Whether we’ve properly safeguarded the freedoms they fought to leave us, may be a discussion best left for another day. Today we struggle to envision — or, for a few of us, to remember — how the world must have looked on Oct. 26, 1942.
Don’t skip this one.
Update – by pure coincidence, a few hours after posting this link, Drudge features this development. Which I believe, answers some of the questions posed by commentors.
Do you think we still have that kind of ‘stuff’ nowadays?
I fear the answer to that question.
Makes me feel proud to read this article. Thanks for the Link Kate.
John West – we need to TEACH kids about these great moments so they will have role models like this to follow. What kids learn is the defeatist attitude of Taliban Jack, Deyawn and the msm.
His history is wrong. The Marines seized the airfield from the Japanese. And it was completed by Seabees, not Marines. I should know: one of my great-uncles was a Marine on Guadalcanal. Another was a Seabee at Henderson Field. A third was a US Army soldier who arrived after the landing, and a fourth was a sailor in the dangerous waters offshore.
If you’re going to use history to make a point about events of today, get the history right.
Good ancestors there Mark. Were you related to Napoleon and Florence Nightingale too?
Thanks for the link Kate, in spite of it’s incorrect info according to Mark!
Thanks, Kate, and my Vietnam era Marine(never an “ex”) husband thanks you too. I meet some of the precious few WWII old guys down here in Florida, it’s the retirement state after all, at our local American Legion. They are a classy group, quiet, humble – too bad our schools in NA no longer tell their heroic stories.
John West, today’s narcissistic offspring of a 60’s narcissists is more enraged at a price hike at Starbucks than any horrific behavior by Islamofascists. Nothing is going to change until sadly the Big One gets dealt our way by the terrorists.
… and now we know… the rest of the story.
Don’t forget the Cactus Air Force over Guadalcanal. These were extraordinary men, Wildcat Studs all of them!
http://www.daveswarbirds.com/cactus/cactus.htm
If you like warbirds and you are interested in the Cactus Air Force, watch this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_32ZspW80v4
Awesome!
Penny – you mis read John West I think.
“John West – we need to TEACH kids about these great moments … “
When I was a kid we used see this kind of stuff in Hollywood movies. Guys like John Wayne, William Holden, Audie Murphy and many other of Hollywood’s leading ‘real men’ of the day. There were lots of western frontier movies back then as well that showed the strong and brave good man winning over the bad guys.
Hollywood is now busy giving us inane comedy, grotesque slasher, mindless chick-flicks (although some aren’t too bad and are good for ones’ love life), teen movies that are just plain stupid and rude and of course all the dramas are anti-American.
Other than an occasional Bruce Willis action movie there aren’t any heroes to speak of.
At home we watch the parents of kids going nuts trying have everything and get their kids into every sport, arts and outdoor program possible, while the kids resist so they can have more quality on-line time messaging back and forth all day tying up band width.
What is being taught in schools is acceptance of the homo world and the Muslim world along with a complete rejection of the Christian world as thought Muslim work is compatible with our secular progressive society and Christianity is not.
I agree that kids should have more exposure to the brave heroes of the past who gave us our freedoms and prosperity, but it ain’t gonna happen.
Stupidity, apathy along with a bagful of cynicism is what rules the day.
If the 70s were the me generation, the latest gens are the me me me me me me generation.
Great post. I too, like others that have posted fear that we are no longer up to the task of defending our freedoms. Soon, I suppose, we will fall to the whims of a people that are willing to kill us for what we have while we sit idly by fiddling.
Lest we forget, Kate.
Passchendaele (3rd Battle of Ypres) Oct.26-Nov.10 1917
Google. Second entry.
Speaking of which …
===========================
Hollywood now proposes that in a new live-action movie based on the G.I. Joe toy line, Joe’s — well, “G.I.” — identity needs to be replaced by membership in an “international force based in Brussels.” The IGN Entertainment news site reports Paramount is considering replacing our “real American hero” with “Action Man,” member of an “international operations team.”
Paramount will simply turn Joe’s name into an acronym.
The show biz newspaper Variety reports: “G.I. Joe is now a Brussels-based outfit that stands for Global Integrated Joint Operating Entity, an international co-ed force of operatives who use hi-tech equipment to battle Cobra, an evil organization headed by a double-crossing Scottish arms dealer.”
Well, thank goodness the villain — no need to offend anyone by making our villains Arabs, Muslims, or foreign dictators of any stripe these days, though apparently Presbyterians who talk like Scottie on “Star Trek” are still OK — is a double-crossing arms dealer. Otherwise one might be tempted to conclude the geniuses at Paramount believe arms dealing itself is evil.
(Just for the record, what did the quintessential American hero, Humphrey Bogart’s Rick Blaine in “Casablanca,” do before he opened his eponymous cafe? Yep: gun-runner.)
According to reports in Variety and the aforementioned IGN, the producers explain international marketing would simply prove too difficult for a summer, 2009 film about a heroic U.S. soldier. Thus the need to “eliminate Joe’s connection to the U.S. military.”
Well, who cares. G.I. Joe is just a toy, right? He was never real. Right?
On Nov. 15, 2003, an 85-year-old retired Marine Corps colonel died of congestive heart failure at his home in La Quinta, Calif., southeast of Palm Springs. He was a combat veteran of World War II. His name was Mitchell Paige.
It’s hard today to envision — or, for the dwindling few, to remember — what the world looked like on Oct. 25, 1942 — 65 years ago.
The U.S. Navy was not the most powerful fighting force in the Pacific. Not by a long shot. So the Navy basically dumped a few thousand lonely American Marines on the beach at Guadalcanal and high-tailed it out of there.
======================================
Etc Etc … see the rest on Drudge
I spotted that on Drudge about the same time you did, John. Unbelievable.
As usial liberals twist history to suit themselves and their revionists history and how they like to use term like BEFORE COMMON ERA and COMMON ERA which is so rediclous and so darn PC
Thanks Kate! The article was stirring.
Hollywood’s despicable, but everyone knows that. Col. Paige formed part of the the greatest generation.
The deceased vets of Flanders, Passchendasle and the Somme etc., from all sides of the conflict were heros too.
They were people of honour and that, sadly, means little to many, too many.
Read both links.
Watched Doug’s youtube video, too.
God love those Iron Men!
Thank goodness they were there when they were needed so desperately, as well as all the rest of that Greatest Generation.
Mark Bourrie, I’m certain no malicious revision of history was intended… and thank God we had your great uncles in the fight as well; be proud of ’em! The 2 stories certainly imply that EVERY man was needed in the fight.
Should I? Well, ya, sure…
Here’s a personal story about (sniff) my Mom. She got married to a fly boy in 1942; he got shipped overseas almost immediately, and was killed when the Halifax(?) on which he was a gunner got shot down in March, 1943. Code Pink??? Nope. She quit her job at the Bessborough and went to work down east in an arms plant in Ajax, Ontario… artillery shells, I think it was. Payback time.
THAT’S what made that generation the Greatest Generation.
OMG can Hollywood sink any lower? These people make me sick.
The author of the Review Journal article makes it sound like the Marines were building Henderson Field (airport runway). However the Japanese had already built the runway and the Marines fought them and won control of it.
The editor of the United Church Observer stated in the Oct edition that “our country is not accustomed to fighting wars.Historically we are peacekeepers”.I expect unmitigated crap like this from yahoos and moon bats but NOT from editors of magazines.He smeared the Canadians that gave their lives in the 1st and 2nd World War.The liberators of Holland,the convoy escorts,the bomber crews and the other thousands of military personel that gave their lives so that he could write that crap.I am sending him an E mail stating same.He also states,that in his opinion,that Canadians will support our troops till the current mission ends in Afganistan.Apparently not after.
For those of you wondering if the kids still have what it takes to defend the USA, Canada, Britain etc. The MSM would like to encourage you in your despair, and get to to give up and vote Democrat. Quit now and avoid the rush.
I direct your attention attention to Afghanistan and Iraq, where unparalleled feats at arms are being recorded every year. Kids now are every bit as tough as the vets were, and they have ‘way better kit.
Example, longest combat shot with a rifle ever recorded, taken by a PPCLI sniper team in Afghanistan. Over a mile and a half with a .50 cal, popped a Taliban mortar gunner square in the 10 ring across a valley, saved a bunch of Americans. Awesome.
Example, twenty something Argyle and Sutherland Highlanders routing over a hundred Iraqi Army regulars with a bayonet charge. Scots wahey!
Example, the Taliban lasted two weeks and Saddam’s goons lasted five frackin’ days. I give Ahmadinnerjacket’s fanatical fiendish fighters maybe a whole week, because none of them have ever seen a B52 strike so they don’t know enough to be afraid like the Iraqis were. But not two weeks because the Taliban were a much tougher bunch and generally not afraid of anything. Except the Canadians, ’cause they keep running away from our guys even though the CBC doesn’t tell you that.
The Canadian Forces and the US Marines, the Brits and God forbid probably the friggin’ Germans are just as scary as they were in World War Two. That hasn’t changed.
What changed is Hollywood. As somebody said above, after WWII Paramount was making movies about Guadalcanal with The Duke starring as Mitchell Paige. These days Paramount Pictures is beavering away trying to make you think GI Joe is a Belgian policeman.
Not to worry, they should be out of business pretty soon. ~:D
…and now we know…
And knowing is half the battle.
My father was a senior in high school when Pearl Harbor was bombed. Soon after that his school graduated all the young fellows a few months early and my father joined the US Marine Corps. He was sent to Guadalcanal with the 1st Marine Division and fought at the battle described in the article. It was called Bloody Ridge. He also fought at Teneru River and elsewhere on that island. When he turned 18 he’d already been in the Solomons for three months and would go on to be badly wounded while attached to the Marine Raiders at the battle for Munda on New Georgia. He was one of two men of his Marine Corps training class to survive the war, and when he left the Corps after two years at Oakland Naval Hospital he was wracked with the effects of malaria, amoebic dysentary, jungle rot and the memories he didn’t talk about until near his death in 1995. He was also one inch shorter than when he joined the Corps.
My Dad was always a Marine and inspired me during all of the years I knew him. I loved him very much and I still miss him.
Jeff in Pullman, WA…
It’s guys like your Dad that won it for us. I wish I could say we deserved to have a Man like that on our side, fighting our battles for us… sometimes I feel our society’s not lived up to the example fellows like your father have left us with.
Remembrance Day is coming up in a couple weeks; when I go down to the 11:00 AM service at the cenotaph, I hope you don’t mind if I include your father’s memory along with my memories of my own Dad, and my uncles, who wore those soldiers’ uniforms in the 1940s.
said it in the past will say it again. we will have to fight our own in order to remain free. there are some people who have courage but the numbers are too low.
This was very moving. My dad was a Canadian vet—a very young soldier—who helped to liberate Holland. Like most of that “Greatest Generation”, he didn’t talk about it. It’s only after watching “Band of Brothers”—just after my dad died—that I became aware of the huge sacrifices of these young men.
My mom—whose fiance, an RCAF pilot, was shot down and killed—my kids, siblings, and I will all be at church on November 11th, with procession to the nearby cenotaph. We will remember. We do remember.
At our public schools, it will be “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?” time again. I know there are many fine fighting men and women in the ME: I’ve no doubt they’re every bit as good as my dad’s generation. What’s changed is the mindset of those at home. Rather than full hearted support, the surrender monkeys—incubated in the public schools of our dumbed down culture—undermine morale and aid and abet the enemy by their appeasement, which adds up to collusion.
Lawyer, Karen Selick, in the National Post, in a recent series about one change that could help “fix” Canada, targeted our “phoney and deceitful” human rights (sic) laws, which actually do the opposite of what they claim to. In fact, these duplicitous laws are altogether inequitable and subversive: they favour certain groups and often deprive non minority Canadians of their rights to freedom of both expression and association. Traditionalists—those who support the values on which this country was founded and built—are being targeted for supporting such “outmoded” virtues as honour, loyalty, and courage in relation to various issues (marriage, abortion, religion, fighting wars vs “peacekeeping”, etc.)
In relation to this—the subversive happenings in our public schools is one of the most important, and ignored, issues of the day—I recently wrote to an interested party:
“Are our public schools turning out citizens? No. The abuse of ‘human rights’ in Canada is destroying the legitimate authority of teachers (and parents) and empowering opportunists. Children—bless them—are natural opportunists: if they know they can get away with something, they will. The worst of them will take gross advantage. Empowering immature people who have no serious responsibilities is madness. But that’s what we’ve done in Canada. I shake my head . . .”
So would/do our brave fighting men and women and all of us who stand with them.
I can’t imagine what it would have been like fighting at Guadalcanal. Thank God for our Marines — and all our service men and women…
For those here that dispare that the kind of courage and devotion might not be there in today’s Canada, I point you here :
http://www.gg.ca/media/doc.asp?lang=e&DocID=5196
And an example for those that do not want to read through all 37 citations :
On October 14, 2006, Private Larochelle of the 1st Battalion, The Royal Canadian Regiment Battle Group, was manning an observation post when it was destroyed by an enemy rocket in Pashmul, Afghanistan. Although he was alone, severely injured, and under sustained enemy fire in his exposed position at the ruined observation post, he aggressively provided covering fire over the otherwise undefended flank of his company’s position. While two members of the personnel were killed and three others were wounded in the initial attack, Private Larochelle’s heroic actions permitted the remainder of the company to defend their battle positions and to successfully fend off the sustained attack of more than 20 insurgents. His valiant conduct saved the lives of many members of his company.
Here’s a Canadian war heroes story, from a Dutch lady I know in California:
She was a little girl in a town in occupied Holland during World War Two. Her widowed mother joined the Dutch Resistance and, with some men in her group, was later caught by the Gestapo smuggling guns. The Gestapo had the German garrison force the whole town watch the Resistance people, including her mother, be put up against a a wall in the town square and shot.
My friend, the Dutch lady, was held in the front row of the people by a German soldier, who held her head and made her watch her mother be killed.
Later, Canadian soldiers liberated that town.
As my Dutch lady friend told me that story, she started to cry. Then, when she got to the part where Canadian soldiers arrived and liberated that town, her tears were mixed with the most heart-warming smile and shining eyes.
A half century after those events, she vividly remembers the death of her mother…and the Canadian soldiers coming to their town and liberating her and all the people of that town.
Canada used to be a country of hardworking, courageous, modest people—with a whole lot of things NOT to be modest about.
Then the hippie-dippie crap started: moral relativism, equality, and official multiculturalism, all topped off by the loss of democracy: judge-made law and the Human Rights (sic) Commission kangaroo courts, thanks to Trudeau’s Charter. Its tentacles only grow longer and spread wider to strangle wisdom and justice in Canada, and the freedoms of Canadians who fit no minority status.
Despite this, there are still “real” Canadians, from all categories, who don’t expect something for nothing, who understand the idea of community and serve their fellow citizens. Our fighting men and women generally fit the latter category. Bless them.
“John West – we need to TEACH kids about these great moments … “
Instead, all we get is “ANGST! ANGST! VIETNAAAAAAAM!!!!” delivered with the curled upper lip and ironic quip of the Seinfeld Sneer.
And we DO have heroes to TEACH kids about their great moments — of a sort:
LINDSAY LOHAN!
BRITTNEY SPEARS!
PARIS! HILTON!
And, after this summer’s 40th Anniversary of the Summer of Love, we’re starting the buildup to the 40th Anniversary of WOODSTOCK!
A fight to the death between a Starbucks-swilling, yapping, vibrating, pee-all-over-the-floor metrosexual lapdog and a wild jackal fresh off the Arabian desert howling “AL’LAH’U AKBAR!” can have only one outcome.
Or for all you Browncoats out there, we’re turning ourselves into Good Little Mirandans while Islam breeds Reavers.
Well, given the attitude of hollywood, at least no one will see their piece of s**t…
Just like the current batch of anti-american treason they’re pushing out now. Torture porn movies are beating them all. Combined.
GI Joe will be No Income Joe.
No matter how many stories like this I read, each new one brings tears to my eyes. I am in awe of these men, and I am proud that my father was one of them (part of both the D-Day invasion and the Battle of the Bulge). Those of us who are free owe them more than we could ever repay, not that I’ve ever known one to ask for anything.
We should be in awe of our fighting troops in Afghanistan. We are the best combat soldiers in the world right now. Re: peacekeeping, in today’s IED theatre, it equals casualty. The velvet glove must follow the mailed fist, not the other way around. Right now the “Taliban Hunting Club” (saw on RCR T-shirt) is preparing the ground for real development and peace in that failed nation, what Hillier described is a generation away because, as some misunderstand, that’s how long it takes to develop the institutions necessary for a state to exist.
I too would like to believe the Afghans can develop their military and law enforcement forces to take over, but I think Mr Harper is referring to internal security, though not protecting development. The border with Pakistan must be controlled and monitored.
While I agree that is an elusive goal, running away in 2009 isn’t the answer either. Can Jack Layton or Stephane Dion honestly say Afghanistan won’t again be under the thumb of Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, with AQ again ensconsed, having been ejected from Iraq?
As we begin to remember again, let our guys do their best until their country orders them home, their part of the mission complete, passing the torch, as Major McRae beckoned.