D-Day+62 years
Via the BBC and The Washington Times.
From the Washington Times essay by Stroube Smith:
If you want a quick lesson in the true cost of war, walk to the top of the hills overlooking those beaches and see the vast fields of crosses and Stars of David that mark the graves of the American dead. And if you look at the ages on those markers, perhaps you will be as amazed as I was at the number of lives cut short at 18 or 19 years of age. Sometimes, it seemed an old man was all of 21 or 22.
The raw figures tell the cost. According to the Army’s Web site, American casualties in the June 6 beach and airborne landings totaled 5,200, about a third of them killed in action, for a casualty rate of a little more than 5 percent. The British and Canadians suffered similar losses. While not the bloodiest day in U.S. military history, it is still a high price for some oceanfront property that we were to give back to the original owners.
Read the entire essay. And say thank you.
Thank you US Army, thank you patriots, than you warriors for freedom. Even if you killed many civilians, and even some German soldiers who might have been willing, or even trying, to surrender. Thank you for freedom. Still, given that the US was to develop the A-bomb in a year, and that Germany was already a much smaller threat to invade England, there’s a good argument that another year of containment would have resulted in a better peace. a) Focus on Japan, instead of Germany, more rapidly reducing Japan to a blockaded 4-Island core, b) Continue to fund our ally Stalin, biggest known butcher in history before the war, as his Russian troops wear down the German army, c) To Stalin’s desire for the US to open a second, Western Front, refuse for two reasons: (1) Japan attacked the US, not Germany, so it should be defeated first (revising the earlier Stalin-Churchill-FDR idea to defeat Germany first), (2) Before losing thousands of Americans so as to help the Russians, who had allied with Hitler before Hitler’s betrayal, there should be more agreement on a post-war environment of democracies, especially in Poland; and 3) unspoken — let the commies kill more nazis first, so there are fewer nazis to kill Americans when we invade in 1945. The shame of the Iron Curtain was partly due to America’s desire to win the war as quickly as possible. A delayed D-Day & longer war would likely have cost fewer American lives, though more German and far more Russian lives, and it seems unlikely to have made Stalin a greater post-war enemy. It would have weakened Russia even more, relative to the US, so the US might have been able to demand more democracy (in Poland)– but it might have also have had Russia even more dominant in Eastern Europe post War. This containment option is underdiscussed. (try 2 without url, try 1 was spam flagged with url)
Comment by Tom Grey - Liberty Dad — 6/6/2006 @ 6:56 am
Bloggers Remember D-Day… Austin Bay reminds us of the cost of that day, and links to stories from the Washington Times and the BBC….
Trackback by Ordinary Everyday Christian — 6/6/2006 @ 9:11 am