June 6, 1944: D-Day In Memoriam

rhetorical spin on any situation could suggest otherwise.

The Holocaust I'm referring to are the ~6 million Jews who were murdered by Hitler and the Nazis during WWII:

The Holocaust | The National WWII Museum | New Orleans (nationalww2museum.org)

And amen--if we don't learn from history, we are bound to repeat it. Our current era proves this is true because we are doing some of the same dumb things we have done in the past that yielded bad results.

I think an important question to ask is why don't people know about the 80th Anniversary of the D-Day invasion taking place but are unthinkingly able to recite a figure of 6 million when the word "holocaust" is mentioned.

My point was the Soviets had already won the war in Europe two years prior to D-Day with the battles of Stalingrad, Kurst, Moscow and then Leningrad.

D- Day was an heroic effort but by then the Germans were basically doomed, D-Day allowed them to follow through easier.

not sure if the link worked but here it is again

hmm,all but maybe Warsaw. In their case they decided to take a break and watch the Germans slaughter the Jews and other Polish allies... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warsaw_Uprising

What about the 5 million who were also killed in the concentration camps by the Nazi's who weren't Jewish? They don't count?

The Russians won the war on the battlefield against Nazi Germany.

hmm,all but maybe Warsaw. In their case they decided to take a break and watch the Germans slaughter the Jews and other Polish allies... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warsaw_Uprising

They do count for sure. My focus was the Jewish count.

How many other millions of lives are the Nazis responsible for in WW2? ~50 million?

The 80th Anniversary of the D-Day invasion is taking place today, and it is an important day in the history of the free world. As a WWII scholar and historian who focuses a lot on the European campaign, this day is evoking some strong emotions for me on the sacrifices so many English, American, and Canadian soldiers made to begin the liberation process of France and start driving the Nazi forces out of occupied countries.

My grandfather served in Patton's 3rd army during the latter part of the Battle of Bulge in January of 1945, and he was shot through the neck by a sniper in the Spring when his platoon was making their way through a German city. Thankfully, he survived, and he's the primary reason why I am so passionate about preserving this history.

Here are some startling statistics I learned from the news this morning:

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Thank you to all of those who contributed to the successful landings on the Normandy beaches, and thank you to all of their families as well. While my grandpa was not there for the invasion, he helped to push the Germans back into Germany later in the European campaign. I was struck to learn from my wife that he was 25 years old when he was commissioned, which tells me that America was digging deep into the pool to throw all available resources at winning the war in Europe as swiftly as possible.

My current WWII study is Eisenhower's memoir Crusade in Europe, and it is outstanding:

I think an important question to ask is why don't people know about the 80th Anniversary of the D-Day invasion taking place but are unthinkingly able to recite a figure of 6 million when the word "holocaust" is mentioned.

On a separate note, I respect Eisenhower, he warned of the "military industrial complex."

Thanks. I plan to read about his presidency down the road, too.

I stated this




You responded.

My response to now is, if we are going to discuss which country was the most moral/ethical during the war then that would be a different topic.

No really I wasn't meaning who was more or less moral or ethical during ww2(I have low opinions of several of those involved,lol) I just didn't see Russia the same as you is all. Anyway I was only five when it first began and eleven or twelve when it ended in the first place so what would I know about it right?

Oh, I know your sarcasm and ignored the word "rhetorical" and answered in the way I wanted to answer, smile emoji indicates I saw you little dig as per your usual style of conversation.

I did not say that society was already here, but surely people who reduce 80 years of history to one paragraph and can only see "good guys versus the bad guys" could fit right in.

While having experienced if first hand as my parents did in Europe is valuable and I have learned a lot from them, I think that while we may not like a certain country or leader we cannot deny the documented effort and manpower the Soviet Union put into the defeat the Nazi's on the eastern front.

I guess you are one of the people who can see through it all.


A lot of those soldiers were from Ukraine and other republics which seceded from the Soviet Union after the collapse of that empire.