winston churchill

Inspire. April.

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Adventures in Writing

“Writing a book is an adventure. To begin with it is a toy and an amusement. Then it becomes a mistress, then it becomes a master, then it becomes a tyrant. The last phase is that just as you are about to be reconciled to your servitude, you kill the monster and fling him to the public.”

Winston Churchill
Colored pencil sketch with top and bottom borders. There is a green feather quill that has the ink flowing into the lower word. It says: It's a good day to Write.

Let’s try that again. The entire essay is gone. No recovering it, and we’re off to the races again. It won’t be as witty or a breathtaking example of fine writing, but it is what it is.

I woke up this morning with a ton of stuff on my mind, and in my mind, and my mind would not settle down. I thought of a great story to write about the holidays, but it would also make a great blog post, and it might be a good memoir essay for the prompt of “details, details” that I’ve been struggling with, but it was also a good piece of family history, and it was probably prompted by a conversation I had with a friend about the balancing of Passover and Easter. As an aside, I happened to look at a calendar, and next year Easter is March 31, and Passover is near the end of April, so that should cause less balancing and juggling and stress, but of course, we’ll see how it goes. The best laid plans and all.

The thoughts and memories were coming fast and furious, one thing after the other, and I tried to filter out other unrelated memories that happened in the same space I was writing about. I had twenty minutes before I had to leave, and I could use that time to get it down before it was gone forever. I’ll remember it, I told myself. No, you won’t. You never do. And to make matters worse in my head, I knew that NO ONE in the history of writing remembers when they say they’ll remember and will jot the thought down later. No. One.

You know it’s true.

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Tomorrow is the Anniversary of D-Day

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The military uses the codes, D-Day and H-Hour when the day and hour have not been decided or announced. That was the case in 1944 when the Allies were planning their invasion of the European continent. There were deception plans in place and troops were either moved or left in places to make the deception plans remain secretive and on the Nazi’s “radar”.

They were getting their plans ready for an assault of Nazi forces who were invading and taking over Europe with executions, concentration camps, and new laws forcing their sovereignty across the landscape.

That began to change with the amphibious attacks on the French coast in 1944.

Planning for the invasion began long before a date had been thought of, let alone set. So much depended on so many factors that the plans needed to be set, the logistics considered, alternatives, at what point to go ahead or abort. In the case of this preparation, the phases of the moon and tides were a major consideration as well as the time of day. This limited how many opportunities they had to make their assault. Preceding the landings were airstrikes, naval bombardments and an air assault just after midnight.

June 6, 1944. The Allied Invasion of Normandy during Operation Overlord during World War II. Now it is commonly known as D-Day. It was (and continues to be)  the largest seaborne invasion in history, landing 24,000 British, US, and Canadian forces at 6:30am.

Out of 156,000 troops, there were at least 10,000 casualties with 4414 confirmed dead.

I can’t give this decisive victory the proper justice it deserves on my own, so please, please visit the D-Day website and support the national museum.

Or begin your reading about the Normandy landings and invasion, but remember Wikipedia is a starting point.

The USS Slater is the only remaining destroyer class ship that fought Nazi U-boats during World War II that remains afloat. It is a national historic landmark and museum ship moored on the Hudson River in the port of Albany, the capital of New York State.

More than 70 years later, there continues to be a profound gratitude to the American Servicemen and Women who liberated the Dutch and who sacrificed their lives: Washington Post article: Americans Gave their LIves to Defeat the Nazis. The Dutch Have Never Forgotten.

“Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few.”
– Winston Churchill