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Tag Archives: D-Day

They Were Men

27 Monday Jun 2016

Posted by jrbenjamin in History, Sports, War

≈ Comments Off on They Were Men

Tags

army, Army Rangers, Athletics, Boxing, D-Day, Football, Military, Randolph Milholland, Sports, Training, World War Two

Robert Kennedy

“Every American boy should be made to play football and box and participate in all kinds of athletics, and above all the American should be taught discipline and decent living. Then he should be given a year of the toughest kind of military training, not the kind that we know, but the kind I gave my Rangers.

God, but I wish I had those boys now; we would tear the Germans stringy. I hear of those boys now and then and although they are almost all gone now, they have done unbelievable things and are spoken of almost in a tone of reverence by officers and men alike who have fought with them.

They were men.”

__________

The closing of Major Randolph Millholland’s letter to his daughter, Ginnie Schry, on December 22, 1944. Millholland trained the 29th Rangers for the D-Day invasion, leading them in a five-week course in amphibious landing, cliff scaling, and hand-to-hand combat. The group was ultimately disbanded and never saw combat as a unit, though Millholland’s men were later deployed separately throughout Europe.

I found this excerpt in chapter four of John Robert Slaughter’s book Omaha Beach and Beyond. The picture is of Bobby Kennedy, taken by Jacques Lowe, and available at 1stDibs.

Move on:

  • The story of the photographer who stormed Omaha Beach
  • “Who wants it more?”
  • How the Spartans scared the Greek army with one word

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Dick Winters on Staying Disciplined under Pressure

12 Tuesday Apr 2016

Posted by jrbenjamin in War

≈ Comments Off on Dick Winters on Staying Disciplined under Pressure

Tags

Band of Brothers, Beyond Band of Brothers: The War Memoirs of Major Dick Winters, combat, D-Day, Dick Winters, Discipline, Exercise, history, War, World War Two

Dick Winters

“In an attempt to escape the tension that combat caused, I developed a heavier than usual exercise regimen and I attended church on a regular basis. There were only a few days that I didn’t run two to three miles, do eighty push-ups, sixty sit ups on a foot locker, a couple of splits, and some leg and trunk exercises after the day’s work was over. As a result I kept in pretty good shape — not what I’d call wrestling shape, but good enough for army work. Physical activity kept me mentally alert, built up my endurance, and kept me supple.

Another thing I noted about being overseas and away from home was that I found myself not giving a damn about trivial things. Maybe I was spoiled. If I received mail, good, but it didn’t bother me one way or another if I didn’t. The only value about receiving mail is that it temporarily took my mind off my work and back to the land I dreamed of all the time… On Sundays, I prepared for church, buttons shined, boots polished, and ribbons in neat rows on my tunic. I considered it a very special privilege to be able to go to church and I didn’t want to miss the chance. If combat had taught me anything, it taught me what was essential in life and what wasn’t. In my prayers before D-Day, I had always thanked God for what He had done for the world in general and asked that others would be given a break in the future. I had also thanked Him for a lot of things that I now found to be insignificant. The only thing I asked for now was to be alive tomorrow morning and to survive another day. That was all that mattered — that was the only thing as far as wanting anything for myself. All other things had become extra, nonessential, and I could not be bothered or burdened with nonessentials. Not when battle was the payoff. […]

Evening allowed a few minutes of quiet reflection… The Germans were evidently not as tired as we were because they fired their machine guns all night and hollered like a bunch of drunken kids having a party. Before I dozed off, I did not forget to get on my knees and thank God for helping me to live through this day and ask His help on D+1. I would live this war one day at a time, and I promised myself that if I survived, I would find a small farm somewhere in the Pennsylvania countryside and spend the remainder of my life in quiet and peace.”

__________

Pulled from Dick Winters’s war memoirs Beyond Band of Brothers. Winters parachuted into Normandy on D-Day as the commander of Easy Company, as shown in the HBO series Band of Brothers.

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The Hungarian Photographer Who Stormed Omaha Beach

06 Friday Jun 2014

Posted by jrbenjamin in Biography, History, Photography, War

≈ Comments Off on The Hungarian Photographer Who Stormed Omaha Beach

Tags

Adolf Hitler, battle, combat, Combat Photography, D-Day, Dwight Eisenhower, English Channel, film, France, Invasion, Life Magazine, Normandy, Omaha Beach, Photography, Propaganda, Robert Capa, Slightly Out of Focus, Soldiers, Spanish Civil War, Steven Spielberg, War, War Correspondent, World War Two

D-Day Invasion

“I would have to make up my mind and choose a barge to ride in… On the one hand, the objectives of Company B looked interesting, and to go along with them seemed a pretty safe bet. Then again, I used to know Company E very well and the story I had got with them in Sicily was one of my best in the war…

If at this point my son should interrupt me, and ask, ‘What is the difference between the war correspondent and any other man in uniform?’ I would say that the war correspondent gets more drinks, more girls, better pay and greater freedom than the soldier… The war correspondent has his stake — his life — in his own hands and he can put it on this horse or that horse, or he can put it back in his pocket at the very last minute.

I am a gambler. I decided to go with Company E in the first wave.

Once I decided to go in with the first assault troops I began to convince myself that the invasion would be a pushover and that all this talk about an ‘impregnable west wall’ was just German propaganda. I went up on deck and took a good look at the disappearing English coast. The pale green glow of the vanishing island hit my soft spot and I joined the legion of the last-letter-writers. My brother could have my ski boots and my mother could invite someone from England to stay with her. The idea was disgusting, and I never mailed the letter. I folded it up, and stuck it in my breast pocket…

They fixed a gas mask, and inflatable lifebelt, a shovel, and some other gadgets around me, and I placed my very expensive Burberry raincoat over my arm. I was the most elegant invader of them all… The coast of Normandy was still miles away when the first unmistakable popping reached our listening ears. We ducked down in the puky water at the bottom of the barge and ceased to watch the approaching coastline… It was now light enough to start taking pictures and I brought my first Contax camera out of its waterproof oilskin. The flat bottom of our barge hit the earth of France. The boatswain lowered the steel-covered barge front, and there, between the grotesque designs of steel obstacles sticking out of the water, was a thin line of land covered with smoke — our Europe, the “Easy Red” beach.

My beautiful France looked sordid and uninviting, and a German machine gun, spitting bullets around the barge, fully spoiled my return. The men from my barge waded in the water. Waist deep, with rifles ready to shoot, with the invasion obstacles and the smoking beach in the background — this was good enough for the photographer. I paused for a moment on the gangplank to take my first real picture of the invasion. The boatswain, who was in an understandable hurry to get the hell out of there, mistook my picture-taking attitude for explicable hesitation, and helped me make up my mind with a well-aimed kick in the rear. The water was cold, and the beach still more than a hundred yards away. The bullets tore holes in the water around me, and I made for the nearest steel obstacle.

A soldier got there at the same time, and for a few minutes we shared its cover. He took off the waterproofing of his rifle and began to shoot without much aiming at the smoke-hidden beach. The sound of his rifle gave him enough courage to to move forward and he left the obstacle to me. It was a foot larger now and I felt safe enough to take pictures of the other guys hiding just as I was. It was still very early and very gray for good pictures, but the gray water and the gray sky made the little men, dodging under the surrealistic designs of Hitler’s anti-invasion brain trust, very effective.

I finished my pictures, and the sea was cold in my trousers. Reluctantly, I tried to move away from my steel pole, but the bullets chased me back every time. Fifty yards ahead of me, one of our half-burnt amphibious tanks stuck out of the water and offered me my next cover. I sized up the moment. There was little future for the elegant raincoat heavy on my arm. I dropped it and made for the tank. Between floating bodies I reached it, paused for a few more pictures, and gathered my guts for the last jump to the beach.

Now the Germans played on all their instruments, and I could not find any hole between the shells and bullets that blocked the last twenty-five yards to the beach, I just stayed behind my tank, repeating a little sentence from my Spanish Civil War days, ‘Es una cosa muy seria. Es una cosa muy seria.’ This is a very serious business.

The tide was coming in and now the water reached the farewell letter to my family in my breast pocket. Behind the human cover of the last two guys, I reached the beach. I threw myself flat and my lips touched the earth of France. I had no desire to kiss it.”

Robert Capa

__________

A section from Robert Capa’s memoir of World War Two, Slightly Out of Focus.

70 years ago today, Capa trudged up the French coast to capture the first and only photographs of the opening assault on Omaha Beach. He used a pair of Contax II cameras mounted with 50mm lenses to snap a total of 106 pictures in the first two hours of the invasion. But only eleven frames would survive. No, they did not get lost in the skirmish, shot through by a German gunner, or sink to the bottom of the English Channel. They melted at the Life Magazine offices in London, after a fifteen-year-old lab assistant set the dryer too high, bleaching the emulsion in the negatives of three and a half of Capa’s four film rolls.

The surviving photos, which would soon come to be known as “The Magnificent Eleven,” are the sole visual record of the invasion and some of the most striking combat photography ever captured. They were printed in the July 19th Life Magazine article “The Beachheads of Normandy,” with a fitting caption, “slightly out of focus,” which Capa later came to think of as a metaphor for his memory of wartime — so it became the title of his book.

Robert Capa and Gerda Taro Robert Capa - D-Day Normandy Robert Capa - D-Day Normandy Robert Capa - Soldier - Spanish Civil WarRobert Capa

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The Dignity of Every Life: Viktor Frankl’s Powerful Speech to a Concentration Camp

28 Monday Apr 2014

Posted by jrbenjamin in History, Speeches

≈ 11 Comments

Tags

Adolf Hitler, D-Day, Dachau, history, Holocaust, Holocaust Remembrance Day, hope, Human Dignity, Inspiration, Life, Man's Search for Meaning, Nicholson Baker, Robert Jay Lifton, Speeches, Third Reich, Viktor Frankl, World War Two

Viktor Frankl

In the middle of Viktor Frankl’s tour de force chronicle of his survival of the Holocaust, Man’s Search for Meaning, there is a particular moment when existence at Dachau goes from dark to pitch black. It is the winter of 1944, several months after the D-Day invasions and thus the point in which Hitler’s Third Reich, sensing the writing on the wall, ratchets up the noxious gears of its Final Solution. The markers of this period are evoked by arresting phrases like Robert Jay Lifton’s “wild euthanasia” and Nicholson Baker’s “human smoke,” and can be seen crystalized in Schindler’s List, when an initially puzzled Liam Neeson sees ash fall from a clear sky as he wanders amidst children playing in a bourgeoisie town square.

For Frankl and his work group, these portents are worsened by the fact that they are being incrementally starved after refusing to identify a fellow prisoner suspected of stealing potatoes from a camp store house. Several days into this deprivation, the men have gone from emaciated to skeletal, as have their hopes for survival. As they lie on their dark bunks one evening, Frankl, only thirty-nine years old and one of the most respected men in the group, is asked by the barracks leader to give a speech.

The following is Frankl’s recollection of his words. It is one of the most beautiful and life-affirming speeches I’ve read, and one of several scenes I would have most wanted and hated to witness in the entire human drama of World War Two. Without fantasy or sentimentality, Frankl testifies to the force of life amidst terror and reaffirms the innate dignity of each human being in the face of whatever degradations he has suffered. I highly recommend a few moments of reading and reflection. The passage starts just as Frankl is called from his bunk:

__________

Concentration Camp

“God knows, I was not in the mood to give psychological explanations or to preach any sermons — to offer my comrades a kind of medical care of their souls. I was cold and hungry, irritable and tired, but I had to make the effort and use this unique opportunity. Encouragement was now more necessary than ever.

So I began by mentioning the most trivial of comforts first. I said that even in this Europe in the sixth winter of the Second World War, our situation was not the most terrible we could think of. I said that each of us had to ask himself what irreplaceable losses he had suffered up to then. I speculated that for most of them these losses had really been few. Whoever was still alive had reason for hope. Health, family, happiness, professional abilities, fortune, position in society — all these were things that could be achieved again or restored. After all, we still had all our bones intact. Whatever we had gone through could still be an asset to us in the future…

Then I spoke about the future. I said that to the impartial the future must seem hopeless. I agreed that each of us could guess for himself how small were his chances of survival. I told them that although there was still no typhus epidemic in the camp, I estimated my own chances at about one in twenty. But I also told them that, in spite of this, I had no intention of losing hope and giving up. For no man knew what the future would bring, much less the next hour. Even if we could not expect any sensational military events in the next few days, who knew better than we, with our experience of camps, how great chances sometimes opened up, quite suddenly, at least for the individual. For instance, one might be attached unexpectedly to a special group with exceptionally good working conditions—for this was the kind of thing which constituted the ‘luck’ of the prisoner.

But I did not only talk of the future and the veil which was drawn over it. I also mentioned the past; all its joys, and how its light shone even in the present darkness. Again I quoted a poet — to avoid sounding like a preacher myself — who had written, ‘Was Du erlebst, kann keine Macht der Welt Dir rauben.’ (What you have experienced, no power on earth can take from you.) Not only our experiences, but all we have done, whatever great thoughts we may have had, and all we have suffered, all this is not lost, though it is past; we have brought it into being. Having been is also a kind of being, and perhaps the surest kind.

Then I spoke of the many opportunities of giving life a meaning. I told my comrades (who lay motionless, although occasionally a sigh could be heard) that human life, under any circumstances, never ceases to have a meaning, and that this infinite meaning of life includes suffering and dying, privation and death. I asked the poor creatures who listened to me attentively in the darkness of the hut to face up to the seriousness of our position. They must not lose hope but should keep their courage in the certainty that the hopelessness of our struggle did not detract from its dignity and its meaning. I said that someone looks down on each of us in difficult hours — a friend, a wife, somebody alive or dead, or God — and he would not expect us to disappoint him. He would hope to find us suffering proudly — not miserably — knowing how to die.

And finally I spoke of our sacrifice, which had meaning in every case. It was in the nature of this sacrifice that it should appear to be pointless in the normal world, the world of material success. But in reality our sacrifice did have a meaning. Those of us who had any religious faith, I said frankly, could understand without difficulty. I told them of a comrade who on his arrival in camp had tried to make a pact with Heaven that his suffering and death should save the human being he loved from a painful end. For this man, suffering and death were meaningful; his was a sacrifice of the deepest significance. He did not want to die for nothing. None of us wanted that.

The purpose of my words was to find a full meaning in our life, then and there, in that hut and in that practically hopeless situation. I saw that my efforts had been successful. When the electric bulb flared up again, I saw the miserable figures of my friends limping toward me to thank me with tears in their eyes. But I have to confess here that only too rarely had I the inner strength to make contact with my companions in suffering and that I must have missed many opportunities for doing so.”

_____

From Viktor Frankl’s psychological chronicle of the Holocasust Man’s Search for Meaning.

Related reading:

  • Cornel West’s testimony: “… Every person has a sanctity. Not just a dignity the way the Stoics talked about, but a sanctity: a value that has no price…”
  • Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s moving “Who Am I?” letter from a German prison
  • A section from Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s Nobel speech, “A World Split Apart”

Viktor Frankl

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Hitler’s Laziness

16 Wednesday Apr 2014

Posted by jrbenjamin in History

≈ 16 Comments

Tags

A.N. Wilson, Adolf Hitler, Alan Bullock, Alois Hitler, Austria, Berchtesgaden, Berghof, D-Day, history, Holocaust, Ian Kershaw, Joseph Goebbels, Lateline, laziness, Martin Amis, Mein Kampf, Nazi Germany, Nazism, Third Reich, Tony Jones, Vienna, World War Two

Adolf Hitler

“Adolf Hitler – remarkably, in a man whose father was the son of an illegitimate housemaid – had grown up with the middle-class confidence that he need never earn a living…

Had his father, a customs official in various border towns between Austria-Hungary and Germany, lived to see the publication of Hitler’s autobiography Mein Kampf (My Struggle), he might well have asked, ‘What Struggle?’… Alois, whose early life had marked a real struggle to leave poverty behind, and to acquire respectability and savings through boring government service in customs offices, had urged young Adolf to find paid employment. The boy had preferred to lounge about, to wear dandified clothes, to attend the opera and to imagine that one day he would become a famous artist. Hitler never had any paid employment, so far as one can make out, except when manual work was forced upon him as a temporary necessity when he was living in men’s hostels and dosshouses on the outskirts of Vienna…

Hitler’s indolence was to remain one of his most mysterious characteristics. Many would assume that a man who, in his heyday, strutted about in uniforms, and who presided over a militaristic dictatorship, who expected not merely his intimates but everyone in the country to click their heels and salute at the mere mention of his name, would have been up in the morning early, taking cold baths and performing Swedish exercises. By contrast, like many depressives, he kept strange hours, and spent most of his days on this planet sitting around doing nothing much, dreaming his terrible dreams, and talking interminable nonsense. […]

By the time he became Chancellor, the pattern of life did not markedly change. He rose late, spent most of the day chatting, and would nearly always round off the evening with a film. Adjutants tried to find him a new film to watch every day. His earlier fondness for high culture began to diminish. He enjoyed ‘light entertainment’, and if women, such as his girlfriend Eva Braun, were present in the evenings, political conversation was banned – as was, of course, that cardinal sin, smoking.”

__________

From A.N. Wilson’s three-hour read Hitler.

I’m on a World War Two kick. A few weeks ago, after putting down Martin Gilbert’s indescribable The Holocaust: A History of the Jews of Europe During the Second World War, I wanted to move on to something easier to both read and stomach. I like A. N. Wilson’s columns — and I wasn’t going to dive into Ian Kershaw’s two-part, two-thousand-page Hitler: A Biography — so I started on Wilson’s short life of the monster. At fewer than 200 pages, it’s a highly rewarding text, one in which all heavy historiographical lifting and dry research is filtered through Wilson’s very readable prose. I usually hate that descriptor — readable — as it’s so often just a lazy euphemism for what is lazy or facile writing. But Wilson’s work is polished, seamless, and never overworked: it’s readable in the best sense of that bad word. Ivory Tower egotists might still pick at his scholarship — Wilson is a newspaper columnist who doesn’t speak or read German — but this seems to me misplaced. There’s room for an almost infinite number of books on the shelf.

While I was reading Wilson’s book, I occasionally tracked along in Kershaw’s more extensive work, which sheds more light on the immeasurable extent of Hitler’s lethargy. Perhaps the best account of this comes in Kershaw’s account of the night of the D-Day invasion:

That evening, Hitler and his entourage viewed the latest newsreel. The discussion moved to films and the theatre. Eva Braun joined in with pointed criticism of some productions. ‘We sit then around the hearth until two o’clock at night,’ wrote Goebbels, ‘exchange reminiscences, take pleasure in the many fine days and weeks we have had together. The Führer inquires about this and that. All in all, the mood is like the good old times.’ The heavens opened and a thunderstorm broke as Goebbels left the Berghof. It was four hours since the first news had started to trickle in that the invasion would begin that night. Goebbels had been disinclined to believe the tapping into enemy communications. But coming down the Obersalzberg to his quarters in Berchtesgaden, the news was all too plain; ‘the decisive day of the war had begun.’

Hitler went to bed not long after Goebbels had left, probably around 3 a.m. When Speer arrived next morning, seven hours later, Hitler had still not been wakened with the news of the invasion…

According to Speer, Hitler – who had earlier correctly envisaged that the landing would be on the Normandy coast – was still suspicious at the lunchtime military conference that it was a diversionary tactic put across by enemy intelligence. Only then did he agree… to deploy two panzer divisions held in reserve in the Paris area against the beachhead that was rapidly being established some 120 miles away. The delay was crucial. Had they moved by night, the panzer divisions might have made a difference.

  • More from Wilson’s book: The Tragic Paradox at the Center of the Twentieth Century

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