That’s lovely grass.
no hosepipe ban there, the yanks ferry in fresh water every day to maintain the grass to the required standard
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A humble auld grave stone for a man with his CV
That’s the measure of the man in fairness though incongruously it is set back from all of the other graves.
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Yeah heaps of them. Lots are unloved. Some German ones have been refurbished but as many or more are basically abandoned. Quite poignant.
There are mad videos that I saw on YouTube before where lads were digging into random fields in Ukraine and finding MG32’s, belts of ammo and a couple of skeletons with helmets. Anyone who died while their army was retreating was lost to the sands of time.
There is no American soldier from wwII intentionally buried on German soil
The stories around Patton are remarkable, not to mind the circumstances of his death. Willis Lee was a prominent ww2 American admiral who died at the end of war naturally so those kind of things happened but Patton’s death is open to interpretation
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Stopped at St Mere Eglise on the way back to the ferry. The town is famous for the parachute drop in the early hours of DDay and in particular this incident
A well-known incident involved paratrooper John Steele of the 505th Parachute Infantry Regiment (PIR), whose parachute caught on a spire of the town church, and could only observe the fighting going on below. He hung there limply for two hours, pretending to be dead, before the Germans took him prisoner. Steele later escaped from the Germans and rejoined his division when US troops of the 3rd Battalion, 505 Parachute Infantry Regiment attacked the village, capturing thirty Germans and killing another eleven. The incident was portrayed in the movie The Longest Day by actor Red Buttons.
It is commemorated thus today.
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There’s a decent enough museum there too if I recall?
I was at the one in Normandy when I was younger. Who actually owns the grounds? The us flag flys over it. I just remember it being huge.
American Battlefield Monuments Commission
The russians had it worse. Sent to battle without weapons, actually used as cannon fodder and then returning home to the stalins russia where even having been in the west was grounds for years in a gulag. Having been a POW was as good as having deserted the red army
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There’s a reason they are forgotten and considered a German national shame. A very good reason. The same reason the thugs “fighting” for the despot thug Putin in Ukraine right now will be consigned to the dustbin of history and eternal shame.
It must be great to have these neat little boxes you can file things away in as absolute truths.
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The Wermacht uniform was a thing of beauty
The average German soldier wasnt fighting for Nazi values. That’s not to say they didn’t carry out horrible acts on civilians, but they were fighting for each other or their country, not genocide or the pure white race.
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Coins used to ruin them.
Go and celebrate Soldier F and his buddies, buddy.
The SS divisions were certainly fighting for Nazi values and ideology. And they could be relied upon to carry out atrocity after atrocity.
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100%, they fought for each other, far more a Band of Brothers than their adversaries
Leadership knew that and fostered it
Any recommendation of books on the non nazi Germans?
