My father as a 19-year-old army grunt landed on Omaha Beach on D-Day in 1944. None of the guys on his Higgins boat survived. He only talked about this and being in France and Germany (getting two purple hearts) as an elderly man. He did mention the French hedgerows as being even more horrible than Omaha Beach itself, and, later, about stumbling around considering shooting himself in the foot rather than shooting to kill. Today we are inundated with carefully curated news and images about war and all the politics and corruption supporting it. So I value personal accounts, biased as they may be by the fundamental human concerns: life, health, relations with others; they demonstrate a kind of truth. The War Horse website gathers and publishes just such material from contemporary events. For that reason, today, Memorial Day, I would like to direct Antiwar.com readers attention to it: The War Horse | Nonprofit journalism about military service.
Alexia Gilmore, Board Member, Randolph Bourne Institute/Antiwar.com
My father was in the Army during WWII. His first action was in South Africa. That was a warm up for what came next for him. Normandy.
Never spoke about it, or the fighting as they went inland, except, he did say that his unit crossed paths with the 442nd.
When I was a kid I asked him about the war. Did not want to talk about it, but he told me that if I wanted to know about war, visit the VA hospital in Long Beach, CA, that there was a specific ward there that would teach me all I needed to know about the war.
He was a pacifist all the years he was alive. When he heard “taps” he would just sob.