God bless America for its greatest sons...

In case anyone thinks that ALL Yankees are myopic and prejudiced Americanists, the truth is that they are not.

Most Americans are, I believe, far more reasonable than that.

And all Americans have reason to be very proud of an extraordinary legacy.

I am proud of my true-blue American uncles and of the fact that most members of my wider clan live in the USA.

Here's a post dedicated to Good Yankees - indeed some really great ones to whom we in Europe owe a very great deal.

Pretty near top of the tree must be GI Joe, the archetypal US infantryman who gave up his farm or post office or teamster job to join the Army, cross the Atlantic, train in a foreign country and then risk his neck a hundred times over.

Let's just start with something like D-Day or, in particular, Omaha Beach where the enemy fire was murderous, the cliffs too high to climb quickly and the air cover and naval gunfire support hampered by bad weather conditions.

The result was a lot of GIs killed and injured helping to save Europe from a madman and his mad secular, atheist ideology.

Let us not forget how Winston Churchill described what we were fighting:

"What General Weygand called the Battle of France is over. I expect that the Battle of Britain is about to begin. Upon this battle depends the survival of Christian civilization. Upon it depends our own British life, and the long continuity of our institutions and our Empire. The whole fury and might of the enemy must very soon be turned on us. Hitler knows that he will have to break us in this Island or lose the war. If we can stand up to him, all Europe may be free and the life of the world may move forward into broad, sunlit uplands. But if we fail, then the whole world, including the United States, including all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science..."

The GIs knew that's what they were fighting against and they were willing to risk their lives to do it even if some must have suspected that the same sort of perverted science would once again rear its ugly head in the latter half of the 20th and the beginning of the 21st century. They measured this all up and decided it was worth the fight.

Who can forget those incredible scenes so well captured in the memorable opening sequences of the Hollywood film Saving Private Ryan - some just too harrowing to replay.





As President Ronald Reagan rightly said, when challenged about the continuing presence of American bases on European soil, American military forces are in Europe to help defend Europe not, like some foreigners on European soil, to conquer and oppress it.

Then he said this: America does not claim any part of European soil...except, perhaps, those parts where American soldiers, who died fighting to save Europe from tyranny, are buried.

President Ronald Reagan memorably said that America claimed no part of Europe except, perhaps, the land where her sons, who had died defending Europe, were buried.

Indeed.

We, in Europe, must ever thank God for the sacrifice of those gallant and heroic men.

...