Ladies and Gentlemen,
This is totally off topic and for my American friends.
On the 14th I had the honour to visit your cemetary at Omaha and paid my resepects to your war dead, I took many pictures, a few below. The cemetary is run magnificently by your superintendent and everything is maintained as it should be by the French workforce, the grass is well cut, the headstones are cleaned continuously and there is an air of absolute peace about the whole cemetary. I planned to visit the Canadian and, of course, the British yesterday but the weather turned foul and I will do those next time round. I know that for you it is a long, long way but I hope that you may all one day visit this peaceful place, as I surely will again.
Kim
Thank you for sharing your experience and for being sensitive to the fact that almost every one of us has, in one way or another, been affected by by the events at Normandy.
They are not our war dead, meaning American, but rather Our war dead, meaning Allies. I am of the belief that D-Day, the Normandy landing, was the most important and most critical event of the 20th Century. History was balancing by a thread.
Thanks to the British, Aussies, French et al who were united in fraternity with their American Cousins…a fraternity baptized by blood and solidified by the proposition that the evil force, Fascism and Nazism, that had engulfed and enslaved our fellow humanity, the Germans, Japanese and Italians, had to be wiped from the face of the earth.
Joe as usual i agree with you and further I am going to visit all the beaches used in the “D” day landing as well i even agree with Kim about the inportance of that landing.
I expect to be there about 7 th September if anyone has anything especial they would like form me or for me to do please say so, and send a can of beer to my address here on Kawana island (only joking about the beer)
Our main aim is actually Sword Beach, we know Jim and Betty Sword and we will be staying with them.
I hope you have better weather Ian than we did for Sword & Juno, it was throwing it down! We stayed in Arromanches on Gold beach, where Mulberry B was built, the museum and 360 degree cinema are superb. See you in August.
Joe, I agree with you about the war dead, they do belong to us all, by saying ‘your war dead’ I meant that the cemetary at Omaha is maintained completely by you guy’s out of your income tax and you get every pennies worth.
Cheers,
Kim
[tup]
I’ve visited the area for a few years now - very moving. As Kim says, the museums around Arromanches are well worth a look, just be sure to arrive early - I went last year a month or so after the 60th anniversary events and found queues a mile long at most of the museums, the year before they were much quieter. Others worth a look include the “Memorial” museum in Caen, the Wurzburg radar at Douvres-le-Delivrande, and the surviving gun batteries. The Arromanches museum has large-scale models of the Mulberries built by Basset-Lowke many years ago - they still look most impressive.
This is one of the things i liked about the Turks at Gallipoli, thewy say “Your dead young men are our dead young men” how nice.
You may remember us Aussies and New Zealanders along with Kims grandfather went ashore there in 25 April 1916 ang promptly got slaughtered by the Turks. we had nothing against them and they had nothing against us so why did it happen. politics of the empire thats how!