D-Day, the invasion of Europe, took place 61 years ago today. I'm grateful to the brave men who died in Normandy that day so that we could have peace today.

I was just thinking about that in school the other day. I am sad that we don't honor it as much as we should.

so many poeples died:(

Hurray for Victory!

Quite a historic day it was.

They shall never be forgotten...

I'm all for rememberance of fallen heroes, especially on such a historic date like D-Day, but that picture is ridiculously large.

In the end, war is never a victory.

My Civ teacher gave us(his favorite students) nickels minted on this day for graduation, because he feels this to the the most important day of the 20th Century. I tend to agree with him.

Then resize and rehost -- I don't want to mess with uploading anything at 33.2kbps..

Man...I've been thinking about this lately. I watched Saving Private Ryan and a few Band of Brothers episodes today..hard to believe the gore factor being worse than those movies. Look at it this way: would you have the guts to do that for millions of people you don't know? 'Twas a sad day in American history, and yet a day to be celebrated. It marks the beginning of the final chapter of World War 2. I don't even want to try to imagine what they went through.

Tell that to the GI's that fought through hell to liberate Auswitch.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but didn't a lot of soliders not even know concentration camps existed until they were stumbled upon?

(Moment of Silence)

So many brave men, all too young to die... We salute you.

We knew that they were messing with jews. Not to that extent though. We were over there mainly because Hitler had taken over Europe, a good enough reason I should think.

Yeah. I don't think most people realize just how depraved their fellow man can be until they see it themselves.



Of course "war" is not victory. It's about the guys who win them! And war is, often, a necessary good.

Definitley the most important day of the 20th century.

If we had not breached Normandy, who knows what the world would be like. There is an extremely good chance that the Allies would not have come out on top.

However, part of the victory at Normandy is definitley attributed to Garbo and Double-Cross, so don't forget them!

We salute you.

But does anyone know when the Battle of Stalingrad started, without googling/search engines?

Let this be a reminder that a lot of people died fighting for what they thought, and is, right. And there were a lot of casulaties on that day, 61 years ago today. This was not just a battle, it was a war of people.

I thought the Allies could still win the war without the Americans.

I have a final inclusive of this tomorrow haha

Who knows, maybe they could have .. Hitler and the Nazis in general definitely made plenty of mistakes tacticalwise, but there's no doubt the US helped the push a lot .. especially in contributing to the strength of the western front going eastward

No, no, someday D-Day will be just like Armistice Day, and so will 9-11. Time goes on, and people forget. :[

Yes, but it would have taken at least 5-10 more years.

But they would have won without a doubt.

I remember armstice day .. 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month

or maybe that's just because it's in my head right now but I've remembered it since I heard about it

You mean...uhm...evil, right? That's how it goes. Unless you're joking, or maybe you're even serious (scary thought).

That would have sucked very badly, because it would have meant a bigger victory for the Soviet Union, which was just as evil a country as nazi Germany...

Yeah, Americans did a great service not only to Europe in general but to themselves as well.

Yeah, man, the liberation of Western Europe from occupation by genocidal fascists? It's meaningless 'cause people diiiiiiiiiied and stuff

I'm serious. War isn't intrinsically evil.

But war isn't a good thing. Sometimes it needs to happen, but should be a avoided whenever it can.

If you really mean that then you should realise you also think killing people is not evil, because that's what wars have always meant.

It all depends on motive. If you just want more land or power yeah, it's bad, but if you are defending your country or an ally it would be justified.

I still think that World War one was more important than the second.

Just a side-note. Just because there hasn't been a popular multi-million dollar Spielberg film on it or countless game missions based on it in the loosest sense doesn't mean that the Allies didn't land in southern Italy almost a year earlier in September 1943 at Salerno. It frequently gets glossed over.

It's so funny how the words "Liberation" and "War" kinda mean the same thing, in some aspects.

Umm soviet union was much less 'evil' if you're talking about the instilled mindset of the population

They just had a ruler that was really mean to them

Sorry if the topic is diverging too much, but:

Tell that to Poles, (former) Czechoslovaks, Estonians, Lithuanians, Latvians, (former) East-Germans, Romanians and other systematically opressed nations who fell behind the Iron Curtain.

The Soviets started on the same side as the Germans, both invaded Poland in 1939. Even during the war the Eastern Front was a brutally nasty affair for all sides. Soviets aren't famous for taking prisoners, let alone for their treatment of them. There are numerous reports of Soviet fighter-aircraft shooting up opposing pilots stuck in their parachutes who had managed to bail from their aircraft. Soviet troops had a horrible reputation as "liberators" compared to the Western Allies (much more raping, reprisal-killing and looting going on). This is without bringing up the massacres such as the one in Katyn, or other ethically debatable events such as the sinking of the Steuben.

To take a somewhat personal example: one of my grandmothers would probably have been summarily executed (or worse) had her station been overrun by the Soviets during the war.
Why? She was just an unarmed non-combatant radio-operator near the frontline.
Because she had volunteered for auxiliary service and therefore belonged to a specific organisation that the Soviets had pretty arbitrarily deemed "fascist".

War is nasty.

Then again, the Ukrainians who hailed the nazis as their liberators when they invaded during WWII era soviet oppression got a nasty surprise when the Nazis began killing them all off because they were untermenschen

It depends on how you define evil .. self-superiority vs oppressing your people

I personally see the ussr as the lesser of the two evils because it was more the government (read: stalin) doing 'acts of evil' whilepeople got oppressed or victimized, as opposed to the entirety of a generation of the German (aryan german) population being brought up with instilled evil .. and in this case ignorance is definitive of evil. Inherent eviliness.

I don't quite understand what the USSR and the germans signing a non agression pact has anything to do with anything, but arguably hitler never intended to work with stalin .. the entirety of europe thought WWII was going to be a germany-ussr war because the the whole fascist-communist facade (IE the spanish civil war and the ussr backing the popular front and the nazis backing the spanish fascists) .. Hitler only made the pact so he could invade poland without russia coming in and bothering them.

Also (also arguable), when the Nazis invaded the USSR and the eastern front opened, the Allies took a freaking long time opening up a second front and helping the Soviets out .. if you want to be technical, doing nothing on the Allies' part resulted in the deaths of tens of thosands of extra soviet soldiers

All because yea, war is nasty

Well, this is of course a different issue but killing people is also not intrinsically evil.

Well, the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact was more than a non-agression treaty. They basically split-up the border-states between Germany and the USSR throughout Eastern Europe (Hmmm... I see you've got Czechoslovakia. I'll tell you what: I'll let you have half of Poland, and Romania if you let me have the other half of Poland, Finland, Estonia, Lithuania, and Latvia). The point being that the USSR was just as keen as the Germans to gobble up territory belonging to sovereign and independent nations ( or "liberating the proletariat from their oppressive bourgeois taskmasters" as they'd call it), either through political intimidation or sheer force.

Sure, Germany in 1939 looked pretty scary to Stalin, and it's pretty understandable that what he needed and wanted was pleeeeeenty of buffer-space around Moscow and St. Petersburg to soak up a probable German blitzkrieg advance (their ideologies didn't exactly go hand in hand). That's just not a good enough of an justification or a casus belli in my eyes to annex, invade, forcefully occupy, and strongarm neutral sovereign nations (The Western allies didn't either, which led to them materially supporting Finland during the Winter War against their eventual post-Barbarossa ally, the USSR).

Therefore I don't really see them as a huge amount better or more justified than the Third Reich, and certainly not deserving of much praise. That's what I meant, and while I'm only speaking for myself, I think lassev's talking about the same thing. Europe was far better of being liberated by the USA, England, Canada, and France than the USSR.

I would like to add that the other allied countries were there too. It's a sad day, but an important one in Canadian History, the landing at Juno Beach was a defining point in Canadian History.