D Day Anniversary

Another anniversary of D Day, when 156,000 mostly American, British and some Canadian and Australian/New Zealand forces landed on five beaches along a 50-mile stretch of the heavily fortified coast of France’s Normandy region, in order to rescue France (France seems to constantly need to be rescued from itself, but then when you are busy being arrogant, as the French are, it's a hard to stand up for yourself) from German occupation in W.W. II. I'll skip waxing about the enormity of that event and the tragic loss of life in it and look at it from another angle- it was and will be the last massive infantry combat invasion by the world's nations and was the first extensively film world war.

That such massive conflicts in which human infantry soldiers are slaughtered are over is a good thing about being alive in this age. As the technology of war changes so do the tactics of war. The new technology tends to make war a riskier process, and hence, reduces the probability of it. If World War I was as claimed at the time, "The Great War" and "The War to End all Wars", W.W. II was the last conventional large scale war. With modern military technology, any "world war" today would end the world itself, making the likelihood of having one of those again less probable.

World War II and D Day were among the best photographed (particularly with the relatively new video cameras) of them all. the world has extensive and spectacular film of it. Extensive video was used for the first time in a global conflict, and armies of every persuasion that fought in the war sent cameras into combat then too. Most of the soldiers who fought in D Day or those who were adults at the time are now deceased. The D Day celebration now is more of a historical retrospective than a personal remembrance of the D Day invasion.

New Orleans has the world's largest D Day museum (an esteemed professor of history from New Orleans campaigned for it to be in New Orleans, the fact that New Orleans has ties to D Day because a shipbuilding company in the city designed and built the famous "Higgins boats' that were used in the invasion of Normandy, made putting the museum in New Orleans possible). The museum has been designated by the U.S. Congress as America's 'National World War II Museum'. When walking through the the museum one is aware of the way in which war was to be reported has changed dramatically since W.W. II was fought. Then war was more of a personal horror story, now the video and pictures of war seem more like a Hollywood film or reality TV show, less real to the observer. It's now something that "is over there' and does not affect the ordinary citizen directly.

Wars today are more like political conflicts that are confined to single spots and that require little or no sacrifice by the general populations outside the conflict area. Looking at D Day or at any W.W. II footage or reading about them makes one realize the art and nature of war is far different today than it was in the Second World War.
At any rate, if you are curious about D Day, here is a link for the New Orleans based D Day museum. http://www.nationalww2museum.org/