Today is June 6th, 2003.

D-Day.

You're welcome, you ungrateful bastards.

JC,

I was wondering if the Frenchies would flood the site today with fulsome expressions of a secret bottled up gratitude.

Though before checking out the site I scouted the skies for flying pigs. No pigs. So not surprised, no Frenchies.

But America and Britain did not spearhead the invasion to oblige the French their thanks. The Normandy invasion was done because it needed doing.

Let's see if anyone shows up August 25th with a "thank you" for liberating Paris.

Regards,
DGB

My Uncle Joe, who passed away last November, was with the 101 that day. My dad was flying above the fight dropping bombs on the Germans, and his best friend from home, Roy Young landed on Omaha Beach.
Roy was killed at St. Lo a month later.

To France,
From LaCrosse Wisconsin,

YOUR WELCOME!

The more I think about it, the more I think that we should have looted the Louvre, brought it back and loaded it in the Smithsonian. What an oversight. We should at least be guilty of some of the things they accuse us of.

semper fidelis

Anybody read "Band of Brothers"? I think it's interesting that the GI's, even though they didn't like the Germans any, at least RESPECTED them. They hated the Frogs pretty much in all respects. Sadly the respect thing for the Germans doesn't even hold up any more.

How do the french people feel about the American and allie deaths for the liberation of their country? Before the war with Iraq, they spray painted the following on of the D-Day cemetery monuments:

"Dig up your trash, it's soiling our land."

Read the story.

Graveyard graffiti taunts the allies
By Jerry Seper
THE WASHINGTON TIMES

Authorities have increased vigilance over 24 U.S. military cemeteries abroad in the wake of desecration of a memorial to allied dead of World War I at a military cemetery in France.

"We have on-site personnel 24 hours a day, and they are the eyes and ears of our cemeteries," said Thomas R. Sole, director of engineering, maintenance and operations for the American Battle Monuments Commission, which oversees the U.S. military cemeteries in foreign countries, including 11 in France.

"We're concerned and we have increased our vigilance," Mr. Sole said, noting that each of the U.S. cemeteries is watched over by at least one commission employee who lives at the site. "This is not going to be tolerated, and we intend to work closely with local authorities and police to be sure."

Vandals spray-painted insults at the Etaples Military Cemetery near Calais last week: "Dig up your trash, it's soiling our land." The graffiti, scrawled in French across the base of a large cenotaph, or memorial, includes a swastika, under which was written "Death to the Yankees," and the names of President Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair. Scribbled nearby was the boast: "Saddam will triumph and spill your blood."

The vandalized cemetery includes the remains of 10,744 British, Canadian, Australian and New Zealand soldiers killed during World War I.

Mr. Sole said security at the sites generally is the responsibility of local police. The U.S. military cemeteries are located on land supplied by the foreign governments, and treaties give the United States sovereignty over the land forever.

Of the 541,915 American dead of World Wars I and II, 124,167 are buried in military cemeteries in Europe and the South Pacific, including 60,486 in France.

No U.S. soldiers are buried at the Etaples cemetery, located about 150 miles north of Paris. The graffiti was cleaned off the memorial this week by the French branch of the Commonwealth War Graves Commission, which manages the site. The cemetery is located on the site of a major British reinforcement camp and a British hospital of World War I.

French President Jacques Chirac apologized yesterday for the desecration of the cemetery, describing the antiwar graffiti as "inadmissible and shameful." In a letter delivered to Queen Elizabeth at Windsor Palace, he said: "From the French people and from me personally, I offer you my deepest regrets."

Mr. Chirac, who has been a leading opponent of the war in Iraq, told the queen, "At the moment when your soldiers are engaged in combat, the thoughts of the French are naturally turning towards them."

Public opinion polls show that 80 percent of the French population opposes the war. Only yesterday French Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin said the United States erred morally, politically and strategically by going to war with Iraq. "Going to war was a moral error," Mr. Raffarin told a French television interviewer. "One can disarm in other ways."

A spokesman for Mr. Blair said: "We unreservedly welcome both the content and the sentiment of President Chirac's letter and the sentiments towards our troops serving in action at the moment and that his thoughts and the thoughts of the people of France are with those soldiers."

The French Embassy in Washington noted that Hamlaoui Mekachera, France's minister of state for war veterans, went to the cemetery yesterday to participate in a ceremony of remembrance and to place a wreath in the presence of British diplomatic authorities and members of the Commonwealth War Graves Commission.

"The French government wants in this way to pay tribute to the memory of the soldiers from across the channel who sacrificed their lives to liberate France," Mr. Mekachera said, noting that inscriptions "hostile to the U.S.-British intervention in Iraq" had been discovered on a wall at the cemetery, "arousing widespread outrage.

"France condemns these acts of vandalism in the strongest terms," he said. "The international tension only makes more heinous this violation of the memory of combatants who came to liberate our land."

Donnedieu de Vabres, vice chairman of the French National Assembly's Foreign Affairs Committee, said he was "deeply shocked and appalled" by the incident and that "no words are too strong to express the revulsion caused by such barbaric, monstrous and utterly despicable acts.

"This crime was committed in France, but in no way reflects the true feelings of France. Needless to say, the French government will spare no effort to bring the perpetrators of this crime to justice."

The American Battle Monuments Commission is an independent agency of the executive branch of the U.S. Government and is responsible for the design, construction, operation and maintenance of permanent U.S. military burial grounds in foreign countries.

Collins.

Perfect post. Concise, to the point.

Well I know my Dear Late Papa hated the French. Uncle Joe commented on what good cooks the German ladies who they ended bein billeted with were.
I hope we never again go to their aid. Period. twice in the 20th Century was twice too much.
Let em be an Islamic Republic and see Chanel add Burkas and Chadres to its fall line!

I was in Normandy this Week-end.

Went to visit of Course a couple of brits and US cemetaries.

I met a lot of people. putting flower on graves.
You wouldn't believe it, but they were French ...

Marc, please, you perfectly know everyone at Pave knows not all French are blatantly anti-American or at least behaving like a total jerk towards the US like Chirac.

Especially in Normandy, pleople are very grateful.

You know, last time I went to Normandy, there was many people too, but they were all Americans. But it wasn't on June 6.

Again Levis trys to insinuate himself into the conversation.
My father, was a WWII vet, he saw stuff going on that well did turn his hair white. Thanks to cowards like Deladier who allowed Hitler to occupy the Rheinland (Which gasp was against the Versailles Treaty..France seems to think that when Butchers like Saddam, and Hitler defy treaties and the world that its OK.....) guys like my dad, from small towns like LaCrosse Wisconsin, USA his brother (Uncle Joe) who landed with the 101 at Normandy, and was wounded in the face at Bastonge, and Roy Young who was killed at Saint Lo, had to come across the big pond to save their miserable hides. Then we come to find out that over half the country was pro Vichy. Very good at transporting Jews to Germany and then the east.....Levis never saw a concentration camp liberated, or mass graves, or ovens still warm with bones inside..but the Americans and Brits who liberated those camps did. And most of the French now call Israel an s***y little country. Perhaps had you Frogs done something to help your Jews they would not have needed a real home of their own to return to. If it had not been for your natural European anti-Semitism and racial bigotry the Jews of Europe would not have been sheep led to the slaughter. Levis hypocrisy astounds me. We wasted our young men to help your miserable hides..my father lost his youth, when Joe returned from the War he was so uptight they all called him jitters, but, I have less blame for the Germans who were doing what they naturally did at the time and used the French as targets, than I do the French who had they stood their ground like men could have stopped they Germans long before Dad, Roy and Joe had to go and be thrown into the breech.
Levis stay away from those cemeteries because your an ungrateful pipsqueek who needs a lesson. Perhaps a visit as an inmate to Dachau, Sachsenhausen, Buchenwald, or other pleasent German vacation spots would make you understand what a complete and utter idiot you really are.
Even Eli Wiesel, Auschwitz survivor knows why we went to Iraq and is still thankful to this day we went to Europe to bring down the Nazis...
But Levis, anti-American fool doesn't understand. I guess French schools don't teach real history any more...
PHFTT!

It is my feelings that we as Americans should go over to France and bring home our dead and leave them with gaping holes in the ground. The armed forces from the ohter countries shold bring home their dead also then boycott anythng to do with France. Where woud the French be without the Americansm, British and other courntries that came to their aide? I would like to have seen Chirac try to disarm Hitler. We need to bring our men home so that the French vandal's do not have an oportunity to desacrate the grave of out bave men and women. Bring them home to Amerian Soil.
GOD BLESS AMERICA

Carol