Books I read in 2021, Part II

In 2021 I read 18 books, and earlier this month I posted the first six of the dozen that had the most impact on me. Here are books 7-12 on my list of favorites.

7. Cat on a Hot Tin Roof by Tennessee Williams #1954. This play won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1955. Big Daddy and the machinations swirling around his fortune and his alcoholic sexually ambivalent favored son, Brick and his dissolute wife Maggie. She speaks wisdom that is applicable to our polarized country one year out from January 6: "Silence about a thing just magnifies it. It grows and festers in silence, becomes malignant . . ."

8. The First Wave: D-Day Warriors Who Led the Way to Victory in WW2 by Alex Kershaw #2019. Extraordinary heroism at work on the five invasion beaches and beyond by men who were the tip of the spear that pierced the Third Reich and destroyed fascism in the world, at least until it reared its ugly head here on home ground during the last enabling, potentially fatal presidency. When I visited the five beaches with the aid of a paid guide in 2019 with friends, it cracked us up when the guide referred the three beaches (Sword, Juno and Gold) stormed by the Britsh and Canadians as "the Commonwealth beaches." When I stood on Omaha Beach, the bloodiest beach to secure and a very near thing, I was standing on a place of now-lost American exceptionalism.

9. Das Reich by Max Hastings #2013. The bloody tale of the blood-soaked trail left across France by this elite SS Panzer Division as it made its way from garrison duty watching the coast in Southern France to the raging battle in Normandy after D-Day. Traveling mostly at night to avoid Allied air interdiction in the daylight, it took 10 days to arrive at the battlefield because the division stopped to exact terrible retribution upon innocent civilians almost every time it was attacked in any fashion by the French Resistance enroute--expending murderous German fury over the lost war on the hapless and helpless French population.

10. 1776 by David McCullough #2005. The book dragged on a bit as it covered a bewildering cast of colonial characters while it described the important events of the fashioning of our nation like Lexington and Concord, the Battle of Bunker Hill and finally Washington forcing the British to withdraw from Boston by maneuver rather than battle.

11. Six Frigates: The Epic History of the Founding of the US Navy by Ian W. Toll #2006. An interesting account of the early growth of the US Navy from gunboats guarding the rivers and coastline of the nasceant United State building warships able to challenge British warships in proper one-on-one situations and to project American power overseas, especially against the Barbary Pirates.

12. "A Few Acres Snow" The Saga of the French and Indian War by Robert Leckie #1996. A French minister consoled the French king who was lamenting losing Quebec and the upper Mississippi Valley to the British during this war by describing the loss as merely a few worthless acres in a winter wasteland while France still controlled rich sugar-cane islands in the Caribbean. How did that work out for the French?

The other six books were hardly worth mentioning but I did glean a few factoids and interesting tidbits from each of them, I suppose.

2021 Books--A half dozen

 I lost control of my blog in late 2020 and wrote about 60 posts in a nearby blog which now I can't locate.  C'est le guerre.  I seem to have found a tenuous route back to my original blog so copied straight from a FB post last year here are the half dozen most impactful books of the 18 I read last year.  I like summarizing lists.

In 2021 I read 18 books, the most I'd read since before I retired five years ago. In the next two days I'll list the dozen books that had the most impact on me.

Fifteen of the books were histories of some sort, focusing upon WW2 and the American Revolutionary War mostly but I also read a book on the Black Plague of the fourteenth century, the French and Indian War and the Civil War. One book was a play--I try to read a play a year--one book was a biography of an artist with lots of pictures of his drawings so it went down easy, and one book was literature, not fiction but literature as I try to limit any made-up story I read to be a classic as long as I usually only read one fictional tale (non-play) per year.

1. As I lay Dying by William Faulkner, #1930. I love Faulkner. Everybody should read Faulkner. Such scathing disapprobation of the racial inequities in the South, but also such love for its uniqueness. And its strong women, what depictions of them! There's subtle humor that's occasionally laugh-out-loud in them, like when the poor white trash family in this book can't afford to take an adult family member to the doctor when he breaks his leg, they try to fix it themselves by making him a cast out of concrete. But first they have to persuade the store owner to break open a 25-pound bag to sell them 10 cents worth of cement, which he finally does to get this noisy, smelly out-of-town riff-raff out of his store. Having a cement cast does not do the injured family member any good, it turns out. I suppose it was worth a try, in a poor-man's canny self-help sort of way.

2. The Conquering Tide: War In The Pacific Islands 1942-44 by Ian W. Toll, #2015. My Dad fought in the Pacific War with the First Marine Division at two horrific battles and was training to be in on the invasion of the Japanese mainland in 1946, with its projected one million American casualties, before we dropped the bomb which finally caused beaten Japan to surrender already. Sorry, but not sorry at all about that.

3. Twilight of the Gods: War in the Western Pacific 1944-45 by Ian W. Toll, #2020. The Americans ruthlessly and relentlessly brought the ruthless and implacable Japanese to the peace table just before the Russians' cynical, opportunistic and cheap land grab garnered a prized Japanese island for themselves and communism. The ensuing Cold War would never have been the same. The section on the peaceful occupation of Japan itself made the book fascinating and worthwhile.

4. The British Are Coming! The War For America 1775-77 by Rick Atkinson, #2019. Volume One of the Revolution Trilogy by the Pulitzer Prize winning author of the Liberation Trilogy (WW2, ETO), which I read last year. I can't wait for volumes two and three to come out.

5. Stars In Their Courses, The Gettysburg Campaign June-July 1863 by Shelby Foote #1994, 1963. This is a "book" lifted straight out of Foote's magisterial Civil War Trilogy and deposited whole as a history of the Gettysburg campaign, with all of its star-fated actors, Lee who lost the war on the afternoon of Pickett's Charge, Meade who steadfastly defended his high ground that couldn't be taken but just as steadfastly refused to come out of his redoubt and attack a defeated foe and therefore consigned the nation to another two years of bloodletting, Reynolds who died after setting the Union line in its winning position, Ewell who hid behind the words "if practicable" in Lee's order of the first day to attack the reeling enemy and knock him off of his dominant position and therefore failed to unhinge the Union line while it was still possible and assured the loss for the Confederacy of the key battle in North American history. I read the massive trilogy back in the nineties and still remember it as a great read, even if written from a Southern POV. Every American adult should know something, or more, about the Battle of Gettysburg, it is where slavery was doomed to die in North America.

6. The Pacific Crucible: War at Sea in the Pacific 1941-42 by Ian W. Toll #2012. The desperate first two years of WW2 in the Pacific, at least until the Battle of Midway changed the course of WW2 in five minutes on June 22, 1942 when American dive-bombers from the US carriers Enterprise and Yorktown arrived simultaneously over the attacking Japanese fleet by happenstance from different directions and battle groups and sank three of the four Japanese carriers in the enemy's taskforce in the most momentous five minutes of WW2. Japan never seriously regained the initiative again during the war, just as Nazi Germany never seriously regained the initiative again after the Battle of Stalingrad was fought to a standstill in 1942, before the Russians annihilated the overextended and encircled German Sixth Army in January 1943.

Two Memories

 I'm trying to remember occurrences in this year that wasn't. when the coronavirus closed down our lives in March and the USA's non-response to it was akin to allowing the Japanese to invade America in 1942 and now they're poised upon the heights of Arlington ready to overwhelm DC on the morrow. I guess FDR wouldn't be one of the Triumphant Threesome off Presidents if he had followed Trump's incompetent response to everything (which gets lots of people killed) and thrown up his hands and said, The Virginia and Maryland governors need to act and if they need combat boots or web belts for their militias, I could assign my son-in-law to seek contracts worldwide to help procure those.

My last post detailed the one thing during this year-that-wasn't that was normal that I indulged in. Movie-going, I went to see Parasite on Valentine's Day, the Academy Award winning film that, well, sucked. I got incredibly sick that night that made me see God and for the next two weeks I thought I might die as I coughed my lungs out. I wonder what I had, but there were no reliable or helpful tests then, despite the president's subsequent claim that If you want a test you can get a test.

So now it's time to remember my two most memorable moments this year without referring to my daily notes, and I can do that. I went to a wedding party in January in the District that was thrown by a supermarket magnate that was way over the top; I boogied with my love and barely made the last subway to Virginia and expected moreso the rest of the year. But no. the coronavirus intervened and way later, in July when we were all housebound, I come out of my house on July 4th and saw 500 feet up a B-29 bomber fly over my house escorted by four P-51 Mustangs, all restored WW2 warplanes which had flown on Independence Day over the National Mall and were headed to IAD then, and in that instant I thought of my dad who endured 180 days of intense combat in two battles in the Pacific and my mother who got out of her small-town as a teenager by traveling to CA to work in the war industries (where she met my dad at an USO dance).

July 4th in The Year That Wasn't

My neighbors were having a backyard barbecue on the Fourth of July with some guests invited over.  We are friendly, banter across the fence lines, and if I needed something that I couldn't do for myself, I would ask them if they were around.  Like the time I had a splinter in the back of my head and I went over to their house and asked A to dig it out with a needle, which he hesitantly did (I had to tell him at the moment of hesitation, Go Deep, Man, I know it's bleeding but I'll be alright) did, since I couldn't do it to or for myself because I couldn't see the splinter directly.

The brother of the lady of the house is my gardener and has become a friend of mine, although he is notably a proud, prickly man, easily offended.  He was there so I knew if I went outside my door where they would see me, they would call me over to join them.  But six feet of social distancing over there more like four feet or even much less and not one of them was wearing a mask.  They were engaged in eating and drinking, after all.  I knew if I joined them they would pile me with food, which I always enjoy since, being from South America, the meats are made the South American way and is invariably delicious.  In these extraordinary times, I did not want to join that party.  The pandemic, you know.  I don't want to become part of the problem overwhelming this forsaken (by its leaders) nation by becoming sick with Covid19 or maybe, getting it again.

I surreptitiously drew my curtains and went up to my bedroom to read.  My dinner was slowly roasting in the oven.  My cell phone had rung, I saw it was from my gardener but I did not answer it.  I left my phone downstairs, recharging.  But then I heard thunder in the sky.  A low, loud roar was coming nearer, from the east, the direction of the National Mall.  I knew from the morning's paper that The Blue Angels and the Thunderbirds and some WW2 vintage planes were flying over the Mall at about that time and perhaps they were flying west to Dulles to land.  I ran to the door and stepped out and was rewarded with the majestic sight of a B-29 bomber flying overhead at about 500 feet accompanied by four much smaller P-51 Mustang fighters, one on each of the four corners of an imaginary large square with the plane that dropped the two atomic bombs on Japan and ended WW2 before a million more Americans (and untold Japanese) had to die, one of them being my father with the First Marine Division.

Those twenty or thirty seconds as I watched the formation recede to the west imprinted in my memory banks a sight that I will never forget.  I saw vintage WW2 planes fly over the Mall in 2015 in commemoration of the 70th anniversary of the end of the war but they were much higher and not so easily distinguishable.  This was special and worth what followed, I think.  (B-25 bombers fly over the Mall in 2015.)

I was immediately called over to my neighbor's backyard, now that I had emerged.  I went, sat in a lawn chair between two people who were each perhaps six feet away, or perhaps five feet of four feet.  I ate the food heaped upon my plate with insistence and pride, and enjoyed myself with my neighbors and some strangers for about an hour, being neighborly.  I went home then, turned off my oven and saved that food for dinner the next night.  I saw that I had been called four times by my gardener the previous hour with voicemails calling me over.  I hope he doesn't think I rebuffed him by not answering, did I say he's prickly?  Leaving, I was going to go out their front gate but someone in that direction executed a robust sneeze, without a mask or covering the sneeze in any way, so I executed a hard right and went out the other way using their back gate.

I like my neighbors and most of their relatives and many of their friends, a lot, but anxiety gnawed at me throughout the hour as I thought about reckless exposure.  Anxiety still gnaws upon me eleven days later because now I'm still a few days removed form the outside festering time for the deadly disease.  I've quarantined since then (i.e. I haven't changed my behavior of the last four months one whit) but a few nights ago I awoke in the early morning hours and had severe shortness of breath that didn't abate even when I sat up in bed.  It reminded me of my acute oxygen hunger I experienced for three or four days in Leadville in 2001 when I stayed at my sister's place there at over ten thousand feet with my three children during my interminable divorce (it was altitude sickness) and I was desperate to get a true or deep breath.  That was how I felt in February for two or three nights, except then I was coughing violently, when I was sick for two weeks with respiratory problems.  But those night terrors haven't returned the last two nights so perhaps it was just anxiety.  I don't have a cough, I just feel vaguely "off" with semi-sore lungs, as I have felt since February.

That was my Fourth.  How was yours in these extraordinary times?

Happy Birthday, Dad. Glad to have known you.

My father had his 95th birthday this month. As is my wont on birthdays important to me, I contributed a dollar coin, along with my regular contribution, to the collection basket in church on the Sunday closest to it as a talisman to marshal my thoughts and prayers for him. It's what I did for my middle child as well earlier in the month near his birthday. Then I reflected on that person as I knelt for a few moments after taking communion and prayed for him, in the ethereal or the physical world.

I didn't have any specific thoughts that struck me about my child earlier in the month (I haven't heard from or anything about him in 13 years) other than I prayed that he was alive, well and happy and asked God to continue to give me strength to keep on loving him as a father would.  But as I knelt in prayer for my father at a later service (he died at age 61), something fantastic happened, and for 3 or 4 minutes his life flashed through my mind's eye amidst images I saw of him, even 60 or more years ago, during my life and the superimposed images of him as he was when he was a young man or a boy, even decades before I was born, created from memories of what I knew or imagined of his life when he was growing up and a struggling young family man during and after the war before he became a successful (and affluent) Wall Street lawyer.

I saw him as a red-headed boy hunting with his dad, or alone, in the wetlands around his hometown in Winona, Minnesota. I saw him as a stand-out student and athlete at his boarding school (I subsequently went to the same one) and taking weekends to listen to jazz in New York City and during his matriculation at Princeton walking down Nassau Street. Then he went off to war and survived two harrowing battles in the Pacific, and I saw him at the few supposedly funny or descriptive combat tales I heard (one involved him bathing and unarmed on Peleliu when a squad of armed Japanese troops came upon him--[pause] ["What happened!"]--""They all got away.") (and another involved him getting hit by lightning during a rainstorm on Okinawa when the bolt came down his radio antenna as he was transmitting radio coordinates with the nearby fleet while he was set up on a ridgeline--["I remember hearing a tremendous noise and watching sparks fly from one set of fingertips to the other."] ["What happened next?"]--"After a few moments of sitting there, I got up, ambled about for a minute or two, decided I was all right, and I went back to transmitting." I saw the sparks fly as I knelt in prayer, and I saw him return and greet his wife, my mother, after being away for two years and all the gnawing anxieties about the continuing marital compatibility of this man and woman, who knew each other for mere weeks before they wed as teenagers a few days or weeks before he shipped out, fade away in those first few delicious moments of reconciliation. I saw this war veteran attend four years of college in snowbound Northfield, Minnesota, then three years of law school in New Haven, Connecticut, where I was born.

Then I saw him through my eyes and my long-stored memories at our first apartment in Falls Church, Virginia, with him working in the District at a law firm. I saw him in our yard in autumn lift too large a load of raked leaves in a blanket with a grunt and stagger off to the metal barrel where we burned them. I watched our move to Staten Island when he was transferred to New York City by his law firm and him fix up our ramshackle house there, and stagger through snow a yard high after a blizzard to get to the bus stop so he could go to work.  Then I saw him moving boxes as we moved from Stapleton to Westerleigh, I saw him breaking up a fight on our porch between a gang of four toughs and a friend of mine being bullied and me when we accepted the challenge, were being overwhelmed and dad sent them packing with that war-instilled killer's look (the only time I ever saw it) in his eyes.   I sat beside him again as he drove me to my boarding school, or picked me up from it. I watched from above as he steadily climbed a 14,000 foot peak in Colorado during a summer vacation because he thought, unknown to me because I was already at the peak and fine, that I was in trouble; when I saw him I waved and he thereupon immediately took a break and smoked a cigarette, probably in a fury, before he continued more slowly to the top. I saw him in Brooklyn when we moved there, and at his retirement house in Santa Fe. I saw him in his sickbed in the adobe house there when he had lung cancer, and I watched him die. These were a precious three or four minutes for me as I knelt with my eyes pressed closed and my hands clasped in prayer earlier this month focusing on him.  I murmured "God bless you, Dad," just as I had said that terrible summer morning in Santa Fe thirty three years ago when I bid goodbye to his spectral being as it slipped from his failing, ravaged body and passed over to God's right hand. The flashing images inside my head completed, the spell broke and I opened my eyes and sat in my pew. After the final hymn was sung, I went forth from the church more enlightened than when I entered it.

The Eleventh Hour . . .

Veterans Day.  Thanks to all who served, including my dad who endured 90 days of murderous combat in Peleliu and 90 more days of hellacious combat on Okinawa during the war against the Japanese Empire.

Thanks to my Uncle Harry, who was a gunnery control officer in Admiral Halsey's Fast Carrier Task Force aboard the light cruiser USS Vincennes during intense naval combat in the Pacific War, earning a bronze star defending his ship against land-based fighter and bomber planes during a carrier strike against Tokyo.  Also during WW2 my Uncle Bill served in the Philippines and my Uncle Bob served as a pilot in a B-26 in the Mediterranean Theatre, and my mom left her hometown in a small farming community in Colorado to go work in the West Coast war industries.

Also thanks to my forebears who served, such as my Grandad, my father's father, who served aboard a destroyer in the North Sea during the Great War.  I had several relatives who served the Union cause in the Civil War, including Daniel Webster Pierce from New Hampshire who was captured, served out the war in a Rebel POW camp and died shortly after his release from having his health wrecked during his confinement.

Thanks to my brother who served in Beirut during the time when the Marine barracks was blown up. And thanks to my relatives and friends who served in Vietnam (a Lamberton, from Georgia, is on the Wall); and to my relatives and friends who have served during the Terror Wars (a friend lies in Arlington National Cemetery who was killed in Afghanistan).

Bedford

On the last day of my week-long car trip I was in Virginia and went to two reverential sites in south central Virginia (plus the UVA campus where two of my children were born and I earned a law degree in my late-thirties) that defined our country.  The first was Bedford, a small farming community of 2500 souls where unknown to its inhabitants, in a terrible half-hour on Omaha Beach in Normandy on June 6, 1944, D-Day, twenty of their sons were cut down in the first wave of the Allied assault on Hitler's Fortress Europa.  It would be a full month before the residents of this sleepy town would know, in three terrible days in July when the War Department released casualty lists from the battle and sent telegrams to the affected families that their sons, husbands, brothers, and fathers had been among the 80% carnage rate of the first wave on that beach during the assault, the true cost of our freedom.

That was a different generation, a breed hardened as children who often went hungry during the Great Depression where 25% of Americans were out of work, and payment for services and goods were done in a barter economy.  My grandfather in Colorado, a dentist, took chickens in payment for dental work in his small farming community there, Doc Fox, and for all I know and highly suspect, no payment at all, only a promise, very often fulfilled later, or not.

This is the America I love.  When I was a young boy, practically everyone's household had a veteran of WW2, tightlipped, many having seen the elephant, like my father did in the Pacific War, learning there in the crucible that having to depend unthinkingly and instantaneously upon boys from Brooklyn, Birmingham, Boise and Bath for their very survival, that American greatness depended upon cooperation with all other Americans who were there and learned the same lesson, leaving out the lunatic fringe who never went which unfortunately, we see influential in a commanding way as "victims" today.

Heroes, those twenty two or more men from Bedford, (more Bedford Boys died during the Bocage Campaign in Normandy).  The National D-Day Memorial is there in Bedford, symbolizing American greatness, belying the notion of American Carnage as espoused recently by people who never knew or forgot our greatness.

In Bedford, Virginia

Yesterday was the 75th anniversary of D-Day in Normandy, which was a brilliant success, albeit a hard fought battle involving close to ten thousand casualties and over a thousand deaths for the Americans alone, and in retrospect, it was a close thing; many things could have gone wrong and changed the outcome perhaps.  In Bedford, Virginia, resides the National D-Day Memorial.

Why Bedford, a small out-of-the-way town in rural Virginia?  From Stephen Ambrose's book D-Day, p.328: "About 60% of the men of Company A came from one town, Bedford, VA: for Bedford, the first 15 minutes at Omaha was an unmitigated disaster.  ... all the Germans around the heavily defended Vierville draw concentrated their fire on Company A.  When the ramps on the Higgins boats dropped, the Germans just poured the machine-gun, artillery, and mortar fire on them.  It was slaughter.  Of the 200+ men of the company, only a couple of dozen survived, and virtually all of them were wounded."

Can you imagine the dreadful rumors that swept through this small, thighs-knit farming community in the days after the well-publicized lands in France?  Especially after the first few Western Union bicycle messengers pulled up in front of residences in town and delivered telegrams to the households, a sure sign of a death in the family or a missing-in-action notification during the war.

These heroes who never returned home again, the vast majority of the men who left that community for the war, most of them lost in the first hour  of the greatest military enterprise in world history that literally saved world civilization, are called the Bedford Boys.  Freedom involves great and noble sacrifice sometimes, far from home and loved ones.

75 years ago today...

...the greatest military endeavor in history was undertaken and it succeeded after a ferocious fight and it literally saved world civilization.  On June 6, 1944, American, British and Canadian forces stormed ashore on five Normandy beaches, catching the defending Germans by surprise and by gaining a lodgment on that Longest Day, put a crack in Hitler's Fortress Europa, a growing fissure that a summer of desperate fighting by the mighty German military machine (two thirds of it was fighting the Soviets in the east, thankfully) that the Germans couldn't stanch and seal off or rebuff.  (The killing ground on Omaha beach.)

On Omaha Beach 1,000 GIs were killed that day trying to get ashore, yet succeeding waves of Americans continued to enter the deadly maelstrom and the day and the beach was won, by a thread.  On Utah beach to the right more effect was achieved the naval bombardment and a bombing run by the Army Air Force and the troops met light resistance and pushed on inland.  On the left the three Commonwealth beaches, Gold, Juno and Sword, were being contested and won by the Allies.  (The Canadians coincidentally aimed their initial thrust at this unique stand-alone house on Juno Beach, now known as the Canada House.)

Virtually every single father of the friends I had as a boy was a WWII veteran, whether they saw action or not, they served. My uncles served in the Mediterranean, the Philippines, the vast Pacific and my father served on two hard-won islands on the road to Tokyo.  (A lonely statue in Normandy a couple of miles off Gold beach of a weary British soldier resting at the end of the fighting on the Longest Day, marking the furthest point inland the Allies reached that day.)

My mother left her home in a small Colorado farming town on the plains as a teenager and went to Sn Diego (and met my father before he was shipped off overseas) to help build airplanes.  The Greatest Generation.  (Quiet reigns at the Canadian cemetery in Normandy as hushed visitors visit the gravestones of fallen Allied heroes; the American cemetery overlooks Omaha beach and the British cemeteries are scattered about France but the biggest one in Normandy is in Bayeux, largely still looking as it did, a Norman medieval town, because it was the largest city seized by the Allies on that day, the largest city, Caen, took all summer to acquire and it was a pile of rubble when finally taken.)

Normandy

Seventy five years ago, on June 6, 1944, the Allied forces (ABC--Americans, British and Canadians ) landed on five D-Day beaches and wrenched back Europe into light from the darkness it had descended into under Hitler.  Starting closest to Paris, on the most direct line into the heart of Germany to end the scourge of Nazism was Sword beach (british), Juno beach (Canadian), Gold Beach (British), Omaha beach (American) and on the Cotentin peninsula, Utah beach (American).  (Desperate moments on Omaha beach 75 years ago.)

The British were supposed to take Caen, the Norman capital with its important road junctions out of the confining bocage country and into open tank country, on the first day but they failed to do so and hard fighting lay ahead for the rest of the summer in Normandy as German armored reinforcements steadily came on to be engaged in a stalemate by the British and Canadians as the Americans loaded up a "right punch" to finally break out of Normandy at the end of August.  Certainly Operation Overlord was no sure thing, it was a close thing perhaps, there was no Plan B if the landings failed, and what I discerned from tramping over the beaches for two days was how far apart the beaches were and how, with a little luck and a better performance by the Luftwaffe, the Germans might have exploited the initial gaps between the five beachheads and driven the Allies into the sea in piecemeal fashion.  (The long walk in from the low tide point on Gold beach.)

The most success was had at Gold beach as the British Green Howards drove almost to Bayeux the first day and established a firm lodgment with some depth, although not as far inland as the plans called for.  The three Allied Airborne units sowed confusion in the German rear and prevented coherent counterattacks on the beaches, and the Americans poured ashore on Utah beach where they met negligible resistance thanks to an effective naval and air bombing that worked as planned there alone amongst the five beaches.  (A Green Howard at rest on the tip of the spear on the evening of the Longest Day.)

Tragedy ensued on Omaha beach as the first wave was slaughtered, and off Juno beach as SS troopers systematically executed Canadian POWs in cold blood at Ardenne Abbey.  But our forces prevailed and it was very poignant to spend two days walking in the footsteps of heroes and giants on the beaches and battlefields and in the cemeteries there.  (The Price. The Canadian cemetery, one of many Allied cemeteries in Normandy.)

 

Juno

Rhea and Eric's plans for their trip to Normandy in the spring included a full day tour, escorted by a sought-after personal guide, of the two American D-Day beaches, Omaha (the really famous one) and Utah.  There were three other beach landings that day in history, Gold and Sword by the British sandwiched around Juno by the Canadians, quaintly referred to by local guides as the "Commonwealth" beaches.  (Omaha Beach.)

My two friends indicated an interest to their British guide in touring those beaches the subsequent day, and he gave them the names of other guides who might accommodate them on short notice (personal tours are locked up months in advance, especially since this year is the 75th anniversary of the landings).  These guides when contacted all lauded my friends as being the rare Americans who showed interest in the British and Canadian beaches, or even knowledge of the fact that there were other beaches involved in D-Day beyond Omaha and Utah.  (Juno Beach.)

My friends locked in the second personal tour.  There's so much to do and so many places to see in Normandy, where the fighting raged all summer in 1944 before the Americans broke out of the bocage country at the end of August and unlocked the German defensive containment of the Allied lodgment on the Cotentin Peninsula, that an overview, with an emphasis in depth on the British and Canadian beaches is warranted, even for Americans.  (Utah Beach.)

Meanwhile, I pondered the invite to come along extended by my two friends.  As Eric the journalist put it to me--If not now, when?  (Sword Beach.)

The 75th Anniversary

When I was walking through the USN Memorial last year at noon on December 6th, the Navy band and honor guard were practicing, and I heard one passerby ask her companion what the servicemen were commemorating (practicing for, the next day), and her friend replied, "Oh, the observance of D-Day, which I think is tomorrow."  Of course, this is the typical shocking ignorance on the part of many Americans of our own hallowed history, but at least the commentator had one factoid correct in that she identified the correct war involved, World War II.

Of course, the commemoration the next day was to solemnly remember the dastardly Pearl Harbor attack by Japan on December 7, 1941, which propelled the US overnight into the already raging global conflagration.  Inexplicably, Nazi Germany, which already had its hands full trying to subjugate the vast expanse of Soviet Russia with its untold millions of people, and which was concurrently battling the world's greatest then-existing empire as well in Great Britain, declared war on the US a few days later and the rest is history.

D-Day followed two and a half years later, when American, British and Canadian troops stormed Fortress Europa by coming ashore on five Normandy beaches in France on June 6, 1944, the greatest military operation in history, and within a year the Nazi scourge was totally obliterated and the Japanese East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, a fancy name for a brutal colonialist exploitation scheme, was consigned to history's scrapheap a few months later as well.  This summer is the 75th anniversary of the D-Day landings, an event that will be celebrated in France and the world over.

My first and foremost running buddy, Rhea, who last decade moved to the left coast with her husband Eric, is a military buff and they contacted me recently about their plans to tour Normandy later this spring and to specifically hire a guide for a close-in and personal inspection of the two American D-Day beaches, Utah and the infamous Omaha beach.  Although they know I have never been outside of North America, they invited me to come along.

Happy Birthday, Dad

My father was born in January in the mid-twenties.  Obviously he came of age during the Depression and as a young man was thrust into the maelstrom of combat in World War Two to become a man practically overnight.

Then he returned from overseas, a husband already, to use the GI Bill to go on to receive his higher education at Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota.  Somewhere in my house is a picture of a handsome young man, exuding confidence and grace, standing with snow shovel in hand outside a Quonset hut living unit next to a mountain of shoveled snow, alongside a beautiful young wife looking lovingly at him.

Yale Law school followed, where he had three children, including me.  Three more children followed as he practiced law at a Wall Street law firm and engaged in civic and humanitarian work.  I am most proud of the fact that he used his entire yearly vacation time two years in a row to go to the deep south in the mid-sixties after passage of the Civil Rights Voting Act to help register historically disenfranchised voters, a dangerous and potentially deadly task in those days.

Warrior, husband, father, son, brother, grandad, activist, lawyer, the list could go on and on for this principled man. Taken away way to early at age 61 by cancer, I still miss you and think about you often; I love you dad!

A veteran is laid to rest.

On the fourth day of my trip I arose at the crack of dawn and went to Vandemere's waterfront to capture my sunrise picture.  Then I spoke with a local, Max, who had built a very unusual hurricane-proof house on the waterfront using waterproof fiberboard panels secured to the structure's steel skeleton comprising of a central embedded spine with overhead and deck-level girders emanating out like the spokes of a wheel to create a raised, round house that proved to be impervious to Hurricane Florence, which caused extensive damage to the town's low-lying buildings otherwise.  The roof is of  flat and made of waterproof fiberboard so it is leakproof and doesn't require additional covering and a mostly round house does well in high winds.

Max, an engineer, knows Jimmy well, and graciously explained the house's construction to me and gave me a tour of his new-age home.  I returned to Jimmy's house in time to accompany him on a drive to Cary where a World War Two veteran, the father of a friend of his, was being laid to rest with full military honors.  John Welsey Dickens was a sailor on a destroyer who was present in Tokyo Bay when Japan surrendered, having survived a typhoon at sea six months earlier called Halsey's Hurricane which capsized and sank three other destroyers and caused great damage to the fleet.

The memorial for this hero, who carved out a successful and prosperous post-war life in NC, was moving and his graveside service was very poignant, with a navy bugler playing taps as the US flag covering the coffin was folded up and presented to the family.  Jimmy's friend wept quietly, overcome with grief during this somber ceremony at the passing of her father.  Cary proved to be a nice little inland town, as Jimmy and I discovered walking around before the memorial, looking at houses.

My favorite part of Cary's small downtown, besides its stately pre-war theatre-turned-movie-house, was its paean to the free press, embodied in a statue of a newsboy hawking newspapers on a street corner.  After the interment, we returned to Vandemere and enjoyed a special bottle of season's ale, a Christmas gift to me from a friend of mine with whom I had spent Christmas day at her house.  Jimmy and I made plans for the morrow, and we decided to visit another seaport to look at houses there, a town where Jimmy had spent many a delightful day being with his friend so recently aggrieved by the loss of her father, as she lived in a nearby community.

A Trip

I finally took a little car trip beyond going to Columbus as I recover from my third and hopefully last eye surgery and I went south to visit relatives and friends.  The first day I drove to Hampton to see my cousin and her husband and enjoyed a day walking on the beach with her and a dinner of a fried seafood sampler plate that evening at a waterfront restaurant.

The next day I continued on to Vandemere, passing by gas at $1.69 a gallon along the rural highway, and enjoyed a dinner of spaghetti and sausage links prepared by Jim, my friend from college, in his house on stilts on the waterfront.  Jim, despite the incredible natural beauty of his rustic coastal location, might be moving to another town where there are more sailing opportunities, so we looked at houses near the water in a seaport town the next day and indulged in sightseeing, including sampling a tasty local brew at the town's brewery during happy hour.

 Then came a somber day where we attended the funeral of a World War Two veteran who survived Halsey's Typhoon during his service in the Pacific War, on a destroyer no less, which yawed during the tempestuous storm to within 2 degrees of its keel over point, learning in the big blow's aftermath that three other destroyers within the fleet capsized with great loss of life.  Then came another day of looking at houses and sightseeing in a seaport town.

I got up early and drove back to DC the next day, having had a fun and satisfying little car trip of about a thousand miles.  I saw people on this trip that I knew from my life that stretched back decades, to even when I was married, and before.

Do you read?

I read a little in 2018.  I wish I had read more, but my vision was occluded by my retina degeneration and I spent many weeks in recovery.  Reading books for information, knowledge or pleasure is a lifelong multifaceted enterprise--history, philosophy, biography, literature, fiction, the sciences, great books, poli-sci, but I think many modern Americans will default to a one minute search of wikipedia, and done. Knowledge stored and confirmed.

Here's the baker's dozen list of books I read in 2018, in order of how significant I thought they were to me.  Past is  prologue, and knowledge is power.

To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf.  This book took me a year to read and I read it in response to a course I took on Victorian female authors, whom I had never read as a boy growing up in the 1960s.  The book was very dense and went on very long but it had its interesting moments, and now I can read a novel by Jane Austen and be done with this enlightening quest.

Legs by William Kennedy.  Crime in the 1930s brought to us (along with the Mafia and scoffing at laws) by the Prohibition Amendment.  Molding our country's more's through constitutional amendments, and this novel describes the unintended aftermaths.

1493 by C Charles C. Mann.  The Columbian Exchange, which was mostly one-way, foodstuffs towards Europe, diseases to the Americas.  This book was very interesting but it went on too long, getting into very obscure subjects.

Codename Downfall by Thomas Allen and Norman Polmar.  The American plan to invade Japan in 1945 and 1946.  It would have been very bloody, involving millions of casualties and probably would have seen the tactical use of nuclear and chemical weapons on the battlefield and resulted in a Japan divided into a communist north and a democratic south, just like in Korea.

Why Germany Nearly Won by Steve Merctante.  Germany (the Nazis) acted very badly and lost World War II.  The Americans, British and Canadians stormed Fortress Europa on D-Day in 1944 and won the war in ten months but meanwhile the Soviet forces were tying up two thirds of the Wehrmacht's forces.  Not that I feel sorry or grateful for the Russians, they participated with the Nazis in dismembering Poland in 1939 which was the naked invasion that started World War II.  The Russians did most of the fighting against the Nazis for four years but they got what they wrought.

Isaac's Storm by Erik Larson.  The greatest natural disaster in US history, a hurricane that devastated Galveston and killed 15,000 Americans.

The Storm of the Century by Al Roker. Yep, 15,000 Americans drowned in Texas in 1900.  A story of meteorology, racism and fake news.

Operation Sea Lion by Leo McKinstry.  Would the English have thrown the Nazis back into the sea in 1940, and thereby saved the world we now know?  America barely helped, but thank the lord that the British developed radar and produced the Spitfire fighter and barely saved history.

The Origins of the Second World War in the Pacific by Akira Irtiye.  The war actually started in 1931 when the Japanese threatened then invaded China.  Japan couldn't actually subjugate all of China to end the fighting and had its own Vietnam there.

Asiatic Land Battles by Trevor Dupuy.   Yep, we beat the Japanese, with some Australian and British assistance.  Ours was more of a naval and aerial war, but there was ground fighting in Burma and on the islands, large and small, in the Pacific.

World War Two, The Battle of the Bulge Re-Assessed by Charles Whiting.  No matter how you look at it, the Allies won.  The Nazis threw their last reserves against American forces in the Ardennes in December 1944 in the greatest battle in U.S. history, and thereby greatly aided the Soviet takeover of Eastern Europe.

The Profiler by Pat Brown. My guilty pleasure, crime scenes deciphered (I was a policeman for nine years before I went to law school).

Dragon Teeth by Michael Crichton.  Another "found" manuscript by a science fiction author who died more than a decade ago.

Flipping the Tenth: The final Sunday

On a beautiful fall day I travelled twenty miles outside of the beltway to canvass in Virginia's Tenth Congressional District, held by the GOP for four decades. Not after tomorrow!

In an affluent compact subdivision of narrow culture-de-sacs sprouting off secondary through-roads like buds off a branch, I knocked on 59 doors in the hope of speaking to 81 registered voters and had a response from about half the houses.  The energy to vote was palpable as, unstated, a referendum on Trump two years in.  The door-answerer in a couple of houses gave me guarded, laconic answers to my conversational questions about how they were inclined to vote and I got the message to back off and I thanked them for speaking with me and left, realizing the favorable contrast of polite tight-lippedness to the unhinged threat to shoot me in the initial exchange, as happened to me further west in the district on my second day of canvassing.

I ran into a lot of pockets of fervent occupants on my dedicated who had plans for the whole household to vote for the democratic challenger Jennifer Wexton against the republican incumbent congresswoman Barbara Comstock. A man who answered at one house where I was seeking four registered voters said that he was a fifth occupant of the house, and all five were voting for Wexton.  Is that a signal of what's coming down tomorrow, or an outlier in this "safe" red district?

We're all Americans, and all (except for Indians) immigrants.  We all work together, and get together to point towards a greater future for our country, like the great cross-pollination of southerners and northerners, city-dwellers and rural boys, easterners and westerners in the great American wave of soldiers who swept across the Pacific and the Atlantic in WW2 winning that tragic conflagration by cooperating magnificently for a more humane world by the Greatest Generation, my parents and for many Americans, their grandparents.

Feelin' Sorry on Easter

Easter Sunday falls on April 1st this year.  I remember another year when it also fell on April 1st, and am keenly aware of yet another year when it did so.

The last time I remember Easter Sunday being on the first day of April, I was a senior in boarding school, run down from my scholastic workload and speaking on the phone with my Dad.  I was feeling sorry for myself, going on and on about the several rejections I had received from colleges I'd applied to, and I bitterly noted that it was Easter Sunday, supposedly a time for hopeful change but here I was in the throes of rejection and feeling hopeless after four hard years away at this school.

My Dad was trying to be encouraging, saying that it was Harvard's, Antioch's and Colorado College's loss and the University of Colorado was a fine school, and since I had noted the date, perhaps I should reflect that Easter was traditionally a time of renewal and rebirth.  "Yeah," I said cynically, "what a joke, April 1st, Easter Sunday, so full of hope and don't you know it's also April Fools Day."

My Dad said quietly to his complaining 17-year old son, "The last Easter Sunday I spent that was also April Fools Day, as you note, was when I was put ashore on Okinawa in 1945 with the rest of the First Marine Division."  It was a teaching moment, a reference to the opening day of one of the worst battles of World War II, which produced 50,000 American casualties and that he participated in at the tender age of 20, and I was never so embarrassed by the juxtaposition of such a stark contrast of things young men are faced with.

Movies

Last year I saw ten movies.  One I can't remember, but the others were, in loose order of how I liked them, these, although I might have the exact titles wrong:

Dunkirk.  A rousing, well-told spectacle about the British evacuation by boat lift of their surrounded army from the French mainland in 1940 during the fall of France.  It might have saved the world from the scourge of Nazism, although as Churchill drily noted, wars are not won by evacuations.

Darkest Hour.  Another Dunkirk era tale, this time focusing on the lonely struggle of Winston Churchill to keep Britain in the fight during their darkest hour of World War II, and thereby maybe saving the world from the scourge of Nazism, once America finally got in the fight a year and a half later.

Beauty and the Beast.  Yeah, a musical.  I got dragged to it under false pretenses but I liked it.

Hidden Figures.  A stirring (and true) tale of black women's fight against not only sexism but racism.

The Batman Leggo Movie.  We sneaked into it after another show.  It was funny.

Despicable Me 3.  We sneaked into it after another show.  It was funny.

Thor.  It was deadpan funny, inspiring, well-paced and well done.

A Monster Calls.  It was about a tree in the cemetery, is what I remember.  And fatherhood, I think.

Fist Fight.  It was dreadful and unwatchable, something about a beleaguered schoolteacher in a tough school.  We walked out after 20 minutes and snuck into another show.

Reading a Little

In accord with the chaotic year just past, I only read 8 books in 2017.  I am currently reading three other books simultaneously but I am bogged down in all three, although one has become more informative and interesting near the end (I have ten more dense pages to go on a study by an academic on Japan's rush to war with the U.S. in 1941), another book I'll eventually struggle through because it is classic literature by Virginia Woolf but I'm not getting its point yet, and the last one is a tedious survey of the last 500 years of community histories following the Columbian Exchange.  I expect you'll read about these books next year here.

The best book I read was Hell to Pay by D.M. Giangreco, copyright 2009 & 2017, a detailed study of detailed American and Japanese war plans in 1945 for the Americans' final assault on the Japanese Empire's home islands in 1945 (on Kyushu) and 1946 (on Hokkaido).  It would have been hell, with a million casualties on the American side and ten million or more on the Japanese side, with tactical use of nuclear bombs by the Americans on the battlefield, over which the American infantrymen would traverse because of the immature realization at the time of radioactive aftereffects.  It was gruesome if laborious reading to me because my Dad was a combat Marine in the theatre, with two horrific battles already engaged in (Peleliu and Okinawa), and he almost certainly would have been killed at age 21 in the bloody assault.  Perhaps you can already guess how I feel about the use of two nuclear bombs on Japanese cities (which induced Japan to surrender) and whether its use in Asia was "racist" or not (these bombs would certainly have been used on Germany when available if that country hadn't already been overcome).  Japan had over 15,000 radar-evading wooden-framed kamikaze planes hidden away in hardened, hidden hangars for the final battle (three times as many as the American planners reckoned on), thousands of similarly radar-invisible wooden high speed suicide boats collected for use against the Allied armada, and many combat-hardened divisions brought over from China dug in at and behind all the invasion beaches (they knew by deduction exactly where the Allies would land), just waiting for the ultimate Gotterdammerung.

A close second as the best book I read last year is The Unvanquished by William Faulkner, a novel published in 1938.  Using exquisite language and spellbinding descriptions, Faulkner deals head-on with the racial problem in America, focusing on the racist South where racism was casual and non-controversial, a white author using the N-word liberally and casually.  Because, like it or not, that's the way it actually was back then, whether you want to deny it and ban it or not.  I loved this book, about the family majordomo, Granny, who keeps the family together during the waning days of the Civil War when the menfolk are away fighting.  With the help of her teen grandson's companion slave, a very clever boy the same age as her kin and raised in the household with him, she bilks the invading Yankees out of much livestock (which she distributes to the needy) and scores of contraband (liberated) slaves (whom she sent back to their "homes," where else did they have to go?) who represented a drag upon the bluecoats' offensive impetus.  This matriarch's death at the hands of a band of renegade Rebel deserters in one last sham transaction leads to a tale of devastating southern vengeance.

The other half-dozen books I read were interesting (like Last to Die (2015) by Stephen Harding, about the last U.S. airman to die in the air on a photo reconnaissance mission over Japan two days after the Japanese acceptance of the Allies' surrender terms, at the hands of fanatical Japanese fighter pilots who refused to accede to the Emperor's surrender dictum) or not (like Operation Barbarossa (2011) by Christian Hartman, a formulaic short account of Hitler's dreary war in Russia which doomed his Third Reich practically from the outset of this onslaught).  Here are the remainder of the books I read last year in addition to those already mentioned:  Monty's Men (2013) by John Buckley, an account of the British and Canadian armies under the command of British General Bernard Montgomery in northwest Europe after D-Day; Lincoln and His Generals (1952) by T. Harry Williams, any description of the Young Napoleon, General George McClellan who prolonged the war by years due to his megalomania and indecisiveness, is always interesting; The First World War (1998) by John Keegan, an insightful and pithy exposition of the run-up to the conflict and an insightful and pithy exposition of its aftereffects sandwiched around 400 pages of dreary recounting of large armies on the move; and Sinai Victory by S.L.A. Marshall (1956) about the abortive but successful Israeli military takeover of the Sinai peninsula in 1956 on a shoestring basis, sort of a precursor to the 1967 war which forged the modern Middle East.