A Brief History…

Today is the 75th anniversary of D Day. There are ceremonies honoring the men who landed that day. Few are left but about 170 did make it to the event. The President spoke and of course the leftist press is complaining.

How small he is! Small in spirit, in valor, in dignity, in statecraft, this American president who knows nothing of history and cares still less and now bestrides Europe with his family in tow like some tin-pot dictator with a terrified entourage.

To have Donald Trump — the bone-spur evader of the Vietnam draft, the coddler of autocrats, the would-be destroyer of the European Union, the pay-up-now denigrator of NATO, the apologist for the white supremacists of Charlottesville — commemorate the boys from Kansas City and St. Paul who gave their lives for freedom is to understand the word impostor. You can’t make a sculpture from rotten wood.

You can almost feel the spittle flying.

Ignoring the ankle biters, This is what the day is about

That is my cousin, Bud Kerrison’s plane. He flew 50 missions as bombardier from North Africa.

That is Bud home on leave before heading for Africa. That is me, age about five, saluting him.

Here are the bluffs at Omaha Beach that troops had to get over somehow.

Here is the top of that bluff. A long way up.

Here is one of the German bunkers on the beach. They were angled to avoid exposure to shell hits from the ships supporting the invasion. The angle was arranged to provide the best aim at high tide, assuming that would be the time of the landing. The troops landed at low tide to better see the obstacles and that gave them a bit of shelter as the guns had trouble traversing that much. Of course the sea wall was at the zero spot.

This is the bluff at Pont du Hoc where the rangers climbed to reach gun emplacements that Were empty. The guns had been moved inland.

Utah Beach did not have the bluff to climb but there were marshlands east of the beach. The airborne landings were to seize and hold the causeways across those marshes.

Some of them landed in the town of Sante Mere Eglise and one, in particular, got his parachute caught on the church roof. The town maintains museums celebrating the events of June 6,. 1944.

Here is one of those museums. Their collection is growing as dying veterans often leave memorabilia to the museums.

These road markers are all over the area just inland from the beach. They commemorate men killed at this spot.

And then, of course, there are the cemeteries.

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 6th, 2019 at 6:21 am and is filed under History, military. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.