• Sign up or login, and you'll have full access to opportunities of forum.

Milestones

Go to CruxDreams.com
Also today is the anniversary of the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich, "Deputy Protector of Bohemia and Moravia":boaa:

Heydrich was critically wounded in Prague on 27 May 1942 as a result of Operation Anthropoid. He was ambushed by a team of Czech and Slovak agents who had been sent by the Czechoslovak government-in-exile to kill the Reich-Protector; the team was trained by the British Special Operations Executive. Heydrich died from his injuries a week later. Nazi intelligence falsely linked the assassins to the villages of Lidice and Ležáky. Both villages were razed; all men and boys over the age of 16 were shot, and all but a handful of the women and children were deported and killed in Nazi concentration camps. Wikipedia.
 
Praefectus Praetorio said:
Today is celebrated in the US as Memorial Day, one of our oldest National holidays. It started soon after our Civil War. In 1868, Union Army General John A. Logan established a national holiday “for the purpose of strewing with flowers or otherwise decorating the graves of comrades who died in defense of their country.”

The practice started earlier, in 1865 when the War ended. Numerous towns claim to have been the first.

The holiday went hand in hand with the ascendancy of the Grand Army of the Republic, the main Union veterans association.
View attachment 711073
New York Post 160, Cazenovia, New York.
View attachment 711074Date not given. Probably around 1910. Note this post was integrated.
US Grant funeral
View attachment 711075
Funeral procession of General William T. Sherman, turning from Pine Street onto Grand Avenue, St. Louis, Missouri. 21 February 1891
View attachment 711076
ST. LOUIS • Sunshine pierced low, billowing clouds as people jammed the rain-washed 12th Street Bridge and Union Depot platforms. A special train eased onto Track 1 at 8:48 a.m. with an officer's saber slung from the locomotive headlamp.

A volley by the St. Louis Light Artillery shattered the respectful silence.

Thus began the funeral procession of Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman, Civil War hero and occasional St. Louisan. For four hours on Feb. 21, 1891, a procession of 12,000 soldiers, veterans and notables marched past mourners on a winding, seven-mile path from downtown to Calvary Cemetery.

Sherman died at 71 in New York on Feb. 14, 1891. The Pennsylvania Railroad provided its executive train to return the general...
- St. Louis Post-Dispatch
Click to expand...
Supposedly Joe Johnston, Sherman's opponent in the March to the Sea, marched bare-headed in the funeral procession and died of pneumonia soon after.
 
It is worth remembering that most soldiers of all countries try to do what they see as their duty, despite being pawns of politicians and egotistical generals. So, here is a tribute from Sergeant Bill Mauldin (1921-2003). These cartoons infuriated Patton ("they look like bums"), but Eisenhower thought they were good for morale (and "the most important hole in the world" was tacked up in General Truscott's bunker on the Anzio beachhead).
19+bill+mauldin+tenor.jpgMauldin-Cartoon-2.jpgbill-mauldin-cartoon-print-1.gifmauldin1.jpgmauldin-724023.jpgWar-letters-gallery-05.jpg
 
Frank Petrexa said:
Supposedly Joe Johnston, Sherman's opponent in the March to the Sea, marched bare-headed in the funeral procession and died of pneumonia soon after.
Click to expand...
Johnston, like Lee, never forgot the magnanimity of the man to whom he surrendered. He would not allow criticism of Sherman in his presence. Sherman and Johnston corresponded frequently, and they met for friendly dinners in Washington whenever Johnston traveled there. When Sherman died, Johnston served as an honorary pallbearer at his funeral. During the procession in New York City on February 19, 1891, (at 84 years of age) he kept his hat off as a sign of respect, although the weather was cold and rainy. Someone concerned for his health asked him to put on his hat, to which Johnston replied, "If I were in his place and he were standing here in mine, he would not put on his hat." He caught a cold that day, which developed into pneumonia. Johnston died several weeks later in Washington, D.C. Wikipedia
 
Praefectus Praetorio said:
Today is celebrated in the US as Memorial Day, one of our oldest National holidays. It started soon after our Civil War. In 1868, Union Army General John A. Logan established a national holiday “for the purpose of strewing with flowers or otherwise decorating the graves of comrades who died in defense of their country.”

The practice started earlier, in 1865 when the War ended. Numerous towns claim to have been the first.

The holiday went hand in hand with the ascendancy of the Grand Army of the Republic, the main Union veterans association.
View attachment 711073
New York Post 160, Cazenovia, New York.
View attachment 711074Date not given. Probably around 1910. Note this post was integrated.
US Grant funeral
View attachment 711075
Funeral procession of General William T. Sherman, turning from Pine Street onto Grand Avenue, St. Louis, Missouri. 21 February 1891
View attachment 711076
ST. LOUIS • Sunshine pierced low, billowing clouds as people jammed the rain-washed 12th Street Bridge and Union Depot platforms. A special train eased onto Track 1 at 8:48 a.m. with an officer's saber slung from the locomotive headlamp.

A volley by the St. Louis Light Artillery shattered the respectful silence.

Thus began the funeral procession of Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman, Civil War hero and occasional St. Louisan. For four hours on Feb. 21, 1891, a procession of 12,000 soldiers, veterans and notables marched past mourners on a winding, seven-mile path from downtown to Calvary Cemetery.

Sherman died at 71 in New York on Feb. 14, 1891. The Pennsylvania Railroad provided its executive train to return the general...
- St. Louis Post-Dispatch
Click to expand...

Originally entitled "Decoration Day."
 
30 years and barely a peep today.:(

On June 4, 1989 — 30 years ago today — the Chinese government decided it had been patient enough with the 50,000 to 100,000 demonstrators occupying Tiananmen Square. The protesters had called for democracy and liberty, but also denounced corruption and cronyism. What began as the Tiananmen Square protests became remembered as the Tiananmen Square massacre. Anywhere from hundreds to 2,600 Chinese protesters were killed, thousands more were wounded, and while many nations condemned the crackdown at the time, China and the world quickly moved on. The iconic “tank man” was never identified and his fate will probably forever remain unknown.

China is deploying its massive cyber-security force to vigorously scrub any mention of the incident from the domestic Internet. The censorship will be so thorough that Chinese people won’t even be able to send a text message that contains any one of the numbers eight, nine, six, and four.

How overwhelming is Chinese censorship? They just banned 40 percent of numerals. If you lived in China, you wouldn’t be able to text the sentence preceding this one because of the “4.”
 
Praefectus Praetorio said:
30 years and barely a peep today.:(

On June 4, 1989 — 30 years ago today — the Chinese government decided it had been patient enough with the 50,000 to 100,000 demonstrators occupying Tiananmen Square. The protesters had called for democracy and liberty, but also denounced corruption and cronyism. What began as the Tiananmen Square protests became remembered as the Tiananmen Square massacre. Anywhere from hundreds to 2,600 Chinese protesters were killed, thousands more were wounded, and while many nations condemned the crackdown at the time, China and the world quickly moved on. The iconic “tank man” was never identified and his fate will probably forever remain unknown.

China is deploying its massive cyber-security force to vigorously scrub any mention of the incident from the domestic Internet. The censorship will be so thorough that Chinese people won’t even be able to send a text message that contains any one of the numbers eight, nine, six, and four.

How overwhelming is Chinese censorship? They just banned 40 percent of numerals. If you lived in China, you wouldn’t be able to text the sentence preceding this one because of the “4.”
Click to expand...

 
Praefectus Praetorio said:
30 years and barely a peep today.:(

On June 4, 1989 — 30 years ago today — the Chinese government decided it had been patient enough with the 50,000 to 100,000 demonstrators occupying Tiananmen Square. The protesters had called for democracy and liberty, but also denounced corruption and cronyism. What began as the Tienanmen Square protests became remembered as the Tiananmen Square massacre. Anywhere from hundreds to 2,600 Chinese protesters were killed, thousands more were wounded, and while many nations condemned the crackdown at the time, China and the world quickly moved on. The iconic “tank man” was never identified and his fate will probably forever remain unknown.

China is deploying its massive cyber-security force to vigorously scrub any mention of the incident from the domestic Internet. The censorship will be so thorough that Chinese people won’t even be able to send a text message that contains any one of the numbers eight, nine, six, and four.

How overwhelming is Chinese censorship? They just banned 40 percent of numerals. If you lived in China, you wouldn’t be able to text the sentence preceding this one because of the “4.”
Click to expand...
The long arm of Chinese censorship. Numbers of Twitter accounts in the US and Europe containing mentions of Tiananmen have been shut down. Twitter later explained that the suspension was part of their routine effort to shut down “spam, inauthentic behavior and ban evasion.” Twitter admits “sometimes our routine actions catch false positives or we make errors. We apologize.” It insists the inclusion of China critics’ accounts was not demanded by Chinese authorities. Yet many Chinese dissidents and China watchers don’t buy it.

Joe Biden believes the Chinese government is harmless and not bad.
China is going to eat our lunch? Come on, man!” Biden exclaimed at a rally in Iowa. “The fact that they have this great division between the China Sea and the mountains in the East – I mean in the West.”
“They can't figure out how they're going to deal with the corruption that exists within the system. They're not bad folks, folks. But guess what, they're not competition for us,” he said.
“What are we doing? We're walking around with our heads down, 'Woe is me,'” the leading 2020 Democrat told the crowd. “No other nation can catch us, including China. I got criticized for saying that. I've spent as much time with [Chinese President] Xi Jinping as any world leader has.”
 
Last edited:
Praefectus Praetorio said:
30 years and barely a peep today.:(

On June 4, 1989 — 30 years ago today — the Chinese government decided it had been patient enough with the 50,000 to 100,000 demonstrators occupying Tiananmen Square. The protesters had called for democracy and liberty, but also denounced corruption and cronyism. What began as the Tiananmen Square protests became remembered as the Tiananmen Square massacre. Anywhere from hundreds to 2,600 Chinese protesters were killed, thousands more were wounded, and while many nations condemned the crackdown at the time, China and the world quickly moved on. The iconic “tank man” was never identified and his fate will probably forever remain unknown.

China is deploying its massive cyber-security force to vigorously scrub any mention of the incident from the domestic Internet. The censorship will be so thorough that Chinese people won’t even be able to send a text message that contains any one of the numbers eight, nine, six, and four.

How overwhelming is Chinese censorship? They just banned 40 percent of numerals. If you lived in China, you wouldn’t be able to text the sentence preceding this one because of the “4.”
Click to expand...

It is true that there have been such things in the West as well (Armistar in British India, Wounded Knee in the United States, and some pretty brutal military actions against strikers in both places). But the difference is that there is a free press, and there are elections. Those in power cannot hide forever. Unfortunately, that is not true in China. No one can hide from history, but in China (and Russia) one can hide for a good while before history catches up with you.
 
thehangingtree said:
June 6, 1944...

D-Day...
Click to expand...
Omaha Beach almost scuttled the whole thing. It was individual initiative, sometimes in defiance of orders, that saved the day. People need to remember that armies are only as good as the soldiers they contain.

There is a story in Anthony Beevor's book. An Allied aid station had been set up in the home of an elderly Norman gentleman at his invitation. As the campaign wound done, the medical people wanted to do a celebration of the liberation of Normandy. The owner of a chateau told them to move the party up to her place. It seems the elderly gentleman had lost his wife. On June 6, they had been on the road, and were attacked by a British fighter. The wife was killed. The husband had said nothing about it. There was a great cost to D-Day, but people were willing to pay it.
 
I held this until today so as not to be seen as being disrespectful of D-Day remembrances

My father-in-law enlisted in the army in early 1942, just before he turned 19 nad served until the end of the war in 1945. Mustered out at 22. He has a factory job in a defense industry which made him draft exempt but he enlisted anyway.
He came from a small tobacco farm in Southern Ohio. His father had been in the US Cavalry under Blackjack Pershing in Mexico and then in France. He was gassed there but recovered. He came home, left the military, married and got a good job. He used his savings to by the farm as an investment. Then he got flu and his weaken lungs failed and he died leaving his wife, a widow with three small children. My f-i-l grew grew up in a loving family but in real poverty.
He spent the war in the Pacific in the Combat Engineers. He took part in three landings under fire, the first at Guadalcanal and the last at Palau. His unit was training for invading the Japanese home islands when the atomic bombs were dropped and Japan surrendered.
Throughout all the time I knew him, he never bragged or boasted about his service. In fact, you had to drag the information out of him. My ex would tell be that as a little girl she and her sisters were warned, "Never wake you father out of sleep suddenly." If you did, he might respond violently. And yet he was one of the gentlest men I've ever know.
However, he would always bristle at someone talking about the D-Day. In his courteous but firm, country voice, he would say, "WELL, you know what d-day means don't you?" And most would not. "It means disembarkation day. Every time we landed on an island, it was d-day to us. And when we landed under fire, that was our D-Day."
Separately he would tell of his first landing. Struggling up through the surf under fire, he was beside a guy who had been his pal through training. He turned to speak to him only to see his head blown away. He said he suddenly had tunnel vision and only saw the beach that he wanted to get to alive as he heard bullets like bees buzzing near his head. Of course he made it through the war alive and won a few medals. He always was a hero to me.

Just wanted to remind all, that D-Day wasn't everything. Many fine men died in actions you will never hear of. Their own D-Day.
 
Not to mention Stalingrad and many more on that front ...
I was disappointed too, how little mention there was of
the huge contribution from the then British Empire,
from India, Africa, and the Caribbean, as well as the then Dominions.
 
Eulalia said:
Not to mention Stalingrad and many more on that front ...
I was disappointed too, how little mention there was of
the huge contribution from the then British Empire,
from India, Africa, and the Caribbean, as well as the then Dominions.
Click to expand...
Indeed, I had two uncles who fought in the pacific with a New Zealand division. They got little glory.
 
Eulalia said:
Not to mention Stalingrad and many more on that front ...
I was disappointed too, how little mention there was of
the huge contribution from the then British Empire,
from India, Africa, and the Caribbean, as well as the then Dominions.
Click to expand...
The Canadian Army made a major contribution. They were in my view victimized at Dieppe (there is a book called "Unauthorized Action", which claimed that Mountbatten organized the Dieppe raid without going through channels, and that Churchill, writing his six-volume memoir, sent his secretary a note about Dieppe: "I do not wish to expose any secrets, but we ourselves need to understand how this happened".) They also ran convoys from Halifax, ensuring the massive industrial capacity of the United States ended up where it needed to. In my opinion this was an outsized contribution from a small country with less than a sixth of the population of Germany alone, and less than a seventh if one includes Austria and the Sudentenland. And most of the personnel were volunteers.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom