The way to Normandy

It'd D Day +2. One of my hobbies is WWII. I dabble rather than obsess, unlike some history buffs I've witnessed here and there. I've let the only magazine subscriptions I actually bother to pay for run out. That would be WWII magazine and World War II History magazine. And, I haven't watched Saving Private Ryan in a while. I think I will tonight -- I couldn't find the DVD around the house on Monday.

It's the heroic WWII moment for us Americans, and with good reason. It was a big gamble that changed the war, and lots of Allied soldiers paid the hard way for the action and ensuing campaigns. But, it also tends to shift our attention from other events of the war. We talk a lot about the casualties on Normandy or the Battle of the Bulge, but the numbers of dead on the Eastern Front are staggering by comparison.

The Allies involved around 175,000 men in the invasion, a campaign that lasted from June 6 to June 30. Somewhere around 5,558 Allies died during that time. German casualties were somewhere between 4,000 and 9,000. Neither figures include wounded casualties.

By comparison, the Battle of Stalingrad -- which went on over a longer period from August 1942 to early February 1943 -- was also a major turning point in the war. There, the Soviets fielded well over a million soliders. 478,741 were killed or missing. About 40,000 civilians -- that's about 9 of my home towns -- died. The Germans had killed or wounded numbers around 750,000. Which means well over a million people died at Stalingrad, and easily more than another million were sick or wounded.

As hard a time as I have watching those jarring opening scenes of Saving Private Ryan, and as much as my insides bust up for those poor guys when I imagine what it must have been like -- for all that, I can't even wrap my head around a million people killing each other or shitting or starving themselves to death, literally. For us Americans, it just doesn't have that heroic message, that bravery overcomes. But, without Stalingrad, there is no Normandy. It's an easy thing for us to ignore, but it's there. Spielberg put his camera in another direction, and that's how we tend to think of it. (Who blames him? I don't -- the guy's a genius.)

Real life heroism is never so simple, is it? We want stories, we don't want muck and shit and dying.

So, I'm off to watch the movie that I find a little hard to watch. When I saw it in the theater -- I'll never forget this -- I saw it at the theater in Indianola. I had a box of Runts candy in my hand. Next me me was some loud mouth asshole who was talking all kind of macho bullshit as the film started. I tried to ignore him.

So, the landing craft door opens up, and for about 20 minutes I was paralyzed. When I was over, I realized two things. First, that had that box of candy gripped tight as hell in my hand. I hadn't touched a one, and I was motionless. Awestruck. The other thing I noticed was that asshole next to me finally shut the hell up. It took him about 30 seconds of watching to knock him down a peg.