DDay: UK and USA the next 75 years?

The DDay 75th anniversary is significant not just for - at last - the first official state visit to UK by POTUS Trump, or the first memorial to the British landing beaches in Normandy but the last event of the liberation of Europe by those who took the beaches, and as POTUS Reagan said, climbed the cliffs, as it passes from living memory.

Here in East Kent the P22 US Navy patrol boat taking part in the DDay event and Ramsgate Dunkirk Little Ships event, and the P22 boat for patrol on the Rhine after WW2 a reminder of how far European tribalism had collapsed into flames.

P22 not dissimilar to the younger Kennedy's PT109 boat sunk off the Solomon Islands.

Certainly a larger boat needed on the Channel for the Ramsgate-Ostend and Dunkirk/Boulogne refloatation of the Channel ports. Hitler's worst efforts perhaps only outmatched by UK town planners in the long peace.

With protection against aggregates dredging for an expanded Dover port - perhaps proving opportunity for the sands of the Sahel and South Sudan economies with EV shipping.

Indeed the nearby Goodwin Sands stretching from the UNESCO wetland of Pegwell Bay by Ramsgate to the White Cliffs of Dover this week are rated a Marine Conservation Site with 6 other nearby sites as a war grave of rare UK and German fighter planes and bombers such as the recently excavated rare Dornier aircraft. And now the swimming tanks - failing in UK Slapton Sands-style tests but USA unaware of the results and further swim tanks and deaths in Normandy.

Perhaps the saddest reminder of UK and USA failing to work together to deliver on what Trump calls The Extra Special Relationship.

While Churchill as warlord and architect of DDay proved less successful in democratising UK society with homes fit for heroes returning from the frontline. Surely those troops huddled in landing craft and trenches would look askance at a modern Britain jailing its citizens for council tax, detailed by Chris Daw QC campaigns, or BBC licence fee debt and jail for pensioners, or homes fit for rabbit hutches, without minimum room and garden sizes detailed by Karen Buck MP and Cllr Tom Copley.


### Got any gum chum? ###


But as DDay passes from living memory Ambo Woody raising the bar on UK-USA relationship on an Extra Special Relationship in preserving the memories of the last survivors of the Normandy invasions.

My Dad as a child remembering he and his schoolfriends chasing after the lorries bringing in the 3M USA and Canadian troops ahead of DDay shouting "Got any gum chum, got any gum chum?". I always get a little tearful after he tells me that story as I don't like to think of him as a little child adrift in what was the UK as a giant army camp readying for the Normandy beaches.

As a child in war though he loved collecting shrapnel bomb fragments, and his brother a dashboard clock from a downed Messerschmidt and a billeted soldier briefly forgetting his rifle, or tracer bullets on the mantelpiece.

Such detritus of war familiar here in East Kent with a regular crop of sea-mines and aircraft bombs and Doodlebugs even after 75 years.

My dad's next door neighbour a Kwai survivor with a bento box stick for starvation rations of rice and fish, not much bigger than a thumbnail, that now preserved with his grandson.

That American sacrifice on DDay as poignant as USA troops and navies alone in clearing the Pacific islands as Britain grimly clung onto the rainsoaked jungles of India and Myanmar.

And my grandad speaking of how he escaped from Dunkirk in an abandoned row-boat either to one of the larger ships or even all the way back to here in Ramsgate. The good folks of Ramsgate throwing cigarettes and sweets and bedsheets for bandages and clothes to the British and French troops as they returned before returning in a few short years to Dieppe and then DDay with our Canadian and American friends and allies.

My grandad eventually working on the troop ships and convoys that kept the Atlantic open to Britain and Russia and he working via South Africa to El Alamein and India and Myanmar.

I still have his whittled stick of his journeys after 1940.

And my Mum every Xmas in the 1970's setting out a Xmas sock with an orange and apple for me and my brother and sister because as she reminded us she'd never seen oranges until after the war and the Commonwealth economies developed -and she sometimes only had a piece of coal as a Xmas present.

The dark days before DDay stretching well into the 1950's for UK with continued food and sweets rationing and only now the British Army on the Rhine at Bielefeld being demobbed.

My dad then as a National Serviceman conscripted in the 1950's with one foot in Beilefeld and one foot on the Berlin Wall scanning the horizon for Russian tanks with his Zeiss binoculars and ready to sound the alarm through the Fulda Gap, the Suwalki Gap of its day.

Only in the last decade those British Army on the Rhine WW2 occupation bases reduced to storage.


### The sweet success of Fortitude ###


Kent's role with General Patton and Fortitude long forgotten in delaying German panzers from attacking the Normandy beaches or first V1 and V2 rockets on Kent. The elder Kennedy brother dying in such a raid on the V1 launch sites in an early drone plane for a Manston landing.

Enough panzers or V1 rockets on the Normandy beaches could have sunk the landings and hurled the troops back into the sea perhaps not to return for years, if at all.

The success of DDay though leading to the liberation of Paris and Brussels upto the German frontier, and Rome, and Southern France occupations, and Russian troops liberating all of Russia to the gates of Warsaw. And the assassination attempt on Hitler, all in just 10 weeks.

The excellent Max Hastings DDay book Overlord details not just the neglected stories of the Royal Engineers and Seabees with Pluto and Mulberry but the wafer-thin logistics route of the Red Ball Express lorries that in essence continues as US Army Europe maintains its mission from 1942 in safeguarding Europe.

Perhaps apt now that US Army Europe is at the gates of Kiev in Ukraine, downwind of the Chernobyl nuclear spectre, and Poltava USAAF base when Russia and USA and UK were Allies.

The lavish barracks of the Rhineland and multi-billion NATO office blocks of Brussels surely highlighting what I describe as a Sarajevo Shift east and south for SHAEF. The infrastructure of Hungary and Serbia and Romania surely in need of upgrades, even the mafia drugs gangs of the Italian south of Naples and Palermo welcoming a brigade or two of American-Italian Marines rotating through Helmand.

Why win the war to lose the peace?

The vast American economy of FDR's New Deal becoming an astonishing cornucopia of ships, planes and lorries and jeeps - protected by my grandad. So many tanks that Eisenhower even halted deliveries of more tanks during the Battle of the Bulge.

And my dad being able enjoy from those planes and lorries some of the 6,250 pounds of sweets, 12,500 pounds of biscuits and 100,000 packets of gum issued to the first assault waves of American troops.

As Max Hastings details:

"130,000 (American) men with another 1,200,000 to follow by DDay+90...and 137,000 vehicles, 4,217 tanks, 3,500 artillery pieces.Week by week the transatlantic convoys docked in British ports unloading new cargoes of artillery shells from Illinois, blood plasma from Tennessee, jeeps from Detroit, K-ration cheese from Wisconsin."

That treasure paid with in blood in the Atlantic convoys, the 30% casualties of the first assault companies onto the beaches, and the CWG graves stretching from Normandy to Flanders.

The greater slaughter of a Nazi atom bomb and von Braun rockets on NYC prevented by the rapid success of DDay. Those DDay soldiers though surely horrified at the stockpiling of nuclear weapons into the 21st century or waiting for the nuclear test troops of the 1950's,and with the Murmansk convoys or Agent Orange army of Vietnam, waiting to die off and save on medicare and medals.


### A new Sword, Gold, Juno, Omaha and Utah for an Extra Special Relationship ###


The Iron Curtain that descended from Trieste to Stettin now long pulled away as Churchill's idea of a United States of Europe takes imperfect shape despite the Brexit silliness through Russia and North Africa and Levant.

And if Ambo Woody is maybe more keen on Wrigley Field rather than Wrigley gum surely DDay75 is the right time to consider delivering on The Special Relationship with butter rather than guns as that Extra-Special Relationship?

Empire and Cold War and even FDR New Deal of the distant past but an Extra-Special Relationship capable of prospering beyond brass bands and braid and musket smoke of yesteryear.

If not Gold, Juno, Sword, Omaha and Utah then surely there are 5 other key areas of expansion for UK and USA as an Extra Special Relationship in working together far more closely than bullets on the rates:


1. UK and USA universities from the top ten if not 20 best such institutions in the world and of course with the added strength of English as the world language. Surely Ambo Woody should have all 130 UK universities and 34 Eire universities marching in lockstep with all USA universities, with formal twinning agreements and research on STEM Cancer and Dementia etc.

Not to have Marshall and Kent's Chevening scholarship quotas for all Atlanticist universities seems weak. As does the equivalent of a British-Ireland Economic Council perhaps welding together similar think tanks such as the Council for Foreign Relations or Milken Institute or East-West Center.


2. The UK may invent stuff from trains and television and USA and cinema and internet but USA delivers on it. Surely Wall St and The City, the two pre-eminent financial services systems, should be more tightly linked to unleash a tsunami of capital? Those rickety American railways won't fix themselves or yet another burst levee.

A Bering Bridge and Tunnel or Scotland-Ireland a mere drop in the ocean themselves. And pennies in upgrading the Russian farm industry with agritech and John Deere tractors or Detroit Jeeps again.

UK and USA battery and cybersecurity just two of the Strategic Industries (a packet of gum if you can name any of the others) that aren't linked up over the pond.

While British schools and colleges and consumers must be crying out for USA Tech with Microsoft and Tim Apples. Perhaps the question on why Europe is not so good at Big Tech is a lack of USA focus on its buddies? Too much popcorn and Budweiser in the bleachers rather than working with UK on that Extra Special Relationship or even the real World Series of football - soccer if you must?

Kent's Pocahontas must be on the warpath over the diamonds under her Adidas moccasins of MIT projects gathering dust in that college library, or the closed shop of 75 years of NHS biotech data rusting in a Crapita database. Ambo Woody probably thinking of going NFL cap in hand to her over to help on his NHS gaffe.


3. UK DFID and USA USAid share similar branding and c.$20BN in aid each, by far the largest in the world. Again they must surely be more closely integrated with the Commonwealth to form beachheads against the poverty of East Africa or Western India? Ambo Woody has probably saved some Johnson and Johnson soft soap for the crunchy realities of Janssen cancer pills or Durex condom factories or tampons that would save and lengthen a billion lives.


4. With UK and USA each the largest trade partner of the other since at least the days of the Atlantic convoys shouldn't that be ramped up with say 1,000 companies in each USA state landing in UK and vice versa? The British capacity for tea and biscuits musings should be galvanised into waking up and smelling the coffee from Boston to Broadstairs. A beanfeast and bunfight of rapid growth.

That could extend to a more coherent Anglicised trade with China and India of city delegations etc. Vattenfall wind and solar farms here in east Kent for example, some the best Swedish exports since Abba or Volvo snow ploughs, are surely ideal in ramping up the Eco-Economy.

The largest ever UK exports of £649BN with Trade Minister Liam Fox surely capable of being doubled just with USA trade - 400k viable UK companies not yet exporting. In all sincerity, even without Sincerity Advertising, maybe 1,000 UK companies per state is too low?

While AOC digging in her Gucci heels over an Amazon warehouse must surely be wondering how else it could be best-placed in the USA Rust Belt. Or even Puerto Rico and Haiti or further afield in Panama's logistics economy and Caribbean Commonwealth.

Certainly UK-USA trade promises built on mega trade deals are mere vanity compared to the weft and weave of state and city trade delegations.

A gaping hole for both UK and USA is a Gilgamesh Strategy on Ageing even the interim of social care and training enough nurses and doctors. The UK and USA and Canadian Red Cross fulfilling that role easily even before DDay. It's neither rocket science nor brain surgery. Especially if UK and USA training hospitals can dispense with mooks for MOOCs.


5. The real World Series of football (soccer if you must) along with Cricket and Rugby and Crazy Golf certainly highlight UK as a Sporting Superpower but with gridiron and hoops could also be flag bearers for both UK and USA UNSDG and Smart City work in Commonwealth India and Africa. The latter neck and neck in underperforming for UK and USA trade yet the home of the world's youngest consumers through the next century.

Shouldn't for example Ambo Ken Juster in India be a guest of UK at the Cricket World Cup? He knows he's on a sticky wicket with promoting baseball in India but Boeing rockets at Sheffield or Syracuse or Woomera, or those road safety-tech Volvo cars in the Carolinas or Ford AR-glass not so impossible?

Goofy for UK and USA Creative Industries such as Disney and PBS and CSpan and Kent Paramount theme parks and comics not be working together. Even POTUS Trump turning the channel on Fox News for UK cultural impact of Winnie the Pooh and Paddington Bear and Harry Potter and East Kent's Bond, James Bond. That sit alongside Revolution beauty, with East Kent Core Companies such as Airfix, Bakkavor, Givaudan, Saga with the Davos 15 and The Six Companies.

And here in East Kent a gathering perfect storm of Charlton Athletic and Arsenal Community work, school dinners and twin towns.


### USA as a hyperpower without the hype and with a UK Extra Special Relationship ###


It seems a distinct failure of Old World thinking in the 21st century to emphasise aircraft carriers and massed armies in the Age of Drones or Climate Change, even Eisenhower's auld enemy of the military-industrial complex still talking up a war with Iran or China so UK and USA can take equal blame in failing to deliver on the disarmament aspects of the Atlantic Charter.

And as per the united Franco-German brigade of Strasbourg, a USA-Russian brigade can't be far from Brest-Litovsk and certainly nearer than Torgau?

Even a Scottish golf fan POTUS must be surprised at the number of Pentagon golf courses on the $750BN Pentagon rates for so few troops put into the field of battle. Wouldn't planting 18 trees before the nineteenth hole be as relaxing?

The American taxpayer perhaps grateful that US troops abroad now number no more than the first wave of DDay troops. Perhaps Kashmir calling ahead of the Koreas for USA troops as a security safeguard. The misfires of the last Trump-Kim Summit and subsequent short-range and limited gains surely only a pause in working through the appetite for armistice and hunger for peace in the Koreas even before the 2020 Olympics.


### From the shores of Tripoli to the halls of Marrakesh ###


Messrs Xi and Putin presumably preferring greater OBOR integration with Asia and Alaska and an American army quartered safe in the other unsinkable aircraft carrier of Japan.

China's inner island strategy undoubtedly a success, although perhaps more as modern mainland China becomes more like modern Taiwan in combining democracy and a booming economy.

UK slow in developing Koreas links as Asia's WW2 East German-style dispute fizzles out? A few Massey Ferguson tractors and JCB diggers alongside John Deere's finest might yet yield Rolls Royce harvest and roads.

And Irish gold in the shape of Kerrygold butter - and a can or three of Guinness - via NYC and Bering might even put some flesh on the bones of the Walmart Asda supermarkets of Pyongyang.

My daughter not averse to a bit of Isaan silk in a Pyongyang or Pusan, even downtown Hitachi or Kawasaki with John Lewis or Waitrose exports.

All the above a fraction of a percent of the F35 programme - or an even tinier percent of the cost of not replacing outdated nukes - could be deployed to deliver on all the above along with the Boeing NASA Space missions - even upgrading African planes with the Airbus of Toulouse and Bristol. Or US Army Medicine teams on Romanian TB Pandemics or Sahel Ebola and expanding the Operation Smile on Virginia's face.

Ebola vaccines as with DDay chemical weapons kit showing what can be done with a united effort on everything from rice to ricin.

While UK and USA films and television from Hollywood to Cricklewood surely capable of expansion before the onslaught of Bollywood and Nollywood production. Whether film archive digitisation or celebrating UK-USA Film Noir emigres from Wilder to Welles or ramping up the film slate with BBC and Film Four as well as HBO and Netflix.

And if DDay was the largest USA-UK invasion, again perhaps it's apt to commemorate that and the first UK-USA invasion of North Africa with Patton's Torch landings in illuminating the way for the clearance of the North African WW2 minefields of Egypt, Libya and Tunisia. The shores of Tripoli and halls of Marrakesh though now being failed by US troops in those minefields - and the refugees now drowning within sight of the massed ranks of the UK and USA navies.

A Kaine War Powers Act and a review of ISIS/Iraq and Syria and AfPak wars long overdue - both Churchill and Ike unforgiving of failing generals from Kasserine to Falaise.

DDay75 for the next 75 years surely delivering on the disarmament and peacekeeping of the Atlantic Charter and a Special Relationship that really is an Extra Special Relationship.

Time for Change
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