D-Day - the Normandy landings

[Theatre of Trees]

"told he couldn't attend"?

My goodness.

If he is in a care home then I suggest those in charge believed he may have been too frail to attend. This isn't a naughty boy scenario - at 89 there are all kinds of issues from mobility to mental health this person may perceived to have problems with.

 

[Theatre of Trees]

If he is in a care home then I suggest those in charge believed he may have been too frail to attend. This isn't a naughty boy scenario - at 89 there are all kinds of issues from mobility to mental health this person may perceived to have problems with.

And having just checked through the story he wasn't banned or told he could not go, the nursing home actually tried to get him on an accredited trip with the British Legion but it was full up. What the home did was report him missing when he failed to return home from a day out and were not aware he had gone to France. Apparently he has all his faculties so my quote above can be disregarded too.

 

[Buzzer]

And having just checked through the story he wasn't banned or told he could not go, the nursing home actually tried to get him on an accredited trip with the British Legion but it was full up. What the home did was report him missing when he failed to return home from a day out and were not aware he had gone to France. Apparently he has all his faculties so my quote above can be disregarded too.

Yep, you're absolutely spot on. I was just taken aback a bit by that phrase. Good for him too.

 

[Eeyore]

Gets even better, Bernard is an Albion fan (see last line) http://blog.gracewell.co.uk/celebrating-residents-mayor-hove-bernard-jordan/

Well, if he can bypass his care home captors and get to the AMEX, I'm sure they'll be an abundance of pies and pints waiting for him next season. Lovely story.

 

[Leekbrookgull]

Which ever way you look at it,good on him.

 

[Mr Bridger]

Not sure of this has been posted anywhere on here, but worth another post. Just had me in bits.

Feel so proud of these veterans.

 

[Questions]

I have alway been interested in Russia's take on the Normandy 2nd front but don't go off on on one thinking I am disrespecting anyone here because I am not, but it makes for an interesting read.


Russia's President Vladimir Putin attends a ceremony to commemorate the anniversary of the beginning of the Great Patriotic War against Nazi Germany in 1941 at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier by the Kremlin walls in Moscow, June 22, 2013.
CREDIT: REUTERS/ALEXEI NIKOLSKYI/RIA NOVOSTI/KREMLIN
(Reuters) - Sitting in the shade on a bench in the center of Moscow, 77-year-old Galina Makarenko pauses for several seconds before delivering her blunt opinion on the Allied D-Day landings of June 6, 1944.

"It helped us a little. But only a little," says the sprightly physicist, who was evacuated from Moscow to Kazakhstan to escape the conflict that Westerners call World War Two and Russians refer to as the Great Patriotic War.

President Vladimir Putin joins the leaders of France, Britain, the United States and Germany to mark the 70th anniversary on Friday of the Normandy landings that opened the western front against Hitler's forces, catching them in a giant pincer movement as Stalin's Red Army pushed them back in the east.

But while many in the West see D-Day as the decisive turning point in the conflict, conversations in the Russian capital on Thursday reflected a widely held view here that the Soviet Union had already turned the tide of the war, in which it lost more than 20 million people, and would have prevailed on its own.

"That is absolutely clear, there's no doubt about that. It would have won because the people were desperate, they had gathered their strength and learned to wage war. The war would definitely have been won by the Soviet people," said pensioner Nikolai Kosyak, 64.

STALIN HOSTS CHURCHILL

The timing of the second front was a vexed question between the wartime Allies: Soviet leader Josef Stalin had urged British Prime Minister Winston Churchill to open it as far back as August 1942.

According to the interpreter's record of their tense encounter that month in Moscow, Churchill argued this would be premature, insisting that "war was war but not folly, and it would be folly to invite a disaster that would help nobody".

A "restless" Stalin retorted that "a man not prepared to take risks could not win a war".

For the eventual D-Day assault, the Allies mustered more than 150,000 British, Canadian and American troops, and preceded their offensive with months of intensive bombing of targets in German-occupied France.

But many Russians are convinced to this day that the delay was a deliberate ploy. While D-Day "helped us a great deal", Kosyak said, Churchill "wanted the Russians and Germans to destroy each other in this war, and to enter it at the right moment when both were weakened".

Communications worker Igor Tolkarev, 48, said: "I think he just waited for us and decided to do it only when our troops started an offensive. Only then he joined the side of those who were stronger."

MISTRUST OF COMMUNISM

For retired engineer Lyudmila Krylova, 67, the timing had to do with political ideology.

"Because the West had a very bad attitude towards the Communist Soviet Union at that time and was interested in preventing Communism from spreading across Europe - that's why probably political leaders in the West were not interested in such a triumphal victory of the Red Army and a swift end of the war," she said.

"And then they were sparing their people, their army, their casualties."

Her grandson Maxim Krylov, 11, chimed in: "If not for our Red Army and for all our troops we, Russians, would not be standing here now."

In a schoolchildren's encyclopedia on sale in central Moscow, the opening of the western front is dealt with in just half a sentence, in a four-page entry on the Great Patriotic War: "In the meantime the allies had opened a second front in Europe, but Soviet forces had captured the initiative in the offensive on Germany."

At a time when Russian authorities have denounced the rise of what they call "fascism" in neighboring Ukraine, elderly physicist Makarenko is skeptical about attempts to invoke the wartime spirit in Moscow's dispute with its neighbor.

But among those interviewed she is not alone in seeing parallels between Western mistrust of Russia then and now.

"Everyone wanted to strangle the Soviet Union - and they want to now," she said. "The whole of the West is jealous of Russia ... Russia is a unique country."

 

[Thunder Bolt]

Soviet leader Josef Stalin had urged British Prime Minister Winston Churchill to open it as far back as August 1942.

According to the interpreter's record of their tense encounter that month in Moscow, Churchill argued this would be premature, insisting that "war was war but not folly, and it would be folly to invite a disaster that would help nobody".

A "restless" Stalin retorted that "a man not prepared to take risks could not win a war".

Britain had tried landings in August 1942 with the Dieppe raid. It lasted just 5 hours and over 3000 men were killed.

 

[skipper734]

Should imagine that the Wests leaders were more interested in preventing Stalin spreading into Europe. A leader who had so many of his own people killed that guesstimates vary between 2 and 60 million people. Modern experts appear to have settled on an agreed figure of 20 million.

 

[Questions]

Should imagine that the Wests leaders were more interested in preventing Stalin spreading into Europe. A leader who had so many of his own people killed that guesstimates vary between 2 and 60 million people. Modern experts appear to have settled on an agreed figure of 20 million.

I don't think Stalin could be held responsible for Russian casualties during battle or the subsequent starvation etc after the German invasion. I'm not commentating on his other atrocities though of course.

 

[vegster]

I don't think Stalin could be held responsible for Russian casualties during battle or the subsequent starvation etc after the German invasion. I'm not commentating on his other atrocities though of course.

Stalin killed more Russians than the Germans ever did. Apart from sending virtually unarmed troops up against trained ,well equipped German soldiers at the point of a gun under the NKVD. he was responsible for the Gulags and destroying the upper echelons of the armed forces command thus causing more casualties as Political Commissars led Russian troops in human wave, virtual suicide, attacks.

 

[Questions]

Stalin killed more Russians than the Germans ever did. Apart from sending virtually unarmed troops up against trained ,well equipped German soldiers at the point of a gun under the NKVD. he was responsible for the Gulags and destroying the upper echelons of the armed forces command thus causing more casualties as Political Commissars led Russian troops in human wave, virtual suicide, attacks.

I know all about Stalins atrocities. Would the outcome of the 2nd world war have been different if the Russians had not defended Stalingrad. There were 200k Russians killed in the first week of battle and 3 million POW within a month. Let's remember putting Stalins evils aside who got to Berlin first. Not sure Yalta would have changed things really. How much did Germany deploy after the allies breakout at Normandy to allow Russia to fight back ?

 

[GoldWithFalmer]

I know all about Stalins atrocities. Would the outcome of the 2nd world war have been different if the Russians had not defended Stalingrad. There were 200k Russians killed in the first week of battle and 3 million POW within a month. Let's remember putting Stalins evils aside who got to Berlin first. Not sure Yalta would have changed things really. How much did Germany deploy after the allies breakout at Normandy to allow Russia to fight back ?

Had Germany had 4 million troops instead of 3 for the invasion of Russia,had Britain and America not run and supplied equipment to Russia early on with the convoys,perhaps the Germans could have equipped their troops for winter war,maybe a the decision was taken to leave Berlin to the Russians as the potential casualties were too high..

It's a fascinating subject,right form the moment World war 1...stopped....a 20 year armistice,and predicted by the French in 1918 to within weeks to resume in 1939...

 

[Thunder Bolt]

Bernard has his 90th birthday this week.