I had a rather amusing conversation with someone once, regarding the invasion. I'm a history nut, so I've done a lot of reading on the subject. I happened to mention the fact that the only Allied force that managed to complete all of their assigned objectives on the first day of the invasion was the Canadians at Juno Beach. The person I was talking to replied: "The Canadians? I didn't even know they had an army!"



A result, I suppose, of the American-centric view of history.

Canadians are also Americans, so the person you were talking to was not just American-centric; (s)he was US-centric.

Those of us who know better tend to be Euro-centric rather than American-centric. Most of what we have learned about the war against Hitler has to do with the Battle of the Atlantic and the fighting in Northern Africa, Italy, France, and (the Western Front in) Germany. We seem much less interested in the Eastern Front, where the Soviets defeated Hitler.

Stalin was delighted by the Allied invasion of France, which he viewed as the first serious contribution by his allies toward the defeat of Germany.

our next door neighbor in my hometown landed at Normandy Beach on D-Day +1.

After WW2, they mostly wanted to forget about the war and get on with their lives.

He was in the navy hunting subs in the Caribean. He told us stories, mistly because he only had adventures and boredom. He never dropped a torp and was never fired upon.

Curiously, I had another uncle hunting subs in the Caribbean, and he sunk a German sub and was shot down three times, once by the deck gun on a submarine, the one they sunk. He died in 1957, before I was born.

The GIs came home, resumed their lives, and never talked about the war.

Last edited Mon Jun 9, 2014, 05:41 AM - Edit history (1)

Neither were involved in D-Day, though my dad came close. He missed being sent over in June, didn't get to France until later in 1944. His ship crossing the English Channel was torpedoed by a German U-Boot and sunk. He was the last man off it. He made it onto another boat and landed safely. He was radio operator at Patton's camp the night Patton had his fatal motorcycle accident, and said "all hell broke loose." Other than that, he never spoke about what combat he may have seen. He was in Germany briefly before the end of the war, but by then, that part of Germany had already surrendered.

The only funny story he had was at the end, when the American forces were searching franctically to house the troops while organizing transport home. The US forces had sent out an appeal to all friendly Europeans asking anyone who still had a house and was willing to put up US soldiers for a while. My dad's CO came in and asked if there was anyone in his unit who liked to sail. No one spoke up, but my dad, the future journalist, had the sense to ask why. The CO said some rich people with a villa on Lake Geneva in Switzerland had offered......"I LIKE TO SAIL!!" My dad didn't even let him finish the sentence. He ended up spending some time in a fabulous country mansion in a small village outside Geneva in the small village of Hermance. He remained friends (mostly by letter) with the family, who graciously offered to put me up when I made my first solo trek through Europe at age 18. It was almost comical when I arrived in the village and asked directions to the address. The people in the village looked at this American with a beard and jeans asking the way to the richest (I had no clue) family in the area. I later understood, when I went into Geneva and saw every construction site in the whole city with their name on it. But they were wonderful normal people who happened to live in the most elegant place in the area.

My wife's father had a very different story. At age 17, he was drafted off his farm in the northwest of Germany. He came from an area that doesn't even speak German as their native language. His native language was "Pladdütsch," or Low German, which Germans can't understand if all they speak is standard German. He was sent as cannon fodder to the Russian front, and was at Stalingrad in the middle of the Russian winter. Used to working outside in the cold, he was the only survivor in a unit of city boys.

A Soviet artillery shell blew off his leg, and he barely survived the gangrene that set in. He was nearly dead when a retreating unit saw him move, and grabbed him to take to a makeshift hospital. At age 18, he was returned to his farm, now a cripple, and totally useless as a farm worker. His greatest hope was that his grandchildren, if he ever had any, would all be girls, so they never had to be in the military. He applauded when his son (my wife's brother) faked physical unfitness so that when he was called up for his exam (military service in Germany was still compulsory in the 1970s), he was excused and assigned a civil service job. He NEVER talked about his war experience until his final days, when he slipped into delirium, and started calling out to members of his unit, who never survived Stalingrad. All those horrible experiences, kept bottled up inside him all those decades, finally found their expression when he no longer had the presence of mind to repress them. My grandfather, who saw combat in World War I, had said the same thing--it was more horrible than anyone ever could imagine.

My father-in-law got his wish, incidentally: all his grandchildren were girls. He and my dad later became friends and proudly stood beside each other at our wedding--curiously enough, alongside a delegation of Japanese. My brother and I had a double wedding, and his wife is from Japan.

What little I know about WW2 is from books, but you have these amazing stories from family members who experienced the war directly. I sm copying your post into a document that I can print out and read in the old fashioned way. Thank you for sharing so much of your family history.

But my wife's father went through horrors that were so traumatic to him, he couldn't bear to speak about them, lest the memories come back to haunt him. My wife said he was calling out warnings about incoming Soviet artillery shells to members of his unit who either froze to death or got blown to bits on the spot. The details of his leg are gory enough, and that's just the parts I DO know about. I remember he used to freeze up and grow cold with anger every time Hitler's image was shown on TV. To remind the population of how horrible the Nazi era was, West German (at the time) TV showed anti-Nazi documentaries frequently. To some extent, they still do. My daughters went to elementary school in a building that was the local Gestapo HQ for the area during the war. When they got the chance, the city government turned it into the "Anne Frank School," something the former workers of the building would have hated (which was the whole idea).

One very educational event was being here when the wall fell, even though it is more of a post-WW II story. My wife and I were in a hotel in Hamburg that night, and we saw the East Berlin press conference where the East German press spokesman said that, effective immediately, all East German citizens were allowed to visit West Berlin and West Germany without getting permission first. My wife and I looked at each other in disbelief. As in "did you just hear what I think I just heard?" November 9, 1989. The next morning, Hamburg was flooded with East Germans (it is only 30 miles from the former border) who were seeing the West for the first time. The way they were gaping, you'd have thought they were getting their first trip to Mars.

I wish I could write like that.

Every time I write ANYTHING, I always see defects in need of refinement. That goes for insignificant internet posts to my novel, which, despite years of refinements, is finally being published later this year--with all sorts of things I still catch that I should have fixed (as usual). I find that writing, like music composition, is a frustrating pursuit: if you're completely happy with your creation, that means there's probably something seriously wrong with it.

which I found enjoyable and definitely worth publishing. You are a perfectionist like Beethoven, who was never satisfied and kept making changes to his compositions, rather than Mozart or Isaac Asimov, whose first draft of anything was the final version. We perfectionists should be happy with our computer programs which make editing easy compared to what it was in the age of typewriters.

I'll make an announcement when it's on Amazon.

By the way, I've started on the next one...beware!!

We're big WWII wargamers, but I suppose the late Eastern Front tournament last weekend had something to do with it. I hope to play a Normandy themed private game this week, with the Desert Rats in their Cromwells.

Crap... I could play on Friday. That's not a good omen...