“We are Forerunners. Guardians of all that exists. The roots of the Galaxy have grown deep under our careful tending. Where there is life, the wisdom of our countless generations has saturated the soil. Our strength is a luminous sun, towards which all intelligence blossoms… And the impervious shelter, beneath which it has prospered.”

The forgotten men

by | Jun 6, 2024 | Philosophy | 2 comments

Forty years ago today, St. Reagan Magnus of the Right stood at the site of the US Ranger monument at Pointe du Hoc, Normandy, and delivered one of his many great and legendary speeches. The monument commemorating the assault of the 2nd Ranger Battalion up the sheer cliffs of Normandy is a simple, stark, but beautiful thing – it is a solid obelisk of stone with two stone plaques on either side, inscribed with words of remembrance for the young men who scaled those cliffs to secure the vital high ground overlooking the beaches onto which the Allied forces would land over a million men in the coming days of Operation: OVERLORD.

The monument looks a lot like a Ranger knife of those times, and with good reason. (There are far less charitable, and far more scatological, descriptions one might give – we will not entertain them here today.)

Reagan Magnus spoke with moving and heartfelt conviction about the men of his own generation – some of whom sat right there in front of him, assembled to commemorate the 40th anniversary of that great and terrible day – who fought hard and bitter battles against entrenched German soldiers to capture those cliffs.

They paid a high price for real estate that, at first glance, sure did not appear to be worth the cost.

As the President pointed out in his speech, 225 boys from 2d Batt landed and ran up to the cliffs on June 6. On June 8, perhaps 90 of them remained. The battalion had suffered 60% casualties in 48 hours – a level of loss that would render many military formations largely useless.

But they, like so many around them, fought on. And, eventually, they took the Allied military all the way to the gates of Berlin.

Looking at the world around us today, one is sorely tempted to ask the spirit of Reagan Magnus, and the Boys of Pointe du Hoc to whom he paid such respectful and graceful tribute, whether it was all worth it.

For, if those men could see what the Western world that they fought, bled, and died to save, has become, I rather doubt any of them would have taken up arms.

The men of Reagan’s generation, and the Gipper himself, believed in something greater than themselves. Many of Reagan’s Hollywood friends had fought in the war – some came back as highly decorated heroes, like Brig. Gen. James Stewart. Reagan himself never forgot why his friends and comrades fought in that war – to resist a great evil – and he took that conviction with him to his Presidency.

He did not forget. I fear, however, that we have.

Eighty years have passed since the day when Allied troops landed at Normandy Beach. On that first day, June 6, 1944, over 132,000 Allied troops landed – and on that one day, they suffered 3,400 killed or missing. That was but the beginning of a long and arduous campaign to force the Germans back across the Seine, by the end of which over 2 million Allied troops had landed in northern France, and had suffered over 209,000 casualties, including 37,000 dead.

That sounds pretty bad… until you remember how bad things really got in WWII, on the other front, the one that actually made the success of the D-Day landings possible.

That “other front” was, of course, the Eastern Front, and as the Soviets had agreed with the Allied powers at the Tehran Conference in late 1943. Two weeks after D-Day, the Soviets launched Operation: BAGRATION, which dwarfed the Normandy invasion in terms of geographical scale. The sheer complexity of organising that campaign surely burned out the top planners of the Soviet General Staff, but the results were absolutely undeniable.

By the end of BAGRATION, the Soviets had annihilated German Army Group Centre as a combat force, wiping out at least 28 out of their 34 divisions, liberating Belarus, retaking large parts of the Baltic states, and taking parts of Poland.

For this, the greatest of their many victories up to that point on the Eastern Front, the Soviets paid with over 180,000 of their own dead – against nearly twice that many Germans. They captured some 57,000 of the very best of the Wehrmacht, and paraded them through the streets of Moscow, to illustrate the sheer magnitude and depth of their victory – and, to some extent at least, to wipe away the shame and catastrophe of losing some 600,000 of their own men, encircled at Bryansk and Vyazma three years earlier during the horrors of Operation: BARBAROSSA.

It is not an exaggeration to say that D-Day simply could not have succeeded without the Soviets. There is no way the Allied offensive into northern France could have worked, if it were not for the fact that the cream of the Wehrmacht had been methodically destroyed through Soviet application of attrition, annihilation, and operative art – precisely as their top strategists, Svechin, Isserson, Tukachevskiy, and of course Zhukov, recommended.

It is also not an insult to the bravery and strength of will of all those who landed at Normandy all those years ago to say such a thing. Russians today honour and hold dear the memories of all who died trying to wipe out the Nazis. They, more than any other people on Earth, remember – at a practically genetic level – what fascism means in an applied form.

The sad part – the truly heartbreaking part – is that the West has forgotten these basic facts of history.

In recent days, we have been treated to the ugly spectacle of the Fake President completely refusing to recognise the immense losses of Soviet soldiers, which made D-Day possible. One cannot look at D-Day in isolation – it was part of a much broader multi-front strategy, agreed upon by the Allies, to destroy Nazi Germany.

Nor can one look at the deliberate misrepresentation of history as an isolated error. This is very much part of a wider, and very ugly, campaign of revisionism, designed to eliminate the very real contributions of the Russian and Soviet peoples to the history of the West, and therefore of the world.

It is important to remember that one can hate Communism (as I do), yet love Russians (as I do) and others who once lived under that yoke. It is also important to remember the facts of history. The people who think otherwise, are always the ones who want to rewrite it in their own image.

Like, say, the Nazis, who wanted to build their own perfect world, in which the “lesser races” would not exist to pollute it.

Eighty years ago, tens of thousands of young, scared, grass-green, seasick men stared Death in the eyes as they poured out of their landing craft, straight into the very mouth of Hell, to stop that rewriting of history, that erasure of all that is Good, Beautiful, and True. It is with great sadness that we note almost none of them are left alive today to remind us what they did, how they lived, and why their brothers died.

It is even more sad to think that they may well have died for nothing.

I would like to believe they did not. But I have to admit, it is getting harder every year to entertain that notion.

For a little while longer, though, until the West finally collapses and falls to its richly deserved doom, I choose to believe their sacrifice meant something – because that means, when the time comes to rebuild, we who honour their sacrifice will have something to aspire toward, to guide us, and to remind us what is worth dying for – and what is worth living for.

HAIL the victorious dead!

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2 Comments

  1. JohnC911

    Yes true, they would of turn the guns on their political leaders if they knew what has happen since then.

    The question of what did they die for. I guess the only thing you could say is that without D-Day western Europe would of been under Soviet rule. Only Great Britain by itself. Kind of Alt history now.

    I guess some questions on this point of a Alt history of no US involvement in Europe.
    1. Would the hatred of Russians today be same, better or worse?
    2. Would the Soviet Union Collapse earlier?
    3. What happens to the USA and the rest of the world post WW2?
    4. Would Nazi Germany be seen differently?
    5. Would the Chinese and the Soviets go to war with each other?
    6. When and if the Atom Bomb be invented?

    Reply
  2. The Old Sarge

    “If all the dead Allied soldiers could have seen their countries now, they would have thrown down their weapons and fought with the Germans.” — David Irving

    Reply

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