I wish I had written this!
"If D-Day Had Been Reported On Today
by William A. Mayer
Tragic French Offensive Stalled on Beaches (Normandy, France - June 6, 1944) - Pandemonium, shock and sheer terror predominate today's events in Europe.
In an as yet unfolding apparent fiasco, Supreme Allied Commander, Gen. Dwight David Eisenhower's troops got a rude awakening this morning at Omaha Beach here in Normandy.
Due to insufficient planning and lack of a workable entrance strategy, soldiers of the 1st and 29th Infantry as well as Army Rangers are now bogged down and sustaining heavy casualties inflicted on them by dug-in insurgent positions located 170 feet above them on cliffs overlooking the beaches which now resemble blood soaked killing fields at the time of this mid-morning filing.
Bodies, parts of bodies, and blood are the order of the day here, the screams of the dying and the stillness of the dead mingle in testament to this terrible event.
Morale can only be described as extremely poor--in some companies all the officers have been either killed or incapacitated,leaving only poorly trained privates to fend for themselves.
Things appear to be going so poorly that Lt. General Omar Bradley has been rumored to be considering breaking off the attack entirely. As we go to press embattled U.S. president Franklin Delano Roosevelt's spokesman has not made himself available for comment at all, fueling fires that something has gone disastrously awry. "
As the man says, read the rest!
The thing is: the Public wasn’t told for months before D-Day that any invasion would be a Cake Walk. They weren’t told that the Germans would lay down their arms and welcome the Allies with flowers and laurels. We were told this about Iraq. Naturally it comes as a bit of a shock that Iraqis are _still_ fighting with us a year later...
Uh, Andrew, I have seen photos of Iraqis welcoming us with flowers, and it would seem that their number is larger than the number of Iraqis, as distinct from Chechans, Syrians etc., who _are_ _still_ fighting us. And if you are shocked that international terror hasn't been wiped out yet you must have been looking at different predictions than I have.
I myself was saying ever since 9/11/2001 that we were in for a long, hard war.
The reasons Operation Overlord would not have been reported like that if World War II were taking place today are stark: the continued and violent demonstrations of the Nazi threat facing the world, its actual invasion of a massive tranche of Europe, its military strength and doctrine, and most of all perhaps for Allied news media, the need for strong morale on the home fronts.
Remember that if we were facing that threat today, people *would* be quaking in their boots, and you'd not need a media frenzy to have that feeling. Allied countries faced *actual* *physical* *invasion*. Of a *permanent* nature.
Us media types may be accused of being insensitive sometimes, but if I was an editor on a 2004 D-Day and I was passed copy like the above, I'd rip it up and tell the journalist to start over.
You don't need to wonder how journalists would have reported D-Day had it happened today. It happened then, and we have, in archives, how journalists *did* respond. I can't conjecture any compelling reasons why an Allied advance against a Nazi threat today would be reported any differently than it actually was at the time.
That said, the article is exceptionally interesting, but not so much for historical reasons.
What Triticale said.
As for the media today vs. yesterday: Pete, I've read that there were any number of Americans in the 1940s who said of World War II that "it's Roosevelt's war!" and quite a few who said we were fighting "the wrong people" (i.e. the Nazis). The difference then seems to have been that the overwhelming majority of people put patriotism over partisanship, and once war was declared had no truck with naysayers and petty politickers. Indeed, in the 1942 elections Republicans tried hard to cast nasty aspersions at the Roosevelt administration, insinuating that they knew in advance about the Pearl Harbor invasion and did nothing, and that Roosevelt was a liar when he said he wanted to keep us out of the war in Europe. In response voters gave them the worst election spanking of the party's entire history.
Rightly so, in my view.
Quite so, Dean. I agree with you on the history. There was a victory of patriotism over partisanship. I'd be inclined to emphasise the monumentally extreme nature of the Nazi threat to the allies collectively a little more, and individual patriotism a little less, however, but that's a moot point.
However, if (as I suspect) this discussion also attempts to draw a few sneaky parallels between the War on Terror and World War II and the rightness / worldwide agreement / worldwide fear / political acceptability / imperative of truly historic proportions thereof, those parallels will fail.
I say this with my mind concentrated on the goods and evils of World War II and *not* on those of the War on Terror: these two conflicts are not comparable. No succour for the present war, or for any other war, can be drawn from the specific and horrible threats the Allies faced in the 30s and 40s.
I say the above after having also spent more or less an entire half-year reading various books about WWII. I, like everyone here, am living through the current war. Right or wrong *completely* aside, I simply don't sense that we are living through a period which 'matters' as much as that one did. Or (the usual naysayers you get in every war aside) that we are in a war agreed upon by as many people worldwide as those who agreed *at the time* about the absolute necessity of overcoming the Nazis back then.
These are just two completely different wars. Mixing them up with comparisons will be done. Colleagues of mine will be among the guilty parties. I just don't feel it would serve a purpose, I don't think it would work - I just don't think parallels can be drawn between the two. Enough said.