The Italian theatre of operations was the forgotten theatre of operations in World War II Europe. The American, British, Poles, New Zealanders, Australians, South Africans, Brazilians and other allied troops fought a long and grinding campaign against a formidable German defense, with advances often painfully won from mountain top to mountain top, up the tough spine of the Italian boot. Typical of how events in Italy were overshadowed by events elsewhere in Europe was the liberation of Rome on June 5, 1944, a very hard won objective of the Allied 5th American Army and the 8th British Army, which was immediately overshadowed by D-Day the next day.
The above video is color footage showing the entrance of some of the American troops into Rome on June 5, 1944, and an audience they had with Pope Pius XII. (more…)
Reagan gave the above speech on the 40th anniversary of D-Day, a third of a century ago. Tuesday is the 79th anniversary of the longest day, and there are only a precious few of those men who stormed the beaches who still remain with us. Time to remember them on Tuesday and every day:
We’re here to mark that day in history when the Allied armies joined in battle to reclaim this continent to liberty. For four long years, much of Europe had been under a terrible shadow. Free nations had fallen, Jews cried out in the camps, millions cried out for liberation. Europe was enslaved, and the world prayed for its rescue. here in Normandy the rescue began. Here the Allies stood and fought against tyranny in a giant undertaking unparalleled in human history.
We stand on a lonely, windswept point on the northern shore of France. The air is soft, but forty years ago at this moment, the air was dense with smoke and the cries of men, and the air was filled with the crack of rifle fire and the roar of cannon. At dawn, on the morning of the 6th of June 1944, 225 Rangers jumped off the British landing craft and ran to the bottom of these cliffs. Their mission was one of the most difficult and daring of the invasion: to climb these sheer and desolate cliffs and take out the enemy guns. The Allies had been told that some of the mightiest of these guns were here and they would be trained on the beaches to stop the Allied advance.
The Rangers looked up and saw the enemy soldiers on the edge of the cliffs shooting down at them with machine guns and throwing grenades. And the American Rangers began to climb. They shot rope ladders over the face of these cliffs and began to pull themselves up. When one Ranger fell, another would take his place. When one rope was cut, a Ranger would grab another and begin his climb again. They climbed, shot back, and held their footing. Soon, one by one, the Rangers pulled themselves over the top, and in seizing the firm land at the top of these cliffs, they began to seize back the continent of Europe. Two hundred and twenty-five came here. After two days of fighting only ninety could still bear arms.(more…)
Something for the weekend. Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong team up to give an unforgettable rendition of Summertime. Composed as an aria in 1934 by George Gershwin for the play Porgy and Bess, it always conveys to me memories of the various hot summers of my boyhood when home air conditioning was rare and a luxury.
It is poor business measuring the mouldered ramparts and counting the silent guns, marking the deserted battlefields and decorating the grassy graves, unless we can learn from it some nobler lesson than to destroy. Men write of this, as of other wars, as if the only thing necessary to be impressed upon the rising generation were the virtue of physical courage and contempt of death. It seems to me that is the last thing we need to teach; for since the days of John Smith in Virginia and the men of the Mayflower in Massachusetts, no generation of Americans has shown any lack of it. From Louisburg to Petersburg-a hundred and twenty years, the full span of four generations-they have stood to their guns and been shot down in greater comparative numbers than any other race on earth. In the war of secession there was not a State, not a county, probably not a town, between the great lakes and the gulf, that was not represented on fields where all that men could do with powder and steel was done and valor exhibited at its highest pitch…There is not the slightest necessity for lauding American bravery or impressing it upon American youth. But there is the gravest necessity for teaching them respect for law, and reverence for human life, and regard for the rights of their fellow country-men, and all that is significant in the history of our country…These are simple lessons, yet they are not taught in a day, and some who we call educated go through life without mastering them at all.
Rossiter Johnson, Campfire and Battlefield, 1884
With the signing of the articles of surrender in Galveston by Kirby Smith on June 2, 1865, the terms having been agreed to on May 26, 1865, the Civil War was at an end. This is a good time to give a few thoughts as to what this immense event in American history meant to the nation.
1. Secession-A temptation for Americans whenever national fortunes grew rough or when it seemed that different sections could not compromise and agree, secession as a mainstream political option was as dead as the Confederacy.
2. Slavery-The stain of chattel slavery was ended. As the years have rolled by, it has become fashionable to pooh pooh emancipation and to focus on the terrible disabilities that the freed slaves and their descendants would labor under. All true and all irrelevant. Those who lived at the time, both white and black, realized what a vast change the end of slavery made in America. An institution that had grown up over 250 years, it seemed almost divinely inspired that it ended so swiftly over four years, and at a terrible cost.
3. National Pride-It is odd that such a blood letting would be a source of pride North and South, but such was the case after the War. Celebrating the courage of the men who fought, and the genius of the great generals of the conflict, was a common impulse North and South. Union and Confederate veterans began holding joint reunions in the 1880s. Fond remembrance of what seemed at the time a national nightmare, and honoring the veterans who fought in the conflict, helped reunify the nation.
4. The Solid South-A legacy of the Civil War was enmity against the Republican party in most of the South and domination by the Democrat Party. It was a heavily factionalized Democrat Party, where people who would have been Republicans elsewhere in the country, shoehorned themselves into a party with natural political adversaries. The Democrat primaries, restricted to whites, were where the real contested elections were conducted. This feature of American political life was so taken for granted for generations, that insufficient study has been given as to how this warping of the usual course of politics impacted the South and the nation as a whole.
5. Civil Rights-The ultimate failure of Reconstruction to safeguard the rights of blacks, coupled with Supreme Court decisions that reflected a country concerned with national unity rather than the rights of minorities, set up a situation which held back the economic development of the South, leading to massive black exoduses in the early and mid twentieth centuries to the urban centers of the North. One of the more dramatic results of the Civil War era, although it is not often thought of as a legacy of the Civil War. (more…)
Although a Thursday, the national day of mourning struck most Northerners like a Sunday. Businesses and government offices were closed and people repaired to their churches where they prayed and heard sermons on Lincoln. Pat McNamara at his blog in 2012 noted the remarks after communion of Father Sylvester Malone, the founder of Saints Peter and Paul parish in Brooklyn:
The more I study Theodore Roosevelt, the more I appreciate the impact he had on this nation, both in large and small ways. He brought several phrases, for example, into common usage in this country. One of these is “weasel words”. Roosevelt did not invent the phrase, he noted that he first heard it used in conversation in 1879, but when he used it the phrase quickly entered American popular usage. Roosevelt’s most famous use of the phrase was on May 31, 1916 in a speech entitled Mr. Wilson’s Weasel Words in which he attacked Wilson’s call for “voluntary universal military training”, Roosevelt viewing such a plan as inadequate and calling for a draft. (more…)
Lee realized that he was reaching a limit to how he could respond to Grant’s continual movement to the southeast. Protecting Richmond was nailing his army in place, depriving it of the ability to maneuver as Grant used his superior numbers to outflank Lee’s defense. Lee’s left and center along the Totopotomoy were relatively easy to defend, but his right was at a right angle tot he creek as the Union forces were continuing their push south to outflank him. It was for this reason that Lee ordered Early, now in command of the II corps after Lee had relieved Ewell, attack Warren’s V corps.
The Confederate attack, although pressed heroically by the men of Ramseur’s division, proved a costly failure with 1500 Confederate casualties to 700 Union, the Union troops cheering the valor of the Confederate troops they repulsed and captured. (more…)
When you go home, tell them of us and say, For your tomorrow, we gave our today
Inscription on the Memorial to the dead of the British Second Division at Kohima
I have always been careful, as best as I am able, to repay any debts I have incurred in this life. Of course some debts are unrepayable. How, for example, do we repay the debt to our parents for their care of us as children, especially, as in my case, when they died relatively young, before they endured the ravages of age and required our assistance? Our salvation, bought by Christ on the Cross, is completely beyond our poor power to repay. On Memorial Day we honor those who we can never repay, those who have died in our wars. They had the sweetness of life taken from them, usually after a short twenty years or so on this Earth. Most of them are long forgotten, as the decades remove from the scene those who knew and loved them. We owe our peace and freedom to them, and we are in their debt, a debt we can never hope to pay.
Thus we do the best we can. We erect monuments to them which they will never see in this Vale of Tears, give speeches that they can never hear, hold parades that they will never march in. We do our best to care for their widows and orphans, and that is something, but it is not enough. When a man dies for you, your gratitude seeks for an outlet. Gratitude is one of the noblest impulses of Man, just as ingratitude is one of the most ignoble features of our fallen nature.
The only real way to even begin to pay this blood debt is to make it mean something. As Lincoln noted in the Gettysburg Address: that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain.
We can do this by preserving our freedom and fighting, when needs be, against those who seek to take that freedom from us. To ensure that the nation remains strong to deter threats from abroad. To never take for granted that this nation that has been purchased for us with the blood of others, over a million others. It is a fought for nation, and it will always be a fought for nation as long as it is free.
For most Americans Memorial Day is the unofficial beginning of summer and the long weekend is filled with fun activities, and there is nothing wrong with that. If our war dead could come back for a Memorial Day weekend, I am sure that most of them would be joining in the fun. However, the day means so much more than that. The debt it symbolizes must be never forgotten, and we should do our best with our lives to repay a debt impossible to repay.
Any understanding of this nation has to be based, and I mean really based, on an understanding of the Civil War. I believe that firmly. It defined us. The Revolution did what it did. Our involvement in European wars, beginning with the First World War, did what it did. But the Civil War defined us as what we are and it opened us to being what we became, good and bad things. And it is very necessary, if you are going to understand the American character in the twentieth century, to learn about this enormous catastrophe of the mid-nineteenth century. It was the crossroads of our being, and it was a hell of a crossroads.
Shelby Foote
It is fitting that Memorial Day arose out of our bloodiest war, our war without an enemy. Films to watch over the weekend:
10. Abe Lincoln in Illinois (1940)-The showcase of this film biopic of Lincoln is the above depiction of one of the Lincoln-Douglas debates. The debate portrayed has remarks culled from all the debates, is an excellent recreation of the main arguments made by each of the men, and is evocative of their speaking styles.
Ironically neither of the actors portraying Lincoln and Douglas were Americans. The actor portraying Douglas was Gene Lockhart, a Canadian. If his voice sounds vaguely familiar to you, it is probably because you recall him as the judge in Miracle on 34th Street. His daughter June Lockhart, of Lassie and Lost in Space fame, carried on the thespian tradition of the family.
Lincoln was portrayed by Raymond Massey, also a Canadian. Massey was one of the great actors of his day and bore a strong physical resemblance to Lincoln. Massey served in the Canadian Army in both World War I, where he saw combat on the Western Front as an artillery officer, and World War II, becoming a naturalized American citizen after World War II. Like Lincoln he was a Republican and made a TV ad for Goldwater in the 1964 campaign.
The film helps explain why the Civil War happened. A nation like America could not endure forever denying freedom to millions of Americans on the basis of race. That we did not free the slaves peacefully led to the most terrible war in our history.
9. Friendly Persuasion (1956)-Starring Gary Cooper as Jess Birdwell, the head of a Quaker family in southern Indiana during the Civil War, the film is a superb mix of drama and comedy as the Quakers have to determine whether to continue to embrace their pacifist beliefs or to take up arms against General John Hunt Morgan’s Confederate cavalry during his Great Raid of the North in June-July of 1863. When the oldest son of the Birdwell family, portrayed by Anthony Perkins in his pre-Psycho days, takes up arms, his mother, played by Dorothy McGuire is aghast, but Cooper, as Jess Birdwell, defends him. Although he remains true to his pacifist convictions, Birdwell understands that his son is acting in obedience to his conscience, and, as he tells his wife, “A man’s life ain’t worth a hill of beans except he lives up to his own conscience.”
8. Major Dundee (1965)-Sam Pekinpah’s flawed, unfinished masterpiece, the film tells the fictional account of a mixed force of Union soldiers, and Confederate prisoners, who join forces to hunt and ultimately defeat an Apache raider, Sierra Charriba, in 1864-65. Charlton Heston gives an outstanding performance as Major Amos Dundee, a man battling his own personal demons of a failed military career, as he commands this Union-Confederate force through northern Mexico on the trail of the Apache, with fighting often threatening to break out between the Union and Confederate soldiers. Use of Confederate prisoners as Union soldiers in the West was not uncommon. Six Union infantry regiments of Confederate prisoners, called “Galvanized Yankees”, served in the West. The final section of the film involving a battle between Major Dundee’s force and French Lancers, the French occupying Mexico at the time, has always struck me as one of the best filmed combat sequences in any movie.
7. The Horse Soldiers (1959)-In 1959 John Ford and John Wayne, in the last of their “cavalry collaborations”, made The Horse Soldiers, a film based on Harold Sinclair’s novel of the same name published in 1956, which is a wonderful fictionalized account of Grierson’s Raid.
Perhaps the most daring and successful Union cavalry raid of the war, Colonel Benjamin Grierson, a former music teacher and band leader from Jacksonville, Illinois, who, after being bitten by a horse at a young age, hated horses, led from April 17-May 2, 1863 1700 Illinois and Iowa troopers through 600 miles of Confederate territory from southern Tennessee to the Union held Baton Rouge in Louisiana. Grierson and his men ripped up railroads, burned Confederate supplies and tied down many times their number of Confederate troops and succeeded in giving Grant a valuable diversion as he began his movement against Vicksburg.
John Wayne gives a fine, if surly, performance as Colonel Marlowe, the leader of the Union cavalry brigade. William Holden as a Union surgeon serves as a foil for Wayne. Constance Towers, as a captured Southern belle, supplies the obligatory Hollywood love interest.
Overall the film isn’t a bad treatment of the raid, and the period. I especially appreciated two scenes. John Wayne refers to his pre-war activities as “Before this present insanity” and Constance Towers gives the following impassioned speech:
“Well, you Yankees and your holy principle about savin’ the Union. You’re plunderin’ pirates that’s what. Well, you think there’s no Confederate army where you’re goin’? You think our boys are asleep down here? Well, they’ll catch up to you and they’ll cut you to pieces you, you nameless, fatherless scum. I wish I could be there to see it.”(more…)
Something for the weekend. A Confederate paean to The Infantry sung by Bobby Horton, who has waged a one man crusade to bring Civil War music to modern audiences. After the Civil War, a veteran of the conflict, I can’t recall his name, said that with Confederate infantry and Union artillery there was no position on Earth that he could not take.
Donald R. McClarey
Paul Zummo
Almost Chosen People 