How dare you?
Donald Trump has repeatedly menaced the Kingdom of Denmark with threats of invasion, which would mean war between the United States and NATO.
Insanity doesn’t begin to describe the madness, but it is a start.
Horror would be unleashed, and it would bring war to North America, including civil war in the United States.
Trump’s poisonous belligerence is shameful and embarrassing.
Trump has brought deep dishonor to the United States of America. He has desecrated the memories and sacrifice of 405,000 Americans who gave the last full measure of devotion to their country, side-by-side with the gallant forces of nearly 50 Allied nations.
President Harry Truman made clear who died next to whom in the service of humanity in a war between the darkness and the light:
The heroism of our own troops…was matched by that of the Armed Forces of the nations that fought by our side…They absorbed the blows and they shared to the full in the ultimate destruction of the enemy.
The magnitude of the betrayal is stupefying.
What Trump is proposing is an attack against our values, history, and yes, family.
Let me explain.
I am an enormous fan of the historian Rick Atkinson.
There is no volume of books that I recommend more highly than his “Liberation Trilogy,” which tells the story of the United States Armed Forces in Europe during World War II.
If I had the power to make them mandatory reading for the American people I would.
The final book from the “Liberation Trilogy” concludes with an epilogue that I would like to share with you.
Donald Trump has smashed the alliances and values that were created and defended with great sacrifices and immense cost.
Maybe this will help explain it better than I have been able to do across almost 2,700 warnings.
What has been lost — and what will be burned — is tragic beyond any measurement.
The magnitude of Donald Trump’s betrayal is unmatched since Jefferson Davis.
From the incomparable Rick Atkinson, this is an excerpt from the epilogue of the final volume of the “Liberation Trilogy.”
I hope you will read this slowly, and keep it close to your heart.
Share it.
Think about it.
Think about the cost that gave us the world that Stephen Miller wants to destroy.
Perhaps there will always be monsters. When they rise there should be no confusion about their existence, and no delusion about what is required to face them.
“Seventy-five thousand Americans had been listed as missing or captured during the European campaign; thousands still were not accounted for at war’s end, leaving their loved ones with the particular anguish of uncertainty.
“Darling, come to me in a dream tonight and tell me that you’re alive and safe,” Myra A. Strachner had written from the Bronx on April 18, after Private First Class Bernie Staller went missing.
“Please! I know you want to tell me.”
Private Staller’s secret eventually would be out: he had been killed by German artillery a month earlier, at age nineteen.
For others, the mystery endured.
An estimated 25,000 GIs lay in isolated graves around the Continent, many of them hidden or lost.
No sooner had the ink dried on the surrender documents than mobile teams fanned across Europe to seek the dead and missing, including 14,000 Americans believed killed in air crashes behind enemy lines and others who had died in German prison hospitals.
Similar searches began from the Arctic Circle to Cape Town, from the Azores to Iran.
Graves Registration units labored to confirm the identities of more than 250,000 American dead in 450 cemeteries scattered across 86 countries, two-thirds of them in Europe or the Mediterranean.
For an estimated 44,000 lost at sea, nothing could be done.
Within weeks, 700 bodies were disinterred in Czechoslovakia.
Hundreds more emerged from scattered graves in eastern Germany, where the Soviets grudgingly permitted three American recovery squads to roam the countryside.
Thirteen hundred sets of American remains were unearthed in the Low Countries, many from MARKET GARDEN polders.
Millions of land mines made tromping around the Hürtgen Forest and the Siegfried Line perilous, but a nine-month hunt through western Germany would find 6,220 Americans on battlefields large and small.
In three years, European fields, forests, orchards, and cellars would yield 16,548 isolated GI dead; over the subsequent decades they would continue to give up a skull here or a femur there.
Even as this search began, all twelve U.S. military cemeteries on German soil were emptied; no dead GI would knowingly be left in the former Reich.
By the thousands, and then by the tens of thousands, the dead were reinterred at thirty-eight temporary sites, mostly in France, of which ten eventually became permanent American cemeteries.
The solicitude accorded them could be seen at the Ninth Army cemetery in Margraten, where on May 30, 1945, Memorial Day, Dutch citizens gathered flowers from sixty villages and spread them like a brilliant quilt across seventeen thousand graves.
The power of a well-wrought grave was beyond measure.
Patricia O’Malley, who was a year old when her father, Major Richard James O’Malley, a battalion commander in the 12th Infantry, was killed by a sniper in Normandy, later wrote of seeing his headstone for the first time in the cemetery at Colleville, above Omaha Beach.
“I cried for the joy of being there and the sadness of my father’s death. I cried for all the times I needed a father and never had one. I cried for all the words I had wanted to say and wanted to hear but had not. I cried and cried.”
In 1947, the next of kin of 270,000 identifiable American dead buried overseas would submit Quartermaster General Form 345 to choose whether they wanted their soldier brought back to the United States or left interred with comrades abroad.
More than 60 percent of the dead worldwide would return home, at an average cost to the government of $564.50 per body, an unprecedented repatriation that “only an affluent, victorious nation could afford.”
In Europe the exhumations began that July: every grave was opened by hand, and the remains sprinkled with an embalming compound of formaldehyde, aluminum chloride, plaster of Paris, wood powder, and clay.
Wrapped in a blanket, each body was then laid on a pillow in a metal casket lined with rayon satin.
Labor strikes in the United States caused a shortage of casket steel, and repatriation was further delayed by a dearth of licensed embalmers, although government representatives made recruiting visits to mortician schools around the country.
In warehouses at Cherbourg, Cardiff, and elsewhere the dead accumulated.
Finally the Joseph V. Connolly, the first of twenty-one ghost ships to sail from Europe, steamed down the Scheldt with 5,060 dead soldiers in her hold.
Thirty thousand Belgians bade them adieu from the Antwerp docks, while pledging to look after the 61,000 Americans who would remain in those ten European cemeteries, “as if,” one man vowed, “their tombs were our children’s.”
On Saturday, October 27, the Connolly berthed in New York.
Stevedores winched the caskets from the ship two at a time in specially designed slings.
Most then traveled by rail “in a great diaspora across the republic for burial in their hometowns.”
Among those waiting was Henry A. Wright, a widower who lived on a farm in southwestern Missouri, near Springfield.
One by one his dead sons arrived at the local train station:
Sergeant Frank H “Wright, killed on Christmas Eve 1944 in the Bulge; then Private Harold B. Wright, who had died of his wounds in a German prison camp on February 3, 1945; and finally Private Elton E. Wright, killed in Germany on April 25, two weeks before the war ended.
Gray and stooped, the elder Wright watched as the caskets were carried into the rustic bedroom where each boy had been born.
Neighbors kept vigil overnight, carpeting the floor with roses, and in the morning they bore the brothers to Hilltop Cemetery for burial side by side by side beneath an iron sky.
Thus did the fallen return from Europe, 82,357 strong.
When it comes to Donald Trump, Lindsey Graham, Kristi Noem, Corey Lewandowski, Pam Bondi, Tom Homan, Greg Bovino, Stephen Miller, Susie Wiles, Megyn Kelly, Pete Hegseth, and all of the MAGA fascists, there are only three words necessary to express the disgust they have so well earned:
How Dare You?
All so true and terrifying. Thanks to Steve as always for his hard work and dedication to documenting the challenges to our Democracy. I would also ask how 77,000,000 US citizens would dare to trust our sacred tenets and history to this group of despicable miscreants?
Thank you ever so much for this, especially in light of little coverage of your WW11 dead. All those lives lost for- freedom against tyranny. Very interesting info re retrieval of the dead, I didn’t know.