11-11-18

[JackLuis]

Happy Veterans Day!

In a way, it's not a day for joy since we have so many people engaged in War across the Globe.

The current wars will probably be over in 2018. We'll have run out of fiat money.

 

[amicus]

Veteran's Day was originally Armistice Day, celebrating the end of World War One, on November 11th.

WW1 was the War to end all Wars....so it was said...

The History of Man is a History of conflict; like it or not.

I served eight years active duty, four in the US Navy, four in the US Air Force, so it is my day, as a veteran, that we are celebrating.

So few seem to understand the necessity of protection that communities of people have always required. Those young men, and now women, that offer up their lives for the defense of others is an honorable act and I applaud them all and wonder why so few understand the necessity.

Amicus

 

[oggbashan]

Armistice Day is still observed in the UK and most of the Commonwealth with a two minute silence at 11 am on 11 November.

The major observance is on Remembrance Sunday, the Sunday closest to 11 November - next Sunday this year. Locally there will be a church service and then a parade to our town's War Memorial. The village that has been absorbed into our town will also have a church service and then will assemble by their War Memorial in the churchyard.

Since the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts the numbers attending both events have increased from the hundreds to over a thousand. Our town had lost men in the Boer War, the First and Second World Wars, the Korean War, Suez, The Falklands, Iraq and Afghanistan, and in other minor conflicts. We lost civilian women and children in the Second World War. During the First World War the UK lost one tenth of all men of military age. My family and my wife's family lost relations in both wars. My parents, then children, lost their homes to Zeppelin bombing in World War 1, and my uncle and aunt lost their home to Nazi bombing in World War 2.

In the village church there are memorials to those who fell in even earlier conflicts - the Napoleonic Wars, the Crimea and other places.

On Remembrance Sunday we remember them all and pray that we won't lose any more. The names added to our memorials in the last few years remind us that freedom has a price.

Og

 

[Handley_Page]

I was talking to some of the Cadets at my local ATC. I could not believe it, but there were some there who did not understand what Armistice Day was all about. The most clueless said "something about a War?".

They got both barrels. And they will be on Parade at our local War Memorial on Sunday Morning ext.
With luck they will remember.

 

[trysail]

Knowledge of WWI is virtually nonexistent in the U.S. The average citizen couldn't tell you anything about it.

Sometime during the last forty-odd years, "History" as a subject in the government operated schools got mashed into a bigger something called "Social Studies" and that was the end of "History."

Whenever I travel in Scotland, Wales or England, I make a point of stopping to read the markers and memorials that exist in EVERY SINGLE VILLAGE honoring the fallen of World War I. It is always illuminating and very sobering.

 

[oggbashan]

My family were fortunate in WWI and II. They didn't lose any direct relations. One of my aunts lost a fiancé in 1915 on the Western Front and her second died as a pilot over the Western Front in 1918. She never married, saying "All the good ones are dead and all that are left are damaged". One of my uncles was invalided out of the Army during WWII.

But - my parents lost their homes to bombing in the First World War. The schools they had gone to and the office building where they met were destroyed by bombing in 1940, as was the Church where they married, and the Churches where my father and his brothers had been choirboys.

My wife lost two uncles in WWII, one in Italy and the other at Walcheren.

That is insignificant compared with the losses suffered by the Russians in WWII, that they still call "The Great Patriotic War". The USSR lost twenty million people in that war.

We remember and regret every loss suffered in Iraq and Afghanistan but the UK's total losses in all three conflicts, and even adding our losses in the Korea, Suez, and Falkland Islands conflicts, are far less than a single bad day on the Western Front in 1914-18. The names shown on our town's War Memorial for 1914-18 include deaths of men from almost every family then living in our town, and many of the same surnames recur for 1939-45.

When I was in Australia, the school's war memorial listed the names of five brothers, all former students, who had died during 1914-18. Their names recur on the honours board for academic and sporting achievements. I met the sixth, and last brother. He too had fought during that war and had watched one of his brothers die. All of them had been volunteers.

I try to remember them all.

Og

 

[Handley_Page]

One of my Uncles is buried on the Western Front. If there were any others, by folks didn't tell me about them.

 

[JackLuis]

My great-uncle was a Marine at Beloue (sp) Woods in WW1. He came home to Pueblo and got a job on the Pueblo PD. He carried a 1911 .45 and was almost killed by a gang with lead pipes.

Violence is ever with us.

Perhaps more so with the political classes who "Send the Marines" in to "correct" the socio-economics of the Emerging World.