Skip to main content

Classroom Time


Oh, this certainly was made for an economics teacher.
A big part of the Institute is some classroom learning that we do while at University of Maryland. We spent the bulk of the morning in a conference room on our dorm's ground floor hearing from two speakers.

My workstation. 

Our classroom. 
The second of them, a professor from Mary Washington College, gave a presentation about the home front. Her presentation leaned heavily on sharing visuals from the war era, especially propaganda posters urging for women's participation in the war effort. There were a few posters, in particular that caught my eye.


There's so much punnery happening here. I love it. 

Simply a fascinating example of how to market war contributions to women. 
The second presentation certainly gave me ideas for artifacts I could use when next teaching World War II. However, the first presentation made me giddy. Our speaker was the historian secretariat for the U.S. Navy, and he offered an analysis of the Allied planning that made D-Day possible. It was the first dedicated history lecture for which I was in a student role since, oh, I don't know, 2003. There were a few really big takeaways from the lecture. The first of them was the central logistical problem of an army on the advance: fuel. It takes about 80 lbs. of gasoline per day per soldier to support an advancing army. Meanwhile, the central logistical challenge of defense was ammunition. I appreciate the chance to put a logistical challenge in such stark and straight forward terms.

The second big takeaway was the historian's generally positive appraisal of the job the navy and air force did supporting the invasion. Despite the horrific losses at Omaha, the beach where our soldier was killed, the losses for the Allies overall were less than projected. And the Allies were able to build up their forces on the beach head much more quickly than the Germans in those opening weeks. That speaks to the effectiveness of the air and naval support for the invasion.

There's a third takeaway about landing craft and how they were a prized asset that might be too nerdy to get into in this spot. But ask me sometime about the wedding metaphor our professor shared.

Still, a bitter pill for Lauren and I to swallow. Our soldier happened to be on the beach where casualties were about what they projected them to be. It was the beach where the preliminary bombardments didn't work well, where the landing craft were launched too far from shore, where the contingency of the contingency was necessary for victory.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Some Thoughts on Liberation

One of the markers placed by the French and Belgian governments to mark the path of the liberators.  My greatest takeaway from this most recent trip involves some refined feelings about liberation. I'm writing this post in a time of high cynicism. And the were matters of which one could be cynical back in 1944, the year in which Charlie fought and died. This trip, however, left me with renewed appreciation for what our country did back in that war, helping me refocus on what I've had the chance to see and do the past few years. Christopher is the military historian who accompanied us on this voyage. In one of our webinars this spring, he made an offhand reference to a piece of scholarship about the Holocaust he said was worth reading. It's entitled Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin. It's heavy. I can't say I read every chapter. But I read most of it on our bus rides this summer. And I'm glad I did. My unassigned reading. Saying that Bloo...
1 comment
Read more

Day of Days

It's the seventy-third anniversary of the Normandy Invasion, D-Day. That means it is also the seventy-third anniversary of Bill's death. Bill, of course, is 1st Lt. Edmund William Duckworth. A map Lauren uncovered in her research.  To learn about the circumstances of Bill's death, I have done a lot of reading to better understand what led up to and took place on D-Day. I saw a post today on Facebook that discussed, quite well, the anxiety, unease, apprehension, and even frivolity that characterized the soldiers on the night before the invasion. D-Day was months in the making, and the soldiers who landed on those five beaches on June 6 had been preparing for the invasion for weeks or even months. In the immediate week before the invasion, they were queued up in embarkation areas and on ships, awaiting their chance to go. They were penned up for days. Knowing this adds more weight to the very difficult call General Eisenhower had to make, whether or not to go on June 6...
Post a Comment
Read more

Normandy American Cemetery: Our Students' Eulogies

Bill's name is visible on the First Infantry Division Memorial found between the Normandy American Cemetery and Omaha Beach.  The culmination of our Normandy Institute experience took place on Tuesday with the students’ eulogies. Each of our students had the task of offering appropriate words of remembrance at their soldier’s grave. Typically these eulogies lasted approximately five minutes. We worked through the cemetery from back to front, which means Lauren offered her words second. Altogether fifteen students spoke. I didn’t once feel tempted to look at my phone or check the time. It was the most meaningful day I’ve spent with students in a long time. Our procedure at each grave followed the same pattern. Lynne and Amanda would scout out where the grave was and the rest of the group would find them there. At each grave, Frank would assist the student in putting sand on the soldier’s name, rank, unit, and state so that the information would stand out. The studen...
Post a Comment
Read more