the lack of Garands in the early Pacific theater. Pearl Harbor was the reason that Roosevelt needed to get the American public from an isolationist stand and into the fray. He and Churchill had already agreed that the Nazi menace would be their first priority and therefore all the current arms and materials went to the European theater and North Africa. There were some Garands that arrived on Guadalcanal, but those came with reinforcement troops about six to nine months after the initial invasion. On top of the redirection of equipment to Europe, the Marines had the misfortune of being at the end of the supply line (after the Army) at that time.
Dennis said that only 1 in 9 WW2 vets ever fired their weapons in combat. That sounds close to the true number. This was noted in Dave Grossman’s book “On Killing” or “On Combat” – I forget which one. After WW2 the US military addressed this issue and today in a fight a far larger percentage engage than was the case in WW2. However, I can’t see that level of disengagement with the Marines in the Pacific during WW2. Those battles were so bloody and vicious that it seems that you either engage or get killed. But I could be wrong.
My father was in a combat engineers battalion in the European theater and carried an M1 Carbine. When I was a kid he very rarely would watch a war movie about WW2 or Korea in the theater or on TV. It wasn’t until very late in life that he was more open to discussing it.
Like you, Mas, I also have a Parkerized 1911-A1 in .45 ACP. It pretty much just sits in the safe, but I keep it for the reason that it is a link to the past.
My father as well as my wife’s father, fought in Europe during WWII. My dad was with the Infantry and her dad was a tank commander, both had the rank of Staff Sergeant. My dad wouldn’t talk of his experiences and as a teen in Boy Scouts, I didn’t understand why he wouldn’t go on the camp-outs with us. When asked, his reply was,” I have spent all the time I care to lying on the cold hard ground!”(Didn’t stop me from joining the Marines in 1971)
In his latter years my father-in-law would recount some of his experiences as a tank commander and some were (as you might expect) quite emotional for him to relate.
I would have to agree with Tom Brokaw’s refering to them as “The Greatest Generation”. These two men certainly were, The Greatest, to my way of thinking! RIP Edward N Kendell and Harry M Muse
My dad went into the Army Air Corps after graduating from college in 1939. Army Air Corps had one small Arial Photography unit which would now be called intelligence. Just before Pearl Harbor was attacked he was in command of as a lieutenant and the only officer because of the recent death his CO. The unit went to England as soon as we went to war with Germany and provided analysis of the aerial photos for both bombing targets in occupied Europe, the D Day invasion and follow on war in Europe. Near the end of the war as soon as the bridge Remagen was taken and US forces were across the Rhine. My dad was part of an effort to race across Germany to beat the Russians to collect the German scientist. They had a small lightly armed mechanized detachment. They had over a thousand of German soldiers surrender to them because they wanted to be Americans POWs not the Russian POWs. He had a German General surrender his brigade to him and his personal Luger as part of the surrender. They had so many Germans that they could not really guard them. They had them line the rifles up on the road with the barrels up on the curb and ran a half track over them to destroy them. They had a jeep with a sergeant and a driver escort the Germans back to the American lines without any trouble. My dad past away at almost 93 and was in a gun free assisted living facility near me for the last 7 years of his life. We had him over to the house weekly and about every few weeks he would want to see his Luger.
TW,
You’re right about the Marines in the South Pacific. Unlike the Army, in Europe, who handled all of their own logistics, the Navy handled the logistics for the Marines, who were basically the ground combat forces of the Navy.
My Dad’s WW2 experiences were sort of unique. Even with bad knees, he was drafted into the Army Air Corps, right after Pearl Harbor. His first month was spent in the hospital for knee surgery, followed by abbreviated basic training while recovering. He was sent to an airbase on New Caledonia in the South Pacific where he served as an aircraft mechanic (was a mechanic prior to being drafted, aircraft skills learned OJT) for the duration, as he called it.
As the saying goes, “all gave some, some gave all”.
I love all the vets, and especially the combat vets. When I was young, I studied war and felt that America was always justified and on the right side in every war we’ve been in. When I have had the chance to go to war, I have always declined it, because the negatives in combat outweigh the positives for me. Fortunately, the draft ended when I was 9, I think.
As I’ve grown older, I’ve decided to re-examine the reasons America has gone to war. I tried to look at the Revolutionary War from the point-of-view of the British. I’ve tried to see the Civil War through the eyes of the Confederacy. I tried to see if our involvement in both world wars could have been avoided.
We probably didn’t need to invade Europe to stop Hitler. Hitler’s forces were wearing themselves out fighting Stalin’s forces. There we have two dictators beating their brains out. What could be better than that? Let them destroy each other. Hitler couldn’t even conquer Great Britain. He was no danger to us.
In the Pacific, after being attacked by Japan, we could have gone on the defensive, instead of taking the fight all the way to Japan. We would have to defend Hawaii, Alaska, and the West Coast, and just let Japan have China, the Pacific, and the Philippines. If we did that, we would not have had to send Marines onto far away islands, to kill Japanese soldiers hiding in caves. Those soldiers were no threat to the USA as long as they were on those islands. If they got on troop transports, headed to America, we could sink those ships by submarines, battleships, or air power.
My argument breaks down when we come to the issue of the atomic bomb. If Germany or Japan had developed the bomb first, the USA, and the world, would be in big trouble. So I am very happy we got the bomb first. Maybe if we had stayed home on D-Day we could have nuked Berlin and brought the European war to an end that way.
Anyhow, brave men fight for their own countries, and really great men fight for other peoples’ countries. Americans, Canadians, British, Australians, New Zealanders and South Africans (and others) and super great men who fight for other peoples’ countries.
The thing I really like about WWII is how we turned our enemies into our friends, and made Italy, Germany and Japan better countries FOR THEIR OWN CITIZENS than they were before. That is almost miraculous.
Dennis, your last comment here turns out to be the 20,000th on this blog. Prize will be on its way to you Monday. Congratulations.
My dad just turned 91 and never spoke much about his experiences in WW2 until recently and the stories he has been telling are humbling after growing up with a person who seemed so different to me . I was in the 1st Inf Div as a gunner in a heavy mortar platoon 1968 & ’69 and thought I saw alot. What I did was a walk in the park compared to his experience as a farm boy from Michigan that joined the Navy, became a corpsman (medic) in 7th marine Div. and made the initial assault on Iwo Jima. Watch the video “36 Days of Hell” to get an idea of how brutal war can be . He landed with the first wave on “Green beach” and spent the next few weeks dragging wounded & dying men to the beach and carrying ammo back to where it was needed. He also carried a .45 and grenades and was active in the fight when not tending to the wounded. At one point after being pinned down and taking too many casualties from a pill box / machinegun position a crack shot friend of his kept firing through the opening in the pillbox to keep the enemies heads down while my dad made his way to the bunker and dropped 4 grenades inside neutralizing the threat. Many of the things we have been talking about ,swapping war stories for the first time has given me a view of this person I didn’t know existed. What some of us look back upon as the “job” of war contains everything from people so terrified they literally could not move to others who did insanely dangerous acts to “get the job done” that only became heroic in retrospect.
To my brothers and sisters who stepped up and risked all I respect your sacrifices and determination. To those of you that didn’t, I respect your right to that decision , but you missed a hell of a ride.
Let’s be fair. The M1903 Springfield entered production in 1903, but it was produced right up through WW II, so the weapons carried by the Marines on Guadalcanal were a lot newer “vintage”. The M1 was only introduced in 1937.
The M1903 was one of the finest bolt-action rifles ever made, and other WW II armies relied on bolt-action rifles throughout the war (.303 SMLE, Arisaka, Mosin-Nagant, Karabiner 98k). So the Marines were not outgunned.
I posted this on the next thread, but it is better here.
It was my privilege to know a gentleman (and he WAS a gentleman, in every sense of the word) who went ashore in Normandy that morning. He survived and in interviews later in life credited the hunting skills he learned as a boy with his survival and success that morning and in the days following. You may assume what you will from that statement. He wouldn’t go into detail.
I lost track of him when I moved to the other side of the state, but I was happy to see in the newspaper a few years ago that one of our U.S. Senators (and a Democrat, at that) had made it a personal mission to make sure this old soldier was FINALLY awarded the Bronze Star he earned in that action.
He told me once that every year, on the anniversary of 6 June, 1944 he disappears. “My wife doesn’t even know where I am,” he told me.
“I go somewhere off by myself and spend the day remembering all those friends I lost that morning.”
God bless you Chuck, and all those boys who will be forever 18, 19, and 20 years old.
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