Today is the anniversary of D-Day.

World War II saw some of the greatest war correspondents of all time go into action with the troops. Along with Ernie Pyle in the Pacific, Martha Gellhorn was probably the best of them — blessed with courage and determination, she stowed away on a hospital ship and thus become the first reporter on the beaches of Normandy:

Then we saw the coast of France and suddenly we were in the midst of the armada of the invasion. First it seemed incredible; there could not be so many ships in the world. The is seemed incredible as a feat of planning; if there were so many ships, what genius it required to get them here, what amazing and unimaginable genius.

There were destroyers and battleships and transports, a floating city of huge vessels anchored before the green cliffs of Normandy. Occasionally you would see a gun flash or perhaps only hear a distant, as naval guns fired over those hills. Small craft beetled around in a curiously jolly way. It looked like a lot of fun to race from shore to ships in snub-nosed boats beating up the spray. It was no fun at all, considering the mines and obstacles that remained in the water, the sunken tanks with only their radio antennae showing above water, the drowned bodies that still floated past. On an LCT near us washing was hung upon a line, and between the loud explosions of mines being detonated on the beach dance music could be heard coming from its radio. Barrage balloons, always looking like comic toy elephants, bounced in the high wind above the massed ships, and invisible planes droned behind the grey ceiling of cloud.

Troops were unloading from big ships to heavy cement barges or to light craft, and on the shore, moving up four brown roads scarred the hillside, our tanks clanked slowly and steadily forward.

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From a speech by Jimmy Carter at the University of Havana on May 14, 2002 which was broadcast throughout Castro’s islandwide fiefdom and trumpeted worldwide by all “news” agencies with Havana bureaus:

My nation is hardly perfect in human rights. A very large number of our citizens are incarcerated in prison, and there is little doubt that the death penalty is imposed most harshly on those who are poor, black, or mentally ill. For more than a quarter century, we have struggled unsuccessfully to guarantee the basic right of universal health care for our people. …but Cuba has superb systems of health care and universal education.

Thus did a former President of the United States prostrate himself before a regime that jailed and tortured political prisoners at a higher rate than Stalin’s and murdered (in absolute numbers) more political prisoners in its first three years in power (out of a population of 6.4 million) than Hitler’s murdered in its first six years (out of a population of 70 million.) Not to mention that Pres. Carter’s host insulted his nation as “a vulture preying on humanity!” and came within a hair of nuking it.

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