D-Day 2013: 9,000 Fallen Soldiers Etched into the Sand on Normandy Beach

A soldier died today (poem)

D-Day 2013: 9,000 Fallen Soldiers Etched into the Sand on Normandy Beach to Commemorate Peace Day September 25, 2013. dday8In 2013 Obama closed the Memorials to WWII as part of the government shutdown, but the French in Normandy still paid tribute to those who gave their lives for Freedom. British artists Jamie Wardley and Andy Moss accompanied by numerous volunteers took to the beaches of Normandy with rakes and stencils in hand to etch 9,000 silhouettes representing fallen people into the sand.dday7

 https://blog.johntrudel.com/?p=341

Titled The Fallen 9000, the piece is meant as a stark visual reminder of the civilians, Germans and allied forces who died during the D-Day beach landings at Arromanches on June 6, 1944 during WWII. The original team consisted of 60 volunteers, but as word spread nearly 500 additional local residents arrived to help with the temporary installation that lasted only a few hours before being washed away by the tide. 

***dday6

June 6, 2013, the 69th anniversary of “D-Day,” the largest invasion by sea ever attempted, where 200,000 Americans (Note: Anti-American leftist loons quibble: “Allied troops under the command of American General Eisenhower as Supreme Commander”) stormed the beaches at Normandy to begin the final push to defeat Nazi Germany in WWII. D-Day marked the turning point in WWII in Europe, where the Nazis were engaged in mass murder of Jews and minorities by the thousands. This is history the left seeks to erase.

Americans who want the full story of one of our finest hours, should watch the (today little known) 1945 Academy Award Winning documentary “The Greatest Glory.” It consists entirely of actual war footage, and Dwight D. Eisenhower is credited as the producer. Link.

Naturally there have been a number of Award Winning Hollywood movies about D-Day. Here are films worth seeing: Saving Private Ryan, and The Longest Day, and Nova: D-Day’s Sunken Secrets. (Some are available on Amazon Prime for free.)

Today, European heads of state make it a point to recall and honor the sacrifices of those who landed in Normandy, as do our Presidents…. well, most of them….

dday5In the 69 years since D-Day, there are four recent occasions when the President of the United States chose not to visit the D-Day Monument in Normandy that honors the soldiers killed during the Invasion.

Note: Leftist loons babble endlessly about how other Presidents — e.g. George Washington, Truman, FDR — didn’t visit Normandy either. Alinsky 101. This post makes no comments about other Presidential visits. It is focused on the conduct of Barack Hussein Obama, who has been decidedly anti-American and Anti-military in words and deeds. In 2015 Obama was the ONLY major Head of State to skip the anti-jihad march in Paris.  My response to the loons: Up yours!!!

The four occasions I speak of were:

1. Barack Obama, 2010

2. Barack Obama, 2011

3. Barack Obama, 2012

4. Barack Obama, 2013

  • June 6 2010, Obama had no events scheduled.
  • June 6, 2011, Obama met with the National Security team and was interviewed by WEWS Cleveland and WDIV in Detroit about the auto industry – FAR too busy to visit the D-Day memorial.
  •  June 6, 2012, instead of honoring our fallen soldiers, Obama made a campaign trip to California on Air Force 1 (at our expense) to raise funds for (his) upcoming election.
  • June 6, 2013, Obama was doing ANOTHER fund raiser with the multimillionaires in the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee in Palo Alto CA, once again at our expense.

THEY DIED FOR THIS? Neil Cavuto on D-Day +69 years.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mQ7LLJzDVuo

The Way of the Warrior (Video)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JKqT0-3JV5E&feature=youtube_gdata_player

The Boy on the Beach (2014)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8k9Si28k0Fk

Eisenhower’s Legacy

This blog post has attracted some interesting information. One thing that I did not know was that Dwight D. Eisenhower reenlisted in the Army AFTER serving as President of The United States. He is buried in the same type wooden box, interred in his home town in Kansas with only three medals, the ones he was given for his involvement with the D-Day invasion.

He is reported to have said this: “A hundred years from now, few will remember that I served as President. What will be remembered is that I commanded the D-Day invasion.”

A Fascinating Nugget of History

The radical left likes to denigrate the importance of D-Day. What if it had not happened when it did? Now that I write Thriller novels, I think a lot about “what ifs.”

I stumbled across interesting history that indicates that we just might have lost the war, or to not have achieved unconditional surrender, or at least had to use nukes to vanquish Nazi Germany had not D-Day been successful when it was.

Today we talk about “cruise missiles” and their devastating effects. The first successful cruise missile was the German V-1. The RAF, in Britain’s finest hour, prevented the Nazi war machine from bombing England into rubble, but Germany produced almost 30,000 V-1 rockets, thousands of which were used in combat with brutal effectiveness. The air defenses of that era could not cope with rocket attacks.

The V-1 had a short range, but Germany built 96 launch sites in France in range of London. The first V-1 attack was launched one week after D-Day, on June 13, 1944. Attacks continued until all the sites were overrun by advancing Allied armies. England was hit with 8,025 V-1s in a single nine-week period, with over one million houses and buildings destroyed. Antwerp was hammered by 2,500 V-1 attacks.

In March of 1945 the last of the V-1 sites were finally overrun. Germany surrendered just 5 1/2 weeks later. Source: Backstory in a novel, Sword of Shiva.

 

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2 Responses to D-Day 2013: 9,000 Fallen Soldiers Etched into the Sand on Normandy Beach

  1. John Trudel says:

    Barack Hussein Obama has now reluctantly visited the D-Day ceremonies in France twice. Both times resulted in embarrassment for America and outrage or ridicule from his hosts, our allies. Here is the second debacle: 2014. (The first one, 2009, which follows, is as bad or worse. Neither got much coverage in the legacy media in America.)

    Obama did not play well in France. He can walk and chew gum, but he’d probably do better in Kenya, Detroit, or on the South side of Chicago.

    ***

    https://images.search.yahoo.com/yhs/search;_ylt=AwrTccnEk8lUS8sAUnsnnIlQ;_ylu=X3oDMTB0c2puYm1xBHNlYwNzYwRjb2xvA2dxMQR2dGlkA1lIUzAwM18x?_adv_prop=image&fr=yhs-mozilla-001&va=D-day+gum+obama&hspart=mozilla&hsimp=yhs-001

    http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2014/06/06/16-french-tweets-reacting-to-obama-s-gum-chewing-during-d-day-celebration/

    http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2014/06/obama_criticized_for_chewing_gum_during_dday_ceremony.html

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tgUfm-bqSKM

    http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/06/06/barack-obama-d-day-gum_n_5461090.html

    http://www.newsmax.com/Newsfront/Obama-chews-gum-dday/2014/06/06/id/575636/

    http://www.politico.com/story/2014/06/obama-d-day-gum-107556.html

    ***
    Added note: Obama’s first visit to the Normandy events for D-Day (2009) was even more of a debacle, causing irritation at the “Heads of State” level. Here is some about the French reaction. If possible the Brits were even more irritated (including even the Queen herself, who was there). It did not help that Obama’s narcissistic speech (without his ever present teleprompter) was all about him and made false claims about his own ancestors. This visit was so much of an embarrassment, that few in the U.S. were even aware he had been there.

    This odd visit started poorly when he refused to attend, flat-out. It got worse when Obama, under pressure, eventually reversed his position and did attend. This link covers only the first part. The rest is well documented, but not in the U.S. media.

    http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/barackobama/5096803/Barack-Obama-rejects-Normandy-trip-to-avoid-offending-Germany.html

  2. John Trudel says:

    A HARD TIME

    Dawn broke on the rainy and sandy shores of Omaha Beach, and through the mist could be seen the ghostly shape of ships and small landing craft. The boats were manned with guns and fast approaching the shoreline. Suddenly the sky filled with shadowy, human silhouettes. These were the paratroopers, thousands of them, dropping through the mist and into the winds of war.

    We recently observed the anniversary of D-Day, WWII, which celebrates the Allied invasion of Normandy on June 6th, 1944. Operation Overlord, as it was known, began as stated in the wee hours of dawn. It sent our young men into the jaws of a fierce and bloody battle which would turn out to be the beginning of the end of the war. Over 9000 American men, boys really, perished that day and in the days that followed. Thankfully we prevailed. If we hadn’t, the world might now be a very different place.

    I grew up hearing about D-Day, because it occurred on the day I was born. According to my mother, the hospital was in quite an uproar, with everyone glued to the radio and pretty much ignoring the mothers-to-be. The excitement and tension were, my mother said, palpable. Girl babies left and right were being named “Europa”, “D-Day” and “Invasia”! Being of a sound disposition, my mother prevailed and I was able to escape that fate. Thank you, Mom (many doctors, including obstetricians, were involved in the war effort-so I got to be delivered by an orthopedic surgeon!)

    Because of my interest and that of my husband, who is a veteran, we decided to attend the recent D-Day ceremonies which were to take place on the various beaches of Normandy and in the cemeteries. Northern France was a long way to go for such a solemn activity, but it turned out to be an enriching experience. There were a lot of re-enacters about, but there were also some genuine articles. Real soldiers came from all over.

    We were able to meet some of the soldiers from the U.S. 82nd Airborne Division, the same 82nd Airborne that sent its paratroopers on a descent from the skies over Normandy so many years ago. These young soldiers had completed a jump the day before and were beside themselves with excitement and pride because they felt like they were living the history of their division. One of them was a medic, which reminded us of Al Turner, a D-Day survivor from Wilsonville.

    Al left us several years ago, but not before my husband, then in the army, pinned a medal on him and he told us his D-Day story. It seems Al, as a medic, had to carry ninety pounds of plasma and wade to shore in deep water. He and fifty other unarmed medics somehow managed to make it off the beach to the shelter of an orchard where they fell asleep. The next morning he was awakened by a German soldier pointing a Mauser (German gun) at his head. He and his fellow medics, who were lying all around him, were told to get up. One fellow was slow to respond and was quickly shot. So Al got up. He was then taken prisoner and made to march fifty miles, sometimes being strafed by our own aircraft because he was mixed in with the retreating Germans. He ultimately survived and was assigned to a German field hospital.

    We ended our visit with a trip to Coleville, the American cemetery for soldiers killed in the invasion and its aftermath. There are over 9000 crosses in that cemetery, each one with a story. If only we could look through the windows of time and know them. I do know that they were mostly young, often teenagers or in their early twenties. And I know that they never got to live their lives. When you stand in Coleville cemetery listening to the silence, feeling the stillness and looking at all those crosses, it leaves a lasting impression-an impression that war should be avoided if at all possible.

    At the end of our stay we encountered some D-Day veterans, resplendent in their uniforms, but mostly using canes or wheelchairs. They are, sadly, rapidly disappearing from our midst. It seemed people realized that, as the elderly soldiers were thanked again and again by passers-by.

    One of the things I took away from this experience was the validation of how proud I am to be an American. Our soldiers didn’t so much feel that they were invading, but rather that they were liberating the people. As one Frenchman said, “You may have invaded, but then you left. That’s not usually what invaders do.” What we did was save France and in doing so, made it possible to save ourselves.

    This Newspaper Article was written by my friend Kay Jewett, who was born on D-DayJune 2016

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