Thanks

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Photo credit here.

I am thankful for a lot of things, but for this post I would like to thank Jonathan for being such a gracious host on this blog.  The comments and posts that I read at ChicagoBoyz are very beneficial to me and always entertaining. 

I would also like to thank Jonathan for inviting me to share some ideas here with what I consider to be one of the very best audiences on the internet.  The audience is not so large as to have a giant quantity of trolls, yet is large enough – and adult enough – to be able to engage myself and the other authors in thoughtful conversations.  Thanks to you, authors and commenters.

That said, Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday and as always I am on my 36 hour Pre Thanksgiving Fast which precedes my Thanksgiving Day Cocktails, Gorging, and Traditional Late Afternoon Thanksgiving Day Nap.  Happy Thanksgiving to all of you.

D-Day: “Clink”

One of my favorite writers is A.J. Liebling. This recent review of the new Library of America volume of his Six Armies in Normandy. The reviewer justly praises John Keegan’s book Six Armies in Normandy, then compares Keegan’s writing about the invasion to Liebling’s on-the-scene reportage.

His account of the Normandy Invasion is pretty much limited to a single cross-channel trip by a single landing craft. Its art is almost the inverse of Keegan’s. It begins in boredom, unacknowledged anxiety, uncertainty; its later moments of danger and violence are realized largely after the fact. It is so small a fragment of the gross event that it has almost no significance in the success or failure of the invasion. Liebling later found out that of the ten landing craft that were part of the group with which he went in, four were sunk before they had unloaded the men they were carrying, “a high proportion of whom were killed.” …
 
Liebling was, he says, on the upper deck during the four minutes it took for the two platoons the landing craft carried to disembark. “I looked down at the main deck and the beach-battalion men were already moving ahead, so I knew that the ramps must be down.” Just as the stern anchor was being taken up “something hit the ship with the solid clunk of metal—not as hard as a collision or a bomb blast; just ‘clink.’” This is the direct experience of what was later discovered to have been a seventy-five-millimeter antitank shell with a solid-armor-piercing head hitting the forward anchor winch, being deflected toward the stern, tearing through the bulkhead, smashing the ramp winch, breaking into several pieces, and killing two of the crew. Clink.

We read of spectacular and overtly horrific events on D-Day. Yet, often death came in seemingly trivial form. People are walking along, in photos of the invasion, apparently nonchalant, next to them, not five feet away, someone is falling, hit by German fire. Tanks that are supposed to “swim” ashore are deposited in the water too far off, they drift off target, they try to steer toward where the troops are pinned down on Omaha Beach, off-angle in the surf, they founder, they sink like stones, all their crews die. People who think they have reached safety, behind barriers, away from the enemy, are smacked, lethally, by random shell fragments or stray bullets.

D-Day was a gargantuan, colossal undertaking. It was a juggernaut, a Moloch. It ate men with both hands. It consumed the Germans in stacks and heaps. Read about what it was like to be under the hammer of Allied naval artillery and airpower. It was like the Earth was being torn up by the roots. Few lived to tell the tale. Americans, especially at Omaha Beach, where the German resistance was strongest, also died in droves.

There was no other way to do it. The Third Reich had to die. The Allies, including the Red Army, had to kill it. There was no easy, clean or humane way to do it. They were fighting a malign enemy which had, insanely, chosen to launch a war against the entire world. It would not surrender when it was beaten, but only when it was crushed. There was no rapier thrust, no magic bullet. It was sledge-hammer blows, straight on, with men and machines, until the beast was smashed, and had bled its life away. It cost lives and it was going to cost lives.

Defeat for the Allies was possible on D-Day. Eisenhower knew that. Montgomery, the meticulous planner and unsung hero of Overlord, knew it too. Rommel, who planned to beat them, knew it.

On top of all the massive armament hurled at the Germans, the day was finally carried by the courage and will of the attackers to press on, to come to grips with the Germans, destroy them, and push inland. Napoleon said that in war the moral is to the physical as ten to one.

Let us have perpetual gratitude to the men of D-Day.

A Picture From the Front

We are in the midst of a culture war.

Hunting is on the decline in the United States, even though it is an essential activity for conservation and wildlife preservation. So-called “animal rights” groups are delighted, apparently unable to understand the basic issues behind preserving populations of wild animals in the world today.

There are a few reasons why the number of hunters is on the wane, but most people would agree that the one factor which has the greatest impact is that fewer fathers are teaching their children to hunt. Hunting is usually a family tradition, and it most often is the foundation of a true understanding of wildlife issues.

Let me show you the worst nightmare of an anti-hunting activist.

That isn’t my family, in case you are wondering. The mom is a friend of mine, and she sent the picture.

It seems that the younger kids were so excited about being out in the woods that they couldn’t sit still. They made so much noise that no one even saw any game. Their dad, the tall fellow pictured above, had to take his oldest son on a later hunt.

Please take a look at the young girl to the left. She was going on her first hunt, and she carefully coordinated her outfit. The pink shirt matches the pink gators on her feet.

It would be less than truthful for me to say that we are winning this particular battle in the culture war. But there is hope.

(Cross posted at Hell in a Handbasket.)

Taking Stock: Nostalgia

Widen the screen just a little, in fact, and a particularly prominent and disturbing lost self can be seen as merely one guest in a room full of permutations, good and bad. And each of those selves must have an idealized doppelgänger of its own. (Benedict Cary’s Times article)

Today we take stock. And here’s a (not always reliable but interesting) social studies take:

A 2003 study at Concordia University in Montreal and the University of California, Irvine, for instance, suggested that young adults who scored high on measures of psychological well-being tended to think of regretted decisions as all their own — perhaps because they still had time to change course. By contrast, older people who scored highly tended to share blame for their regretted decisions. “I tried to reach out to him, but the effort wasn’t returned.”

In New Year’s Cocktail, Benedict Cary discusses the role of regret – at times useful but at others corrosive.

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