The queen shant be going to Normandy?...

Fiction, movies, alternate history, humor, and other non-research topics related to WWII.

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phylo_roadking
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Re: The queen shant be going to Normandy?...

Post by phylo_roadking »

who was more at risk of injury by paper clip than IED
On a technical note - HAVE you ever stabbed yourself with the end of a paperclip??? :shock: Like ALL bulk metal items made in China...you fester almost instantaneously! :x Or worst of all - nicked yourself on the razor sharp edges inside a China-made PC case??? In other words, about 99.999999% of the buggers?

It seems the old WWII adage about strict sanitation and hygiene for U.S. servicemen in China still applies; no cut should go untreated, or because of the...um...nightsoil....the vast majority of Chinese use as fertilizer on their fields - how to you think they FEED that many people??? - ALL surfaces are rife with bacteria etc. that the locals have a developed immunity to, but Europeans/Americans will react to almost immediately...

THEN they ship us PC cases with built-in boobytraps!!! :evil:
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Re: The queen shant be going to Normandy?...

Post by pzrmeyer2 »

I believe our esteemed jumior senator from massachusetts, John F Kerry, who served in Vietnam, suffered such an injury, which enabled him to achieve his 3rd Purple Heart and thus a ticket home to the land of the round doorknobs...



Tom Houlihan wrote:Well, if he's an Army lawyer, he might still be downrange, just not for the same reasons everyone else is!


Sorry Commissar! :wink:
wouldnt it be great if the US Army adapted Soviet WW2 mine-clearing techniques and the JAG corps were used as IED detectors?
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Re: The queen shant be going to Normandy?...

Post by Tom Houlihan »

Naw, them bastids would spend more time filing briefs than gettin' blowed up! :[]
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Re: The queen shant be going to Normandy?...

Post by panzermahn »

I think its a shame for the French for not inviting the Queen officially for the D-Day remembrance. If I am not mistaken, the Queen herself did served in a women auxilliary service during WW2 and deserved to be honored as a veteran.
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Re: The queen shant be going to Normandy?...

Post by Paddy Keating »

The skinny here is that the French powers-that-be didn't invite the British, period and that it was only due to Obama's intervention that some last minute invitations were issued. The ordinary French people in general to whom I have chatted since yesterday afternoon were pained by this but are no longer shocked by the conduct of their vertically challenged President, who is really rather an uncultured, vulgar man by comparison with previous incumbents, and very petty-minded. He does not care if he offends war veterans who liberated his country - except that it's not really 'his' country, as anyone familiar with his genealogy can tell us.

Watching him jumping about, wreathed in smiles, gladhanding anyone in the crowd in Caen who would shake his hand, was rather discomforting. He was supposed to commemorating an event that killed a lot of people. The grins were out of place. But then, the whole thing is turning into a carnival, with the local Harley-Davidson Owners Club parading about because they ride American motorcycles, and reenactors swanning about etc etc... What next? A live Star Academy show on the beach? My wife tried to calm me down by saying how good Sarcoma's speech was. Sure, Papa Delta's been to method school. From grins, twitches and standing on his toes when greeting the Obamas to mock solemnity as he read a speech clearly written for him, because the French syntax and grammar was too good.

Playing the Canadian national anthem and having the Canadian PM speechmaking there was a neat piece of revisionism, given that Canada was part of the British Empire in June 1944. Where were the Polish, Czech and Slovak flags to mark the contribution of the Poles and Czechoslovaks? Ah, silly me, they were there with the British, as were the Free French soldiers who came ashore on D-Day. Good idea to airbrush them out of the picture in case they undermine this revisionist myth about D-Day being a joint American-French piece of heroism. Not a single British veteran interviewed on French television, as far as I could see. Some interesting American veterans and some of the small number of Resistance veterans still living but the British were most certainly downplayed bigtime. Plus...Tom Hanks got more screentime than any of the 101st and 82nd vets.

Appalling...

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Re: The queen shant be going to Normandy?...

Post by phylo_roadking »

Pure guilt transference. Next year - the 70th anniversary...would be an excellent time to revive a tradition i remember from my youth...

...The "little ships" that were survivors of Dunkirk - and there are quite a lot of them about, classic boats age in use more gracefully than classic bikes/cars/aircraft AND are infinitely rebuildable with good carpentry skills and a supply of seasoned timber! - used to muster on the Thames each year and go down to Gravesend.

Maybe WE should start the campaign for a 70th anniversary return to Dunkirk....and see the "cheese-eating surrender monkeys" squirm...be hard to miss the British coming ashore on THAT commemoration!!!
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John W. Howard
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Re: The queen shant be going to Normandy?...

Post by John W. Howard »

Hello Gents:
I too believe it a crime the Queen was not invited. Paddy, I saw many Brit vets sitting in the crowd in suits and their berets, looking very distinguished. Perhaps their inherent Brit reserve kept them from "emoting" to the press; a good thing in my opinion. Playing political or nationality games on hallowed ground is about as low as it is possible to get. Best wishes.
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Re: The queen shant be going to Normandy?...

Post by phylo_roadking »

Perhaps their inherent Brit reserve kept them from "emoting" to the press; a good thing in my opinion. Playing political or nationality games on hallowed ground is about as low as it is possible to get
They didn't emote to the Press....but to Gordon Brown! He was right royally (sic) boo'd by the crowd when he appeared first at Arromanches! :shock: :shock: :shock:
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Re: The queen shant be going to Normandy?...

Post by John W. Howard »

Hi Phylo:
I am kind of glad they did boo Gordy; I listened to his speech from here in the States and thought he strayed off topic. I did not listen to our fearless leader though, and he had the potential to be even worse, but the graves did the talking for me. God bless them all. Best wishes.
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Re: The queen shant be going to Normandy?...

Post by pzrmeyer2 »

John W. Howard wrote:Hello Gents:
I too believe it a crime the Queen was not invited. Paddy, I saw many Brit vets sitting in the crowd in suits and their berets, looking very distinguished. Perhaps their inherent Brit reserve kept them from "emoting" to the press; a good thing in my opinion. Playing political or nationality games on hallowed ground is about as low as it is possible to get. Best wishes.

I wonder how many of said veterans and their departed colleagues now believe that what they did was "worth it" when looking around at the current state of Britain and the US or if they think the decision made by His Majesty' Government on 3 Sept 39 was a good one....
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Re: The queen shant be going to Normandy?...

Post by Rolf Steiner »

I wouldn't presume to speak for them, PM.
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Re: The queen shant be going to Normandy?...

Post by Paddy Keating »

Some historians and other pundits opine that had the British and French governments left Hitler to his devices in 1939, the latter would have implemented his neo-imperialist plans to create a new German Empire eventually stretching across "Russia" to the Pacific Ocean. The history of the World from 1940 onwards would have been very different, with the European empires remaining intact, no USSR and no Israel. Of course, given the nature of Man in all his states, it is probable that reasons for war and strife would have been found, and quite possible that our Cold War would have been with the German Reich after an initial period of cooperation, but doubtful that the World would be in quite the mess in which we find it today.

A lot of veterans of the 1939-1945 conflict with whom I have spoken have developed views reflecting some or all of this loose hypothesis. The perceived need to scupper the ambitions of any European country seeking to expand in any way, like France and Germany, has long been an obsession of London governments. The men of the British armed forces and the people of Great Britain did not want to go to war again with Germany in 1939. They were led into this fratricidal war by people with various agendas, as is so often the case. Hitler was much-admired and envied by a great many people and politicians in the 1930s as the necessary strongman who cleaned up Germany, sent the home-grown Bolsheviks packing and got six million Germans back to work.

National Socialism was actually a better socio-political model than the other "isms" of the 20th century, which is why it was always viewed with fear and loathing by the moneymen of the Anglo-American Axis, who prefer to operate in environments in which the peoples off whom they leech are divided by social problems, the spectre of unemployment and fear in general. One only has to look at the sabotage of Perón's Argentina in the late 1940s, the attacks upon Nasser's Egypt in the 1950s and, latterly, the removal of Saddam Hussein and his Ba'athist regime a few years ago. Hitler and his administration ended up giving it a worse name than Communism, which killed far more people, and he was not perhaps the ideal man to carry the idea forwards. In fact, his administration comprised very few men of the qualities required not so much to build but to manage any kind of empire, as their mismanagement of their new dominions quickly demonstrated.

Had there been no war in 1939, Hitler might have been replaced by the early 1940s, because of his state of health, apart from anything else. Britain was, of course, obliged to help Poland but it is quite revealing that neither Britain nor France reacted to the Soviet invasion of Poland at the same time as Hitler's invasion. The men of North-Western Europe who fought in WW2 are not, in the main, stupid or ignorant, and they only have to look around them to understand the exponential effect of that war upon the 'topography' of the countries for which they thought they were fighting. Maybe you get yourself down to your local British Legion and engage a few veterans in conversation. Some of them have, of course, defined that war in terms of a struggle against good and evil, which is the accepted or approved perception of WW2. But even they wonder what happened to their countries as they look around.

PK
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Re: The queen shant be going to Normandy?...

Post by Landser »

Simon H wrote:
...a great many around the World will be thinking of that first day towards peace 65 years ago.

What a washed up phrase.How many millions were klled the last 65 years in the name you call "piece".
Just by the good friends and Allied buddies of WWII,the Communists, alone.

Paddy Keating hit it best with this:

Some historians and other pundits opine that had the British and French governments left Hitler to his devices in 1939, the latter would have implemented his neo-imperialist plans to create a new German Empire eventually stretching across "Russia" to the Pacific Ocean. The history of the World from 1940 onwards would have been very different, with the European empires remaining intact, no USSR and no Israel. Of course, given the nature of Man in all his states, it is probable that reasons for war and strife would have been found, and quite possible that our Cold War would have been with the German Reich after an initial period of cooperation, but doubtful that the World would be in quite the mess in which we find it today.
A lot of veterans of the 1939-1945 conflict with whom I have spoken have developed views reflecting some or all of this loose hypothesis. The perceived need to scupper the ambitions of any European country seeking to expand in any way, like France and Germany, has long been an obsession of London governments. The men of the British armed forces and the people of Great Britain did not want to go to war again with Germany in 1939. They were led into this fratricidal war by people with various agendas, as is so often the case. Hitler was much-admired and envied by a great many people and politicians in the 1930s as the necessary strongman who cleaned up Germany, sent the home-grown Bolsheviks packing and got six million Germans back to work.
National Socialism was actually a better socio-political model than the other "isms" of the 20th century, which is why it was always viewed with fear and loathing by the moneymen of the Anglo-American Axis, who prefer to operate in environments in which the peoples off whom they leech are divided by social problems, the spectre of unemployment and fear in general. One only has to look at the sabotage of Perón's Argentina in the late 1940s, the attacks upon Nasser's Egypt in the 1950s and, latterly, the removal of Saddam Hussein and his Ba'athist regime a few years ago. Hitler and his administration ended up giving it a worse name than Communism, which killed far more people, and he was not perhaps the ideal man to carry the idea forwards. In fact, his administration comprised very few men of the qualities required not so much to build but to manage any kind of empire, as their mismanagement of their new dominions quickly demonstrated.
Had there been no war in 1939, Hitler might have been replaced by the early 1940s, because of his state of health, apart from anything else. Britain was, of course, obliged to help Poland but it is quite revealing that neither Britain nor France reacted to the Soviet invasion of Poland at the same time as Hitler's invasion. The men of North-Western Europe who fought in WW2 are not, in the main, stupid or ignorant, and they only have to look around them to understand the exponential effect of that war upon the 'topography' of the countries for which they thought they were fighting. Maybe you get yourself down to your local British Legion and engage a few veterans in conversation. Some of them have, of course, defined that war in terms of a struggle against good and evil, which is the accepted or approved perception of WW2. But even they wonder what happened to their countries as they look around
War does not determine who is right,war determens who is left.
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Re: The queen shant be going to Normandy?...

Post by phylo_roadking »

How many millions were klled the last 65 years in the name you call "piece".
This is true; many a friday night in my youth I'd have killed for a piece...
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Re: The queen shant be going to Normandy?...

Post by Annelie »

friday night in my youth I'd have killed for a piece...
LOLOL....guys
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