Random facts and thoughts. Half of which are awe inspiring and half of which will frighten the heck out of you...
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First an excerpt from The Story of World War II, one of the best books I've ever read. This is the story of Bob Conroy trapped in a foxhole during the Battle of the Bulge:
"About midnight I was sleeping - my buddy was on duty- and somehow or other, the Germans got within twenty yards of our position. Gordon got ripped by machine guns from roughly the left thigh thru the right waist. He then told me he was hit thru the stomach as well. Well, when your that far from your home base, and it's snowing and the temperature zero, you don't have a chance. We were cut off. The Germans had overrun our position and we were in foxholes by ourselves, so we both knew he was going to die. We had no morphine. We couldn't ease the pain and so I tried to knock him out. I took off his helmet, held his jaw up and just whacked it as hard as I could because he just wanted to be put out. That didn't work and so I hit him up by the head with a helmet and that didn't work. Nothing worked. He slowly froze to death. Bleed to death. The next day I looked at our gear and it looked as though I'd spent a day in a butcher shop. My clothes were all covered in blood. His clothes were all covered in blood and the territory we were in was all covered- it was a butcher shop."
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A recent poll found that 72% of students failed to correctly identify what war we fought against Hitler
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"Posterity, you will never know how much it cost the present generation to preserve your freedom. I hope you will make good use of it. If you do not, I shall repent in heaven that ever I took half the pains to preserve it." ...John Adams
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According to a new poll by Marist, more than a quarter of Americans couldn't correctly identify the country from which the United States declared its independence.
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Ray "Hap" Halloran a captured B-29 pilot captured over Japan and his story:
Hap fell free from 27,000 ft. to approximately 3,000 ft. before opening his chute and landing in N.E. Tokyo. He was set upon immediately by civilians; and severe beatings followed. Mr. Halloran was near death when Japanese soldiers (MP's from Kempei Lao Secret Service Torture Prison) seized him from civilians and took him to Kempei Tai Torture Main Prison in Tokyo adjacent the moat at the north edge of the Imperial Palace grounds. Hap spent 67 days in solitary confinement in a cold, dark cage. Beatings and brutal interrogations followed. Hap lived through the March 10, 1945 fire raid on Tokyo were over 100,000 were killed by B-29s bombing from 0100 to 0400 a.m. The heat, smoke and firestorm were absolutely terrifying.
Then Hap was moved to Ueno Zoo in Tokyo where he was a prisoner in animal cage and tied to the front bars in his lion cage so civilians could march by and view a B-29 flyer. He was naked and black from non-washing and hair all over my face. Hap lost 90 lbs. and was covered with open running sores from flea-bed bug bites. He spent April 1, 1945 to August 1945 in Omori POW Camp contiguous SW Tokyo.
On 8-29-45 Hap and others were liberated by marine/navy landing forces and taken aboard the hospital ship Benevolence in Tokyo Bay. Hap spent about a year in a hospital at Ashford General Hospital, in White Sulphur Springs, W.VA.
Hap received 39 years of nightmares after that ordeal. He later returned to Tokyo in 1984-85, 1989 and 1995, were he met Ambassador Mike Mansfield who was a great help. Hap was also reunited with a former guard (friendly) and many others including: Kaneyuki Kobayashi, former guard, Saburo Sakai, leading living Japanese fighter ace (now friend) and Isamu Kashiide, who shot down their B-29 over Tokyo on 1-27-45 and many others. Reconciliation and friendship finally eradicated the nightmares of 39 years.
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30% of Americans don’t know what the Holocaust was.
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During an attack by his battalion to capture German position son October 8, 1918, York's actions earned him the Medal of Honor. He recalled:
The Germans got us, and they got us right smart. They just stopped us dead in our tracks. Their machine guns were up there on the heights overlooking us and well hidden, and we couldn’t tell for certain where the terrible heavy fire was coming from... And I'm telling you they were shooting straight. Our boys just went down like the long grass before the mowing machine at home. Our attack just faded out... And there we were, lying down, about halfway across [the valley] and those German machine guns and big shells getting us hard.Under the command of Sergeant Bernard Early, four non-commissioned officers, including recently promoted Cpl. York, and thirteen privates were ordered to infiltrate behind the German lines to take out the machine guns. The group worked their way behind the Germans and overran the headquarters of a German unit, capturing a large group of German soldiers who were preparing a counter-attack against the U.S. troops. Early's men were contending with the prisoners when machine gun fire suddenly peppered the area, killing six Americans and wounding three others. The fire came from German machine guns on the ridge. The loss of the nine put Corporal York in charge of the seven remaining U.S. soldiers. As his men remained under cover, guarding the prisoners, York worked his way into position to silence the German machine guns. York recalled:
And those machine guns were spitting fire and cutting down the undergrowth all around me something awful. And the Germans were yelling orders. You never heard such a racket in all of your life. I didn't have time to dodge behind a tree or dive into the brush... As soon as the machine guns opened fire on me, I began to exchange shots with them. There were over thirty of them in continuous action, and all I could do was touch the Germans off just as fast as I could. I was sharp shooting... All the time I kept yelling at them to come down. I didn't want to kill any more than I had to. But it was they or I. And I was giving them the best I had.During the assault, six German soldiers in a trench near York charged him with fixed bayonets. York had fired all the rounds in his M1917 Enfield rifle, but drew his .45 colt pistol and shot all six soldiers before they could reach him.
German First Lieutenant Paul Jürgen Vollmer, commander of the First Battalion, 120th Landwehr Infantry, emptied his pistol trying to kill York while he was contending with the machine guns. Failing to injure York, and seeing his mounting losses, he offered in English to surrender the unit to York, who accepted. By the end of the engagement, York and his seven men marched 132 German prisoners back to the American lines.
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33 percent of respondents to a Newsweek poll didn’t know when the Declaration of Independence was adopted, 65 percent couldn’t say what happened at the Constitutional Convention, and 80 percent had no idea who was president during World War I.
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Marine Sergeant Dan Daly entered World War I as one of the United States’ most famous soldiers, having already won the Medal of Honor on two separate occasions for his service during the Boxer Rebellion and the U.S. occupation of Haiti. The 44-year-old continued to write his name into the history books during June 1918’s Battle of Belleau Wood, a month-long offensive that was one of the first major World War I battles fought by U.S. troops. On June 5, Daly bravely extinguished a fire on the verge of igniting a cache of explosive ammunition. Two days later, as his Marines were being shredded by enemy machine gun fire, Daly urged them to leave their cover and counterattack by supposedly screaming the famous words, “Come on, you sons of bitches! Do you want to live forever?!”
Daly’s near-suicidal courage was put on display once again on June 10, when he singlehandedly charged a German machine gun nest, killing its commander and taking 14 prisoners. That same day, he made several trips into “no man’s land” to drag wounded troops to safety. Daley was wounded later that month during a second solo rescue mission, and suffered two more injuries during the Meuse-Argonne offensive in October 1918. While he was again recommended for the Medal of Honor for his actions at Belleau Wood, the military balked at the prospect of any soldier receiving the award three times, and he was instead given the Distinguished Service Cross and the French Medaille Militaire. General Smedley Butler—himself a double Medal of Honor winner—would later describe Daly as, “the fightingest Marine I ever knew.”
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In the 2010 National Assessment of Educational Progress, nearly 80% of 12th graders selected the wrong answer when asked which country was North Korea’s ally in fighting the U.S. during the Korean War. Even worse, it was a multiple choice question, allowing students to choose between the Soviet Union, Japan, China, and Vietnam.
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The stories of heroism and bravery above are just a few. Again going back to The Story of World War II by Donald Miller there are hundreds of stories in that one book alone just like the one's above. The incredible deeds done to protect our freedom boggle the mind. What equally boggles the mind is the fact that soon, soon, they will all be forgotten. I'm afraid the once proud country that stood "as a shining light on a hill", the freest country history has ever seen, soon that country will be unrecognizable. Let's all take a moment or two this weekend to remember why there is a holiday called Memorial Day.
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