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70th Anniversary of the Battle of Britain
The Battle of Britain should be seen as one of the 10 pivotal military contests of the last 1,000 years.
The 1969 movie about the battle, excerpted above, still pops up on TV occasionally in the US. When it does it should be watched, at least by those who haven't seen it before. From the standpoint of art, I don't even know if it's possible in 2010 to stage aerial photography like this anymore. So that's something that should be experienced. The scenes are somehow more gripping, direct and human than CGI. The ending shot of the German bomber being splashed into the Channel is of course meant to symbolize the entire course of the months-long contest.
Of course, the real value of the film is to remind us of the importance of the battle and to tell us that, however trite it may sound, sometimes civilization literally does hang in the balance. What would have happened if Britain had been successfully invaded or had made terms with Hitler? It is almost too terrible to contemplate.
Churchill of course gave in this period the classic example of leadership inspiring by its sheer resolution. This he was able to transmit down the line, as seen in this quote in which a British diplomat defies a German ultimatum:
"We're not easily frightened. Also we know how hard it is for an army to cross the Channel — the last little corporal to try it came a cropper. So don't threaten or dictate to us until you're marching up Whitehall! ...and even then we won't listen!"
This spirit is sorely needed in defending our civilization - but we face a harder challenge in many ways than the West did in 1940, for we must first convince ourselves that our civilization ought to be defended.
The moral collapse of the West - and its perverse child, the assertion of a moral equivalence between the Western systems based on Christian values and all other systems of thought and governance - have doomed us unless there is, in the most old-fashioned sense, true repentance.
70 years on, be inspired by the few who risked and gave all to defend their nation from what seemed to be an unstoppable tyranny.
Last British Army WWI veteran dead at 111
From CNN:
His death came a week after fellow British World War I veteran Henry Allingham died at the age of 113.Patch was the last surviving soldier to have witnessed the horrors of trench warfare in the first World War
He fought and was seriously wounded in Ypres, Belgium, in 1917 at the Battle of Passchendaele, in which 70,000 of his fellow soldiers died -- including three of his close friends.
This story reminds me of my Irish grandfather (born 1904) telling me how he watched all the lads marching off to war full of enthusiam in the Fall of 1914. Everyone was shocked the following year when only a third of them came back.
