Today is an Historic Anniversary.....

• by donr
• 2014-06-06 07:06:40
• General Posting
• 1325 views
• 11 comments

.....of an event that affected all of the "Western World."

What is becoming a lifetime ago, my family was standing around a very large granite carving in a Munich Park. It was a young German infantryman, laid out on a catafalque in great coat, boots & steel helmet of WW-I. Our younger son, Eric (about 12 or 13) asked me "Dad, what's this memorial about?" The best answer I could generate was "Eric - the losers also mourn their dead." For a 12 yr old, it was apparently correct, because he showed appropriate reverence for the fallen.

Today we collectively reflect on the terrible cost of 6 June 1944 on the beaches of Normandy. That was 70 yrs ago & there are very few of the participants still alive - from any of the nations involved.

In ten more years, Normandy & "OVERLORD" will be "Only" a line in the record of history, with all the participants likely departed. But there will still remain all the cities, towns & villages from the Pripet Marshes and the Vistula River to the Islands of Hawaii that were touched by that event; the area is bounded on the north by the Arctic Circle & on the south by the Gulf of Mexico.

To the English speaking World, that relatively narrow strip of the Earth bounding either side of the English Channel will now have four sites of the decisive battles in history. To Agincourt, Hastings and Waterloo we will now add Normandy.

It is 0600, Eastern Daylight time here - on the relevant day in 1944, the battle was already hours old as the die was cast at about 0300 GMT on that fateful day when US & British paratroopers landed in horribly scattered locations all over the farm fields of Normandy.

I can still go to any location in the continental Europe/North America Continent & find someone w/ a second person connection to that battle. James McPherson, Meet Siegfried Lehnigk.

As a university freshman in 1954, I had an instructor at the Univ of Florida named McPherson as an advisor. As an 18 yr old man, he landed in a farmer's field in Normandy, rolled up his parachute & prepared to do battle.

Fast Forward to 1979 in London, England. I shared an office with Siegfried Lehnigk, PhD in Mathmatics. As an 18 yr old man, he was a private soldier in the German Army stationed inland from the beaches, watching the war of the contrails high above him; helpless as a cannoneer in an anti-aircraft battery, because their guns had been disabled several days before.

Even those of us w/ second person connections to this day are rapidly leaving the scene - give us perhaps another 20 yrs.

Rapidly the "One Great Scorer" of life created in a sports poem by Grantland Rice, a US sportswriter of the 1940's, will be making entries beside the names of all the participants on this historic day.

"... and For when the One Great Scorer comes to mark against your name,
He writes – not that you won or lost – but how you played the Game."

It is now time not to celebrate victory or defeat, but the valor of all men involved and how they played the game - for winners and losers all mourn their dead.

Donr
American Vet