No Threads About The Invasion Of Normandy?
 

Back in 1944?

Surprised, would have thought there would have been a few, or did I miss them?

Those were the days.

with PM banned there's nobody around gfy who was there at the time...

spoiler alert - we won (Germans not included) ;)

...seriously, I missed this too, seems ive been distracted, normally glued to history channel to see if there's still file footage i missed somewhere...guess ill need to wait till Remembrance day rolls around

Why would anyone open thread about it?It just a history as many other things.Plus it's not only interesting thing happened on this day.

Been watching Ken Burns' "The War" this week - 7 2-hour episodes with just tons & tons of incredible archival WWII footage. Definitely from an American perspective tho they make no secret about that. The D-Day episode is excellent, whole series is really.

So something that changed the way the world developed globally isn't something important or worth mentioning?

Damn Commie...

It rolls around every year, but nothing really changes... So many WWII dates to remember, Pearl Harbor Day, etc.... I'm a huge fan but it's the same every year.

A few people mentioned it on FB, including Yanks Todd.

There was a great documentary on it last night, the Americans got the hardest part to attack but they really made it hard for themselves by fucking up badly. Failing to bomb the beaches properly, sending the floating tanks out too early and losing almost all of them in the rough seas, massing up on the beaches with little to no cover rather than heading straight inland, etc. ..

I was surprised it wasn't on Google, though I next year, the 70 year anniversary, we'll hear a lot more about it.

don't forget, the guns at point du hoc had been moved merely days/hours prior to june 6th. aerial recon had them at the spot we nailed.

bradley's blunder, well, ..


massing on the beach? i don't recall that, you could be right, for me, the problem has always been the soldiers backpacks- 150 fucking pounds, the troop carriers got stuck on sandbars and troops had to slowly wade in with soaking wet packs, slow going = easy picking.

there was also the fuckup with the paratroopers but no other real blunders.



who knows, maybe current historians will revise this too. it wouldn't surprise me.

oh, i *think* there is great story re: some troops finding the point du hoc guns amongst the hedges.

yup::::

Away from the Pointe, Rangers were patrolling, fighting when necessary and following any suspicious tracks. At one point a group of around eleven Rangers dropped back to allow a large convoy of armoured Germans to pass uncontested: they simply couldn't attack over 50 enemy troops when the primary objective wasn’t complete and the Germans were heading elsewhere. Having destroyed some telegraph poles on the coastal road, Sergeants Leonard Lomell and Jack Kuhn followed a dirt road inland and made a discovery. There, hidden beneath a swathe of camouflage netting which rendered them invisible to Allied spotting planes, were the five guns, laid out and ready to fire upon Utah beach once the Pointe's spotting point had been re-established. In a later interview, Lomell recounted what happened next:

"There was nobody at the emplacement. We looked around cautiously and over about a hundred yards away in a corner of a field was a vehicle with what looked like an officer talking to his men. We decided let’s take a chance. I said "Jack, you cover me and I’m going in there and destroy them." All I had was two thermite grenades – his and mine. I went in and put the thermite grenades in the traversing mechanism and that knocked two of them out because that melted their gears in a moment. Then I broke their sights. We ran back to the road...and got all the other thermites from the remainder of my guys manning the roadblock and rushed back and put the grenades in traversing mechanisms, elevation mechanisms, and banged the sights. There was no noise to that. There is no noise to a thermite, so no one saw us." (Leonard Lomell, cited in Remembering D-Day, Personal Histories of Everyday Heroes by Martin Bowman, (HarperCollins 2004), pg. 69. )

A few different war anniversaries this week:

4 June: the end of the Dunkirk evacuation, 1940
5 June: the start of 6 Day war, 1967
6 June: D-Day, 1944
7 June: the end of the Battle of Midway, 1942
8 June: an attack killing 56 British soldiers (20% of the total killed) in the Falklands War, 1982

apparently, the bombing was meant to create fox holes for the solders but hardly any actually reached the beaches so when the soldiers came ashore there was no hiding places on the beaches so they congregated on the shore, a German machine gunner interviewed said himself that he couldn't believe how they left themselves so exposed and easy to pick off. they really needed a commanding officer to push them forwards.
The tanks were also meant to be an important part of the landing but as the ships transporting them refused to get in close enough, the tanks were sent out into rough seas and lost in the deep water.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/2016280.stm

i see what you are saying, yeah, also, the troop carriers, i can't recall the name of them, left the tops of the troops heads exposed/had major vulnerablities. the nazi long range machine gunners were getting them ~400 yards out, if memory serves me.

Because D-Day was June 6th.. You expect someone to open a thread about it on another day? Fucking dumbass
Maybe they should have waited for next week?

GFY has went to shit. Nobody cares. Whole world has went to shit.

Is the documentary online anywhere? I'd like to see it.

We here in the US get a very one sided view of WW2. One in which the US did all of the work and saved the world. I can't imagine they would air a show painting Normandy as being blunder filled.

I saw a program a while ago, where they did mention all the fuckups, cant recall as to what the title was. I watch too much of the shit, after a while it all becomes one:winkwink:

the us fuck ups on normandy are well documented. any of them chronicle what went wrong.

here's part one, you can follow the rest from there https://youtube.com/watch?v=PIbNuvowtP4

and another clip that shows the British perspective ;) (your Sanford and Son was based on this show) ..

unexpectedly coming from Cracked.com but this is a great article for a different perspective on WWII than what is taught in schools. The Hitler and Churchill parts are fascinating - Hitler was a complete moron, a loser, batshit crazy yet somehow managed to do what he did, a bizarre tragic comedy starring one social reject and an entire nation who fell under his spell.


#5.
America Won the War Single-Handedly

Claimed By:

Hollywood, WWII-shooters, Cold War politics and chauvinists.

Sixty years of World War II movies, and a decade of WWII video games, have made one thing clear: If it wasn't for America, you'd all be speaking German right now, baby! U-S-A! U-S-A!


How America fights a two-front war.

Why it's Bullshit:

Because it's like thinking that while many X-Men contributed in their own special way, defeating Magneto really came down to Iceman.


Cool party!

There are two radically different histories of WW II, the one that was actually fought, and the one where the US kicked everyone's assess. Guess which one Cold War-era classrooms were allowed to teach? Here's a hint: It's the same one Hollywood chose to film.

World War II wasn't just a clever name. It was a global conflict that included epic acts of heroism by non-Americans like the storming of Madagascar, the Battle of Westerplatte, the Battle of Moscow, the Battle of Kursk, the epically badass Kokoda Track, the pilots of the Polish Underground State, the details of El Alamein or the HMS Bulldog. Of course, Americans never hear about any of those unless, as in the case of the classic submarine film U 571, the characters are just straight up switched to Americans. To quote George S. Patton: "Americans love a winner," which you know because you saw Patton, the film that portrayed Field Marshal Bernard "Rommel-killer" Montgomery like a buffoon simply because he was British.


Cheerio, guv'na!

However, there is one Zangief-sized elephant in the room that America loved to leave out of conversation until the end of the Cold War: the Soviet Union. The "Great Patriotic War" as they called it was the single largest military operation in history, and home to perhaps the biggest turning-point of the war: the Battle of Stalingrad.

Understand, the Russia versus Germany part of the war wasn't just a little more important than the part the USA was involved in. It was "four times the scale" of the whole Western front, larger than all other phases of the war put together. The Soviet military suffered eight million soldiers dead, more than 20 freaking times the number of U.S. casualties.


Suck it up, Damon.

Sounds pretty brutal for a John Wayne movie? Try figuring in another 13.7 million dead civilians.

It's tragic how many kids in the West never heard these stories growing up. One platoon leader in the Red Army named Yakov Pavlov personally rigged a Stalingrad apartment building with enough landmines, rifles and mortars to hold off half the Nazi army. The building was under fire day and night and even had some civilians in the basement, but the fortress never fell. Pavlov himself picked off one dozen tanks from the beast.

Our history books should not have been denied such awesomeness.

Read more: http://www.cracked.com/article_18389...#ixzz2VVd6BdMx

it's funny how this article points out america as getting it wrong, yet concluded with a completely wrong factoid re: pavlov's house that *should* be included in our history books.



oh well.

^ It's funny the article started out with the point that America didn't win the war -- a valid point, though conveniently ignoring the Pacific -- then concluded by pretty much saying the Soviet Union did. Yawn.

If anything, the Russians got off easy in WWII. They deserved far, far worse merely for helping Nazi Germany, let alone every other evil they perpetrated before the war, during the war and after the war.

It's to our eternal shame that we were allies with the most evil and bestial regime in the entire 20th century.

Rather than siding with one abomination over the other, we should have simply allowed Hitler and Stalin to wipe each other off the map.

I've just finished reading Six Weeks: The Short and Gallant Life of the British Officer in the First World War how they were churning officers out as fast as possible at Public Schools in England, then writing their obituaries less than two months later. I hope people never stop remembering events like these and what a fucked-up world it can be if left to politicians.

At the beginning of my years in the Army, I was assigned to the First Infantry Division in Goeppingen, West Germany. To that time - and I believe currently - Army personnel assigned to The Big Red One wear a green and red cord around the left sleeve, with a gold tip, that is an honor of the French government bestowed on that division for the liberation of their country starting at Normandy. When I look at my uniform in the closet tonight, thanks to this thread, it will give me another cause to remember and respect the greatest generation that ever lived on these shores.

http://www.theguardian.pe.ca/media-u...34-59-Vimy.jpg

canadian land. middle of france.

Hard to believe that I'd ever find anything to agree with in your posts, but I almost agree with this one. The other night, TCM was playing "Mission to Moscow", a 1943 Warner Brothers piece of garbage propaganda film that extolled our "virtuous allies" and backpedalled the horrendous record of Stalin's criminal regime. The movie got a critical lookover during the 1950's because of its pro-communist lies, distortions and evasions. This resurrected the issues for me and I went reading about the Hitler-Stalin Pact. The whole thing is nauseating beyond belief and inspired the murders of brave Poles in Katyn Forest, the invasion of Finland and the Baltic states, and wholesale murder and torture of tens of thousads. Outrageously evil. But really, such massive evil has become inconsequential trivia today, footnotes, and not one in a hundred college graduates in the US today could say more than one sentence about it.