Today at the editor’s glance: It’s D-Day plus 77 years (see excerpts from Ernie Pyle’s D-Day column below). Two years ago Normandy veteran Tom Rice, 97, marked the occasion by parachuting over Carentan again. He had a much better jump than in 1994 when “I got my left armpit caught in the lower left hand corner of the door so I swung out, came back and hit the side of the aircraft, swung out again and came back, and I just tried to straighten my arm out and I got free,” he told the Associated Press two years ago. In 2019 he jumped in tandem. If you’re not on the History Channel all day today, might as well get around to Mann’s “The Magic Mountain.” It’s the old German sage’s birthday today. He died in 1955. (“To go on living is a mistake, especially since I live mistakenly,” he said in his old age.) Sunday’s weather: Partly cloudy with a 20 percent chance of showers and thunderstorms in the afternoon. Highs in the lower 90s. Southeast winds 10 to 15 mph. In the 70s tonight.
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“Now that it is over it seems to me a pure miracle that we ever took the beach at all. For some of our units it was easy, but in this special sector where I am now our troops faced such odds that our getting ashore was like my whipping Joe Louis down to a pulp…. Ashore, facing us, were more enemy troops than we had in our assault waves. The advantages were all theirs, the disadvantages all ours. The Germans were dug into positions that they had been working on for months, although these were not yet all complete. A one-hundred-foot bluff a couple of hundred yards back from the beach had great concrete gun emplacements built right into the hilltop. These opened to the sides instead of to the front, thus making it very hard for naval fire from the sea to reach them. They could shoot parallel with the beach and cover every foot of it for miles with artillery fire. … Soldiers carry strange things ashore with them. In every invasion you’ll find at least one soldier hitting the beach at H-Hour with a banjo slung over his shoulder. This most ironic piece of equipment marking our beach — this beach of first despair, then victory — is a tennis racket that some soldier had brought along. Two of the most dominant items in the beach refuse are cigarettes and writing paper. Each soldier was issued a carton of cigarettes just before he started. Today these cartons by the thousand, water-soaked and spilled out, mark the line of our first savage blow. Writing paper and air-mail envelopes come second. The boys had intended to do a lot of writing in France. Letters that would have filled those blank, abandoned pages.”
–From Ernie Pyle’s June 12, 1944 column, in “Ernie’s War: The Best of Ernie Pyle’s World War II Dispatches,” ed. David Nichols.
Previously:
Reagan’s gays | Too much art | Internment | Refracted hate | Online behavior | Groovy Tennyson | Overwork | There is a God | On Lincoln | Killing the planet | A Vietcong infantryman | Property v. minorities | Originalism | Liberty v. fatality | Blanche Gardin | Poe’s old age | Whose Christian tradition? | The real socialists | Roberto Bolaño | WSJ v. China | GOP radicals | Evolution accidents | Xenophobia is us | Washington | Birches | Mindcraft | Disillusion | Husband and wife | Marriage Survivor | Sir’s rudeness | Missing information | Executions | Something to live for | Worrying about Jesus | Norilsk
Michael & Diane Cocchiola says
To all servicemen and women living and dead… thank you!