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For Junior

For the first time in days, he sat alone accompanied only by the sound of the constant English weather as it hit the thatch roof, filling the small room with the silence of falling rain. He sat in the near darkness at the varnished oaken table, the room only lit by the embers of the tip cherry of his ever-present cigarette and a large English fireplace. He crossed his legs and looked down towards his lap, at his legs, splattered with the ever-present mud, somewhat unbecoming the uniform of a commanding officer. The mud was from an airfield he had visited a few hours before, while visiting the troops of the 101st Airborne.

He himself had never seen combat, his battles were always in rooms like this one, one party or another jockeying for power across a large varnished table in the bloodless but never ending combat that is politics. He hated it, it was unbecoming, but it was a job to be done. It was his duty. He also hated the way that those in the press called him a hero, when all that he had done that could even remotely be called heroic was serve as an aide to the most pompous man on the face of the earth, General Macarthur, who was now serving in the Pacific. For that the General was always most grateful for the extreme distance placed between himself and his former boss.

The fireplace cracked as the burning of the moist English oak reminded the General of the slow passage of time, the gradual darkening of the sky through the windows told him that this most unusual time of peaceful solitude was growing short and his appointment with the pen and paper before him would not wait no matter how he delayed.

Yet, he could not get their faces out of his mind. The airborne troops he had met that morning, who had met him so enthusiastically as to nearly sweep him off his feet. He stood quietly and somewhat reverently in their group, smoking, listening, nodding his head up and down and offering the small talk found on city street corners, asking them questions about their towns and families, baseball scores and petty gossip. As he walked back to his car, across the wet grassy airfield he could not help but think that most of the men in the crowd he had just stood in would not survive the events of the next 24 hours. As he stood by his car and waved, as they waved back through the windows of their C-47's, all the while wondering if the 'folks back home' would ever believe that they once met General Eisenhower on one rainy day in June at a grassy field in the south of England.

He knew that their faces would haunt him for the rest of his life, but he went anyway, camp to camp, headquarters to headquarters. It wasn’t just his job to send men to die; it was his duty.Men would die because of his actions and there was no way to avoid it, yet many more would surely die if he took no action at all. This was the combat with his soul that he and he alone had to face, it was a combat with no cease fire. It was the type of combat that no book of warfare would ever describe, no Military academy could ever prepare you for, to awaken every day with the burden of command. While the men he had met that afternoon who fell from the sky to do their combat and the men who huddled in foxholes had each other, he was condemned to bear his duties in his form of combat all alone.

All men doubt, all men suffer the slow nagging bone deep and soul searing pain of wondering “what might have been”, but few men have stood as naked on the stage of history, waiting to be judged by future generations for his actions like General Eisenhower did in 1944. He was now the 'Supreme Allied Commander' yet he was a man who just only a few years before had only been "Major Eisenhower,aide to General Macarthur". Now, the world placed its faith in a man who's main qualification had been his ability to work with and accomplish tasks in the face of the great belligerent pomposity that came from politicans and other allied Generals.

The General sat at the table and slowly leaned forward in this quiet English manor house that served as his sanctuary, his eyes closed and his hands joined together in silent prayer. He prayed to himself, for his men, for his country and in deference to a power greater than himself that he had placed all of his faith and the lives of his men and all that was worth fighting for in the world.

Despite all of his preparations, despite all of his planning, with all of the valor and bravery of the men under his command, he knew the truth. Despite his being the most powerful military leader in the history of mankind and in command of the largest force of free men under arms ever assembled, he and the rest of the western world were taking the biggest risk in the entire war and it could all go horribly wrong.

What would happen in the next 24 hours would be largely out of his hands and in the hands of individual men. An artillery shell here, a machine gun nest there, a bridge, a hill in the wrong place, a swamp where it wasnt supposed to be, just the right or wrong man at the wrong or right place and all of the planning and training could come to naught. All of the faith, all of the hopes that the world had placed on his shoulders could come to nothing but condemnation from those who called him hero today. He was no hero, He was just "Ike from Abeline" and he knew it. But to the world, he was 'General Eisenhower, Supreme Allied Commander of the Allied Forces' and it would fall on his neck no matter the reason of the failure.

He opened his eyes and looked up from his cross weaved hands and slowly reached out for the pen.

It was time and it had to be done.

He wrote:

“Our landings in the Cherbourg Havre area have failed to gain a satisfactory foothold and I have withdrawn the troops. My decision to attack at this time and place was based upon the best information available. The troops, the air and the Navy did all that Bravery and devotion to duty could do. If any blame or fault attaches to the attempt it is mine alone.”

He knew it had to be done. It was one thing to have the landings fail, but the war must go on afterwards, he must not allow the self-criticism and bickering that failure would surely generate to destroy the alliance. He must take the blame alone, just as surely as if everything were to go right, he would undeservedly get all the credit. While there were always plenty to help with the credit, there would never be any help in catching all the blame, nor would he look for any.

It was done.He had prepared for the worse in the only way left for him. Just then, his aide knocked to disturb the Generals solitude.

“Sir, you asked me to let you know when it was 18:30, you said you wanted to be at Prime Minister Churchill’s command center in Whitehall for the evening” she said in a near whisper, not wanting to break the spell.

“I did, and I do”. He said in full exhale, finally breaking the spell the old English fireplace had put on the room. He folded the note and placed it into his jacket pocket.

The aide, who normally did all of the Generals correspondence, noted his movements and gave the General a look askance, as if to signal that she felt that she might have failed him in some small way.

“No Kay, this is personal. Its something only I could and should write. I hope to God I wont have to use it, but I feel better knowing that I am prepared in the event that I do”.

"Yes Sir. I understand".

He just nodded back to her and smiled, but he knew she didn’t really understand, and for that matter, so did she. No one could. For in the next 12 hours as the earth mindlessly rotated around its axis as it improbably orbited around the Sun as it had done since its creation long ago; the entire human race lived in the twilight between its futures with no certainty as to which way it would all go. The fate of the human race was now in the hands of destiny, the gods of statistical chance and the uncertainty that comes with the all too infrequent phenomenon of "miracle".

It didn’t have to work. The landings could have failed and Eisenhower knew it. The invasion and the allies could have been pushed back into the sea, and with it the end of the hope of defeat of Nazi Germany. In the end, it might very well have been the Soviet Union who dominated the continent of Europe in the post war years, condemning millions of innocents to the Soviet gulag, stomping out the hope of freedom for an entire generation. The Iron Curtain might have gone up on the very same beaches that Eisenhower sent his troops in 1944, rather than the middle of Europe.

It didn’t have to work out the way it did; the Nazis were certainly capable of creating the atomic bomb, or at the least, what we today call a “dirty bomb”. At the end of the war, the Nazis were testing the use of Submarine launched Cruise missiles and even Ballistic missiles to further their distructive capabilities. What might have become of our alliance or the German people themselves had their leaders carried out their war against the civilians of North America the way they had done against the civilians of Europe?

The alliance of the west might not have held. The Soviets might have sought a separate peace in 1943, leaving the English and ourselves to fight on against fortified Nazi Army.

Churchill was a great leader but as the English proved in 1945, great leaders and great men can and very often are replaced despite their accomplishments. Democracies are made of people and people can tire of war, and Democracies will often try to vote their way back to the “happy days”. Roosevelt didn’t have to win re-election, he didn’t have to die in 1945, he could have died earlier, placing the country in the hands of Henry Wallace, a man who was most certainly more of a fan of the Soviet Union, than his replacement Harry Truman later proved to be.

World War II was a horrible experience for the bulk of humanity. It was in a very true sense, a ”World War” as virtually every part of the world was effected. The estimates are of 52 million killed and 200 million wounded or displaced as a result of the war. We in the modern age have nothing to compare in our experience to those who lived in those days. The losses we see for an entire war don’t add up to a single hour at the Battle of Okinawa or the first 15 minutes at Omaha Beach. In that new mechanical and technological age when men for the first time could travel to all parts of the globe and weapons could be produced in such astronomically vast numbers, Men of all nations fought only with one thing in mind, to fight and win meant simply the hope of being able to stay alive, to lose was most certainly to be enslaved or worse, exterminated by the “ubermen” of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan. There was no hope to be remain neutral in light of such stakes. Life or death, slavery or freedom, collaborator or partisan, there is no grey shadow cast under the yellow Sun of the Earth.

It's important for everyone who is alive today to remember that the men and women of 1944 did not know how it would all turn out, but they went forth into the uncertain world and did their duties out of hope, out of faith and out of a sense of duty. One night in 1944, a man from Abilene Kansas sat in alone in a room in a home in England and had the weight of the world on his shoulders. He knew that he had no more weight on his shoulders than the anonymous private who might also be from Abilene, who was at that very moment boarding a ship in Southampton or a C-47 in East Anglia for an unfriendly reception on the shore across the English channel. What he and the rest of the human race would find in the morning was unknown to them, but they stood and did their duty despite how they may have felt individually.

Remember when you see pictures like the one above, that when the light came through the camera lens to imprint on the chemicals on the film for that particular picture that the world didn’t know what you know. Imagine what it must have been like to not know if "June 6th" would be remembered forever as a "day of liberation" or the day that the Nazis found their “second wind”. Remember that the men you see coming out of the front of the small landing craft or lying on the beaches at Normandy didn’t know how it would all play out, they didnt know about your future. Remember that the bodies you see are someone’s Father, Uncle, Brother or boyfriend, they are some other mothers little boy who once went to war and who didn’t come home one day. To those families, the day that the telegram arrived to tell them that a loved one had been killed in some far off place called "Utah" or "Omaha" was the day that their world had ended forever. That day brings a whole different emotion to their mind over the 'happy nostalgia' that the rest of us engage in on commemoration days like "June 6th".

Remember when you see gun camera footage on the History Channel of B-17s falling from the sky, that it isn’t Lucasfilm Computer Graphics of what a bomber might look like in that situation, it really is a film of the death of 11 men. Remember that after those planes fell from the sky, another man sat alone in a tent and wrote letters home to their families, carrying out his sad duty much like General Eisenhower carried out his in that cold english manor house. His life will forever be marked by the days he sat in a tent in Foggia, Italy and wrote “ Dear Mrs fill-in-the-blank, It is with deep regret that I write to tell you of the death of your son…” over and over and over again, hating each time he did it and hating more how used to it he eventually became.

It happened. It all happened. It was all very real and none of the people who lived in that time knew how it would all turn out. You do, you live in the certainty that their sacrifices provided, but for them it was all far from certain.

We all live today in the bright light of freedom provided by the courage they found on that dark day. We should all be thankful for the men who had the selflessness to stand in those small ocean going boats, covered with the nervous vomit and cold fear to face the machine guns manned on the shore by men who were a part of a system that was so devoid of its own humanity that it was exterminating people with the same cold manufacturing efficiency that other men used to make cars and razor blades.

Try to be greatful and thankful to the man who you only knew as "Grandpa", who took you fishing, “stole your nose” and made fun of your haircut, who on June 6th 1944 ceased being the kid his family called "Junior" as he crawled along the blood soaked sands of the uncertain shores of Europe,only to come home an old man of 21 just a year later.

And hope and pray you never get to know for yourself why it was that he always got so quiet on June 6th.

Posted @ June 06, 2005 03:34 PM | History file

Posted by: Cowboy Blob at June 6, 2005 04:21 PM

Posted by: varifrank at June 6, 2005 04:35 PM

Posted by: MikeG at June 7, 2005 08:17 AM

Posted by: leelu at June 7, 2005 03:48 PM