D-Day

In the Guardian I found a pretty good article about the invasion of Europe and what it means, because it does have a present tense meaning; the present would be quite different were it not for the way the operation turned out. By the way, if you don’t want to hear any D-Day blather skip on to the next article; I don’t care but this blog is my soapbox too and I’m going to stand on it for a sec. I’ve been reading a 2004 book, “Omaha Beach,” by historian Joseph Balkoski; rather than being another compendium of anecdotal memories from old veterans, it’s a history work and therefore based on the oldest possible documents produced at the time. After the cut, there’s an excerpt from the book:

US Army Historical Division, September 1944 interview account with various soldiers of Company C, 116th Infantry, 29th Army Division:

To the right of the company was a gap in the seawall. Pvt. Ingram E. Lambert led off by crawling through this gap, then raised up, jumped a strand of barbed wire, crossed a road, and stopped at a barbed wire entanglement on the far side. The wire was of hte double-apron type and had to be blown. Pvt. Lambert set a bangalore torpedo, but was killed by machine gun fire before he could set it off. Lt. Stanley H. Schwartz followed and set off the charge….After a first group had made the dash across the road and through the wire, intense artillery and machine gun fire was laid down on this point.
In the book the next event is described by a Lt. Jack Shea, an aide to the top General of the 29th Division:

The first soldier to go through the gap was hit by a heavy burst of machine gun fire and died in a few minutes. “Medico!” he yelled when hit. “Medico! I’m hit! Help me!” He moaned, cried for a few minutes. He finally died after sobbing “Mama” several times.

[Sponson]-Besides the obvious drama, I’m posting this excerpt for a reason: over 800 American kids have died in more or less similar ways in less than a year for an illegal occupation of a country that posed no threat to the United States. However, the operation they are assigned to has a lot more in common with the one that put Germans in the pillboxes on the cliffs at Normandy than with the effort described above. That is relevant, and that is history.