On June 6, 1944, 160,000 American, British and Canadian soldiers stormed the beaches at Normandy, setting in motion the defeat of Germany and the freedom of Europe.
By May 1944, over 2,876,000 Allied troops were amassed in southern England. While awaiting deployment orders, they prepared for the assault by practicing with live ammunition. The largest armada in history, made up of more than 4,000 American, British, and Canadian ships, lay in wait. More that 1,200 planes stood ready to deliver seasoned airborne troops behind enemy lines, to silence German ground resistance as best they could, and to dominate the skies of the impending battle theater.
Against a tense backdrop of uncertain weather forecasts, disagreements in strategy, and related timing dilemmas predicated on the need for optimal tidal conditions, Eisenhower decided before dawn on June 5 to proceed with Overlord. Later that same afternoon, he scribbled a note intended for release, accepting responsibility for the decision to launch the invasion and full blame should the effort to create a beachhead on the Normandy coast fail.
Much more polished is his printed Order of the Day for June 6, 1944, which Eisenhower began drafting in February. The order was distributed to the 175,000-member expeditionary force on the eve of the invasion.
D-day statement to soldiers, sailors, and airmen of the Allied Expeditionary Force, 6/44, Collection DDE-EPRE: Eisenhower, Dwight D: Papers, Pre-Presidential, 1916-1952; Dwight D. Eisenhower Library; National Archives and Records Administration.
Below, the message is read over images of Eisenhower.
Having just observed Memorial Day, this would be a good time to remember and to breathe a prayer of thanks for those who fought for not just our freedom here in the U.S., but around the world. Remember, Japan was also our foe, who would not be defeated until August of 1945, about 3 months after Germany surrendered.
On Saturday I attended a Veteran’s Appreciation Night put on by my local church fellowship and sponsored by local VFW posts. We had vets from the Army, Air Force, Navy, Marines and Coast Guard.
The program included the singing of the national anthem, a dinner, some light musical entertainment, a comedienne, a raffle, and the offer of hope found in Jesus Christ.
But the whole night started with the entrance. Every veteran who walked in the door was greeted with a reception line of volunteers from the church, who cheered, applauded, waved American flags and shook their hand as they walked a red carpet to the registration table, where they had their photo taken by a red, white and blue balloon arch, and then were escorted to their table by other volunteers.
As part of the greeting committee, I got to shake hands with many of the vets, but a highlight was shaking hands with a sprightly 101-year-old WWII veteran and thanking him for his service.
Do you realize it’s been 78 years since the end of World War II? According to US Department of Veterans Affairs, only 119,550 Americans who served in WWII are currently alive. Even the youngest enlisted men, knowing some snuck in at age 16 or 17, would be in their 90s now.
I was there with my wife to host, meaning that I would wait on the guests seated at my assigned table. As it turned out, only one vet and his wife sat at my table. Because there weren’t any other guests for that table, I was invited to have dinner with them so they weren’t stranded by themselves.
Denny (not his real name) was a Navy vet who had always wanted to serve in the armed forces. He enlisted before he graduated from high school, then spent 10 years in the service. He now works for the DOJ. I asked him if he was busy tracking “white supremacists” like me, and he laughed. No, that’s not what he does.
When I asked him how he got to the appreciation dinner, he said that his neighbor is also a veteran and had attended the dinner last year. It was so good, he said, that he kept badgering Denny to attend this year. I asked him if he ever attended an appreciation night like this and he said no.
Unfortunately, I didn’t get to ask him how he enjoyed the evening when it was all over; I was busy cleaning up with the rest of the volunteers when he and his wife left. I hope it was enjoyable for them.
The idea behind the event is to truly appreciate our vets. We live in polarized times, when our military is being wrecked by social experimentation, our war heroes are being “cancelled,” our past and present military engagements are being criticized, and our veterans have been abused by government incompetence.
We forget that our veterans are people who were asked or who volunteered to serve our country and often faced dreadful circumstances in which they had to engage in terrible acts that perhaps defeated our enemies, but that some carried home in their psyches.
To thank a 100-year-old man who served in our military is not to approve of what he did or didn’t do. I didn’t get to have a conversation with him, so I don’t know his rank or where he was deployed or what sort of experience he had. For all I know, he was a clerk in a general’s office in Topeka, Kansas.
My appreciation is to recognize that he performed a noble act, that he took on a role that put “country” before himself, that he put himself at risk on behalf of those who couldn’t. Many of our vets never made it home, having made the ultimate sacrifice. That could have been him, and I deeply appreciate the courage it took to expose himself to that risk on behalf of a country to which he pledged his loyalty.
A “country” isn’t some amorphous entity. A country is citizens like you and me. Every veteran who served in the military did so on behalf of the people who make up the country.
I’ve made it a personal commitment to thank our servicemen and women. While many of them aren’t looking for thanks, I can see that it’s meaningful to them when they are thanked.
I encourage you to thank a vet this Veteran’s Day, November 11.
As we watch events unfolding in Israel, waiting for the ground offensive to begin, waiting on whether Hamas will release hostages in return for a ceasefire (nah), waiting to see if Iran will intervene or conduct a “preemptive strike,” waiting to see if two American aircraft carrier strike groups will deter Iran or Hezbollah in Lebanon, I’ve been mulling over where I stand on the issue.
Bottom line for me is this: Israel must totally and utterly annihilate Hamas. They have to go in and destroy the ability of Hamas to attack, regroup or reconstitute itself in any way, shape or form.
I can hear the cries of horror as readers react. “Sure, but what about all the innocent Palestinian women and children? What about the elderly Palestinians and those who don’t support Hamas? What about proportionality? How can you support such bloodshed?”
Here’s my position: Hamas chose this.
Hamas is a terrorist organization. Their attack on Israel wasn’t an act of “war,” it was an act of terrorism. They indiscriminately murdered men, women, children and the elderly in cold blood. And they didn’t just kill them; they tortured them and desecrated their bodies. The committed atrocities against their neighbors simply because their neighbors are Jews.
What they did was indefensible. I don’t care what excuses are made for their savage slaughter of innocent Israeli citizens. They may have grievances with Israel, but civilization is not required to tolerate their barbarism. Hamas has proven that it is incapable of moderating itself; it’s time to eliminate them.
As far as the women and children go — it is a terrible thing to kill the defenseless, even if they are members of the enemy. I do not advocate for the killing of civilians and if it can be avoided, it should be.
But Hamas does not show that level of concern for their own people. They deliberately position their weapons of war in civilian buildings and neighborhoods in order to create a moral dilemma for civilized nations when it comes to killing innocent: Wipe out the terrorists and take innocent lives with them, or allow the terrorists to survive in order to avoid civilian deaths?
In this case, I place that responsibility squarely on the terrorists. Hamas are the violent enforcers of a religious death cult, and the wives and children of Palestinians are indoctrinated to hate Jews. I don’t want to see impressionable children used as pawns or human shields, but I don’t want the terrorists to survive and launch more attacks.
It’s an imperfect metaphor, but I once discovered that paper wasps had built a nest under the eaves of my garage. There were three larvae in the nest and two adults caring for them. They aren’t a particularly aggressive insect, but will attack if they feel threatened. So I ventured out there with my wasp and hornet spray and gave them a maximum dose, killing both the adults and the larvae. Why the kids? Easy—nest building and attacking is in their nature, and I didn’t want them to grow up and be a threat to me or my family (or any other family). I wanted to completely annihilate them, and I did.
Not only so, but in this post by Rev. Donald Sensing, he argues that Israel is not only battling a physical army of psychopaths, they’re battling an ideology, which can survive physical defeat.
Having formed a “unity government” for the war, Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu has stated clearly that the permanent end of Hamas as the principal war aim. That this objective requires a land invasion of Gaza is also clear. But what can it take to destroy Hamas? Netanyahu has said that killing its terrorists fighters is a specific goal, but Hamas is not merely an organization. It is also an ideology. How does Israel end with not only the present Hamas organization destroyed, but also the ideology?
He goes on to write that both the American Civil War and World War II provide examples of how to achieve the end of Hamas. First, the Civil War:
After more than two years of indecisive, though bloody fighting, the Union’s strategy took a linchpin turn when Gen. U.S. Grant was appointed commander of the US Army and he unleashed Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman to invade the South. Sherman stated his goal very plainly.
“War is the remedy that our enemies have chosen, and I say let us give them all they want.”
“This war differs from other wars, in this particular. We are not fighting armies but a hostile people, and must make old and young, rich and poor, feel the hard hand of war.”
Sherman’s tactics were ruthless, but they did do what he set out to do. His and Grant’s maneuvers and battlefield victories made it very plain not only to the Confederacy’s leadership (especially Gen. R.E. Lee) that they could not win the war, it was also crystal clear to ordinary men and women throughout the South, including those never actually touched by the fighting. Slavery was ended by the war and it is worth noting also that no state has attempted to secede since then.
Then, the objective of the Allies in World War II:
One of the preludes to the massive landings on Normandy’s beaches to “enter the continent or Europe” in 1944 was sustained, large-scale aerial bombing of Germany by American and British aircraft. As the war went on and German (and Japanese) resistance failed to slacken, President Roosevelt decided that the German and Japanese peoples must realize after the war that not only had their armed forces been defeated: the entire nation, as a nation, had been beaten. He and Churchill were well aware that German militarism had survived World War I because its apologists had successfully propagated the myth that the Kaiser’s army had not really been defeated, it had been “stabbed in the back” by disloyal factions at home.
Hence, wrote Roosevelt in a letter to Secretary of War Henry Stimson,
It is of utmost importance that every person in Germany should realize that this time Germany is a defeated nation. . . . The fact that they are a defeated nation, collectively and individually, must be so impressed upon them that they will hesitate to start any new war.
[…]
One notes that Japan and Germany have been well behaved since 1945. But we also have to note that massive, destructive bombing was alone not the reason. It was simply impossible for either country’s armed forces to claim that they had prevailed, or at least held their own, on the field of battle. German and Japanese orphans, widows and grieving parents were in almost every other household, and a lie that their armed forces had not really lost could not possibly have found legs to stand on.
Hamas and the civilians who support them (at least 90% of the population) must be made to see, to feel, to know that they are thoroughly and utterly defeated. They must be made to see that abhorrent tactics they displayed on October 7 will be answered with overwhelming force, and that such savagery will not be tolerated in this world. They must be made to experience “the hard hand of war” and their defeat “must be so impressed upon them” that they spend the next 20 years recovering from their experience.
I am with Israel and pray that God gives them the victory over their enemies.
Daily Verse | 2 Thessalonians 3:13 And as for you, brothers, never tire of doing what is right.
Thursday’s Reading: 1 Timothy 1-6
In Dennis Prager’s provocatively-titled column this week (If Holocaust Deniers Don’t Go to Hell, There Is No God) he addresses the topic of Holocaust denialism. I think he was provoked by the recent news that Nick Fuentes had dined with Donald J. Trump, along with Ye (Kanye West) and Milo Yiannopoulos.
Fuentes “aggressively” denies that the Holocaust happened.
After laying out the effort of Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower and other Allied generals to document the atrocities committed by the Nazi regime, Prager writes that there may not be “a more documented single event in history than the Holocaust.”
He then gives three reasons why denying the Holocaust “is evil”: 1) it’s a Big Lie that can cause more violence, 2) “it is pure Jew-hatred, i.e., antisemitism,” and 3) it’s a “slap in the face of all the Americans who died fighting the Nazis.”
Prager closes his essay with this:
As a college student, I dated a woman whose parents were Holocaust survivors. She told me on a number of occasions how often she would hear her father scream in the middle of the night as he dreamed about watching his family be murdered. Unable to live with these memories, one night, her father hanged himself.
That man is one of millions of reasons Fuentes — and those who ally themselves with him — will go to hell. If there is a just God.
Dennis Prager supports evangelical Christians even though he is not one himself. He also recognizes that Christianity is the key to Western civilization and to the value of liberty (see his article here, for example). Prager is a strong defender of America and of evangelicals against the liberal Left.
I greatly admire Prager and his thinking. However, both his column’s title and his concluding paragraphs are wrong. Denying the Holocaust does not send someone to hell and I’m surprised Prager insists that it must be so — or there is no (just) God.
Prager writes,
It is a central tenet of moral theology that there are gradations of sin. To argue that God views stealing a towel from a hotel and raping a child as moral equivalents renders God a moral fool. And doing that to God is a sin. If we mortals perceive the universe of difference between such actions, it goes without question that God does, too. The idea that we have greater moral clarity than God is logically and theologically untenable.
In the pantheon of evils, among the worst is Holocaust denial.
God, he says, grades on a curve. And because Holocaust denial is among the very worst evils in this world, God will punish such sin with a one-way ticket to hell.
Leaving aside the question of how Prager knows that Holocaust denial is among the very worst sins, it’s clear that he fundamentally misunderstands the nature of sin and redemption. I’m not denying that some evils are worse than others (sometimes exponentially so) since they clearly are. Stealing a towel from a hotel and raping a child are not moral equivalents. One is worse than the other.
But the mistake Prager seems to make is thinking that one of those acts (raping a child) is worthy of hell while the other one (stealing a towel) isn’t. Surely the rapist will go to hell, won’t he? Surely God wouldn’t send a guy who pilfered a hotel towel to hell for such a minor infraction, right?
Wrong. We say, “this sin is worse than that sin.” God says, “They’re both sin.”
The truth is that they both evidence a sinful soul in rebellion against God’s moral standard of perfect holiness.
Jesus said,
“For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life. For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him. Whoever believes in him is not condemned, but whoever does not believe stands condemned already because he has not believed in the name of God’s one and only Son.” (John 3:16-18)
Our default condition apart from Christ is living under condemnation. Jesus didn’t come to condemn us because we were already condemned. That’s what sends someone to hell.
The fundamental problem we all face is that we stand condemned “already” apart from Christ, not that we’ve sunk to new lows of sinfulness. What matters is not the gravity of the sin, but whether a person has put their trust in God or not.
Jesus said that not everyone who calls him “Lord” will enter the kingdom of heaven (Matthew 7:21). Hell will welcome a lot of “nice” people who didn’t sin much according to the standards of this world. Conversely, heaven will welcome at least a few notorious sinners who repented and acknowledged that Jesus is Lord.
Denying the Holocaust is vile. It is extremely hurtful to Jewish people who have been affected by it. Denying that it happened is to deny the immense violence done against the Jewish people. It is to pass without a care by a man mauled by a lion and to emphatically deny the mauling while standing in front of him.
It is irrational and viciously unkind. But it does not, by itself, condemn a person to hell. It is the condition of the soul from whence comes the vile denial that does.
Daily Verse | Job 33:29-30 “God does all these things to a man—twice, even three times—to turn back his soul from the pit, that the light of life may shine on him.’”
Monday and a new week. A week ago was Memorial Day. Fittingly, yesterday was the 77th anniversary of D-Day: Tuesday, June 6, 1944.
After duping the Nazis into believing that the invasion would occur at Pas-de-Calais (the closest point to Britain across the Dover Channel), the Allies instead landed at five sections of beachfront along the Normandy coast. They were codenamed (from West to East), “Utah,” “Omaha,” “Gold,” “Juno” and “Sword.”
“For the Americans of the 1st and 29th Infantry divisions waiting off Omaha Beach in the darkness that morning, almost everything was about to go wrong. Omaha is a gently curving natural amphitheater, dominated by 130-foot bluffs pierced by five “draws,” or gullies, each with its own road or cart track leading up to the plateau. At roughly six miles across, it was the broadest of the five invasion beaches—and the deepest, with more than three hundred yards of exposed beach at low tide. It was also the most strongly defended on June 6. Thirteen fortified strongpoints reinforced with steel and concrete and equipped with 50-, 75-, and 88-millimeter artillery pieces, overlooked the five draws and were situated to provide overlapping fields of fire. Each was surrounded by antitank and anti-fire ditches, and interspersed among them were batteries of artillery, antitank guns, mortar pits, armor-piercing howitzers, and rocket launchers, as well as eighty-five machine-gun nests—all well concealed, reinforced, and interconnected by a maze of camouflaged trenches, subterranean barracks, and command posts. Because of the tall cliffs and curving waterline, guns fired lengthwise from the heights at either end of the beach could cut to pieces anyone brave or foolhardy enough to try to come ashore.” /p.196
U.S. Army infantry men approaching Omaha Beach, Normandy, France on June 6, 1944.
Yet come ashore they did, and many paid the price.
“Terror intensified. As his landing craft shuddered to a stop, one soldier asked another, ‘Mac, when a bullet hits you, does it go through?’ His friend had no time to answer. The men kicked down the landing ramp and found themselves in what one survivor called ‘a new world.’ The Germans along the bluffs had largely held their fire until that moment. Now machine-gun fire ripped through many men before they could step onto the ramp. Scores more were hit in the water. Two companies were obliterated before they could reach the sand. Some wounded men made it to the waterline, then lay helpless amid the seaweed as the tide rose slowly over them.” /pp. 200-201
Altogether, the total number of Allied casualties was about 10,000, with nearly half of that number killed and the rest wounded or missing.
“Far fewer Allied troops had died than Allied planners had expected, but D-day still had been the bloodiest day in U.S. military history since Antietam. Some 2,500 American soldiers lay dead on and behind the beaches. Thousands more were wounded or missing.” /p. 210
The older I get and the more our country spirals into its self-destructive lunacy, the more I appreciate what these men did. Most of them were in their early twenties, 3,000 miles away from home, dying on desolate beaches in a foreign country.
Yet because they fought, the Allies were able to unload 2,500,000 men, 500,000 vehicles and 4,000,000 tons of supplies at two temporary harbors at Normandy over the remainder of the war. That allowed them to liberate France, which led to the liberation of Europe and, ultimately, to the liberation of the rest of the world. Due to their successful breach of Rommel’s “Atlantic Wall,” Germany signed an unconditional surrender less than a year later on May 7, 1945.
D-Day marked a decisive turning point in the war in Europe, beating back the aggression of Nazi Germany. As the National D-Day Memorial puts it, it took “valor, fidelity and sacrifice” to bring peace.
