Way to Russia Talk Lounge

Paul Holmes · VIP Joined: 12 Apr 2005 Posts: 970

Okay, show me a post in which I have berated Russia.
Second Didn't Puskin write " I hate my country from head to toe, and I hate even more foreigners that say negative things about my country" or something like that. Other quote is " Patritism is love of ones country and Nationalism is the hate of others". There is not much difference between Nationalism and Fascism.

But I will say that I have personal preferences based on the way I was raised. I drink very strong tea and drink cold milk with a meal. Russians don't . I prefer Celtic music. I prefer Indian cuisine over Russian Cuisine. But I prefer Russian milk product over the rest. So E, because I do not declare everything about Russia is great, I am berating the country. Because I like the sunny weather of Florida over the snow in Yoshkar-Ola, i am berating Russia.

cyndy22 · Posted: Mon May 09, 2005 6:08 am Post subject:

E,
You have some serious problem. You berated Paul for not being from US. nOT that that really matters but, you E act like you are Russki, and we all know that is crap don't we. Problem with E is that you are a lost ship with no light house. Worse, you swim to what ever shore is convenvient for your economic and protective self.
You area man with no country and no soul. So sad but somehow I can't quite feel compassion.! Perhaps others do but I sadlydoubt it.

Mogsfan · WayToRussified Joined: 03 Nov 2004 Posts: 490

Paul Holmes · VIP Joined: 12 Apr 2005 Posts: 970

Memories of Second World War still haunt veterans 60 years later

John Ward
Canadian Press

May 8, 2005

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Crowd of Dutch civilians celebrate the Liberation by the Canadian Army in Utrecht, Netherlands, May 7, 1945. (CP ARCHIVES/National Archives of Canada/Alexander Mackenzie Stirton)
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(CP) - Sixty years ago, Art Meyer, an infantryman with the Royal Regiment of Canada, was looking forward to a coveted leave in Paris, a respite from the horrors of the front line in northeast Germany.

An officer appeared to tell him his leave was off. Meyer cursed and asked why.

"Because the war is over," came the unexpected reply.

"I said, 'Well that's a good enough reason," Meyer remembers.

So the war ended for one young man from Toronto. Like so many others, he felt no exultation, just a realization that he was alive when so many were dead.

Death had been a companion to the end. Soldiers died just hours before the surrender. Flak guns and accidents killed airmen. HMCS Esquimalt, the last Canadian warship lost, had been sunk off Halifax just three weeks earlier.

But it was over.

Regimental diaries make it clear there were no cheers and few visible signs of emotion.

"It was just a blessed relief," says Victor Bulger, who was a 23-year-old artillery sergeant. "We all breathed a heavy sigh of relief."

The war in Europe ended with a handful of sullen, stone-faced German generals signing the surrender of their troops, but it had been visibly running down for days.

Bulger, who was in Holland after having fought in Italy earlier in the war, noticed that his guns were firing less and less as the days wore on.

"When we were in Italy, we shot at anything," he says. "Towards the end of the war, it appeared that they didn't want to make any more damage than they had to."

During the last month of the war, it was clear the Nazis were tottering. British and Canadian troops were in the Netherlands and northeast Germany, the Americans had linked up with the Russians to slice Germany in half and were pressing into what was then Czechoslovakia. The Russian Red Army, after spilling torrents of blood, had seized Berlin.

Adolf Hitler, the Nazi dictator who had begun the nightmare in Europe in 1939, had died by his own hand in a bunker in Berlin, his body torched by his servants.

But the surrender brought no joy on the front line, says Arthur Pidgeon, who was a private in the Hastings and Prince Edward Regiment, the Hasty Pees.

"There is no joy in anything in war," says Pidgeon, whose only brother had died with the Canadian Scottish the previous August. "Especially for the infantry. If you're infantry, you're here today and gone tomorrow. It's the roughest job. The poor, bloody infantry they called us."

There was joy away from the front. London was filled with ecstatic crowds. Across Canada, people rejoiced in impromptu parades and church services.

"I was at Buckingham Palace, cheering with everybody else," recalls Ralph Kimmerly, a technician with the Royal Canadian Medical Corps.

There was also joy in the Netherlands. That spring the Dutch had come close to mass famine - perhaps 30,000 starved to death - before the Allies forced Nazi forces to allow shipments of food into the parts of the country they still occupied.
Canadians helped truck in tonnes of food. Planes with bomb bays filled with rations instead of explosives dropped relief over starving towns. In return, the Dutch unleashed a torrent of gratitude on their Canadian liberators.

"The day after the war, we went through Rotterdam," Bulger remembers. "It was one of the greatest trips in our lives. They were almost pulling us out of the vehicles. The Dutch people were so pleased to see us."

As a young Dutch girl wrote to Canadian Gen. Harry Crerar:

"It was your boys who gave their lives and blood and it was your people who had to accept, in the interest of our country, so many sad reports about sons being 'Killed in Action'."

For some, the war ended early. Gordon Ritchie was home, hanging around with friends on VE-Day.

Ritchie had served as a tail gunner in a Halifax bomber. His war was crammed into two terrifying years, from recruitment to basic training to advanced training, then 34 missions in the perilous night skies over Europe.

"We went to Berlin and Leipzig and Stuttgart and Hamburg . . . we went right into the heart of Germany," he says. "The first trip I went on we lost 78 aircraft."

In August 1944, after Op 34, his adjutant called him over and said, simply, "you're screened." That meant he was going home.

"Screened," Ritchie says with a sigh. "That's the magic word for air force guys. What a feeling of excitement."

At the same time, Ritchie happened to get a medal and a promotion from pilot officer from flight sergeant. He wired the news home to his parents in Montreal.

"Saw King. Received commission. Finished tour of operations."

With the fighting over, the Canadians turned to feeding the people of the freed territories and moving thousands of German prisoners home. That was especially tricky in the Netherlands, where years of brutal occupation had left the Dutch seething with anger at the Germans and their collaborators.

"God, how the Dutch hated the Germans," one veteran remembers. "You can't blame them."

At one point, the Canadians imposed a curfew on Dutch towns so they could move German prisoners through at night.

Over the next few months, the soldiers came home to Canada. They brought terrible memories with them.

Meyer, the private who didn't get his leave to Paris, still recalls charging into a forest torn by shellfire late in the war. In a clearing lay a wrecked German artillery piece, its crew dead or dying around it.

"This fella looked like an Olympic athlete, bare from the waist up, muscles all over the place, his back against the tree.

"The front of his chest had been blown away by shrapnel as if a surgeon had done it. The guy was sitting there with no head. We were afraid we were going to bring up.
"Here is a young man, who can guess how old he was? What ambitions he might have had? We felt, what are we doing alive? How much longer are we going to be alive?"

Ritchie, the young airman, remembers June 7, 1944, when his bomber was hit by anti-aircraft fire over Dieppe, France. The pilot, a piece of flak in his side, slumped semi-conscious over the controls and ordered the crew to jump.

The three men in the nose, the radio operator, bomb-aimer and navigator, baled out.

Ritchie had to crank his turret around to get back in the plane, struggling against G forces as as the bomber fell into a dive.

The flight engineer managed to tug the pilot from his seat, pull the plane out of the dive, jettison the bombs and turn the big bomber back towards Britain.

Ritchie and the mid-upper gunner injected the mortally wounded pilot with morphine for the pain and dragged him to the rear escape hatch. They rigged his parachute to open automatically. He was aware of what was happening and whispered to Ritchie. "Just give me a moment."

Ritchie bent down again and the pilot looked at him: "OK, let me go."

With the pilot gone, Ritchie and his two companions also baled out.

"As I was coming down, the aircraft crashed and lit up the countryside for miles around.

"Seven of us went out and three came home."

The flight engineer, who brought the plane back with no flying training, was awarded the Conspicuous Gallantry Medal. Ritchie and the gunner received the Distinguished Flying Medal.

Infantryman Bill Ross never forgot seeing a Canadian tank burst into flames after a hit by a German 88-mm gun.

"To hear our fellows caught in the tank as they burned to death . . . it lingered with me all my life."

The Canadians left more than 11,000 dead behind in northwest Europe.

They left heroes there. Men like Aubry Cosens, who in February 1945 led his men in the capture of a fortified farm complex near Mooshof, Germany. He directed a tank to crash through a wall, then cleared room after room of enemy soldiers. As he was going back to report his success, a sniper killed him. Cosens was awarded the Victoria Cross.

There were sailors, like Lt.-Cmdr. John Stubbs, captain of the destroyer HMCS Athabaskan. After it was sunk in a fight with German ships off the French coast in April 1944, a sister ship, HMCS Haida, pulled alongside the survivors and began hauling them in.

But dawn was coming and Haida was dangerously close to shore. As the sky brightened, a voice called from the water: "Get out of it Haida. Get clear." Sailors said it was Stubbs. Haida had to run for it with 44 survivors aboard.
The Germans rescued 83 but 129, including Stubbs, died in the water.

On VE-Day, war still raged halfway around the world where the Japanese were slowly being driven back to their home islands. A few Canadians, mostly aviators, were fighting in the Pacific and hundreds of others, captured at Hong Kong more then three years earlier, were suffering from hunger, disease and unspeakable brutalities in Japanese prisons.

Canada and Britain were preparing to send troops to join in the invasion of Japan itself, little suspecting that the atom bombs which would end the Pacific War were taking shape in the United States desert.

Tens of thousands of young Canadians came home from Europe in 1945. They re-started their lives.

Meyer went back to his optician's job in Toronto, married the girl he had written to throughout the war and had two sons, a daughter and nine grandchildren.

Bulger, the artillery sergeant, decided there would be another depression after the war and since 20 years in the army would mean a pension, he stayed in uniform. He retired as a warrant officer and went into the insurance business. He and his wife raised five kids and have nine grandchildren.

Ritchie, the tail gunner spent, 36 years with Imperial Oil and had three kids.

Pidgeon of the Hasty Pees sold sewing machines for 23 years.

Kimmerly, the medical tech, used the government benefits from five years in uniform to put himself through medical school and spent 47 years as a doctor.

They are in their 80s now, these men and others who stand on Remembrance Day in their Legion blazers and medals, with stooped shoulders and rheumy eyes. They deny being heroes. The heroes, they say, are the men who never came home.

They were ordinary men and the Canadian Army included its share of shirkers, con men, bullies and braggarts. But they were called on to take part in extraordinary events, learned their trade in battle and defeated the German army, which included some of the toughest soldiers ever fielded.

Mogsfan · WayToRussified Joined: 03 Nov 2004 Posts: 490

Cyndy, I don't think it should matter what country we're from, we can have an opinion on another country as well as our own. I guess I am not very nationalistic because if someone criticizes Canada, I don't get upset. The way I rationalize, I will examine the viewpoint and try to assess whether it's well founded or makes sense. Heck, in a lot of cases, I might even agree. I can criticize or praise certain aspects of the U.S. or Russia depending on the topic and points made. All I ask is you hear me out so I can explain why I perceive things a certain way. I also think I'm rather open minded so a great number of my views are not set in stone. But, I am rather cynical and suspicious politically-speaking as I have a great distrust of government and people in general. IMHO, there is a lot of justification for that and I don't care which country you're talking about.

e · VIP Joined: 23 Apr 2005 Posts: 654

Paul Holmes · VIP Joined: 12 Apr 2005 Posts: 970

You are again sadly mistaken. Instead of answering why you hate the USA, you attack the users again. I am not trying to push you out. Quite the opposite I think you have lots of good things to discuss. You assuming again. You are intelligent man. You are full of angst. I want to know why you hate USA so much. Simple question. Why do you hate America and Americans?
I am not here to attack you, e.

e · VIP Joined: 23 Apr 2005 Posts: 654

Again Paul answer MY question that I asked first: why do you ask? Why is it your concern?[/b]

Paul Holmes · VIP Joined: 12 Apr 2005 Posts: 970

Why do I ask? Because you are intelligent man and therefore you should have a logical reason why you dislike the USA. I aminterested in your reasoning. You are not like Winston who wants to segergate a whole nation to make a name for himself.
Plus If you notice, I always address crappy stereotypes about all countries icluding Russians and Americans. I met a majority good people in both.

Are you bigot and racist?

e · VIP Joined: 23 Apr 2005 Posts: 654

e · VIP Joined: 23 Apr 2005 Posts: 654

Paul Holmes · VIP Joined: 12 Apr 2005 Posts: 970

Ahhh E, you are assuming again and over generalizing. How am I a nationalist? Do I run around and say great one country is over another ? Please give me a quote in which I state that I hate a whole country. Do I bash countries(just people)? How can someone call you a Nationalist when we do not know what nation you are from? We have called you anti American, therefore you must be American to anti nationalistic. Interesting.

So here is something you do not know. I have attacked Mogs on his views especially about Russian women views which I totally disagree with him.
I have given you stats including stats Canada and others to proven you wrong. You deny them and state that I am off the thread. E I have attacked Cyndy on her issues also.

Paul Holmes · VIP Joined: 12 Apr 2005 Posts: 970

E, you want to generically insult a whole country without reason. Put invalid remarks about their women based on a stereotype. Tell how much you hate there. Tell how much better another country is, but refuse to leave to go back to the favourite country. Complain to moderators when you dislike something like highjacking a thread like you did here. You kinda remind me of a particular Taiwanese American. Laughing

Paul Holmes · VIP Joined: 12 Apr 2005 Posts: 970

e · VIP Joined: 23 Apr 2005 Posts: 654