Anniversaries to Remember – The Castle Report

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Today, Darrell Castle talks about remembering two anniversaries that are very significant in the history of the United States and the entire world. He shares how he believes they affect us today many years past those anniversaries, some of which he has personally experienced.

Transcription / Notes:

ANNIVERSARIES TO REMEMBER

Hello, this is Darrell Castle with today’s Castle Report. This is Friday the 2^nd day of May in the year of our Lord 2025. I pause today to remember some anniversaries that are very significant in the history of the United States of America and of the entire world for that matter. In addition, I will endeavor to talk about the world as it appears to me today many years past those anniversaries some of which I have personally experienced.

Next week the 8^th of May is the 80^th anniversary of the German surrender in WWll. I talk of that surrender today because it will happen before my next Castle Report. In Russia they remember what is called Victory in Europe Day on May 9^th instead of the 8^th. Russia usually has a military parade before the Kremlin in Moscow to memorialize the Great Patriotic War as they call it. However, they don’t memorialize what happened for 40 years after the war. The Stalinist show trials and millions of dead are nothing to celebrate I guess. From my American viewpoint I talk about the anniversary to honor those who served and especially those who died. This year, 11 world leaders have announced that they will attend the celebrations in Moscow including the Chinese Premier Xi but I haven’t heard of any Americans in attendance. If I were president I would be there or at least send a high-ranking representative.

When General Eisenhower visited the airborne divisions on the night they were to jump into occupied France for the D-Day Invasion he said we may never see their like again and at this point I will say that he was right, at least I don’t see their like right now. Long before D-Day the Americans had some catching up to do because Germany had been fighting in Europe for two years and only Britain held them at bay across the Channel for two years alone.

I risk being overly dramatic about the war against Germany but on the other hand, that would be very difficult to do since the courage and sacrifice of the men who fought the war is hard to exaggerate. For example, right after Pearl Harbor the 8^th Air Force was formed and assigned to defeat the Luftwaffe which at that time was the best AirForce in the world and believed to be unstoppable. The 8^th had 8 pilots and no airplanes at the time. Three years later by the D-Day landings the Luftwaffe had been driven from the sky, their experienced pilots were dead, and their country’s infrastructure was a pile of rubble.

That happened because 55,000 young men gave their lives in the skies over Germany and France. A B-17 crew of 10 men had to complete 25 missions to get a break at home for a while. The average life expectancy was 15 missions and the chances of surviving 25 missions was 1 in 4. That improved when the P-51 Mustang fighter was available later because it had the range to escort the bombers all the way to Berlin and back.

The Germans were fine warriors, dedicated men who fought hard for their country but on May 8^th, 1945, they reached a state of unconditional surrender. Hitler was dead, apparently, and the head of state was Grand Admiral Carl Doenitz who had commanded the U-Boat campaign and later the German Navy. Doenitz sent General Afred Jodl to sign the German surrender and Jodl tried to time it so as many German soldiers as possible could make their way West and surrender to the Americans. Eisenhower told him that if he did not surrender immediately he would close the West to Germans and they would be left to the tender mercies of General Zhukov and the Red Army.

No German wanted to be at the mercy of the Russians because of the merciless way they had conducted warfare inside Russia. Germans who were taken prisoner by the Russians, hundreds of thousands, had a way of never returning alive. Well, Jodl signed the articles of surrender on German home ground and with Russian officers in attendance.

Eisenhower was a national hero, of course, the most popular man in the free world and he was destined to be president a few years later. The free world did not include the Far East at that time because the war against Japan continued until August, but that is another anniversary for another time. In looking at the German surrender and thinking of the men who fought their way across North Africa, Sicily, Italy, France, and finally Germany itself my conclusion is that as Americans we have lost the honor of calling ourselves worthy of them.

You would have thought that WWll, with its millions of deaths, would have taught the world a lesson and it did teach ordinary people the horrors of war but for the ruling elite well, they never seem to get enough of it. For example, the Soviet Union which probably would have been defeated by Germany without the resupply conveys of American and British supplies, started to believe that it should be at the head of the post war world order. To that end it set about spreading its idiotic ideology of Communism around the world.

In totalitarian countries like North Korea and China it found fertile ground and thus just 6 years later the world was at war again in Korea. That invasion of North Korea invading the South in an attempt to unite Korea under communism cost about 35,000 American lives just to get back to pre-war neutrality. However, Korea is not the anniversary that I remember today, because from all this carnage emerged even more carnage in the form of Mao and his cultural revolution with its 50 million dead.

This week we remember the 50^th anniversary of the end of the Vietnam war. 50 years ago, after a couple of years of negotiations about prisoners and the shape and position of the conference table the final papers were signed. Most prisoners were released and for some of those men they were tortured, starved and imprisoned for six years. The war in Vietnam, formerly Indochina or more accurately French Indochina, in reality lasted 30 years.

In 1945 after the Japanese had been defeated, General Eisenhower and President Truman agreed that the Asian colonies which existed before the war should be returned to their European owners. Ho Chi Mihn didn’t appreciate that and began a war of independence against France or perhaps he just continued the one he had fought against the Japanese. When he finally defeated the French in 1954 and the French agreed to leave Vietnam General Eisenhower still would not agree to free elections in Vietnam. In about 1960 the U.S. saw that the communist North was winning the war and decided to take the place of the French. The rest is history but there are lessons in the 15 years the U.S. spent in that hellhole of a country. I knew many of the men who fought there from those of General Officer rank all the way to private. They were taken from the farms, factories, gas stations, high schools and homes of America and sent into that meat grinder which they knew nothing about and should never have been forced to care about.

The lesson in my opinion as I look at the 50^th anniversary is that the lives of those who serve are precious and should not be sacrificed so carelessly. People fight hard when someone invades their country and determined guerillas with a willingness to accept any casualties are pretty hard to defeat, especially when they have the help of local powers who know that you will not risk total war with them to prevail. It was thought better by U.S. leadership to sacrifice all those men rather than risk war with China or Russia in order to prevail.

That is indeed a valuable lesson but did we actually learn it, obviously not. The lesson is valuable but it is not the real lesson. The real lesson is to let people run their own countries in the way they see fit. How much sacrifice are you willing to bear in order to set the world in the order that pleases you. Looking back after 50 years this whole thing stinks to high heaven. The decision to fight in the first place and the decision to not seek victory smells of the military industrial complex and the new globalist world order.

One is reminded a little of the disease of cancer when thinking about it. The money is not in curing cancer, it is in treating it. Keeping the patient alive with very expensive lifetime treatment is a lot more lucrative than curing his disease. It pleases those who profit in money and power to keep eternal war going and that, at least in part, explains some of the hatred against Donald Trump. He appears to be at least trying to find peace in the currently ongoing wars.

Speaking of current wars, the India-Pakistan war in the Kashmir region seems to be on again and is rapidly escalating toward full-scale war. The Chinese, right on the border, seem to favor Pakistan in this struggle and I suspect they have an easier time controlling Pakistanis than Indians but that is just a guess. The Pakistani defense minister said this week that considering the Pakistani incursion that killed 27 Indians he expects an Indian reprisal and he announced that war is imminent. Both countries are nuclear armed and the defense minister said Pakistani nuclear forces were placed on high alert.

What does any of this have to do with the United States, nothing. For that reason, I am hopeful that the U.S., as much as it appears to love war, will let these people fight among themselves without our help. I’m certain many defense contractors are licking their chops at the prospect of how profitable this war could be but I pray that Donald Trump is able and willing to resist them.

The struggle between Israel and Iran takes a new twist almost every day. Recently Netanyahu said that he expects to be finished in Gaza by September or perhaps a little sooner. That sounds encouraging until you think that it means several more months of pounding the rubble that is now Gaza. It also means that Israel will be free to turn its attention fully upon Iran.

In Ukraine the war rages on but Putin said he would ceasefire for three days around the celebrations in Russia of Victory in the Great Patriotic War. Ironically, the area of fighting right now is where the greatest armored battle in history took place between the great German, Heinz Guderian, and the Russian Commanding General Marshall Zhukov, so it seems that not much changes in this world. Certainly not human nature.

Finally, folks, what is the correct American foreign policy to remember these anniversaries. Come home, mind your own business, not isolation but instead fortress America. The correct way for me to remember is to raise a glass and remember so I think I’ll do that tonight.

At least that’s the way I see it,

Until next time folks,

This is Darrell Castle,

Thanks for listening.