A Polish destroyer

[Ford Prefect]

Originally Posted by PavelKirilovich

One of my favourite photos of the Blyskawica.



Quite. Disturbingly, many of my countrymen forget that Canada was assigned its own beach during the D-day landings, and practically none of them know the role that Canadian troops played in preventing the 21. Panzer Lehr and 12 SS "Hitlerjugend" divisions from sweeping the Americans off their beachheads. This is just the single most famous example, we're not going to go into the book-long list of other actions.

There are kids over here who probably don't know a thing about the somme yet in all likelihood some member of their family fought and died there.
I came close to throttling some kids a few years back when they were giving abuse to an old man in town, this guy had fought in WWII, he was busy shouting at them that he wasn't afraid of the ities 60 years ago and he wasn't afraid of them now.
I wanted to pull their heads clean off, in hindsight I probably should have done, now they're older and still scum, but scum with a criminal record now, never amount to anything. The old man must have wondered what he and his friends fought for, paid for freedom in blood for people who don't know or just don't care.