Text 17095, 93 rader
Skriven 2005-11-27 23:39:00 av FRANK SCHEIDT (1:123/140)
     Kommentar till en text av WARD DOSSCHE
Ärende: [1/2] Wars
==================
-=> Quoting Ward Dossche to Frank Scheidt <=-

 > WD> Arghhh ... wrong country ... I meant Chili ...
 
 > Shows I actually *read* what you write ...
 WD> 
 WD> Indeed.
 
 > also (I hate doing
 > this!) the nation is "Chile", the chow is "chili" ... however,
 > since both have the same pronunciation it really doesn't matter.
 
 WD> In a way it does matter because there is a reason why certain things
 WD> are written in a specific way. Today's youths tend to lose that kind of
 WD> feeling in a language.
 
 > Ralph Waldo Emerson once wisely observed, "A foolish consistency
 > is the hob-goblin of little minds."
 WD> 
 WD> I don't know the person but obviously a good quote.

Ralph Waldo Emerson was a well-known American writer of the 
Nineteenth Century.
 
 > Certainly!  Hitler *knew* the Americans were the greatest threat.
 > That tied up many of his best troops.  Hitler, you see, was in
 > WWI as a Corporal so he saw first-hand how entry of the Americans
 > won WWI for the allies.  He didn't want that to take place with
 > WWI.  He also recalled how Russia folded during WWI so he had
 > little fear of them.
 WD> 
 WD> Well, Hitler was a fool. He fought in the Flanders battlegrounds and
 WD> in all reality nothing much happened there the way it did in France. In
 WD> the very west of Belgium there is a small meandering stream called
 WD> 'IJzer", in French sometimes called "Yser", it ends in the Northsea at
 WD> Nieuwpoort. Very early in the hostilities the lock-keeper in Nieuwpoort
 WD> opened the sea-locks (sluices?) and flooded the hinterland in the whole
 WD> shallow valley for quite some distance (most of the area is at or below
 WD> sealevel so this could be done). Thousands of Germans drowned and after
 WD> that the front remained fairly immobile for the rest of the war. The
 WD> exceptions were raids across the water, artillery shelling, sniping,
 WD> machine-gunning from airplanes. 

 WD> I don't think Hitler did much fighting, if any at all. Early in May
 WD> 1940 he was flown to an airfield in Belgium and with his car visited
 WD> the battlefields where he had been in WW1. These were rather "stable"
 WD> areas of the frontline. 

As I recall Hitler was gassed during WWI. I'm not sure though.

 WD> After the war when the locks were closed again and the water gone back
 WD> to the sea one of my grandfathers was assigned to the detail that had
 WD> to clear the area from corpses which had been rotting in the water for
 WD> shorter or longer periods. He said that most were so far gone you
 WD> couldn't handle them anymore, they used a wheelbarrel and a shovel to
 WD> scoop-up whatever they found after possible identification. On solid
 WD> ground again they poured the content of the wheel-barrel into what we
 WD> call a "potato-bag" to keep everything together and placed in a small
 WD> casket. 

Grisly work!

 WD> It seems identification-tags were already in use then but they were
 WD> made of leather, so after a while in the water they deteriorated also
 WD> which explains a relatively high number of not-to-be-identified
 WD> corpses.

I wonder if they made them of leather so they'd not make any 
noise.  American dog-tags were made of metal, but troops had to 
cover them with rubber to keep them from making unwanted noise.
 
 >> WD> Jan.1943 and Nazi Germany had already lost the war on the eastern
 >> WD> front by that time.
 
 >> Of *course*, since much of the German Army was involved in
 >> fruitlessly fighting the Americans.
 > WD>
 > WD> In January 1943? Yeah ... right ... !
 
 > Right ...
 WD> 
 WD> How could that be? There was no western front and there wasn't going
 WD> to be one for another year and 5 months.

There was, what one might call, a *virtual* Western Front since 
it was believed at the time that the Allies would invade via the 
West Coast of Europe.

... "Oh, my ears and whiskers, how late it's getting!"

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