Clothing store advocating hate has billboard of Trump depicted as Hitler removed in a day

The cemetery above Omaha beach at Normandy is one of many but gets more attention than any other overseas. And the graves of those, mostly airmen, scattered all over Europe from WW II get little attention from visitors. But where ever those graves and cemeteries are, all them, the countries from which those men came, did not come to stay. They did not come to dominate the land where they lie forever, for the duration. And that is the difference between the graves and cemeteries of Germans, Italians, and Japanese from WW II which lie outside their homeland.
A story of personal experience. One of several this former soldier could tell.
We are told quite often that the US is not respected and not like by a majority of the populace in Europe. The legacy of the Doughboys and Dog faces/GI’s long forgotten. Even the cold war protectors of Fulda Gap and all Western Europe from the military might and aggression of the Warsaw Pact not appreciated. Well, this may be true for some Europeans but it was not my experience in some of the places I went during my time as a US soldier in Europe.
In 1986 I was a team member on ODA 071, Co. A, 1st Bn., 10th SFG(A) stationed at Flint Kaserne in Bad Tolz, Germany. As was typical at the time, most of this Battalion was tasked to support the various special operations sub-exercises of the huge annual Reforger exercise in Europe. We set up and helped run the various special operation exercises for teams coming out of CONUS (Continental US) to participate.
The largest and best known of these special operations sub-exercises was the one conducted in Germany named Flintlock. But what many SF soldiers that weren’t in 10th Grp didn’t know was that there were smaller exercises of a type similar to Flintlock conducted in about all NATO member nations in Western Europe. That year my team was tasked to support Osprey, which was the Belgian equivalent of Flintlock.
So, in early April of 1986 my team drove up to a Belgian Army facility in Arlone, Belgium. Being a paratrooper, a student of military history, and an admirer of George Patton, I was very happy to be spending time in the area of the Battle of the Bulge. The city of Arlone had been on the southern edge of the bulge and where the lead elements of the 4th Armored division passed through during their drive to Bastogne.
After getting settled in to our Belgian Army barracks our first major task was to survey all the Drop Zones (DZs) the teams jumping in would or might use. Several of those DZs were near towns, villages, and cross roads with names that will forever be remembered in US military history. Bastogne was one of them.
The DZ we were surveying was on the west edge of Bastogne. There was a long triangular patch of woods between us and the town to the east that served as the division between two fields. The woods was about 200 yards wide at road at it’s north end and then tapered down to nothing but a fence line as it ran to the south along the top a ridge forming a triangle about 1/4 of a mile long. We were on top of a ridge and as one looked out to the east he saw a series of rolling ridge lines with their long axis running generally north-south and they went that went on as far as the eye could see. It was all open farm land for the most part and as I remember I could see about a half dozen church steeples sticking up over the ridge lines marking the locations of villages that were nestled down in the valleys between the various ridges.
As we were working on our survey a farmer walked up to us. He, spoke pretty good english and introduced himself as the owner of the land and we told him what we were doing.
I asked him if he knew what had happened there abouts during the battle of the bulge and siege of Bastogne. He said yes he did, his father owned the land then and he was a little boy and witnessed some of it. He pointed over to the triangular patch of woods and said some of the American defensive positions for this side of the town are still right there just inside the tree line. We walked over with him and he showed us.
Sure enough there were the rectangular depressions of what had obviously once been two man fox hole fighting positions spaced evenly about 30 feet apart all along the west side of the woodline. There were small irregular depressions that appeared to be from artillery strikes too. Further back in the woods there was one big hole which he told us was where after the battle the troops piled up a bunch of the debris and left over ammo and ordinance and blew it up to dispose of it and make it inert. As I looked closer at the ground I started to notice bits of metal laying right on top the ground unburied after all that time. Most of it was twisted junk from the explosion but then I started finding bent up .50 cal brass with 1943 stamped on the base. I found the remnants of the cylindrical german gas mask container and a damaged by easily recognizable part of a bazooka rocket round. There were also pieces of track from some kind of tracked vehicle(s) laying about.
Then the farmer explained that after the Germans surrounded the town and several attacks from different directions failed they tried attacking the west side of the town coming across the fields to the moving east with some armor moving along the east west road that the base of the woods ran up to.
I stood and looked out and tried to imagine what it would have looked like and I could see it in my minds eye. The Americans would have been very exposed to artillery preparation even in their foxholes. Shells hitting the trees in that woods would have rained shrapnel down upon them so if they had not put stout wood and dirt covers over their holes they would have suffered severely. Then as the Germans attacked they would have been sitting ducks if they did not have either smoke or fog to conceal them. As they crested every ridge on their approach and for a ways down the east face of the two nearest ridges they would have been perfect targets. Same thing for their Armor support. Then they faced a near assault right up the west face of the ridge we were on. It had to be hell for both sides. This attack happened the day before Patton’s 4th Armored broke into Bastogne with the tank “Cobra King” that I wrote about before leading the way. It was the last desperate attempt of the Germans to take the town for Patton’s forces reached it.
I researched this engagement extensively after that visit and here at home online years ago. History shows that the Germans had already lost the battle by this time. But history also shows that in the next few weeks far more combatants from both sides would die as the Americans retook the ground they had lost than died when the Germans were on the offensive.
While four of us were finishing up our survey of that alternate DZ we looked over to the road where our CUCV was parked we noticed a little white van with a guy standing by it. As we approached our vehicle the man appeared to be an old Belgian farmer. He wore the blue coveralls with trouser legs stuffed down into to tops of his high rubber boots typical of the work uniform for farmers working with livestock around that area.
The man greeted us and after finding he spoke German (thankfully, since none of us were fluent in French or Flemish) we understood that he would like us to follow him in his vehicle a short distance to show us something. We were done for the day and so agreed.
We followed the white van the short distance around to the north west side of Bastogne until he pulled up in front of a medium small building set on the edge of the rolling farm fields outside the NE side of town.
The two story building looked ancient. Stone and stucco with green paint on the large paned window frames pealing away to reveal the paint of other colors below from countless previous paint jobs. There was a huge set of carved solid double wooden doors under the covered entranceway, one of which was open due to the mild weather. We followed our host through the door and found the place to be a kind of tavern. To the left was a small room with a couple of the old wooden table games using tops or balls. In front a beautiful old wooden staircase leading to the second floor. To right was a single larger room. All the floors were plain concrete that appeared to me to have been poured over the original stone floor.
In this larger room there was an ancient ornately carved wooden stand up bar that ran along the whole back of the room complete with a large mirror and liquor shelves behind it. The thing looked like it has been around since the days of Napoleon. A couple of naked light bulbs hung from the ceiling by their wires supplemented the light coming through the widows. Scattered about the room were old wooden tables and chairs.
The room with the bar was filled with old Belgian men. Most of these men appeared to be farmers since they wore garb similar to our host’s outfit. I got the impression that it was a place for the local farmers to gather, talk, and drink after a days work before going home to dinner.
They all just looked at us at first when we came through the door and then after a quick introduction by our host they all came towards us and shook our hands and embraced us like we were long lost old friends. They offered us drinks of Cognac and beer, which we accepted. A couple of us that smoked offered them our American cigarettes which some of them accepted.
At first I was shocked. But then as we sat there drinking and smoking and conversing as well as we could with these old Belgium men I came to understand. Most of these men were old enough to remember what happened here during the winter of 1944-45. And these guys had seen our paratrooper wings and that is all they needed to know to invite us so openly into their world. They wanted to shake our hands and press our shoulders and let us know how they felt even 42 years after the event.
It was not us that earned this greeting, friendship, and respect. The reason we were here was because we were American soldiers enjoying the legacy of those that had come before us. Freezing, frost bitten, hungry, besieged paratroopers and regular ground troops who had fought and bled, and in some case died on the land these farmers worked had earned what we were now enjoying now. Most of them were old enough to have remembered some were not, but they were there too and showed us respect and so the legacy of what had happened there had been passed on to them by their fathers or grandfathers.
There are Europeans around that remember. This was one of several experiences I had during my six weeks supporting Osprey. I drove all over the area where that battle occurred and got to look over so much of the ground I had read and studied about. We got a personal tour of Belgums national war museum and I actually got to touch the sleeve of one of Napoleons uniform coats and had many other wonderful experiences in that museum. I never understood how little Napoleon really was until I saw his uniform. I had read about it of course but to see that uniform really brought it home like nothing else could have. I’ll bet I was larger than him when I was 9 years old!
I had a similar experience in Italy also. But that story will have to wait until later.
Anyway, when a Special Forces ‘A’ team, like the one I was on, deploys for training or anything else, like our support mission for Osprey they take what they need with them of their personal and team equipment and the rest is inventoried and packed away in locked wooden or metal boxes and placed out ready to be put on aluminum palates for immediate air shipment. This is done in the event that the team is called to deploy for a “real world” mission while they are away training so their equipment can be shipped to their location, where ever they are going to stage for the mission, as efficiently as quickly as possible.
Included in the standard SF team equipment was a radiation warfare kit. Among the various items in this kit were two “doseimeters”. Doseimeters do the same function and the radiation badges that people that work in places where they may be exposed do except these little devices that are about the size and shape of an old fountain pen are reusable. They measure the cumulative amount of radiation they are exposed to in “rads” between the time they were last calibrated and “zeroed” and when they are read.
We did not take our radiation warfare kit with us to Belgium. The items in the kit were packed in their rubberized canvas cases which in turn were packed inside of one of those supposedly airtight metal breifcase things, which in turn was packed inside of a heavy plywood wooden box. That box along with every thing else was laid out and stacked ready for shipment on our “team room” floor.
Our “team room” was located in the first underground floor of the huge quadrangle of Flint Kasserne which was built by the Nazis during WW II as an SS officers training school. This huge quadrangle building was of heavy steel reinforced concrete construction with 4 above ground floors over our team room topped off with a typical red tile Bavarian style roof. There was a small “well window” in the team room.
When we got back both dosimeters read 5 rads! The commo man, who’s responsibility it was to pack the dosimeters swore that as per SOP he had calibrated both dosimeters and zeroed them before they were packed away.