Comments on: Troopship

By: Wallsy

Wallsy — Tue, 15 Nov 2005 15:17:58 +0000

Hi Eric,

I watched a discussion yesterday on SkyNews between Robert Wilson and SkyNew’s Adam Boulton on Blair’s recent speech at Doha. I have never in my life witnessed such perverse apologetics from a member of Bush’s entourage (Wilson). The way in which he papered over the falsehoods propounded in the run up to the war by the Bush Administration, claiming everyone had the same intelligence, was startling. The only redeeming quality of this discussion came in the form of the arbiter, the programme host, who asked some very searching questions (as yet to be answered by Wilson) on the issue of intelligence prior to the war. In additon, the host actually accused Bush’s politicisation of the Rememberance Day services as highly inappropriate; and indeed it is, cheap, low and the clearest indication to date of Bush’s ethical satndards.

By: cynthia stancioff

cynthia stancioff — Mon, 14 Nov 2005 19:18:53 +0000

Hi Eric, I am impressed with your father’s writing. Must be where you got your talent. How do people put up with the amazing hardships of military service? It just makes the world seem stranger and more grueling than ever, to think about how many are doing it for a living these days, not even for any set of beliefs.

By: Eric

Eric — Sat, 12 Nov 2005 11:05:01 +0000

John, your post blew me away. Thank you very much for that story. I certainly relate, as my dad “had little to say about the experience” as well. I actually know very little about the action he saw, but he was in the thick of the Bulge. His job was computing trajectory for artillery. He never got over whatever it was he saw. Once or twice he spoke of fields of corpses and the stench he could not forget. My mother never forgave the war for what it did to him.

(Pardon my ignorance, but what is “CIB”?)

By: John

John — Sat, 12 Nov 2005 10:43:37 +0000

My father got back and out and married in March 1946 after being inducted on Pearl Harbor Day, 1942. They got him when he was thirty years old, to his surprise. Had little to say about the experience, except to show me his CIB when I was a kid and tell me it was the most important thing on a soldier’s uniform. He got the opportunity to see his two elderly aunts in Austria, which would never have happened otherwise. I found out years later that a U-boat sunk the first troop ship carrying half his 66th Division across the channel and 900 died. He was on the sister ship Christmas morning. Eisenhower was in a panic over the Waffen counter-offensive and was throwing men at the problem like Stalin. Because of the loss of men and equipment the division was redirected south to attack a couple of Nazi gun fortresses on the Mediterranean, which was cake compared the the meatgrinder of the Bulge. He wasn’t big on American leadership, considering it impromptu and amateurish and disorganized. He hated the American Legion when I was a kid, and Nixon and everyone else he considered a phony in California. I came back from VN with no CIB in ‘68 and I think he was just fine with that. The Camels got him six years ago, but he stuck it out for 87 years.

By: Geoffrey Holland

Geoffrey Holland — Sat, 12 Nov 2005 05:05:55 +0000

Hi Eric, my own late father used to refer to Armistice Day in the UK on 11/11. Now we have Remembrance Sunday on the closest Sunday to 11/11. Thank you for your father’s account from Now and Then. God bless them all. Geoff

By: Eric

Eric — Sat, 12 Nov 2005 03:57:37 +0000

Thanks for all the messages I’ve received on this post so far.

My dad always called “Veterans Day” “Armistice Day”. I heard him repeat on many occasions the popular Wilson-era notion that WW I was “The war to end all wars”, always in a voice reflecting the cruel irony.

By: Milt

Milt — Fri, 11 Nov 2005 23:35:12 +0000

Hi Eric, Thanks for sending letter and picture. Great stuff! Especially for Veterans Day……

By: Ilze

Ilze — Fri, 11 Nov 2005 22:27:38 +0000

Hi Eric, thanks for sharing this special gift from your dad. I can see you the inherited humor, sense of irony, careful attention to detail and great writing skill from your dad. –Ilze

By: Cindy

Cindy — Fri, 11 Nov 2005 20:47:29 +0000

Very nice and interesting. I don’t think I have ever read anything like that from your dad before.

By: Jonathan

Jonathan — Fri, 11 Nov 2005 19:02:48 +0000

“Veterans day” did not start out as “Veterans Day.” It was originally “Armistice Day” and had a very different meaning. See below.

Perhaps the best way to honor veterans, and ALL who are decimated by war (it is no longer the soldiers who suffer most in war) is to go back to the original intent of Armistice Day, of mourning, horror, and disgust at war, and relief at its end, and redouble our efforts to make such organized human madness an action of only the very final resort, if at all, instead of “wars of choice.” Wishing you a peaceful Armistice Day. –Jonathan

Today is Veterans Day, honoring Americans who have served in the armed forces.

November 11 was originally called Armistice Day because it was on this day in 1918 that the First World War came to an end. The armistice was signed at 11:00 AM, on the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month of the year. After four years of brutal trench fighting, nine million soldiers had died and 21 million were wounded. It was called “The War to End All Wars,” because it was the bloodiest war in history up to that point, and it made many people so sick of war that they hoped no war would ever break out again.

Many intellectuals and artists were disillusioned by the war. The philosopher Bertrand Russell said, “All this madness, all this rage, all this flaming death of our civilization and our hopes, has been brought about because a set of official gentlemen, living luxurious lives, mostly stupid, and all without imagination or heart, have chosen that it should occur rather than that any one of them should suffer some infinitesimal rebuff to his country’s pride.”