Today is the anniversary of one of the most important turning points in the twentieth century- D-Day. . . The more one reads about that gigantic undertaking, the more amazing it becomes- and the more profoundly grateful we should be that such an effort someone was successful in the end, at a brutally high price. We might be living in a far different nation and world if things had not gone as they had.
It only just now occurred to me that one of the neatest things which Kathy and I saw in New Orleans was the D-Day Museum there. N.O. has such a museum because the special sea vessels used to unload the troops were manufactured in New Orleans- and you can see some of those vessels with your own eyes. The museum includes a lot of other materials and artifacts pertaining to other aspects of the war and the effort undertaken both by our troops and by civilians back home. (There’s a large display about rationing that I found very fascinating.)
The single neatest thing in the whole place, however, is something you see as you first walk in to the heart of the museum itself. It is a display to indicate how large the respective fighting forces of Japan, Germany, and the United States were in 1941. On three shelves we see toy soldiers – in numbers proportionate to the size of the respective armies- and the flag of each nation as a backdrop on each shelf. I wish I could remember the specific numbers, but one sees row upon row upon row of “German” toy soldiers and “Japanese” toy soldiers- and a tiny number of “American” toy soldiers by comparison. (In my mind’s eye, there were maybe a five times as many Japanese soldiers as American – and a similar sort of difference with German.) The point of the display was to indicate how relatively vulnerable we were as WWII began – and it only heightens one’s sense of gratitude and relief that in the end we emerged victorious.
Earlier this week, we had a tragedy occur in Milwaukee- a Cessna plane crashed into Lake Michigan, killing six people who were part of an organ transplant team. It was so sobering to think about all that was lost in that tragic accident. . . those six lives snuffed out and with them all the good which they could have gone on to do. Now think about the Battle of Normandy, which occurred in the wake of D-Day. . . 29,000 Americans are believed to have been killed, which does not include other allied troops- or for that matter the many Germans who were killed as well. Every one of those deaths meant the loss of all which that person might have gone on to do. Such loss is staggering to contemplate. And yet we must contemplate it – weigh it carefully – and work for the day when no one has to lose their very life under such awful circumstances.