6 June 1944

[ontario claret]

Little known fact: while Denmark was neutral during WW1, many patriotic Danes joined Allied Forces during the war. Among them was Thomas Dinesen, brother of the famous author, Isak Dinesen ("Out of Africa"). He joined the Canadian Black Watch regiment, based in Montreal, and became the first foreign-born soldier to win the Victoria Cross while fighting in the Canadian Army, something which gives me a great deal of personal pride.

[mikeS]

The Burnley Express published the ‘Roll Of Honour’ in 1919 which lists those killed from the Burnley area. There is a copy of it in Burnley Library and is a sobering and sad read.
It begins with the family in Padiham that lost four sons during the conflict. There follows several entries of where three family members were lost. Following those are pages wher two were lost before page after page of individual losses. Mostly the entries are where sons died, but sometimes it was a father and a son.

There is one particular entry that haunts me.

It is of two Burnley brothers who joined up together, had consecutive army numbers. Who served together, fought together and who one day were killed instantly by the same shell.

Think of their mother getting the telegrams.

[Lancasterclaret]

Whenever I see stuff like that you always remember a Mrs Sullivan.

All five of her sons died when the USS Juneau was hit by a torpedo and blew up in 1942 off Guadalcanal.

[karatekid]

It was a similar story that inspired Stephen Spielberg to make saving private Ryan. Lots of brothers names on a cenotaph.

[ontario claret]

There are 2 "Vanstones" (my grandmother's maiden name), listed on the cenotaph in Whitby, Ontario. One was her brother, who died during the war, and the other was her cousin, who died from the Spanish influenza before he could return home. Because of this, the name "Vanstone" is now extinct in our region of Ontario.

[LeadBelly]

Spanish flu killed more people than WW1; estimates vary greatly between 20 and 100 million worldwide. It killed a lot of 25-45 year olds as well as the usual vulnerable very young/very old.
That 1914-18 period was a bugger.

[Wokingclaret]

Wasn't over for a lot of them, they progressed through France to Holland and a Bridge too Far in crossing the Rhine

[ontario claret]

That was WW2, Woking.

[Strela_999]

It's truly sobering to read the stories of families that lost all of their children in the war. My wife's Russian, so it's something that hits close to home for her : there isn't one family who didn't lost someone during WW2, and 90% of the young men born in 1923 died during WW2. But what sets Russia and other ex-Soviet republics apart is that they didn't lose only 8 to 10 million soldiers (half of them starved to death or killed through forced labour after surrendering in the first 3 months of the war), but that they lost 18 to 20 million civilians as well. In Belarus, for example, every second village was razed to the ground, and the whole population slaughtered ; which means that there isn't even anyone to remember some people, as they died along with everyone who knew them.

That's why the Russians are very touchy about the history of WW2, and specifically when they hear stuff like D-Day being the turning point of the war or America being the biggest winner. It's something that can get you socked in the face even today!

Russians respect the sacrifices of everyone during WW2 - especially the British, who fought from the first to the last day and stood alone for some time - but really don't like when people forget that 80% of the German forces fought on the Eastern Front and met their end there, and that neither D-Day nor the landings in Italy or the battles of El Alamein and Tobruk in North Africa could have won by the Western Allies if there wasn't, well, 4 German soldiers, tanks, and howitzers out of five in Russia.

[Lancasterclaret]

That is not actually true

The Russians ignore anything that happened before June 1941, specifically their occupations of Poland, Latvia, Lithuania and bessarabia from Romania, Estonia and the Winter War with Finland. And especially the Nazi-Soviet Pact. It took them seventy years to admit responsibility for the Katyn massacre.

They also ignore that they couldn't have moved their massive tank armies without fuel shipped in from British and American oilfields, fed their massive armies without the food from the same and transported their massive armies with the thousands of vehicles supplied by the Western Allies. They didn't bother building trucks, just concentrated on tanks, tank destroyers and artillery guns because they knew the US would supply them. Ditto the boots, the uniforms, in fact everything that takes a modern army to move and be supplied came from the West.

They also saw the occupation of eastern europe as their right as a war aim and a right, despite only the Germans, Hungarians and Romanians having fought them. They effectively occupied Eastern Europe for fifty years and definitely don't like talking about that.

[Oshkoshclaret]

This is a very good video on lots of levels, but especially if you want to understand the scale of WW2's impact on Russia

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DwKPFT-RioU&app=desktop" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;