Operation Overlord Quotes

Many scholars argue that the voyages of Admiral Zheng He of the Chinese Ming dynasty heralded and eclipsed the European voyages of discovery. Between 1405 and 1433, Zheng led seven huge armadas from China to the far reaches of the Indian Ocean. The largest of these comprised almost 300 ships and carried close to 30,000 people.7 They visited Indonesia, Sri Lanka, India, the Persian Gulf, the Red Sea and East Africa. Chinese ships anchored in Jedda, the main harbour of the Hejaz, and in Malindi, on the Kenyan coast. Columbus’ fleet of 1492 – which consisted of three small ships manned by 120 sailors – was like a trio of mosquitoes compared to Zheng He’s drove of dragons.8 Yet there was a crucial difference. Zheng He explored the oceans, and assisted pro-Chinese rulers, but he did not try to conquer or colonise the countries he visited. Moreover, the expeditions of Zheng He were not deeply rooted in Chinese politics and culture. When the ruling faction in Beijing changed during the 1430s, the new overlords abruptly terminated the operation. The great fleet was dismantled, crucial technical and geographical knowledge was lost, and no explorer of such stature and means ever set out again from a Chinese port. Chinese rulers in the coming centuries, like most Chinese rulers in previous centuries, restricted their interests and ambitions to the Middle Kingdom’s immediate environs. The Zheng He expeditions prove that Europe did not enjoy an outstanding technological edge. What made Europeans exceptional was their unparalleled and insatiable ambition to explore and conquer. Although they might have had the ability, the Romans never attempted to conquer India or Scandinavia, the Persians never attempted to conquer Madagascar or Spain, and the Chinese never attempted to conquer Indonesia or Africa. Most Chinese rulers left even nearby Japan to its own devices. There was nothing peculiar about that. The oddity is that early modern Europeans caught a fever that drove them to sail to distant and completely unknown lands full of alien cultures, take one step on to their beaches, and immediately declare, ‘I claim all these territories for my king!

For more than a hundred years the Republic of South Africa had been the center of racial strife. Men of good will on both sides had tried to build a bridge, but in vain—fears and prejudices were too deeply ingrained to permit any co-operation. Successive governments had differed only in the degree of their intolerance; the land was poisoned with the hate and the aftermath of civil war. When it became clear that no attempt would be made to end discrimination, Karellen gave his warning. It merely named a date and time—no more. There was apprehension, but little fear or panic, for no one believed that the Overlords would take any violent or destructive action which would involve innocent and guilty alike. Nor did they. All that happened was that as the sun passed the meridian at Cape Town it went out. There remained visible merely a pale, purple ghost, giving no heat or light. Somehow, out in space, the light of the sun had been polarized by two crossed fields so that no radiation could pass. The area affected was five hundred kilometers across, and perfectly circular. The demonstration lasted thirty minutes. It was sufficient; the next day the government of South Africa announced that full civil rights would be restored to the white minority.

But for all that American industrial brawn and organizational ability could do, for all that the British and Canadians and other allies could contribute, for all the plans and preparations, for all the brilliance of the deception scheme, for all the inspired leadership, in the end success or failure in Operation Overlord came down to a relatively small number of junior officers, noncoms, and privates or seamen in the American, British, and Canadian armies, navies, air forces, and coast guards. If the paratroopers and gliderborne troops cowered behind hedgerows or hid out in barns rather than actively seek out the enemy; if the coxswains did not drive their landing craft ashore but instead, out of fear of enemy fire, dropped the ramps in too-deep water; if the men at the beaches dug in behind the seawall; if the noncoms and junior officers failed to lead their men up and over the seawall to move inland in the face of enemy fire—why, then, the most thoroughly planned offensive in military history, an offensive supported by incredible amounts of naval firepower, bombs, and rockets, would fail.

By the beginning of March, K Company, 333rd Regiment, had reached the Rhine. The men settled down in the village of Krefeld to await Montgomery’s Operation Plunder, the crossing of the river; Monty was planning the operation with as much care as he had put into Operation Overlord, so the pause was a long one. By some miracle, the men found an undamaged high-rise apartment building in which everything worked—electricity, hot water, flush toilets, and telephones with dial tones. The had their first hot baths in four months. They found cigars and bottles go cognac. Pvt. Ray Bocarski, fluent in German, lit up, sat down in an easy chair, got a befuddled German operator on the phone, and talked his way through to a military headquarters in Berlin. He told the German officer he could expect K Company within the week.

final major secret at the core of Operation OVERLORD was that the Allies didn’t plan to capture or target a key harbor in the opening of the invasion. German officials believed that places like Pas-de-Calais or Cherbourg would be vital early targets of the Allies in order to secure the port facilities

Changes elsewhere in the Middle East swept a region racked by continued instability. Following a bitter clash with Allied occupying forces, the nucleus of a Turkish republic arose in Anatolia in place of the Ottoman Empire. Meanwhile, Britain failed to impose a one-sided treaty on Iran and withdrew its occupation forces in 1921. France established itself in Syria and Lebanon, after crushing Amir Faysal’s state. Egyptians revolting against their British overlords in 1919 were suppressed with great difficulty by the colonial power, which was finally obliged to grant Egypt a simulacrum of independence in 1922. Something analogous occurred in Iraq, where a widespread armed uprising in 1920 obliged the British to grant self-rule under an Arab monarchy headed by the same Amir Faysal, now with the title of king. Within a little more than a decade after World War I, Turks, Iranians, Syrians, Egyptians, and Iraqis all achieved a measure of independence, albeit often highly constrained and severely limited. In Palestine, the British operated with a different set of rules.

The headline of a comprehensive exposé in The Guardian expressed the global shock among the scientific community at the rank corruption by scientific publishing’s most formidable pillars: “The Lancet has made one of the biggest retractions in modern history. How could this happen?”94 The Guardian writers openly accused The Lancet of promoting fraud: “The sheer number and magnitude of the things that went wrong or missing are too enormous to attribute to mere incompetence.” The Guardian commented, “What’s incredible is that the editors of these esteemed journals still have a job—that is how utterly incredible the supposed data underlying the studies was.” The capacity of their Pharma overlords to strong-arm the world’s top two medical journals, the NEJM and The Lancet, into condoning deadly research95,96 and to simultaneously publish blatantly fraudulent articles in the middle of a pandemic, attests to the cartel’s breathtaking power and ruthlessness. It is no longer controversial to acknowledge that drug makers rigorously control medical publishing and that The Lancet, NEJM, and JAMA are utterly corrupted instruments of Pharma. The Lancet editor, Richard Horton, confirms, “Journals have devolved into information laundering operations for the pharmaceutical industry.”97 Dr. Marcia Angell, who served as an NEJM editor for 20 years, says journals are “primarily a marketing machine.”98 Pharma, she says, has co-opted “every institution that might stand in its way.”99,100 Cracking Down on HCQ to Keep Case Fatalities High Referring to the Lancet Surgisphere study during a May 27 CNN interview, Dr. Fauci stated on CNN about hydroxychloroquine,

The Marshall Plan,” New York Times correspondent William White wrote, “appears to draw its greatest strength not from any special feeling that other peoples should be helped for their own sake, but only as a demonstration against the spread of communism.”67 Communist “overlords,” South Dakota Republican Karl Mundt said, were disrupting economic activity “so as to produce chaos and put an end to freedom.” We must, he said, “turn the Red tide.” Herter himself cited the danger posed by Communist-controlled labor unions in western Europe. Freshman California Republican Richard Nixon, assigned to tour Italy, wrote that “the great difficulty [here] is not so much the physical destruction of the war, but the fact that the Communists have chosen this country as the scene of one of their most clever and well-financed operations against the forces of democracy.” Alabama Democrat Pete Jarman, who traveled in eastern Europe, spoke of the “feeling of strangulation that one has behind the iron curtain.” We in the United States, he concluded, had to recognize “the absolute necessity of our doing whatever is necessary to prevent [communism’s] spread.

Since January, when he had arrived in England to command Overlord, Eisenhower had been under crushing, ever greater strain. Now it had all boiled down to this decision. Eisenhower alone—not Roosevelt, not Churchill—had the authority to give the final command to go, to “enter the continent of Europe,” as his orders from on high had stated, and “undertake operations aimed at the heart of Germany and the destruction of her armed forces.”3 He alone could pull the trigger. Marshaling the greatest invasion in the history of war had been, at times, as terrifying as the very real prospect of failure. The last time there had been

If not for the invasion of northern France (OVERLORD), the Pacific operation (FORAGER) would have surpassed all previous amphibious landings in scale and sophistication. That two such colossal assaults could be launched against fortified enemy shores, in the same month and at opposite ends of the Eurasian landmass, was a supreme demonstration of American military-industrial hegemony.