Somewhere over there

Since yesterday was the 80^th anniversary of the D-Day landings, for today’s earworm we’re having something that soldiers on both sides would have been listening to.

The song we know as “Lili Marlene” originated as a poem in the First World War (the one that was supposed to end all wars), written by a Hamburg schoolteacher conscripted into the German army, Hans Leip. It was set to music by Norbert Schultze in 1938 and recorded by a German singer, Lale Andersen, in 1939.

The gist of the piece is a lonely soldier on watch, missing his girlfriend. Pretty universal—I expect there was some Greek song around 520 BCE that expresses the same thoughts.

The song pretty much went nowhere until in 1941 German troops occupied Belgrade, in Yugoslavia, and needed recordings to broadcast over Radio Belgrade. Andersen’s “Lili Marlene” was one of the few discs the station had, so it got played a lot. And soldiers loved it.

But Reich propaganda minister Josef Goebbels loathed it. It wasn’t sufficiently martial—no proper German soldiers had time to miss their girlfriends or be anything but aggressively victorious. Besides, Andersen hung around with Jewish artists, which was not the done thing.

Still—soldiers within range of Radio Belgrade demanded more “Lili Marlene”. It expanded coverage to North Africa, where the British Eighth Army took it up. By the time Allied forces landed on the Normandy beaches in 1944, it was on everyone’s playlist, and a standard for Marlene Dietrich’s USO performances. Vera Lynn also covered it.

(It's kind of interesting that a song with a male soldier's narrative seems only to have been covered by female singers.)

Today we’re going to go back to Lale Andersen’s version, the one that etched itself into the hearts of millions of men in all kinds of uniforms 80 years ago.

 

 

©2024 Bas Bleu

 

Eighty years on

This time around, the 80^th anniversary of the launching of Operation Overlord, we’re not seeing the news reporting as in commemorations past. Well, that’s partly due to the remaining participants being centenarians, probably. As well as to changes in journalism overall (prioritizing clicks over coverage), plus this being a presidential election year in a particularly circuslike atmosphere here in the States.

Plus—Republicans at this point are uncomfortable with the notion that the Big War was fought against fascists, so they’d just as soon forget about it.

But in thinking about it, I am reminded of one particular element, which didn’t make it into most of the reports in the past, but is, I think, a mark of how different things—and men—were then than they are now.

The Normandy landings had been planned with extraordinary thoroughness. I have always stood in shock and awe at the idea that men and women from several nations (not to mention many different military and government branches) put together the strategy, the intelligence, the logistics, the training, the communication plans to get more than 150,000 soldiers and all the necessary matériel from the south of England to the Normandy coast (and beyond).

And they did it without computers. Without whiteboards, if you please!

Supreme Allied Commander Dwight D. Eisenhower had overall responsibility, of course. Not to mention the heavy burden of keeping rampaging egos like Montgomery and Patton somehow working as members of a team. These days we’d refer to it as herding cats, only those two were very big jungle cats with sharp claws and vicious teeth.

But here’s the detail I’m interested in at the moment. Despite all the meticulous planning of this particular operation, it is a primary maxim of military leadership that no battle plan survives first contact with the enemy. In this instance, the weather—critical to safe landing and ongoing support of several armies that were far from operational ports—was a particular crapshoot. The only guaranteed result from pulling the trigger on Overlord was that men were going to get killed. Success was just one possible outcome.

So, in addition to the official “D-Day is underway” proclamation, Eisenhower prepared an alternative announcement, the one in which he admitted that the landings had failed, he’d pulled back the troops and they would have to rethink the whole thing.

And he said, “The troops, the air and the navy did all that bravery and devotion to duty could do. If any blame or fault attaches to the attempt it is mine alone.”

He wrote this out in pencil—alone, no SHAEF PR flunkies polishing it, no discussion with anyone in his chain of command—and he put it in his pocket until such time as it might be necessary to have it typed up and transmitted.

These days no one embarking on any crack-brained self-aggrandizing political or corporate or military scheme on someone else's dime even considers the remote possibility that it could go belly-up. (Looking at you, AI.) So (and probably because of that lack of forethought) when it (perhaps predictably) does go to hell in smithereens, after much behind-the-scenes scuffling and consulting of PR departments, crisis management companies, social media mavens, lawyers and other miscellaneous spin-doctors, a statement is issued in which someone grudgingly admits that “mistakes were made”, but the makers of those alleged mistakes are never named. And they are certainly never the persons reading the statement to the news outlets, Congressional committees or The View.

I am not a fan of the uncritical gushing about “The Greatest Generation” that has occurred since Tom Brokaw wrote his paean. The men and women blooded by the Great Depression indeed made the enormous sacrifices they were called upon to make during the years 1939-1945. And I am deeply grateful that they did. But I don’t see how it was somehow a greater sacrifice than what was asked for in the years 1914-1918.

(And if you want to talk military service, do not even try to tell me that the men and women who went to Vietnam were somehow lesser beings than the ones who went to Iwo Jima or Anzio or the Hürtgen Forrest. They suffered from bad military and political leadership and lack of strategy, not from any moral deficit.)

However—when I compare this scratched-out pencil draft of Eisenhower’s intent to accept full responsibility for the failure of Overlord with any no-fault statements made by politicians, generals or corporate executives caught in everything from flagrante delicto to global embezzlement and multiple manslaughter, it is clear to me that something indeed changed in the intervening 80 years.

 

And not for the better.

 

 

©2024 Bas Bleu

 

I can do this

For about three weeks, I’ve had first muscular discomfort and then muscle/joint pain in my left hip. It started with something behind the pelvic blade, then moved deep into the glute and finally attacked the ball and socket. Having had way too many interactions with orthopods in the previous two years, I tried toughing it out for much longer than I should, but eventually caved.

Saw the doctor yesterday and the diagnosis is bearable: trochanteric bursitis, caused by chronic tendonitis. Treatment: a cortisone shot to reduce the inflammation and physical therapy to, you know, do the usual. Prescription-strength NSAID as backup.

I can’t tell you how relieved I am about this. I’d nearly convinced myself that this pain, which greatly limited my mobility and flexibility, would be my future, and now it’s just an episode.

 

 

©2024 Bas Bleu

Sizing up

The couple ahead of me in line at the Weird Brothers coffee house the other day had quite the complicated order to place, so I had some time to examine their attire. At first, his tee-shirt seemed normal—I was just trying to think where Currituck might be. (Outer Banks, North Carolina.)

But then I realized this:

Evidently they don’t wash new articles of clothing before wearing them. (Or remove the size tags.)

Huh.

 

 

©2024 Bas Bleu

 

Gratitude Monday: Civic duty

Today’s a big one: I’m so grateful that the criminal justice system—with all its flaws—worked, and that 12 ordinary citizens of Manhattan stepped up to the plate, guided with patience and professionalism by a judge, and convicted the Kleptocrat on all 34 felony counts of falsifying business records to cover up hush money payments to influence the 2016 election.

These 12—and six alternates—sat through six weeks of mostly tedious and sometimes tawdry testimony, paying attention to all of it, while the defendant pouted and dozed and frowned and growled his contempt for the proceeding. They did their civic duty; they rendered their verdict based on their understanding of the judge’s instructions and the evidence presented. They deserve our thanks and respect for that.

It was an extraordinary case, with extraordinary precautions—jurors remained anonymous because of the very real danger of threats to them by TFG and his toadies all up and down the food chain. (The number of Republican legislators, many of whom hold law degrees, who have decried the verdict as a travesty is appalling.) Imagine—a criminal trial of a former president with the kinds of precautions normally only seen when mobsters are in the dock.

The calls to dox and harass the jurors began shortly after the end of the trial.

We live in strange times; no doubt about it. And there is danger all around us. I need to be clear: the legal system is not going to save us. We have to do that at the polls in November. But today I am grateful that a dozen men and women stood up for all of us in a court of law and held a criminal accountable for his actions. That’s not nothing.

 

©2024 Bas Bleu