Maggie's Farm

(Photos tear at emotions. I purposely do not include any images in this post as emotions are far from enough to convey the individual stories or the brutalities.)

At sundown today begins the annual observance of Yom Hashoah, Holocaust Martyrs' and Heroes' Remembrance Day. There are many museums, plaques, books that let today’s visitors get a glimpse of the horrors and the heroes of that time. As one passes through and on, what is often missed is the individual stories, the lost hopes and potentials, the personal exertions, the evils that were so common among men and women of many nationalities. The Nazis could not have killed so many without the work of those in conquered countries, some coerced, some bribed, some for their own salvation, many because of rife anti-Semitism. The Yad Veshem museum and memorials, including to Righteous Gentiles, outside Jerusalem, is a major repository of these individual stories. Visit the website.

The Holocaust needs to be remembered and restudied in every generation just because of its scale, and because of what it says about the thin veneer that separates now from then and now from recurrence. (It is not by coincidence that the week after Yom Hashoah is the celebration of Israel's Independence Day, Yom Ha'atzmaut.)

Below is a piece I wrote in 2006 that includes first-person accounts of what happened in a village near where much of my family perished.

My old friend Bob Turner served in Vietnam in various capacities. He then went on to law school and teaches national security law at the University of Virginia, having also headed up that section for the American Bar Association. Want to be impressed? Read his bio at the link of his name above. Below, he writes about the last days of South Vietnam and what brought them about. This is slightly edited from another piece he recently wrote.

Congress did not totally cut off assistance to South Vietnam in 1975; but as a scholar who has been studying and writing about Vietnam for more than forty-five years (who was the last congressional staff member to leave Vietnam during the April 1975 final evacuation), I can assure you that the U.S. Congress was the most decisive factor in the Communist conquest of South Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia in 1975.

To keep things in context, it is important to note that in the post-war era, Hanoi has repeatedly admitted that its leaders made a decision on May 19, 1959, to open the Ho Chi Minh trail and send tens of thousands of soldiers and countless tons of equipment and supplies south to "liberate" South Vietnam by armed force. That was more than 5 years before the U.S. decided to send combat units to Vietnam, and our purpose was precisely the purpose for which we sent troops into South Korea in 1950 -- to uphold the non-aggression principles of the UN Charter and oppose the expansion of Communism by force.

Viet Cong defectors used to laugh and express shock at how successful their campaign to portray the "National Liberation Front" to the west as something other than a classic Leninist "front" organization had been. (Hanoi actually published an English-language translation of the proceedings of the Third Party Congress in 1960, including the resolution it approved calling for "our people" in south Vietnam to set up a front under Party leadership three months before the NLF was allegedly formed by non-Communist resistance leaders in Ben Tre.) American "scholars" who fell for this ruse should be ashamed of themselves.

Many of us have read dozens, hundreds, of books about Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, World War II, the Holocaust. Until now, however, a careful work of sound scholarship has not appeared that pulls it all together as does Bloodlands. I could write thousands of words reviewing the book, but nothing could do justice to reading it yourself. Indeed, if you or someone you know reads nothing else on this era, this is the one book that must be read. Bloodlands, by Yale historian Timothy Snyder, details the – by Snyder’s admission an undercount – 14 million individuals murdered in purposeful killing policies by Stalin and Hitler in the central zone of Eastern Europe, Poland, Belorussia, Ukraine, non-Jews and Jews, between 1930-1945. That doesn't include, and dwarfs, the millions of soldiers who died in combat or the civilians in the path of battles.

In his concluding chapter, “Humanity”, Snyder tells us, “Each record of death suggests, but cannot supply, a unique life. We must be able not only to reckon the number of deaths but to reckon with each victim as an individual.”

Snyder points out: “To dismiss the Nazis or the Soviets as beyond human concern or historical understanding is to fall into their moral trap.” Stalin and Hitler had conscious policies to extract material gain from the people who they thought stood in their way. It was boths’ commonality that had each act so barbarously: “Both the Soviet and Nazi political economies relied upon collectives that controlled social groups and extracted their resources.” Many perpetrators of the horrors, also, had material objectives or just were trying to survive themselves. Snyder says that the millions of deaths tells us as much about the living. “It is not at all obvious that reducing history to morality plays makes anyone moral.” Snyder’s recounting of the murders focuses upon the – to them – practical objectives of Hitler and Stalin: “In colonization, ideology interacts with economics; in administration, it interacts with opportunism and fear.”

The personal vignettes that fill the book, along with the details of the scale of murders, have set every reader back on their heels. No one, no country, is spared the telling of their heroes or devils. Go to Google to see how the learned react to the book. Go to your own soul to see how you react.

The reporting of the court martial of Frank Wuterich’s actions in 2005 at Haditha fails to adequately explain the background of the specific charges and, also, the standards of evidence that must be met. Without that crucial information, the reader of daily news reports is likely justifiably confused. The news reports are being more circumspect than previously in parroting accusations of willful massacre. But, major media reports are mostly cherry-picking comments from prosecution witnesses, briefly passing over defense cross-examination, and most importantly not presenting the crucial context of the testimony and examinations.

The core issues in the court martial are whether beyond a reasonable doubt Frank Wuterich acted (1) with dereliction of duty to not obey rules of engagement, (2) leading to his own actions and command culpability for negligent homicide in the deaths at Haditha that otherwise would have been avoided. These are reductions of charges from the original charges of murder against Frank Wuterich. Several other charges were thrown out in opening motions at the court martial.

These key points were examined in Frank Wuterich’s Article 32 proceeding. An Article 32 hearing is comparable to a preliminary hearing in civilian law, with even broader latitude in searching for whether there is cause to proceed to a court martial trial. In an Article 32 hearing, the standard is reasonable doubt. In a court martial, generally following civilian federal trial guidelines, the higher standard is beyond a reasonable doubt. The Article 32 hearing officer concluded   that the throw-the-sink, murder charges brought by the prosecution were excessive to the standard of reasonable doubt, and that a key prosecution witness granted immunity – then Corporal, now Sergeant, Sanick Dela Cruz -- was not credible, his story changing multiple times.

On December 15, 1944, the desperate German army launched its surprise Ardennes Offensive, otherwise known as the Battle of the Bulge, to reach Antwerp and interrupt Allied supplies. Allied control of the Belgian town of Bastogne was an obstacle to the German tank advance. In the coldest winter, without supplies being able to reach them, the small American force led by the 101st Airborne held out. The battle is described here. There were many heroes among the US forces. There was, also, another hero, a nurse, born in the Congo. Here's the story:

A Belgian nurse who saved the lives of hundreds of American soldiers during the Battle of the Bulge at the end of World War II was given a U.S. award for valor Monday — 67 years late.

Congolese-born Augusta Chiwy, now 93, received the Civilian Award for Humanitarian Service medal from U.S. Ambassador Howard Gutman at a ceremony in the military museum in Brussels.

"She helped, she helped, and she helped," Gutman said at the ceremony. He said the long delay in presenting the award was because it was assumed that Chiwy had been killed when a bomb destroyed her hospital.

The Battle of the Bulge was a ferocious encounter in the final stages of World War II. In desperation, Adolf Hitler ordered a massive attack on allied forces in the Ardennes, in southern Belgium. More than 80,000 American soldiers were killed, captured or wounded.

Chiwy had volunteered to assist in an aid station in the town of Bastogne, where wounded and dying U.S. soldiers in their thousands were being treated by a single doctor in December 1944 and January 1945. Chiwy braved the gunfire, helping whoever she could, and saving the lives of hundreds of American GIs.

The Nazis hoped the surprise attack would reach the sea at the Belgian port of Antwerp and cut off the advancing allied armies. Bastogne, a market town that was also a critical road junction, was quickly besieged.

AP

Belgian nurse Augusta Chiwy, center, who saved hundreds of wounded GIs during the WWII Battle of the Bulge, receives an award for valor from the U.S. Army, in Brussels, Monday, Dec. 12, 2011. The U.S. ambassador says there was a 67-year delay in presenting the award because it was assumed that Augusta Chiwy had herself perished in the battle. (AP Photo/Yves Logghe)

The U.S. troops — led by paratroopers of the 101st Airborne Division — found themselves surrounded. But they resisted fiercely, and the key crossroads was never taken.

During the battle, Brig. Gen. Anthony McAuliffe, the 101st's acting division commander, delivered his famous reply to a German surrender demand when he scribbled: "To the German commander: Nuts! The American commander." In the ensuing siege, Bastogne was heavily shelled and quickly reduced to ruins. Another Belgian nurse — Chiwy's friend Renee Lemaire — was killed along with about 30 patients when a bomb penetrated a cellar where she was tending to the wounded.

Gutman said the diminutive Chiwy combed battlefields during the battle, often coming under enemy fire, to collect the wounded in the deep snow. "What I did was very normal," Chiwy said during the ceremony. "I would have done it for anyone. We are all children of God."

But Col. J.P. McGee, who commands a brigade of the 101st Airborne Division based in Fort Campbell, Kentucky, said that to the wounded soldiers Chiwy was "a goddess."

"Men lived and families were reunited due to your efforts," he said. McGee said the army's doctor in Bastogne, John Prior, had joked that the German snipers couldn't hit Chiwy because she was so tiny. But Chiwy, who moved to Belgium from the colony of Congo before the war, responded that they were just bad shots. Historian Alexander Omhof, who has dealt extensively with the history of the allied advance, also praised Chiwy's deeds during the month-long battle. Chiwy then received a letter of appreciation from Gen. David Petraeus, himself a former commander of the 101st Airborne.

After the battle, Chiwy slipped into obscurity, working as a hospital nurse treating spinal injuries. She married a Belgian soldier and had two children. She was finally located several years ago by a British author and historian, Martin King, who had heard stories about a black nurse at Bastogne.

Chiwy was knighted by the Belgian king in June.

The below is copied from Home Of Heroes. I hadn't heard this story before. On this day, 70-years after Pearl Harbor, take some time to navigate around the site, and find many stories you may not have heard before. And remember. And resolve for our future that lays in the hands of our Presidents to come and our servicemen and women who rise to the challenges for us all.

At 7:58 A.M. Paradise was shattered.  The first of two separate waves of Japanese fighters and bombers unleashed death and destruction on the city below.  Amid the bullets raking her deck, the men of the Nevada stood in formation without breaking ranks until the flag had been raised and the "Star Spangled Banner" finished its refrain.  Then they begin what ultimately became a two hour struggle for survival.  They watched in horror as the first bombs hit their sister ship the U.S.S. Arizona.  A few minutes after 8 A.M. the Arizona sank beneath the surface of the harbor taking 1,103 men of its 1,400 crew to a watery grave.