The D-Day and After: The Reminiscences of the War - Essay Example

The Germans were caught off guard in the very beginning, but they quickly recovered their senses and blasted us with the vicious gunfire that claimed the lives of many of my own pals. My best friend, Gerry Hunter, was killed by the German sniper when he took part in the attack on one of the German dots that still resisted our attacks after forty hours of gunfire. Now it is still impossible to try to foretell the subsequent course of the operations, but it is still clear that as of now, on 5 July the strategic advantage is firmly in our hands.

My friend who serves at the Division Staff managed to have a sneak peak at the recent intelligence report, which affirmed that over 500,000 Allied troops are already in Normandy. We have succeeded in encircling the rather important group of enemy forces, isolating them on Cotentin Peninsula. The Germans are surprisingly ineffective at sending the new troops to substitute for the units we have already smashed. Their tanks are rarely seen by our troops in battle. The officers are confident in our victory, as it is known that the bulk of the German tank armies have already been destroyed in the East; the Wehrmacht simply lacks the armor potential it enjoyed in the 1940 campaign.

Nevertheless, I am greatly disturbed by the scenes of fighting and slaughter I have seen so far. My father, who served as a soldier under General Pershing’s command in 1918, told me of the terrors that he faced in the Great War, but he would have scarcely understood the full horror of the modern, fully mechanized war that we find ourselves in the midst of. The roaring of the airplanes’ engines above and the merciless tottering of the machine guns invokes horror even in my heart, despite the fact that I have lived through the fighting in Sicily and near Monte Cassino, where the resistance of enemy forces, the usual fairy tales about the ‘lackluster’ Italian campaign notwithstanding, was often surprisingly stiff and formidable.

In my dreams I often see the images of my friends and loved ones consumed by the fire from the aerial bombardment, like in Guernica and Coventry. The modern war is really a beast feasting on human misery. In addition, I have recently become more and more obsessed with the questions pertaining to the nature and meaning of this war, unheard of in the global history. Why do we fight, and for what? The powers that clashed with each other in this vicious circle all claim that they initiated the war for the sake of ‘racial well-being’, ‘democracy’, or ‘proletarian revolution’.

In reality, as I have come to believe after my late 1930s acquaintances with the American Liberals, Communists, and even occasional Silver Shirt, all of them are unlikely to be genuine. The ‘democratic’ British Empire is well known for the cruel treatment visited upon its restless colonial subjects, the German “New European Order” has turned to be a vast nightmare, with the population of this ancient and proud Continent turned into the slaves of cruel and capricious Teutonic masters. As for Stalin’s claims to the titles of a “great anti-Fascist” and the “leader of world proletarian revolution”, it is only excessively trusting New York intellectuals who still believe in the Communist fairy tales, after the Purges