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Jun. 6th, 2012 12:03 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
winterbadgerI've been reading (listening to, mostly) to a good many books about the Second World War in Europe. Today especially, it seems to me worth remembering the tremendous upheaval and destruction that took place ~ 70 years ago.
Standard estimates are that about 20,000 soldiers, sailors, and airmen were killed or wounded just in the one or two days of the Allied invasion of Normandy that began on the night of 5 June and continued throughout the day of 6 June. That, of course, doesn't count civilians, and its estimate of German losses is sketchy. Allied air and naval forces brought over 150,000 men across the English Channel and landed them on the shores of Nazi-occupied Europe. No one was sure that the invasion would work. Innumerable things went wrong. Most of the German defenders fought back tremendously hard. If the landings had been defeated, it would have crippled Allied morale, cost countless lives and a huge amount of materiel, and the war (and Nazi control over Europe and all that entailed) would have gone on for many more years.
The invasion was successful, but the war still continued for almost another year.
There's a lot of talk these days about sacrifice and protecting "our way of life". I think that's a lot harder to be sure about with some of the murky wars we've been fighting in the last decade or two. But I think there can't be a much starker contrast between the world that America, Britain, Canada, France, and all our allies in World War Two were fighting to preserve (despite all its manifest faults) and the world that Hitler and his ilk wanted to construct.
God bless, chaps.
Standard estimates are that about 20,000 soldiers, sailors, and airmen were killed or wounded just in the one or two days of the Allied invasion of Normandy that began on the night of 5 June and continued throughout the day of 6 June. That, of course, doesn't count civilians, and its estimate of German losses is sketchy. Allied air and naval forces brought over 150,000 men across the English Channel and landed them on the shores of Nazi-occupied Europe. No one was sure that the invasion would work. Innumerable things went wrong. Most of the German defenders fought back tremendously hard. If the landings had been defeated, it would have crippled Allied morale, cost countless lives and a huge amount of materiel, and the war (and Nazi control over Europe and all that entailed) would have gone on for many more years.
The invasion was successful, but the war still continued for almost another year.
There's a lot of talk these days about sacrifice and protecting "our way of life". I think that's a lot harder to be sure about with some of the murky wars we've been fighting in the last decade or two. But I think there can't be a much starker contrast between the world that America, Britain, Canada, France, and all our allies in World War Two were fighting to preserve (despite all its manifest faults) and the world that Hitler and his ilk wanted to construct.
God bless, chaps.
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Date: 2012-06-06 05:38 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-06-06 07:41 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-06-07 02:39 am (UTC)