Conservapedia - User contributions [en]

Talk:Barack Hussein Obama

2013-01-06T13:14:08Z

Darkmind1970:

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== Poverty comment in paragraph 2 of intro ==

The poverty comment isn't supported by the link at all. The link looks at from the 1950s to 2009. Obama began office in 2009, so the 14.3 percent marked at the end of the graph is a measure of the poverty at some point during 2009, and may have been taken in Bush's last month in office. It is unreasonable to conclude from the graph that poverty increased under Obama's presidency. I'll also note that the increase in poverty began, according to the graph, whilst Bush was in office. - [[User:JamesCA|JamesCA]] 00:08, 20 March 2012 (EDT)

== Better, More Objective Article at CreationWiki.org ==

There's now a better-sourced, more objective article at CreationWiki.org:

http://creationwiki.org/Barack_Obama

This article mentions virtually no biographic detail about Obama, or major controversies, including the Born Alive issue or his Chicago Politics. And the sourcing looks haphazard here. --[[User:Jzy|Jzy]] 09:52, 29 May 2012 (EDT)

Still, you guys have a 1-sentence mention of the Born Alive controversy even though it was brought up by Obama's last 4 political opponents, John McCain, Sarah Palin, Hillary Clinton, and Alan Keyes. And Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum both brought it up a few months ago as well. There's a whole article on this subject alone over at CreationWiki:

http://creationwiki.org/Obama_born_alive_controversy

You're missing the boat on the biggest controversy surrounding Obama, one that hasn't been debunked and is going to cause him a WHOLE lot of trouble. I told you guys this 2 years ago.
--[[User:Jzy|Jzy]] 10:14, 29 May 2012 (EDT)

:Thanks for the comments Jyz, the current article has been in the top 10 for nearly four years now. Most Americans are quite aware that Obama is the most pro-abortion president ever. Feel free to add to our wiki with the born-alive controversy page. In addition, you were not registered here two years ago so no wonder we didn't heed your warning.--[[User:Jpatt|Jpatt]] 12:52, 29 May 2012 (EDT)

::Well, if this were just another abortion issue Obama wouldn't have a thing to worry about. This is an entirely different subject because it involves aborting children who aren't inside the mother's body but are outside the body and capable of surviving if given medical attention. We passed the federal Born Alive Infant Protection Act in 2002 making it illegal to let premature, newborn babies who survive late-term abortions get left to die without medical attention. We also passed the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act outlawing the late-term Dilation & Extraction (D&E) abortions that resulted in these live births. Nurses Jill Stanek and Allison Baker (of Christ Hospital in Oak Lawn, IL) testified before Congress in 2001 that newborn babies were being born prematurely after botched abortions in their home state of Illinois and being thrown in wastebaskets or soiled utility rooms. Stanek's moving testimony about how she held a little baby in her arms after one of these abortions and the physician refused to help keep it alive so that it died in her arms, proved especially influential.

::The entire U.S. Senate passed the Born Alive Infant Protection Act unanimously, because as Obama would put it, it was "the bill everybody supported". The Partial-Birth Abortion Act twice refers to the practice in federal law as "infanticide". It's a legal, technical term referring to what U.S. law now considers murder of newborn children. Stanek also testified before the Illinois Senate at the time, where Obama was leading a Planned Parenthood movement to vote down numerous Born Alive bills and cover up this fact from Illinois citizens using "present votes". Normally pro-choice Democrats like Barbara Boxer, Hillary Clinton, John Kerry, and Ted Kennedy all voted for the Born Alive Infant Protection Act. Hillary Clinton herself brought up Obama's voting record on this in 2008 to criticize him over. So like I said, if this were just a Pro-Life vs. Pro-Choice issue it wouldn't be controversial. I'm not talking about abortion here. I'm talking about infanticide, and opposition to medical care for newborn infants. I'm talking about Obama's opposition to a bill that had over 90% public support, unlike typical Pro-Life bills. --[[User:Jzy|Jzy]] 02:18, 4 June 2012 (EDT)

:::I'm going to incorporate some of my writing and sourcing from that article to this one, and edit boldly. If anyone has any objections to any material please state them. However, I believe I've sourced everything so solidly it should be unobjectionable. --[[User:Jzyehoshua|Jzyehoshua]] 22:03, 20 July 2012 (EDT)

== Last Change ==

The protests weren't peaceful, but they were really violent, to date there's no proof that Muammar Gaddafi had took any violent action against civilians, but there are proof and reports from Amnesty International, Human rights watch, Russian intelligence which denies any of the rumors and falsely alleged crime.

Here's one source where US defense secretary Robert Gates and Navy Admiral Michael Mullen tells about whole thing, :-

http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL1110/S00144/un-silent-despite-no-basis-for-natos-illegal-war-on-libya.htm

Thanks. [[User:Regular|Regular]] 11:10, 14 June 2012 (EDT)

== Changes, Detailed ==

I made the following changes, merging an article I wrote on Obama for CreationWiki with this one:

http://creationwiki.org/Barack_Obama

The diff for the changes can be seen here:

http://www.conservapedia.com/index.php?title=Barack_Hussein_Obama&action=historysubmit&diff=994904&oldid=994689

I left the Lede intact.

* Birth: I removed an opening sentence about Obama eating dog meat. It looks really silly there, starting off the section. Maybe the article could be linked somewhere else but it looks really bad starting off the page like that.
* Early Life: I included a whole new section on his early life and family and removed some unsourced claims that he was the antichrist and will be instating police rule (which either way doesn't fit the section). If it's going to be put anywhere in the article an appropriate subsection should be created for it, and some sourcing provided - neither of which was the case before.
* Personal Life: I added a whole new section on his marriage to Michelle Obama, children, and church.
* Education: I added a new section on education. Some of it was alluded to earlier but didn't have sources, my material does.
* Non-Political Employment: Whole new section, a LOT of detail about his employment history here.
* Personal Awards: The Nobel controversy mentioned in this new section.
* 1991-1992, Project Vote: His time as a community organizer, new section.
* 1996 Election: I added an entirely new section on how Obama knocked candidates off the ballot.
* 2003 Emil Jones Deal: Whole new section on how Obama struck a deal with Emil Jones to get appointed legislation for other Illinois Senators to advance his political career.
* 2004 Primary Election: Completely new section on how the Illinois media knocked off Obama's first opponent.
* 2004 General Election, Jack Ryan: Completely new section on how the Illinois media knocked off Jack Ryan afterwards through the same tricks.
* 2004 General Election, Alan Keyes: Completely new section highlighting the Born Alive controversy surrounding Obama.
* 2008 Presidential Election: I preserved what little detail there was and merged it in but otherwise everything here is new.
* 2009-2012, U.S. Presidency: I added new sections on the Stimulus and Iraq troop withdrawal. What little info there was about the withdrawal I preserved and merged in.

--[[User:Jzyehoshua|Jzyehoshua]] 23:15, 20 July 2012 (EDT)

=== Deletions ===

I figure it's best to mention any deletions made.

- I deleted the following from the end of the Lede:
{{cquote|Later Obama apologized. When Obama visited [[England]] in 2011, he signed his name and added the date of "2008" -- the last time he won an election. He never explaned that one. When Obama read a speech from a teleprompter, as he almost always does, he repeatedly mispronounced the familiar military term of "corpsman" by sounding out the "p".}}
I removed it because (A) it had no sourcing provided, (B) it showed signs of poor grammar (misspelled "explained"), (C) used weasel words/phrases (almost always does), and perhaps most importantly, (D) it's not even especially relevant. I mean, who cares if he mispronounced the word "corpsman"? How many Americans even would pronounce it right? Maybe that could merit a footnote somewhere on the page, but in the Lede? Really??? I try to preserve as much of the page as possible, but I really think those sentences made the rest of the page look bad. --[[User:Jzyehoshua|Jzyehoshua]] 15:45, 21 July 2012 (EDT)
:Having those sentences there in the Lede gives the impression the whole page is going to be about nitpicking over Obama's grammar, and I really don't think that's the impression Conservapedia wants to give. I'd like to think the Lede would show evidence Obama will be fairly and accurately criticized, not with poorly written and unsourced claims that he mispronounced a word most Americans wouldn't pronounce right anyway. --[[User:Jzyehoshua|Jzyehoshua]] 15:49, 21 July 2012 (EDT)

-I deleted the "Retrieved from 对当代托洛茨基主义的批判：英文论集百花齐放 - 中国文革研究网, March 15, 2010." part of this footnote:
{{cquote|[[File:O-2002-antiwar-rally-davidson.jpg|right|thumb|250px| Obama speaking at the October 2002 rally in Chicago organized by [[Carl Davidson]].Davidson is a longtime [[Mao]]ist and champion of the ''Thought of Mao Tse Tung.'' Davidson's anti-Trotskyite polemic, [http://www.wengewang.org/read.php?tid=10925 ''Left in Form, Right in Essence''] defends Maoist doctrine. Retrieved from 对当代托洛茨基主义的批判：英文论集百花齐放 - 中国文革研究网, March 15, 2010. ''"[H]e is a brutal man who butchers his own people,"'' nevertheless Obama opposed ''"dumb wars".'']]}}
I think this should all be in English. It might belong on a Chinese page for Conservapedia, the alternate language translations, but I don't think so here. Hopefully someone can find an alternate reference for this, but it looks bad at the bottom of the page in footnotes like that, and since it can't be understood doesn't serve any real purpose. --[[User:Jzyehoshua|Jzyehoshua]] 21:39, 21 July 2012 (EDT)

== New Section On ACORN/New Party Ties ==

Alright, I just removed the following sentence from the 1996 section:
{{cquote|In 1995 Obama openly sought and obtained the endorsement of the [[Marxist]] [[New Party]] in his quest to be elected to the Illinois State Senate.[http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/groupProfile.asp?grpid=7434 NEW PARTY (NP)], discoverthenetwork.org. ; Rick Moran. [http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2008/06/obamas_alliance_with_marxists.html Obama's Alliance with Marxists], ''American Thinker'', June 03, 2008.}}

I made a new section on this at the end of the article. Frankly, I just wanted to remove the section from the 1996 section because it makes the whole thing look bad. I don't really care about his New Party or ACORN affiliations but I know many conservatives care about them, so I didn't want to delete the sentence and wanted to see if I could move it somewhere else, and maybe provide some more detail to give it a small subsection somewhere. I didn't think much of the sources it had so I figured I'd see if I could find any decent sourcing and information for it. In the process, I found out it had articles relating to it at National Review, Politico, and by Billy Hallowell (a FOX News contributor), plus had been addressed by Obama's "Fight the Smears" campaign and David Axelrod. Plus it's still relevant in 2012.

So I wrote it a new section, because I just follow sources and newsworthiness, and it is does appear to have some prominence. I tried to provide sources and perspective from both sides, and provide all the facts, so it won't just be a one-sided claim. Anyway, that's why I detailed it out more. Like I said, I don't really care about the claim myself, but it is newsworthy and a cause for concern among some conservatives, so I figured I might as well write it a section - and get it out of the 1996 one :) --[[User:Jzyehoshua|Jzyehoshua]] 23:21, 21 July 2012 (EDT)

:For me, the big issue surrounding Obama has always been his voting record against the Born Alive bills, and repeated lying attempts to cover this up. That he's gone to such lengths to prevent newborn babies from being given medical attention and then lie about having done so, has always struck me as reprehensible. His political corruption and constant lies are also disgusting. I just want people to know about these things. But his Marxism and ACORN stuff? Not really an issue for me. I just wrote this because I know it's a cause for concern to other conservatives, so I made sure the facts are presented on it. --[[User:Jzyehoshua|Jzyehoshua]] 23:37, 21 July 2012 (EDT)

:And mainly I didn't want that sentence in the 1996 section, by the way, because it's still highly controversial. I don't like starting off an otherwise credible section with undeniable sources with a claim that is still under investigation. Maybe this stuff on the New Party will hold up - those minutes will be strong evidence if Kurtz is right about them. But right now the sourcing for it isn't as strong as I'd like, even if it is newsworthy. And I'd prefer the 1996 section stick to strongly proven facts. That he knocked off all his opponents using a team of lawyers is well sourced by the Chicago Tribune, CBS News, CNN, New York Times, etc. The stuff about the New Party had two lesser-known sources and while it has better sourcing now, it's still an ongoing issue, which is why I think it's more relevant in a 2012 section than 1996. --[[User:Jzyehoshua|Jzyehoshua]] 23:51, 21 July 2012 (EDT)

==References==
{{reflist|2}}

== Conspiracy theory that Obama is not born in the US is by crazy lunatic fringe right-wing people who don't represent the mainstream right, it is just like crazy lunatic fringe left-wing conspiracy theories on JFK being killed by the CIA and not J. Harvey Oswald or 9-11 truthers ==

Regardless of criticisms and condemnations by mainstream conservatives of Obama's policies, these claims that he is a foreign-born citizen have been disproven and mainstream conservatives accept that he is an American citizen. Theories that he was born outside the USA are lunatic fringe conspiracy theories - and I don't care whether they are right-wing - their ideas have been disproven just like the crazy 9-11 truther conspiracy theories and JFK conspiracy theories by lunatic fringe left-wing people. Why is there such focus on conspiracy theories on where Obama is born in the intro, rather than focus in the intro on Obama's policies and conservative criticisms of Obama's policies?--[[User:TheQuestioner|TheQuestioner]] 12:31, 3 August 2012 (EDT)

:Thank God you registered here to set the record straight. --[[User:Jpatt|Jpatt]] 12:34, 3 August 2012 (EDT)

::What do you mean?--[[User:TheQuestioner|TheQuestioner]] 12:36, 3 August 2012 (EDT)

== Title of article ==

The middle name should be removed as the name of the article. The middle name of other figures is not in the title in other articles. [[User:AcomaMagic|AcomaMagic]] 15:17, 18 August 2012 (EDT)
:[[Ronald Wilson Reagan]]?? --[[User:JamesWilson|James Wilson]] 05:16, 4 September 2012 (EDT)
::That looks like a rarity. All the other biography pages that I've seen use the most common name. The middle name of Reagan should be removed as the title too. [[User:AcomaMagic|AcomaMagic]] 08:08, 9 September 2012 (EDT)

== Teleprompter at school ==

It is a false rumor, based on photoshopped photos, that Obama had teleprompters set up for a speech to a middle school class. He spoke to the class without teleprompters, then went to another classroom, where he spoke to the ''media'' using a teleprompter. Surely there are enough things to criticize without distorting the truth? [http://www.snopes.com/politics/obama/photos/6thgrade.asp] [[User:SharonW|SharonW]] 10:39, 2 September 2012 (EDT)
:This is a little shaky as a criticism I suppose. With his voting record on the Born Alive bills and political corruption, there's an awful lot that can be criticized about him. That he uses teleprompters so often is a valid criticism of him, but the teleprompters in classrooms one needs to be carefully presented in context, as pointed out by Sharon. --[[User:JZambrano|Joshua Zambrano]] 08:56, 4 September 2012 (EDT)

== "may have had a prior marriage" ==

This appears in the information box - I assume its about Obama rather than his wife - but is not explained in the main article, let alone supported with any references. As a Brit, this is completely new to me. Can anyone develop this further? [[User:Rafael|Rafael]] 17:54, 10 September 2012 (EDT)

== Accusations about birth certificate and cultural and name identity ==

I would like to move this section back to the section about Obama's birth, and weave it back into the relevant section instead of having it tagged on to the end of the article. None of the edits will change the argument at all. [[User:MattyD|MattyD]] 12:40, 16 September 2012 (EDT)
:JPatt, the edits I made REMOVED fluff and apologies. Can you please point to specific passages where you think the argument was softened? [[User:MattyD|MattyD]] 12:57, 16 September 2012 (EDT)
::No--[[User:Jpatt|Jpatt]] 13:01, 16 September 2012 (EDT)
:::Why not? My edits REMOVE a lot of the fluff. Where is the problem? [[User:MattyD|MattyD]] 13:03, 16 September 2012 (EDT)

==Page has too many kbs==
This age is ''WAY'' too heavy for updating the Intro and I can't wait 2 hours to make these minor changes. Can someone who actually cares please add,
* the U.S. Government's credit rating, for the first time in its history, was downgraded, and [[poverty]][http://www.census.gov/hhes/www/poverty/data/incpovhlth/2009/pov09fig04.pdf Figure 4: Number in Poverty and Poverty Rate: 1959-2009]. ''U.S. Census Bureau''. Current Population Survey, 1960 to 2010 Annual Social and Economic Supplements. increased markedly every year.[http://www.cbsnews.com/2100-201_162-20105376.html Poverty continues to rise in U.S., now 15.1%], CBS News.
I realize I am penalized 9 mainspace edits for asking for this help, but some, if not much of the Intro citations are two years out of date. [[User:OscarO|OscarO]] 11:38, 29 September 2012 (EDT?)
:Could the group agree on creating three major subpages such as "Obama Presidency", then move the current content to the subpages and have only a summary paragraph in this article for each of the subpages? That would give this article a readable length. It would also make editing easier and page loading quicker. [[User:Wschact|Wschact]] 06:49, 12 October 2012 (EDT)

== Country of birth ==

He released his long-form birth certificate, so what evidence is there that he was born in Kenya? [[User:Nightsky|Nightsky]] 15:43, 8 October 2012 (EDT)

*I think at this point the question might better be, "Why do we care at this point?" Obama's almost certainly going to be defeated by Romney, since Romney is better-suited to handle the currently-relevant economic issues (and boy howdy do we ever need someone like that in the Oval Office right now!) Seriously, he's got a little bit more than a month before the election in November, and at this point if his country of birth was conclusively proven to be Kenya it really wouldn't make all that much difference. It's an interesting academic question, but at this point it's irrelevant to the practical situation. [[User:JGrant|JGrant]] 17:17, 8 October 2012 (EDT)

::In response to Nightsky, the document released by the White House as the Obama long form birth certificate was proven to be an item created via Photoshop; it is in individual layers grouped together, and ''not'' a .jpeg or .PNG image one would expect had they simply scanned the actual item.
::In response to JGrant, yes we should care. Obama has a past association with communists and radicals; he has fought to prevent this part of his history from being revealed to the public; this includes that birth certificate. Why would he hide something as innocuous and mundane as a birth certificate, ''unless there was information on it that he does not want revealed?'' If it's a Kenyan goat herder who had no part in politics whatsoever, then why spend millions just to keep that man's name from the public? I happen to think it's another man's name, and it's something that's part and parcel to his current belief system and his political associations, past and present: the communist radical [[Frank Marshall Davis]]. [[User:Karajou|Karajou]] 17:46, 8 October 2012 (EDT)
:::Are there any reliable sources for this proof? It's just that if it was proven or suspected, it would be a major news story and there would be a constitutional crisis and I'm surprised I haven't heard about it. [[User:Nightsky|Nightsky]] 18:09, 8 October 2012 (EDT)
::::What is needed is for the actual birth certificate to be seen in public and examined by impartial investigators. News items are here: [http://www.wnd.com/?s=frank+marshall+davis]
:::::They aren't reliable sources and I'm not even sure they can be counted as a news item. For a claim that the birth certificate has been proven to be false, I expect a media frenzy and a vote of no confidence in Congress. [[User:Nightsky|Nightsky]] 18:47, 8 October 2012 (EDT)
::::::First, you are in no position to judge what is and what is not a reliable source; you're just another individual. Second, their wont be a media frenzy about this subject because the media here is solidly pro-Obama, which is why WND, Newsmax, Fox, Breitbart, and similar organizations labeled "faux" by leftists with severe bias problems are covering the story. [[User:Karajou|Karajou]] 19:03, 8 October 2012 (EDT)
::::::Meh, they were accused of being Pro-Bush, especially during the WMD intelligence controversy. If a news organisation can break a story as big as this would be, they'll take it. At the moment there's no evidence that it's fake and it's a fringe theory even among Republicans and it's a non-issue. [[User:Nightsky|Nightsky]] 19:15, 8 October 2012 (EDT)
:::::::They did break the story; if it's not your favorite news organization I don't know what to tell you. [[User:Karajou|Karajou]] 19:35, 8 October 2012 (EDT)
::::::::There were reports that some conservatives alleged it was fake and that very few people agreed with them, even among republicans. [[User:Nightsky|Nightsky]] 13:44, 12 October 2012 (EDT)

== Image ==

Sorry if this has been discussed before, but wouldn't it be better for consistancy with the other presidential pic to have the image at the top of the article to be the official US presidential portrait. --[[User:Dvergne|Dvergne]] 08:29, 14 October 2012 (EDT)

:Definitely. The current photo is of fairly low quality, and isn't focused on the face. I can see why it was chosen, I just think that those reasons betray stupidity and parochialism and are not really worthy of consideration. [[User:Cmurphynz|Cmurphynz]] 04:30, 17 October 2012 (EDT)

Indeed, the change to this picture seems to conflict with our distaste for Liberal Tricks, ''see e.g.'' Biased Photos [[Media_tricks]] [[User:WilliamWB|WilliamWB]] 16:42, 17 October 2012 (EDT)
::Change done. [[User:Conservative|Conservative]] 14:24, 24 October 2012 (EDT)

==Saying that he is the president==

I was thinking that the first sentence of this article should start by saying that Obama is the current president of the US, instead of saying that he was elected president of the US in 2008 and 2012. For example, I think it should read "Obama is the 44th and current president of the US"... and then talk about how he was elected in '08 and '12. [[User:GSalmeron|GSalmeron]] 18:01, 19 November 2012 (EST)

== Article Shortening ==

A while back RobSmith, Conservative and myself set to shorten this article, as it had grown to a massive size. Anyone who edits the page now should see this warning:
:'''WARNING: This page is 116 kilobytes long; some browsers may have problems editing pages approaching or longer than 32kb. Please consider breaking the page into smaller sections or removing irrelevant information.'''
I think we all know it's important that articles such as this one include only the major and necessary contexts, because obviously subpages (on ideology, religion, etc.) can be linked to to establish further context and details. Obviously before starting anything too drastic I'd like to make sure that there's community support for such a downsizing; to give you all some idea:
*[http://www.conservapedia.com/index.php?title=Barack_Hussein_Obama&diff=867430&oldid=866477 '''This link'''] is the general finalization of the work that was done at the update page compared with what the article was prior to the update. Further updates were made, obviously, but that diff is the general sense of what we tried to achieve.
*[http://www.conservapedia.com/index.php?title=Barack_Hussein_Obama&diff=1019134&oldid=867562 '''This link'''] is everything that has happened since (about) that. Obviously a little expansion is expected; major events have occurred and an election was held - but the article size was more than tripled (we had gotten it down to about 35 kb i believe).
I figured this was not worth mentioning during the election, but since the election has passed I think we once again have an opportunity to look at the article with more perspective and trim it - as is necessary for the page to work on all browsers (according to the wiki software). Thoughts before I create a second update page (which will also have a talk page for more thoughts) - I plan on waiting some time before doing this so feel free to take your time.--[[User:Iduan|I]][[User_talk:Iduan|Duan]] 13:04, 22 November 2012 (EST)

== Good Grief ==
This entire article is strewn with cites from ridiculous sources and basically assumes that Obama is guilty of everything that he's ever been accused of. It is neither fair nor balanced. [[User:Darkmind1970|Darkmind1970]] 08:14, 6 January 2013 (EST)

Talk:Atheism

2012-05-06T16:27:12Z

Darkmind1970:

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==Is atheism protected by the First Amendment?==
I think this issue needs to be researched and clarified in the page. Thank you. [[User:JoeSmithson117|JoeSmithson117]] 18:53, 4 December 2011 (EST)
::I am not a lawyer who specializes in U.S. Constitutional law. Setting the issue of the law aside, I can tell you that there will be no protecting atheism from the [[Question evolution! campaign]] which will rip it to shreds.
[[File:Carcharodon carcharias.jpg|thumbnail|400px|right|The [http://creation.com/question-evolution 15 razor sharp teeth] of the [[Question evolution! campaign]], are going to publicly rip [[evolution]]ary [[pseudoscience]] and atheism to shreds. Evolutionists have a long track record of getting devoured in [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dWBRpZhk_vA open water] conditions (please see: [[Creation scientists tend to win the creation vs. evolution debates]].) ]]
::: Ooh, what a scary shark. Too bad in a real debate, big pictures with unfunny captions don't convince anybody. Of course, if all you care about is getting attention from your intellectual superiors, keep on doing what you're doing, you might not get Dawkins to mention you in his next book, but maybe some Atheist on YouTube looking for an easy target might take 5 minutes to inform his viewers what a unique personality you are. News Flash: Creation scientists do not "win" debates, they lose miserably and declare victory anyway, if they don't block the release of the debate video, of course. [[User:RachelW|RachelW]] 11:59, 20 February 2012 (EST)
::::Has [[Richard Dawkins]] debated [[William Lane Craig]] yet? (see: [[Atheism and cowardice]]). Richard Dawkins was called a clown in the press in 2010 and the [[Question evolution! campaign]] will further demonstrate the man is a clown. Plus, he initially denied debating Rabbi Boteach in a videotaped debate the audience felt he lost (see: [[Richard Dawkins and Rabbi Shmuley Boteach]]). In addition, Dawkins claimed Rabbi Boteach shrieked like Adolf Hitler during the debate. How could you possibly forget debating a rabbi who supposedly shrieked like Adolf Hitler which leads me to the conclusion that Richard Dawkins is a fraud and a liar (see: [[Atheism and deception]]). [[User:Conservative|Conservative]] 18:10, 20 February 2012 (EST)

== Atheism shrinking is accelerating; the religious shall inherit the earth ==

Atheist researcher of demographics of atheism says that the shrinking of atheism is expected to accelerate: [http://kitmantv.blogspot.com/2011/05/eric-kaufmann-shall-religious-inherit.html Religious shall inherit the earth] [[User:Conservative|Conservative]] 22:54, 20 February 2012 (EST)

== Agnostic Dawkins ==

Other articles now say that Dawkins is an agnostic, not an atheist. Should this one be amended accordingly?--[[User:CPalmer|CPalmer]] 10:25, 28 February 2012 (EST)
::I made some changes to the article. Second, it occurred to me recently that effectively in the Anglosphere atheism is dead in terms of having prominent adherents on the public stage. Who is a prominent proponent of [[strong atheism]]? [[User:Conservative|Conservative]] 11:26, 7 March 2012 (EST)

:::::You do seem to have got most of them. I think there's one reference remaining to "atheist and evolutionist Richard Dawkins" though.--[[User:CPalmer|CPalmer]] 11:33, 7 March 2012 (EST)
::::::Let me know what section it is in. [[User:Conservative|Conservative]] 11:34, 7 March 2012 (EST)
::::::::It is in section 12.2, "The claim that atheists tend to be quarrelsome and socially challenged men".--[[User:CPalmer|CPalmer]] 11:36, 7 March 2012 (EST)

== Investigate the issue of atheism and infanticide in light of recent events ==

Investigate the issue of atheism and infanticide in light of recent events: http://creation.com/abortion-after-birth and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MpOhSEA9Yb8

Create this article: [[Atheism and infanticide]] [[User:Conservative|Conservative]] 23:33, 27 March 2012 (EDT)

== Misrepresentation and Misspelling of Ninian Smart ==

"Religion scholar Ninian Smartt identified seven dimensions which make up religion: narrative, experiential, social, ethical, doctrinal, ritual and material. It is not necessary in Smartt's model for every one of these to be present in order for something to be a religion."

The first sentence is talking about Ninian Smart, religious scholar. As written, it is easy to see the second sentence as a misspelling suggesting that Ninian Smart intended his scheme to be used as criteria, but as you can see [http://books.google.com/books?id=14j2UrLCi64C&pg=PA130&lpg=PA130&dq=ninian+smart+narrative&source=bl&ots=Hq3WwG_mVT&sig=j-8FpwSdqohURYodSdcl46erSJY&hl=en&sa=X&ei=FgybT6zxIc-_gAe864X6Dg&ved=0CCoQ6AEwAQ#v=onepage&q=ninian%20smart%20narrative&f=false here] on page 2, he meant for his scheme to be descriptive; these are seven things to look at when defining any worldview, secular or religious, and not a means of determining if something is or isn't a religion. The second sentence is talking about Daniel Smartt (two ts), pastor, who is interpreting (and misinterpreting, I believe) Ninian Smart's scheme, mistaking them for criteria. Read the reference and let me know if you agree.

==SPPS Survey==
Apparently the journal ''Social Psychological and Personality Science'' has a new survey that shows that atheists are more compassionate and generous than highly religious people. Does anyone have access to this? Here's the story on the UC Berkley news page - http://newscenter.berkeley.edu/2012/04/30/religionandgenerosity/
Interesting. [[User:Darkmind1970|Darkmind1970]] 12:27, 6 May 2012 (EDT)

Railroad

2011-08-25T17:30:02Z

Darkmind1970:

A '''railroad''' (British: '''railway''') is a form of [[transport]] in which trains are pulled on [[railway track|rails]] along fixed routes carrying freight or passengers. Emerging from small-scale horse-drawn operations combined with the steam engine, railroads were developed in Britain after 1830 to become the iron workhorse of the [[Industrial Revolution]]. Steel came after 18790, making railways more efficient as more powerful locomotives pulled longer trains at higher speed. Thanks to safety measures and signals, accident rates were kept low. Diesel and electric engines in the 20th century improved efficiency, bit the railroads lost most of their traffic to trucks, buses and other new forms (such as airplanes and pipelines) in the 20th century. Today railroads mostly handle bulk freight, such as coal and containers. It is cheaper to move coal by rail to electric power plants than to burn the coal near the mines and move the electricity.

[[Image:Csx_railroad.jpg|thumb|300px|A CSX freight train]]

== History ==
{{main|Railroad history}}

===Pre-locomotive===
The use of rails to guide carts, or to provide a smooth roadway, goes back many centuries. In these early railways, wagons were pulled along wooden rails by horses or mules; the main purpose was to move coal (or mineral ores) from mines to navigable waterways, where cheap transportation by boat was possible.

Because wooden rails wore away quickly, they were covered with [[iron]] plates, then replaced by all-iron rails. Cast iron rails were first used, but they were too brittle to handle heavy loads.
===Steam power===
The first steam railway [[locomotive]] was designed by [[Richard Trevithick]] (1771-1833), a mining [[engineer]] from [[Cornwall]], who in 1804 built a locomotive for the Penydarren iron works in south [[Wales]]; it proved impractical because the weight of the engine kept breaking the relatively brittle cast-iron rails.

William Hedley (1779-1843) built three steam locomotives between 1813 and 1815. These worked successfully until 1828-29, when they were replaced by two more innovative locomotives, including the famous ''[[Puffing Billy]]''. Wylam was a true nursery of railway talent.

[[George Stephenson]] (1781-1848) was 'the father of the railways'. Although he neither invented railways nor steam locomotion, he made huge improvements to the technology of the latter and was a pioneer in the field of civil engineering for large railway projects. An illiterate miner's son, born in a cottage next to the Wylam colliery railway (as a child, his first job was keeping the line clear of stray animals), he learned to read as a young adult at night classes, obtained a post as engineer at Killingworth Colliery, Northumberland, and there built a number of improved locomotives. He designed the Hetton Railway in [[County Durham]] in the early 1820s, at that time the longest railway line in the world, linking a colliery to loading staiths (short piers for pouring coal from wagons on to waiting ships) on the River Wear, and then was appointed engineer to the [[Stockton and Darlington Railway]]. The S&DR, which opened in 1825, was the world's first public steam-operated railway, linking the coalfields of SW County Durham to the River Tees. This was not purely a colliery line, but allowed other freight, and even passengers, to be carried. Initially it used both locomotive and horse-drawn trains, though later was converted to steam haulage only.

Stephenson's most famous achievement was the Liverpool & Manchester Railway, opened in 1830 and linking two of the fastest-growing cities of [[Industrial Revolution]] [[England]]. Although this crossed largely flat terrain, the route involved considerable engineering difficulties, including the crossing of the Chat Moss marshland west of [[Manchester]]. Stephenson spent much time, money and effort pouring earth and stone into the marsh to create a firm footing for the railway, without success. He decided instead to build the line upon hurdles of brushwood floating on the bog. The line is still in use.

[[Isambard Kingdom Brunel]] (1806–1859) was the world's leading railway engineer of the 1840s and 1850s, credited with bridges and many technical improvements, and more importantly with the idea of a railway as a system for moving people and freight. Brunel set the standard for a very-well-built railway, using careful surveys to minimize grades and curves. That necessitated expensive construction techniques and new bridges and viaducts, and the famous two-mile-long "Box Tunnel." His assistant Daniel Gooch designed the locomotives. One controversial feature was the wide gauge (7 feet, instead of the standard 4'8.5"), which added to passenger comfort but made construction much more expensive and caused difficulties when eventually it had to interconnect with other railways using standard gauge; after his death the gauge was changed to standard.

The opening of the Liverpool & Manchester Railway marked the opening of the 'Railway Age' in Britain and the world. Within three decades most of the major cities in Britain were linked by rail, and railway networks had begun to spread acoss the deveoped nations of the world.

== Gauges ==
The ''gauge'' of a railway is the distance between the inside edges of the top of the rails, usually 4' 8.5". Trains are built to operate on a track of a given gauge.

The history of railways is replete with railways being built to a variety of gauges, which has led to numerous problems including limiting the viability of individual railways.

A gauge of four feet eight and a half inches (1435 [[mm]]) is generally known as ''standard gauge'', and is widely used around the world. Gauges smaller than this are referred to as ''narrow gauge'' and larger gauges are referred to as ''broad gauge''.<ref>[http://www.askoxford.com/concise_oed/narrowgauge?view=uk narrow gauge] and at [http://www.askoxford.com/concise_oed/broadgauge?view=uk broad gauge] at AskOxford.com</ref>

Narrow-gauge lines are usually cheaper to construct and have often been used for short industrial lines, connecting branch lines, and places where it would not be economic to construct a more substantial line.
However, some narrow gauge lines, such as those of [[Queensland]] and [[South Africa]], are built to the same standards as standard gauge lines and perform just like standard-gauge lines.

== Safety ==
=== Incident statistics ===
Trains are one of the safest modes of passenger transportation in common use today.

In 2007 in the United States, there were 579,505,279 passenger trips on railroads regulated by the [[Federal Railroad Administration]] (excluding [[mass transportation|urban transit]]), resulting in 5 fatalities and 1155 injuries, or a fatality rate of approximately 1 per 115 million passengers, and an injury rate of 1 in 500,000.<ref name="FRA statistics">http://safetydata.fra.dot.gov/OfficeofSafety/</ref>


=== Issues and problems ===

==== grade crossings ====
Most railroad fatalities occur at crossings or involve trespassers, rather than passengers. In 2007, 851 people died in railroad-related incidents in the United States.<ref name="FRA statistics" /> Of these, 5 were passengers, 470 were trespassers, and 338 were vehicle occupants or pedestrians at railroad crossings.

Some railroad-crossing collisions occur when a [[car|motor vehicle]] begins to cross railroad tracks while other vehicles are stopped ahead. In order to prevent such accidents, some traffic signals may be designed to provide "[a] special sequence of signal phases and timing to provide additional clearance time for vehicles to clear the tracks prior to the arrival of a train"<ref name="4D13">''Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices'', [http://mutcd.fhwa.dot.gov/htm/2003r1r2/part4/part4d.htm#section4D13 chapter 4D].</ref><ref name="8D07">''See also'' ''Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices'', [http://mutcd.fhwa.dot.gov/htm/2003r1r2/part8/part8d.htm#section8D07 chapter 8D].</ref>; however, such designs are not mandatory. It is the driver's sole responsibility never to start to cross any railroad tracks until it is certain that both the tracks and the roadway beyond are clear.<ref name="driver handbooks">''See'', ''e.g.'', [http://mva.state.md.us/Resources/DL-002B.pdf ''Maryland Driver's Handbook''], page 103 (page 53 of online edition); [http://www.bmv.ohio.gov/pdf_forms/HSY-7607.pdf ''Digest of Ohio Motor Vehicle Laws''], page 38.</ref><ref name="HAR-9602">''See also'' National Transportation Safety Board ''[http://www.ntsb.gov/publictn/1996/HAR9602.pdf Highway/Railroad Accident Report]: Collision of Northeast Illinois Regional Commuter Railroad Corporation (METRA) Train and Transportation Joint Agreement School District 47/155 School Bus at Railroad/Highway Grade Crossing in Fox River Grove, Illinois, on October 25, 1995''.</ref>

==== derailments ====
''This section is a stub. You can help Conservapedia by [{{fullurl:{{FULLPAGENAME}}|action=edit}} expanding it].''

=== Rail operations ===
{{main|Safeworking (railway)}}

In order to prevent trains from colliding, railroads use electrical signaling systems. The most common systems in use today are based on variations of [[automatic block signaling]], which can be supplemented by [[positive train control]].

==== automatic block signaling ====

In automatic block signaling, railroad tracks are divided into sections known as blocks. The signaling system prevents more than one train from occupying any one block at any given time by detecting the presence of trains and by using colored lights (similar to [[traffic signal]]s) to indicate to train crewmembers whether it is safe to proceed<ref name="train control systems">''See'' [http://www.ntsb.gov/events/symp_ptc/presentations/03_VanderClute.pdf Train Control Systems].</ref>; for example, a yellow signal may be used to instruct train crews to slow down, and a red signal may be used to instruct train crews to stop so as to avoid entering a block that is occupied.

==== positive train control ====
[[Positive train control]] is a technology by which "automatic control systems" are able "to override mistakes made by human operators" in order to prevent train collisions.<ref name="NTSB recommendation">http://www.ntsb.gov/recs/mostwanted/positive_train.htm</ref> [[Amtrak]]'s Northeast Corridor, for example, uses a system that comprises two elements, "positive train stop" and "civil speed enforcement," which together provide the functionality of positive train control.<ref name="NTSB recommendation" />

Positive train control systems can prevent those collisions that are caused by crewmember inattention to signal indications.<ref name="NTSB testimony">''See'' [http://www.ntsb.gov/speeches/s050428.htm National Transportation Safety Board: statement on positive train control].</ref>

== Trains ==
{{main|Train}}
[[Image:Gallitzin_rr.jpg|thumb|260px|Train emerging from the famous tunnels in Gallitzin, Pennsylvania. This photo illustrates how a good deal of railway freight is hauled these days -- in intermodal shipping containers]]

The vehicles that operate on railways are known as ''[[train]]s'', and usually comprise one or more [[locomotive]]s hauling a number of vehicles.

== Further reading ==

===Notes===
<references/>

==see also==
* [[Railway history]]
===Bibliography===
* Armstrong, John H. ''The Railroad: What It Is, What It Does''. (4th ed. 1998)
* Nock, O.S. ''Encyclopedia of Railwys'' (1977), well illustrated
* Simmons, Jack, and Gordon Biddle, eds. ''The Oxford Companion to British Railway History'' (1997), online at academic libraries

[[Category:Railroads]]
[[Category:Transportation]]
[[Category:Economic history]]

===External links===
* [http://www.fra.dot.gov/us/content/1265 Federal Railroad Administration » press room » positive train control]
* [http://parovoz.com/spravka/gauges-en.php Railroad Gauge Width], a comprehensive list of railway gauges and countries where they are and were used.
* [http://tigger.uic.edu/~rjensen/railroad.htm Guide to Railroad History online]

== Notes ==
<references />

[[Category:Railroads]]
[[Category:Business]]
[[Category:Economics]]
[[Category:Economic history]]

Royal Society

2011-08-25T17:23:58Z

Darkmind1970:

The '''Royal Society''' is [[Britain|Britain's]] preeminent scientific institution. It was founded in 1660, and early Fellows included [[Christopher Wren]], [[Robert Boyle]], [[Robert Hooke]] and [[Isaac Newton]]. Past presidents include Wren, Newton, [[Joseph Banks]], [[Humphrey Davy]], [[Charles Darwin]], [[Lord Kelvin]], [[Lord Lister]] and [[Ernest Rutherford]].

==Election Process==

Fellows of the Royal Society are elected for life through a peer review process that culminates in a vote by existing Fellows. The main criterion for election as a Fellow is scientific excellence.

==Current Fellows==

Current Fellows include [[Jocelyn Bell Burnell]], [[Richard Dawkins]], [[Stephen Hawking]], [[Harry Kroto]], [[Tim Berners-Lee]], [[Paul Nurse]] and [[John Sulston]].

==U.S. counterpart==
Its U.S. counterpart is the [[National Academy of Science]].

[[category:science]]

==External Links==

[http://www.royalsoc.ac.uk Royal Society]

Talk:Counterexamples to Relativity

2011-08-20T19:00:06Z

Darkmind1970: /* Attempt at Helping the Consensus Along */

'''Attention: Please review previous points on the discussion page before adding your own commentary. Many topics have been discussed many, many, times. If you have something new to add, feel free, but it is not necessary or helpful to read the same arguments over and over and over.'''

{{articletalkheader|prefix=archive}}

'''Raising arguments which have been discussed before wastes the time of valuable editors and repeatedly doing so violates 90/10.'''

----

== Countering the counterexamples ==

The content of this page aside, I question whether it serves the interests of CP for it to exist in its current form. CP has been lucky to attract a long string of competent math and physics editors. Yet once again it finds itself in the position of not having any except ASchlafly and Ed Poor. Many of these editors were good-faith contributors who wrote a lot of other science articles and generally improved the site, but were eventually driven out after becoming frustrated with this opposition to relativity (and its cousin, the pervasive skepticism about complex numbers).

:Actually, it was their refusal to write articles on basic topics accessible to our average reader's background that sealed their doom. While Andy is much more tolerant of "advanced" articles on math, etc., I prefer that each article at least '''begin''' with an introduction that even a high school student can understand.

:I even started to suspect that this refusal went beyond mere inability to empathize with our readership, but could be a deliberate flouting of editorial policy.

:Bottom line: it's not the topic, but how it's described. No science topic is out of bounds here. --[[User:Ed Poor|Ed Poor]] [[User talk:Ed Poor|Talk]] 13:00, 16 August 2010 (EDT)

Yes, maybe free speech dictates that this page ought to remain. But when the viewpoints of supporters of relativity have been ''without exception'' removed from the page, is there really free speech at all? ASchlafly, you remove these views on the grounds that they are not logical. But their proponents hold them surely as you hold your position, so would it not be reasonable to allow the other side to be posted somewhere, maybe on another page rebutting this one?

Disbelieving the theory of relativity is really not a ''conservative'' position as such, so I think it's a shame that it has caused CP so much harm. Indeed, the only person who seems to be convinced by these "counterexamples" is ASchlafly: the public (liberal and conservative) constantly disputes them on the talk page; the media openly mocks this page and hurts the public perception of CP's credibility; even some CP administrators, surely open-minded conservatives, disagree with these positions. (Maybe some editors have expressed agreement. Such are certainly parodists and should be banned on sight.)

I think it would be advisable to allow some pro-relativity views back on this site, in the interest of free speech, keeping productive editors, and maintaining credibility. --[[User:KyleT|KyleT]] 11:54, 16 August 2010 (EDT)

: Kyle, your rant is misplaced and does not warrant a detailed response. If you would like to set up a new entry along the lines of what you propose, please do so. It can go point-by-point in trying to rebut the counterexamples. Good luck doing so, because each counterexample has withstood every attempt to criticize it.--[[User:Aschlafly|Andy Schlafly]] 11:58, 16 August 2010 (EDT)

Despite my oppositions to the arguments contained on this page, science is about progress through repeatable experimentation. If a theory is found to be incompatible to experimental data, then it is editted or thrown out. A great many papers published on relativity (see websites such as NASA's ADS for peer reviewed papers) contain a great many references to other authors that have aided the writers in their work. These references are peer reviewed and in turn built on the foundations of many older peer reviewed references.

The references that are presently used in the 'Counterexamples to Relativity' page are of dubious origin.

1. Is not a reference, as it does not contain
1) The author, title, ISBN number, print edition, print date, publisher, and page number where the quote about how relativity misleads the public is contained. It can be corrected if you input these important bits of information, so that people can follow your reasoning.

2. Whilst this is arguably a reference, the website does not contain data as to when it was originally accessed, which may bring into question if the page has been edited by some outsider since your use as a reference. There is also and more importantly the question of MSNs reliability as a reference. As it is not a peer reviewed article, it is written by a non-scientist, with no references to papers written BY NASA scientists on the occurrence claimed within, it is highly unreliable. It would be more precise to actually reference a peer-reviewed paper, or report by an acclaimed institute, which specialise in the sciences explaining or even mentioning the anomalies.

3. Reference 3 is not a reference, as it does not actually refer to a specific source of data. There is no reference to percentages of physics majors that cannot replicate relativity equations. The data quoted is also unreferenced, and should in any case be contained in the body of the article, and not in the references. Finally when mentioning Professor Clifford Will, it is again unreferenced about his 'omitted this in listing tests confirming relativity.' Please reference this quotation by finding it in his articles, and reference it.

4. Reference 4 is not a reference at all, as it is a statement of opinion. I would also point out that you say 'If space were curved, one would never expect the universe as a whole to be almost precisely flat. Yet it is.' But as you can see using the term 'almost precisely flat' you are actually saying that there is a partial curvature in space-time, as the universe would have to be precisely flat, and not almost precisely flat. Again reference peer reviewed papers on the curvature of space-time and perhaps the explanations of the so called 'flatness problem in cosmology' and perhaps look at 'solutions to the flatness problem'.

5. Again this reference does not contain any information as to where you are getting your claims. Perhaps referencing papers from a peer reviewed paper about quantum entanglement, involving the author, title, Journal title or ISBN number, print edition, print date, publisher, and page number.

6. This link actually sends the user to another conservapedia page, and upon inspection then reveals the reference to this page as a BBC website article. Whilst I am a strong fan of the BBC, again as my issue with reference number 2, the data accessed has not been input, and the BBC is also a dubious source for referencing. Please use peer reviewed papers as sites such as BBC/MSN are 'popular' science ie do not explain the actually cause of certain anomalies, and please follow reference guidelines.

7. Again New Scientist is not a peer-reviewed paper and is not a reliable reference source. Whilst the paper goes into more detail that your average website article, it is still written in laymen’s terms, and often actually avoids the mathematical details that are unbendable by opinion. It would be more correct to reference the paper that the scientists within have published on their findings, rather than relying on the NS's analysis of it.

8. Again for reference 7.

9. Excellent! An actual peer reviewed paper in here! However when citing papers, it is more correct to cite the author, title, Journal title or ISBN number, print edition, print date, publisher, and page number rather than the website that the data is taken from.

10. Again this is not referenced. It would be correct to reference Professor Stephen Hawking’s papers on black hole entropy. I believe that there may be some in NASA's that you can find and reference following conventions.

11. This is again not referenced as it does not contain any link to the press release, or papers written by the The Time Service Department, U.S. Navy refuting the claims by scientists that GPS does not rely on relativity. Doing so would be useful to disprove relativity.

12. Reference 12 links back to reference 1, which for some reason starts out scientific, but then the reference it is linked to be reference 1, which at no point actually explains, or even mentions the tensor-stress-energy that is present in relativity. Again using a corrected reference 1 would be more correct than having a reference 12. It would also more good to mention that the scientific part of reference 12 should also be contained in the body of the text, and a reference for the science, such as Einstein's papers should be referenced for the mathematical cases to be seen as correct.

13. Reference 13 is a statement and not a reference. It should be moved into the main body of the text and referenced itself, by citing a peer-reviewed paper.

14. Nature magazine is a reputable peer reviewed source, but as reference no 9, it should be referenced by the author, title, Journal title or ISBN number, print edition, print date, publisher, and page number rather than the website that the data is taken from.

15. Again this is not referenced correctly, as it does not say who the author is, etc. It would actually be honest to point out that in no case in physics, engineering, biology, chemistry, can equations be shone to be perfectly correct, but more often as moderately to highly accurate models, depending on the situation.

Editing the above errors in referencing will make the page more professional. Vancouver or Harvard referencing are used world wide, and there is no excuse to reference incorrectly. Doing so cheapens the image of the author, and is often than not an insult to the reader.

Hope this has been helpful. Regards, ARogers

== A reminder ==

We are all scientists here: we all seek the truth.

"When people thought the earth was flat, they were wrong. When people thought the earth was spherical, they were wrong. But if you think that thinking the earth is spherical is just as wrong as thinking the earth is flat, then your view is wronger than both of them put together."

-- Isaac Asimov

[[User:Freiberg|Freiberg]] 15:42, 16 August 2010 (EDT)

:That's misleading. Hardly anyone ever thought the earth was flat, at least not since Western Civilization began. And the earth is so near to a perfect sphere that a globe (atlas) needs no "polar flattening".

:Don't try to make subtle points: come out and say whatever it is you were trying to say. --[[User:Ed Poor|Ed Poor]] [[User talk:Ed Poor|Talk]] 22:58, 18 August 2010 (EDT)

== Pioneer anomoly ==

The first counterexample, "The [[Pioneer anomaly]]", doesn't actually satisfy the list's purpose as stated by "Here is a list of 29 counterexamples: any one of them shows that the theory is incorrect."

Under [[Pioneer_anomaly#Explanations]] there's a list of potential explanations for the anomaly, and while "The theory of General Relativity and the Law of Universal Gravitation could be wrong" is on that list so are drag forces and the presence of unknown celestial bodies. In other words, the anomaly itself could still exist even if general relativity is 100% accurate.

Maybe "shows" should be changed to "suggests"?
[[User:Stoob|Stoob]]

: All of the other items also have explanations that do not contradict relativity. [[User:RSchlafly|RSchlafly]] 13:28, 18 August 2010 (EDT)

::I have to agree wholeheartedly - and I can see that you are trying for quite a while to get rid of these distortions, at [[Counterexamples to Relativity]] and [[Theory of Relativity]]. I liked your comment:

:::{{Quotebox|''All of those statements are completely false. Relativity has no physical discontinuities, logic contradictions, or contradictions from evidence. Relativity promoters are no more liberal than those who promote quantum mechanics, superconductivity, or any other aspect of physics. RSchlafly 10:30, 24 November 2009 (EST) ''}}

::But seeing how long this is going on, my hopes for any improvements are vanishing... [[User:RonLar|RonLar]] 08:23, 19 August 2010 (EDT)

== If Biblical quotes are allowed... ==

Since we are allowing quotes from the Bible to undermine Relativity, can I also use quotes from the Quran in the "Counterexamples to the Bible" section? Seems only fair.

: Are you saying all books are created equal, Pete?--[[User:Aschlafly|Andy Schlafly]] 22:49, 17 August 2010 (EDT)

::That is ''precisely'' what I am saying. For example, it seems to me that the page "Christian apologetics" could, with a few alterations, be renamed "Islamic apologetics". Pete 17 August 2010 (EDT)

:::Sorry, Pete, but truth is not relative on this site.--[[User:Aschlafly|Andy Schlafly]] 00:04, 18 August 2010 (EDT)

::::I agree, truth is not relative, neither here nor anywhere. However, it seems to me, but the laws of logic, that exactly one of the following statements must be true -

::::1. The Bible is true
::::2. The Qu'ran is true
::::3. Neither are true

::::You are assuming #1 to falsify #2 and #3. Then why can't I assume #2 to falsify #1 and #3. That seems perfectly in line with what you are doing. [[User:Pete5383|Paul]] 18:07, 18 August 2010 (EDT)

:::::No, Pete, you have come here assuming the Bible is false, and you're ''pushing'' your religious beliefs here. I think you better give it up. [[User:Karajou|Karajou]] 18:10, 18 August 2010 (EDT)

::::::I have no religious beliefs. What I am "pushing" is rational thinking and embracing science. [[User:Pete5383|Paul]] 18:26, 18 August 2010 (EDT)
:::::::You are pushing a religious belief, and it certainly is not rational. [[User:Karajou|Karajou]] 18:29, 18 August 2010 (EDT)

What religion am I adhering to? And is it irrational because it is supported by hundreds of years of scientific scrutiny?
:Belief or non-belief in God is a religious belief. And which scientists are irrational? Do they include the thousands of PHd's who believe in God? [[User:Karajou|Karajou]] 18:37, 18 August 2010 (EDT)

::Non-belief is a religion the same way that bald is a hair color. You disregard a million gods; I disregard a million plus one, and I'm irrational? Out of those thousands of PhD holder's, how many have written papers presenting testable evidence of God? The difference between my non-belief and your belief is that my non-belief is not actively trying to undo scientific advancement; my non-belief has never raised millions of dollars to pass laws that tell two loving adults that they are not as good as their heterosexual counterparts; my non-belief has never caused my young son to come home in tears because he was told that he was destined to spend an eternity being tortured because "Your daddy doesn't go to church"; my non-belief ruler (if it had one) has never refrained from intervening in the molestation of a child despite being perfectly capable of doing so.

::I am sitting now, alone in my study, and there is a quarter on my desk. If this quarter were to flip from heads to tails by itself, I would instantly become a convert to Christianity. As of yet, the quarter has not moved. Either there is no god, or he does not care about saving me enough to give me even the slightest bit of evidence. Now, absence of proof does not proof there is no god; however, the silence has been awful hard to ignore. [[User:Pete5383|Paul]] 18:54, 18 August 2010 (EDT)

:::I don't expect you to change in an instant if that quarter flips by itself, but here you are, in our site, knowing we are Christian, and you are willfully and deliberately pushing your non-beliefs here. A wolf amongst the sheep.
:::And there is a God, and He does care enough about you to send His Son; the evidence for it is historical and documented. Whether or not you choose to accept Him is up to you, but I don't think He's going to give into a demand for a test just because you feel like it. [[User:Karajou|Karajou]] 19:01, 18 August 2010 (EDT)

:::Paul, atheists don't build hospitals, don't have championship teams, and don't give much to charity. Atheism is a self-centered ideology that leads individuals and societies to self-destructive rather than selfless conduct. Even your quarter example is self-centered. Atheists are also censors of classroom prayer, even when everyone in the classroom wants to pray.

:::There's no free lunch. Selfish ideologies aren't getting away with anything. Over time, the objective individual wakes up to where the road of atheism takes him, and he finds another road.--[[User:Aschlafly|Andy Schlafly]] 19:08, 18 August 2010 (EDT)

::::Aren't Warren Buffet and Bill Gates atheists? They've donated billions to charity, I think more than a third of everything they earned during their lifetimes. Definitely no championship teams though... [[User:Stoob|Stoob]]

:::::Gates' wife is a devout Catholic, I think, and ''together'' they've given money to a foundation they control. I'm not aware of their building any hospitals. Ditto for Buffet. Moreover, their wealth is just a drop in the bucket of the overall wealth of atheists, very little of which goes to atheists.

:::::What's another name for a self-centered, uncharitable person who censors classroom prayer? An atheist.--[[User:Aschlafly|Andy Schlafly]] 21:35, 18 August 2010 (EDT)

::::Andy, there are atheists doing charitable work. The relatively small work being done is easily attributable to atheists being cast out from society for millenia, and only recently gathering ground and forging a community. See [http://www.redcross.org/] [http://foundationbeyondbelief.org/] [http://www.aclu.org/] [http://www.amnesty.org/] [http://www.eff.org/about]. There are many others, and the number and size of these organizations continues to grow. You may want to believe that atheists lack charity, but the world simply must disagree with you. [[User:AAckermann|AAckermann]] 11:03, 19 August 2010 (EDT)
:::::The world disagrees with you in one respect, AAckermann. Since 1963 when a loud-mouth atheist named Madalyn Murray O'Hair used her hate to remove prayer from public schools, we have had consistent and constant attacks by atheists and like-minded individuals against Christians through legislation, speeches, books and other published material, film and television, as well as personal threats, intimidation, and violence. That is mainstream atheism in action here, and I would hardly call that "charitable." [[User:Karajou|Karajou]] 11:13, 19 August 2010 (EDT)
::::::Prayer is still permitted in schools; Any child can, at their choosing, pray as they feel. All that has changed is the school must not direct it. Just as I'm sure you wouldn't want your children forced to pray for Allah, we must not force children to pray for God, or any other deities. [[User:AAckermann|AAckermann]] 11:31, 19 August 2010 (EDT)
:::::::And you're wrong once again. A kid begins a prayer, an atheistic parent gets mad and sues the school district with the help of the ACLU; that fact alone is in the newspapers in some part of the country at least once a week. We're not going to make atheism look good here, AAckermann, not just because doing so is against the site's policies, ''but because doing so is an impossibility.'' [[User:Karajou|Karajou]] 11:38, 19 August 2010 (EDT)
::::::::Please cite any case where that happened. The ACLU defends human rights, not anti-Christian concepts. [[User:AAckermann|AAckermann]] 11:43, 19 August 2010 (EDT)
:::::::::You know full-well what I'm talking about, AAckermann; you've seen the citations and the news about the subject too many times yourself. [[User:Karajou|Karajou]] 11:49, 19 August 2010 (EDT)
::::::::::In answer to the above troll's "request" for a cite backing up what I said about prayer and the ACLU's attempts to stop it, how about 22,000 of them: [http://www.google.com/#hl=en&q=aclu+sues+school+prayer&aq=f&aqi=&aql=&oq=&gs_rfai=&pbx=1&fp=93c3c78db929eee0]. If the ACLU was so bent up about defending human rights, they would be defending the rights of anyone to engage in prayer anytime, anywhere, as per the First Amendment. [[User:Karajou|Karajou]] 12:01, 19 August 2010 (EDT)

:Karajou, I'm not sure a list of google results is an accepted citation...however, playing along, I looked at the first result. It was about how a school was required to take down a banner that asked "Our Heavenly Father" to watch over them. Are you saying, Karajou, that if a school hung a banner that said "Praise be to Allah", you'd be fine with that? Side note, in your "citation", I noticed, a couple down, that the ACLU also sued a Twin Cities school for promoting Islam. Are you outraged about that?
:AAckermann, I've noticed from posting here for a while, that any time you request proof or a citation, you get responses in line with "You know full-well what I'm talking about" and little else.
:PS Karajou, I have a "citation" for you: http://www.google.com/#hl=en&q=andy+schlafly+hates+kittens&aq=f&aqi=&aql=&oq=&gs_rfai=&fp=634be7f9c98ae18c
:Mine has 27,000 results. More true, then, yes? (Mr. Schlafly, I mean no disrespect with that link. I was just using it as an illustration. I'm sure you love kittens as everyone does :) [[User:Pete5383|Paul]] 14:19, 19 August 2010 (EDT)
(unindent) A lot of what Ackermann was talking about is unrelated to the purpose of this page, which is to help contributors improve the article ... not to debate [[school prayer]]. Maybe we can cut and paste samo of the above to one of our [[Conservapedia:Debate topics]]. --[[User:Ed Poor|Ed Poor]] [[User talk:Ed Poor|Talk]] 13:30, 20 August 2010 (EDT)

== Black Holes are High Entropy ==

Point 16 states that black holes are highly ordered, thus possess low entropy. However, black hole entropy is understood to increase as expected by the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics: [http://prd.aps.org/abstract/PRD/v7/i8/p2333_1]. The citation refuting a similar proposition by Stephen Hawking is also not a citation, but an assertion by some individual. It would be more effective to cite peer-reviewed research showing black holes do not possess entropy through these mechanisms. [[User:AAckermann|AAckermann]] 14:47, 18 August 2010 (EDT)

== Searchlight Paradox ==

Number 30 is a misunderstanding of relativity. The essence of the argument is that the "spotlight (that is, where the light ends)" will move faster than the speed of light, moving from point A to point B faster than the speed of light. However, the inaccuracy in this thinking is that the light at point A and point B are not the same - point A and point B share no common photons.

Think of it like a water hose. You are spraying water onto the lawn. Then you turn around, 180 degrees, and spray on the street. Did the water on the lawn move to the street? No, they are two different sets of water.

Also, there is no violation in the transmission of information, because point A and point B are not communicating with each other - the searchlight is communicating with point A, and THEN with point B.

I await the removal of this counterexample. [[User:Pete5383|Paul]] 18:07, 18 August 2010 (EDT)

: I agree with this general sentiment. There is a mistake in reasoning in the article that even if we suppose that the light source was a movie projector for instance. Two observers that are located the same distance away from the light source would receive the same information, they have not communicated with each other in any way. Imagine a light source that radiates in two polar directions, and two observers located 1 light year away from the source. Both would receive the information in 1 year. Using the naive reasoning in the article this constitutes a breakdown in causality because the observers are two light years apart, however they clearly have not communicated with each other and have simply received the same information from a single source. There is no way for observer A to confirm that observer B has received the information. You can argue that they agreed that they will be in the same location, but this act of agreement requires transmission of information (telling the other where to wait) along a causal channel, and you have gleaned no NEW information about the other observer, all the information you have gleaned has come from causal channels. This same reasoning applies to the sweeping light source.I would remove the argument, but since I am a new user I would prefer to wait for someone who has more say in the community--[[User:DenisTR|DenisTR]] 16:50, 19 August 2010 (EDT)

:: OK, thanks for the good points. We are [[Essay:Quantifying Openmindedness|open-minded]] here and I've stricken that particular counterexample based on the logic above.--[[User:Aschlafly|Andy Schlafly]] 18:19, 19 August 2010 (EDT)

== Different values of Inertia ==

For counter-example 19, I'm not quite sure I understand. The value of the inertial mass (m) is constant for a given physical body undergoing any sort of motion, whether parallel or perpendicular to the observer's motion. I don't want to remove this as an counter-example to relativity before I understand what the author meant. Could this be clarified for me? Thanks.

: The rest mass is the same. I think Lorentz discovered what he called the longitudinal and transverse mass in around 1900. It was experimentally testing in around 1902. Einstein uses similar terminology in his 1905 paper. [[User:RSchlafly|RSchlafly]] 02:32, 25 August 2010 (EDT)

== counter example 12 ==

counter example 12, referring to the W13 magnetar does have an explanation that, while not proven, or provable, is at least consistent with relativity. It is explained here http://www.astronomynow.com/news/n1008/20magnetar/ one possible way it could have formed. [[User:Vikten|Vikten]] 16:38, 18 October 2010 (EDT)

: The attempt to reconcile the W13 data with relativity is highly speculative, unproven, and seems implausible to me. Almost anything can be reconciled with any theory if enough speculation about additional causes or forces is allowed, but that process is hardly scientific.--[[User:Aschlafly|Andy Schlafly]] 00:45, 20 October 2010 (EDT)

::It is less about trying to reconcile it with relativity as it is to basic astrophysics. More than that, if in fact the speculated method of formation is false, the resulting fallout would be far more reaching than simply overthrowing relativity. It would cast doubt on much of modern physics (which obviously are done with relativity in mind) but even many other possible interpretations of space and time, such as the pre-relativity Eddington Paradigm. This is not so much a counter example to relativity but an unknown in physics as a whole, and as more information is gained about the W13 Magnetar, if the above speculated method of formation is found to be false, we will see a revolution of physics surrounding its study. I don't think it should be removed as a counter example, but perhaps clarified to show that it does not fit the traditional method of magnetar formation, and that other hypothesis have been unproven, and that it could have far-reaching effects, not just relativity.[[User:Vikten|Vikten]] 18:48, 27 October 2010 (EDT)

:::The basic problem posed by #12 is that Relativity predicts a [[black hole]] but there is none. Classical physics does not predict a black hole.

:::But that is beside the point. The issue is whether Relativity is true or not, regardless of other theories. It's difficult to find the correct theory as long as people cling to an incorrect one.--[[User:Aschlafly|Andy Schlafly]] 19:54, 27 October 2010 (EDT)

== Tachyons ==

Not sure if this belongs here, but Tachyons seem to violate relativity, (while they do fit the math, strictly) They are quite confusing, and even under the most scientifically liberal interpretations, these hypothetical particles are somewhat self contradictory.
http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/physics/ParticleAndNuclear/tachyons.html[[User:Vikten|Vikten]] 19:46, 19 October 2010 (EDT)

:Thanks for mentioning this, and I'll investigate it further. Please feel free to edit the content page for this as you think best.--[[User:Aschlafly|Andy Schlafly]] 00:47, 20 October 2010 (EDT)

== John 4:53 ==

As Jesus didn't state that the healing happened instantaneously, but we have only the report of the nobleman who spotted the coincidence, the sign could have happened
#instantaneously
#with the speed of light
#with the speed of sound (the ''word'')
So, this is no example of an [[Action-at-a-distance]]!
[[User:AugustO|AugustO]] 10:04, 18 March 2011 (EDT)

: No, the point of the story is that it happened at the same moment. The modern translation should reflect that obvious meaning.--[[User:Aschlafly|Andy Schlafly]] 11:05, 18 March 2011 (EDT)
:::''No, the point of the story is that it happened at the same moment. The modern translation should reflect that obvious meaning.''

:::''Obviously'', God could have created the Heavens and the Earth in a single moment. He chose to take six days. How do we know this? Because ''He'' told us so, not a mortal. ''Obviously'', the Lord Almighty can't be exhausted. But he chose to rest for the seventh day. Again, we know this as ''He'' told us so Himself.

:::We don't know which time the Lord chose to take to perform the sign of the son. ''Obviously'', it could have happened in an instant. Or a heartbeat. Or with the speed of light or sound. The Lord doesn't tell us His (and not ''our''!) choice. We only have the word of a mortal man, who measured the period up to an hour: the ''seventh hour'' is between 12:30 p.m. and 1:30 p.m. - even between 12:35 p.m and 1:45 p.m. in the summer. This reminds me of Galileo's trials to measure the speed of light with the help of a servant and two shuttered lantern...

:::I'll revert your reversion of my edit - and perhaps I'' get blocked for this, though I am giving ample reason for my acts. Thus you could avoid to address my points, and ignore them like quite a few arguments against items in the list of counterexamples. As Rschlafly said: ''All of the other items also have explanations that do not contradict relativity.'' But I hope that you just answer the following questions:

:::*Do you have any justification for your translation other than '''the Lord ''could'' have done this in a single instant'''? As I mentioned above, the Bible is about what God did, and so your translation shouldn't be be about what God ''could'' have done, neither.

:::*Above, you wrote: ''The instantaneous healing is central to the purpose of the event.'' and ''the point of the story is that it happened at the same moment''. How so? Why has the healing to be spontaneous, when the creation of the world took six days?

:::--[[User:AugustO|AugustO]] 10:36, 19 March 2011 (EDT)

::::For a moment, I won't address the problematic translation of John 4:53. Instead consider the following little story:
::::::''When I was in New York, I visited a small broadcasting studio. I was there at the begin of the broadcasting of the 1 o'clock news - and it started at 1 o'clock. The next day, I told a friend about this - and he said, that he had watched this very beginning of the news show at 1 o'clock, but in Danbury, Connecticut, roughly sixty miles away. I questioned whether he was sure of this - and he said that he had looked not only at his watch, but also at the sundial in his garden.''
::::Does this story disproves the Theory of Relativity?
::::[[User:AugustO|AugustO]] 09:55, 21 April 2011 (EDT)

==Refutations & Edits==
The following are refutations of points made in the article by user Gresavage, and is meant for article improvement. Discuss one at a time. [[User:Karajou|Karajou]] 14:30, 11 May 2011 (EDT)

:seeing no further discussion from the administrators on these points which have already been previously discussed in great detail on this talk page, i am going to edit the page. [[User:Gresavage|Gresavage]] 18:50, 12 May 2011 (EDT)

::I'm going to refute all of the "counterexamples" which incorporate quantum interactions. This is due to the fact that it is generally accepted that GR does not account for them. It is a mathematical model that applies to a certain range of values. The values encountered in QM and the ones on the much larger scale at the other end of the spectrum are not within the domain of GR. If GR did in fact agree with QM in it's predictions of quantum interactions, then we would have found the elusive "unifying gravitational field theory". Which of course we have not. There is in fact no unifying field theory. comparing GR and QM, is very much akin to trying to compare principles of circuits to principles of newtonian mechanics (F=ma). Yes, there is some overlap, but these two things deal with, and are born from, completely different domains; yet are proven to exist due to the same thing (electromagnetism). If i were to try to solve for voltages and currents in a mechanics problem, naturally i would have wrong answers. This does not imply that either of them is incorrect. As i have said, to properly determine whether a theory is accurate, one must see if it is true everywhere in it's domain. So far, GR has been proven to be true everywhere in it's domain. If that is not the case, then we limit the domain solely to where it is true. This is a very well known principle of mathematics. Take, for instance, the function <math>f(x)=1/(2-x)</math>; and lets say that we are using this function to try to explain a graph, (lets say the graph of: if U(x)={(2+x)/(4-x2) for -∞<x<-2 ∪ -2<x<2 ∪ 2<x<∞; 3 for x = -2 ; 5 for x = 2}. We would find that the graphs are nearly identical. However there are two hitches. The first is that the graphs are NOT identical, this would be the metaphor between GR and the actual universe, as well as QM and the actual universe. The graphs are only mostly identical, in fact, they are so identical that the percent error goes to 0 as the limit of x → ∞. This does not mean that <math>f(x)</math> is a bad representation of <math>U(x)</math>, it means that it is not the exact one. Lets say that at QM says that for x=2 <math>h(x)=5</math>, and for x=-2 <math>h(x)=3</math>. This theory of QM would be a good model for the universe where GR falls short. This also does not mean that GR or QM is a bad model. QM being true at some points does not mean that GR is generally inaccurate, just as QM being true in ALL points does not mean that GR is generally inaccurate. In fact, both models can be true independently, as well as simultaneously (however they are not true simultaneously in this example).(this metaphor, however, is not a good example of the true relationship between the universe and QM). Finally, to say that GR is not a good model for the universe because at one point, or even a range of points, it is inaccurate, would be an erroneous statement. To say that because GR is a bad model at 2, and/or -2, because it does not match exactly what the universe (<math>U(x)</math>) is doing, it then must be a bad model everywhere else, would be erroneous. Also, to say that solely because <math>f(x)</math> is not defined at x=2, it must be a bad model of the universe, is incredibly erroneous, as it is a near perfect model everywhere else! And in fact, this is the relationship that GR shares with the universe, and QM. Where GR leaves off (is not defined/is an inaccurate model) is exactly where QM picks up, and is an accurate model. That is not to say, that because QM is true where GR is not true, GR as a whole must be an erroneous theory, is preposterous. And to think otherwise is an incredible misunderstanding of math, physics, logic, and the universe as a whole. [[User:Gresavage|Gresavage]] 20:12, 12 May 2011 (EDT)

I intersperse my rebuttals below:

#Header:Theory of relativity: A set of mathematical relations showing that mass and energy come from equivalent space curvatures that can appear differently in different observational situations. NOT "a mathematical system that allows no exception". The statement is ambiguous and false. Requires rewording Citation: http://www.ccel.us/gange.glossary.html; http://wordnetweb.princeton.edu/perl/webwn?s=theory%20of%20relativity.

:No explanation requires no rebuttal. There are no exceptions to mathematical truths, such as 2+2=4. If one exception is found, then the mathematical statement is disproved.--[[User:Aschlafly|Andy Schlafly]] 17:30, 11 May 2011 (EDT)

::2+2 = 0, 2+2=1, 2+2=3, 2+2=10, 2+2=11, 2+2=100, 2+2= and 2+2=4 are all true. They can not be simultaneously true. Furthermore, truth is relative to the constraints you put on the system in which you are observing. which is why 2+2 = 0, 2+2=1, 2+2=3, 2+2=10, 2+2=11, 2+2=100, and 2+2=4 are all true. There are some mathematical expressions that can be violated. Mathematical systems therefore do allow exceptions. And furthermore, when you try to apply GR outside of the scope of the system over which it is defined, it breaks down. It's just like trying to plug in x = 2 to the function <math>f(x)=1/(2-x)</math>. Are you therefore going to say that f(x) must not be true since it is not defined over 2, which is not in it's natural domain? [[User:Gresavage|Gresavage]] 20:58, 11 May 2011 (EDT)

#Header:"It is heavily promoted by liberals who like its encouragement of relativism and its tendency to mislead people in how they view the world."|This talks about social relativism and is thereby irrelevant. Furthermore, the assertion that it is heavily promoted by liberals is not cited. You would require that there be some study showing that a tenant of liberalism is to promote the theory of relativity. Should be removed. Citation: No citation needed → irrelevant.

:Self-evident statements hardly require a citation. But see Tribe's law review article, which he credits the president for supposedly helping with it, for one example.--[[User:Aschlafly|Andy Schlafly]] 17:30, 11 May 2011 (EDT)

::it's no matter, social relativism ≠ General Relativity. You are trying to imply that they do, which is false by their definitions. FURTHERMORE self evident statements is a nonsensical term. And i would hardly say that that statement is self evident. it is not intuitively obvious that a tenant of liberalism is to believe in either social relativism or general or special relativity. [[User:Gresavage|Gresavage]] 20:58, 11 May 2011 (EDT)

#Header: "any one of them shows that the theory is incorrect.". Does this mean that only examples that fully falsify relativity be included? If so the list should be revised.

:Your statement seems to have a grammatical error and I can't make sense of it.--[[User:Aschlafly|Andy Schlafly]] 17:30, 11 May 2011 (EDT)

::excuse me i mean to imply that (from my recollection) none of the counterexamples tautologically prove GR to be false. I want to know whether this page should include only Counterexamples that can do that, or if we are just going to include insignificant "roadblocks" like the ehrenfest and twin paradoxes, which are easily explained by GR. In fact they are included in entry level courses in GR. No scientist in the last century, who has been well or even slightly versed, in the theory of GR understand these to be true paradoxes, As there is an explicit solution. Simply because one may not be able to comprehend the answer does not mean it's wrong. [[User:Gresavage|Gresavage]] 20:58, 11 May 2011 (EDT)

# Counterexample 1: This is not a counterexample of relativity and "sounds like global warming?" is pejorative speculation. it is furthermore false. gravitational waves have been indirectly detected. Should be removed. Citation: http://pubman.mpdl.mpg.de/pubman/item/escidoc:147982:1/component/escidoc:147981/AdvSR-43-1049.pdf

:No, gravitational waves have not been detected in a meaningful way. Every search for them has been a failure, and a waste of money.--[[User:Aschlafly|Andy Schlafly]] 17:30, 11 May 2011 (EDT)

::Indirectly detecting them is not meaningful? many other scientists and i would beg to disagree. The same failures and indirect detection has been instrumental in discovering many of the waves that make up the EM spectrum. IN FACT, indirect detection of EM waves is the reason we know the curvature, and change in temperature of the universe. It is like being inside a boat with no way out in a choppy ocean, but not being able to look out and see the waves. You indirectly detect them using your inner ear, and balance. But simply because you can not directly put yourself in the water or are unable to develop a device, given your own technological knowhow, with which to detect the waves, does not mean that they do not exist. [[User:Gresavage|Gresavage]] 20:58, 11 May 2011 (EDT)

# Counterexample 4: "If you please, Mark, try quoting the actual scientific journal instead of the New York Times. Wikipedia is also not a source. Karajou 21:31, 5 May 2011 (EDT)" if the new york times is not a source (which it is not) then neither is msnbc. Please recite!

:Not sure what the point of the objection is here.--[[User:Aschlafly|Andy Schlafly]] 17:30, 11 May 2011 (EDT)

::I was quoting karajou when he dismissed news articles as sources, msnbc is not a source and thus must be recited. There is no other way to explain it [[User:Gresavage|Gresavage]] 20:58, 11 May 2011 (EDT)

# Counterexample 5: This is not a citation. Requires recitation
# Counterexample 5: this is not true. Citation: http://www.relativity.li/en/epstein2/read/i0_en/i1_en/; http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/relativ/grel.html; http://arxiv.org/abs/1008.1811v1.

: No explanation requires no rebuttal.--[[User:Aschlafly|Andy Schlafly]] 17:30, 11 May 2011 (EDT)

::The explanation is the citation. Read the articles and you will have your explanation. [[User:Gresavage|Gresavage]] 20:58, 11 May 2011 (EDT)

# Counterexample 6: This is clearly falsified by NgSmith and Toph in the talk forums. Citation: http://conservapedia.com/Talk:Counterexamples_to_Relativity#Counterexample_4_.28limiting_behavior.29

: No explanation requires no rebuttal.--[[User:Aschlafly|Andy Schlafly]] 17:30, 11 May 2011 (EDT)
::The explanation is the citation. Read the articles and you will have your explanation. [[User:Gresavage|Gresavage]] 20:58, 11 May 2011 (EDT)

# Counterexample 7: Falsified by NgSmith. Citation http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/physics/Relativity/SR/velocity.html; http://conservapedia.com/Talk:Counterexamples_to_Relativity#Point_4

: No explanation requires no rebuttal.--[[User:Aschlafly|Andy Schlafly]] 17:30, 11 May 2011 (EDT)
::The explanation is the citation. Read the articles and you will have your explanation. [[User:Gresavage|Gresavage]] 20:58, 11 May 2011 (EDT)
# Counterexample 8: It is common knowledge that general relativity incorporates a "flat universe". Citation: http://www.astro.ucla.edu/~wright/cosmo_03.htm

: Does relativity incorporate Newtonian mechanics also??? A flat universe is contrary to the basic claims of relativity.--[[User:Aschlafly|Andy Schlafly]] 17:30, 11 May 2011 (EDT)
::No it is not, i beg you to please read the citations. I put them there for a reason and your blatant disregard for them is becoming tiresome. Relativity incorporates principles of newtonian mechanics. However we understand most of newtonian mechanics to be a poor model for explaining things on the scale of which GR is talking. Just like GR is a poor model for the behavior of quantum particles. and newtonian mechanics is even worse. [[User:Gresavage|Gresavage]] 20:58, 11 May 2011 (EDT)

# Counterexample 9: General relativity is to Quantum mechanics as Force equations without friction are to ones that consider friction. However, i can not find valid enough sources to edit this counterexample.

:No; [[quantum mechanics]] confounds and disproves relativity, as in the [[action-at-a-distance]] that exists in QM but is denied by relativity.--[[User:Aschlafly|Andy Schlafly]] 17:30, 11 May 2011 (EDT)
::as i have said before, quantum mechanics is a completely different scale than GR. GR is a poor model for quantum interactions. but it is a great model for most other things in the universe. I also could not find a source to back up that refutation, i was hoping that someone, with a better understanding of both GR and QM to provide them. [[User:Gresavage|Gresavage]] 20:58, 11 May 2011 (EDT)

# Counterexample 10: (action at a distance) entirely false. Citation: http://books.google.com/books?id=mbUGZYzs878C&pg=PA42&lpg=PA42&dq=relativity+action+at+a+distance&source=bl&ots=Sp3i4fEcfB&sig=T10swXL7u39VubURAXKuY1U66_Q&hl=en&ei=y1LKTbmnKIK_gQf7k_iDBg&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=7&ved=0CEoQ6AEwBg#v=onepage&q=relativity%20action%20at%20a%20distance&f=false

: No explanation requires no rebuttal. OK, this is getting tiresome. Please explain your very best points and we can discuss them.--[[User:Aschlafly|Andy Schlafly]] 17:30, 11 May 2011 (EDT)
::No sir, you are getting tiresome, please read the citations as they are incorporated for a very specific purpose. [[User:Gresavage|Gresavage]] 20:58, 11 May 2011 (EDT)

#Counterexample 12: gravitons are not part of general relativity this is general knowledge. Citation: http://www.unisci.com/stories/20021/0322023.htm
#Counterexample 14: (W13) This is possible in general relativity. Furthermore, solely because one scientist can't explain it, does not mean it is not explainable, in fact someone did provide an explanation. Citation: http://www.astronomynow.com/news/n1008/20magnetar/
#Counterexample 15: Irrelevant, even if the theory didn't lead to insights it does not detract from it's validity. However GR does have insights. Citation: http://arxiv.org/pdf/hep-ph/9810512; http://www.parkes.atnf.csiro.au/people/sar049/papers/JMS_17.pdf
#Counterexample 16: This is completely irrelevant, the standard mass of the kilogram has no bearing on the validity of general relativity because it is measured from a physical object and thus subject to variance. Whereas a standard measure of a meter, second, candella and others are absolute and unchanging definitions not subject to change
#Counterexample 17: (uniform temperature) Requires better citation. (primary source)
#Counterexample 18: (space should be smooth) Requires better citation. (primary source)
#Counterexample 19: This does not falsify the theory as a whole, or even majority, rewording should be considered as well as a better source.
#Counterexample 21: Citation required as well as disambiguation. Are you implying that GR predicts that it should be possible for black holes to "congeal" into existence?
#Counterexample 22: This is full of falsehood and speculation. Citation: http://www.phys.uu.nl/~prokopec/JeroenBurgers_gw_talk2.pdf
#Counterexample 23: Neither true nor relevant, and also reiteration of a previously stated point. Whether or not you can save lives has no bearing on the validity of a theory.
#Counterexample 24: (anisotropic mass) Citation desperately needed. Anisotropic mass is understood and accepted outside of GR. Citation: http://academics.hamilton.edu/physics/smajor/StudentR/ben_f2004.pdf
#Counterexample 25: Citation needed. As well as the fact that general relativity breaks down at the quantum level. Just like newtons equations break down at the quantum level, and at the level of lets say, planets even, like for instance mercury. That does not mean it's not a valid theory for it's frame of reference. In fact it's commonly accepted that GR doesn't work at that size. (I believe) REGARDLES... CITATION NEEDED
#Counterexample 26: (conservative field) Citation needed. GR does not violate the definition of a conservative field. Where are you getting this conclusion?
#Counterexample 27: (Ehrenfest paradox) What? This does not disprove relativity. Citation: http://www.wbabin.net/physics/hynecek7.pdf
#Counterexample 28: (Twin Paradox) http://www.phys.vt.edu/~jhs/faq/twins.html
#Counterexample 29: The citation clearly explains how the clocks would not be off DUE to relativity, and explains the mechanism. So your point is disproved by your citation
#Counterexample 30: (Aether/higgs field) Citation Required!
#Counterexample 31: The dimension is not time, it is analogous to time though. Citation: http://www.ugr.es/local/jagalvez/pdfpapers/A18.pdf; http://mathworld.wolfram.com/Timelike.html
#Counterexample 32: Speculation and needs citation
#Counterexample 34: Simply because we can't fully solve them does not detract from it's validity. This is like saying, because ancient egyptians didn't know how to do laplace transforms, laplace transforms must be false. The inability of people to fully comprehend something does not mean it is not valid.
#Counterexample 35: Not a counterexample. Citation: http://www.phys.unsw.edu.au/einsteinlight/jw/module4_pole_paradox.htm; http://astro.ucla.edu/~kevinhainline/relativity.html

== Partial Removal ==

I do not know why this page exists. General Relativity does not contradict the conservative ideals of this country. However, instead of refuting all the points by links (this has not worked in the past), I will explain a few of the simpler mistakes on my own. Although this page should be taken down, I realize that you would never allow me to do that. So I recommend that you at least take down these:

counterexample 6:
Even an infinitesimal mass cannot get to c. Also, a massless particle has to go at c, since if it went slower, it would have no energy and thus not exist, which is a contradiction. Therefore, there is no discontinuity.

counterexample 7:
Force is defined as dp/dt, or (change in momentum) / (change in time). Say, over a period of time, the force imparts a momentum p to the moving object. Since momentum in the perpendicular direction is initially 0, its final momentum in the perpendicular direction will be p. <math>p=\gamma_ymv_y</math>. If the new momentum is small, <math>\gamma_y=1</math> (the gamma factor in the perpendicular direction), <math>v_y</math> = perpendicular velocity and m = rest mass. Thus the force will act on the rest mass.

counterexample 8:
Actually, the results of an experiment provides good evidence of two predictions of general relativity: frame dragging and basic curvature. This is very recent and exciting news, so I couldn't resist adding one link:
http://einstein.stanford.edu/highlights/status1.html#PRL_paper

counter example 16:
Not sure what this has to do with relativity, and it is ambiguous. (So for now, a change, not deletion would be nice)

counterexample 24:
The concept of inertia is ill-defined, but it is kind of like resistance to change in velocity. However, there is a specific direction chosen, the direction of motion. Thus, symmetry is broken, so some direction can be preferred. In another, unrelated, example (just to show that symmetry can be broken), imagine a river flowing fairly fast. It is harder to swim 100 feet upstream than 100 feet downstream. Although it's 100 feet either way, one direction is preferred.

counterexample 25:
Actually, according to the relativistic formula <math>E^2 = m^2c^4+p^2c^2</math>, momentum is not strictly dependent on rest mass, but is dependent on energy as well. Since light has energy, it can have momentum under relativity.

counterexample 31:
Vectors don't have unique inverses under dot or cross multiplication. However, you can multiply all vectors v by <math>1/|v|</math> (|v| is the length of the vector) and get the unit vector in that direction. (Which you can do with time.)

counterexample 35:
I found this image online, but it shows the idea. Each point (x, t) in the barns frame corresponds to a point in the ladder's frame (x', t'). I will say that it is intuitively weird. The point when the end of the ladder enters the barn is A. The point when the front of the ladder leaves the barn is B. A and B have the same time coordinate in the barn's rest frame, but, in the ladders frame, A has a latter time coordinate than B.
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikimedia/en-labs/9/9a/Polebarn.GIF - Added by Kitcher

: You make some good points. Maybe the list ought to be divided into "physical anomalies related to relativity" and "counter-intuitive aspects of relativity".
: If you adopt the philosophy that one counterexample disproves the theory, then it is not clear why so many need to be listed. It invites others to reason that if one of these 35 arguments is wrong, then the whole page is discredited.
: The Gravity Probe B paper is still not posted. I am surprised that the project leaders made such a big splash over this, with no paper to back up what they say. [[User:RSchlafly|RSchlafly]] 10:05, 13 May 2011 (EDT)

== Mass and Momentum (25)==
"Relativity requires that anything traveling at the speed of light must have mass zero, so it must have momentum zero. But the laws of electrodynamics require that light have nonzero momentum. "
I'm confused how this is a counterexample to relativity. Relativity does say that anything traveling at the speed of light must have 0 rest mass, but it does not make the claim that something of zero mass has zero momentum. It's a rather famous equation that <math> E^2 = (pc)^2 + (mc^2)^2</math>. Zero mass in the context of special relativity then simply implied that <math>E = pc</math> for massless particles. It's also true that the laws of electrodynamics require light to have momentum, but I'm confused, if you follow this line of reasoning is it trying to imply that light has mass given the premise of this counterexample? Photons have <math> E=pc</math> fits perfectly well in the context of relativity and is self-consistent as far as I'm aware. ([[User:Madblueplanet|Madblueplanet]] 09:01, 20 June 2011 (EDT))

:It looks rather obvious that the person who wrote the list of alleged Einstein's errors interprets terms not in the same way as contemporary physicists would. Whoever set the list should consult it with a physicist freshly from school since many terms in common language don't need to have the same meaninig in physics as they had in Einstein's times. E.g. word ''"mass"'' denoted now by ''m'', itself changed its meaning between Einstein's and contemporary times. It is presently the ''invariant mas'' while before, e.g. in ''"Feynman lectures on physics"'' <math>m</math> was strictly ''relativistic mass'' while ''"invariant mass"'' had to be denoted <math>m_o</math> which still causes endless arguments between physicists and engineers or chemists who each might use different conventions. It looks silly when alleged Einstein's error turns out to be due only to misunderstanding of a physical term. In Einstein's times photons, as today, had mass <math>m=h\nu/c^2</math> and only their <math>m_o=0</math>, which today is written <math>m=0</math> but only because '''idea''' of "mass" chaged, not its physics. [[User:JimJast|JimJast]] 15:28, 18 July 2011 (EDT)

== Correcting example #3 (Pioneer "anomaly") ==

For many years I'm trying to publish in any scientific peer reviewed establishment journal (to avoid accusations of crankery) the news that according to physics of Einstein's general relativity the universe works slightly differently than scientific establishment assumes. The most important difference is that the so called "cosmological redshift" is not produced by expansion of universe but by an interesting effect of relativity of time, verifyiable with simple, almost Newtonian math, by any bright high shool student. This effect is time running slower in deep space than at (any) observer proportionally to exponent of ratio of the distance between observer and the point in deep space to so called "Einstein's radius of curvature of space". Equally important part of this effect is that it predicts Pioneer "anomaly" within one standard deviation being about as it is observed <math>(7\times 10^{-10}m/s^2)</math>. I'm supplying here the paper that might support this bright high school student in his/her calculations of this effect that I call ''[http://www.fuw.edu.pl/~wjast/160.htm Hubble time dilation]'' and consider it being overlooked by all the Big Bang aficionados insisting on expansion of universe against better judgement of Einstein.

A sad part of this story is that Einstein was right in his assumption that the universe is stationary (non expanding) and his critics supporting LeMaitre wrong but Einstein gave up arguing with [http://www.fuw.edu.pl/~wjast/3268.htm#fo idiots] to be able to work peacefully on other projects. And now we have a lame hypothesis of ''Big Bang'' which is physically impossible (for its creation of energy from nothing), and scientific establishment who refuses for years to peer review papers supporting Einstein's original idea accidentally turning out right. As Einstein told a journalist asking how to make a discovery: ''"Very simple, when all the wise men decide that something can't be calculated, comes an ignorant who does not know it, and calculates it."'' What just happened in my case, but I might gladly show my calculations to any intelligent high school student to prove that he or she can make them too, despite that all the wise men couldn't. [[User:JimJast|JimJast]] 15:53, 18 July 2011 (EDT)

== Correcting example #1 <math>(G_{\mu\nu} = 8 \pi K T_{\mu\nu})</math> ==
Contrary to the above equation, the original Einsteinian equation was <math>R_{\mu\nu} = 8 \pi T_{\mu\nu}</math>, where <math>R_{\mu\nu}</math> is ''"[[Ricci tensor]]"'' and <math>T_{\mu\nu}</math> is ''"[[Stress-energy tensor]]"'', which is much simpler and does not contain <math>G_{\mu\nu}</math> that was introduced by authors of 1973 ''"Gravitation"'' to suggest the need for expansion of the universe but turned out to be not necessary when ''"[[Hubble time dilation]]"'' (HTD) entered the picture in 1985 and explained the redshift in stationary ''"[[Einstein's universe]]"'' <ref>See ''"[[Einsteinian gravitation]]"''.</ref>.

==References==
<references/>

== A point of view on this article ==

Hi! First of all, please excuse me for my awful english. I'm a huge fan of Conservapedia in general, and of this article in particular: I've found the points 11 and 12 of this list (the "action-at-a-distance" points) incredibily inspired, so I use sometimes these points as sign at the end of posts in some forums.

First of all, as I've seen during my physics studies, there is no such thing as "liberal physics", just physics.
Physicists can have different opinions on specific topics, and it's a good thing: finding who is wrong is the only way to make scientific progress.
When a new phenomenon is discovered, the first thing to do is to find out if the known physics laws can describe it: this may be called a "conservative" point of view. But if this is not possible new laws have to be found: you may call them "liberal laws".

The special theory of relativity, though, is not object of debates, so actually the physicists are '''conservative''' in beliving
that a lot of phenomena can be explained using the relativity theory.

This article pretends to be a page about science. Well, it turns out that it is a (wonderful) ''pure nonsense'' page (I really love nonsense!). There are conceptual errors, absurdities, even miracles (I hope that you won't call them "scientific proofs")...
for example, points 7, 11, 29, 31, 32 are all manifestly wrong, as
everyone with a little knowledge of physics can confirm. Point 13: no one is searching gravitons.
Point 25: if an object is moving in one direction,
then physics '''should''' distinguish among the directions (and, in fact, it does).

The classic aether does not exist.

Not all the points are wrong, though. The necessity of dark matter and dark energy in the current cosmological models it's a problem well known
to the experts. There are two possibilities: one can prove experimentally that these entities exists ''and/or'' general relativity is wrong
on large scales. My opinion (but it's just an opinion) is that the dark matter exists (it has been observed in galaxy collisions, for example), but
general relativity has to be modified on large scales (maybe a quantum theory of gravitation could help?).

So: most of the points are trash. Some of the points are quite right indeed (not the Bible ones, at least if you want to write an article
about science). And, for the sake of correctness, someone should write a page with phenomena explained by relativity that aren't
explained in the framework of classical mechanics and electrodynamics.

This is only my POV, obviously. But if Conservapedia wants to be a source of knowledge (regardless the "conservative" or "liberal" point of view)
you have to write facts, not nonsense. I'm a Conservapedia fan for the nonsense, so this advice is against my interests :P

p.s. I see that my advice is, in fact, the [[Conservapedia:Commandments|first commandment]] of Conservapedia.

Have a nice day, [[User:MM87|'''MM''']]''[[User_talk:MM87|'''''87''''']] 08:18, 8 August 2011 (EDT)

: You say, "there is no such thing as 'liberal physics,' just physics." But obviously an [[atheistic]] view of the world is going to lean towards atheistic explanations, no matter how implausible. Moreover, [[liberals]] are often unwilling to admit that they are wrong about anything, leaving them clinging to theories for decades after they should have been rejected. See, e.g., [[Piltdown Man]].--[[User:Aschlafly|Andy Schlafly]] 13:15, 8 August 2011 (EDT)

:: ... and so? Physics, and science in general, is the study of interconnections among natural phenomena, not between natural and supernatural ones. This other thing is called "metaphysics" ("beyond-nature"). Do you see? Even the ancient greeks knew the difference.
::But this is not the point. You're probably the first and main writer of this page, so I'll talk directly to you. Do you care if some of the points of the article are wrong of not? How did you verify the correctness of the sentences?
::(Curiosity: if you don't think that the theory of relativity gives a good description of the world, how do you explain the relativistic effects... without relativity? I mean, for example, the costance of the speed of light, or the different mean lives of instable particles when they are at rest or in motion). --[[User:MM87|'''MM''']]''[[User_talk:MM87|'''''87''''']] 15:40, 8 August 2011 (EDT)

:::An example of [[atheistic]] bias in science is the view of some that evolution '''''must somehow be true regardless of the facts'''''. A similar attitude is taken towards the [[Theory of Relativity]]. But the [[Counterexamples to Relativity]] are overwhelming. Yes, the counterexamples are true.--[[User:Aschlafly|Andy Schlafly]] 19:54, 8 August 2011 (EDT)

::::Andy, you have not answered, and we're talking about Relativity, not Evolution... '''Why''' do you say that these counterexamples are true? How have you verified these statements? Did some physics professor, or more generally, a relativity expert, told you? Are they written on some physics book? (I doubt it) --[[User:MM87|'''MM''']]''[[User_talk:MM87|'''''87''''']] 20:33, 8 August 2011 (EDT)

:::::The counterexamples are well-supported by citations or obvious logic. The internet is popular for learning because books have limitations of being outdated and subject to biased censorship. If you want to limit learning to what is written in books, rather than using logic as well as the most recently available information, then why are you even discussing science on the internet?--[[User:Aschlafly|Andy Schlafly]] 21:39, 8 August 2011 (EDT)

Ok, let's use logic, then :D Point 32: given a four-vector pµ=(p0,p1,p2,p3), the inverse vector
is defined as qµ=(-p0,-p1,-p2,-p3). As you can easily check, pµ+qµ is the null four-vector, and this holds for every pµ. A negative time component is not absurd, it just relates with events happened in the past.
This is math, not physics, ok? It is true because the Lorentz vectors are ''defined'' this way.

Another example: it is written, or seems so to a reader, that relativity and quantum mechanics are incompatibile (point 20). This is not true at all, since relativistic quantum theories like Quantum Electrodynamics are the most successful theories in the history of physics. They work in curved spacetime too, if you keep fixed the geometry. The absurdities emerge when you try to "animate" the gravity field, ant it's an open research field.

Another one: the Higgs field (point 31) has nothing to do with aether. The classical aether was meant to be the media in which light propagates, the Higgs field not. In fact, the light propagates in vacuum. I want to stress this point: aether does not exist, it is known by more than a century. (and I hope that
in a couple of years will be found out that the Higgs field doesn't exist, too)

This is one of the best (16): "The inability of the theory to lead to other insights, contrary to every verified theory of physics." Relativity
is the skeleton of all the theories that describe ''all'' the nature's forces. For example, antimatter is a consequence of relativity.
It seems that your scientific internet-based knowledge is quite updated... (and, yes, relativity is useful. Try thinking to the positron-electron tomography).
I'll ask you again: do you think that the speed of light is constant for every observer or varies? --[[User:MM87|'''MM''']]''[[User_talk:MM87|'''''87''''']] 07:41, 9 August 2011 (EDT)

:Since Schlafly is not responding, I'm asking to every other user: why this page is still unedited? I remember to you all the [[Conservapedia:Commandments|first commandment]] (and the laughs that this page causes all over the world :D). I don't want to edit the page without the consense of other users (Schlafly ''in primis''), so I think I'll wait... --[[User:MM87|'''MM''']]''[[User_talk:MM87|'''''87''''']] 16:40, 9 August 2011 (EDT)

:: The entry is supported by citations and logic. To take your highest-ranking criticism (point 16), the fact is that the [[theory of relativity]] has yielded nothing of value. Contrast that with real physical insights, like [[quantum mechanics]], which have produced tremendous progress.--[[User:Aschlafly|Andy Schlafly]] 20:12, 9 August 2011 (EDT)

::: This is you opinion, not the opinion expressed, for example [http://www.hindawi.com/journals/mpe/2008/410156/ here], [http://scholar.google.it/scholar?hl=en&q=%22Relativity+in+the+future+of+engineering%22&btnG=Cerca&lr=&as_sdt=0 here], [http://www.springer.com/physics/particle+and+nuclear+physics/book/978-3-540-20623-1?cm_mmc=Google-_-Book%20Search-_-Springer-_-0 here] (do you think lasers are useless?) or [http://iopscience.iop.org/1367-2630/8/10/247 here] (the mathematical tools of general relativity used to understand metamaterials... some times ago I attended a conference in which explained why the electrons in graphene could be well described with general relativity-like formulas).
::: So, do not repeat "citations and logic" again and answer these easy questions: do you think that pµ+qµ is the null vector or not? (It's math easily handled even by children...) And the most important question: do you think that the speed of light is a constant or not? --[[User:MM87|'''MM''']]''[[User_talk:MM87|'''''87''''']] 07:50, 10 August 2011 (EDT)

::::Since user ASchlafly is not giving appropriate answers, I'm going to delete a few entries, those corresponding uniquely to pure fantasy and without citations: (7), (8), (13), (16), (26), (32), (33). This is a pretty... ''conservative'' choice. I don't think that any user (except ASchlafly) disagrees with the deletion, but if it's not the case please '''write here''' why any of these points is worth consideration. --[[User:MM87|'''MM''']]''[[User_talk:MM87|'''''87''''']] 07:37, 11 August 2011 (EDT)

:::::I fail to see how any of the above equals a consensus on the changes you propose. In fact it looks to me like there's a profound disagreement on these points. That being so, I'm reverting your changes. Please don't make major changes to controversial articles without consensus. [[User:Jcw|Jcw]] 08:04, 11 August 2011 (EDT)

Ok, fair enough. So, how many users here think that these points are correct? (And why? Any citations?) And how many disagree with that point?
I'll start giving proof of citations of these points:

(7) The limit is not taken in E=γmc² (m is the invariant mass) but in E² = (pc)² + (mc²)². If m=0 then E=|p|c: the ratio between the magnitude of the speed '|v|' and the speed of light 'c' is given by (|p|c)/E, so |v|=c. There is no discontinuity: these formulas can be found on every basic relativity textbook.

(8) The relativistic one, but it's a coincidence. The longitudinal inertia is proportional to γ³m (which is not the relativistic mass), the transverse inertia to γm (which is the relativistic mass). Inertia, rest mass and relativitstica mass have different meanings, they coincide only when the particle is much slower than light. Please note that same effect is also present in the electromagnetic theory (inertia caused by the self-interaction between a charged object and his own electromagnetic field) ''without'' using relativity.
See, for example: Lorentz, H.A. (1899), "[http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&cd=1&ved=0CBoQFjAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.dwc.knaw.nl%2FDL%2Fpublications%2FPU00014586.pdf&rct=j&q=Lorentz%2C%20H.A.%20(1899)%2C%20%22Simplified%20Theory%20of%20Electrical%20and%20Optical%20Phenomena%20in%20Moving%20Systems%22%20filetype%3Apdf&ei=UtNDTu6iDcPQsgaG5Nn0Bw&usg=AFQjCNFdeh3z8bGjXCGF3sVO5vfjrz2VZQ&sig2=ZTmtnZRgRwCY7LGxkC17uw&cad=rja Simplified Theory of Electrical and Optical Phenomena in Moving Systems]", Proc. Roy. Soc. Amst.: 427-442.

(13) I've never heard about an experiment that aimed to the direct search of gravitons. Physicists don't expect to find gravitons in particle or astroparticle experiments, their theoretical (tree-level) cross section is too small (please excuse me for the jargon). This entry needs citations
from academic sources, but I doubt strongly they exist at all.

(16) An example: Relativistic Field Theories (see [[Quantum field theory]]). Some Nobel prizes in physics were given for work on RFTs.

(26) As I demostrated before, E=|p|c. (E means energy, |p| means the magnitude of the momentum)

(32) Given any 4-vector p^µ, the '''opposite''' 4-vector is defined as q^µ=-p^µ. Negative times are related with events happened in the past, the opposite 4-vector has noting to do with the time arrow or the second law of thermodynamics. (What does "the inverse of time" mean, exactly?!)

(33) Definitely not. The light speed has been experimentally proven costant from more than a century: currently there is a plethora
of experiments giving bounds on speed of light variations with direction or frequency (type "speed of light" in Google Scholar), so the aether can't exist. (there are currently theories that predict variations in the speed of light like the "doubly special relativity", but at present time they're not supported by experiments).

p.s. I shouldn't remark that Schlafly, not me (or '''all the others before me'''), should prove his affermations, since mine are mathematical truth or facts that anyone can easily verify (or math that anyone can verify by himself). --[[User:MM87|'''MM''']]''[[User_talk:MM87|'''''87''''']] 08:51, 11 August 2011 (EDT)

: (7) as velocity approaches c, momentum becomes undefined rather than approaching the momentum of light

: (8) orthogonality breaks down if it is the relativistic mass, which would create logical problems

: (13) see [http://prd.aps.org/abstract/PRD/v57/i4/p2061_1] (time taken to find - 2 minutes on the internet)

: (16) Nobel Prizes are politicized - witness Barack Obama winning one despite accomplishing nothing. A true theory becomes the basis for real insights. Relativity has not.

: (26) your point does not address the claim.

: That's enough for now. Do you still have any objections to counterexamples 1-6, or 9-12?--[[User:Aschlafly|Andy Schlafly]] 16:43, 13 August 2011 (EDT)

:: (7) That's what you say, but you haven't ''proved'' it yet. On the other hand, I '''proved''' that momentum is perfectly well defined.
:: P.s. another proof, taking the m->0 limit in E=γmc^2. It can be done, keeping E and c fixed, while m->0. You see that γ must go to infinity: well, it means that <math>1/\gamma^2=1-\frac{v^2}{c^2}\to 0</math>, or <math>v\to c</math>. <math>\gamma m</math> is finite in this limit and the momentum reads <math>p=\gamma m v = E v/c^2 \to E /c </math>.
:: (8) Which logical problems? Are you disturbed by the fact that orthogonal and transverse masses are different? A disturb is not a concectual problem at all. Why don't you link some scientific article saying that this is a logical problem that proves inconsistency of the theory?

:: (13) You should pay attention to the abstracts. This guy reports limits on observations that could be made with experiments designed to search for gravitational waves (such as LIGO and VIRGO), not gravitons (this is another point). So, this is not a valid source. Can you tell me an experiment designed to catch gravitons?

:: (16) I agree on Obama's nobel: peace Nobels are definitely politicized. This is not so true for the other prizes, though. Now you have to cite some article saying that the standard model, or every other relativity-based theory, isn't a great insight: as before, you ''say'' that but you don't ''prove'' that.

:: (26) Or maybe you cannot read formulas: I'll repeat for the sake of clearness. If m=0 then E=|p|c, so that massless particles can have nonzero momentum if and only if they have nonzero energy: they're directly proportional. Actually, a photon with energy E has a momentum equal to E/c.

:: Don't be impatient, you have to justify these statements first (don't forget (32) and (33)). --[[User:MM87|'''MM''']]''[[User_talk:MM87|'''''87''''']] 07:20, 14 August 2011 (EDT)

::P.s. I forgot: do you want a plot of ''v'' as a function of ''m'' so you can see with your eyes that there aren't any discontinuities in <math>m\to 0\,</math>? I can easily do it.

::: (7) Your analysis assumes that E is fixed, but that's not what point (7) states.

::: (8) If a force in an orthogonal direction can affect inertia in the original direction, then orthogonality breaks down and lots of physical assumptions are violated. Can you cite any authority for your claim?

::: (13) [[LIGO]] is attempting to detect the existence of gravitons, as are other multi-million dollar tests.

::: (16) If the Nobel Peace Prize is politicized -- and you concede it is -- then the other prizes are going to suffer from similar politicization. How else would you explain the shocking humiliation of [[Fred Hoyle]] shortly after he criticized a claim of evolutionists, by giving the Nobel Prize in physics to his understudy on his project while omitting him? Please don't say you weren't aware of this.

::: Why are you focusing on items so far down the list? What about counterexamples 1-6, and 9-12? I hope you will concede that it takes only one counterexample to disprove [[Relativity]].--[[User:Aschlafly|Andy Schlafly]] 21:51, 14 August 2011 (EDT)

:::: (7) Well, your observation means only that you can't do limits properly. I can teach you if you want. (Have you studied math in college?)
:::: (8) In a certain sense you're correct: "standard" ortogonality breaks down because the metric is not Euclidean but Minkowskian. I made the calculus by myself on the basis of my rational mechanics and special relativity course book (which is in Italian), and I have cited Lorentz (1899, well before Einstein's theory). The same calculus is made [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special_relativity#Force here], but I think you won't accept it ;-) Unfortunately I have not textbooks in english about special relativity dynamics... I'll give you a reference asap.
:::: (13) The acronym LIGO stands for '''Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory''', not '''Laser Interferometer Graviton Observatory'''. I've asked you for ''direct searches''. If they find waves with peculiar features ''maybe'' there is some model that explains these features in terms of gravitons, but it is a quite remote possibility.
:::: (16) Really, I didn't knew it. Neither I care, of course. You are clinging to Nobels while I am saying the relativity is essential in the standard model, which basically explains almost all the particle physics experiments currently made. Remove the hands from your ears!
:::: I'm focusing on these items because I want to make productive discussions and, after that, the '''deletion''' of the points considered. For example, if you think that points 1-6 and 9-12 are sufficient, you can delete all the others. You can surely delete (7-8-13-26-32-33) and merge (1) and (13), we'll talk about (1) later (miracles first!). (no, in my opinion that list does not contain any valid counterexample. But general relativity is far from being safe from this point of view: I told you that not all the points are totally wrong...)--[[User:MM87|'''MM''']]''[[User_talk:MM87|'''''87''''']] 08:13, 15 August 2011 (EDT)

: I've been patiently addressing your questions, but you didn't fully answer mine: do you concede that it takes only one counterexample to disprove relativity?

: Your response to point (16) speaks volumes. The Nobel prizes are heavily politicized ... all of them. To claim that one prize is politicized but another is not is unpersuasive. Anyone who publicly criticizes relativity can forget about ever winning a Nobel prize in anything, or even getting tenure anywhere. That's politics, not science, and that's the reality. Hopefully you can at least admit that.

: On point (7), I think there is circularity in your argument, assuming what it is at issue by insisting that E remain constant.--[[User:Aschlafly|Andy Schlafly]] 20:05, 15 August 2011 (EDT)

::It's not so easy as you think. To invalidate a theory with an experiment you have to carefully consider every other aspect that could influence the measure. If a theory works good, but a new experiment finds that in some conditions the theory doesn't work anymore, the experiments has not falsified the theory, but only proven that this theory has a finite range of applications. Examples are Newtonian mechanics, classical electromagnetism, even nonrelativistic quantum mechanics. Today general relativity has not been proved correct on big scales, while it works correctly within the solar system. Special relativity is thought not to have similar (distance) limits, but may have corrections due to quantum gravity, which today are only conjectured and not seen experimentally. I'll tell you a secret: "true" theories do not exist, and all the theories have limits of applicability. Today we don't know the limits of both relativity theories, because they agree with ''all'' current experiments.
::(16) The truth is that who doesn't know relativity is ignoring 100 years of history of physics.
::Andy, let me explain to you some math stuff. Suppose you have a function of two variables, e.g. ''f(x,y)''. Suppose you want to change the value of the first variabile: what does the second? Well, you have to decide it: you can keep ''y'' to a fixed value, or you can change ''y'' as ''x'' varies: in this case ''y'' become a function of ''x'': ''y=g(x)''. The original expression becomes ''f(x,g(x))'' and is a 1-variable function, that you can call ''h(x)''. In other words, you have to specify a trajectory in the ''(x,y)'' plane. This is also the way limits work: you have to specify the trajectory.
::In our case we want to send ''m'' to zero. And the other variabiles (energy, momentum, speed)? Since the relation ''E²=(pc)²+(mc²)²'' holds, energy and momentum are not indipendent. If you vary ''m'', ''E'' and ''p'' cannot be both costant. A possible choice is keeping fixed ''E'' and vary ''p'', but you can also vary ''E'' keeping ''p'' fixed. Or you can vary both, specifying a function ''E(m)'' or ''p(m)'', as before. You might think that the final result can depend on the limit choice, and this is indeed the case for ''E'' and ''p''. BUT, when ''m=0'' you have ''E²=(pc)²'' for every path choice. A a consequence, the speed of the particle equals the speed of light for any energy or momentum value, since the relation ''v=c(pc/E)'' holds for every mass. If you take the limit keeping ''p'' fixed you'll obtain exactly the same speed for the particle. No circularities.
::Andy, what will you do with these points? --[[User:MM87|'''MM''']]''[[User_talk:MM87|'''''87''''']] 08:58, 16 August 2011 (EDT)

== Attempt at Helping the Consensus Along ==

Well, MM87 and Jcw, if you're looking for a consensus of other people to join in on this subject, you're not going to be particularly gratified by the result. Nearly everyone who knows or cares about the topic has been driven off or has otherwise left, especially people who accept the premises of Einsteinian relativity or the interpretations of same that are accepted by the scientific community. But I'll give it a try. This is just a quick summary; no time to go into detail.

1. True, the ''direct'' search for gravity waves has not yet yielded any results, though indirect observations have been made (Hulse/Taylor.) Before people dismiss indirect observations, recall that no one has ever seen an electron. Whether the LIGO and LISA experiments are a good use of money is another question; one that has no bearing on whether relativity is correct.

2. Rubbish. You can't take every new observation that we don't yet have an explanation for and say that that disproves relativity. Relativity never claimed it would neatly, precisely, and straightforwardly explain every future observation of everything.

3. Is the Pioneer anomaly ''still'' in here? It was never about relativity. It is 1000 times greater than the difference between Newtonian and Einsteinian mechanics. In any case, it seems to have been solved recently by consideration of the reflection of radiation off the back of the antenna dish.

4. See 2 and 3.

5. Not related to relativity (except insofar as the fact that gravity exists.) Large-scale galaxy dynamics is complicated. People are working on it. If someone wants to make a contribution to this field that involves replacing relativity, go right ahead.

6 See extensive discussion with user KSorenson, for example. GR does a spectacularly good job of explaining the precession. There may still be tiny deviations from the current best observations, but there are an enormous number of complex things going on. People have moved on. If someone wants to continue beating this dead horse, go right ahead.

7. Rubbish, based on profound misunderstanding. See MM87's debunking.

8. The terms "rest mass" and "relativistic mass", as distinct quantities, is archaic. Read some reasonably modern textbooks, and the confusion should be cleared up.

9. What? Is there some confusion between local curvature (which is undeniable; it causes gravity) and global curvature? Remember that the curvature tensor is very complicated. You can't just throw around terms like "overall curvature." The subject is complicated. In any case, plain Einsteinian GR admits a number of global solutions (LeMaitre, Friedmann, etc.) Working out the problems of overall structure of the universe does not refute relativity.

10. The fact that quantum mechanics and relativity have not been ''totally'' reconciled is well known. That doesn't disprove either, except insofar as it suggests that the future "grand unified theory" will expand on both and thereby differ, in its details, from both. Also, keep in mind that the "standard model" is a "relativistic field theory". It (and the Dirac equation before it) unifies relativity and quantum mechanics far better than this page would suggest.

11. See 10.

12. See 10. Also, few people believe that the events related in the Bible had been measured to microsecond accuracy; the tools for doing so had not been invented. Also, even modern medicine can't measure the time of "cures" or "healing" to microsecond accuracy. Of course, if you are really just saying "The Bible says that relativity is wrong, and that settles it", so be it.

13. No one ever expected to observe gravitons. That calculations show that it is well-nigh impossible. This is known. No experiments have ever been devised, suggested, or funded for this purpose.

14. See 10. Also, relativity doesn't say that ''everything'' is the same. The view from my house is different from the view from your house.

15. See 2.

16. Unfathomable.

17. Utterly irrelevant. See 2.

18. Unfathomable. See 2.

19. See 2 and 10.

20. See 2 and 10.

21. Interesting speculation (science is full of them); see 2.

22. Misunderstanding of the dynamics of black holes. It's a complicated subject.

23. They're not doing the experiment any more. It did its job, and it's finished. No one drops cannonballs off the Leaning Tower of Pisa any more either.

24. See 16.

25. Profound misunderstanding of the subject. See 8.

26. See 7, 8, and 25.

27. There are no "conditions of a conservative field". This is just confused. See extensive discussion [http://www.conservapedia.com/index.php?title=Talk%3ACounterexamples_to_Relativity&action=historysubmit&diff=801452&oldid=799266 here]. (Sorry about all the extraneous material.)

28. Not a paradox. The subject is complicated. Ehrenfest did not disprove relativity.

29. See 28. Einstein did not say that. The footnote muddies the waters. The twin paradox is well known.

30. The claims of that item are preposterous. "Made new assumptions about the Earth's shape to justify this contradiction?" Ridiculous. Read the cited paper carefully. It (like all the other cited papers) does not refute relativity.

31. Rubbish. The Michelson-Morley "luminiferous aether" is not the Higgs field. See 10.

32. Profound misunderstanding of vector spaces.

33. No. Such experiments have been conducted many times. Relativity is universally accepted.

34. Uh, no.

35. They are not "beyond understanding". They are beyond closed-form solution. Cosmologists work with approximate solutions all the time.

[[User:SamHB|SamHB]] 21:36, 14 August 2011 (EDT)

: Sam, logic and science are not determined by "consensus". Of course, for a variety of reasons, many people dare not question liberal theories. Anyone who hopes to win a Nobel Prize, for example, would be foolish to criticize [[Relativity]] because that would prevent him from ever winning the prize. But here we're more concerned about the truth than what others may think.

: I reviewed your points 1-5 and was not persuaded by any of them. For example, gravity waves do not exist. Liberals should stop wasting the public's money looking for them. There's no point in proceeding to your criticism of other points, because just one counterexample is enough to disprove Relativity. Hopefully you'll at least concede that.--[[User:Aschlafly|Andy Schlafly]] 22:15, 14 August 2011 (EDT)

:: Moving further down your list, your response on point 6 is particularly unpersuasive. The increasingly precise data disprove the theory. It's that simple. If scientists have "moved on" in an attempt to avoid addressing this discrepancy, then that's politics rather than good science.--[[User:Aschlafly|Andy Schlafly]] 00:10, 15 August 2011 (EDT)

:::SamHB, I really appreciate your intervent. Andy, you're right, logic and science are not determined by consensus, but if someone's logic fails someone else should tell him, don't you think? Why are you so firm in keeping this page in this form when there are (lots of) people who ''knows'' what are they talking about? --[[User:MM87|'''MM''']]''[[User_talk:MM87|'''''87''''']] 08:29, 15 August 2011 (EDT)

::::SamHB, MM87, and Andy: there is a very good reason why this page should be kept. The reason is just not to repeat the same objections against relativity over and over. It may be better organized but not by removing silly objections but explaining them slowly point by point by a competent physicists (possibly an experimentalist, of Feynman type, if such types are still around). As e.g. I tried to explain objection #3 (Pioneer anomaly). Potentially wrong explanation but also turning attention of "relativists" (if they read this page) to the existence of competing explenation that otherwise may be ignored. If they don't read it then they should since it may contain some good ideas that may help them in keeping [[science]] at a proper level. E.g. #3 may seem to be explained but it may be also a prejudice based on a possibly false assumption that the universe is expanding. Which may be just an optical illusion as I try to point out elsewhere. This illusion is within 1 standard deviation off the "Pioneer anomaly". Of course it might be a coincidence but may be an indication that the expansion of the universe is really an illusion. As all other "coincidences", including quasars, non symmetric metric tensor of flat spacetime, and impossibility to create energy from nothing, seem to indicate and yet being all kept in the "standard cosmological model". [[User:JimJast|JimJast]] 19:12, 15 August 2011 (EDT)

:::::Jim, the standard cosmological model is not safe from being falsified (however, which theory is?), and the are a lot of competiting models (like yours). This page is not meant to describe the problems of the current cosmological model, but to discredit relativity ''in toto'', and who wrote this page clearly does not know anything about relativity. I think that a new page with "open problems in cosmology" or "open problems in physics" would be warmly welcome, but must be written by some expert in the field. --[[User:MM87|'''MM''']]''[[User_talk:MM87|'''''87''''']] 09:17, 16 August 2011 (EDT)

::::::Relativity is a mathematically complete system that is either true or false ''in toto''. Pretending that Relativity can be true despite a counterexample against it is like saying that a number can be partially prime.

::::::The problem, of course, is that no one who wants tenure, a Nobel Prize, or even self-esteem within the liberal university system dares admit that Relativity might not be true. That alone is telling: if Relativity were true, then there would not be the need for it to be propped up by political pressure.--[[User:Aschlafly|Andy Schlafly]] 14:27, 16 August 2011 (EDT)

:::::::"Propped up by political pressure"? Maybe you are talking about string theory...
:::::::Newtonian mechanics is a mathematically complete system that is either true or false ''in toto''. So is the Maxwell's theory of electromagnetism. From your point of view, they're both totally wrong, since there is a huge number of counterexamples (they aren't even compatibile each other), but physicists teach these theories to students everyday. Why don't you attack them in the same way as you attack relativity? --[[User:MM87|'''MM''']]''[[User_talk:MM87|'''''87''''']] 15:14, 16 August 2011 (EDT)

:::::::: That's not true about Newtonian mechanics. Its exponents can be tweaked and its equations revised based on observation. Not so for Relativity.

:::::::: Liberals already teach that Newtonian mechanics is fundamentally incorrect, so there is little reason to add to that (often false) criticism. In contrast, liberals insist that Relativity must be true and they punish anyone who dares claim otherwise. That needs to be challenged, but don't expect anyone who is a university grad student or professor wannabee to dare to do so. His career will be over if he utters any criticism of Relativity.--[[User:Aschlafly|Andy Schlafly]] 15:20, 16 August 2011 (EDT)

::::::::: Where have you read that this is not true about Newtonian Mechanics? Academic sources, please.
::::::::: With "liberals" are you referring also to non-physicists? Because, as you can easily imagine, their opinions don't have much value... --[[User:MM87|'''MM''']]''[[User_talk:MM87|'''''87''''']] 15:43, 16 August 2011 (EDT)

:::::::::: I'm referring to academic physicists - a very liberal group indeed. Probably 80% or more of them voted for Obama, for example. Do you doubt it?

:::::::::: The advance of the perihelion of Mercury (point 6) can be explained in Newtonian mechanics by tweaking the exponent of distance in the basic gravity equation. But no amount of tweaking is possible in Relativity to make the theory fit the data. So the liberals simply ignore the most recent data, and censor any criticism of Relativity based on this.--[[User:Aschlafly|Andy Schlafly]] 20:00, 16 August 2011 (EDT)

::::::::::: No, I think that most of US physicists are liberals, too. A lot of them are also atheists or agnostics. But I simply don't see the link between liberalism, or moral relativitsm, or whathever you want, and the physical theory of relativity. I don't see it because it doesn't exist. Physical laws are purely a reflection of nature's laws: if you don't like relativity, well, you don't like the way nature behaves. This has nothing to do with humans behaviour or politics. While in other "sciences" (such as economics and psychology) there are a lot of contrasting paradigms, in physics experiments rules. A lot of paradigms (such as "all is made of matter", "movement is absolute" and things like that) were abandoned in the history of science because of experiments (I don't think this is true for economics, for example), not politics. This mechanism stops when theory is not comparable with experiments, such in the string theory case: in this case, research is driven in the direction of the mainstream thought for non-scientifical reasons (as you was saying before talking about relativity, today - or since some years ago - every young theoretical particle physicist in US had to study string theory to have the chance to have an academic career). But this is definitely not the case for Relativity, since the experimental proofs are '''overwhelming'''.
::::::::::: Ok, maybe is possible to modify Newton's gravity law in order to explain the perihelion shift of Mercury. I did not verify this, but this time I'll trust you. Good. What about the speed of light? And what about the lifetime of particles near the speed of light? (don't forget to answer to the other points with reliable sources... or deleting points 7-8-13-16-26-32-33) --[[User:MM87|'''MM''']]''[[User_talk:MM87|'''''87''''']] 07:30, 17 August 2011 (EDT)

::::::::::::The reality is that Relativity is '''''not''''' based on observations of nature, and never has been. It's a mathematical theory and a worldview that liberals would like nature to obey. But nature doesn't obey it. The mathematical theory came first and for a century people have been trying to fit it to the data. The fit isn't there, but liberals like the political effect of the theory so they don't permit criticism of it. Can you cite anyone who won a Nobel Prize after criticizing Relativity? [[Robert H. Dicke]] is an example of a great physicist who was denied the Nobel Prize because he dared criticize the liberal theory of Relativity.--[[User:Aschlafly|Andy Schlafly]] 20:14, 17 August 2011 (EDT)
:::::::::::::Quick question (from someone who doesn't know science all to well) what is the "political effect" of the theory of relativity? [[User:MaxFletcher|MaxFletcher]] 20:23, 17 August 2011 (EDT)

:::::::::::: It is true that there are Einstein biographers who claim that he invented relativity from pure thought, without attention to experiment. But it is not true that mathematical theory came first. Relativistic mass was already being tested in 1901, before Einstein. All of the original relativity papers cited experimental evidence. Eg, Minkowski said relativity was "grown on experimental physical grounds". See also my blog.[http://blog.darkbuzz.com/2011/08/favoring-empiricist-conception-of.html] [[User:RSchlafly|RSchlafly]] 01:13, 18 August 2011 (EDT)

@MaxFletcher: I've never noticed "political effects" of Relativity, at least in Italy.

@Aschlafly: In addition to RSchlafly's answer, let me ask you again (for the third or fourth time, I think): do you belive that the speed of light is costant for every observer or not? If the answer is not, you are ignoring hundreds of experiments that proved it beyond any reasonable doubt. If you don't trust all these experiments, you should believe that not only relativity, but every physical theory is flawed in this way: how can you trust physicists on, for example, quantum mechanics, or any other physical theory, if you think that they falsified so many relativity experiments?

A lot of scientists criticize relativity every day (both special and general). The difference between you and them is that they admit that relativity works rather well under all the actual tests, as it is an approximation of other theories (today untested). Relativity '''can't''' be completely right, but today works. --[[User:MM87|'''MM''']]''[[User_talk:MM87|'''''87''''']] 08:30, 18 August 2011 (EDT)

:[[Poincare]] developed many of the challenging aspects of Relativity as a mathematical theory that he thought probably did '''''not''''' represent nature. Very little of Relativity, if any of it, is based on observation. Generally the theory came first, and then [[liberal]]s (like [[Arthur Eddington]]) fudged the data to try to make it fit the theory. Today relativists simply stop reporting on the data as it diverges from the theory (e.g., perihelion advance of Mercury, and the [[binary pulsar]]).

:I doubt that the speed of light has been constant throughout history, and I doubt that it is constant for all observers. But note that Relativity is based on more assumptions than that. It also assumes that all (non-accelerating) frames of reference in the universe are physically equivalent, which is particularly implausible.--[[User:Aschlafly|Andy Schlafly]] 20:40, 18 August 2011 (EDT)

::You're really hard to convince! [[User:SamHB|SamHB]] 22:45, 18 August 2011 (EDT)

:: Poincare certainly thought that relativity represented nature, and relied on experiments. The experiments were: Michelson-Morley, the first order aether drift experiments, the tests of Maxwell's theory, such as magnetic induction, and the measurements of relativistic mass. These were all done before 1905. It is a myth that Einstein created relativity without experimental observation, and I thoroughly debunk it on my blog. [[User:RSchlafly|RSchlafly]] 00:36, 20 August 2011 (EDT)

::: You're defining Relativity very broadly to include Maxwell's equations, which of course were developed (and observed) long before the mathematical theory of relativity. Yes, I'm sure that Poincare accepted Maxwell's equations, as did [[Robert H. Dicke]] and other modern critics of Relativity.

::: I looked for a quote I recall seeing about Poincare expressing skepticism that Relativity was physically true rather than being merely a mathematical theory, but I couldn't find it (yet).--[[User:Aschlafly|Andy Schlafly]] 00:52, 20 August 2011 (EDT)

:::: The important point is that relativity is compatible with Maxwell's equations while classical mechanics is not. So if you accept classical mechanics you cannot have Maxwell's equations, but with relativity you can. --[[User:MatthewQ|MatthewQ]] 02:11, 20 August 2011 (EDT)

:::: Walter Kaufmann did experiments measuring the relativistic mass starting in 1901, and at one point he declared that the experiments favor a rival theory from Max Abraham. I think that Lorentz and Poincare conceded that these experiments, if confirmed, could prove Relativity wrong. Poincare did express skepticism that the aether was physically true. Also, there are Einstein biographers who concede that Poincare had all the Relativity formulas before Einstein, but insist on crediting Einstein because they claim that Poincare never understood Relativity. (I think that it is pretty crazy to say that someone could derive all of the formulas correctly and not understand them.) Perhaps you saw something connected to one of these matters.

:::: Yes, nearly everyone defined Relativity to include Maxwells equations. Einstein certainly did. To him, the whole point of special relativity was to get a better understanding of Maxwells equations. Maxwells theory was the first relativistic theory, and Maxwell was the first relativist. I don't know how anyone could reject relativity without rejecting nearly everything we know about electromagnetism. [[User:RSchlafly|RSchlafly]] 03:53, 20 August 2011 (EDT)

::::: I agree with your point about Poincare developing and understanding the equations. Poincare was perhaps one of the top twenty geniuses of all time. But I also think he was smart enough to be skeptical about whether the mathematical theory described physical reality!

::::: It's a common misconception that Relativity explains all of Maxwell's equations. In fact, Relativity is contradicted by an induction experiment, which I've added as counterexample #36, with a reference. I've seen at least one other paper talking about this problem, but of course most American (liberal) academics avoid talking about it.--[[User:Aschlafly|Andy Schlafly]] 10:19, 20 August 2011 (EDT)

:::::: Your reference says, "it is obvious that the electric filed directions in these two graphs are opposite, which is the inevitable result because Einstein haven’t pointed out clearly which one is the true moving and which one is the false one.", and that a followup paper will answer explanation is correct. Of course Einstein did not say which one is truly moving because Relativity teaches that motion is relative. The article is incoherent nonsense. Magnetic induction is explained in every textbook since Faraday. Poincare explained it also. [[User:RSchlafly|RSchlafly]] 12:03, 20 August 2011 (EDT)

This will be my final posting here. I apologize for its length.

Of course, no one is suggesting that the truth of a scientific theory is determined by polls. MM87 wasn't asking for a poll so that the issue of relativity could be settled. He was asking whether there was any consensus among Conservapedia editors of their positions on the matter. And he noted the extremely small number of interested people. As one of that very small number, I thought I would reply.

The premise of this page is that theories can be refuted by counterexamples, and that even one counterexample would do it. This is true, but the counterexamples need to be much more compelling than the 35 items listed. Several of the items are are the form "this is complicated" (9, 18, 19, 20, 21), or "I don't understand this" (22, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32), or "many textbooks explain it badly" (7, 8, 25, 26), or "there is some phenomenon somewhere that relativity doesn't explain" (2, 3, 4, 5, 14, 15, 17).

Remember that the actions of Nobel committees or tenure committees or conference committees, or the perception that "liberals like it", as much as we might disagree with them, don't determine the correctness of a scientific theory. Experiments and observations do.

An example of something that refutes a theory would be an observation that is clearly at odds with the predictions of the theory, and that can't be explained away. For example, observations of planetary motion refuted the Ptolemaic theory of epicycles and more epicycles. (Actually it was the increasing number of epicycles needed to fit the observations, and the Copernican theory, that started the process. Occam's Razor finished the job.)

So what kind of observation would actually refute relativity? Failure of the time dilation or length shortening of special relativity would do it, as would failure of gravitational time dilation. Failure of light bending would do it, that is, no bending, or bending at 0.875 second instead of 1.75. Failure of the Shapiro effect would do it. Failure of the Lense-Thirring effect would call it into question, though the observations of the GPB are near the limits of our ability to measure.

Failure of planetary precession would do it. But let me say something about that, since it has been discussed at length on many pages. The Mercury measurements are very "noisy", making it not a good test if one is looking for incredible accuracy, that is, better than 42.98 second. The actual precession is something like 5600, with an enormous amount of noise from other planets, solar oblateness, etc. If one really wanted to claim that relativity is refuted because the 42.98 figure doesn't match exactly, one would have to go through all the sources of noise much more meticulously than anyone has. One would also have to take into account asteroids that haven't been discovered yet—keep in mind that a new "trojan" asteroid at one of Earth's Lagrange points was discovered only a few weeks ago. And remember, the Yarkovsky effect was undiscovered for years, as was the reflection of infrared radiation off the back of the Pioneer antenna dish. Can you really say that you know, exactly, all the forces acting on Mercury? Did you consider the frame-dragging effect from the Sun's rotation or the Yarkovsky effect? My guess is that this has never been done. There are much "cleaner" measurements that scientists can make than tracking all possible influences on Mercury's motion. Examples of "clean" tests are the quasar measurements, the pulsar measurements, and the Shapiro effect.

Speaking of other ways of explaining the precession non-relativistically, Andy refers, above, again, to the "Newtonian exponent tweaking". This is the Asaph Hall / Simon Newcomb hypothesis. It was refuted, by actual observations, 100 years ago. Please see the analyses that I wrote [http://www.conservapedia.com/Theory_of_relativity#Fallacious_Claims_of_Experimental_Verification_of_Relativity here] and [http://www.conservapedia.com/Debate:What_is_the_exponent_of_r_in_Newtonian_gravity%3F here]. The latter contains some pretty graphs that I made and that JacobB uploaded for me.

Andy is quite right in that general relativity does not have "tweakable parameters" to alter planetary precession. Precession is determined by the planet's speed and the speed of light, which is, of course, not tweakable. If one were to change the number <math>8 \pi</math> appearing in Einstein's equation, it would just tighten or loosen the orbit; the precession would not change. Changing the "cosmological constant", that is, R00, would do the same thing.

[[User:SamHB|SamHB]] 22:45, 18 August 2011 (EDT)

: The Mercury measurements disagree with Relativity by more than the margin of error. Due to the political pressure to prop up Relativity, scientists have simply stopped publishing and discussing the increasingly precise data.--[[User:Aschlafly|Andy Schlafly]] 00:52, 20 August 2011 (EDT)
:: Sorry Andy, but you've been repeatedly shown to be wrong on this point. And can I ask ''what'' political pressure to prop up relativity? If I recall correctly the last government to comment on relativity was Hitlers, which regarded it in a highly negative manner. I think that the disgusting phrase used was "Jewish physics". [[User:Darkmind1970|Darkmind1970]] 15:00, 20 August 2011 (EDT)

==Open problems in cosmology==

Sam, MM87 is right so why not to use his advice and open a new section in which some of us try to work with cosmology rather than with relativity alone.

IMHO the main open problem in cosmology is the problem whether the universe is expanding or not. According to opinion of guys who look for careers in cosmology it is expanding (based on doctored Einstein's equation <math>R_{\mu\nu}-(R/2)g_{\mu\nu}+\Lambda g_{\mu\nu}=8\pi T_{\mu\nu}</math>) but in reality may be stationary <math>H_{\mu\nu}=-8\pi T_{\mu\nu}</math>, where <math>H_{\mu\nu}</math> is what I call ''"Hubble tensor"''. As it follows from his original equation that contained an error removed by Hilbert (mentioned also by MM87, non zero trace) and also patched later with cosmological constant to keep his ''Field Equation'' stable.

So let's analyze the situation in cosmology: Why its ''"standard model"'' still contains the cosmological constant that Einstein considered ''"the biggest blunder of my life"''?

My answer is this: because general relativity is most likely not Einstein's (a Patent Office clerk) but his wife's, Mileva Marić (a physicist way better than her husband), who as a woman didn't have a chance to publish such work as relativity and might have reason to be angry at her husband and so didn't want to show him the obvious way of getting rid of his cosmological constant (which doesn't exist anyway so it was not any loss to science).

Now, If I, a sculptor and an engineer knowing practicaly no tensor calculus (and almost no English) can show what Mileva Marić (a physicists and an astronomer, knowing "Einstein's theory" in and out) didn't tell her husband, would it be credible enough that it might have happened this way? And that the universe is really not expanding. As I keep saying since 1985, similarly as Mileva Marić, not being able to publish a paper, that the only referee who saw it couldn't falsify and so recommended its rejection only on faith in expansion. Would it? [[User:JimJast|JimJast]] 15:34, 18 August 2011 (EDT)

:Better than opening a new section, of this article, on cosmological problems, I would favor creating new pages for explaining/discussing it. [[User:SamHB|SamHB]] 22:47, 18 August 2011 (EDT)

::Agree. What about ''"[[Problems in Cosmology]]"''. How do you like my story about Mileva Marić? [[User:JimJast|JimJast]] 16:18, 19 August 2011 (EDT)

::: I think that you are mixed up. Maric probably did help Einstein understand special relativity. But they had been divorced for a long time when the work was being published on general relativity, and she is not known to have had anything to to do with it. [[User:RSchlafly|RSchlafly]] 00:25, 20 August 2011 (EDT)

Operation Overlord

2011-08-18T21:22:16Z

Darkmind1970: /* British views */

[[Image:normandy.jpg|300px|thumb|right|American troops disembark under heavy fire at ''Omaha'', the code name for their section of the Normandy coastline]]
'''Operation Overlord''', also known as the '''Normandy Invasion''' or simply '''D-Day''', was the code name for the Allied invasion of northern [[Europe]] in [[World War II]]. It began with the landings on the beaches of [[Normandy]] in northwestern France on June 6, 1944, and accomplished the largest amphibious invasion in the history of mankind, using 200,000 men, 9,000 planes, and 5,000 ships.

==Strategic Setting==
The British Chiefs of Staff charged Admiral Lord [[Louis Mountbatten]] and his Combined Operations Headquarters in September 1941 with investigating the feasibility of amphibious operations in the European theater of the war. Earlier, Admiral Sir Roger Keyes had undertaken some planning for commando raids, but Mountbatten was to do more. "You are to prepare for the invasion of Europe," British Prime Minister [[Winston Churchill]] told him. "You must devise and design the appliances, the landing craft, and the technique...The whole of the South Coast of England is a bastion of defense against the invasion of Hitler; you've got to turn it into the springboard for our attack."

American planners began formal cooperation with Britain in December 1941, just after the Japanese attack at [[Attack on Pearl Harbor|Pearl Harbor]] and the German and Italian declarations of war against the United States. In compliance with earlier, informal understandings, the two partners agreed to put first the defeat of [[Germany]] and its ally [[Italy]] if forced to wage a two-front war against both those nations and Japan. Shortly thereafter, British planners drafted a proposal, code-named ROUNDUP, for an attack across the English Channel into France. The assault would come only after a series of major campaigns on the periphery of Europe, in [[Scandinavia]], the [[Mediterranean Sea]], the [[Balkans]], and the [[Soviet Union]], where the Germans would have difficulty massing their power. Once bombing, blockade, partisan uprisings, and the fighting on those other fronts had weakened the enemy sufficiently, ROUNDUP, or something like it, would begin.

Despite talk that a Continental invasion might come as early as 1942, Allied leaders in the end decided tentatively to make the assault in 1943, either through Western Europe or the Balkans. Because British forces would bear the burden of operations in Europe until the United States could complete its buildup for war, the decisions that came out of the conference hewed closely to Britain's preference for attacks on Germany's periphery. Although the British later accepted an American proposal, code-named BOLERO, for the establishment in Britain of a million-man force trained and equipped for the 1943 invasion, the United States agreed that during 1942 Allied forces should concentrate on wearing down Germany's resistance through air attacks, operations along the North African coast, and assistance to the Soviet Union.

====Initial disagreements====
Allied leaders honed their strategy further at a series of great conferences during 1942 and 1943—at Casablanca, [[Quebec]], [[Cairo]], and [[Tehran]]. Examining a range of alternatives, they gradually adopted the broad outlines of the attack they would launch. As planning continued, however, it became clear that the Americans disagreed ardently with the British desire to wear down the Germans before beginning a final confrontation on the Continent. Confident in the strength of their vast resources, American planners argued that "wars cannot be finally won without the use of land armies" and that only direct action against the main body of the German force could produce an Allied victory. Britain's peripheral approach, they asserted, would waste valuable assets on operations that could have at best an indirect effect on the outcome of the war. There was also the Soviet Union to consider, which had suffered millions of casualties in its fight with the Germans on the Eastern Front and might conceivably collapse and conclude a separate peace if Britain and the United States failed to relieve some of the pressure by attacking in the west. Soviet leader Joseph Stalin was already clamoring for a second front. To the Americans it seemed far better to seize the initiative from Germany with a bold assault than to allow the alliance's resources to dribble away in operations that would have little long-term effect on the enemy's will to resist.

====British views====
The British viewed the situation in Europe with an eye closely focused on their own circumstances and experience. As conscious of their nation's lack of resources as the Americans were of the vast wealth available to the United States, they had already withstood a disaster at Dunkirk in 1940, when the Germans had driven a British army off the Continent in defeat, and at the French seacoast town of [[Dieppe]] in August 1942, when the Germans, at great cost to the Allies, had repelled a Canadian landing. Their experiences with amphibious warfare during World War I had been little better. Their forces had endured a bloodletting at [[Gallipoli]] in the [[Dardanelles]], where landings championed by Churchill had failed. They had also lost an entire generation of young men to trench warfare on the stalemated Western Front in France. Britain's leaders thus had visions of catastrophe whenever the Americans raised the issue of a cross-Channel attack. If haste prevailed over reason, Churchill warned, the beaches of France might well be "choked with the bodies of the flower of American and British manhood."

If the British had agreed in principle at the [[Arcadia Conference]] to an early attack across the Channel, by the end of 1942 they had nevertheless succeeded in shifting many of the resources marked for Bolero to TORCH, an Allied invasion of North Africa much more in accord with their own point of view. The American military had little choice but to go along. They not only lacked the landing craft, warplanes, and shipping necessary to carry out a cross-Channel attack, they also had to contend with their commander in chief, President Roosevelt, who had become convinced that some sort of immediate action against Germany was necessary to divert the attention of the American people from the Pacific to the Atlantic side of the war. In addition US troops were not battle-seasoned yet, having had little experience of fighting well-trained and well-equipped German forces, as they subsequently showed at their defeat at the hands of Rommel at the battle of the Kasserine Pass in Tunisia.

The vehement German response to the assault at Dieppe, resulting in the loss of nearly a thousand British and Canadian lives, the capture of more than two thousand fighting men, and the destruction of better than one hundred aircraft, weighed heavily upon Allied planners. If the German response at Dieppe was any indication, an invasion of the Continent would require more meticulous preparation and more strength than a 1943 attack could possibly allow. Indeed, Allied planners and logisticians would have to create, field, and supply an organization that could meet and defeat the worst counterattack the enemy was capable of devising.

The British point of view prevailed for much of the next year, causing Allied forces to fight on the fringes of the enemy's power in Sicily and southern Italy. By the middle of 1943, however, with victory in North Africa in hand, the fall of Italy near, and the first Russian victories in the east, the Americans renewed their call for a cross-Channel attack. A crash effort in the United States to construct shallow-draft landing vessels and long-range fighter aircraft had assured that at least minimum resources would be available to move a major force onto the beaches of France and to protect it from air attack. Meanwhile, the success of the anti-U-boat campaign in the Atlantic had guaranteed that the vast supplies of ammunition and provisions necessary for the invasion could move safely from the United States to staging areas in Great Britain.

Although British leaders continued to advocate their peripheral strategy, the importance of American resources to the war effort had become so great that they had little choice but to go along with their ally. At the [[Casablanca Conference]] of January 1943 they thus agreed in principle to a 1944 invasion of the Continent. Shortly thereafter, the British General Staff appointed Lt. Gen. Frederick E. Morgan to be Chief of Staff (COS) to a still to be appointed Supreme Allied Commander (SAC) and gave him responsibility for planning the attack. By April 1943 Morgan had established an organization to carry out that task and had named it COSSAC after the initials in his new title. He warned his officers at that time to avoid thinking of themselves as planners and to see themselves instead as the embryo of a future supreme headquarters. "The term planning staff has come to have a most sinister meaning," he observed. "It implies the production of nothing but paper. What we must contrive to do somehow is to produce not only paper but action."

Under Churchill's influence, the British for a time continued to argue in favor of possible operations in the Balkans. The Americans, however, suspected that their ally was more interested in securing a postwar empire than in defeating Germany as soon as possible. Refusing further delays, they won agreement for a 1 May 1944 attack during the May 1943 Trident Conference in Washington. One month later, the Quadrant Conference in Quebec reaffirmed the decision.

Soviet Premier [[Joseph Stalin]] strengthened the Americans' hand during the Tehran Conference in November. He had reacted furiously to news after the Casablanca Conference that there would be no second front in 1943. At Tehran he welcomed the new emphasis on an attack and pushed vigorously for the appointment of a supreme commander to head the operation. From then on, the Americans were able to argue that any postponement of the invasion would constitute a breach of faith with the Russians. Wrangling continued over the Italian campaign and a possible invasion of southern France, code-named ANVIL, the flow of men and supplies to the Mediterranean theater slowed and the final buildup for the cross-Channel attack began in earnest.

====Selection of Eisenhower====
The selection of a commander for Allied forces required considerable thought. If the invasion had occurred early in the war, the British would have supplied the bulk of the resources and would have controlled the operation. Churchill had tentatively selected General Sir Alan Brooke for the task. But as the war lengthened and American resources became predominant, the selection of an American commander seemed appropriate. Roosevelt and Churchill first inclined toward the man who had played the principal role in coordinating the overall American military effort, U.S. Army Chief of Staff General [[George C. Marshall]]. When Roosevelt decided that Marshall's presence in Washington was indispensable, the Allies agreed on General [[Dwight D. Eisenhower]], another well-experienced officer and the commander of Allied forces in North Africa and the Mediterranean. In the end, Eisenhower would serve as Supreme Allied Commander in Europe and as commanding general of all U.S. forces in the European Theater of Operations.

Appointed as Supreme Commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force in December 1943, Eisenhower selected his former chief of staff in the Mediterranean, Lt. Gen. [[Walter Bedell Smith]], to be his chief of staff in Europe. Smith transformed COSSAC into the supreme headquarters Morgan had envisioned and installed Morgan as his deputy. Aware of British sensitivities and attuned to the political difficulties that might develop if American generals came to dominate Allied councils, Eisenhower selected his principal commanders from among the British. Air Chief Marshal Sir Arthur Tedder became the Deputy Supreme Allied Commander and principal coordinator of the theater's air forces, and Admiral Sir Bertram Ramsay served as naval commander for the invasion. An American, Lt. Gen. Carl Spaatz, commanded U.S. Strategic Air Forces in Europe, while an Englishman, Air Chief Marshal Sir Arthur T. Harris, commanded the Royal Air Force's Bomber Command. Air Chief Marshal Sir Trafford Leigh-Mallory headed those portions of the Allied air forces concerned with tactical air support.

If the tactical air forces for the invasion were clearly under Eisenhower, there was disagreement over whether he commanded the strategic air forces employed in bombing Germany. Spaatz and Harris were disposed to cooperate with Eisenhower but insisted on remaining independent in order to concentrate on destroying Germany's industrial base and air force. After considerable give and take, an arrangement suitable to all sides emerged. Subject to the oversight of the Combined Chiefs of Staff, a joint committee composed of the British Chiefs of Staff and their American counterparts, Eisenhower gained responsibility for the "direction" of strategic air forces. It was understood, however, that the cross-Channel attack, code-named Operation OVERLORD, would not absorb the entire bomber effort and that the air campaign against Germany would continue.

Eisenhower asked General Sir [[Bernard Law Montgomery]], who had led the Eighth Army in North Africa, Sicily, and Italy, and who had become the commander of the 21st Army Group for the invasion, to serve as pro tem commander of the Allied ground forces coming ashore in France. Montgomery would carry out final planning and coordinate the early phases of the attack. Two commanders would serve under Montgomery: Lt. Gen. [[Omar Nelson Bradley]] would head the American force, the First U.S. Army; General Sir Miles Dempsey would lead the Second British Army, composed of British, Canadian, and a handful of French troops. The Third U.S. Army, commanded by Lt. Gen. [[George S. Patton]], Jr., would enter the battle after the Allies had achieved a secure lodgment on the Continent. It would join the First U.S. Army, now commanded by Lt. Gen. Courtney Hodges, to form the 12th Army Group under Bradley. Lt. Gen. Henry D. G. Crerar's First Canadian Army would join Dempsey under Montgomery.

==Creating the general plan==
During the summer of 1943, COSSAC had formulated a tentative plan of attack that involved a force of from three to five divisions. That assault would depend for supply upon the development of two prefabricated harbors, called "mulberries", that were to be positioned along with breakwaters composed of scuttled ships just off the invasion beaches. The mulberries would give the Allies a measure of flexibility by allowing them to provision the force moving inland without having to rely upon the immediate capture of an established port.

====Landing site====
As COSSAC developed that plan, the question of where to land posed problems. The site would have to be within the range of fighter aircraft based in Great Britain but also on ground flat enough to construct the airfields that would become necessary once the invading force moved off the beaches and out of the range of its initial fighter support. The landing zones themselves would have to be sheltered from prevailing winds to facilitate around-the-clock resupply operations and would have to possess enough exits to allow the invading force to proceed inland with as little difficulty as possible. Similarly, the area behind the beaches would have to include a road network adequate to the needs of a force that intended to move rapidly. Since the region would ultimately form a base for the drive across France toward Germany, a series of large ports would also have to be close enough to facilitate the unloading of the massive quantities of supplies and ammunition that would be necessary to sustain the attack.

The most appropriate location, COSSAC's planners decided, lay directly across the English Channel from Dover in the Pas de Calais region. The area fulfilled many of the Allies' requirements and offered a direct route into the heart of Germany. Since the enemy had recognized that fact, however, and had already begun to construct heavy fortifications along the coast, an alternative had to be found. The most suitable stood farther to the west, along the Normandy coast near Caen and the Cotentin Peninsula. That region contained major ports at Cherbourg and Le Havre and offered a gateway to ports at Brest, Nantes, L'Orient, and St. Nazaire. Allied planners believed that the Germans would undoubtedly sabotage Cherbourg, forcing the invaders to place heavy initial reliance upon the mulberries, but the damage could be repaired and the region itself was less strongly defended than the Pas de Calais. Offering, as well, a satisfactory opening into the French interior, it became the site of the invasion.

====Looking towards Normandy====
As planning continued, both Eisenhower and Montgomery recognized that the three-to-five-division assault COSSAC had envisioned would have to be strengthened and spread over a larger area. Looking toward the early capture of Cherbourg and the secure flow of supplies that port would ensure, Montgomery argued in favor of a broad attack somewhat west of Caen. Stretching from the area below that city into the region beyond the town of St. Martin-de-Varreville, the front he envisioned would have a breadth of some sixty miles. When Morgan's planners responded that a bridgehead of that size would require resources far in excess of those available, Montgomery asserted that nothing less would work and that the Allies would either have to find the means or another commander.

Montgomery's insistence led to a sometimes acrimonious debate over the value of ANVIL, a plan to invade southern France that Eisenhower wanted to schedule simultaneously with OVERLORD. The invasion's planners considered the attack important and the conferees at Tehran had endorsed it, but the British — particularly Churchill — had never seen its merit. Hesitant at first to cancel the operation because it seemed a necessary diversion for the main effort in the Cotentin, Eisenhower in the end agreed to a postponement. Given the enlarged scope of OVERLORD, no other alternative seemed possible. There were too few landing craft to go around.

Although the debate over ANVIL continued, by 23 January 1944 the Allies had settled on a basic plan of attack for Normandy. The Americans would take the western flank closest to Cherbourg while the British operated to the east, on the approaches to Caen. Logistics determined the arrangement. American forces had arrived in Britain via the country's western ports and had positioned depots in those areas. It made sense for them to operate near those bases. In addition, responding to the congestion in Britain's ports brought on by preparations for the invasion, American logisticians planned to load ships in the United States for direct discharge onto the beaches of France, without an intermediate unloading in Britain. The western flank was closer to that line of supply.

====Finalizing the plan====
On the night before the invasion, the U.S. 82d and 101st Airborne Divisions would land by parachute and glider near the town of Ste. Mere-Eglise, securing the roads that led from the shoreline and obstructing enemy efforts to reinforce beach defenses. The next morning Bradley's First Army would arrive. The VII Corps would put the U.S. 4th Division ashore on UTAH Beach near les Dunes de Varreville.

To the east, the V Corps, composed of the U.S. 1st and portions of the 29th Infantry Divisions, would land on OMAHA Beach near the town of Vierville-sur-Mer. With a foothold secure in Normandy, V Corps would expand the beachhead to the south while VII Corps cut across the Contentin Peninsula and then wheeled north to capture Cherbourg. With the seaport in hand, VII Corps was to turn south and move toward the town of St. Lo. Once Bradley held the town and the St. Lo-Periers Road, he would have his army on dry ground suitable for offensive operations by mechanized forces. Patton's Third Army would then take to the field. Advancing into Brittany, it would seize Brest and other ports and cover the south flank when the First Army began an attack to the northeast toward Paris. To the east, the Second British Army would operate in the region between Bayeux and Caen, an area that possessed suitable sites for airfields and that offered a relatively unimpeded route to Paris. As in the American sector, an airborne division, the British 6th, would secure the northeastern flank of the operation, dropping during the hours before dawn near Caen and the mouth of the Orne River. At H-hour, the British 50th Division under the British 30 Corps would come ashore on GOLD Beach, near Bayeux and the American zone, while 1 Corps conducted a two-pronged attack farther to the east. There, the 3d Canadian Division would cross JUNO Beach near the town of Courseulles and the British 3d Division would come ashore at SWORD, near Lion-sur-Mer. "In the initial stages," Montgomery told his officers, "we should concentrate on gaining control quickly of the main centres of road communications. We should then push our armoured formations between and beyond these centres and deploy them on suitable ground. In this way it would be difficult for the enemy to bring up his reserves and get them past these armoured formations."

Over all, Allied planners intended to gain a lodgment between the Seine and Loire Rivers. Assuming that the Germans, after initial resistance, would choose to withdraw their forces behind the natural barrier provided by the Seine, they estimated that the task would take about ninety days. After a pause to regroup and resupply, the Allies would then begin an advance into the regions beyond the Seine and toward Germany.

====Troop buildup in England====
As planning continued, the BOLERO buildup in Britain, begun in 1942 to arm and provision the invasion, took on new momentum. With 39 divisions slated to participate in the invasion—20 American, 14 British, 3 Canadian, 1 French, and 1 Polish—along with hundreds of thousands of service troops, there was little time to waste. The number of U.S. fighting men based in Great Britain alone would double in the first six months of 1944, rising from 774,000 at the beginning of the year to 1,537,000 in the week preceding the final assault. More than 16 million tons of supplies would be needed to feed and supply those men and their allies: six and one-quarter pounds of rations per day per man; 137,000 jeeps, trucks, and half-tracks; 4,217 tanks and fully tracked vehicles; 3,500 artillery pieces; 12,000 aircraft; and huge stores of sundries—everything from dental [[amalgam]] for fillings to chewing gum and candy bars.

Quarters and depots to house the entire force mushroomed across the English countryside, many in just the seventeen weeks that preceded the invasion. The fields of Somerset and Cornwall became armories for the vast stores of bombs and artillery shells that the operation would require. The congestion extended to Britain's harbors, where ships laden with more supplies stood by. By the day of the attack, besides the immense force of fighting ships that would land the troops in Normandy and of cargo vessels that continued to ply Atlantic supply routes, more than 3 million deadweight tons of merchant shipping were in direct service to the invasion. The huge size of the buildup notwithstanding, landing craft were in such short supply that Eisenhower postponed the invasion for one month, from May to June.

While logisticians laid the base for the invasion, the Allied air forces opened the way for the attack itself by waging massive bombing campaigns in Germany and France. In Germany, between January and June 1944, Allied fighters swept the skies clear of German warplanes and took a heavy toll in pilots. As a result, by June 1944 the enemy lacked both the aircraft and the airmen to mount more than a token resistance to Allied plans.

==Deception==
Meanwhile, in France, as members of the French resistance cut railroad tracks, sabotaged locomotives, and targeted supply trains, Allied aircraft bombed roads, bridges, and rail junctions to prevent the Germans from moving reinforcements toward the invasion beaches. To deceive the enemy's intelligence agencies, the attacks occurred along the entire length of the Channel coast. By June, despite intelligence reports questioning the value of the attacks, all rail routes across the Seine River north of Paris were closed; the transportation system in France was at the point of collapse.

Deception was, indeed, a major part of the Allied campaign plan. To mislead the Germans into believing that the Pas de Calais, rather than the Cotentin, would be the site of the invasion, Eisenhower's staff created a mythical 1st Army Group, with an order of battle larger than that of Montgomery's 21st Army Group. Basing the phantom force near Dover, just across the Channel from the supposed target, the planners then set construction crews to building dummy installations of plywood and canvas and dotted them with an array of inflatable tanks and vehicles. They also anchored a vast armada of rubber landing craft in the Thames River estuary, where German reconnaissance aircraft were certain to spot them. Eisenhower assigned Patton, the American general the Germans most respected, to command the phantom army and saw to it that known enemy agents received information on the status of Patton's force. Allied naval units conducted protracted maneuvers off the Channel coast near the location of the shadow army, and components of Patton's fictitious command indulged in extensive radio trafficking to signal to German intelligence analysts that a major military organization was functioning. A careful plan of aerial bombardment complemented the ploy. During the weeks preceding the invasion, Allied airmen dropped more bombs on the Pas de Calais than anywhere else in France.

To protect the date of the invasion from prying German eyes, the Allies called it [[D-Day]], which carried no implications of any sort. NEPTUNE, the code name they used in place of OVERLORD on planning documents after September 1943, was similarly devoid of connotation. Although American commanders doubted that their ruses would have much effect, their schemes succeeded far beyond expectations. The Germans became so convinced that the Pas de Calais would be the Allied target that they held to the fiction until long after the actual attack had begun. As a result, nineteen powerful enemy divisions, to include important panzer reserves, stood idle on the day of the invasion, awaiting an assault that never came, when their presence in Normandy might have told heavily against the Allied attack.

==German planning==
For their part, enemy forces labored against problems generated by a long war and an autocratic political system. In May 1942 the Germans had adopted a policy that gave the Russian Front first priority for troops and garrisoned the west with those who, because of wounds or other disabilities, were unable to endure the rigors imposed by that theater. Over the year that followed, twenty-two infantry and six armored divisions left France for the Eastern Front, along with the best equipment and men from the divisions that stayed behind. They were replaced by soldiers who were over-age or convalescing from wounds and by units composed of Russian, Italian, and Polish defectors. A few first-line units were present on the Western Front, but most of the rest had been shattered in the east and required replacements and refitting. The weapons they used were often leftovers. The artillery, for example, consisted of more than twenty types of guns, many of Czech or French rather than German manufacture. Training lagged because the men were frequently employed in crash efforts to build fortifications rather than in exercises to sharpen their combat skills.

In theory, the German chain of command in the west was an example of good order. [[Adolf Hitler]] served as supreme commander of the Wehrmacht, the nation's armed forces. The High Command (OKW), led by Field Marshal [[Wilhelm Keitel]], ran the war everywhere except in the Soviet Union. Navy Group West and the Third Air Fleet, in turn, managed Germany's naval and air forces in Western Europe while the ground force, some 58 divisions, came under the Oberbefehlshaber West (OB West), headed by Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt. OB West controlled two army groups, Army Group G. which had charge of the Mediterranean and Atlantic coasts of France, and Army Group B under Field Marshal [[Erwin Rommel]], who had charge of anti-invasion forces along the Channel coast as far south as the Loire River. Rommel commanded two armies: the 15th, guarding the Pas de Calais and the Normandy coast to a line just south of the Seine River with 19 divisions (5 panzer), and the 7th, with 13 divisions (1 panzer), covering the coast from the boundary with the 15th Army to the Loire River.

====German weakness====
So logical on paper, those arrangements masked conditions in the field that were close to Byzantine. Using the operations staff of OKW as an intermediary, Hitler exercised direct control over Rundstedt's OR West. In theory a theater commander, Rundstedt had no authority over air force or naval units based within areas under his jurisdiction. The navy commanded most of the coastal artillery that would be called upon to repel an Allied attack, and the air force controlled the bulk of the antiaircraft and parachute units stationed in the region. Some armor units also came under the administrative supervision of the SS (Schutzstaffel), the elite political army that answered first to Hitler and Berlin rather than to its supposed commanders in the field.

The manner in which Rommel exercised authority at Army Group B was symptomatic of the debilities afflicting the German staff. Subordinate in theory to Rundstedt, Rommel was his equal in rank. Much more forceful than Rundstedt in personality, he came to exercise far more influence than his position would normally have dictated. In addition, as a field marshal, he had the privilege of communicating directly with Hitler outside the chain of command. Thus he had the ability to undercut his superior whenever he wished.

Rommel disagreed with Rundstedt over how best to repel an Allied invasion. Rundstedt placed great reliance on mechanized reserves that could respond quickly and flexibly to an enemy thrust. To that end, he stationed a newly created armored command, Panzer Group West, near Paris. From there, the force could move, as circumstances required, toward the site of an enemy assault in either the Pas de Calais or Normandy.

Understanding the ability of the Allied air forces to isolate a battlefield and inhibit the movement of ground troops, Rommel believed Allied air superiority in France prevented the sort of mobile response Rundstedt envisioned. If Eisenhower's forces gained even the barest foothold on the Continent, he reasoned, they would win the war. To prevent that, German forces would have to repel the invasion at the water's edge through the use of well-dug-in and stationary troop formations on the shoreline. Directing his efforts to that end, Rommel built beach defenses, laid down minefields, and constructed obstacles to entangle Allied landing craft before they reached land. He also applied personally to Hitler, over Rundstedt's head, for control of the panzer divisions he believed he needed to reinforce his design.

Hitler temporized. Agreeing to Rommel's request at first but then returning control of the reserves to Rundstedt when the latter objected, he finally compromised between the two approaches. Three of Panzer Group West's divisions went to Rommel, but OKW maintained control over four others that were to operate as a central reserve. Hitler's caution satisfied neither field marshal and deprived each of the decisive authority over armor that would become critical as the battle for France evolved.

The malaise gripping the Wehrmacht might have made little difference if Hitler had been more forceful in preparing for the inevitable invasion. Although his generals, misled by the Allied deception plan, believed that the main Allied assault would come in the Pas de Calais, he thought that the attack would occur near Caen, and he said as much during March. Yet he failed to push the idea with any vigor, perhaps because he doubted his intuition in the face of his generals' certainty. Lacking any impetus from Hitler, his subordinates took no action on his insight. Based on Allied naval activities, Germany's naval commander in France likewise predicted the true site of the invasion but also neglected to take adequate precautions. He reasoned that the Allies had yet to concentrate the weight of their air power on targets in the region and so were obviously unprepared to carry out the attack.

The ruse enacted by Patton's nonexistent 1st Army Group was not the only reason that German commanders failed to deduce the correct location of the Allied attack. By 1944 Britain's secret services had deprived Germany of its eyes by identifying and either turning or eliminating virtually every enemy agent assigned to their shores. Meanwhile, Allied warships had rendered German naval patrols in the English Channel ineffective, and Allied bombers had destroyed most of the German radar units that might have monitored air and naval traffic near the invasion beaches. A German spy working in the British embassy in Ankara had provided his mentors in Berlin with the code name for the invasion—OVERLORD but the revelation apparently carried little weight and led to no concrete action. German intelligence had also managed to learn that the British Broadcasting Corporation would transmit two lines of a poem by the nineteenth century author Paul Verlaine to warn the French Resistance that the attack was imminent. Even so, that finding was of little use without firm indications of where and when the invasion would occur.

The Luftwaffe might have made the difference by conducting reconnaissance flights over the coastal regions of Great Britain. The Allied buildup was proceeding at a frenzied pace, mainly in the south of England opposite Normandy. Yet no flights of the sort occurred during the critical early months of 1944. German air commanders were preoccupied with the wounds inflicted upon their forces by the Allied bombing campaign and loath to waste valuable pilots on an exercise that, given their enemy's air superiority, would spell virtually certain death for most of those involved.

Despite the impediments dogging German forces, Rommel and Rundstedt still possessed a number of tangible assets that would work to their advantage once the invasion began. The terrain in Normandy where the Allies would land consisted of small fields and pastures ringed by dense, tangled shrubbery, the so-called bocage. Each of them constituted a natural fortification and killing ground. In the same way, the overarching limbs of trees sheltered many rural lanes in the area. German commanders could use those byways as hidden corridors to move men and supplies. Even large, open areas were easily defended. Rommel peppered those that were suitable for the landing of gliders and paratroopers with mines, booby-trapped wooden stakes called Rommel's asparagus, and other obstructions. Since the regions near the mouths of Normandy's rivers and streams were often reclaimed marshlands, the field marshal had his engineers return them to their natural state by opening dikes and floodgates that held in check spring overflows. The deep inundations that followed would claim a number of the paratroopers who dropped into Normandy on the night of the invasion and would inhibit efforts to close the gap between the American forces fighting on OMAHA and UTAH Beaches.

For Hitler and his generals, the invasion represented a moment filled with danger and opportunity. If they failed, German defeat would become inevitable, but if they succeeded they would eliminate for a year or longer any threat to their power from the west. That would enable them to move the bulk of their divisions to the Russian Front, where their forces were sorely pressed. If the approach of the Normandy invasion thus evoked anxiety on the part of the Germans, it was also a source of high expectation.

==The invasion==
As the day of the invasion approached, the weather in the English Channel became stormy. Heavy winds, a five-foot swell at sea, and lowering skies compelled Eisenhower to postpone the assault from 5 to 6 June. Conditions remained poor, but when weathermen predicted that the winds would abate and the cloud cover rise enough on the scheduled day of the attack to permit a go-ahead, Eisenhower reluctantly gave the command. Expecting casualties of up to 80 percent among the airborne forces, he traveled to an air base at Newbury to bid farewell to the members of the 101st Airborne Division before their tow planes and gliders carried them off to battle. A newspaper man who accompanied Eisenhower later told friends he had seen tears in the general's eyes.

The weather actually worked to the Allied advantage. The BBC broadcast the lines from Verlaine's poem indicating commencement of the attack — ''"Blessent mon coeur d'une longueur monotone"'' ("The violins of autumn wound my heart with monotonous languor") — a code alerting the French Resistance that the invasion was imminent. Rommel's Army Group B headquarters in Normandy did nothing. The weather was so foul that no one believed an invasion possible. Indeed, many commanders at 7th Army had already left for Brittany to participate in an exercise designed, ironically, to simulate an Allied landing in Normandy. Rommel himself was in Germany celebrating his wife's birthday.

====Landing of airborne units====
[[Image:D-day 2.jpg|200px|thumb|right|Soldiers using German tank traps as cover]]
As planned, airborne units led the invasion. Shortly after midnight the British 6th Airborne Division dropped northeast of Caen, near the mouth of the Orne River, where it anchored the British eastern flank by securing bridges over the river and the Caen Canal. On the other side of the invasion area, the U.S. 101st and 82d Airborne Divisions dropped near Ste. Mere-Eglise and Carentan to secure road junctions and beach exits from which the VII Corps could push to capture Cherbourg.

Some of the American airborne troops came to ground near their objectives, but most were scattered over a wide area. A number drowned in the flooded lowlands. Others landed in the midst of German positions, where they were killed or captured. In the hours that followed, nevertheless, paratroopers from the 101st succeeded in clearing much of the way for VII Corps' move inland. The 3d Battalion, 505th Infantry, of the 82d Airborne Division meanwhile captured Ste. Mere-Eglise and cut the main enemy communications cable to Cherbourg.

Other units, entangled in the thickets and hedgerows of the region, failed to achieve their objectives, but by their very presence they sowed confusion in German ranks. Reports began to surface in enemy headquarters all along the line that paratroopers were landing, but little information was available to commanders on the size and meaning of the attack. Was it a probe to test Germany's defenses, a diversion for a larger assault in the Pas de Calais, or the long-awaited invasion itself? The Allies added to the confusion by parachuting dummies wired with firecrackers far to the rear of German positions. The trick drew major enemy units away from the landing zone, where their presence might have done considerable damage to the attackers.

As dawn neared, bombers began to strike up and down the coast, flying the first of what would become, by the end of the day, more than 11,000 sorties against enemy batteries, headquarters, railroad junctions, and troop concentrations. The gliders Eisenhower had watched depart also arrived. Those of the British landed on target as did most of those from the U.S. 101st Airborne Division. Fewer than half of the gliders assigned to the U.S. 82d Airborne reached their assigned landing zones. The rest lodged in hedgerows, struck German obstructions, or floundered in the swollen marshes. By midmorning, 4,000 men of the 82d were still unaccounted for, along with 60 percent of the equipment they had carried.
Although convinced that the disturbances were a diversion for an assault to come in the Pas de Calais, Rundstedt, at 0400 on 6 June, ordered two panzer divisions to move immediately toward Caen to guard against Allied amphibious operations in support of the airborne attack. The units, however, were in OKW reserve. Informed of the order, Rundstedt's superiors at OKW placed it on hold until Hitler himself could concur. Since he was asleep and disliked being awakened, approval took many hours to come and stalled what might have been a powerful German response. The few officers of Rommel's staff present in the area were more energetic. When they learned during the early morning hours that an enormous Allied fleet was approaching the coast, they ordered the 21st Panzer Division to Caen.

By first light at 0530, the entire horizon off Normandy between Caen and Vierville-sur-Mer had filled with the invasion armada. "They came, rank after relentless rank, ten lanes wide, twenty miles across, five thousand ships of every description," wrote one reporter that morning: "Coast Guard cutters, buoy-layers and motor launches," and "a formidable array of 702 warships." The naval bombardment began at 0550, detonating large German minefields and destroying many blockhouses and artillery positions.

====The Normandy landings====
Emerging from behind a screen of smoke, three German torpedo boats attempted briefly to contest the attack, but only one inflicted any damage, sinking the Norwegian destroyer ''Svenner''. It was the sole contribution of the German Navy to the fight that day. The Luftwaffe was equally absent, leading one young soldier to comment later, "We were all more or less expecting...dive bombers...continually backed by high level bombing. But no, nothing like that...The Luftwaffe is obviously smashed."

The Allied bombardment ended precisely on schedule but the landing craft ran late, giving the Germans a brief respite before the troops came ashore. That complicated matters for the British 1 and 30 Corps when they arrived on GOLD, JUNO, and SWORD Beaches at 0700 and for the American VII Corps, which began to debark on UTAH at 0630. On GOLD, the British 50th Division encountered intense German fire at first but rapidly worked its way forward and moved off the beach. On JUNO, the 3d Canadian Division also experienced early difficulties but by the end of the day had reached the Caen-Bayeux highway, inland from the landing zone. Confusion reigned on SWORD, where delivery schedules slipped and succeeding waves of landing craft piled a jumble of men and vehicles at the water's edge. Even so, the troops on SWORD were off the beach within an hour of landing and by dark had joined up with the forces of the British 6th Airborne Division. British and Canadian forces failed to seize Caen because the Germans threw the weight of their resources and their only available armored division, 21st Panzer, into the defense of the city, but they, too, had established themselves well ashore.

The forces that arrived on UTAH also performed ably. Elements of the 4th and 24th Cavalry Squadrons (132 men) of the 4th Cavalry Group landed on the St. Marcouf Islands flanking the beach at 0430, two hours in advance of the main attack. Directed to clear enemy minefields, control points, and observation posts, they found the islands heavily mined but otherwise unoccupied. During the main attack, German artillery managed to sink the U.S. destroyer Corry; swift currents carried the landing craft of the 4th Division well to the south of their target onto a portion of the beach that was only lightly defended; and thirty-two amphibious tanks assigned to land in the first wave of the attack were delayed by the loss of a control vessel that struck a mine. Those setbacks notwithstanding, the assaulting troops quickly took the upper hand. Within three hours the enemy force defending the beach had surrendered and Allied troops and supplies were moving inland. In all, some 23,000 men came ashore at UTAH, at a cost for the day of 197 casualties among the ground forces.

Many men distinguished themselves that morning, among them the 4th Division's Assistant Division Commander, Brig. Gen. Theodore Roosevelt, Jr. Going ashore with the first wave, Roosevelt contributed materially to the success of his forces by personally reconnoitering the area inland from the beach. He then returned to the beachhead time and again, without concern for his own life, to lead groups of his men over a seawall through enemy fire to safety. He earned a [[Medal of Honor]] for his gallantry.

====Omaha====
If the attack went well on UTAH, the situation was quite different on OMAHA. Maj. Gen. Leonard T. Gerow's V Corps came up against the worst conditions encountered that day. High seas swamped many landing craft during the ten-mile run from mother ships to shore. Survivors reached land seasick and wobbling. Well over half (fifty-seven of ninety-six) of the dual-drive amphibious tanks assigned to the landing also went down, victims of heavy seas they had not been designed to withstand. Strong winds and adverse currents likewise pushed a significant number of landing craft away from their designated targets, into areas where commanding officers' maps were useless and supporting fires from friendly ships totally lacking.

Bombing attacks by Allied aircraft and assaults by naval gunfire designed to soften enemy positions did little to improve the situation. Blinded by heavy clouds and concerned lest poorly aimed bombs strike the landing force on the beach, bomber pilots overshot their targets and dropped their loads up to three miles inland. Naval gunners had difficulty zeroing in on their targets. Most of the radios required by artillery spotters ashore had gone down with landing craft that never reached the beach.

OMAHA itself was a tangle of obstructions: concrete cones, slanted poles, logs tilted seaward with mines lashed to their tips, and steel rails welded together at angles and so strongly set into the beach that their ends would stave in the bottoms of landing craft. The Germans had also made good use of a line of cliffs, four miles long and up to one hundred fifty feet in height, that paralleled the length of the landing zone. Dotting the ravines and draws that led through the bluffs with antitank and antipersonnel mines, they had scattered blockhouses, bunkers, and machine gun nests in strategic locations where they could dominate the shoreline below. Unknown to the Americans, the highly disciplined 352d Infantry Division manned many of those fortifications. Its presence in the area had been suspected by some intelligence analysts, but the evidence they presented had proved too uncertain to affect planning for the attack.

The effort to destroy the enemy's beach obstacles was only marginally successful. In the vanguard of the attack, members of the 6th Engineer Brigade and naval demolition units attempted to cut avenues of approach to the beach by blasting lanes through the obstructions. Despite a series of mishaps—of 16 bulldozers, for example, only 3 survived enemy fire and I was prevented from maneuvering freely by American riflemen who sought shelter from incoming rounds in its lee—they succeeded in opening six complete gaps. Even so, they could mark only one for use during high water because all the buoys and poles designated for that purpose had been destroyed by enemy artillery. Casualties for the engineering task force ran to 40 percent, most incurred in the first half-hour of the attack.

As the day lengthened, those conditions combined to produce a near-inferno on OMAHA. Enemy mortar and artillery batteries, unscathed by Allied fire, poured destruction upon the attackers while the invading force time and again appeared to fumble. Allied rocket ships responded, but from extreme range. When their missiles fell short, they hit the troops on the beach. Wreckage at the water's edge accumulated as timetables slipped and landing craft became hopelessly entangled in the barbed wire and projecting beams of uncleared beach obstructions. Even those craft that succeeded in ramming their way forward encountered difficulties. Riding a rising tide, most grounded on unforeseen sandbars located 50 to 100 yards from the surf's edge. There, enemy machine guns claimed a heavy toll of the debarking troops, who had to wade to shore with all their equipment through water that was often neck deep. In the end, perhaps a little more than one-third of the first wave of attackers reached dry land. Lacking most of their heavy weapons, those survivors had little choice but to huddle behind sand dunes and in the lee of a small seawall that ran along the base of the beach. Many soldiers were killed outright, but some, wounded and unable to move, drowned as the tide moved in.

The Germans were elated. Convinced that the attack was faltering, the commander of the 352d Division transferred some of his reserves to the east, where the British appeared a greater threat. General Bradley was distressed and for a time debated whether to cancel the assault and to move the remainder of his force to UTAH Beach.

If chaos ruled at first, order asserted itself as the day lengthened. In some areas, heavy smoke from grass fires and exploding ammunition obscured landing zones and blinded enemy gunners, allowing the attackers to advance largely unopposed. Here and there, as well, tanks arrived, rolling off landing craft that had somehow plowed their way through the obstacles. Bringing their guns to bear, they began to provide the fire support the men on the beach required. The remnants of three companies of Rangers who had come ashore with the first units also did good work. Assigned to destroy a battery of six partially casemated 155-mm. guns thought to be positioned atop a promontory named the Pointe du Hoe, those highly disciplined infantrymen scaled the nearly l00-foot height and cleared it of its German defenders. Although the guns had been moved a few hundred yards inland the Rangers still managed to spike them. They then held their position for two days against waves of counterattacking Germans, incurring losses that would reduce their combat effectives to about ninety men before reinforcements finally arrived.

Unit cohesion had disintegrated among the troops on the beach, especially within the inexperienced 29th Division, but leaders of all ranks asserted themselves and saved the day. "Two kinds of people are staying on this beach," the commander of the 1st Division's 16th Infantry Regiment, Col. George A. Taylor, exclaimed to his men, "the dead and those who are going to die. Now let's get the hell out of here." The sergeants were especially abrupt. Resorting to curses they had hoarded for years, they exhorted their men to get off the beach. The 29th Division's assistant commander, Brig. Gen. Norman D. Cota, was particularly effective. Ignoring enemy fire, he moved up and down the shoreline among his troops, cajoling, rallying, urging them forward through the bluffs.

As the invaders reorganized, Allied destroyers moved close to shore. Risking grounding and almost point-blank fire from enemy batteries, they raked the cliffs with their guns. More and more landing craft also pushed their way to the beach, bringing new troops, heavy weapons, radios, and ammunition.

====The push inland====
Although victorious against the first wave of invaders at OMAHA, the Germans could do little when the force on the beach began to renew itself. With many of their troops off in pursuit of the dummy paratroopers the Allies had dropped far to the rear, they could hold their own from fixed positions but lacked the numbers to drive the invaders back. Thus the Americans kept the ground they gained. Inch by inch they moved forward, up through the bluffs and onto the flatland above. In the absence of much room to maneuver, their attack had been unoriginal, a straightforward frontal assault, but the weight of their numbers and the enormous volume of supplies and equipment they began to bring to bear made the difference. By nightfall, 34,000 men were ashore on OMAHA. The beach itself was a shambles of burning and disabled vehicles, but almost all of the coastal villages located inland were in Allied hands.

The Germans, for their part, were in far worse condition than they seemed. Rommel's Seventh Army, commanded by Generaloberst Friedrich Dollmann, had succeeded in holding its own, but it had employed all of its resources in doing so and lacked the means to mount the sort of counterattack that might have driven the Allies back. Meanwhile, Hitler and Rundstedt remained reluctant to commit the reserves they held in the Pas de Calais because of the threat Patton's phantom army posed. Even if they had acted, Allied bombers might have decimated the force as it moved along the roads of France into Normandy. In the same way, the enemy retained sizable forces in Brittany, but German commanders refused to use them because a second landing from that direction seemed a clear possibility.

Allied losses had been high: 2,500 men at OMAHA alone, another 2,500 among the American airborne divisions, almost 1,100 for the Canadians, and some 3,000 for the British—more than 9,000 men in all, one-third of whom were killed in action. Even so, the number was less than Allied planners had expected. Concerned that Hitler would respond to the invasion with extreme violence and might even resort to poison gas, Eisenhower's chief surgeon, Maj. Gen. Albert W. Kenner, and the Chief Surgeon of the U.S. Army's European Theater of Operations, Maj. Gen. Paul R. Hawley, had prepared their staffs to process at least 12,000 killed and wounded in the First U.S. Army alone.

By the evening of 6 June 1944, Allied power had prevailed all across the Normandy beachhead. The British had failed to seize Caen. The Americans had yet to secure a lodgment far enough inland to keep enemy artillery from hitting supply dumps and unloading points they were building along the invasion beaches. Yet more than 100,000 men had come ashore, the first of millions who would follow.

==The following days==
In keeping with his concept of a mobile defense, Rundstedt wanted to attack the beachhead but Allied fighter-bombers imposed so many delays on the movement of his reserve panzer divisions that he had little choice but to defer the strike until 8 June. While he waited the units that might have formed the counterattack dribbled in piecemeal, and harried commanders plugged them into the line wherever the need was greatest. Filling gaps and sealing off areas of special concern, they never had a chance to deliver the blow Rundstedt had envisioned. The problem would recur time and again in the days that followed. Allied air interdiction efforts were so effective and enemy forces so hard pressed that German commanders were rarely able to mass enough strength in a single place to make a sustained advance.

Over time, Hitler's inflexibility compounded the problem. On 17 June Rundstedt and Rommel requested their leader's permission to withdraw their forces out of the range of naval gunfire before launching an armored attack on the flank of Montgomery's Second Army. Hitler refused. Convinced that the dogged efforts of soldiers who had stood and fought even when surrounded during the Battle of Moscow in 1941 had averted a German collapse, he believed the same would hold true in Normandy. He forbade his commanders to abandon any position voluntarily and ordered them to hold their ground at all costs. Despite their difficulties, the Germans still made good use of the advantages the bocage offered. They turned the region's sunken lanes into trenches and fortifications. The hedgerows—some more than five feet in height and several feet thick—became traps concealing riflemen, machine guns, and infantrymen armed with antitank weapons.

====The hedgerows====
Because they assumed that the Germans would withdraw toward the Seine and fight a delay along the river's lines, the invasion's planners had concentrated on the challenge of getting ashore and had paid scant attention to the impediments posed by the bocage. As a result, Bradley's First Army was unprepared for the difficulties it faced and paid a steep price for each foot of its advance into the region. The experience of the U.S. 90th Division was a case in point. Faced with hostile fire from an invisible enemy, the unit's commanders found the principles of fire and maneuver nearly impossible to apply in the hedgerows, especially the precept that an attacking force should move just behind its artillery in order to confront the enemy while he is still off balance. The division suffered heavy casualties as a result—150 officers and 2,315 enlisted men during June and 310 officers and 5,188 enlisted men during July. More experienced units also suffered terribly in the bocage. A U.S. Army survey of casualties in portions of the 1st, 4th, 9th, and 25th Infantry Divisions between 6 June and 31 July 1944 found that rifle companies lost nearly 60 percent of their enlisted men and over 68 percent of their officers.

The countryside in the British and Canadian sectors — a relatively open, flat, dry expanse stretching from Caen to Paris — was more favorable for offensive warfare. Paradoxically, those conditions made fighting there perhaps more difficult than in the American sector. The nature of the ground and the strategic importance of the area compelled the Germans to mass the bulk of their panzer units and their best troops in the path of Montgomery's forces. They turned the checkerboard of villages that dotted the region into an interlocking, mortar-and-concrete version of the bocage.

Montgomery's commanders appear to have been little more prepared than the Americans for the sort of resistance the Germans mounted. Poorly versed in combined arms tactics, they allowed their tanks to advance without the protection of accompanying infantry units. That approach gave German soldiers wielding highly effective Panzerfausts (the enemy version of the American bazooka) and teams firing formidable, high-velocity antitank cannons a relatively free hand in dealing with the advancing forces.

What Montgomery intended to do remains shrouded in controversy. Time and again he appeared to delay. The terrain and the heavy weight of the German defenses facing his forces were undoubtedly part of the reason. He may also all along have planned to allow the offensive to develop in the direction that time and circumstance dictated, whether in the American sector or his own. In that sense, it is possible that he decided Bradley's front offered the most opportunities and that his own army should concentrate on holding the enemy in place to allow his ally the fullest latitude. Or he may have thought that Allied advances elsewhere would allow him to achieve his objectives without incurring the level of casualties that had consumed an entire generation of his countrymen during World War I. He had been warned of a shortage of infantry replacements well before D-Day. During July the British Adjutant General had underscored the point by personally traveling to Normandy to notify him that some British battalions had already been divided to fill gaps in the line and that divisions might be next. Whatever the reason, Montgomery's forces, commanded by Lt. Gen. Sir Miles Dempsey, took the town of Bayeux and moved several miles inland but, despite three full-scale attempts between 6 June and 1 July, failed to take Caen.

Montgomery's intentions notwithstanding, British efforts were hardly without effect. The attacks his forces launched bled the Germans of strength they could ill afford to lose and kept the enemy's best units, including the majority of the panzer divisions deployed against the Allied bridgehead, concentrated around Caen. That relieved some of the pressure on Bradley to the west, buying time and room for him to consolidate his beachhead on OMAHA and to turn his attention toward the capture of Cherbourg.

In fact, Bradley needed all the help he could get. With the enemy well concealed in the hedgerows, it took an average of five Americans to displace one German defender. Under normal circumstances, a ratio of three to one would have sufficed. "Prior to invasion33' he later wrote, "we had estimated that the infantry would incur 70 percent of the losses of combat forces. By August we had boosted that figure to 83 percent on the basis of our experience in the Normandy hedgerows." Bradley illustrated his point by noting that, in fifteen days of fighting around St. Lo, the 30th Division sustained 3,934 battle casualties, a loss rate of 25 percent for the unit as a whole but of 90 percent in its rifle platoons, where three out of every four casualties occurred.

====Towards Cherbourg====
The flooded marshes of the Merderet River also hampered American progress, as did a great storm that lashed the English Channel between 19 and 21 June. Besides destroying nearly 500 small craft and beaching another 800 well above the high-water mark, the gale slowed the effort to resupply American forces for a time by ruining the mulberry harbor at OMAHA Beach. On 18 June, just before the storm, Allied logisticians had achieved 72.8 percent of their targeted level of supplies to that date. By 22 June, as a result of the storm, that figure had fallen to 57.4 percent. The buildup in vehicle strength fell over the same period from 66 to 57 percent and in personnel from 88 to 77.7 percent. Nevertheless, those impediments proved only temporary. Bradley's logisticians quickly learned to bring what they needed directly across the beach. By the last week in June, OMAHA was averaging 13,500 tons of supplies per day, 115 percent of planned capacity. UTAH, meanwhile, had achieved 7,000 tons per day, 125 percent of its target.

By 18 June Maj. Gen. J. Lawton Collins' VII Corps had cut its way across the Cotentin Peninsula and had severed all roads leading into Cherbourg. Under orders from Hitler "to defend the last bunker and leave to the enemy not a harbor but a field of ruins," the remnants of five German divisions fought back stubbornly. The fighting around the city's main fortification, the Fort du Roule, embedded in a cliff overlooking the harbor, was particularly intense. Coming under attack on 25 June, the stronghold's defenders leveled heavy fire at the attackers from a number of pillboxes and artillery positions.

The fort held out until the men of the 314th, after capturing the upper battlements, crushed diehard resisters by dropping demolitions into the bastion's lower reaches. Shortly thereafter, the city's commander surrendered but, on orders from Hitler relayed by Rommel, refused to instruct his troops to do the same. American psychological warfare officers turned the trick. Dropping surrender leaflets that emphasized dwindling food supplies within the city, they announced that all who came across should bring their mess kits. That evening, twenty days after the offensive had begun, Cherbourg was in friendly hands.

By then, enemy engineers had so thoroughly demolished the city's harbor that it would take three weeks of rebuilding before the facility could open to even minimal shipping and months before it would be able to handle cargo in quantity. That being the case, the victory still provided a much needed boost to Allied morale. Progress had been so slow that Allied leaders had become concerned the attack might bog down into the sort of crippling stalemate that had prevailed on the Western Front during World War I.

As Allied morale rose, that of the Germans fell lower than ever. Hitler himself was unhappy. Exasperated with Rundstedt's continuing doubts and his desire to pull back to more defensible positions, he replaced the field marshal as Commander in Chief West on 2 July with Field Marshal Guenther von Kluge. Although at first optimistic, Kluge rapidly came to sympathize with Rundstedt's point of view.

The fall of Cherbourg offered only temporary consolation to the Allies. By I July they had established a beachhead 70 miles wide and had brought about a million men and 177,000 vehicles ashore. Yet, except around Cherbourg, their lodgment was in no place more than 25 miles deep, and in most areas it extended little more than 5 miles inland.

====Caen and St. Lo====
On 9 July Montgomery launched a massive air assault against Caen in hopes of clearing the way for an attack the following morning. Four hundred fifty heavy aircraft participated, dropping 2,500 tons of bombs, but the airmen negated most of the effect by releasing their loads well back from the forward line to avoid hitting their own troops. As a result, the city incurred heavy damage but German defenses went largely unscathed. In the two days of desperate fighting that followed, the Germans fought back viciously. Montgomery's forces entered Caen and took half the city but moved no farther. Casualty rates during the battle were appalling. Most infantry battalions sustained losses of 25 percent.

Bradley's advance on St. Lo was also an agony. Daily rains reduced visibility and negated much of the value of Allied air support. As with the British at Caen, the casualty rate was alarming. The 30th Division sustained some 3,000 killed and wounded between 7 and 20 July; the 9th suffered 2,500 between the 10th and the 20th.

Bradley's forces were nonetheless gradually learning how to fight in the bocage. Tank and infantry units began to support each other. The tanks supplied the heavy firepower needed to eliminate the enemy's well-sited firing positions while the infantry kept enemy soldiers with antitank weapons at bay. The tankers also found a way to cross the hedgerows without exposing their vehicles' vulnerable undersides to enemy fire. With huge iron teeth salvaged from German beach obstacles welded to the fronts of hundreds of tanks, they began to bull their way through the hedgerows, taking hours to advance through obstacles that would earlier have required days of fighting to overcome. From then on, the Rhinos, as the men named them, became an invaluable asset to Bradley. They allowed American armor to move across country at will while German tanks had to continue to make do with the roads.

By 15 July American forces had reached the outskirts of St. Lo, but the garrison holding the town refused yield. In a battle that inflicted carnage reminiscent of World War I, the Germans gave ground only gradually, house by house. On one occasion, as a result, American riflemen used a bulldozer to bury three German soldiers who refused to surrender their position. By 18 July the attackers had succeeded. A task force from the 29th Division under General Cota entered the town. Cota carried with him the body of Maj. Thomas D. Howie, who had commanded the 3d Battalion of the 116th Infantry. Several days earlier, Howie and his men had crept undetected through early morning mist to reinforce an isolated battalion less than 1,000 yards from St. Lo. Ordered to move his unit to the eastern edge of the town, despite his own exhaustion and that of his men, Howie had responded without hesitation, "Will do." A few moments later an enemy shell had ended his life. The commander of the 29th Division, Maj. Gen. Charles H. Gerhardt, considered Howie's response an example of the patriotic self-sacrifice that had carried the Army through to that point. By honoring Howie he could remind his men of the perseverance and courage of all those who had given their lives at St. Lo.

On the same day, the British launched a major attack beyond Caen but again allowed their tanks to advance without supporting infantry and failed to inflict a decisive blow. In response Kluge increased the concentration of German troops around the city, adding two armored divisions that might have done invaluable work against Bradley in the bocage. As a result, 7 panzer divisions and 4 heavy tank battalions guarded Caen while only 2 panzer divisions confronted the Americans. Even those forces were sorely depleted. By the last week in July, according to ULTRA intercepts of coded German radio communications, the enemy in Normandy had sustained casualties of more than 100,000 enlisted men and 2,360 officers killed and wounded. On 17 July misfortune touched Rommel himself. Two British Spitfire fighters attacked his open car—ironically, near a village named Ste. Foy de Montgommery—and drove it into a ditch. Thrown from the vehicle, Rommel suffered head injuries so grievous that he had to return to Germany for treatment. Kluge succeeded him, assuming command of Army Group B while retaining his position as Commander in Chief West.

The Allies, for their part, had brought four years of planning and hard work to completion. Exhausted and battle-worn, they had at last reached the Periers-St. Lo road. From there the land was dry and the country relatively open. The final act of the war, the great push through France into Germany itself, could now begin.

==Analysis==
It had been a grim fight. Six weeks of battle had left the Germans disheartened and susceptible to any farther blow the Allies might deliver. "It was casualty reports, casualty reports, casualty reports wherever you went," Rommel told his son Manfred from his sickbed. "I have never fought with such losses...And the worst of it is that it was all without sense or purpose." Indeed, Rommel continued, on some days the equivalent of a regiment of his men had fallen in Normandy—more than in a whole summer of fighting in Africa during 1942.

The days had been filled with mud, heartache, and pain for the Allies as well. From the very beginning, little had seemed to go right. The airborne assault on the night before the landing had sown confusion among the enemy and had provided an important diversion, but too many of the men had landed too far from their targets. As a result, the effort had only a marginal effect on the developing battle. Over the days that followed, rather than withdrawing beyond the Seine as Allied planners had expected, the Germans had hung on tenaciously, taking brutal losses but inflicting them upon the Allies as well. Meanwhile, Montgomery's careful plan for the attack had begun to unravel on D-Day itself. His forces failed to take Caen, the key to further operations in the open country to the south. Attacking time and again as the campaign developed, they had nonetheless held the cream of the German force in place, absorbing pressure that would almost inevitably have fallen upon Bradley's forces in the bocage.

As for the Americans, the landing on OMAHA Beach had been a near-disaster averted only by the courage of unsung sailors and soldiers. When air attacks and naval gunfire had failed to silence German guns and the momentum of the assault had begun to lag, those heroes had pushed their frail landing craft to shore despite the traps and obstacles blocking their way. Rallying to the directions of their commanders, they had then climbed the bluffs overlooking the beach and advanced inland, often at the cost of their own lives. In the same way, although Maj. Gen. J. Lawton Collins' VII Corps captured the port of Cherbourg on 29 June, the American advance bogged down in the hedgerows. Bradley's First Army absorbed forty thousand casualties while slowly advancing twenty miles to St. Lo.

Even so, enough went well for the campaign to succeed. Roosevelt, Marshall, Eisenhower, Churchill, and Montgomery were master communicators who bonded an unwieldy coalition into an extraordinary fighting machine. The plan they and their staffs devised failed to foresee every circumstance that would occur on the battlefield, particularly the difficulties Bradley's forces would encounter in the bocage, but it was still a masterpiece of innovation that provided ample means for Allied commanders to prevail. Cunning deceptions kept the Germans transfixed on the Pas de Calais until long after the real invasion had occurred; Allied airmen swept the skies clean of the enemy fighters and bombers that might have imposed a heavy toll upon the landing force; and the effort to build up the stocks of supplies and munitions necessary for an effective attack succeeded beyond the most optimistic expectation. In the end, notwithstanding, it was the heroism of infantrymen such as Major Howie, who rose day and night to the challenge despite almost overwhelming fear and fatigue, that afforded the critical margin for success.

A barely failed assassination attempt upon Hitler's life, implicating Rommel himself, brought about a purge of officers in Germany that would, for a time, strengthen Hitler's control over his armed forces. Although the Germans would fight on with resilience and determination for another ten months, their line in France would soon break, Patton's army would swing clear, Paris would fall, and Allied forces would approach the Rhine. The loss of France would deprive Germany not only of a major source of Mod, raw resources, and labor but also of seaports that had long sheltered its U-boats and of radar sites that had afforded early warning of Allied bomber attacks. More important, it would provide the Allies with the secure base they needed to launch their final offensive against the German heartland. As Rommel told his son, the future was clear and inevitable. The end of Hitler's Reich was at hand: "There is no longer anything we can do."

{| style="width: 100%; background:transparent; border: 2px solid #000099;" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="1"
!colspan=2 style="width: 100%; text-align: center; background-color: #000088; color: white; "|'''Copyright Details'''
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!style="background-color: #000088; color:white;"|License:
|style=" background-color: none;"| This work is in the [[Public Domain]] in the United States because it is a work of the United States Federal Government under the terms of Title 17, Chapter 1, Section 105 of the U.S. Code
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!style=" background-color: #000088; color:white;"|Source:
|style="background-color: none;border-top: 2px solid black"| File available from the {{{1|[[United States Federal Government]] [http://www.history.army.mil/brochures/normandy/nor-pam.htm]}}}.

{{DEFAULTSORT:Overlord, Operation}}
[[Category:World War II]]

Talk:Atheist hospitals

2011-08-18T21:15:26Z

Darkmind1970: /* hospitals created by people who believe there is no creator God */

== hospitals created by people who believe there is no creator God ==

''hospitals created by people who believe there is no creator God'' I don't understand what an Atheist Hospital is and this line is ambiguous at best. Created by people who believe there is no creator god? Do you mean the builders? The architect? Or the Government? NZ's prime minister [[John Key]] does not believe in god and neither did the previous PM but they built hospitals. Good ones too. Please help me understand. [[User:MaxFletcher|MaxFletcher]] 17:25, 16 August 2011 (EDT)
::Atheist hospitals do exist. Do atheist fat farms/fat camps exist? :) Please see: [[Atheism and obesity]]. [[User:Conservative|Conservative]] 17:44, 16 August 2011 (EDT)
:::That doesn't answer my question I'm afraid. Can anyone else answer? [[User:MaxFletcher|MaxFletcher]] 17:55, 16 August 2011 (EDT)
::::Aren't all hospitals atheist? [[User:Darkmind1970|Darkmind1970]] 09:10, 18 August 2011 (EDT)
:::::Many hospitals in the UK are dedicated to saints, eg St Thomas's Hospital. I would imagine those are Christian hospitals, at least originally.--[[User:CPalmer|CPalmer]] 09:12, 18 August 2011 (EDT)
:::::: Yes, but many of the local hospitals in London are named after monarchs or spouses of monarchs (ie: King George), or after the area they're in (Whipps Cross). I don't think that they were founded by monarchists or local associations. [[User:Darkmind1970|Darkmind1970]] 17:15, 18 August 2011 (EDT)

Talk:Atheist hospitals

2011-08-18T13:10:13Z

Darkmind1970: /* hospitals created by people who believe there is no creator God */

Baden-Baden

2011-08-18T12:55:21Z

Darkmind1970:

'''Baden-Baden''' is a city in the [[German]] state of [[Baden-Wuerttemberg|Baden-Württemberg]]. The city became fashionable in the Nineteenth Century as a spa resort due to the apparent beneficial effects of the spring waters there. It is also notable for being the location of the annual Baden-Baden Rendez-Vous, a meeting of reinsurance representatives who gather to discuss the renewal season.
When Germany was occupied after [[World War II]], the city became the headquarters for the French zone.
<ref>http://pqasb.pqarchiver.com/courant/access/874732202.html?dids=874732202:874732202&FMT=ABS&FMTS=ABS:AI&type=historic&date=Jan+06%2C+1947&author=&pub=Hartford+Courant&desc=French+Make+Reich+Zone+Pay+Own+Way&pqatl=google</ref>

==References==
{{reflist}}

[[Category:Germany]]
[[Category:Cities]]

Operation Overlord

2011-08-03T11:41:37Z

Darkmind1970:

[[Image:normandy.jpg|300px|thumb|right|American troops disembark under heavy fire at ''Omaha'', the code name for their section of the Normandy coastline]]
'''Operation Overlord''', also known as the '''Normandy Invasion''' or simply '''D-Day''', was the code name for the Allied invasion of northern [[Europe]] in [[World War II]]. It began with the landings on the beaches of [[Normandy]] in northwestern France on June 6, 1944, and accomplished the largest amphibious invasion in the history of mankind, using 200,000 men, 9,000 planes, and 5,000 ships.

==Strategic Setting==
The British Chiefs of Staff charged Admiral Lord [[Louis Mountbatten]] and his Combined Operations Headquarters in September 1941 with investigating the feasibility of amphibious operations in the European theater of the war. Earlier, Admiral Sir Roger Keyes had undertaken some planning for commando raids, but Mountbatten was to do more. "You are to prepare for the invasion of Europe," British Prime Minister [[Winston Churchill]] told him. "You must devise and design the appliances, the landing craft, and the technique...The whole of the South Coast of England is a bastion of defense against the invasion of Hitler; you've got to turn it into the springboard for our attack."

American planners began formal cooperation with Britain in December 1941, just after the Japanese attack at [[Attack on Pearl Harbor|Pearl Harbor]] and the German and Italian declarations of war against the United States. In compliance with earlier, informal understandings, the two partners agreed to put first the defeat of [[Germany]] and its ally [[Italy]] if forced to wage a two-front war against both those nations and Japan. Shortly thereafter, British planners drafted a proposal, code-named ROUNDUP, for an attack across the English Channel into France. The assault would come only after a series of major campaigns on the periphery of Europe, in [[Scandinavia]], the [[Mediterranean Sea]], the [[Balkans]], and the [[Soviet Union]], where the Germans would have difficulty massing their power. Once bombing, blockade, partisan uprisings, and the fighting on those other fronts had weakened the enemy sufficiently, ROUNDUP, or something like it, would begin.

Despite talk that a Continental invasion might come as early as 1942, Allied leaders in the end decided tentatively to make the assault in 1943, either through Western Europe or the Balkans. Because British forces would bear the burden of operations in Europe until the United States could complete its buildup for war, the decisions that came out of the conference hewed closely to Britain's preference for attacks on Germany's periphery. Although the British later accepted an American proposal, code-named BOLERO, for the establishment in Britain of a million-man force trained and equipped for the 1943 invasion, the United States agreed that during 1942 Allied forces should concentrate on wearing down Germany's resistance through air attacks, operations along the North African coast, and assistance to the Soviet Union.

====Initial disagreements====
Allied leaders honed their strategy further at a series of great conferences during 1942 and 1943—at Casablanca, [[Quebec]], [[Cairo]], and [[Tehran]]. Examining a range of alternatives, they gradually adopted the broad outlines of the attack they would launch. As planning continued, however, it became clear that the Americans disagreed ardently with the British desire to wear down the Germans before beginning a final confrontation on the Continent. Confident in the strength of their vast resources, American planners argued that "wars cannot be finally won without the use of land armies" and that only direct action against the main body of the German force could produce an Allied victory. Britain's peripheral approach, they asserted, would waste valuable assets on operations that could have at best an indirect effect on the outcome of the war. There was also the Soviet Union to consider, which had suffered millions of casualties in its fight with the Germans on the Eastern Front and might conceivably collapse and conclude a separate peace if Britain and the United States failed to relieve some of the pressure by attacking in the west. Soviet leader Joseph Stalin was already clamoring for a second front. To the Americans it seemed far better to seize the initiative from Germany with a bold assault than to allow the alliance's resources to dribble away in operations that would have little long-term effect on the enemy's will to resist.

====British views====
The British viewed the situation in Europe with an eye closely focused on their own circumstances and experience. As conscious of their nation's lack of resources as the Americans were of the vast wealth available to the United States, they had already withstood a disaster at Dunkirk in 1940, when the Germans had driven a British army off the Continent in defeat, and at the French seacoast town of [[Dieppe]] in August 1942, when the Germans, at great cost to the Allies, had repelled a Canadian landing. Their experiences with amphibious warfare during World War I had been little better. Their forces had endured a bloodletting at [[Gallipoli]] in the [[Dardanelles]], where landings championed by Churchill had failed. They had also lost an entire generation of young men to trench warfare on the stalemated Western Front in France. Britain's leaders thus had visions of catastrophe whenever the Americans raised the issue of a cross-Channel attack. If haste prevailed over reason, Churchill warned, the beaches of France might well be "choked with the bodies of the flower of American and British manhood."

If the British had agreed in principle at the [[Arcadia Conference]] to an early attack across the Channel, by the end of 1942 they had nevertheless succeeded in shifting many of the resources marked for Bolero to TORCH, an Allied invasion of North Africa much more in accord with their own point of view. The American military had little choice but to go along. They not only lacked the landing craft, warplanes, and shipping necessary to carry out a cross-Channel attack, they also had to contend with their commander in chief, President Roosevelt, who had become convinced that some sort of immediate action against Germany was necessary to divert the attention of the American people from the Pacific to the Atlantic side of the war.

The vehement German response to the assault at Dieppe, resulting in the loss of nearly a thousand British and Canadian lives, the capture of more than two thousand fighting men, and the destruction of better than one hundred aircraft, weighed heavily upon Allied planners. If the German response at Dieppe was any indication, an invasion of the Continent would require more meticulous preparation and more strength than a 1943 attack could possibly allow. Indeed, Allied planners and logisticians would have to create, field, and supply an organization that could meet and defeat the worst counterattack the enemy was capable of devising.

The British point of view prevailed for much of the next year, causing Allied forces to fight on the fringes of the enemy's power in Sicily and southern Italy. By the middle of 1943, however, with victory in North Africa in hand, the fall of Italy near, and the first Russian victories in the east, the Americans renewed their call for a cross-Channel attack. A crash effort in the United States to construct shallow-draft landing vessels and long-range fighter aircraft had assured that at least minimum resources would be available to move a major force onto the beaches of France and to protect it from air attack. Meanwhile, the success of the anti-U-boat campaign in the Atlantic had guaranteed that the vast supplies of ammunition and provisions necessary for the invasion could move safely from the United States to staging areas in Great Britain.

Although British leaders continued to advocate their peripheral strategy, the importance of American resources to the war effort had become so great that they had little choice but to go along with their ally. At the [[Casablanca Conference]] of January 1943 they thus agreed in principle to a 1944 invasion of the Continent. Shortly thereafter, the British General Staff appointed Lt. Gen. Frederick E. Morgan to be Chief of Staff (COS) to a still to be appointed Supreme Allied Commander (SAC) and gave him responsibility for planning the attack. By April 1943 Morgan had established an organization to carry out that task and had named it COSSAC after the initials in his new title. He warned his officers at that time to avoid thinking of themselves as planners and to see themselves instead as the embryo of a future supreme headquarters. "The term planning staff has come to have a most sinister meaning," he observed. "It implies the production of nothing but paper. What we must contrive to do somehow is to produce not only paper but action."

Under Churchill's influence, the British for a time continued to argue in favor of possible operations in the Balkans. The Americans, however, suspected that their ally was more interested in securing a postwar empire than in defeating Germany as soon as possible. Refusing further delays, they won agreement for a 1 May 1944 attack during the May 1943 Trident Conference in Washington. One month later, the Quadrant Conference in Quebec reaffirmed the decision.

Soviet Premier [[Joseph Stalin]] strengthened the Americans' hand during the Tehran Conference in November. He had reacted furiously to news after the Casablanca Conference that there would be no second front in 1943. At Tehran he welcomed the new emphasis on an attack and pushed vigorously for the appointment of a supreme commander to head the operation. From then on, the Americans were able to argue that any postponement of the invasion would constitute a breach of faith with the Russians. Wrangling continued over the Italian campaign and a possible invasion of southern France, code-named ANVIL, the flow of men and supplies to the Mediterranean theater slowed and the final buildup for the cross-Channel attack began in earnest.

====Selection of Eisenhower====
The selection of a commander for Allied forces required considerable thought. If the invasion had occurred early in the war, the British would have supplied the bulk of the resources and would have controlled the operation. Churchill had tentatively selected General Sir Alan Brooke for the task. But as the war lengthened and American resources became predominant, the selection of an American commander seemed appropriate. Roosevelt and Churchill first inclined toward the man who had played the principal role in coordinating the overall American military effort, U.S. Army Chief of Staff General [[George C. Marshall]]. When Roosevelt decided that Marshall's presence in Washington was indispensable, the Allies agreed on General [[Dwight D. Eisenhower]], another well-experienced officer and the commander of Allied forces in North Africa and the Mediterranean. In the end, Eisenhower would serve as Supreme Allied Commander in Europe and as commanding general of all U.S. forces in the European Theater of Operations.

Appointed as Supreme Commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force in December 1943, Eisenhower selected his former chief of staff in the Mediterranean, Lt. Gen. [[Walter Bedell Smith]], to be his chief of staff in Europe. Smith transformed COSSAC into the supreme headquarters Morgan had envisioned and installed Morgan as his deputy. Aware of British sensitivities and attuned to the political difficulties that might develop if American generals came to dominate Allied councils, Eisenhower selected his principal commanders from among the British. Air Chief Marshal Sir Arthur Tedder became the Deputy Supreme Allied Commander and principal coordinator of the theater's air forces, and Admiral Sir Bertram Ramsay served as naval commander for the invasion. An American, Lt. Gen. Carl Spaatz, commanded U.S. Strategic Air Forces in Europe, while an Englishman, Air Chief Marshal Sir Arthur T. Harris, commanded the Royal Air Force's Bomber Command. Air Chief Marshal Sir Trafford Leigh-Mallory headed those portions of the Allied air forces concerned with tactical air support.

If the tactical air forces for the invasion were clearly under Eisenhower, there was disagreement over whether he commanded the strategic air forces employed in bombing Germany. Spaatz and Harris were disposed to cooperate with Eisenhower but insisted on remaining independent in order to concentrate on destroying Germany's industrial base and air force. After considerable give and take, an arrangement suitable to all sides emerged. Subject to the oversight of the Combined Chiefs of Staff, a joint committee composed of the British Chiefs of Staff and their American counterparts, Eisenhower gained responsibility for the "direction" of strategic air forces. It was understood, however, that the cross-Channel attack, code-named Operation OVERLORD, would not absorb the entire bomber effort and that the air campaign against Germany would continue.

Eisenhower asked General Sir [[Bernard Law Montgomery]], who had led the Eighth Army in North Africa, Sicily, and Italy, and who had become the commander of the 21st Army Group for the invasion, to serve as pro tem commander of the Allied ground forces coming ashore in France. Montgomery would carry out final planning and coordinate the early phases of the attack. Two commanders would serve under Montgomery: Lt. Gen. [[Omar Nelson Bradley]] would head the American force, the First U.S. Army; General Sir Miles Dempsey would lead the Second British Army, composed of British, Canadian, and a handful of French troops. The Third U.S. Army, commanded by Lt. Gen. [[George S. Patton]], Jr., would enter the battle after the Allies had achieved a secure lodgment on the Continent. It would join the First U.S. Army, now commanded by Lt. Gen. Courtney Hodges, to form the 12th Army Group under Bradley. Lt. Gen. Henry D. G. Crerar's First Canadian Army would join Dempsey under Montgomery.

==Creating the general plan==
During the summer of 1943, COSSAC had formulated a tentative plan of attack that involved a force of from three to five divisions. That assault would depend for supply upon the development of two prefabricated harbors, called "mulberries", that were to be positioned along with breakwaters composed of scuttled ships just off the invasion beaches. The mulberries would give the Allies a measure of flexibility by allowing them to provision the force moving inland without having to rely upon the immediate capture of an established port.

====Landing site====
As COSSAC developed that plan, the question of where to land posed problems. The site would have to be within the range of fighter aircraft based in Great Britain but also on ground flat enough to construct the airfields that would become necessary once the invading force moved off the beaches and out of the range of its initial fighter support. The landing zones themselves would have to be sheltered from prevailing winds to facilitate around-the-clock resupply operations and would have to possess enough exits to allow the invading force to proceed inland with as little difficulty as possible. Similarly, the area behind the beaches would have to include a road network adequate to the needs of a force that intended to move rapidly. Since the region would ultimately form a base for the drive across France toward Germany, a series of large ports would also have to be close enough to facilitate the unloading of the massive quantities of supplies and ammunition that would be necessary to sustain the attack.

The most appropriate location, COSSAC's planners decided, lay directly across the English Channel from Dover in the Pas de Calais region. The area fulfilled many of the Allies' requirements and offered a direct route into the heart of Germany. Since the enemy had recognized that fact, however, and had already begun to construct heavy fortifications along the coast, an alternative had to be found. The most suitable stood farther to the west, along the Normandy coast near Caen and the Cotentin Peninsula. That region contained major ports at Cherbourg and Le Havre and offered a gateway to ports at Brest, Nantes, L'Orient, and St. Nazaire. Allied planners believed that the Germans would undoubtedly sabotage Cherbourg, forcing the invaders to place heavy initial reliance upon the mulberries, but the damage could be repaired and the region itself was less strongly defended than the Pas de Calais. Offering, as well, a satisfactory opening into the French interior, it became the site of the invasion.

====Looking towards Normandy====
As planning continued, both Eisenhower and Montgomery recognized that the three-to-five-division assault COSSAC had envisioned would have to be strengthened and spread over a larger area. Looking toward the early capture of Cherbourg and the secure flow of supplies that port would ensure, Montgomery argued in favor of a broad attack somewhat west of Caen. Stretching from the area below that city into the region beyond the town of St. Martin-de-Varreville, the front he envisioned would have a breadth of some sixty miles. When Morgan's planners responded that a bridgehead of that size would require resources far in excess of those available, Montgomery asserted that nothing less would work and that the Allies would either have to find the means or another commander.

Montgomery's insistence led to a sometimes acrimonious debate over the value of ANVIL, a plan to invade southern France that Eisenhower wanted to schedule simultaneously with OVERLORD. The invasion's planners considered the attack important and the conferees at Tehran had endorsed it, but the British — particularly Churchill — had never seen its merit. Hesitant at first to cancel the operation because it seemed a necessary diversion for the main effort in the Cotentin, Eisenhower in the end agreed to a postponement. Given the enlarged scope of OVERLORD, no other alternative seemed possible. There were too few landing craft to go around.

Although the debate over ANVIL continued, by 23 January 1944 the Allies had settled on a basic plan of attack for Normandy. The Americans would take the western flank closest to Cherbourg while the British operated to the east, on the approaches to Caen. Logistics determined the arrangement. American forces had arrived in Britain via the country's western ports and had positioned depots in those areas. It made sense for them to operate near those bases. In addition, responding to the congestion in Britain's ports brought on by preparations for the invasion, American logisticians planned to load ships in the United States for direct discharge onto the beaches of France, without an intermediate unloading in Britain. The western flank was closer to that line of supply.

====Finalizing the plan====
On the night before the invasion, the U.S. 82d and 101st Airborne Divisions would land by parachute and glider near the town of Ste. Mere-Eglise, securing the roads that led from the shoreline and obstructing enemy efforts to reinforce beach defenses. The next morning Bradley's First Army would arrive. The VII Corps would put the U.S. 4th Division ashore on UTAH Beach near les Dunes de Varreville.

To the east, the V Corps, composed of the U.S. 1st and portions of the 29th Infantry Divisions, would land on OMAHA Beach near the town of Vierville-sur-Mer. With a foothold secure in Normandy, V Corps would expand the beachhead to the south while VII Corps cut across the Contentin Peninsula and then wheeled north to capture Cherbourg. With the seaport in hand, VII Corps was to turn south and move toward the town of St. Lo. Once Bradley held the town and the St. Lo-Periers Road, he would have his army on dry ground suitable for offensive operations by mechanized forces. Patton's Third Army would then take to the field. Advancing into Brittany, it would seize Brest and other ports and cover the south flank when the First Army began an attack to the northeast toward Paris. To the east, the Second British Army would operate in the region between Bayeux and Caen, an area that possessed suitable sites for airfields and that offered a relatively unimpeded route to Paris. As in the American sector, an airborne division, the British 6th, would secure the northeastern flank of the operation, dropping during the hours before dawn near Caen and the mouth of the Orne River. At H-hour, the British 50th Division under the British 30 Corps would come ashore on GOLD Beach, near Bayeux and the American zone, while 1 Corps conducted a two-pronged attack farther to the east. There, the 3d Canadian Division would cross JUNO Beach near the town of Courseulles and the British 3d Division would come ashore at SWORD, near Lion-sur-Mer. "In the initial stages," Montgomery told his officers, "we should concentrate on gaining control quickly of the main centres of road communications. We should then push our armoured formations between and beyond these centres and deploy them on suitable ground. In this way it would be difficult for the enemy to bring up his reserves and get them past these armoured formations."

Over all, Allied planners intended to gain a lodgment between the Seine and Loire Rivers. Assuming that the Germans, after initial resistance, would choose to withdraw their forces behind the natural barrier provided by the Seine, they estimated that the task would take about ninety days. After a pause to regroup and resupply, the Allies would then begin an advance into the regions beyond the Seine and toward Germany.

====Troop buildup in England====
As planning continued, the BOLERO buildup in Britain, begun in 1942 to arm and provision the invasion, took on new momentum. With 39 divisions slated to participate in the invasion—20 American, 14 British, 3 Canadian, 1 French, and 1 Polish—along with hundreds of thousands of service troops, there was little time to waste. The number of U.S. fighting men based in Great Britain alone would double in the first six months of 1944, rising from 774,000 at the beginning of the year to 1,537,000 in the week preceding the final assault. More than 16 million tons of supplies would be needed to feed and supply those men and their allies: six and one-quarter pounds of rations per day per man; 137,000 jeeps, trucks, and half-tracks; 4,217 tanks and fully tracked vehicles; 3,500 artillery pieces; 12,000 aircraft; and huge stores of sundries—everything from dental [[amalgam]] for fillings to chewing gum and candy bars.

Quarters and depots to house the entire force mushroomed across the English countryside, many in just the seventeen weeks that preceded the invasion. The fields of Somerset and Cornwall became armories for the vast stores of bombs and artillery shells that the operation would require. The congestion extended to Britain's harbors, where ships laden with more supplies stood by. By the day of the attack, besides the immense force of fighting ships that would land the troops in Normandy and of cargo vessels that continued to ply Atlantic supply routes, more than 3 million deadweight tons of merchant shipping were in direct service to the invasion. The huge size of the buildup notwithstanding, landing craft were in such short supply that Eisenhower postponed the invasion for one month, from May to June.

While logisticians laid the base for the invasion, the Allied air forces opened the way for the attack itself by waging massive bombing campaigns in Germany and France. In Germany, between January and June 1944, Allied fighters swept the skies clear of German warplanes and took a heavy toll in pilots. As a result, by June 1944 the enemy lacked both the aircraft and the airmen to mount more than a token resistance to Allied plans.

==Deception==
Meanwhile, in France, as members of the French resistance cut railroad tracks, sabotaged locomotives, and targeted supply trains, Allied aircraft bombed roads, bridges, and rail junctions to prevent the Germans from moving reinforcements toward the invasion beaches. To deceive the enemy's intelligence agencies, the attacks occurred along the entire length of the Channel coast. By June, despite intelligence reports questioning the value of the attacks, all rail routes across the Seine River north of Paris were closed; the transportation system in France was at the point of collapse.

Deception was, indeed, a major part of the Allied campaign plan. To mislead the Germans into believing that the Pas de Calais, rather than the Cotentin, would be the site of the invasion, Eisenhower's staff created a mythical 1st Army Group, with an order of battle larger than that of Montgomery's 21st Army Group. Basing the phantom force near Dover, just across the Channel from the supposed target, the planners then set construction crews to building dummy installations of plywood and canvas and dotted them with an array of inflatable tanks and vehicles. They also anchored a vast armada of rubber landing craft in the Thames River estuary, where German reconnaissance aircraft were certain to spot them. Eisenhower assigned Patton, the American general the Germans most respected, to command the phantom army and saw to it that known enemy agents received information on the status of Patton's force. Allied naval units conducted protracted maneuvers off the Channel coast near the location of the shadow army, and components of Patton's fictitious command indulged in extensive radio trafficking to signal to German intelligence analysts that a major military organization was functioning. A careful plan of aerial bombardment complemented the ploy. During the weeks preceding the invasion, Allied airmen dropped more bombs on the Pas de Calais than anywhere else in France.

To protect the date of the invasion from prying German eyes, the Allies called it [[D-Day]], which carried no implications of any sort. NEPTUNE, the code name they used in place of OVERLORD on planning documents after September 1943, was similarly devoid of connotation. Although American commanders doubted that their ruses would have much effect, their schemes succeeded far beyond expectations. The Germans became so convinced that the Pas de Calais would be the Allied target that they held to the fiction until long after the actual attack had begun. As a result, nineteen powerful enemy divisions, to include important panzer reserves, stood idle on the day of the invasion, awaiting an assault that never came, when their presence in Normandy might have told heavily against the Allied attack.

==German planning==
For their part, enemy forces labored against problems generated by a long war and an autocratic political system. In May 1942 the Germans had adopted a policy that gave the Russian Front first priority for troops and garrisoned the west with those who, because of wounds or other disabilities, were unable to endure the rigors imposed by that theater. Over the year that followed, twenty-two infantry and six armored divisions left France for the Eastern Front, along with the best equipment and men from the divisions that stayed behind. They were replaced by soldiers who were over-age or convalescing from wounds and by units composed of Russian, Italian, and Polish defectors. A few first-line units were present on the Western Front, but most of the rest had been shattered in the east and required replacements and refitting. The weapons they used were often leftovers. The artillery, for example, consisted of more than twenty types of guns, many of Czech or French rather than German manufacture. Training lagged because the men were frequently employed in crash efforts to build fortifications rather than in exercises to sharpen their combat skills.

In theory, the German chain of command in the west was an example of good order. [[Adolf Hitler]] served as supreme commander of the Wehrmacht, the nation's armed forces. The High Command (OKW), led by Field Marshal [[Wilhelm Keitel]], ran the war everywhere except in the Soviet Union. Navy Group West and the Third Air Fleet, in turn, managed Germany's naval and air forces in Western Europe while the ground force, some 58 divisions, came under the Oberbefehlshaber West (OB West), headed by Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt. OB West controlled two army groups, Army Group G. which had charge of the Mediterranean and Atlantic coasts of France, and Army Group B under Field Marshal [[Erwin Rommel]], who had charge of anti-invasion forces along the Channel coast as far south as the Loire River. Rommel commanded two armies: the 15th, guarding the Pas de Calais and the Normandy coast to a line just south of the Seine River with 19 divisions (5 panzer), and the 7th, with 13 divisions (1 panzer), covering the coast from the boundary with the 15th Army to the Loire River.

====German weakness====
So logical on paper, those arrangements masked conditions in the field that were close to Byzantine. Using the operations staff of OKW as an intermediary, Hitler exercised direct control over Rundstedt's OR West. In theory a theater commander, Rundstedt had no authority over air force or naval units based within areas under his jurisdiction. The navy commanded most of the coastal artillery that would be called upon to repel an Allied attack, and the air force controlled the bulk of the antiaircraft and parachute units stationed in the region. Some armor units also came under the administrative supervision of the SS (Schutzstaffel), the elite political army that answered first to Hitler and Berlin rather than to its supposed commanders in the field.

The manner in which Rommel exercised authority at Army Group B was symptomatic of the debilities afflicting the German staff. Subordinate in theory to Rundstedt, Rommel was his equal in rank. Much more forceful than Rundstedt in personality, he came to exercise far more influence than his position would normally have dictated. In addition, as a field marshal, he had the privilege of communicating directly with Hitler outside the chain of command. Thus he had the ability to undercut his superior whenever he wished.

Rommel disagreed with Rundstedt over how best to repel an Allied invasion. Rundstedt placed great reliance on mechanized reserves that could respond quickly and flexibly to an enemy thrust. To that end, he stationed a newly created armored command, Panzer Group West, near Paris. From there, the force could move, as circumstances required, toward the site of an enemy assault in either the Pas de Calais or Normandy.

Understanding the ability of the Allied air forces to isolate a battlefield and inhibit the movement of ground troops, Rommel believed Allied air superiority in France prevented the sort of mobile response Rundstedt envisioned. If Eisenhower's forces gained even the barest foothold on the Continent, he reasoned, they would win the war. To prevent that, German forces would have to repel the invasion at the water's edge through the use of well-dug-in and stationary troop formations on the shoreline. Directing his efforts to that end, Rommel built beach defenses, laid down minefields, and constructed obstacles to entangle Allied landing craft before they reached land. He also applied personally to Hitler, over Rundstedt's head, for control of the panzer divisions he believed he needed to reinforce his design.

Hitler temporized. Agreeing to Rommel's request at first but then returning control of the reserves to Rundstedt when the latter objected, he finally compromised between the two approaches. Three of Panzer Group West's divisions went to Rommel, but OKW maintained control over four others that were to operate as a central reserve. Hitler's caution satisfied neither field marshal and deprived each of the decisive authority over armor that would become critical as the battle for France evolved.

The malaise gripping the Wehrmacht might have made little difference if Hitler had been more forceful in preparing for the inevitable invasion. Although his generals, misled by the Allied deception plan, believed that the main Allied assault would come in the Pas de Calais, he thought that the attack would occur near Caen, and he said as much during March. Yet he failed to push the idea with any vigor, perhaps because he doubted his intuition in the face of his generals' certainty. Lacking any impetus from Hitler, his subordinates took no action on his insight. Based on Allied naval activities, Germany's naval commander in France likewise predicted the true site of the invasion but also neglected to take adequate precautions. He reasoned that the Allies had yet to concentrate the weight of their air power on targets in the region and so were obviously unprepared to carry out the attack.

The ruse enacted by Patton's nonexistent 1st Army Group was not the only reason that German commanders failed to deduce the correct location of the Allied attack. By 1944 Britain's secret services had deprived Germany of its eyes by identifying and either turning or eliminating virtually every enemy agent assigned to their shores. Meanwhile, Allied warships had rendered German naval patrols in the English Channel ineffective, and Allied bombers had destroyed most of the German radar units that might have monitored air and naval traffic near the invasion beaches. A German spy working in the British embassy in Ankara had provided his mentors in Berlin with the code name for the invasion—OVERLORD but the revelation apparently carried little weight and led to no concrete action. German intelligence had also managed to learn that the British Broadcasting Corporation would transmit two lines of a poem by the nineteenth century author Paul Verlaine to warn the French Resistance that the attack was imminent. Even so, that finding was of little use without firm indications of where and when the invasion would occur.

The Luftwaffe might have made the difference by conducting reconnaissance flights over the coastal regions of Great Britain. The Allied buildup was proceeding at a frenzied pace, mainly in the south of England opposite Normandy. Yet no flights of the sort occurred during the critical early months of 1944. German air commanders were preoccupied with the wounds inflicted upon their forces by the Allied bombing campaign and loath to waste valuable pilots on an exercise that, given their enemy's air superiority, would spell virtually certain death for most of those involved.

Despite the impediments dogging German forces, Rommel and Rundstedt still possessed a number of tangible assets that would work to their advantage once the invasion began. The terrain in Normandy where the Allies would land consisted of small fields and pastures ringed by dense, tangled shrubbery, the so-called bocage. Each of them constituted a natural fortification and killing ground. In the same way, the overarching limbs of trees sheltered many rural lanes in the area. German commanders could use those byways as hidden corridors to move men and supplies. Even large, open areas were easily defended. Rommel peppered those that were suitable for the landing of gliders and paratroopers with mines, booby-trapped wooden stakes called Rommel's asparagus, and other obstructions. Since the regions near the mouths of Normandy's rivers and streams were often reclaimed marshlands, the field marshal had his engineers return them to their natural state by opening dikes and floodgates that held in check spring overflows. The deep inundations that followed would claim a number of the paratroopers who dropped into Normandy on the night of the invasion and would inhibit efforts to close the gap between the American forces fighting on OMAHA and UTAH Beaches.

For Hitler and his generals, the invasion represented a moment filled with danger and opportunity. If they failed, German defeat would become inevitable, but if they succeeded they would eliminate for a year or longer any threat to their power from the west. That would enable them to move the bulk of their divisions to the Russian Front, where their forces were sorely pressed. If the approach of the Normandy invasion thus evoked anxiety on the part of the Germans, it was also a source of high expectation.

==The invasion==
As the day of the invasion approached, the weather in the English Channel became stormy. Heavy winds, a five-foot swell at sea, and lowering skies compelled Eisenhower to postpone the assault from 5 to 6 June. Conditions remained poor, but when weathermen predicted that the winds would abate and the cloud cover rise enough on the scheduled day of the attack to permit a go-ahead, Eisenhower reluctantly gave the command. Expecting casualties of up to 80 percent among the airborne forces, he traveled to an air base at Newbury to bid farewell to the members of the 101st Airborne Division before their tow planes and gliders carried them off to battle. A newspaper man who accompanied Eisenhower later told friends he had seen tears in the general's eyes.

The weather actually worked to the Allied advantage. The BBC broadcast the lines from Verlaine's poem indicating commencement of the attack — ''"Blessent mon coeur d'une longueur monotone"'' ("The violins of autumn wound my heart with monotonous languor") — a code alerting the French Resistance that the invasion was imminent. Rommel's Army Group B headquarters in Normandy did nothing. The weather was so foul that no one believed an invasion possible. Indeed, many commanders at 7th Army had already left for Brittany to participate in an exercise designed, ironically, to simulate an Allied landing in Normandy. Rommel himself was in Germany celebrating his wife's birthday.

====Landing of airborne units====
[[Image:D-day 2.jpg|200px|thumb|right|Soldiers using German tank traps as cover]]
As planned, airborne units led the invasion. Shortly after midnight the British 6th Airborne Division dropped northeast of Caen, near the mouth of the Orne River, where it anchored the British eastern flank by securing bridges over the river and the Caen Canal. On the other side of the invasion area, the U.S. 101st and 82d Airborne Divisions dropped near Ste. Mere-Eglise and Carentan to secure road junctions and beach exits from which the VII Corps could push to capture Cherbourg.

Some of the American airborne troops came to ground near their objectives, but most were scattered over a wide area. A number drowned in the flooded lowlands. Others landed in the midst of German positions, where they were killed or captured. In the hours that followed, nevertheless, paratroopers from the 101st succeeded in clearing much of the way for VII Corps' move inland. The 3d Battalion, 505th Infantry, of the 82d Airborne Division meanwhile captured Ste. Mere-Eglise and cut the main enemy communications cable to Cherbourg.

Other units, entangled in the thickets and hedgerows of the region, failed to achieve their objectives, but by their very presence they sowed confusion in German ranks. Reports began to surface in enemy headquarters all along the line that paratroopers were landing, but little information was available to commanders on the size and meaning of the attack. Was it a probe to test Germany's defenses, a diversion for a larger assault in the Pas de Calais, or the long-awaited invasion itself? The Allies added to the confusion by parachuting dummies wired with firecrackers far to the rear of German positions. The trick drew major enemy units away from the landing zone, where their presence might have done considerable damage to the attackers.

As dawn neared, bombers began to strike up and down the coast, flying the first of what would become, by the end of the day, more than 11,000 sorties against enemy batteries, headquarters, railroad junctions, and troop concentrations. The gliders Eisenhower had watched depart also arrived. Those of the British landed on target as did most of those from the U.S. 101st Airborne Division. Fewer than half of the gliders assigned to the U.S. 82d Airborne reached their assigned landing zones. The rest lodged in hedgerows, struck German obstructions, or floundered in the swollen marshes. By midmorning, 4,000 men of the 82d were still unaccounted for, along with 60 percent of the equipment they had carried.
Although convinced that the disturbances were a diversion for an assault to come in the Pas de Calais, Rundstedt, at 0400 on 6 June, ordered two panzer divisions to move immediately toward Caen to guard against Allied amphibious operations in support of the airborne attack. The units, however, were in OKW reserve. Informed of the order, Rundstedt's superiors at OKW placed it on hold until Hitler himself could concur. Since he was asleep and disliked being awakened, approval took many hours to come and stalled what might have been a powerful German response. The few officers of Rommel's staff present in the area were more energetic. When they learned during the early morning hours that an enormous Allied fleet was approaching the coast, they ordered the 21st Panzer Division to Caen.

By first light at 0530, the entire horizon off Normandy between Caen and Vierville-sur-Mer had filled with the invasion armada. "They came, rank after relentless rank, ten lanes wide, twenty miles across, five thousand ships of every description," wrote one reporter that morning: "Coast Guard cutters, buoy-layers and motor launches," and "a formidable array of 702 warships." The naval bombardment began at 0550, detonating large German minefields and destroying many blockhouses and artillery positions.

====The Normandy landings====
Emerging from behind a screen of smoke, three German torpedo boats attempted briefly to contest the attack, but only one inflicted any damage, sinking the Norwegian destroyer ''Svenner''. It was the sole contribution of the German Navy to the fight that day. The Luftwaffe was equally absent, leading one young soldier to comment later, "We were all more or less expecting...dive bombers...continually backed by high level bombing. But no, nothing like that...The Luftwaffe is obviously smashed."

The Allied bombardment ended precisely on schedule but the landing craft ran late, giving the Germans a brief respite before the troops came ashore. That complicated matters for the British 1 and 30 Corps when they arrived on GOLD, JUNO, and SWORD Beaches at 0700 and for the American VII Corps, which began to debark on UTAH at 0630. On GOLD, the British 50th Division encountered intense German fire at first but rapidly worked its way forward and moved off the beach. On JUNO, the 3d Canadian Division also experienced early difficulties but by the end of the day had reached the Caen-Bayeux highway, inland from the landing zone. Confusion reigned on SWORD, where delivery schedules slipped and succeeding waves of landing craft piled a jumble of men and vehicles at the water's edge. Even so, the troops on SWORD were off the beach within an hour of landing and by dark had joined up with the forces of the British 6th Airborne Division. British and Canadian forces failed to seize Caen because the Germans threw the weight of their resources and their only available armored division, 21st Panzer, into the defense of the city, but they, too, had established themselves well ashore.

The forces that arrived on UTAH also performed ably. Elements of the 4th and 24th Cavalry Squadrons (132 men) of the 4th Cavalry Group landed on the St. Marcouf Islands flanking the beach at 0430, two hours in advance of the main attack. Directed to clear enemy minefields, control points, and observation posts, they found the islands heavily mined but otherwise unoccupied. During the main attack, German artillery managed to sink the U.S. destroyer Corry; swift currents carried the landing craft of the 4th Division well to the south of their target onto a portion of the beach that was only lightly defended; and thirty-two amphibious tanks assigned to land in the first wave of the attack were delayed by the loss of a control vessel that struck a mine. Those setbacks notwithstanding, the assaulting troops quickly took the upper hand. Within three hours the enemy force defending the beach had surrendered and Allied troops and supplies were moving inland. In all, some 23,000 men came ashore at UTAH, at a cost for the day of 197 casualties among the ground forces.

Many men distinguished themselves that morning, among them the 4th Division's Assistant Division Commander, Brig. Gen. Theodore Roosevelt, Jr. Going ashore with the first wave, Roosevelt contributed materially to the success of his forces by personally reconnoitering the area inland from the beach. He then returned to the beachhead time and again, without concern for his own life, to lead groups of his men over a seawall through enemy fire to safety. He earned a [[Medal of Honor]] for his gallantry.

====Omaha====
If the attack went well on UTAH, the situation was quite different on OMAHA. Maj. Gen. Leonard T. Gerow's V Corps came up against the worst conditions encountered that day. High seas swamped many landing craft during the ten-mile run from mother ships to shore. Survivors reached land seasick and wobbling. Well over half (fifty-seven of ninety-six) of the dual-drive amphibious tanks assigned to the landing also went down, victims of heavy seas they had not been designed to withstand. Strong winds and adverse currents likewise pushed a significant number of landing craft away from their designated targets, into areas where commanding officers' maps were useless and supporting fires from friendly ships totally lacking.

Bombing attacks by Allied aircraft and assaults by naval gunfire designed to soften enemy positions did little to improve the situation. Blinded by heavy clouds and concerned lest poorly aimed bombs strike the landing force on the beach, bomber pilots overshot their targets and dropped their loads up to three miles inland. Naval gunners had difficulty zeroing in on their targets. Most of the radios required by artillery spotters ashore had gone down with landing craft that never reached the beach.

OMAHA itself was a tangle of obstructions: concrete cones, slanted poles, logs tilted seaward with mines lashed to their tips, and steel rails welded together at angles and so strongly set into the beach that their ends would stave in the bottoms of landing craft. The Germans had also made good use of a line of cliffs, four miles long and up to one hundred fifty feet in height, that paralleled the length of the landing zone. Dotting the ravines and draws that led through the bluffs with antitank and antipersonnel mines, they had scattered blockhouses, bunkers, and machine gun nests in strategic locations where they could dominate the shoreline below. Unknown to the Americans, the highly disciplined 352d Infantry Division manned many of those fortifications. Its presence in the area had been suspected by some intelligence analysts, but the evidence they presented had proved too uncertain to affect planning for the attack.

The effort to destroy the enemy's beach obstacles was only marginally successful. In the vanguard of the attack, members of the 6th Engineer Brigade and naval demolition units attempted to cut avenues of approach to the beach by blasting lanes through the obstructions. Despite a series of mishaps—of 16 bulldozers, for example, only 3 survived enemy fire and I was prevented from maneuvering freely by American riflemen who sought shelter from incoming rounds in its lee—they succeeded in opening six complete gaps. Even so, they could mark only one for use during high water because all the buoys and poles designated for that purpose had been destroyed by enemy artillery. Casualties for the engineering task force ran to 40 percent, most incurred in the first half-hour of the attack.

As the day lengthened, those conditions combined to produce a near-inferno on OMAHA. Enemy mortar and artillery batteries, unscathed by Allied fire, poured destruction upon the attackers while the invading force time and again appeared to fumble. Allied rocket ships responded, but from extreme range. When their missiles fell short, they hit the troops on the beach. Wreckage at the water's edge accumulated as timetables slipped and landing craft became hopelessly entangled in the barbed wire and projecting beams of uncleared beach obstructions. Even those craft that succeeded in ramming their way forward encountered difficulties. Riding a rising tide, most grounded on unforeseen sandbars located 50 to 100 yards from the surf's edge. There, enemy machine guns claimed a heavy toll of the debarking troops, who had to wade to shore with all their equipment through water that was often neck deep. In the end, perhaps a little more than one-third of the first wave of attackers reached dry land. Lacking most of their heavy weapons, those survivors had little choice but to huddle behind sand dunes and in the lee of a small seawall that ran along the base of the beach. Many soldiers were killed outright, but some, wounded and unable to move, drowned as the tide moved in.

The Germans were elated. Convinced that the attack was faltering, the commander of the 352d Division transferred some of his reserves to the east, where the British appeared a greater threat. General Bradley was distressed and for a time debated whether to cancel the assault and to move the remainder of his force to UTAH Beach.

If chaos ruled at first, order asserted itself as the day lengthened. In some areas, heavy smoke from grass fires and exploding ammunition obscured landing zones and blinded enemy gunners, allowing the attackers to advance largely unopposed. Here and there, as well, tanks arrived, rolling off landing craft that had somehow plowed their way through the obstacles. Bringing their guns to bear, they began to provide the fire support the men on the beach required. The remnants of three companies of Rangers who had come ashore with the first units also did good work. Assigned to destroy a battery of six partially casemated 155-mm. guns thought to be positioned atop a promontory named the Pointe du Hoe, those highly disciplined infantrymen scaled the nearly l00-foot height and cleared it of its German defenders. Although the guns had been moved a few hundred yards inland the Rangers still managed to spike them. They then held their position for two days against waves of counterattacking Germans, incurring losses that would reduce their combat effectives to about ninety men before reinforcements finally arrived.

Unit cohesion had disintegrated among the troops on the beach, especially within the inexperienced 29th Division, but leaders of all ranks asserted themselves and saved the day. "Two kinds of people are staying on this beach," the commander of the 1st Division's 16th Infantry Regiment, Col. George A. Taylor, exclaimed to his men, "the dead and those who are going to die. Now let's get the hell out of here." The sergeants were especially abrupt. Resorting to curses they had hoarded for years, they exhorted their men to get off the beach. The 29th Division's assistant commander, Brig. Gen. Norman D. Cota, was particularly effective. Ignoring enemy fire, he moved up and down the shoreline among his troops, cajoling, rallying, urging them forward through the bluffs.

As the invaders reorganized, Allied destroyers moved close to shore. Risking grounding and almost point-blank fire from enemy batteries, they raked the cliffs with their guns. More and more landing craft also pushed their way to the beach, bringing new troops, heavy weapons, radios, and ammunition.

====The push inland====
Although victorious against the first wave of invaders at OMAHA, the Germans could do little when the force on the beach began to renew itself. With many of their troops off in pursuit of the dummy paratroopers the Allies had dropped far to the rear, they could hold their own from fixed positions but lacked the numbers to drive the invaders back. Thus the Americans kept the ground they gained. Inch by inch they moved forward, up through the bluffs and onto the flatland above. In the absence of much room to maneuver, their attack had been unoriginal, a straightforward frontal assault, but the weight of their numbers and the enormous volume of supplies and equipment they began to bring to bear made the difference. By nightfall, 34,000 men were ashore on OMAHA. The beach itself was a shambles of burning and disabled vehicles, but almost all of the coastal villages located inland were in Allied hands.

The Germans, for their part, were in far worse condition than they seemed. Rommel's Seventh Army, commanded by Generaloberst Friedrich Dollmann, had succeeded in holding its own, but it had employed all of its resources in doing so and lacked the means to mount the sort of counterattack that might have driven the Allies back. Meanwhile, Hitler and Rundstedt remained reluctant to commit the reserves they held in the Pas de Calais because of the threat Patton's phantom army posed. Even if they had acted, Allied bombers might have decimated the force as it moved along the roads of France into Normandy. In the same way, the enemy retained sizable forces in Brittany, but German commanders refused to use them because a second landing from that direction seemed a clear possibility.

Allied losses had been high: 2,500 men at OMAHA alone, another 2,500 among the American airborne divisions, almost 1,100 for the Canadians, and some 3,000 for the British—more than 9,000 men in all, one-third of whom were killed in action. Even so, the number was less than Allied planners had expected. Concerned that Hitler would respond to the invasion with extreme violence and might even resort to poison gas, Eisenhower's chief surgeon, Maj. Gen. Albert W. Kenner, and the Chief Surgeon of the U.S. Army's European Theater of Operations, Maj. Gen. Paul R. Hawley, had prepared their staffs to process at least 12,000 killed and wounded in the First U.S. Army alone.

By the evening of 6 June 1944, Allied power had prevailed all across the Normandy beachhead. The British had failed to seize Caen. The Americans had yet to secure a lodgment far enough inland to keep enemy artillery from hitting supply dumps and unloading points they were building along the invasion beaches. Yet more than 100,000 men had come ashore, the first of millions who would follow.

==The following days==
In keeping with his concept of a mobile defense, Rundstedt wanted to attack the beachhead but Allied fighter-bombers imposed so many delays on the movement of his reserve panzer divisions that he had little choice but to defer the strike until 8 June. While he waited the units that might have formed the counterattack dribbled in piecemeal, and harried commanders plugged them into the line wherever the need was greatest. Filling gaps and sealing off areas of special concern, they never had a chance to deliver the blow Rundstedt had envisioned. The problem would recur time and again in the days that followed. Allied air interdiction efforts were so effective and enemy forces so hard pressed that German commanders were rarely able to mass enough strength in a single place to make a sustained advance.

Over time, Hitler's inflexibility compounded the problem. On 17 June Rundstedt and Rommel requested their leader's permission to withdraw their forces out of the range of naval gunfire before launching an armored attack on the flank of Montgomery's Second Army. Hitler refused. Convinced that the dogged efforts of soldiers who had stood and fought even when surrounded during the Battle of Moscow in 1941 had averted a German collapse, he believed the same would hold true in Normandy. He forbade his commanders to abandon any position voluntarily and ordered them to hold their ground at all costs. Despite their difficulties, the Germans still made good use of the advantages the bocage offered. They turned the region's sunken lanes into trenches and fortifications. The hedgerows—some more than five feet in height and several feet thick—became traps concealing riflemen, machine guns, and infantrymen armed with antitank weapons.

====The hedgerows====
Because they assumed that the Germans would withdraw toward the Seine and fight a delay along the river's lines, the invasion's planners had concentrated on the challenge of getting ashore and had paid scant attention to the impediments posed by the bocage. As a result, Bradley's First Army was unprepared for the difficulties it faced and paid a steep price for each foot of its advance into the region. The experience of the U.S. 90th Division was a case in point. Faced with hostile fire from an invisible enemy, the unit's commanders found the principles of fire and maneuver nearly impossible to apply in the hedgerows, especially the precept that an attacking force should move just behind its artillery in order to confront the enemy while he is still off balance. The division suffered heavy casualties as a result—150 officers and 2,315 enlisted men during June and 310 officers and 5,188 enlisted men during July. More experienced units also suffered terribly in the bocage. A U.S. Army survey of casualties in portions of the 1st, 4th, 9th, and 25th Infantry Divisions between 6 June and 31 July 1944 found that rifle companies lost nearly 60 percent of their enlisted men and over 68 percent of their officers.

The countryside in the British and Canadian sectors — a relatively open, flat, dry expanse stretching from Caen to Paris — was more favorable for offensive warfare. Paradoxically, those conditions made fighting there perhaps more difficult than in the American sector. The nature of the ground and the strategic importance of the area compelled the Germans to mass the bulk of their panzer units and their best troops in the path of Montgomery's forces. They turned the checkerboard of villages that dotted the region into an interlocking, mortar-and-concrete version of the bocage.

Montgomery's commanders appear to have been little more prepared than the Americans for the sort of resistance the Germans mounted. Poorly versed in combined arms tactics, they allowed their tanks to advance without the protection of accompanying infantry units. That approach gave German soldiers wielding highly effective Panzerfausts (the enemy version of the American bazooka) and teams firing formidable, high-velocity antitank cannons a relatively free hand in dealing with the advancing forces.

What Montgomery intended to do remains shrouded in controversy. Time and again he appeared to delay. The terrain and the heavy weight of the German defenses facing his forces were undoubtedly part of the reason. He may also all along have planned to allow the offensive to develop in the direction that time and circumstance dictated, whether in the American sector or his own. In that sense, it is possible that he decided Bradley's front offered the most opportunities and that his own army should concentrate on holding the enemy in place to allow his ally the fullest latitude. Or he may have thought that Allied advances elsewhere would allow him to achieve his objectives without incurring the level of casualties that had consumed an entire generation of his countrymen during World War I. He had been warned of a shortage of infantry replacements well before D-Day. During July the British Adjutant General had underscored the point by personally traveling to Normandy to notify him that some British battalions had already been divided to fill gaps in the line and that divisions might be next. Whatever the reason, Montgomery's forces, commanded by Lt. Gen. Sir Miles Dempsey, took the town of Bayeux and moved several miles inland but, despite three full-scale attempts between 6 June and 1 July, failed to take Caen.

Montgomery's intentions notwithstanding, British efforts were hardly without effect. The attacks his forces launched bled the Germans of strength they could ill afford to lose and kept the enemy's best units, including the majority of the panzer divisions deployed against the Allied bridgehead, concentrated around Caen. That relieved some of the pressure on Bradley to the west, buying time and room for him to consolidate his beachhead on OMAHA and to turn his attention toward the capture of Cherbourg.

In fact, Bradley needed all the help he could get. With the enemy well concealed in the hedgerows, it took an average of five Americans to displace one German defender. Under normal circumstances, a ratio of three to one would have sufficed. "Prior to invasion33' he later wrote, "we had estimated that the infantry would incur 70 percent of the losses of combat forces. By August we had boosted that figure to 83 percent on the basis of our experience in the Normandy hedgerows." Bradley illustrated his point by noting that, in fifteen days of fighting around St. Lo, the 30th Division sustained 3,934 battle casualties, a loss rate of 25 percent for the unit as a whole but of 90 percent in its rifle platoons, where three out of every four casualties occurred.

====Towards Cherbourg====
The flooded marshes of the Merderet River also hampered American progress, as did a great storm that lashed the English Channel between 19 and 21 June. Besides destroying nearly 500 small craft and beaching another 800 well above the high-water mark, the gale slowed the effort to resupply American forces for a time by ruining the mulberry harbor at OMAHA Beach. On 18 June, just before the storm, Allied logisticians had achieved 72.8 percent of their targeted level of supplies to that date. By 22 June, as a result of the storm, that figure had fallen to 57.4 percent. The buildup in vehicle strength fell over the same period from 66 to 57 percent and in personnel from 88 to 77.7 percent. Nevertheless, those impediments proved only temporary. Bradley's logisticians quickly learned to bring what they needed directly across the beach. By the last week in June, OMAHA was averaging 13,500 tons of supplies per day, 115 percent of planned capacity. UTAH, meanwhile, had achieved 7,000 tons per day, 125 percent of its target.

By 18 June Maj. Gen. J. Lawton Collins' VII Corps had cut its way across the Cotentin Peninsula and had severed all roads leading into Cherbourg. Under orders from Hitler "to defend the last bunker and leave to the enemy not a harbor but a field of ruins," the remnants of five German divisions fought back stubbornly. The fighting around the city's main fortification, the Fort du Roule, embedded in a cliff overlooking the harbor, was particularly intense. Coming under attack on 25 June, the stronghold's defenders leveled heavy fire at the attackers from a number of pillboxes and artillery positions.

The fort held out until the men of the 314th, after capturing the upper battlements, crushed diehard resisters by dropping demolitions into the bastion's lower reaches. Shortly thereafter, the city's commander surrendered but, on orders from Hitler relayed by Rommel, refused to instruct his troops to do the same. American psychological warfare officers turned the trick. Dropping surrender leaflets that emphasized dwindling food supplies within the city, they announced that all who came across should bring their mess kits. That evening, twenty days after the offensive had begun, Cherbourg was in friendly hands.

By then, enemy engineers had so thoroughly demolished the city's harbor that it would take three weeks of rebuilding before the facility could open to even minimal shipping and months before it would be able to handle cargo in quantity. That being the case, the victory still provided a much needed boost to Allied morale. Progress had been so slow that Allied leaders had become concerned the attack might bog down into the sort of crippling stalemate that had prevailed on the Western Front during World War I.

As Allied morale rose, that of the Germans fell lower than ever. Hitler himself was unhappy. Exasperated with Rundstedt's continuing doubts and his desire to pull back to more defensible positions, he replaced the field marshal as Commander in Chief West on 2 July with Field Marshal Guenther von Kluge. Although at first optimistic, Kluge rapidly came to sympathize with Rundstedt's point of view.

The fall of Cherbourg offered only temporary consolation to the Allies. By I July they had established a beachhead 70 miles wide and had brought about a million men and 177,000 vehicles ashore. Yet, except around Cherbourg, their lodgment was in no place more than 25 miles deep, and in most areas it extended little more than 5 miles inland.

====Caen and St. Lo====
On 9 July Montgomery launched a massive air assault against Caen in hopes of clearing the way for an attack the following morning. Four hundred fifty heavy aircraft participated, dropping 2,500 tons of bombs, but the airmen negated most of the effect by releasing their loads well back from the forward line to avoid hitting their own troops. As a result, the city incurred heavy damage but German defenses went largely unscathed. In the two days of desperate fighting that followed, the Germans fought back viciously. Montgomery's forces entered Caen and took half the city but moved no farther. Casualty rates during the battle were appalling. Most infantry battalions sustained losses of 25 percent.

Bradley's advance on St. Lo was also an agony. Daily rains reduced visibility and negated much of the value of Allied air support. As with the British at Caen, the casualty rate was alarming. The 30th Division sustained some 3,000 killed and wounded between 7 and 20 July; the 9th suffered 2,500 between the 10th and the 20th.

Bradley's forces were nonetheless gradually learning how to fight in the bocage. Tank and infantry units began to support each other. The tanks supplied the heavy firepower needed to eliminate the enemy's well-sited firing positions while the infantry kept enemy soldiers with antitank weapons at bay. The tankers also found a way to cross the hedgerows without exposing their vehicles' vulnerable undersides to enemy fire. With huge iron teeth salvaged from German beach obstacles welded to the fronts of hundreds of tanks, they began to bull their way through the hedgerows, taking hours to advance through obstacles that would earlier have required days of fighting to overcome. From then on, the Rhinos, as the men named them, became an invaluable asset to Bradley. They allowed American armor to move across country at will while German tanks had to continue to make do with the roads.

By 15 July American forces had reached the outskirts of St. Lo, but the garrison holding the town refused yield. In a battle that inflicted carnage reminiscent of World War I, the Germans gave ground only gradually, house by house. On one occasion, as a result, American riflemen used a bulldozer to bury three German soldiers who refused to surrender their position. By 18 July the attackers had succeeded. A task force from the 29th Division under General Cota entered the town. Cota carried with him the body of Maj. Thomas D. Howie, who had commanded the 3d Battalion of the 116th Infantry. Several days earlier, Howie and his men had crept undetected through early morning mist to reinforce an isolated battalion less than 1,000 yards from St. Lo. Ordered to move his unit to the eastern edge of the town, despite his own exhaustion and that of his men, Howie had responded without hesitation, "Will do." A few moments later an enemy shell had ended his life. The commander of the 29th Division, Maj. Gen. Charles H. Gerhardt, considered Howie's response an example of the patriotic self-sacrifice that had carried the Army through to that point. By honoring Howie he could remind his men of the perseverance and courage of all those who had given their lives at St. Lo.

On the same day, the British launched a major attack beyond Caen but again allowed their tanks to advance without supporting infantry and failed to inflict a decisive blow. In response Kluge increased the concentration of German troops around the city, adding two armored divisions that might have done invaluable work against Bradley in the bocage. As a result, 7 panzer divisions and 4 heavy tank battalions guarded Caen while only 2 panzer divisions confronted the Americans. Even those forces were sorely depleted. By the last week in July, according to ULTRA intercepts of coded German radio communications, the enemy in Normandy had sustained casualties of more than 100,000 enlisted men and 2,360 officers killed and wounded. On 17 July misfortune touched Rommel himself. Two British Spitfire fighters attacked his open car—ironically, near a village named Ste. Foy de Montgommery—and drove it into a ditch. Thrown from the vehicle, Rommel suffered head injuries so grievous that he had to return to Germany for treatment. Kluge succeeded him, assuming command of Army Group B while retaining his position as Commander in Chief West.

The Allies, for their part, had brought four years of planning and hard work to completion. Exhausted and battle-worn, they had at last reached the Periers-St. Lo road. From there the land was dry and the country relatively open. The final act of the war, the great push through France into Germany itself, could now begin.

==Analysis==
It had been a grim fight. Six weeks of battle had left the Germans disheartened and susceptible to any farther blow the Allies might deliver. "It was casualty reports, casualty reports, casualty reports wherever you went," Rommel told his son Manfred from his sickbed. "I have never fought with such losses...And the worst of it is that it was all without sense or purpose." Indeed, Rommel continued, on some days the equivalent of a regiment of his men had fallen in Normandy—more than in a whole summer of fighting in Africa during 1942.

The days had been filled with mud, heartache, and pain for the Allies as well. From the very beginning, little had seemed to go right. The airborne assault on the night before the landing had sown confusion among the enemy and had provided an important diversion, but too many of the men had landed too far from their targets. As a result, the effort had only a marginal effect on the developing battle. Over the days that followed, rather than withdrawing beyond the Seine as Allied planners had expected, the Germans had hung on tenaciously, taking brutal losses but inflicting them upon the Allies as well. Meanwhile, Montgomery's careful plan for the attack had begun to unravel on D-Day itself. His forces failed to take Caen, the key to further operations in the open country to the south. Attacking time and again as the campaign developed, they had nonetheless held the cream of the German force in place, absorbing pressure that would almost inevitably have fallen upon Bradley's forces in the bocage.

As for the Americans, the landing on OMAHA Beach had been a near-disaster averted only by the courage of unsung sailors and soldiers. When air attacks and naval gunfire had failed to silence German guns and the momentum of the assault had begun to lag, those heroes had pushed their frail landing craft to shore despite the traps and obstacles blocking their way. Rallying to the directions of their commanders, they had then climbed the bluffs overlooking the beach and advanced inland, often at the cost of their own lives. In the same way, although Maj. Gen. J. Lawton Collins' VII Corps captured the port of Cherbourg on 29 June, the American advance bogged down in the hedgerows. Bradley's First Army absorbed forty thousand casualties while slowly advancing twenty miles to St. Lo.

Even so, enough went well for the campaign to succeed. Roosevelt, Marshall, Eisenhower, Churchill, and Montgomery were master communicators who bonded an unwieldy coalition into an extraordinary fighting machine. The plan they and their staffs devised failed to foresee every circumstance that would occur on the battlefield, particularly the difficulties Bradley's forces would encounter in the bocage, but it was still a masterpiece of innovation that provided ample means for Allied commanders to prevail. Cunning deceptions kept the Germans transfixed on the Pas de Calais until long after the real invasion had occurred; Allied airmen swept the skies clean of the enemy fighters and bombers that might have imposed a heavy toll upon the landing force; and the effort to build up the stocks of supplies and munitions necessary for an effective attack succeeded beyond the most optimistic expectation. In the end, notwithstanding, it was the heroism of infantrymen such as Major Howie, who rose day and night to the challenge despite almost overwhelming fear and fatigue, that afforded the critical margin for success.

A barely failed assassination attempt upon Hitler's life, implicating Rommel himself, brought about a purge of officers in Germany that would, for a time, strengthen Hitler's control over his armed forces. Although the Germans would fight on with resilience and determination for another ten months, their line in France would soon break, Patton's army would swing clear, Paris would fall, and Allied forces would approach the Rhine. The loss of France would deprive Germany not only of a major source of Mod, raw resources, and labor but also of seaports that had long sheltered its U-boats and of radar sites that had afforded early warning of Allied bomber attacks. More important, it would provide the Allies with the secure base they needed to launch their final offensive against the German heartland. As Rommel told his son, the future was clear and inevitable. The end of Hitler's Reich was at hand: "There is no longer anything we can do."

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|-
!style=" background-color: #000088; color:white;"|Source:
|style="background-color: none;border-top: 2px solid black"| File available from the {{{1|[[United States Federal Government]] [http://www.history.army.mil/brochures/normandy/nor-pam.htm]}}}.

{{DEFAULTSORT:Overlord, Operation}}
[[Category:World War II]]

Charles I

2011-08-03T11:35:12Z

Darkmind1970:

'''Charles I''' (19 November 1600 – 30 January 1649) was [[King of England]], King of Scotland and King of Ireland from 27 March 1625 until his execution.

Charles struggled for power with the Parliament of England. He firmly believed in the [[Divine Right of Kings]], a belief in monarchial power that had been started by his father King James I, and many in [[England]] feared that he was attempting to gain absolute power at the expense of Parliament.

Religious conflicts were a notable feature of Charles' reign. He married a Catholic princess, Henrietta Maria of France, over the objections of Parliament and public opinion. Many of Charles' subjects felt that he brought the Church of England too close to Roman Catholicism, despite the fact that Charles was himself committed to Anglicanism. Charles' later attempts to force religious reforms upon Scotland, including a new Book of Prayer, led to the Bishops' Wars that weakened England's government and led to his downfall.

His last years were marked by the English Civil War, in which he was opposed by the forces of Parliament and by Puritans, who were hostile to his religious policies and alleged Catholic sympathy. Charles was defeated in the first Civil War (1642 - 1645), after which Parliament expected him to accept demands for a constitutional monarchy. He instead remained defiant by attempting to forge an alliance with Scotland and escaping to the Isle of Man. This provoked a second Civil War (1648 - 1649) and a second defeat for Charles, who was tried and then executed in London for high treason. The monarchy was then abolished and a republic called the Commonwealth of England was declared. Charles's son, Charles II, became King after the restoration of the monarchy in 1660.

King Charles I was canonized by the [[Anglican Communion]] as Saint King Charles, the Martyr, his Feast Day is 30 January.

see [[English Civil War]]

{{Nb_english_monarchs}}

To Be Finished...

[[category:Scottish Monarchs]]
[[Category:British History]]
[[Category:England]]
[[Category:Anglicans]]
[[Category:Saints]]

see [[English Civil War]]

[[category:English Civil War]]

Charles I

2011-02-12T21:26:43Z

Darkmind1970:

'''Charles I''' (19 November 1600 – 30 January 1649) was [[King of England]], King of Scotland and King of Ireland from 27 March 1625 until his execution.

Charles struggled for power with the Parliament of England. He firmly believed in the [[Divine Right of Kings]], a belief in monarchial power that had been started by his father King James I, and many in [[England]] feared that he was attempting to gain absolute power at the expense of Parliament.

Religious conflicts were a notable feature of Charles' reign. He married a Catholic princess, Henrietta Maria of France, over the objections of Parliament and public opinion. Many of Charles' subjects felt that he brought the Church of England too close to Roman Catholicism, despite the fact that Charles was himself committed to Anglicanism. Charles' later attempts to force religious reforms upon Scotland, including a new Book of Prayer, led to the Bishops' Wars that weakened England's government and led to his downfall.

His last years were marked by the English Civil War, in which he was opposed by the forces of Parliament and by Puritans, who were hostile to his religious policies and alleged Catholic sympathy. Charles was defeated in the first Civil War (1642 - 1645), after which Parliament expected him to accept demands for a constitutional monarchy. He instead remained defiant by attempting to forge an alliance with Scotland and escaping to the Isle of Man. This provoked a second Civil War (1648 - 1649) and a second defeat for Charles, who was tried and then executed for high treason. The monarchy was then abolished and a republic called the Commonwealth of England was declared. Charles's son, Charles II, became King after the restoration of the monarchy in 1660.

King Charles I was canonized by the [[Anglican Communion]] as Saint King Charles, the Martyr, his Feast Day is 30 January.

see [[English Civil War]]

{{Nb_english_monarchs}}

To Be Finished...

[[category:Scottish Monarchs]]
[[Category:British History]]
[[Category:England]]
[[Category:Anglicans]]
[[Category:Saints]]

see [[English Civil War]]

[[category:English Civil War]]

Charles I

2011-02-12T21:25:10Z

Darkmind1970:

'''Charles I''' (19 November 1600 – 30 January 1649) was [[King of England]], King of Scotland and King of Ireland from 27 March 1625 until his execution.

Charles struggled for power with the Parliament of England. He firmly believed in the [[Divine Right of Kings]], and many in [[England]] feared that he was attempting to gain absolute power.

Religious conflicts were a notable feature of Charles' reign. He married a Catholic princess, Henrietta Maria of France, over the objections of Parliament and public opinion. Many of Charles' subjects felt that he brought the Church of England too close to Roman Catholicism, despite the fact that Charles was himself committed to Anglicanism. Charles' later attempts to force religious reforms upon Scotland, including a new Book of Prayer, led to the Bishops' Wars that weakened England's government and led to his downfall.

His last years were marked by the English Civil War, in which he was opposed by the forces of Parliament and by Puritans, who were hostile to his religious policies and alleged Catholic sympathy. Charles was defeated in the first Civil War (1642 - 1645), after which Parliament expected him to accept demands for a constitutional monarchy. He instead remained defiant by attempting to forge an alliance with Scotland and escaping to the Isle of Man. This provoked a second Civil War (1648 - 1649) and a second defeat for Charles, who was tried and then executed for high treason. The monarchy was then abolished and a republic called the Commonwealth of England was declared. Charles's son, Charles II, became King after the restoration of the monarchy in 1660.

King Charles I was canonized by the [[Anglican Communion]] as Saint King Charles, the Martyr, his Feast Day is 30 January.

see [[English Civil War]]

{{Nb_english_monarchs}}

To Be Finished...

[[category:Scottish Monarchs]]
[[Category:British History]]
[[Category:England]]
[[Category:Anglicans]]
[[Category:Saints]]

see [[English Civil War]]

[[category:English Civil War]]

Charles I

2011-02-12T21:24:42Z

Darkmind1970:

'''Charles I''' (19 November 1600 – 30 January 1649) was [[King of England]], King of Scotland and King of Ireland from 27 March 1625 until his execution.

Charles struggled for power with the Parliament of England. He firmly believed in the [[Divine Right of Kings]], and many in [[England]] feared that he was attempting to gain absolute power.

Religious conflicts were a notable feature of Charles' reign. He married a Catholic princess, Henrietta Maria of France, over the objections of Parliament and public opinion. Many of Charles' subjects felt that he brought the Church of England too close to Roman Catholicism, despite the fact that Charles was himself committed to Anglicanism. Charles' later attempts to force religious reforms upon Scotland, including a new Book of Prayer led to the Bishops' Wars that weakened England's government and led to his downfall.

His last years were marked by the English Civil War, in which he was opposed by the forces of Parliament and by Puritans, who were hostile to his religious policies and alleged Catholic sympathy. Charles was defeated in the first Civil War (1642 - 1645), after which Parliament expected him to accept demands for a constitutional monarchy. He instead remained defiant by attempting to forge an alliance with Scotland and escaping to the Isle of Man. This provoked a second Civil War (1648 - 1649) and a second defeat for Charles, who was tried and then executed for high treason. The monarchy was then abolished and a republic called the Commonwealth of England was declared. Charles's son, Charles II, became King after the restoration of the monarchy in 1660.

King Charles I was canonized by the [[Anglican Communion]] as Saint King Charles, the Martyr, his Feast Day is 30 January.

see [[English Civil War]]

{{Nb_english_monarchs}}

To Be Finished...

[[category:Scottish Monarchs]]
[[Category:British History]]
[[Category:England]]
[[Category:Anglicans]]
[[Category:Saints]]

see [[English Civil War]]

[[category:English Civil War]]

Talk:Counterexamples to an Old Earth

2011-02-12T16:35:32Z

Darkmind1970:

'''''For older discussions, see the archives: [[Talk:Counterexamples to an Old Earth/Archive 1|Archive 1]].'''''

----


I'd like to take out the phrase "asserted by atheists" from one of the Astronomy counterexamples, because it is not just atheists who believe in an [[Old Earth]] but also [[Old Earth Creationists]]. Any objections? --[[User:Ed Poor|Ed Poor]] [[User talk:Ed Poor|Talk]] 07:37, 20 April 2010 (EDT)

== Freshwater lakes are known to be relatively young. ==

I'd like to have this point removed: The [[Talk:Counterexamples_to_an_Old_Earth/Archive_1#Countering_the_counter_examples|previous discussion]] has shown that it doesn't have any merit.

[[User:FrankC|FrankC aka ComedyFan]] 15:05, 2 May 2010 (EDT)

As no one added to the previous discussion, I removed the point. [[User:FrankC|FrankC aka ComedyFan]] 14:18, 9 May 2010 (EDT)

== continued existence of fragile natural arches ==

That's as bad as the example of the lakes: it reminds me of stating: ''he cannot be old, all his pimples are recent''. And the given references don't mention any ''extrapolation''. [[User:FrankC|FrankC aka ComedyFan]] 14:03, 9 May 2010 (EDT)

== Great Lakes ==

''The massive [[Great Lakes]] are receding in volume too rapidly to have existed millions of years ago''

That would be only a counterexample, if there were any geologist who thought them to be millions of years old. But it seems to be scientific consensus that these lakes were created during the last great ice age ca. 10,000 years ago. [[User:FrankC|FrankC aka ComedyFan]] 14:07, 9 May 2010 (EDT)

== Salt Water Lakes ==

''The existence of inland saltwater lakes, such as [[Mono Lake]] and the [[Great Salt Lake]], suggest a recent global [[flood]]''

No, it doesn't. It just suggests that [[endorheic]] lakes exist - lakes without an outflow to rivers or the ocean. If such a sea has an inflow, any dissolved material (like salts) will accumulate, while the water just evaporates.

[[User:FrankC|FrankC aka ComedyFan]] 14:12, 9 May 2010 (EDT)

== Reply to above 4 comments ==

The 4 comments above are not substantive. In each case, the evidence is that a basic attribute of Earth ''is'' young, and nothing above supports the denial of this fact.--[[User:Aschlafly|Andy Schlafly]] 16:58, 9 May 2010 (EDT)

:No. But they are all counterarguments to the concreteness of your examples. The comments above are all traditionally accepted and easily verifiable scientific theories that offer a more plausible and widely accepted version of what happened than the case you present. Take for example, your point regarding inland saltwater lakes. You make the claim that they can ONLY exist with the aid of a global flood. This is CATEGORICALLY untrue, and demonstrates a dangerous predisposition to jump to conclusions without scientific fact. As mentioned above. The existence of said lakes is attributed to a chemical tendency known as distillation. Water is volatile and salt is not, therefore water evaporates out of the lake until the concentration of salt and other solids is extremely high. You can duplicate this experiment at home by taking a large jug of tap water and allowing it to sit in a hot, bright, dry room for a few weeks. When you return, the tap water will have an extremely high salinity, no ocean water needed.

:Conversely, the claim about a global flood has numerous holes in it. For one, there is no uniform layer of sediment that exists evenly in global geological strata. Such a layer would be inevitable if the world really was entirely submerged for any appreciable period of time. Secondly, and more importantly, there isn't enough water to fill the oceans AND cover the land. A global flood would require that there had once been a lot of water that is no longer present on earth, and this simply can't happen.

:I'm sorry to say, Andy, but YOUR arguments are not substantive.--[[User:LoganBertram|LoganBertram]] 17:02, 29 Sept 2010 (GMT+2)

== What's a counterexample? ==

Maybe we have to start with the question above. I think it is reasonable to expect a ''counterexample'' to have some basic properties:

# it should not be easily - or even obviously - be reconciled or explained within the theory of an ''Old Earth''.
# it should be at least as well be explained within the concurring theory of a ''Young Earth'' and finally:
# the negation of the counterexample should be even more obviously and more easily be reconciled or explained within the theory of an ''Old Earth''.

What are the theories saying? Here are two working definitions...

'''Old Earth''': Since the 18th century, scientist are convinced that the surface of the Earth is changing gradually over long periods of time. So, if there is a somewhat widespread geological feature, we expect that we can observe it in all stages of development.

'''Young Earth''': The surface of the Earth was mainly shaped as we find it now by the Great Flood.

So, how do the examples fit in?

: Frank, the style of your remarks reflect a lack of an open mind towards this issue. You state, "Since the 18th century, scientist[s] are convinced ... over long periods of time." This is an historical distortion, and unhelpful to an open-minded discussion even if were true.

: I welcome open-minded discussions, but closed-minded discussions are often a waste of time. So please show some signs of an open mind about this first. Thanks.--[[User:Aschlafly|Andy Schlafly]] 11:10, 11 May 2010 (EDT)

::I'm all for an open-minded discussion, too, and I'm sorry if my previous comment didn't convey this. So, let's drop the historical aspect, and just say:
::*'''Old Earth''': The surface of the Earth is changing gradually over long periods of time, and the rate of this change is roughly constant.
::*'''Young Earth''': The surface of the Earth was mainly shaped by the Great Flood a couple of thousands years ago.

::But I hope you can agree with the basic properties (points 1-3 above) a ''counterexample to an Old Earth'' should have?
::[[User:FrankC|FrankC aka ComedyFan]] 07:46, 12 May 2010 (EDT)

:::Frank, are you trying to refute any of the counterexamples? (In which case please provide some actual evidence) Your closed-minded insistence on causing argument seems pointless. [[User:ArnoldR|ArnoldR]] 08:34, 12 May 2010 (EDT)

=== The continued existence of fragile natural arches without having collapsed a short time period for erosion and stresses on them ===
''Fragile natural arches'' exist, as there are always formed new ones. Old natural arches collapse, but [http://www.archmillennium.net/Baby_Arch.htm others] may [http://dspace.dial.pipex.com/town/close/kcb60/level2/lith61.html replace] them. What if there were no natural arches? I don't think that anybody had thought of them then.

=== The massive Great Lakes are receding in volume too rapidly to have existed millions of years ago ===
No geologists thinks that these lakes are millions of years old: they were created during the last ice age. Lakes are constantly created (e.g., when rivers change there bed), and happen to perish over time ([[Messel pit]]). Some are older than others ([[Baikal sea]]). The absence of new lakes would be quite puzzling for geologists! And Earth isn't as young as the youngest lake, but much older than the oldest one... (by FrankC)

: The "ice age theory" was a patch to try to explain away the counterexample. The patch fails, however, because freshwater lakes exist near the Equator, too far from any plausible ice.--[[User:Aschlafly|Andy Schlafly]] 00:20, 15 May 2010 (EDT)

::It quite a leap to get from ''Great Lakes were created during the last ice age'' to ''all lakes were created during the last ice age''! There a various mechanisms to form a lake, though in the north (Canada, US, Finland) the ice age is responsible for most of them. I doubt that Young Earth Creationists claim that all lakes were created during the [[Great Flood]], though I assume that they think that no lake is older than this.
::BTW, what do you think of the three basic properties of a counterexample which I mentioned above?
::[[User:FrankC|FrankC aka ComedyFan]] 08:45, 18 May 2010 (EDT)

::: Well, then, the freshwater lakes that were not formed by the (implausible) "ice age" theory serve as a counterexample.

::: As to your suggestion of three basis properties of a counterexample, I comment on each here:

::::1. it should not be easily - or even obviously - be reconciled or explained within the theory of an Old Earth.

:::::This would work if you include a requirement of plausibility.

::::2. it should be at least as well be explained within the concurring theory of a Young Earth and finally:

:::::No, this is not required, but illustrates a basic flaw in Old-Earth-thinking. Do you think mathematicians accept the validity of a hypothesis as long as no competing hypothesis has been proven? Of course not.

::::3. the negation of the counterexample should be even more obviously and more easily be reconciled or explained within the theory of an Old Earth.

:::::This is incoherent, but illustrates the contorted logic of Old-Earth advocates.--[[User:Aschlafly|Andy Schlafly]] 10:39, 18 May 2010 (EDT)

::::::''implausible ice age theory''? What's implausible about that? It just doesn't fit your YEC preconceptions.
::::::# Yes, I include the requirement of plausibility. What's the point of implausible counterexamples?
::::::# Is there a third theory I haven't heard of? If the Earth isn't young, it is old.
::::::# ''This is incoherent, but illustrates the contorted logic of Old-Earth advocates''. No, I'm afraid, that' just obvious common sense.
::::::[[User:FrankC|FrankC aka ComedyFan]] 10:55, 18 May 2010 (EDT)

::::::: Frank, if you're not going to address my substantive points, then please don't respond. I make a direct analogy to mathematical hypotheses and you ignored it. Do you really think a mathematical hypothesis must be true if there is no proof for the converse?--[[User:Aschlafly|Andy Schlafly]] 11:16, 18 May 2010 (EDT)

::::::::I'm sorry, I seem to have missed the substantive points, so I try to make myself clearer by using the language of logic. So, let's '''C''' be a counterexample to the Old Earth Theory ('''OET'''). If '''C''' is true, than '''OET''' should be false, that's the first point:
::::::::'''1: ''' '''C ⇒ ~OET'''. If '''C''' is a good counterexample, than this equation should be obvious for everyone.
::::::::I thought the Young Earth Theory ('''YET''') and the Old Earth Theory to be complementary, so ''' YET = ~OET'''. Therefore obviously
::::::::'''2: ''' '''C ⇒ YET'''
::::::::And from ''1'', one gets
::::::::'''3: ''' ''' OET ⇒ ~C'''
::::::::I hope that this straightforward formulation is less confusing than my verbose ''the negation of the counterexample should be even more obviously and more easily be reconciled or explained within the theory of an Old Earth. '' I formulated it this way, as all this isn't as ''exact'' as one would wish for: what's an obvious relation for one, needs quite an elaborate explanation for another.

::::::::But now for ''The massive Great Lakes are receding in volume too rapidly to have existed millions of years ago ''. As I said before, OET don't claim that these lakes existed millions of years ago, but are quite recent. You then said : '' The patch fails, however, because freshwater lakes exist near the Equator, too far from any plausible ice.'' So, what's your ''counterexample'' now? Do you claim that the OET implies that all lakes are of the same age or were created in the same way? It seems to me that you are saying: ''As there are lakes near the Equator, the Great Lakes are millions of years old - according to OET''. But that's just a [[strawman]], and shouldn't be included in the list.
::::::::[[User:FrankC|FrankC aka ComedyFan]] 10:31, 21 May 2010 (EDT)

=== The existence of inland saltwater lakes, such as Mono Lake and the Great Salt Lake, suggest a recent global flood ===
As said earlier, saltwater lakes are explained easily as being [[endorheic]]. If there were no saltwater seas, then the endorheic basins would have to be very unstable, preventing bodies of water to become older than a couple of hundred years. This would imply quite a geologic activity, which we don't observe. But how do these inland saltwater lakes fit within the theory of a ''Young Earth''? Do you imply that the Earth was inundated by a salty ocean for forty days and nights? How could anything survive - and multiply - on this salty ground when the water receded? To explain these lakes with a global flood poses quite a few problems.
So, this ''counterexample'' is especially unconvincing, as it fails all three basic properties...

=== An extrapolation of time between the collapse of weaker arches with still-standing stronger arches supports a young earth age ===
Has anyone done this extrapolation? Without it, the point is moot.

At the moment, the article impresses with the quantity of examples. But the obvious weakness of some examples distracts from other examples which may have some merit.

[[User:FrankC|FrankC aka ComedyFan]] 09:00, 11 May 2010 (EDT)

== Lakes again ==

*It was repeatedly explained why the ''Great Lakes'' are no countexample to an Old Earth.
*Aschlafly concluded: ''Well, then, the freshwater lakes that were not formed by the (implausible) "ice age" theory serve as a counterexample."''
*Aschlafly, could you reformulate the ''counterexample'' in question? Thanks.
[[User:FrankC|FrankC aka ComedyFan]] 10:49, 1 June 2010 (EDT)

: There are large freshwater lakes near the Equator. Do you think an "Ice Age" formed them also?--[[User:Aschlafly|Andy Schlafly]] 11:10, 1 June 2010 (EDT)

::To quote myself: ''There a various mechanisms to form a lake, though in the north (Canada, US, Finland) the ice age is responsible for most of them. I doubt that Young Earth Creationists claim that all lakes were created during the Great Flood, though I assume that they think that no lake is older than this.'' [[User:FrankC|FrankC aka ComedyFan]] 11:15, 1 June 2010 (EDT)

::: You may quote yourself, but your answer was less than direct. You seem to admit that that the Ice Age did NOT form the large freshwater lakes near the Equator. But I'm confident that any testing done on those lakes will reveal a young age for them also. That defies explanation consistent with an Old Earth theory.--[[User:Aschlafly|Andy Schlafly]] 20:29, 1 June 2010 (EDT)

:::: Pfft, in the 70's [[Liberal|liberals]] were saying that the earth was cooling. Now, its supposedly warming. I wouldn't be surprised if they change their tune about the "Ice Age" in 40 years.

''But I'm confident that any testing done on those lakes will reveal a young age for them also.''

I'm afraid that your confidence is misplaced - the examinations and tests of geologists lead to different results. Let's have a closer look - what lakes are we talking about? Near to the equator - say in the strip between 5° North and 5° South - the number of lakes of considerable size isn't big:
*[[South America]]: none
*[[Indonesia]]: '''Lake Toba''' on [[Sumatra]], '''Lake Tempe''' and '''Lake Poso''' on [[Sulawesi]]. Lake Toba is the largest volcanic lake in the world, resulting from an eruption 69,000 - 78,000 years ago. So, it's older (according to the test of geologists) than the last [[Ice Age]], but fairly young on a geological scale. Lake Tempe is a flood plain of an average depth of 5m, so it's quite volatile in geological standards. Lake Poso is a tectonic lake and regarded as ancient (1 - 2 million years).
*[[Africa]]: Here you find the [[African Great Lakes]], in the area of our interest especially, the [[Lake Victoria]], [[Lake Tanganyika]], [[Lake Turkana]], [[Lake Albert]], [[Lake Kivu]], and [[Lake Edward]]. These are located in the [[Great Rift Valley]], which is - according to geologists - a continental rift zone. Though you may call ''Lake Victoria'' young - as it's only 500,000 old and dried out a couple of times, the other lakes are estimated to be roughly 4 million years old.

All of these lakes are older than the American [[Great Lakes]]. So, I repeat my request: please, remove ''The massive Great Lakes are receding in volume too rapidly to have existed millions of years ago '' from the list of counterexamples:
* it is misleading, as ''atheistic geologists'' don't claim that these lakes ''have existed millions of years ago''
* your alternate approach (''Well, then, the freshwater lakes that were not formed by the (implausible) "ice age" theory serve as a counterexample'') doesn't work neither, as there are ancient (≈ 4 million years) freshwater lakes.
[[User:FrankC|FrankC aka ComedyFan]] 11:47, 2 June 2010 (EDT)

: None of the freshwater lakes are older than 10,000 years, and you cite nothing to the contrary. Carbon dating, for example, repeatedly confirms that even the oldest freshwater sources are young.

: I've answered your question, now how about answering mine below, repeated here for your convenience: do you agree that arguing against your view of creationism is no basis for defending the [[Old Earth]] theory? {{unsigned|Aschlafly}}

::''None of the freshwater lakes are older than 10,000 years, and you cite nothing to the contrary.''
::On the contrary, there is little doubt under geologists that all of the lakes above are not young (with the possible exception of Lake Tempe) . Every textbook on geology will tell you that the oldes of Great African Lakes were formed ≈ 4 mya ago, with Lake Victoria being the youngest of the lot<ref>John Reader, ''Africa'', National Geographic 9/2001</ref>. The [http://www.volcano.si.edu/world/volcano.cfm?vnum=0601-09= Toba event] took place ≈ 70,000 years ago.
::''Carbon dating, for example, repeatedly confirms that even the oldest freshwater sources are young.''
::This doesn't make sense. Carbon dating is only used on relatively young (holecenic) freshwater sources. (More in a separate section)
::''I've answered your question, now how about answering mine below, repeated here for your convenience: do you agree that arguing against your view of creationism is no basis for defending the [[Old Earth]] theory?''
::I thought that I've answered this question, too, but I'll elaborate:
::*no, arguing against one theory doesn't defend the other. But both theories can't be true simultaneously - though both could be false. OTOH, there aren't that many concurring theories out there. And entries like [http://conservapedia.com/index.php?title=Counterexamples_to_an_Old_Earth&diff=784643&oldid=784484 this] of your fellow sysop ''Conservative'' show that on this page, Old Earth Theory and Young Earth Theory are put against each other.
::[[User:FrankC|FrankC aka ComedyFan]] 08:58, 5 June 2010 (EDT)

::: You still don't explain why you have repeatedly argued that an Old Earth theory must be true because you think that your view of creationism is false. I don't know why you include creationism at all in your reasoning, given that you think it is false. Would you expect a mathematician to chant as part of his proof of a difficult problem a statement that another proposed proof is false? Of course not. The Old Earth theory is disproved by the numerous counterexamples, and creationism is irrelevant to that disproof or a reasoned discussion of it.--[[User:Aschlafly|Andy Schlafly]] 14:07, 6 June 2010 (EDT)

== Implausibility of the Ice Age Theory ==

What's implausible about it? The article [[Ice Age]] doesn't say anything about plausibility. [[User:FrankC|FrankC aka ComedyFan]] 10:51, 1 June 2010 (EDT)

: What is implausible is that sheets of ice from the north would carve the Great Lakes in their unique shape, plus the Mississippi bluffs that sometimes face north-to-south, plus other unexpected formations. Has a computer simulation ever duplicated this result? I've never found a paper about such a simulation in my search for one. Have you?--[[User:Aschlafly|Andy Schlafly]] 20:29, 1 June 2010 (EDT)

::I'm not aware of any computer simulation of the formation of the Great Lakes and the Mississippi which encompasses the whole of North America and is granular enough to show features like the bluffs you spoke of - neither for the last [[Ice Age]] nor for the [[Great Flood]].

::The creation of the Great Lakes however can be studied by geologists who examined the history of this area. Their surveys paint an interesting picture of the formation of the Great Lakes ([http://www.emporia.edu/earthsci/student/damery1/gl_form.html here] an introduction).

::[[User:FrankC|FrankC aka ComedyFan]] 11:49, 2 June 2010 (EDT)

::: Frank, you repeatedly reason in an "either-or" manner, as though the only two possibilities are the [[Old Earth]] and your view of [[creationism]]. That's not logical or scientific. Both could be wrong. No mathematician would claim that if one proof is defective then an alternative proof must be correct.

::: If the Ice Age theory provided a plausible explanation for the Great Lakes and other observed formations (such as the Mississippi bluffs), then a computer simulation would be easy to build. But it hasn't been done, which suggests that the Ice Age theory is implausible in explaining all that is observed.--[[User:Aschlafly|Andy Schlafly]] 12:14, 2 June 2010 (EDT)

:::*both could be false, both aren't simulated globally
:::*are you ''confident'' that such a simulation could be easily build? The formation of the Great Lakes has been simulatied - that's something I'm confident of.
:::[[User:FrankC|FrankC aka ComedyFan]] 12:24, 2 June 2010 (EDT)

:::(Could you please answer to my substantive edits in the previous section? Thanks. [[User:FrankC|FrankC aka ComedyFan]] 12:25, 2 June 2010 (EDT))

:::: Computer simulations would be easy to make. scientists clearly have access to computers. If they're so confident of their "theories" why not make an accurate simulation and add that as proof? I think they know there irratioinal beliefs won't help up to scruteny. FrankC, just have an open mind. --[[User:ReligiousRight|ReligiousRight]] 12:36, 2 June 2010 (EDT)

::::: Actually, this PDF contains the results of just such a survey: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_udi=B6V72-48F04CM-26&_user=10&_coverDate=08/20/1990&_rdoc=1&_fmt=high&_orig=search&_origin=search&_sort=d&_docanchor=&view=c&_searchStrId=1478705466&_rerunOrigin=google&_acct=C000050221&_version=1&_urlVersion=0&_userid=10&md5=4e83cc89688e873bc3fa1889ab02a7b4&searchtype=a

:::::Andy, and ReligiousRight, I would suggest you both take your own advice on open-mindedness and try to read it.--[[User:LoganBertram|LoganBertram]] 17:17 29 Sept 2010 (GMT+2)

:::::And, just as a side note: As a programmer, I can assure you that simulating systems that involve literally millions of variables is about as easy as as it sounds.--[[User:LoganBertram|LoganBertram]] 17:17 29 Sept 2010 (GMT+2)

== All carbon dating of water supplies, even the most ancient and the deepest underground reservoirs, result in relatively young ages ==

# All [[carbon dating]] of water supplies, even the most ancient and the deepest underground reservoirs, result in relatively young ages,<ref>http://www.betalabservices.com/PDF/Geyh.pdf</ref> and no water has been found suggesting an Old Earth.

The source doesn't corroborate the claim. The authors of the study seem to be well aware of the limits of [[carbon dating]], and don't try to apply it to pre-Holecene water. And of course, a reservoir can be older than the water it holds (you can't judge the age of the glass by the vintage of the wine!).

Conservapedia's article on [[carbon dating]] highlights the fact that it can't be used to determine ages older than 50,000 years.

nota bene: the source shouldn't be used for ''lakes'' at all: it mentions lakes only in a passing reference to the founder of the science of dating water, Franke and Deevey.

[[User:FrankC|FrankC aka ComedyFan]] 09:08, 5 June 2010 (EDT)

<references/>

:"14C dating of the DIC in palaeowater is indispensable for paleohydrological and palaeoclimatologi-
cal reconstructions and for applied hydrogeological studies. Numerical mass-transport modeling
profits from the improvement of hydrogeological conceptions and the revision of boundary condi-
tions. In the case of non-steady-state recharge conditions, maximum and minimum recharge rates in
the past may be estimated from 14C dates of DIC via numerical modeling.

:14C dates measured from DIC enable the determination of regional geohydraulic parameters and
allow water balances to be checked. In most applications, complementary environmental isotope
analyses of hydrogen and oxygen together with general hydrochemical measurements are recom-
mended to facilitate a comprehensive and thorough interpretation of the 14C dates (Cark and Fritz
1997).

:A primary task towards a significant improvement in the applied 14C dating of groundwater remains
with the development of procedures that will enable 14C activities measured from DIC to be confi-
dently included in the calibration of finite-element and compartmental modeling exercises."

:This is a quote from the conclusion of the paper Andy cited to make his point about C-14 testing. In short, the conclusion says that it is necessary to further develop C-14 testing for dissolved carbons so as to improve our understanding of paleohydrology. The paper never makes concrete assertions about the "age" of the water, just suggestions for a method of testing the organic mater in water to help determine the age of isolated aquifers (NOT LAKES, which would have inconsistent levels due to evaporation and run-off.

:Andy, please start showing more discretion with the scope of your claims, and present better evidence. Bad arguments are a detraction from the integrity of this site, and your posts only end up hurting our argument.--[[User:LoganBertram|LoganBertram]] 17:43 29 Sept 2010 (GMT+2)

== Answer to Aschlafy ==

You asked: ''You still don't explain why you have repeatedly argued that an Old Earth theory must be true because you think that your view of creationism is false. I don't know why you include creationism at all in your reasoning, given that you think it is false. Would you expect a mathematician to chant as part of his proof of a difficult problem a statement that another proposed proof is false? ''

I don't think that the reason for the Old Earth theory to be true is that Young Earth creationism is false. But even if I followed the insinuated reasoning above, that shouldn't influence the topic of our discussion: ''counterexamples to an Old Earth''. On this talkpage, I want to discuss the strengths and weaknesses of these counterexamples.

Just for an analogy. Often, you hear criticism of the infallibility of the Bible phrased as questions like ''Whom did Cain marry?'' ''What's the value of π according to 1 Kings 7:23?''. These questions can be phrased as ''counterexamples to Biblical inerrancy'':

*Cain dwelt in the land of Nod. There were no other people. So he couldn't get a wife.

*The circumference and the diameter of a bronze vessel are given as 30 units and 10 units. Therefore, the Bible claims that π equals 3.

Are these valid ''counterexamples''? Would someone using these examples in a discussion impress his dialog partners? No , of course not! The first one makes a claim (''there were no other people'' - Adam and Eve had other children!) not made in the Bible - therefore erecting a straw-man, the second one talks about the features of a special object: maybe there was a brim? And ''3''' ''is'' an approximation for π.... a These so-called ''counterexamples'' are easily explained within the Biblical framework, and anyone using them shows just his ignorance in these matters. Therefore, repeating them and ignoring the given explanation is just a Mantric exercise for those who chose not to face reality: I hope that we can agree that these ''counterexamples'' are weak, and their weakness can be seen be everyone - believing in Biblical inerrancy or not.

I'm afraid that the same must be said about some of the ''counterexamples to an Old Earth'': the most impressive about them is their number. But the individual examples tend to be quite weak. What happens to a pupil using them in a discussion with his fellow students - or his teacher? He will be faced with further questions and explanations. For instance, look at:

*The massive Great Lakes are receding in volume too rapidly to have existed millions of years ago

Here, the straw-man are the ''millions of years'': no geologist is claiming that the Great Lakes are that old. What do you expect the pupil to answer to this? Should he chose to ignore the explanation and go on to the next point in the list? After a couple of easily refuted points, his public will get weary and start to think that there isn't a good counterexample against an Old Age of the Earth.

To prevent this, you should perhaps elaborate the examples, and give refutations for the explanations of geologists.

[[User:FrankC|FrankC aka ComedyFan]] 11:39, 8 June 2010 (EDT)

:What if we assume that geologists really do think that the Great Lakes were made by icebergs 10,000 years ago instead of 10,000,000? There is still no proof of this, not even a computer model (which I assure you could be easily done). Your argument is much ado about nothing. [[User:NateSmall|NateSmall]] 14:59, 8 June 2010 (EDT)

::See my post responding to this topic earlier. The model is there in the link. Other proof includes any of the numerous geological surveys that can be found by googling the topic in google scholar. Also, "much ado about nothing" is taken from Shakespearian slang for sex crazed. I find the assertion that Frank is a sex addict just because you disagree with him to be insulting.--[[User:LoganBertram|LoganBertram]] 17:49 29 Sept 2010 (GMT+2)

== Observations on some deceitful points in this article ==

Hi. I'm new here after finding this site from a google search on abortion. I also came across this, um, peculiar article. I looked at some of the facts presented and it looks deliberately misleading:

*For example, because freshwater lakes appear to be "young" (subjective term but we'll go with it) has no indication on the age of the earth.

*The earth's magnetic field is indeed declining, but when I go to that NASA site, in the ''same, exact'' paragraph, it says:

{{Cquote|There have been about 170 of these reversals during the last 76 million years according to geological evidence. The time between reversals seems to be growing longer, and is currently about 300,000 years or so. The last one of these happened about 770,000 years ago (0.77 on the graph). We are currently living during a period that has been called the Brunhes Magnetic Chron when the South Magnetic Pole is in the Northern Hemisphere. During the previous Matumaya Magnetic Chron, the North Magnetic Pole was in the Northern Hemisphere! Note that, from the polarity figure, at a time 0.94 million years ago (940,000 years ago) the magnetic field reverse itself by going nearly to 'zero' but then after a few thousand years it recovered and began to increase in strength. During the next 150,000 years it rose to a maximum strength and then began to decline. Notice, also, how fast the magnetic field recovers after it reaches 'zero', in some cases much less than 10,000 years.}}

.. but then the article has:

''Presently, Earth's magnetic field is weakening in strength by 5% every 100 years. ... Not comparable to an old earth''

Kind of deceptive and misleading, if not blatantly lying, no?

Thanks for your feedback, [[User:DouglasM|DouglasM]] 15:45, 8 June 2010 (EDT)

===Another observation===
Religulous Right [http://www.conservapedia.com/index.php?title=Counterexamples_to_an_Old_Earth&diff=786079&oldid=786069 undid] an edit of mine, so I'll explain why I removed it. First off, it's highly speculative and opinionated to an individual:
*Are SAT scores going down everywhere? Is this a pattern? I should think that such a remarkable conclusion should have a reference.
*Personal letters and style of writing does not necessarily reflect intelligence. I'd see this as more of a "times change" event. Not to invoke a response here, but language evolves: compare old english to the english of the 1700s to today: all 3 are very different. Because language and social cues change throughout human history doesn't compare to overall intelligence and thus certainly not to the age of the earth. Thanks [[User:DouglasM|DouglasM]] 19:21, 8 June 2010 (EDT)
: I realize you're new here. However, you can't just walk into somebody's living room and strart deleting their work because you don't approve of it. Either you make your case here or contribute to the project with material before you start deleting stuff. If all new useres starting deleting everything they didn't like we would end up with no material. Also, if you didn't notice, there were four footnotes in the section you deleted. --[[User:ReligiousRight|ReligiousRight]] 19:47, 8 June 2010 (EDT)

::I made my case above, did you not read it? [[User:DouglasM|DouglasM]] 19:50, 8 June 2010 (EDT)

:::Hopefully I can address a few of your concerns here, Douglas.
:::*''Are SAT scores going down everywhere? Is this a pattern? I should think that such a remarkable conclusion should have a reference.'' The only data I could find on this statement is [http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2009/08/26/sat here], which does show a slow and steady decline within the past five years of critical reading skills, while mathematics has stayed steady the past three years. The average high school student's SAT score, given the data, has dropped, though I concede that there is perhaps not enough data to make a definitive statement on the matter.
:::*''Personal letters and style of writing does not necessarily reflect intelligence. I'd see this as more of a "times change" event. Not to invoke a response here, but language evolves: compare old english to the english of the 1700s to today: all 3 are very different. Because language and social cues change throughout human history doesn't compare to overall intelligence and thus certainly not to the age of the earth.'' Style of writing does not necessarily reflect intelligence, but linguistics and grammar do. The spoken word has become—for lack of a better word (heh)—lazy due to either lost interest in proper spoken word or lack of mental ability to comprehend and utilize it. I believe that one's speech capabilities are intertwined with how intelligent he is.
:::In the future, please wait for someone to address your points before making changes to a sensitive article. -- [[User:JLauttamus|Jeff W. Lauttamus]][[User_talk:JLauttamus|Discussion]] 20:05, 8 June 2010 (EDT)

:::: Yes. However, I'm saying make your case BEFORE you start deleting points that could possibly be great insights. We don't want to be engaging in [[Liberal censorship]]. --[[User:ReligiousRight|ReligiousRight]] 19:59, 8 June 2010 (EDT)
Thanks for the aid, RR, but this user has been politely removed from the site. He may return in three days. Until then, RR, may I suggest you do something more productive than bicker with liberals on talk pages? I understand they are infuriating, but trust me, us admins have got it under control. Nothing gets by us. [[User:JacobB|JacobB]][[User talk:JacobB|Shout out!]] 20:03, 8 June 2010 (EDT)
I didn't realize he was a liberal. I thought he just may have been a deluded conservative. Even they make me very angry! But you're right. I'll do something more productive. --[[User:ReligiousRight|ReligiousRight]] 20:09, 8 June 2010 (EDT)

::''Administrators'', RR, will offer instruction to other users, not other editors. Is that clear? I am disturbed by the continual similarities in your observations and those of past users we eventually found not to be of good intentions. Jacob's suggestion for you if far more polite than any I would offer at this moment, as I would have blocked you both for two days. While your contributions are appreciated the same as anyone else editing here, refrain from emulating other editors style, especially administrators, and completely refrain from bombast and unsupported statements, RR. --<big>[[User:TK|'''ṬK''']]</big>/Admin[[User_Talk:TK|/Talk]] 04:38, 9 June 2010 (EDT)

== Sources ==

The sources for some of the ''counterexamples'' highlight their weaknesses:
* [http://www.newsweek.com/id/201582 Newsweek: "An embarrassing little secret of astronomy ...."] is a broken link. I couldn't find the actual article. When stating sources, it is helpful (and add to their credibility) if basic information is given, like the date of the publishing, the name of the author, etc.
* [http://www.unisci.com/stories/20021/0207023.htm "Hubble Shows Galaxy Rotating In The Wrong Direction"] this source doesn't say anything about the age of the galaxy
* http://www.amazon.com/review/R1WTZL8GG4H9K0 is a hint to the review from some Portuguese guy whoe writes about the book ''The Young Earth''. I commented this one out as the [[Conservapedia:Commandments]] state ''Sources should be authoritative works, not merely published opinions by others.''
[[User:FrankC|FrankC aka ComedyFan]] 10:38, 15 June 2010 (EDT)

*I get an error for http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/journal/109865519/abstract?CRETRY=1&SRETRY=0 , too
The reinsertion of the link I took out is somewhat surprising. Could someone define what is to be understood by an ''authoritative work''? [[User:FrankC|FrankC aka ComedyFan]] 11:19, 15 June 2010 (EDT)

:: Frank, your comments are nit-picky stuff. This is a site for the open-minded, earnest search for the truth. A galaxy spinning in a direction opposite to its tail confounds old earth theories, and that problem is not to be dismissed because a reporter didn't fully address it.--[[User:Aschlafly|Andy Schlafly]] 13:22, 15 June 2010 (EDT)

:::Where are you getting this information, Andy? You shoot down other's intuition and demand fact when people oppose you, but you refuse to offer fact, when you've been backed into a corner. That isn't fair. intuition doesn't make an argument. You need REAL sources for these assertions. It isn't nit-picky to say that the links you provide for most citations DO NOT remotely support your point. [[User:LoganBertram|LoganBertram]] 17:54 29 Sept 2010 (GMT+2)

== Newsweek ==

I couldn't find the article in ''newsweek'' - some censorship on their part? I reread the somewhat bizarre discussion in the [[Talk:Counterexamples_to_an_Old_Earth/Archive_1#Instability_of_the_Solar_System|archived talk page]] of this article, and [http://www.google.de/#hl=en&q=%22the+planetary+orbits+will+indeed+become+chaotic%2C%22+laughlin&aq=f&aqi=&aql=&oq=&gs_rfai=&fp=b52ff5a993c4ca35 googling] for the quote ''But the chances of orbits changing with less-than-catastrophic results are greater, notes Laughlin: "the planetary orbits will indeed become chaotic," with "the time required for chaos to significantly degrade the predictability of a system [on] the order of 5 million years."'', I came up with this article on [http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v459/n7248/full/459781a.html Nature]. But the conclusion of this article is somewhat the opposite of the statement made here, as it's abstract states:

''Simulations show that orbital chaos can lead to collisions between Earth and the inner planets. But Einstein's tweaks to Newton's theory of gravity render these ruinous outcomes unlikely in the next few billion years.''

[[User:FrankC|FrankC aka ComedyFan]] 10:54, 15 June 2010 (EDT)

: Our citations to articles are for the factual information provided, and sometimes for well-reasoned arguments, but rarely for reporters' conclusions, which of course can be mistaken or biased.--[[User:Aschlafly|Andy Schlafly]] 11:27, 15 June 2010 (EDT)

::The quote above wasn't from some ''reporter'', but made by Gregory Laughlin (Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics, University of California Santa Cruz, Santa Cruz, California), while your counterexample seems to be based on conclusion of the reporter of Newsweek. The factual information can be found here: [http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v459/n7248/full/nature08096.html Existence of collisional trajectories of Mercury, Mars and Venus with the Earth] and can be summarized as: yes such collisional trajectories exist, but they are even more improbable than thought earlier. [[User:FrankC|FrankC aka ComedyFan]] 11:34, 15 June 2010 (EDT)

:::The basic counterexample that planetary orbits are unstable and chaotic is not refuted by anything factual.--[[User:Aschlafly|Andy Schlafly]] 13:12, 15 June 2010 (EDT)

::::You give excellent advice: ''Our citations to articles are for the factual information provided, and sometimes for well-reasoned arguments, but rarely for reporters' conclusions, which of course can be mistaken or biased''. As I stated above, I couldn't find the piece in ''Newsweek'' anymore. You are aware that reporters of popular magazines tend to prefer a sensational headline over a more level-headed one, i.e. ''doom incoming!'' over ''scientists say incoming doom unlikely''.
::::Fortunately, the very articles the Newsweek's journalist wrote about are still available, and I linked to them in [[Counterexamples to an Old Earth]]. Here, you find the factual information, summarized by Gregory Laughlin:
::::'''Their [i.e. J. Laskar's & M. Gastineau's] work shows that the orbits of the terrestrial planets -- Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars -- have a roughly 99% chance of maintaining their current, well-ordered clockwork for the roughly 5 billion years that remain before the Sun evolves into a red giant and engulfs the inner Solar System''''''
::::Getting from this to ''The planetary orbits in the solar system - including Earth's - are unstable and unsustainable over the very long time periods asserted by atheists'' or ''The basic counterexample that planetary orbits are unstable and chaotic is not refuted by anything factual'' is quite surprising.
::::[[User:FrankC|FrankC aka ComedyFan]] 09:50, 22 June 2010 (EDT)

== Receding Moon ==

''The moon is receding from the Earth at a rate suggesting it would have been too close a billion years ago ''

What's ''too close''? [http://eclipse.gsfc.nasa.gov/SEhelp/ApolloLaser.html According to NASA], the current rate is 3.8 cm/year<ref>[http://eclipse.gsfc.nasa.gov/SEhelp/ApolloLaser.html Measuring the Moon's Distance] ''Apollo Laser Ranging Experiments Yield Results'' by Fred Espenak, GSFC Planetary Systems Laboratory (LPI Bulletin, No. 72, August, 1994.)</ref>. If we assume that this rate is constant, than it gained over the last billion years:

'''1,000,000,000 year × 3.8cm/year = 3,800,000,000cm = 38,000,000m = 38,000km'''

That roughly 10% of the current mean orbital radius of the [[Moon]] of 378,000km!

But the [[Roche limit]] of the system Earth-Moon is 18,000km - even 5 billion years ago the moon would not have been within this critical region.

[[User:FrankC|FrankC aka ComedyFan]] 11:25, 23 June 2010 (EDT)

: 10% off the mean is a huge difference, which would have many dire effects. Note that it is bigger than 10% with respect to the closest distance. Have you looked into that? Also, Old Earth believers claim the age is far older than 1 billion years.--[[User:Aschlafly|Andy Schlafly]] 12:08, 23 June 2010 (EDT)

== Pattern ==

*''The moon is receding from the Earth at a rate suggesting it would have been too close a billion years ago '': that is wrong, a billion years ago, there was no problem with the Moon's orbit, even at the current rate of receding.
*''The massive Great Lakes are receding in volume too rapidly to have existed millions of years ago '': that is deceptive, as geologists don't claim that the Great Lakes existed millions of years ago.
*''The planetary orbits in the solar system - including Earth's - are unstable and unsustainable over the very long time periods asserted by atheists'' That is misleading, as they probability that the solar system maintains stable is 99%.

What is to be achieved by massing up a great number of flawed statements?
[[User:FrankC|FrankC aka ComedyFan]] 11:31, 23 June 2010 (EDT)

:I've addressed your first point in the section above. Your second point does not rebut the truth of the statement. The Great Lakes are very young, and people misled by Old Earth teachings are not typically taught that, or even aware of it. Your third point about probabilities is purely speculative. The solar system is unstable, and that is undeniable.--[[User:Aschlafly|Andy Schlafly]] 12:12, 23 June 2010 (EDT)

::''The Great Lakes are very young, and people misled by Old Earth teachings are not typically taught that, or even aware of it.'' Science isn't about the public misconceptions of a theory, but the theory itself.
::[[User:FrankC|FrankC aka ComedyFan]] 13:33, 26 June 2010 (EDT)

== Links ==
<references />

== Strontium Isotopes ==

The concentration of strontium isotopes in seawater is fluctuating - and the concentration at various times is well known (and tabled). ''Long-term erosion'' is not the only cause of changing concentrations (e.g, have a look [http://adsabs.harvard.edu/full/1989AREPS..17..141V here]), so the assumption of a monotonous process is overly simplistic.

For short: not a good example, neither.

[[User:FrankC|FrankC aka ComedyFan]] 12:49, 26 June 2010 (EDT)

:I added a fact tag, as there doesn't seem to be a source to back up the claim made in this ''counterexample''. [[User:FrankC|FrankC aka ComedyFan]] 11:08, 28 June 2010 (EDT)

== Speculations ==

Dear Andy,
above, you write ''Your third point about probabilities is purely speculative.'' No, it is not - as the quoted article states, the probabilities are calculated using the best current models and the best simulations. So, ''purely speculative'' doesn't fit this point at all!

OTOH, I have to read: ''The moon is receding from the Earth at a rate that would have placed it too close to the Earth merely a billion years ago, causing tidal catastrophes and other problems, and colliding with the Earth before that.'' '''Colliding with the Earth before that'''? Have you done any calculation? Made a simple simulation? I doubt it! In fact, a simple back-of-an-envelope calculation would have shown that the Moon was far from ''colliding'' - even making the assumption of a constant rate of recession!

I'm prone to erase this speculative (or better. factually incorrect) statement, but I don't want to be accused of ''censorship''. Therefore, I just added a <nowiki>{{fact}}</nowiki>-tag, giving you the possibility to back up this sentence with ''facts''.

I'll do the same for the for the entry ''An extrapolation of time between the collapse of weaker arches with still-standing stronger arches supports a young earth age.'', as I couldn't find such an extrapolation anywhere, especially not in the given source.
[[User:FrankC|FrankC aka ComedyFan]] 13:16, 26 June 2010 (EDT)

: Frank, your comments are longwinded, but did you respond to the defect in your comparison of the distance that Moon recedes to its mean distance from the Earth? Obviously the relevant comparison is to the closest distance of the Moon to the Earth. Please respond to that relevant issue.--[[User:Aschlafly|Andy Schlafly]] 18:35, 26 June 2010 (EDT)

::*Assuming a constant rate of recession, I get the following values:
:::{|
|Recession of the Moon over one billion years (assuming a constant rate)||''' 38,000km'''
|-
|Current mean orbital radius:||'''378,000km'''
|-
|Current perigee:||'''363,000km'''
|}
::So, a billion years ago, the [[Moon]] would have been 10.05% (mean orbital radius) or 10.47% (closest distance) nearer to the Earth than it is now. Yes, there are consequence of such a closer distance (e.g., more and greater tidal movements), but I doubt that simple multicellular ocean-based life-forms would bother, so this isn't that relevant, is it?
::*Now, could you address the following problems:
:::#What calculation or simulation accounts for the idea that the Moon would collide with the Earth if its orbit was lowered by 38,000km - or 190,000km (five billion years) - or even 300,000km?
:::#Where is the extrapolation of the ''time between the collapse of weaker arches with still-standing stronger arches''?
::*JacobB deleted the <nowiki>{{fact}}</nowiki> tags I added to the two statements above without any further comment (or indeed coming up with sources/calculations/simulations). As he obviously doesn't like when comments of a sysop are reversed, I refrain from doing so. But I do think that these was the perfect place to insert such tags, as
:::#The statements aren't obvious, as they involve estimations and calculations
:::#I did research, and couldn't find any source to back up the claims
:::#In fact, according to my own estimations, these statements are wrong
:::#I stated the reasons for inserting the tags above
:::So, please, back up the statements, or reinsert the tags (hoping that someone else comes up with an explanation), or just delete the statements.
:::[[User:FrankC|FrankC aka ComedyFan]] 10:54, 28 June 2010 (EDT)

== Solar Fusion ==

''The primary reaction in the [[Sun]] is the fusing of [[hydrogen]] to make [[helium]], but the ratio of these remains too high for the Sun to have been burning for millions of years.''

Could someone add some numbers to this? For me, it sounds just wrong, and I couldn't find any source for it. It's something different from the [[Faint young Sun problem]], I suppose. [[User:FrankC|FrankC aka ComedyFan]] 11:02, 28 June 2010 (EDT)

:http://neutrino.aquaphoenix.com/un-esa/sun/sun-chapter5.html

:This article explains the life of the sun so far, with some great equations that explain the rate of H and He depletion in the solar fusion reaction. As you can see, the math supports a sun of at least 4.5 billion years old, with a life span that will extend for another 5 to 10 billion years.

:No doubt, Andy will chastise me for posting this, and demand that i be more open minded (ie. believe only what he believes and disregard "liberally biased math" in favor of the more biblically friendly "no real evidence at all")

== Geothermal Activity ==

''The interior of the earth is heated by decay of radioactive isotopes, which could not possibly still be persisting in sufficient quantities after 5 billion, or even half a billion, years.''

Why not? [[User:FrankC|FrankC aka ComedyFan]] 11:12, 28 June 2010 (EDT)

== Questionable Probabilities ==

''If each of the 25 counterexamples provided here (as of June 28, 2010) has merely a 10% chance of being valid, which is certainly an underestimate, then the probability that the Earth is billions of years old is only 7%. From another perspective, these counterexamples demonstrate that the Earth must be young with 93% probability.''

This seems to be modeled after [[Counterexamples to Evolution]]:

''Moreover, if there is merely a 5% chance that each of these counterexamples is correct (and the odds are far higher than that), then the odds that these counterexamples are all incorrect and that evolution is true is infinitesimally small (only a 6% chance that evolution is true with 54 possible counterexamples).''

There are quite a few problems with these statements:
*Why 10% in the first case, but only 5% in the second? Is it that otherwise these counterexamples demonstrate that the Earth must be young with probability of 72% - and that value isn't convincing enough?
*Where do these probabilities come from? Is there a source which utters statements of which one in ten (or one in twenty) is correct?
*To assume that all these counterexamples are '''independent''' is ''very'' problematic!
*Generally, these counterexamples don't make predictions about unknowns, so, the validity of a statement like ''The moon is receding from the Earth at a rate that would have placed it too close to the Earth merely a billion years ago, causing tidal catastrophes and other problems, and colliding with the Earth before that'' can be calculated at this very moment: The probability that this counterexample is correct is ''zero'' as the statement is wrong.

I won't delete these ''"calculations"'', but I'll add <nowiki>{{fact}}</nowiki> tags to give the authors (or others) the opportunity to state their lines of reasoning: So, why are these probabilities reasonable estimates, and why are the ''odds far higher than that'' resp. why are these ''underestimates''?

[[User:FrankC|FrankC aka ComedyFan]] 11:03, 29 June 2010 (EDT)

: The calculation concerning the overall effect of counterexamples on the likely validity of the theory is helpful. It does not claim to be precise, and is almost certainly an ''underestimate'' of the probabilistic effect. A number of 50% could be used for the probability of each counterexample, rather than merely 10% or 5%. Regardless, the point is clear and educational.--[[User:Aschlafly|Andy Schlafly]] 14:04, 29 June 2010 (EDT)

::*''The calculation concerning the overall effect of counterexamples on the likely validity of the theory is helpful.'' Helpful for what?
::*''It does not claim to be precise, and is almost certainly an ''underestimate'' of the probabilistic effect.'' Stating probabilities like '''6%''' or '''93%''' is a claim to be precise. Getting such precise numbers by putting together some very rough estimates (''50% could be used for the probability of each counterexample, rather than merely 10% or 5%'') isn't good statistical practice.
::*''Regardless, the point is clear and educational.'' What's the educational purpose of this point: ''add percentages to your statements because that sounds scientific'' ?
::*Above, I answered to your question on perigee vs. mean radius. Could you please address my problems:
:::#What calculation or simulation accounts for the idea that the Moon would collide with the Earth if its orbit was lowered by 38,000km - or 190,000km (five billion years) - or even 300,000km?
:::#Where is the extrapolation of the ''time between the collapse of weaker arches with still-standing stronger arches''?
::Thanks, [[User:FrankC|FrankC aka ComedyFan]] 10:53, 30 June 2010 (EDT)

::: Frank, this site isn't "wikianswers" for endless questions. The effect of multiple counterexamples on the likelihood of truth of the original proposition is important to accept with an open mind. If you have a better way of stating it, let's see it. But we're not going to censor the point itself.--[[User:Aschlafly|Andy Schlafly]] 10:55, 1 July 2010 (EDT)

::::''Frank, this site isn't "wikianswers" for endless questions. '' No, it's a ''Trustworthy Encyclopedia''. That's why I'm not posing random questions, but I'm questioning dubious and unsourced statements. I'm not doing so frivolously, but only after checking into the statements myself. As you made these statements, you should either be able to give the necessary calculations/estimations/simulations to affirm them, or you should '''delete''' these questionable counterexamples. To paraphrase one of your comments: '''Please respond to these relevant issues''' - as you expect us to answer your questions...
::::''The effect of multiple counterexamples on the likelihood of truth of the original proposition is important to accept with an open mind.'' I'm sorry but I'm getting the idea that this is a scatter-shot approach where most of the projectiles are expect to miss...
::::''If you have a better way of stating it, let's see it.'' No, I've no better way of stating it, as I don't think it can be stated correctly. May I add that deleting a wrong point from an ecyclopedia isn't censorship, but just due editorial process?
::::[[User:FrankC|FrankC aka ComedyFan]] 12:29, 1 July 2010 (EDT)

::::: No, Frank, you're challenging a mathematical truth here. We welcome suggestions on explaining truths better. [[Censorship]] is not welcome here.--[[User:Aschlafly|Andy Schlafly]] 16:36, 1 July 2010 (EDT)

::::::*I don't doubt the mathematical truth that 1-0.925 ~ 0.93, but I doubt that this model is applicable. That's a difference.
::::::*Above, you asked me a question. I answered it - obviously satisfactorily, as there was no follow-up question of you. Now, I asked you two questions. Could you please try to answer them?
:::::::#What calculation or simulation accounts for the idea that the Moon would collide with the Earth if its orbit was lowered by 38,000km - or 190,000km (five billion years) - or even 300,000km?
:::::::#Where is the extrapolation of the ''time between the collapse of weaker arches with still-standing stronger arches''?
::::::*The counterexamples concerned by these questions aren't self-evident, and the first statement seems to be plainly wrong to me. If you fail to address these problems, if any query for additional information (i.e., the <nowiki>{{fact]]</nowiki>-tags) is removed, you give the impression that the only reason for these examples to be included in the list is that you just like them. Is this sufficient for an encyclopedia?
::::::[[User:FrankC|FrankC aka ComedyFan]] 08:59, 3 July 2010 (EDT)
* The Earth-Moon collision is not a statemente about a future fact, but a statement about a past event. ''Given the current models'' of tidal friction, and extrapolating backwards ''ceteris paribus'', the Earth-Moon ''would have'' collided (or, being as close as you wish) about 109 years ago. [[User:Sunda62|Sunda62]] 13:23, 29 September 2010 (EDT)
** Or, more precisely, about 2 x 109 years ago, according to "Lunar nodal tide and distance to the Moon during the Precambrian", J.C.G. Walker, K.J. Zahnle - Nature, 1986. There may be other theories (even negating this); I found that using Google Academic with "tidal friction earth moon collision". [[User:Sunda62|Sunda62]] 13:36, 29 September 2010 (EDT)

:: Severe problems from the moon being in close proximity to the earth would arise well before the 2 billion years you cite.--[[User:Aschlafly|Andy Schlafly]] 21:31, 29 September 2010 (EDT)

The [[Christian apologetics|evidence for Christianity and the Bible is extremely strong]] and Bible exegesis does not support an old earth and that is why traditional Judaism and most of the early Church fathers who spoke on the issue believe in a young earth. Plus, there is [http://creation.com/age-of-the-earth plenty of evidence for a young earth.] The probability for an old earth is zero. [[User:Conservative|conservative]] 17:20, 29 September 2010 (EDT)

: Your link to evidence for a young earth has some interesting examples.--[[User:Aschlafly|Andy Schlafly]] 21:31, 29 September 2010 (EDT)
:: Interesting but totally unscientific I'm afraid. And illogical. [[User:Darkmind1970|Darkmind1970]] 11:35, 12 February 2011 (EST)

Erwin Rommel

2011-01-22T19:55:14Z

Darkmind1970:

[[Image:Rommel.jpg|thumb|300px|Erwin Rommel (center)]]

'''Erwin Rommel''' (1891-1944) was a German [[field marshal]] during [[World War II]]. He was nicknamed the "Desert Fox" for his tactical genius as commander of the [[Afrika Corps]] from 1941 to 1943.

Rommel was first noticed by [[Adolf Hitler]] in 1937. He was then appointed command of HQ of [[Czechoslovakia]] and then later in [[Poland]]. After this he was given command of the 7th [[Panzer]] division, because of his wonderful work at HQ. His division moved through [[France]] in June 1940 at a blistering pace, fitting the description of [[Blitzkrieg]]. After his great success in France he was appointed to command the newly formed Deutsches [[Afrika Korps]] and successfully drove the [[British 8th Army]] out of [[Libya]]. His greatest victory was at the [[Battle of Gazala]] in June 1942. [[German]] and [[Italian]] troops defeated a British force which was more than twice as large. Ninety-eight thousand [[British Empire]] troops were killed, wounded or captured. He later went on to [[El Alamein]], [[Egypt]], but had been hampered by a lack of supplies and was defeated at the First Battle of El Alamein. A later attempt at breaking through ended in defeat at the Battle of Alam Halfa. Rommel was then forced onto the defensive and was forced to retreat in the wake of the Commonwealth victory at the Second Battle of El Alamein.

Rommel's retreat took him the length of North Africa and ended in Tunisia, where the last stand of Axis Forces on the African continent took place at the start of 1943. American and British forces that landed in [[Operation Torch]] in 1942 advanced from the West, whilst British forces under General Montgomery advanced from the South-East, trapping the Axis forces. He was ordered to fly out of Tunisia by [[Adolf Hitler]] after Rommel expressed pessimism about the chances of a successful defence of North Africa.

He was in charge of Army Group B in Normandy when the [[D-Day]] operation began, but was not present when the invasion itself began. After being wounded, he was implicated in the July 1944 plot to assassinate Hitler. Given a choice between reprisals against his family or quietly committing suicide, he chose suicide.

Rommel is often held in high regard due to how he treated his enemies. He ignored numerous orders from Berlin to kill captured commandos and deport Jews from his area of operations. He was well loved by his men and spoke with them often. His brilliant successes on the battlefield and his well renowned chivalry made him one of the most popular generals in Germany, and garnered a great deal of respect from his enemies, with many of them praising him and British Field Marshal Montgomery even naming his dog after him. His allegiance was to Germany, not Hitler, a choice that lead to many of their disagreements and his eventual affiliation with the plot against Hitler.
{{DEFAULTSORT:Rommel, Erwin}}
[[Category:World War II Commanders]]
[[Category:German People]]

User talk:Darkmind1970

2011-01-22T11:05:56Z

Darkmind1970:

{{welcome|sig=[[User:Philip J. Rayment|Philip J. Rayment]] 08:57, 2 January 2008 (EST)}}

Please don't argue with the Young Earth Creationists. If you think [[Creation Science]] disagrees with mainstream [[geology]], join or start one of our [[Debate Topics]]. --[[User:Ed Poor|Ed Poor]] [[User talk:Ed Poor|Talk]] 12:17, 7 February 2008 (EST)

Had to revert your main page edit. You have to take up Trump's hairstyle with Trump himself...you can't do it here. [[User:Karajou|Karajou]] 11:36, 19 September 2008 (EDT)

Ok, this wiki has now reached the point of no return and has literally become a joke. Any entries that contradict the increasingly shrill view of the tiny group of editors that remain on this site are being reverted and the authors banned. This is censorship of the first order. This is wrong and if this cannot be seen then there really is no hope for this site. The atheism and obesity article is now so ridiculous that it makes me cringe just looking at it. I know a large number of thin atheists and an equally large number of fat churchgoers. Going around saying that 'X' is true because you believe it, and not basing this on verifiable proof from multiple sources, is just a ridiculous way of going about things. This site has not only jumped the shark, but has jumped the entire aquarium and is now stranded on the freeway, wriggling desperately as it tries to pretend that a) it's still swimming along nicely and b) the oncoming traffic of reality is in fact non-existant or made up. [[User:Darkmind1970|Darkmind1970]] 06:05, 22 January 2011 (EST)

Oliver Cromwell

2010-05-12T13:08:08Z

Darkmind1970:

[[Image:Oliver_Cromwell.jpg|right|thumb|250px|Oliver Cromwell by Sir Peter Lely c.1653]]

'''Oliver Cromwell''' (1599-1658) was an English soldier, statesman, and leader of the [[Puritans|Puritan]] revolution. He rose from the ranks of the middle gentry to become an outstanding soldier; his genius for organizing and inspiring the parliamentary armies, called the "[[New Model Army]]" and nicknamed "roundheads", was displayed at the battle of Marston Moor (1644). His admiring soldiers called him "Old Ironsides". Victory in the field allowed him to execute the king in 1649 and become a virtual dictator; after 1653 he ruled under the title "Lord Protector of the Commonwealth of England, Scotland, and Ireland." He executed an aggressive and generally effective foreign policy. Cromwell did as much as any English ruler to shape the future of the land he governed, but his Commonwealth collapsed after his death and the royal family was restored in 1660.

An intensely religious man--almost a Puritan [[Moses]]--he fervently believed God was guiding his victories. However he was never identified with any one sect or position, and favoured religious tolerance, except towards Catholics. His many admirers called him "God's Englishman"

Cromwell is the most controversial figure in all of British history. Strongly held opinions stretch from those who see him as a regicidal dictator who trampled on glorious royal traditions or a religious fanatic and a genocidal murderer of the Irish Catholics, to those who celebrate a hero of liberty who helped make the nation great. Most historians now have a favourable view of Cromwell's achievements and character.
==Early Life==
Cromwell was born at Huntingdon in eastern England on April 25, 1599. His father, Robert Cromwell, and his mother, Elizabeth Steward, were typical English country gentlefolk. His father was a younger son of a family founded by Thomas Cromwell (1485-1540), a minister of [[Henry VIII]]; they had acquired considerable wealth by taking over monastery property during the [[Reformation]]. At the time of Oliver's birth his grandfather, Sir Henry Cromwell, was one of the two wealthiest landowners in Huntingdonshire, but his father was of modest means. Oliver was sent to the Huntingdon Grammar School and afterwards for one year only to Sidney Sussex College at [[Cambridge University]]. His father died when he was 18, and Oliver, the only surviving son, left the university to look after his mother and six sisters. He studied law for a time at the [[Inns of Court]] in London, and at 21 he married Elizabeth Bourchier, the daughter of a London leather merchant. He then returned to Huntingdon and settled down as a farmer.

==Politics ==
For 20 years Cromwell followed the stable and common career of a country gentleman and farmer, taking a prominent part in local affairs. In 1628, he was sponsored by the Montagu family and elected by Huntingdon to the last parliament summoned by King [[Charles I]] before the 11-year period (1629-1640) during which the latter tried to rule without one--the so-called "Eleven Years Tyranny." Cromwell's only speech in the Parliament of 1628-1629 was a fierce attack upon the High Church bishops. About 1628 he had a profound religious conversion that shaped his life; he became involved in local networks of Puritans, did some lay preaching, and considered a move to the Puritan colony of [[Connecticut]].

In 1631 after a humiliating political defeat in Huntingdon, and near bankrupt, he moved to St. Ives, and four years later to Ely. About this time he caught [[malaria]], which troubled him sporadically and shortened his life. An inheritance in 1636 brought him the adequate income of £300 a year.

==Puritan leader==

When King Charles I was forced by a shortage of funds to recall Parliament in 1640, Cromwell was returned to this Parliament as the M.P. for Cambridge. Known as the ''Short Parliament'', Charles again dissolved the house after only 3 weeks.

Cromwell became a local leader in the rapidly the expanding Puritan movement, which demanded a radical reform of the Church of England, and was opposed to the High Church tendencies favored by [[William Laud]], who became [[Archbishop of Canterbury]] in 1633. In 1640, Cromwell was returned to Parliament as member for Cambridge, the poorest man in the House of Commons by some distance; he wore a coarse suit, and plain linen shirt, its collar spotted with blood. Poor in dress but rich in speech, he was a man with a fearless and tactless tongue who denounced the tyranny of the bishops, and the pervasive idolatry of the established Church. He served on eighteen high-profile committees, especially those concerned with investigating religious innovation and abuse of ecclesiastical power. However, he was shunned by those leading the opposition to Charles I's government, but when it came for war he was packed off to raise troops in his home area, which he did with remarkable success.
==Causes of the Civil War (1630-1642)==
In 1630-42, when he governed without calling a parliament, King Charles I multiplied his enemies by imposing irritating financial exactions upon various classes of the community, using prerogative powers exercised by the king in centuries past. He demanded "ship money" from the towns, fined country gentlemen (including Cromwell) for refusing to accept knighthood, raised "forced loans," and increased customs duties. He did all this because he had no right to levy fresh taxes without the consent of Parliament; indeed, his broad aim was to secure the financial independence of the monarchy, and to fasten uniformity upon the Church. Thus the king antagonized the Puritan reformers as well as many of the country gentry and townspeople. In 1638 he became involved in a war against his Scottish subjects (he was hereditary king of Scotland as well as of England) when he tried to force upon them a prayer book similar to that in use in the English Church. They rebelled, and he was compelled to call a parliament at Westminster to ask for money to pursue the war. The accumulation of grievances against the king over eleven years made the leaders of the House of Commons aggressive and uncooperative. Cromwell at once showed himself to be a staunch Puritan, and as such gave steady support to the critics of church and government.

===The Long Parliament===
During the summer of 1640 King Charles was again defeated and humbled by the Scottish rebels. He appealed for help to a new parliament, which met in the autumn, with Cromwell again M.P. for Cambridge. This "Long Parliament," as it was to be called, repudiated the king's policies and obliged him to surrender many of his prerogative powers. It put to death one of the king's chief ministers, the Earl of Strafford. Cromwell and a majority of the Commons voted for a "Grand Remonstrance" against the government, and showed they did not trust the king. When the Irish rose up in rebellion in 1641, Parliament demanded the power to appoint all the king's ministers and principal army officers--an unprecedented step.

The king was eventually goaded to arrest five of the parliamentary leaders for treason. When this coup failed, King Charles left London to rally his supporters in the north of England. The Commons retorted by seizing "the power of the sword" and sending M.P.'s into their constituencies to gain control of local armories and militia. Cromwell himself went to Cambridge, took possession of the castle, arrested a captain of the militia, and prevented the colleges from sending their silver plate to the king, who was short of money. He raised a troop of 60 cavalry and searched for suspected royalists.

In the Long Parliament he made his name as an extreme Puritan who desired the complete abolition of the bishops; in eastern England as a whole he was recognized as a champion of the right of all church congregations to choose their own ministers, and their own religious forms.

==Cromwell as soldier==
The civil war began in August 1642. From that moment, though totally inexperienced as a soldier, the aggressive Cromwell, now in his early 40's, rose to the front as a military organizer and a Puritan leader. Cromwell, a good horseman, became a cavalry officer, raising his own Parliamentarian troop in Huntingdon. Within a year he rose from captain, to colonel, to lieutenant general of one of the largest regional armies in England. Cromwell fought together with his cavalry at the drawn battle of Edgehill (October 23, 1642). Afterwards, he doubled the size of his troop, and then converted it into a full regiment, becoming a colonel in February 1643.

With only 2,000 men he took charge of the defenses in the six parliamentarian heartland counties of East Anglia: Essex, Hertfordshire, Huntingdonshire, Cambridgeshire, Suffolk, and Norfolk. The threat was an attack from the north, and he prepared for it, while suppressing local pockets of royalists; he also organized a supply system based on county committees he appointed. He called repeatedly on the Commons to raise the pay, improve the training, and lift the morale of the soldiers they enlisted. The king, meanwhile, had a capable force furnished largely by peers, landed gentry, and their outdoor staffs. By the autumn of 1643, two thirds of England and Wales were under the king's control; in spite of minor successes achieved at Grantham, Gainsborough, and Winceby, where Cromwell served his apprenticeship in the art of war, the prognosis was poor for Parliament's army. In desperation the Parliamentary leaders came to terms with the Scottish leaders, and a Scottish army entered England in 1644.

Cromwell became convinced that if he could produce a well-disciplined army he could defeat the Royalist forces under the king's nephew Prince Rupert, the Duke of Cumberland, and his [[Cavalier]]s. He also knew, as a result of his limited experience with the local county militia that pikemen, armed with sixteen-foot-long pikes, who stood their ground during a cavalry attack, could do a tremendous amount of damage.

Cromwell had also realised that the Prince's cavalry were poorly disciplined, and that after they charged the enemy they then went in pursuit of individual targets. At the first major battle of the civil war at [[Edgehill]], the majority of the Prince's cavalry did not return to the battlefield until over an hour after the initial charge. By this time the horses were so tired they were unable to mount another attack.

Cromwell instead trained his cavalry to stay together after a charge, and in this way his forces could repeatedly charge the Cavaliers. Cromwell's new cavalry took part in its first major battle at [[Marston Moor]] in [[Yorkshire]] in July 1644. The king's forces suffered a crushing defeat, and Cromwell's soldiers became known as the ''Ironsides'' because of the way they cut through the Cavaliers on the battlefield. Cromwell himself earned the nickname ''Old Ironsides''.

==New Model Army==
At the beginning of the Civil War, Parliament relied on soldiers recruited by large landowners who supported their cause. In February 1645, Parliament decided to form a new army of professional soldiers. This army of 22,000 men became known as the [[New Model Army]] and its commander-in-chief was General [[Thomas Fairfax]]. Cromwell was placed in charge of its cavalry.

Members of the New Model Army received proper military training and by the time they went into battle they were very well-disciplined. Previously, people only became officers because they came from powerful and wealthy families. In the New Model Army men were promoted when they showed themselves to be good soldiers. For the first time it became possible for plain men to become army officers. Cromwell thought it was very important that soldiers in the New Model Army believed strongly in what they were fighting for. Where possible he recruited men who, like him, held strong Puritan views and the New Model Army always went into battle singing psalms, convinced that God was on their side.

One strong faction among the regiments of the Army were known loosely as the "''Levellers''" "for they intend to sett all things straight, and rayse a parity and community in the kingdom".<ref> See [http://www.1911encyclopedia.org/Levellers]</ref> who subscribed to a belief in the "natural rights" of men that had been violated by the king's side. These natural rights, they asserted, came from the law of God expressed in the Bible.
==General Cromwell==
Puritans immediately recognized and appreciated his firm, fair and aggressive leadership. In a military career that only lasted a decade, he fought in more than thirty battles, and took part in more than forty sieges, without ever tasting defeat. The extraordinary self-discipline of his cavalry charges proved decisive in several of the greatest battles of the war, and earned Cromwell himself, and then his men, the title "Ironsides." He demanded that promotions and commands be given not to the well-born (who wore long flowing [[hair]]) but to the godly (who cut their hair short and were called '''"roundheads"'''). "I had rather have a plain russet-coated captain that knows what he fights for, and loves what he knows, than that which you call a gentleman and is nothing else."<ref> Letter #16, Sept. 11, 1638</ref> The two Houses moved to reorganize their armies in the winter of 1644-45, and created a new major assault force, the New Model Army. Cromwell was, to the joy of the radicals, and the dismay of the more cautious Parliamentarians, given command of the cavalry, effectively the number two position in the Army.
===Battles of Marston Moor and Naseby===
Oliver Cromwell, now a lieutenant general, fought alongside the Scots and a northern army under Lord Fairfax and his son, Sir Thomas, at the Battle of Marston Moor in Yorkshire on July 2, 1644, where the king's army, led by Prince Rupert, was outnumbered and defeated.

Next year, fighting without the Scots, the New Model Army took part in its first major battle just outside the village of Naseby in Northamptonshire on 14 June 1645. The battle began when Prince Rupert led a charge against the left wing of the parliamentary cavalry which scattered and Rupert's men then gave chase. While this was going on Cromwell launched an attack on the left wing of the royalist cavalry. This was also successful and the royalists that survived the initial charge fled from the battlefield. Cromwell then ordered his cavalry to attack the now unprotected flanks of the infantry. Charles I was waiting with 1,200 men in reserve, but instead of ordering them forward to help his infantry he decided to retreat. Without support from the cavalry, the royalist infantry realised their task was impossible and surrendered. By the time Prince Rupert's cavalry returned to the battlefield the fighting had ended and his horses were exhausted after their long chase and not in a fit state to take on Cromwell's cavalry. The prince had no option but to ride off in search of the fleeing Charles I. The battle of Naseby was disastrous for the king, with 1,000 of his men killed, and another 4,500 of his most experienced men taken prisoner. The Parliamentary forces were also able to capture the Royalist baggage train that contained the king's complete stock of guns and ammunition. After Naseby, Charles was never able to raise another army strong enough to defeat the parliamentary army in a major battle.

Cromwell served under Sir Thomas Fairfax, the new Parliamentarian commander in chief. In both these battles Cromwell distinguished himself by his courage, enterprise, and leadership. Above all, his hold on eastern England had contributed to the reversal of the fortunes of war. When King Charles allowed his stronghold of Oxford to capitulate in June 1646, and himself fled to seek the mercy of the Scottish army, Cromwell had gained a reputation as the outstanding general of the first civil war. Although he had publicly criticized some of the aristocratic parliamentary commanders for what he considered lethargy and incompetence, he had been a loyal lieutenant to his superior, Sir Thomas Fairfax.

==Second English Civil War==
In January 1647, Charles I fled to Scotland where he was captured and handed over to the New Model Army. Charles was imprisoned in [[Hampton Court]], but in November 1647 he escaped and managed to rally support to raise another army. This time he was able to persuade the Scots to fight on his side. However, in August 1648 Cromwell's New Model Army defeated the Scots army (the "Engagers") at Preston, where Cromwell took sole command for the first time over an army of 9,000, which won a brilliant victory against the 18,000 strong Scots force. Once again King Charles was taken prisoner.

==Parliament versus Army: Second Civil War (1648)==
During the first civil war Cromwell retained his seat in the House of Commons, and appeared there whenever he could. In 1644 he had taken a leading part in promoting a "self-denying ordinance", whereby those members of parliament who had held commissions in the armed forces had relinquished them in order to make way for new blood, thereby paving the way for the appointment of the nonpolitical Fairfax. Cromwell himself had been ready to lay down his command, but Fairfax persuaded him to take command at the battle of Naseby in 1645.

Cromwell was conscious of his gifts, but, as always in his life, attributed his victories to Almighty God. It was indeed his independent-minded, highly personal Puritan religion (to which he had been "converted" as a young married man) that had brought him into the war against the king, and had sustained him in every battle. When the alliance was made with the Scots, he had insisted that this must not be at the price of liberty of conscience for himself and his fellow Independents or "sectarians." However, he was at first content to leave to the civilian leaders in Parliament, most of whom were Presbyterians, the future shape of the government.

However, the House of Commons (from which the Royalists had withdrawn at the outset of war) and the House of Lords, who were a mere handful, now showed themselves anxious to impose a rigid Presbyterian organization upon the English Church, and to dismiss Fairfax' soldiers, most of whom were Independents, without adequate compensation for their services. At first Cromwell, as an M.P. and a figure of immense influence in the army, tried to act as a mediator between Parliament and the soldiers. Eventually, he was driven to make a choice, and threw in his lot with the army. He also tried hard to come to terms with the king, whom the Scots had handed over as a prisoner to the English Parliament before their army went home. Cromwell was not opposed to a Presbyterian form of state church, but he insisted that the Puritan sects or Independents should be tolerated outside it. In negotiating a postwar settlement both with Parliament, and with the king, on behalf of the army, that was always the great point on which he would not yield. At the same time Cromwell acted as a conciliator within the army, trying to persuade those extremists who wanted to set up a democratic republic that the time was not ripe for so revolutionary a change. His idea was to have a constitutional monarchy, a middle-class parliament, and a tolerant church. But he reckoned without the king, who took advantage of the disputes among his enemies to escape to an island, thence to incite the Royalists both in England and in Scotland to a fresh civil war, which broke out early in 1648.

==Second Civil War and Execution of Charles I==
Parliament and its army now more or less closed ranks. While Sir Thomas Fairfax dealt with Royalist risings in southeast England, Cromwell first suppressed a rebellion in Wales, and then marched north to meet the Scots. He won a series of decisive victories over the larger Scottish army, in Lancashire (August 1648), marking his first major success as an independent commander. The temper of the army had been set aflame by the king's revival of war, and the Royalists' breach of faith. While the Presbyterians in Parliament still hoped to reach agreement with Charles I, Cromwell's son-in-law [[Henry Ireton]] led a movement to punish the king and overthrow the old monarchy. In December 1648, the southern army "purged" the Commons of its Presbyterian members and demanded the trial of the king.

During the autumn Cromwell had followed his retreating enemy into Scotland, and restored order in Edinburgh, but he had lingered in the north until General Fairfax recalled him to London; he was hesitating over his political attitude. When he got back to the capital he approved of the purge, and took charge of the arrangements to bring Charles I to his trial under guard. Fairfax having washed his hands of all political matters, Cromwell accepted the responsibilities of leadership. He realized that the trial of the king would result in the latter's death, as a result of all the blood shed in the civil wars. Once he made up his mind, Cromwell acted ruthlessly, and it was largely by his personal efforts that the trial by what was in effect a revolutionary tribunal was pressed through, and the king was condemned to death.

On January 30, 1649, King Charles I was beheaded on a block in view of a silent crowd gathered in front of the Banquet Hall of Whitehall Palace; the king's noble death proved a rallying point for his supporters. After the execution of Charles I, England became a republic; Cromwell was appointed a member of the Council of State, and was its first chairman.

==Ireland==
Meanwhile the Royalists had gained control of most of Ireland, which they hoped to use as a base for an invasion of England. Cromwell decided to eliminate the threat by invading. After occupying Dublin in August, 1649, he led his army north and laid siege to [[Drogheda]].
===Drogheda===
When Drogheda fell to the siege in September 1649, Cromwell's troops massacred nearly 3,500 people. Although this figure comprised around 2,700 royalist soldiers and all the men in the town bearing arms, a concerted propaganda campaign followed which ensured Cromwell was seen as a bloodthirsty tyrant in the national consciousness of Ireland. As recently as the 20th century Irish novelist [[James Joyce]] wrote in his novel ''[[Ulysses]]'': "''What about sanctimonious Cromwell and his ironsides that put the women and children of Drogheda to the sword with the bible text "God is love" pasted round the mouth of his cannon?''".

On September 10-11 his army stormed the town, and killed most of the surviving garrison, which had refused to surrender. Cromwell said that the killing at Drogheda had the goal of encouraging other garrisons to surrender and not fight to the death; indeed it induced some other Irish garrisons to surrender, such as Trim, Ross and Dundalk. In October the garrison at Wexford repulsed Cromwell's army but was overcome; here again no quarter was given once the garrison refused to surrender, and this time the town was plundered. By the end of the year most of the eastern coast of Ireland was in Cromwell's hands. Early in 1650 he marched his army inland, ravaging the land and slaughtering the populace regardless of age or sex.
===Destroying the power of the Irish Catholics===
In 1651 Cromwell's government adopted a policy of destroying the power of those Irish Catholics who did not become Protestants; they were seen as less than human - dangerous barbarians and potential allies of the Royalists. All Irish landholdings (except in Connacht, which was deemed to be too "barren") were confiscated, and most of the populace was driven into the wilds of Connacht to die of starvation and pestilence. The proportion of land owned by Catholics fell from 59% in 1641 to 20% in the span of two decades. The goal was to resettle the island with, in his view, more "Godly" Protestants, who were given the best lands, and given near complete control over the remaining Catholics. As a result, the Irish Catholics have hated Cromwell with a passion that continues to this day.

==Conquest of Scotland==
In May 1650 Cromwell learned that [[Charles II]] had landed in Scotland and been proclaimed king by the Scots Covenanter regime so he returned to England to put down this latest threat, leaving Henry Ireton and Edmund Ludlow in command of the English forces in Ireland. The last Catholic held town, [[Galway]], surrendered in April 1652 and the last Irish troops surrendered in April 1653.

In an effort to avert war, Cromwell appealed to the General Assembly of the [[Church of Scotland]] to break their alliance with the royalists, famously urging them: ''"I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible you may be mistaken."'' The Scot's rejected peace, and Cromwell invaded in August, 1650.

The English republic was threatened because Scotland's Presbyterian [[Covenanters]] had come to terms with Charles I's eldest son, [[Charles II]]. General Fairfax resigned rather than invade Scotland, and Cromwell took his place as commander in chief. He crossed the Scottish border on July 22, 1650, but at first made little headway against the defensive strategy of the Scottish commander. As in Ireland his campaign was supported by English sea power, the importance of which he appreciated. Although cut off from his English base, Cromwell won a great victory at Dunbar (30 miles [48 km] east of Edinburgh) on Sept. 3, 1650. Cromwell destroyed the main Covenanter army at the battle of Dunbar on September 3 1650. Leaving 4,000 Scottish soldiers dead and 10,000 taken prisoner, he quickly moved to capture the Scottish capital of Edinburgh.

During the winter 1650-51 Cromwell was taken ill and the army bogged down. But the following summer he outmaneuvered the Scots who, rather than allow themselves to have their lines of communication cut, followed the young King Charles II into England. Charles II and the remaining Covenanters was making a final desperate bid to invade England and capture London while Cromwell was still in Scotland. Cromwell rapidly pursued them south, however, and caught them at Worcester in September. In the ensuing battle Cromwell's forces wiped out the last major Scottish royalist army. Scotland was henceforward ruled from England under military occupation. Cromwell was welcomed as a hero on his return to London.
==Creating the Protectorate==
During the next two years the quarrel between Parliament and army, which had begun in 1647, was revived. The army was now radically inclined, seeking reform in Church and State. Cromwell became the spokesman of the army's point of view, although once again he tried first to act as conciliator between the two sides. The soldiers asked that the remnant of the original "Long Parliament" of 1640, now known as "the Rump," should be dissolved and a fresh reformist one-chamber Parliament be elected. Other sections of the community had tired of the long naval war then in progress against the Dutch Republic (1652-1654), in which Cromwell's army had no part, and indeed resented as a fratricidal war against fellow Protestants.

When negotiations for the election of a new Parliament broke down, Cromwell forcibly dissolved the Rump on April 20, 1653. By 1653 Cromwell and his Army effectively controlled all Britain. Cromwell did not himself seize political power; he decided instead to invite the Independent churches to nominate members of a Puritan Assembly, which would exercise both executive and legislative powers. In spring 1653 came his best chance to become an all-powerful dictator, and he turned away; with a standing army of under 15,000 men at a time when the population of England and Wales was approximately 5.5 million, the creation of a military dictatorship was a practical impossibility. There were few political prisoners, and only those who actually participated in rebellion were executed; torture was not used.

==Named Lord Protector==
The Nominated Parliament set about reform with enthusiasm, but was soon split between a radical and a conservative wing. When the conservative wing gained control in December 1653 after a tussle, the majority resigned their powers into Cromwell's hands. This coup d'état was engineered by Cromwell's second-in-command, John Lambert; and it was Lambert who drew up an '''"Instrument of Government"''' as a new constitution for the English commonwealth. This constitution provided for an elected parliament, a nominated council of state, and a lord protector as chief executive officer. Cromwell was offered and accepted the post of Lord Protector, not as a dictator but as the first servant of the Commonwealth of England, united with conquered Scotland and Ireland. There was widespread [[republicanism]] and a sense that the old monarchical system was dead.

Some officers wanted Cromwell to become a hereditary king but he refused and instead took the title Lord Protector of the Commonwealth. Cromwell did made the decisions--he was a dictator in that sense--but he rarely broke the law. He preferred persuasion to coercion and did not try to impose an authoritarian regime that tolerated only one set of ideas. His experiment with major-generals taking control of England has aspects of a military dictatorship, but the experiment lasted less than 15 months in 1655-57, and the generals did not in fact loom large in deciding local policies. So it verged upon, but did not reach, military rule. When offered the crown, Cromwell said no. He did set up his son as his successor, but made no serious preparations and the son was soon ousted.<ref> Austin Woolrych, (1990)</ref>

==Lord Protector==
For the remaining five years of his life Cromwell governed as lord protector, sometimes with the help of a parliament, sometimes without it. But like the kings of old, he was always dependent upon the advice and support of his Council of State, or later, [[Privy Council]]. At its opening session the Protectorate Parliament (September 1654-January 1655) was more concerned about revising the new constitution than about passing legislation. Differences between protector and parliament encouraged the Royalists. In January 1655, Cromwell dissolved this parliament.

===Rule of the Major Generals===
A rebellion broke out in March 1655, and although it was easily suppressed, the country was divided into ten districts, each under a major general. That experiment lasted barely a year.

Cromwell imposed martial law in England and the country was divided into eleven districts, each district being overseen by a Major-General. The responsibilities of these Major-Generals included maintaining order, collecting taxes, granting poor relief and imposing Puritan morality. In some districts bear-baiting, cock-fighting, horse-racing and wrestling were banned. Betting and gambling were also forbidden. Large numbers of [[Public house|pubs]] were closed and fines were imposed on people heard swearing. In some districts, the Major-Generals also closed the theatres.

===Constitutional experiments===
Meanwhile England was involved in a fresh war, this time waged against the Spanish Empire; Cromwell, needing money, called a new Parliament to vote him supplies. It met in fall 1656; Cromwell argued on behalf of his policies, but met with considerable opposition, especially from out-and-out republicans who objected to the whole idea of the Protectorate. The new House was therefore in effect "purged" of 160 members, many of whom refused to take an oath to uphold the structure of the Protectorate. The remaining members, on the whole, cooperated with Cromwell and his Council of State. But they were opposed to the system of local government through the major generals. Rather than sustain military rule, a group of lawyers and civilians proposed to create a constitutional monarchy and a Puritan Church, with Cromwell as king.

Cromwell was tempted by the offer of a crown, but eventually, largely because of the opposition of his old friends and supporters in the army, he refused it. Nevertheless a new constitution was promulgated, providing for a revived House of Lords; a Lower House, to which all except known royalists were to be admitted; a Privy Council, replacing the Council of State; and certain restrictions on the powers of the lord protector and on freedom of religion. This constitution, originally called "the Humble Petition and Advice", came into effect in June 1657. A House of Lords was nominated, but the second Protectorate House of Commons, reinforced by the excluded members and deprived of Cromwell's friends whom he had promoted to the upper House, met in January 1658, to be the scene of an immediate attack launched upon the Protector by the republicans, and aiming to tear the new constitution to pieces.

Cromwell was at last angered beyond restraint. Convinced that a fresh squabble in Parliament would be followed by a Royalist invasion, he promptly dissolved Parliament on Feb. 4, 1658.
===Foreign affairs===
For the last few months of his life Cromwell governed without a parliament. The war (with France) against Spain was virtually won, thanks to naval victories. A naval expedition to the West Indies resulted in the capture of [[Jamaica]] from Spain (May 1655), and Cromwell tried to convert it into a flourishing British colony.<ref> James Robertson, "Cromwell and the Conquest of Jamaica." ''History Today'' 2005 55(5): 15-22. Issn: 0018-2753 Fulltext: [[Ebsco]]</ref> In June 1658 he also obtained the port of [[Dunkirk]] as payment for the French alliance. After the peace with Holland in 1654, commerce had expanded.

Cromwell in 1654-55 launched a vastly ambitious "Western Design", with conquest of key Spanish territories in the West Indies; it failed badly because of defeats, disease and [[guerrilla]] resistance. Cromwell despaired that God had turned against him, while public reactions focused on the failure of English character and masculinity, revealing the ideological structures that underpinned both imperial expansion and the English revolution during the 1650s. Contemporary accounts dwelt on the disastrous campaign to control Jamaica, contrasting the supposedly cowardly conduct of General Robert Venables in Jamaica with the heroism of Major General James Heane in Hispaniola, suggesting that Venables's pusillanimity reflected a general failure of the British troops to live up to the ideal of godly valor and English superiority, associated in the public mind with the New Model Army. The Western Design debacle was a crisis for Cromwell's protectorate, straining the notion that God favored Puritan England, but the vision of Heane's martial virtues ultimately provided a model that guided the future success of the British Empire.<ref> Jamaica was permanently captured, at great cost. James Robertson, "Cromwell and the Conquest of Jamaica," ''History Today'' 55, No. 5 (May 2005) pp 15-22; Carla Gardina Pestana, "English Character and the Fiasco of the Western Design." ''Early American Studies'' 2005 3(1): 1-31. Issn: 1543-4273 Fulltext: [[Ebsco]]</ref>

===Toleration===
Cromwell fought hard against the more bigoted Puritans to maintain genuine freedom for the Christian religion, permitting even Episcopalians and Roman Catholics to worship in private houses. He appointed good judges, and pressed his legal advisers to reform the law and make it less expensive. He promoted education; for a time he was chancellor of Oxford University, and helped to found a college at Durham. The regime's religious policies fell significantly short of comprehensive toleration, though; rather, Cromwell offered liberty of conscience to a broad range of independent sects, whose members he sought to draw together in a united 'godly party'. Anglicans, Catholics and some of the more radical Protestant groups were excluded from the embrace of official toleration.<ref> See Blair Worden, "Toleration and the Cromwellian Protectorate" in W.J. Sheils, ed., "Persecution and Toleration Studies" in ''Studies Church History,''(1984) v.21</ref>

===Levellers===
Former members of the Levellers, an extreme anti-elitist group, grew disillusioned with the dictatorial policies of Cromwell. In 1655 Edward Sexby, John Wildman and Richard Overton were involved in fomenting a plot to overthrow the government, but the conspiracy was discovered and the plotters fled to the [[Netherlands]]. In May 1657 Edward Sexby published (under the pseudonym William Allen) ''Killing No Murder'', a political pamphlet that argued the justification of an assassination of Cromwell. The following month he arrived in England to carry out the assassination, but was arrested and imprisoned.
===Death and succession===
Cromwell's strong personality and the backing of the army held the Commonwealth together and preserved internal peace; he had to contend with republican plotters as well as discontented Royalists and foreign enemies.

By 1658 the government's debt stood at £1.5 million, largely because of the heavy cost of the armed forces, which the government proved unable to reduce in size. The regime's military commitments were taking it to the verge of bankruptcy, just when it seemed to be devising a feasible civilian basis for its rule.

In 1658 Cromwell announced that he wanted his son, Richard Cromwell, to replace him as Lord Protector of the Commonwealth. The English army was unhappy with this decision. While they respected Oliver as a skillful military commander, Richard was just a country farmer.

Worn out, Oliver Cromwell died in London of malaria on September 3, 1658. On his deathbed he named his ineffective son Richard Cromwell (1626-1712) his successor. Richard lasted only 8 months, to be followed in power by the head of the army, [[George Monck]]; he lasted for less than a year, whereupon Parliament restored the monarchy, under [[Charles II]].

==Image and reputation==
At the Restoration in 1660, Cromwell's body was disinterred from the tomb of kings in [[Westminster Abbey]] and was hung from the gallows at Tyburn.

Blair Warden, a leading historian, reports, "From his century to ours, Oliver Cromwell has been the most controversial figure of English history."<ref>Blair Warden, "The English Reputations of Oliver Cromwell, 1660-1900" in William Lamont, ed. [http://books.google.com/books?id=fi4SmvdoUfoC&pg=PA35&dq=%22From+his+century+to+ours,+Oliver+Cromwell%22&lr=&num=30&as_brr=0&sig=Zjm1_A4NGCzCyrl8RpbIB-47Dug ''Historical Controversies And Historians'' (1998) p. 35]</ref> First, Cromwell is well known and highly thought of; recent BBC polls show the public considers him one of the ten greatest Britons. Second, his importance and influence is beyond doubt, as is his stature as an outstanding soldier and diplomat. The main facts of his career are not in dispute, only the moral evaluation of those facts.<ref>Compare the controversies over King [[Richard III]], who was a minor player as king for less than two years and whose facts are in dispute.</ref> Third, the range and intensity of opinion is extreme, from those who laud him as a champion of liberty and republicanism who uplifted Britain's stature in the world, to those who to this date hate him as a regicide and murderer of so many Irish Catholics. The debate ranges from commoners to kings, and historians have been deeply involved. In the 1930s and 1940s most scholars saw him as a dangerous dictator, along the lines of Mussolini, Stalin and Hitler. In recent decades nearly all the scholars have been favorable.

During his lifetime, some tracts painted him as a hypocrite motivated by power — for example, ''The Machiavilian Cromwell'' and ''The Juglers Discovered'', both part of an attack on Cromwell by the [[Levellers]] after 1647, present him as a Machiavellian figure. After his death and public disgrace there were many denunciations and a few positive portrayals, such as John Spittlehouse's ''A Warning Piece Discharged'' which compared him to Moses, rescuing the English by taking them safely through the Red Sea of the civil wars.<ref>John Morrill, "Cromwell and his contemporaries", in Morrill, (1990) pp. 263–4, 271-2 </ref> The great royalist historian Edward Hyde, 1st Earl of Clarendon, in his ''History of the Rebellion and Civil Wars in England'' (1667) declared that Cromwell "will be looked upon by posterity as a brave bad man". Clarendon argued that Cromwell's rise to power had been helped not only by his great spirit and energy, but also by his ruthlessness. The aristocracy was especially hostile to Cromwell, in large part because of his strong appeal to the common yeoman.

In the early 18th century, Cromwell’s image began to be adopted and reshaped by the [[Whig Party|Whigs]], an out-party opposing the Tories around the Hanoverian kings. They stressed Cromwell as [[Republicanism|republican]], a theme often adopted by American historians. <ref>Blair Worden, ''Roundhead Reputations: The English Civil Wars and the Passions of Posterity'' (2001). pp.53–59.</ref>

During the early 19th century, Cromwell's image was glorified by Romantic artists and poets. French author Victor Hugo's 1827 play ''Cromwell'' was representative of the French romantic movement, showing Cromwell as a ruthless yet dynamic Romantic hero. The major breakthrough came at the hands of a leading Romantic historian, [[Thomas Carlyle]] who in the 1840s saw Cromwell as the hero in a battle between good and evil. Carlyle used Cromwell as a model for restoring morality to a Victorian era that otherwise was prone to timidity, meaningless rhetoric, and moral compromise. The growth of Nonconformity in the nineteenth century encouraged an appreciation of Cromwell's Puritanism.

By the late 19th century, Carlyle’s portrayal of Cromwell, stressing the centrality of puritan morality and earnestness, had become assimilated into mainstream [[historiography]]. Britain's outstanding research scholar on the era, [[Samuel Rawson Gardiner]], concluded that "the man — it is ever so with the noblest — was greater than his work". <ref>Gardiner, ''Oliver Cromwell'' (1901) p. 315.</ref> Gardiner demonstrated Cromwell’s dynamic and mercurial character, and his role in ridding England of obsolete absolutism, while downplaying Cromwell’s intense religiosity.<ref>Worden, ''Roundhead Reputations'' (2001) pp. 256–260.</ref> Gardner showed Cromwell’s aggressive foreign policy was a foretaste Victorian imperial expansion, with Gardiner stressing his “constancy of effort to make England great by land and sea”.<ref>Gardiner, ''Oliver Cromwell'' (1901) p. 318.</ref>

Royals dislike regicides, so King [[George V]] vetoed Churchill's proposal in 1915 to name a battleship "The Cromwell"; but King [[George VI]] made no objection to the naming of a class of tanks that helped to win World War II after Old Ironsides. In the mid-20th century, Cromwell's reputation was often shaped by the rise of dictators like Mussolini and Hitler. In the 1930s Wilbur Cortez Abott, a Harvard professor, compiled and edited a multi-volume collection of Cromwell's letters and speeches, and concluded Cromwell had fascist tendencies. However, subsequent historians such as John Morrill have criticised both Abbott's interpretation of Cromwell and his editorial approach.<ref>John Morrill, "Textualising and Contextualising Cromwell", in ''Historical Journal'' (1990). v33#3, pp. 629-639.</ref>

Cromwell's reputation is now in the ascendant. More than twenty biographies by academic historians have been published in the past fifty years; all but one have been laudatory. They praise his integrity, his reliance upon his God, his brilliance as a soldier, his restless energy as head of state. There are varying estimates of the long-term effects of his role in the British Revolutions; but no recent biographer doubts that he was a man to be admired.<ref> Morrill (2003)</ref>

Recent scholars have emphasized Cromwell’s religiosity and downplayed his authoritarian style. Austin Woolrych explored the issue of "dictatorship" in depth, arguing that Cromwell was subject to two conflicting forces: his obligation to the army and his desire to achieve a lasting settlement, by winning back the confidence of the political nation as a whole. Woolrych argued that the dictatorial elements of Cromwell's rule stemmed not so much from its military origins or the participation of army officers in civil government, as from his constant commitment to the interest of the people of God, and his conviction that suppressing vice and encouraging virtue constituted the chief purpose of government.<ref>Austin Woolrych, "The Cromwellian Protectorate: a Military Dictatorship?" in ''History'' (1990) 75(244): 207-231</ref>

Historians such as John Morrill, Blair Worden and J.C. Davis have explored Cromwell's religious rhetoric, showing his speeches are suffused with biblical references, and arguing that his radical actions were driven by his zeal for godly reformation.<ref>Morrill "Cromwell, Oliver (1599–1658)", in ''Oxford Dictionary of National Biography,''(2004). [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/6765]; Blair Worden, "Oliver Cromwell and the sin of Achan". In Beales, D. and Best, G., ''History, Society and the Churches'' (1985); J.C. Davis, "Cromwell’s religion", in Morrill, John (ed.), ''Oliver Cromwell and the English Revolution'' (1990). </ref>
==Bibliography==
===Biographies===
* Ashley, Maurice. ''The Greatness of Oliver Cromwell'' (1958). 382pp, a standard scholarly biography [http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=3806780 online edition]
* Bennett, Martyn. ''Oliver Cromwell'' (2006), ISBN 0-415-31922-6. [http://www.amazon.com/Oliver-Cromwell-Routledge-Historical-Biographies/dp/0415319226/ref=sr_1_22?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1212181942&sr=1-22 excerpt and text search]
* Coward, Barry ''Cromwell'' (1991), a standard scholarly biography
* Clifford, Alan. ''Oliver Cromwell: the lessons and legacy of the Protectorate'' (1999), ISBN 0-9526716-2-X. praises his religiousity
* Davis, J. C. ''Oliver Cromwell'' (2001), shows Cromwell's remarkable skill at building complex networks of supporters, including coreligionists, politicians and soldiers. ISBN 0-340-73118-4
* Drinkwater John. ''Oliver Cromwell, a Character Study'' (2007) [http://books.google.com/books?id=62DlZJaCaWkC&pg=PA173&dq=intitle:Cromwell+date:2006-2008&lr=&num=30&as_brr=0&sig=79z-gHLUUSA7Bpsg-3TCXGuMKQM excerpts and text search]
* Fraser, Antonia. ''Cromwell, Our Chief of Men,'' and ''Cromwell: the Lord Protector'' (1973), ISBN 0-7538-1331-9. Popular narrative. [http://www.amazon.com/Cromwell-Antonia-Fraser/dp/0802137660/ref=pd_bbs_sr_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1212181888&sr=1-2 excerpt and text search]
* Gardiner, Samuel Rawson. ''Oliver Cromwell'' (1901). ISBN 1-4179-4961-9. Classic biography. [http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=6034779 online edition]
* Gaunt, Peter. ''Oliver Cromwell'' (1994), 144pp ISBN 0-631-18356-6. Short biography by scholar
* Hill, Christopher. ''God's Englishman: Oliver Cromwell And The English Revolution'' (1970), ISBN 0-297-00043-8.
* Hirst, Derek. "The Lord Protector, 1653-8", in Morrill, John (ed.), ''Oliver Cromwell and the English Revolution'' (1990), ISBN 0-582-01675-4
* Mason, James and Angela Leonard. ''Oliver Cromwell'' (1998), ISBN 0-582-29734-6. 128pp succinct and effective
* Morrill, John. "Cromwell, Oliver (1599–1658)", in ''Oxford Dictionary of National Biography,'' (2004) [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/6765 online to subscribers], the best place to start
* Morrill, John. "The Making of Oliver Cromwell", in Morrill, John (ed.), ''Oliver Cromwell and the English Revolution'' (1990), ISBN 0-582-01675-4.
* Paul, Robert. ''The Lord Protector: Religion And Politics In The Life of Oliver Cromwell''. (1958) [http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=3672431 online edition]
* Wedgwood, C.V. ''Oliver Cromwell'' (1939), popular ISBN 0-7156-0656-5.
* Worden, Blair (1985). "Oliver Cromwell and the sin of Achan", in Beales, D. and Best, G. (eds.) ''History, Society and the Churches'', ISBN 0-521-02189-8.

===Political studies===
* Adamson, John . "Oliver Cromwell and the Long Parliament", in Morrill, John (ed.), ''Oliver Cromwell and the English Revolution'' (1990)
* Adamson, John. "The English Nobility and the Projected Settlement of 1647", in ''Historical Journal'', (1987) v30#3.
* Coward, Barry. ''The Cromwellian Protectorate'' (2002),
* Firth, C.H. ''Oliver Cromwell and the Rule of the Puritans in England'' (1900). [http://books.google.com/books?id=Y14NAAAAIAAJ&printsec=frontcover&dq=intitle:Oliver+intitle:Cromwell+intitle:and+intitle:the+intitle:Rule+intitle:of+intitle:the+intitle:Puritans&lr=&num=30&as_brr=0 full text online]
* Little, Patrick, ed. ''The Cromwellian Protectorate.'' (2007). 218 pp.
* Little, Patrick. "Offering the Crown to Cromwell." ''History Today'' 2007 57(2): 24-31. Issn: 0018-2753 Fulltext: [[Ebsco]]
* Little, Patrick and David L. Smith, eds. ''Parliaments and Politics during the Cromwellian Protectorate'' (2007) [http://www.amazon.com/Parliaments-Politics-Cromwellian-Protectorate-Cambridge/dp/0521838673/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1212300336&sr=1-3 excerpt and text search]
* Peacey, Jason. "Cromwellian England: a Propaganda State?" ''History'' 2006 91(2): 176-199. Issn: 0018-2648 Fulltext: [[Ebsco]], says that in 1653-1659, profound changes were implemented in intelligence gathering, press censorship, and propaganda and in the deployment of resources and bureaucratic efficiency. By concentrating power in the hands of the secretary of state, Cromwell;s regime sought to exert its power in only some areas of print culture rather than to achieve a complete press monopoly.
* Smith, David, ed. ''Oliver Cromwell and the Interregnum'' (2003), ISBN 0-631-22725-3.
* Smith, David. ''Oliver Cromwell: Politics and Religion in the English Revolution 1640-1658'' (1992) [http://www.amazon.com/Oliver-Cromwell-Revolution-1640-1658-Cambridge/dp/0521388961/ref=sr_1_36?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1212181977&sr=1-36 excerpt and text search]

===Military studies===
* Capp, Bernard. ''Cromwell's Navy:The fleet and the English Revolution, 1648-1660'' (1989)
* Durston, Christopher. "'Settling the Hearts and Quieting the Minds of All Good People': the Major-generals and the Puritan Minorities of Interregnum England", in ''History'' 2000 85(278): pp.247-267, ISSN 0018-2648 . Full text online at [[Ebsco]]
* Durston, Christopher. "The Fall of Cromwell's Major-Generals", in ''English Historical Review'' 1998 113(450): pp.18-37, ISSN 0013-8266
* Durston, Christopher. ''Cromwell's Major Generals: Godly Government during the English Revolution'' (2001)
* Firth, C.H. ''Cromwell's Army'' (1902), [http://books.google.com/books?id=hx4kAAAAMAAJ&printsec=frontcover&dq=intitle:Cromwell%27s+intitle:Army&lr=&num=30&as_brr=0 online edition]
* Gillingham, J. ''Portrait Of A Soldier: Cromwell'' (1976), ISBN 0-297-77148-5.
* Kenyon, John, and Jane Ohlmeyer, eds. ''The Civil Wars: A Military History of England, Scotland, and Ireland 1638-1660'' 391 pp. (1998), thorough coverage by numerous scholars [http://www.questia.com/read/85742104?title=The%20Civil%20Wars%3a%20A%20Military%20History%20of%20England%2c%20Scotland%2c%20and%20Ireland%201638-1660 online edition]
* Kitson, Frank (2004). ''Old Ironsides: The Military Biography of Oliver Cromwell'' (2004), 239pp ISBN 0-297-84688-4.
* Marshall, Alan. ''Oliver Cromwell: Soldier: The Military Life of a Revolutionary at War'' (2004), ISBN 1-85753-343-7.
* Wheeler, J. Scott. ''Cromwell in Ireland'' (1999). the standard study
* Woolrych, Austin. "The Cromwellian Protectorate: a Military Dictatorship?" in ''History'' 1990 75(244): 207-231, ISSN 0018-2648 . Full text online at Ebsco.
* Woolrych, Austin. "Cromwell as a soldier", in Morrill, John (ed.), ''Oliver Cromwell and the English Revolution'' (1990)
* Woolrych, Austin. ''Soldiers and Statesmen: the General Council of the Army and its Debates'' (1987), ISBN 0-19-822752-3.
* Young, Peter and Richard Holmes. ''The English Civil War,'' (2000) ISBN 1-84022-222-0. [http://www.amazon.com/English-Civil-Wordsworth-Military-Library/dp/1840222220/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1212300220&sr=1-2 excerpt and text search]

===Surveys of era===
* Coward, Barry. ''The Cromwellian Protectorate'' (2002) ISBN 0-7190-4317-4.
* Coward, Barry, ed. ''A Companion to Stuart Britain'' (2003) [http://www.amazon.com/Companion-Britain-Blackwell-Companions-British/dp/0631218742/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1212300112&sr=8-1 excerpt and text search]
* Coward, Barry ''The Stuart Age: England, 1603-1714,'' (2003). ISBN 0-582-77251-6. Survey of political history of the era.
* Davies, Godfrey. ''The Early Stuarts, 1603-1660'' (1959). [http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=774608 online]. Political, religious, and diplomatic overview of the era.
* Gardiner, Samuel Rawson. ''History of the Great Civil War, 1642-1649'' (4 vol 1898) [http://books.google.com/books?id=absqibcUmIQC&printsec=frontcover&dq=intitle:History+intitle:of+intitle:the+intitle:Great+intitle:Civil+intitle:War+inauthor:Gardiner&lr=&as_brr=0 online edition from Google]
* Gaunt, Peter. ''The Cromwellian Gazetteer: An Illustrated Guide to Britain in the Civil War and Commonwealth'' (1998), 256pp; heavily illustrated; covers the scenes of military conflict such as battlefields, castles, fortified houses and churches, defended and besieged towns and cities
* Korr, Charles P. ''Cromwell and the New Model Foreign Policy: England's Policy toward France, 1649-1658'' (1975) ISBN 0-520-02281-5. [http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=98872257 online]
* Macinnes, Allan. ''The British Revolution, 1629-1660'' (2005), 337pp ISBN 0-333-59750-8.
* Morrill, John. "Cromwell and his contemporaries". In Morrill, John (ed.), ''Oliver Cromwell and the English Revolution'' (1990) ISBN 0-582-01675-4. [http://www.amazon.com/Oliver-Cromwell-English-Revolution-Morrill/dp/0582016754/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1212300435&sr=1-1 excerpt and text search]
* Trevor-Roper, Hugh. ''Oliver Cromwell and his Parliaments'', in his ''Religion, the Reformation and Social Change'' (1967). [http://oll.libertyfund.org/?option=com_staticxt&staticfile=show.php%3Ftitle=719&chapter=77057&layout=html&Itemid=27 online edition]
* Venning, Timothy. ''Cromwellian Foreign Policy'' (1995) ISBN 0-333-63388-1.
* Woolrych, Austin. ''Commonwealth to Protectorate'' (1982), ISBN 0-19-822659-4.
* Woolrych, Austin. ''Britain in Revolution 1625-1660'' (2002), ISBN 0-19-927268-6. [http://www.amazon.com/Britain-Revolution-1625-1660-Austin-Woolrych/dp/0199272689/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1212300255&sr=1-2 excerpt and text search]
===Historiography===
* Davis, J. C. ''Oliver Cromwell'' (2001). 243 pp; a biographical study that covers sources and historiography
* Goodlad, Graham. "The Cromwellian Protectorate." ''History Review,'' (March 2007,) Issue 57; online at [[EBSCO]]
* Lunger Knoppers, Laura. ''Constructing Cromwell. Ceremony, Portrait and Print, 1645-1661'' (2000), shows how people compared Cromwell to King Ahab, King David, Elijah, Gideon and Moses, as well as Brutus and Julius Caesar.
* Morrill, John. "Rewriting Cromwell: a Case of Deafening Silences." ''Canadian Journal of History'' 2003 38(3): 553-578. Issn: 0008-4107 Fulltext: [[Ebsco]]
* Worden, Blair. "Thomas Carlyle and Oliver Cromwell", in ''Proceedings Of The British Academy''(2000) 105: pp.131-170. ISSN 0068-1202 .
* Worden, Blair. ''Roundhead Reputations: the English Civil Wars and the passions of posterity'' (2001), 387pp; ISBN 0-14-100694-3.
* Warden, Blair. "The English Reputations of Oliver Cromwell, 1660-1900" in William Lamont, ed. '' ''Historical Controversies and Historians'' (1998) 35-48 [http://books.google.com/books?id=fi4SmvdoUfoC&pg=PA35&dq=%22 online]

===Primary sources===
* Abbott, W.C., ed. ''Writings and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell,'' 4 vols. (1937-47).The largest reference for Cromwell's own words [http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=98993729 online edition].
** Morrill, John. "Textualizing and Contextualizing Cromwell", in ''Historical Journal'' 1990 33(3): pp.629-639. ISSN 0018-246X . [http://www.jstor.org/pss/2639734 in Jstor] Examines the Carlyle and Abbott editions.
* Carlyle, Thomas, ed. ''Oliver Cromwell's letters and speeches, with elucidations''. (1904 edition), [http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=98993729 online edition]
* Haykin, Michael A. G. ed. ''To Honour God: The Spirituality of Oliver Cromwell'' (1999). ISBN 1-894400-03-8. Excerpts from Cromwell's religious writings.
* Roots, Ivan. ''Speeches of Oliver Cromwell'' (1989, ISBN 0-460-01254-1.

==External links==
*[http://www.olivercromwell.org/ The Oliver Cromwell Association]
*[http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/historic_figures/cromwell_oliver.shtml Cromwell at BBC History]
*[http://britannia.com/history/monarchs/mon48.html Cromwell at ''Britannia'' website]

====notes====
<references/>

{{DEFAULTSORT:Cromwell, Oliver}}

[[Category:Military Commanders]]
{{Nb_english_monarchs}}
[[Category:English Civil War]]
[[Category:British History]]
[[Category:Puritans]]

Charles I

2010-05-12T12:50:08Z

Darkmind1970:

'''Charles I''' (19 November 1600 – 30 January 1649) was [[King of England]], King of Scotland and King of Ireland from 27 March 1625 until his execution.

Charles struggled for power with the Parliament of England. He firmly believed in the [[Divine Right of Kings]], and many in [[England]] feared that he was attempting to gain absolute power.

Religious conflicts were a notable feature of Charles' reign. He married a Catholic princess, Henrietta Maria of France, over the objections of Parliament and public opinion. Many of Charles' subjects felt that he brought the Church of England too close to Roman Catholicism. Charles' later attempts to force religious reforms upon Scotland led to the Bishops' Wars that weakened England's government and led to his downfall.

His last years were marked by the English Civil War, in which he was opposed by the forces of Parliament and by Puritans, who were hostile to his religious policies and Catholic sympathy. Charles was defeated in the first Civil War (1642 - 1645), after which Parliament expected him to accept demands for a constitutional monarchy. He instead remained defiant by attempting to forge an alliance with Scotland and escaping to the Isle of Man. This provoked a second Civil War (1648 - 1649) and a second defeat for Charles, who was tried and then executed for high treason. The monarchy was then abolished and a republic called the Commonwealth of England was declared. Charles's son, Charles II, became King after the restoration of the monarchy in 1660.

King Charles I was canonized by the [[Anglican Communion]] as Saint King Charles, the Martyr, his Feast Day is 30 January.

see [[English Civil War]]

{{Nb_english_monarchs}}

To Be Finished...

[[category:Scottish Monarchs]]
[[Category:British History]]
[[Category:England]]
[[Category:Anglicans]]
[[Category:Saints]]

see [[English Civil War]]

[[category:English Civil War]]

Operation Overlord

2010-05-12T12:26:51Z

Darkmind1970:

[[Image:normandy.jpg|300px|thumb|right|American troops disembark under heavy fire at ''Omaha'', the code name for their section of the Normandy coastline]]
'''Operation Overlord''', also known as the '''Normandy Invasion''' or simply '''D-Day''', was the code name for the Allied invasion of northern [[Europe]] in [[World War II]]. It began with the landings on the beaches of [[Normandy]] in northwestern France on June 6, 1944, and accomplished the largest amphibious invasion in the history of mankind, using 200,000 men, 9,000 planes, and 5,000 ships.

==Strategic Setting==
The British Chiefs of Staff charged Admiral Lord [[Louis Mountbatten]] and his Combined Operations Headquarters in September 1941 with investigating the feasibility of amphibious operations in the European theater of the war. Earlier, Admiral Sir Roger Keyes had undertaken some planning for commando raids, but Mountbatten was to do more. "You are to prepare for the invasion of Europe," British Prime Minister [[Winston Churchill]] told him. "You must devise and design the appliances, the landing craft, and the technique...The whole of the South Coast of England is a bastion of defense against the invasion of Hitler; you've got to turn it into the springboard for our attack."

American planners began formal cooperation with Britain in December 1941, just after the Japanese attack at [[Attack on Pearl Harbor|Pearl Harbor]] and the German and Italian declarations of war against the United States. In compliance with earlier, informal understandings, the two partners agreed to put first the defeat of [[Germany]] and its ally [[Italy]] if forced to wage a two-front war against both those nations and Japan. Shortly thereafter, British planners drafted a proposal, code-named ROUNDUP, for an attack across the English Channel into France. The assault would come only after a series of major campaigns on the periphery of Europe, in [[Scandinavia]], the [[Mediterranean Sea]], the [[Balkans]], and the [[Soviet Union]], where the Germans would have difficulty massing their power. Once bombing, blockade, partisan uprisings, and the fighting on those other fronts had weakened the enemy sufficiently, ROUNDUP, or something like it, would begin.

Despite talk that a Continental invasion might come as early as 1942, Allied leaders in the end decided tentatively to make the assault in 1943, either through Western Europe or the Balkans. Because British forces would bear the burden of operations in Europe until the United States could complete its buildup for war, the decisions that came out of the conference hewed closely to Britain's preference for attacks on Germany's periphery. Although the British later accepted an American proposal, code-named BOLERO, for the establishment in Britain of a million-man force trained and equipped for the 1943 invasion, the United States agreed that during 1942 Allied forces should concentrate on wearing down Germany's resistance through air attacks, operations along the North African coast, and assistance to the Soviet Union.

====Initial disagreements====
Allied leaders honed their strategy further at a series of great conferences during 1942 and 1943—at Casablanca, [[Quebec]], [[Cairo]], and [[Tehran]]. Examining a range of alternatives, they gradually adopted the broad outlines of the attack they would launch. As planning continued, however, it became clear that the Americans disagreed ardently with the British desire to wear down the Germans before beginning a final confrontation on the Continent. Confident in the strength of their vast resources, American planners argued that "wars cannot be finally won without the use of land armies" and that only direct action against the main body of the German force could produce an Allied victory. Britain's peripheral approach, they asserted, would waste valuable assets on operations that could have at best an indirect effect on the outcome of the war. There was also the Soviet Union to consider, which had suffered millions of casualties in its fight with the Germans on the Eastern Front and might conceivably collapse and conclude a separate peace if Britain and the United States failed to relieve some of the pressure by attacking in the west. Soviet leader Joseph Stalin was already clamoring for a second front. To the Americans it seemed far better to seize the initiative from Germany with a bold assault than to allow the alliance's resources to dribble away in operations that would have little long-term effect on the enemy's will to resist.

====British views====
The British viewed the situation in Europe with an eye closely focused on their own circumstances and experience. As conscious of their nation's lack of resources as the Americans were of the vast wealth available to the United States, they had already withstood a disaster at Dunkirk in 1940, when the Germans had driven a British army off the Continent in defeat, and at the French seacoast town of [[Dieppe]] in August 1942, when the Germans, at great cost to the Allies, had repelled a Canadian landing. Their experiences with amphibious warfare during World War I had been little better. Their forces had endured a bloodletting at [[Gallipoli]] in the [[Dardanelles]], where landings championed by Churchill had failed. They had also lost an entire generation of young men to trench warfare on the stalemated Western Front in France. Britain's leaders thus had visions of catastrophe whenever the Americans raised the issue of a cross-Channel attack. If haste prevailed over reason, Churchill warned, the beaches of France might well be "choked with the bodies of the flower of American and British manhood."

If the British had agreed in principle at the [[Arcadia Conference]] to an early attack across the Channel, by the end of 1942 they had nevertheless succeeded in shifting many of the resources marked for Bolero to TORCH, an Allied invasion of North Africa much more in accord with their own point of view. The American military had little choice but to go along. They not only lacked the landing craft, warplanes, and shipping necessary to carry out a cross-Channel attack, they also had to contend with their commander in chief, President Roosevelt, who had become convinced that some sort of immediate action against Germany was necessary to divert the attention of the American people from the Pacific to the Atlantic side of the war.

The vehement German response to the assault at Dieppe, resulting in the loss of nearly a thousand British and Canadian lives, the capture of more than two thousand fighting men, and the destruction of better than one hundred aircraft, weighed heavily upon Allied planners. If the German response at Dieppe was any indication, an invasion of the Continent would require more meticulous preparation and more strength than a 1943 attack could possibly allow. Indeed, Allied planners and logisticians would have to create, field, and supply an organization that could meet and defeat the worst counterattack the enemy was capable of devising.

The British point of view prevailed for much of the next year, causing Allied forces to fight on the fringes of the enemy's power in Sicily and southern Italy. By the middle of 1943, however, with victory in North Africa in hand, the fall of Italy near, and the first Russian victories in the east, the Americans renewed their call for a cross-Channel attack. A crash effort in the United States to construct shallow-draft landing vessels and long-range fighter aircraft had assured that at least minimum resources would be available to move a major force onto the beaches of France and to protect it from air attack. Meanwhile, the success of the anti-U-boat campaign in the Atlantic had guaranteed that the vast supplies of ammunition and provisions necessary for the invasion could move safely from the United States to staging areas in Great Britain.

Although British leaders continued to advocate their peripheral strategy, the importance of American resources to the war effort had become so great that they had little choice but to go along with their ally. At the [[Casablanca Conference]] of January 1943 they thus agreed in principle to a 1944 invasion of the Continent. Shortly thereafter, the British General Staff appointed Lt. Gen. Frederick E. Morgan to be Chief of Staff (COS) to a still to be appointed Supreme Allied Commander (SAC) and gave him responsibility for planning the attack. By April 1943 Morgan had established an organization to carry out that task and had named it COSSAC after the initials in his new title. He warned his officers at that time to avoid thinking of themselves as planners and to see themselves instead as the embryo of a future supreme headquarters. "The term planning staff has come to have a most sinister meaning," he observed. "It implies the production of nothing but paper. What we must contrive to do somehow is to produce not only paper but action."

Under Churchill's influence, the British for a time continued to argue in favor of possible operations in the Balkans. The Americans, however, suspected that their ally was more interested in securing a postwar empire than in defeating Germany as soon as possible. Refusing further delays, they won agreement for a 1 May 1944 attack during the May 1943 Trident Conference in Washington. One month later, the Quadrant Conference in Quebec reaffirmed the decision.

Soviet Premier [[Joseph Stalin]] strengthened the Americans' hand during the Tehran Conference in November. He had reacted furiously to news after the Casablanca Conference that there would be no second front in 1943. At Tehran he welcomed the new emphasis on an attack and pushed vigorously for the appointment of a supreme commander to head the operation. From then on, the Americans were able to argue that any postponement of the invasion would constitute a breach of faith with the Russians. Wrangling continued over the Italian campaign and a possible invasion of southern France, code-named ANVIL, the flow of men and supplies to the Mediterranean theater slowed and the final buildup for the cross-Channel attack began in earnest.

====Selection of Eisenhower====
The selection of a commander for Allied forces required considerable thought. If the invasion had occurred early in the war, the British would have supplied the bulk of the resources and would have controlled the operation. Churchill had tentatively selected General Sir Alan Brooke for the task. But as the war lengthened and American resources became predominant, the selection of an American commander seemed appropriate. Roosevelt and Churchill first inclined toward the man who had played the principal role in coordinating the overall American military effort, U.S. Army Chief of Staff General [[George C. Marshall]]. When Roosevelt decided that Marshall's presence in Washington was indispensable, the Allies agreed on General [[Dwight D. Eisenhower]], another well-experienced officer and the commander of Allied forces in North Africa and the Mediterranean. In the end, Eisenhower would serve as Supreme Allied Commander in Europe and as commanding general of all U.S. forces in the European Theater of Operations.

Appointed as Supreme Commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force in December 1943, Eisenhower selected his former chief of staff in the Mediterranean, Lt. Gen. [[Walter Bedell Smith]], to be his chief of staff in Europe. Smith transformed COSSAC into the supreme headquarters Morgan had envisioned and installed Morgan as his deputy. Aware of British sensitivities and attuned to the political difficulties that might develop if American generals came to dominate Allied councils, Eisenhower selected his principal commanders from among the British. Air Chief Marshal Sir Arthur Tedder became the Deputy Supreme Allied Commander and principal coordinator of the theater's air forces, and Admiral Sir Bertram Ramsay served as naval commander for the invasion. An American, Lt. Gen. Carl Spaatz, commanded U.S. Strategic Air Forces in Europe, while an Englishman, Air Chief Marshal Sir Arthur T. Harris, commanded the Royal Air Force's Bomber Command. Air Chief Marshal Sir Trafford Leigh-Mallory headed those portions of the Allied air forces concerned with tactical air support.

If the tactical air forces for the invasion were clearly under Eisenhower, there was disagreement over whether he commanded the strategic air forces employed in bombing Germany. Spaatz and Harris were disposed to cooperate with Eisenhower but insisted on remaining independent in order to concentrate on destroying Germany's industrial base and air force. After considerable give and take, an arrangement suitable to all sides emerged. Subject to the oversight of the Combined Chiefs of Staff, a joint committee composed of the British Chiefs of Staff and their American counterparts, Eisenhower gained responsibility for the "direction" of strategic air forces. It was understood, however, that the cross-Channel attack, code-named Operation OVERLORD, would not absorb the entire bomber effort and that the air campaign against Germany would continue.

Eisenhower asked General Sir [[Bernard Law Montgomery]], who had led the Eighth Army in North Africa, Sicily, and Italy, and who had become the commander of the 21st Army Group for the invasion, to serve as pro tem commander of the Allied ground forces coming ashore in France. Montgomery would carry out final planning and coordinate the early phases of the attack. Two commanders would serve under Montgomery: Lt. Gen. [[Omar Nelson Bradley]] would head the American force, the First U.S. Army; General Sir Miles Dempsey would lead the Second British Army, composed of British, Canadian, and a handful of French troops. The Third U.S. Army, commanded by Lt. Gen. [[George S. Patton]], Jr., would enter the battle after the Allies had achieved a secure lodgment on the Continent. It would join the First U.S. Army, now commanded by Lt. Gen. Courtney Hodges, to form the 12th Army Group under Bradley. Lt. Gen. Henry D. G. Crerar's First Canadian Army would join Dempsey under Montgomery.

==Creating the general plan==
During the summer of 1943, COSSAC had formulated a tentative plan of attack that involved a force of from three to five divisions. That assault would depend for supply upon the development of two prefabricated harbors, called "mulberries", that were to be positioned along with breakwaters composed of scuttled ships just off the invasion beaches. The mulberries would give the Allies a measure of flexibility by allowing them to provision the force moving inland without having to rely upon the immediate capture of an established port.

====Landing site====
As COSSAC developed that plan, the question of where to land posed problems. The site would have to be within the range of fighter aircraft based in Great Britain but also on ground flat enough to construct the airfields that would become necessary once the invading force moved off the beaches and out of the range of its initial fighter support. The landing zones themselves would have to be sheltered from prevailing winds to facilitate around-the-clock resupply operations and would have to possess enough exits to allow the invading force to proceed inland with as little difficulty as possible. Similarly, the area behind the beaches would have to include a road network adequate to the needs of a force that intended to move rapidly. Since the region would ultimately form a base for the drive across France toward Germany, a series of large ports would also have to be close enough to facilitate the unloading of the massive quantities of supplies and ammunition that would be necessary to sustain the attack.

The most appropriate location, COSSAC's planners decided, lay directly across the English Channel from Dover in the Pas de Calais region. The area fulfilled many of the Allies' requirements and offered a direct route into the heart of Germany. Since the enemy had recognized that fact, however, and had already begun to construct heavy fortifications along the coast, an alternative had to be found. The most suitable stood farther to the west, along the Normandy coast near Caen and the Cotentin Peninsula. That region contained major ports at Cherbourg and Le Havre and offered a gateway to ports at Brest, Nantes, L'Orient, and St. Nazaire. Allied planners believed that the Germans would undoubtedly sabotage Cherbourg, forcing the invaders to place heavy initial reliance upon the mulberries, but the damage could be repaired and the region itself was less strongly defended than the Pas de Calais. Offering, as well, a satisfactory opening into the French interior, it became the site of the invasion.

====Looking towards Normandy====
As planning continued, both Eisenhower and Montgomery recognized that the three-to-five-division assault COSSAC had envisioned would have to be strengthened and spread over a larger area. Looking toward the early capture of Cherbourg and the secure flow of supplies that port would ensure, Montgomery argued in favor of a broad attack somewhat west of Caen. Stretching from the area below that city into the region beyond the town of St. Martin-de-Varreville, the front he envisioned would have a breadth of some sixty miles. When Morgan's planners responded that a bridgehead of that size would require resources far in excess of those available, Montgomery asserted that nothing less would work and that the Allies would either have to find the means or another commander.

Montgomery's insistence led to a sometimes acrimonious debate over the value of ANVIL, a plan to invade southern France that Eisenhower wanted to schedule simultaneously with OVERLORD. The invasion's planners considered the attack important and the conferees at Tehran had endorsed it, but the British — particularly Churchill — had never seen its merit. Hesitant at first to cancel the operation because it seemed a necessary diversion for the main effort in the Cotentin, Eisenhower in the end agreed to a postponement. Given the enlarged scope of OVERLORD, no other alternative seemed possible. There were too few landing craft to go around.

Although the debate over ANVIL continued, by 23 January 1944 the Allies had settled on a basic plan of attack for Normandy. The Americans would take the western flank closest to Cherbourg while the British operated to the east, on the approaches to Caen. Logistics determined the arrangement. American forces had arrived in Britain via the country's western ports and had positioned depots in those areas. It made sense for them to operate near those bases. In addition, responding to the congestion in Britain's ports brought on by preparations for the invasion, American logisticians planned to load ships in the United States for direct discharge onto the beaches of France, without an intermediate unloading in Britain. The western flank was closer to that line of supply.

====Finalizing the plan====
On the night before the invasion, the U.S. 82d and 101st Airborne Divisions would land by parachute and glider near the town of Ste. Mere-Eglise, securing the roads that led from the shoreline and obstructing enemy efforts to reinforce beach defenses. The next morning Bradley's First Army would arrive. The VII Corps would put the U.S. 4th Division ashore on UTAH Beach near les Dunes de Varreville.

To the east, the V Corps, composed of the U.S. 1st and portions of the 29th Infantry Divisions, would land on OMAHA Beach near the town of Vierville-sur-Mer. With a foothold secure in Normandy, V Corps would expand the beachhead to the south while VII Corps cut across the Contentin Peninsula and then wheeled north to capture Cherbourg. With the seaport in hand, VII Corps was to turn south and move toward the town of St. Lo. Once Bradley held the town and the St. Lo-Periers Road, he would have his army on dry ground suitable for offensive operations by mechanized forces. Patton's Third Army would then take to the field. Advancing into Brittany, it would seize Brest and other ports and cover the south flank when the First Army began an attack to the northeast toward Paris. To the east, the Second British Army would operate in the region between Bayeux and Caen, an area that possessed suitable sites for airfields and that offered a relatively unimpeded route to Paris. As in the American sector, an airborne division, the British 6th, would secure the northeastern flank of the operation, dropping during the hours before dawn near Caen and the mouth of the Orne River. At H-hour, the British 50th Division under the British 30 Corps would come ashore on GOLD Beach, near Bayeux and the American zone, while 1 Corps conducted a two-pronged attack farther to the east. There, the 3d Canadian Division would cross JUNO Beach near the town of Courseulles and the British 3d Division would come ashore at SWORD, near Lion-sur-Mer. "In the initial stages," Montgomery told his officers, "we should concentrate on gaining control quickly of the main centres of road communications. We should then push our armoured formations between and beyond these centres and deploy them on suitable ground. In this way it would be difficult for the enemy to bring up his reserves and get them past these armoured formations."

Over all, Allied planners intended to gain a lodgment between the Seine and Loire Rivers. Assuming that the Germans, after initial resistance, would choose to withdraw their forces behind the natural barrier provided by the Seine, they estimated that the task would take about ninety days. After a pause to regroup and resupply, the Allies would then begin an advance into the regions beyond the Seine and toward Germany.

====Troop buildup in England====
As planning continued, the BOLERO buildup in Britain, begun in 1942 to arm and provision the invasion, took on new momentum. With 39 divisions slated to participate in the invasion—20 American, 14 British, 3 Canadian, 1 French, and 1 Polish—along with hundreds of thousands of service troops, there was little time to waste. The number of U.S. fighting men based in Great Britain alone would double in the first six months of 1944, rising from 774,000 at the beginning of the year to 1,537,000 in the week preceding the final assault. More than 16 million tons of supplies would be needed to feed and supply those men and their allies: six and one-quarter pounds of rations per day per man; 137,000 jeeps, trucks, and half-tracks; 4,217 tanks and fully tracked vehicles; 3,500 artillery pieces; 12,000 aircraft; and huge stores of sundries—everything from dental [[amalgam]] for fillings to chewing gum and candy bars.

Quarters and depots to house the entire force mushroomed across the English countryside, many in just the seventeen weeks that preceded the invasion. The fields of Somerset and Cornwall became armories for the vast stores of bombs and artillery shells that the operation would require. The congestion extended to Britain's harbors, where ships laden with more supplies stood by. By the day of the attack, besides the immense force of fighting ships that would land the troops in Normandy and of cargo vessels that continued to ply Atlantic supply routes, more than 3 million deadweight tons of merchant shipping were in direct service to the invasion. The huge size of the buildup notwithstanding, landing craft were in such short supply that Eisenhower postponed the invasion for one month, from May to June.

While logisticians laid the base for the invasion, the Allied air forces opened the way for the attack itself by waging massive bombing campaigns in Germany and France. In Germany, between January and June 1944, Allied fighters swept the skies clear of German warplanes and took a heavy toll in pilots. As a result, by June 1944 the enemy lacked both the aircraft and the airmen to mount more than a token resistance to Allied plans.

==Deception==
Meanwhile, in France, as members of the French resistance cut railroad tracks, sabotaged locomotives, and targeted supply trains, Allied aircraft bombed roads, bridges, and rail junctions to prevent the Germans from moving reinforcements toward the invasion beaches. To deceive the enemy's intelligence agencies, the attacks occurred along the entire length of the Channel coast. By June, despite intelligence reports questioning the value of the attacks, all rail routes across the Seine River north of Paris were closed; the transportation system in France was at the point of collapse.

Deception was, indeed, a major part of the Allied campaign plan. To mislead the Germans into believing that the Pas de Calais, rather than the Cotentin, would be the site of the invasion, Eisenhower's staff created a mythical 1st Army Group, with an order of battle larger than that of Montgomery's 21st Army Group. Basing the phantom force near Dover, just across the Channel from the supposed target, the planners then set construction crews to building dummy installations of plywood and canvas and dotted them with an array of inflatable tanks and vehicles. They also anchored a vast armada of rubber landing craft in the Thames River estuary, where German reconnaissance aircraft were certain to spot them. Eisenhower assigned Patton, the American general the Germans most respected, to command the phantom army and saw to it that known enemy agents received information on the status of Patton's force. Allied naval units conducted protracted maneuvers off the Channel coast near the location of the shadow army, and components of Patton's fictitious command indulged in extensive radio trafficking to signal to German intelligence analysts that a major military organization was functioning. A careful plan of aerial bombardment complemented the ploy. During the weeks preceding the invasion, Allied airmen dropped more bombs on the Pas de Calais than anywhere else in France.

To protect the date of the invasion from prying German eyes, the Allies called it [[D-Day]], which carried no implications of any sort. NEPTUNE, the code name they used in place of OVERLORD on planning documents after September 1943, was similarly devoid of connotation. Although American commanders doubted that their ruses would have much effect, their schemes succeeded far beyond expectations. The Germans became so convinced that the Pas de Calais would be the Allied target that they held to the fiction until long after the actual attack had begun. As a result, nineteen powerful enemy divisions, to include important panzer reserves, stood idle on the day of the invasion, awaiting an assault that never came, when their presence in Normandy might have told heavily against the Allied attack.

==German planning==
For their part, enemy forces labored against problems generated by a long war and an autocratic political system. In May 1942 the Germans had adopted a policy that gave the Russian Front first priority for troops and garrisoned the west with those who, because of wounds or other disabilities, were unable to endure the rigors imposed by that theater. Over the year that followed, twenty-two infantry and six armored divisions left France for the Eastern Front, along with the best equipment and men from the divisions that stayed behind. They were replaced by soldiers who were over-age or convalescing from wounds and by units composed of Russian, Italian, and Polish defectors. A few first-line units were present on the Western Front, but most of the rest had been shattered in the east and required replacements and refitting. The weapons they used were often leftovers. The artillery, for example, consisted of more than twenty types of guns, many of Czech or French rather than German manufacture. Training lagged because the men were frequently employed in crash efforts to build fortifications rather than in exercises to sharpen their combat skills.

In theory, the German chain of command in the west was an example of good order. [[Adolf Hitler]] served as supreme commander of the Wehrmacht, the nation's armed forces. The High Command (OKW), led by Field Marshal [[Wilhelm Keitel]], ran the war everywhere except in the Soviet Union. Navy Group West and the Third Air Fleet, in turn, managed Germany's naval and air forces in Western Europe while the ground force, some 58 divisions, came under the Oberbefehlshaber West (OB West), headed by Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt. OB West controlled two army groups, Army Group G. which had charge of the Mediterranean and Atlantic coasts of France, and Army Group B under Field Marshal [[Erwin Rommel]], who had charge of anti-invasion forces along the Channel coast as far south as the Loire River. Rommel commanded two armies: the 15th, guarding the Pas de Calais and the Normandy coast to a line just south of the Seine River with 19 divisions (5 panzer), and the 7th, with 13 divisions (1 panzer), covering the coast from the boundary with the 15th Army to the Loire River.

====German weakness====
So logical on paper, those arrangements masked conditions in the field that were close to Byzantine. Using the operations staff of OKW as an intermediary, Hitler exercised direct control over Rundstedt's OR West. In theory a theater commander, Rundstedt had no authority over air force or naval units based within areas under his jurisdiction. The navy commanded most of the coastal artillery that would be called upon to repel an Allied attack, and the air force controlled the bulk of the antiaircraft and parachute units stationed in the region. Some armor units also came under the administrative supervision of the SS (Schutzstaffel), the elite political army that answered first to Hitler and Berlin rather than to its supposed commanders in the field.

The manner in which Rommel exercised authority at Army Group B was symptomatic of the debilities afflicting the German staff. Subordinate in theory to Rundstedt, Rommel was his equal in rank. Much more forceful than Rundstedt in personality, he came to exercise far more influence than his position would normally have dictated. In addition, as a field marshal, he had the privilege of communicating directly with Hitler outside the chain of command. Thus he had the ability to undercut his superior whenever he wished.

Rommel disagreed with Rundstedt over how best to repel an Allied invasion. Rundstedt placed great reliance on mechanized reserves that could respond quickly and flexibly to an enemy thrust. To that end, he stationed a newly created armored command, Panzer Group West, near Paris. From there, the force could move, as circumstances required, toward the site of an enemy assault in either the Pas de Calais or Normandy.

Understanding the ability of the Allied air forces to isolate a battlefield and inhibit the movement of ground troops, Rommel believed Allied air superiority in France prevented the sort of mobile response Rundstedt envisioned. If Eisenhower's forces gained even the barest foothold on the Continent, he reasoned, they would win the war. To prevent that, German forces would have to repel the invasion at the water's edge through the use of well-dug-in and stationary troop formations on the shoreline. Directing his efforts to that end, Rommel built beach defenses, laid down minefields, and constructed obstacles to entangle Allied landing craft before they reached land. He also applied personally to Hitler, over Rundstedt's head, for control of the panzer divisions he believed he needed to reinforce his design.

Hitler temporized. Agreeing to Rommel's request at first but then returning control of the reserves to Rundstedt when the latter objected, he finally compromised between the two approaches. Three of Panzer Group West's divisions went to Rommel, but OKW maintained control over four others that were to operate as a central reserve. Hitler's caution satisfied neither field marshal and deprived each of the decisive authority over armor that would become critical as the battle for France evolved.

The malaise gripping the Wehrmacht might have made little difference if Hitler had been more forceful in preparing for the inevitable invasion. Although his generals, misled by the Allied deception plan, believed that the main Allied assault would come in the Pas de Calais, he thought that the attack would occur near Caen, and he said as much during March. Yet he failed to push the idea with any vigor, perhaps because he doubted his intuition in the face of his generals' certainty. Lacking any impetus from Hitler, his subordinates took no action on his insight. Based on Allied naval activities, Germany's naval commander in France likewise predicted the true site of the invasion but also neglected to take adequate precautions. He reasoned that the Allies had yet to concentrate the weight of their air power on targets in the region and so were obviously unprepared to carry out the attack.

The ruse enacted by Patton's nonexistent 1st Army Group was not the only reason that German commanders failed to deduce the correct location of the Allied attack. By 1944 Britain's secret services had deprived Germany of its eyes by identifying and either turning or eliminating virtually every enemy agent assigned to their shores. Meanwhile, Allied warships had rendered German naval patrols in the English Channel ineffective, and Allied bombers had destroyed most of the German radar units that might have monitored air and naval traffic near the invasion beaches. A German spy working in the British embassy in Ankara had provided his mentors in Berlin with the code name for the invasion—OVERLORD but the revelation apparently carried little weight and led to no concrete action. German intelligence had also managed to learn that the British Broadcasting Corporation would transmit two lines of a poem by the nineteenth century author Paul Verlaine to warn the French Resistance that the attack was imminent. Even so, that finding was of little use without firm indications of where and when the invasion would occur.

The Luftwaffe might have made the difference by conducting reconnaissance flights over the coastal regions of Great Britain. The Allied buildup was proceeding at a frenzied pace, mainly in the south of England opposite Normandy. Yet no flights of the sort occurred during the critical early months of 1944. German air commanders were preoccupied with the wounds inflicted upon their forces by the Allied bombing campaign and loath to waste valuable pilots on an exercise that, given their enemy's air superiority, would spell virtually certain death for most of those involved.

Despite the impediments dogging German forces, Rommel and Rundstedt still possessed a number of tangible assets that would work to their advantage once the invasion began. The terrain in Normandy where the Allies would land consisted of small fields and pastures ringed by dense, tangled shrubbery, the so-called bocage. Each of them constituted a natural fortification and killing ground. In the same way, the overarching limbs of trees sheltered many rural lanes in the area. German commanders could use those byways as hidden corridors to move men and supplies. Even large, open areas were easily defended. Rommel peppered those that were suitable for the landing of gliders and paratroopers with mines, booby-trapped wooden stakes called Rommel's asparagus, and other obstructions. Since the regions near the mouths of Normandy's rivers and streams were often reclaimed marshlands, the field marshal had his engineers return them to their natural state by opening dikes and floodgates that held in check spring overflows. The deep inundations that followed would claim a number of the paratroopers who dropped into Normandy on the night of the invasion and would inhibit efforts to close the gap between the American forces fighting on OMAHA and UTAH Beaches.

For Hitler and his generals, the invasion represented a moment filled with danger and opportunity. If they failed, German defeat would become inevitable, but if they succeeded they would eliminate for a year or longer any threat to their power from the west. That would enable them to move the bulk of their divisions to the Russian Front, where their forces were sorely pressed. If the approach of the Normandy invasion thus evoked anxiety on the part of the Germans, it was also a source of high expectation.

==The invasion==
As the day of the invasion approached, the weather in the English Channel became stormy. Heavy winds, a five-foot swell at sea, and lowering skies compelled Eisenhower to postpone the assault from 5 to 6 June. Conditions remained poor, but when weathermen predicted that the winds would abate and the cloud cover rise enough on the scheduled day of the attack to permit a go-ahead, Eisenhower reluctantly gave the command. Expecting casualties of up to 80 percent among the airborne forces, he traveled to an air base at Newbury to bid farewell to the members of the 101st Airborne Division before their tow planes and gliders carried them off to battle. A newspaper man who accompanied Eisenhower later told friends he had seen tears in the general's eyes.

The weather actually worked to the Allied advantage. The BBC broadcast the lines from Verlaine's poem indicating commencement of the attack — ''"Blessent mon coeur d'une longueur monotone"'' ("The violins of autumn wound my heart with monotonous languor") — a code alerting the French Resistance that the invasion was imminent. Rommel's Army Group B headquarters in Normandy did nothing. The weather was so foul that no one believed an invasion possible. Indeed, many commanders at 7th Army had already left for Brittany to participate in an exercise designed, ironically, to simulate an Allied landing in Normandy. Rommel himself was in Germany celebrating his wife's birthday.

====Landing of airborne units====
[[Image:D-day 2.jpg|200px|thumb|right|Soldiers using German tank traps as cover]]
As planned, airborne units led the invasion. Shortly after midnight the British 6th Airborne Division dropped northeast of Caen, near the mouth of the Orne River, where it anchored the British eastern flank by securing bridges over the river and the Caen Canal. On the other side of the invasion area, the U.S. 101st and 82d Airborne Divisions dropped near Ste. Mere-Eglise and Carentan to secure road junctions and beach exits from which the VII Corps could push to capture Cherbourg.

Some of the American airborne troops came to ground near their objectives, but most were scattered over a wide area. A number drowned in the flooded lowlands. Others landed in the midst of German positions, where they were killed or captured. In the hours that followed, nevertheless, paratroopers from the 101st succeeded in clearing much of the way for VII Corps' move inland. The 3d Battalion, 505th Infantry, of the 82d Airborne Division meanwhile captured Ste. Mere-Eglise and cut the main enemy communications cable to Cherbourg.

Other units, entangled in the thickets and hedgerows of the region, failed to achieve their objectives, but by their very presence they sowed confusion in German ranks. Reports began to surface in enemy headquarters all along the line that paratroopers were landing, but little information was available to commanders on the size and meaning of the attack. Was it a probe to test Germany's defenses, a diversion for a larger assault in the Pas de Calais, or the long-awaited invasion itself? The Allies added to the confusion by parachuting dummies wired with firecrackers far to the rear of German positions. The trick drew major enemy units away from the landing zone, where their presence might have done considerable damage to the attackers.

As dawn neared, bombers began to strike up and down the coast, flying the first of what would become, by the end of the day, more than 11,000 sorties against enemy batteries, headquarters, railroad junctions, and troop concentrations. The gliders Eisenhower had watched depart also arrived. Those of the British landed on target as did most of those from the U.S. 101st Airborne Division. Fewer than half of the gliders assigned to the U.S. 82d Airborne reached their assigned landing zones. The rest lodged in hedgerows, struck German obstructions, or floundered in the swollen marshes. By midmorning, 4,000 men of the 82d were still unaccounted for, along with 60 percent of the equipment they had carried.
Although convinced that the disturbances were a diversion for an assault to come in the Pas de Calais, Rundstedt, at 0400 on 6 June, ordered two panzer divisions to move immediately toward Caen to guard against Allied amphibious operations in support of the airborne attack. The units, however, were in OKW reserve. Informed of the order, Rundstedt's superiors at OKW placed it on hold until Hitler himself could concur. Since he was asleep and disliked being awakened, approval took many hours to come and stalled what might have been a powerful German response. The few officers of Rommel's staff present in the area were more energetic. When they learned during the early morning hours that an enormous Allied fleet was approaching the coast, they ordered the 21st Panzer Division to Caen.

By first light at 0530, the entire horizon off Normandy between Caen and Vierville-sur-Mer had filled with the invasion armada. "They came, rank after relentless rank, ten lanes wide, twenty miles across, five thousand ships of every description," wrote one reporter that morning: "Coast Guard cutters, buoy-layers and motor launches," and "a formidable array of 702 warships." The naval bombardment began at 0550, detonating large German minefields and destroying many blockhouses and artillery positions.

====The Normandy landings====
Emerging from behind a screen of smoke, three German torpedo boats attempted briefly to contest the attack, but only one inflicted any damage, sinking the Norwegian destroyer ''Svenner''. It was the sole contribution of the German Navy to the fight that day. The Luftwaffe was equally absent, leading one young soldier to comment later, "We were all more or less expecting...dive bombers...continually backed by high level bombing. But no, nothing like that...The Luftwaffe is obviously smashed."

The Allied bombardment ended precisely on schedule but the landing craft ran late, giving the Germans a brief respite before the troops came ashore. That complicated matters for the British 1 and 30 Corps when they arrived on GOLD, JUNO, and SWORD Beaches at 0700 and for the American VII Corps, which began to debark on UTAH at 0630. On GOLD, the British 50th Division encountered intense German fire at first but rapidly worked its way forward and moved off the beach. On JUNO, the 3d Canadian Division also experienced early difficulties but by the end of the day had reached the Caen-Bayeux highway, inland from the landing zone. Confusion reigned on SWORD, where delivery schedules slipped and succeeding waves of landing craft piled a jumble of men and vehicles at the water's edge. Even so, the troops on SWORD were off the beach within an hour of landing and by dark had joined up with the forces of the British 6th Airborne Division. British and Canadian forces failed to seize Caen because the Germans threw the weight of their resources and their only available armored division, 21st Panzer, into the defense of the city, but they, too, had established themselves well ashore.

The forces that arrived on UTAH also performed ably. Elements of the 4th and 24th Cavalry Squadrons (132 men) of the 4th Cavalry Group landed on the St. Marcouf Islands flanking the beach at 0430, two hours in advance of the main attack. Directed to clear enemy minefields, control points, and observation posts, they found the islands heavily mined but otherwise unoccupied. During the main attack, German artillery managed to sink the U.S. destroyer Corry; swift currents carried the landing craft of the 4th Division well to the south of their target onto a portion of the beach that was only lightly defended; and thirty-two amphibious tanks assigned to land in the first wave of the attack were delayed by the loss of a control vessel that struck a mine. Those setbacks notwithstanding, the assaulting troops quickly took the upper hand. Within three hours the enemy force defending the beach had surrendered and Allied troops and supplies were moving inland. In all, some 23,000 men came ashore at UTAH, at a cost for the day of 197 casualties among the ground forces.

Many men distinguished themselves that morning, among them the 4th Division's Assistant Division Commander, Brig. Gen. Theodore Roosevelt, Jr. Going ashore with the first wave, Roosevelt contributed materially to the success of his forces by personally reconnoitering the area inland from the beach. He then returned to the beachhead time and again, without concern for his own life, to lead groups of his men over a seawall through enemy fire to safety. He earned a [[Medal of Honor]] for his gallantry.

====Omaha====
If the attack went well on UTAH, the situation was quite different on OMAHA. Maj. Gen. Leonard T. Gerow's V Corps came up against the worst conditions encountered that day. High seas swamped many landing craft during the ten-mile run from mother ships to shore. Survivors reached land seasick and wobbling. Well over half (fifty-seven of ninety-six) of the dual-drive amphibious tanks assigned to the landing also went down, victims of heavy seas they had not been designed to withstand. Strong winds and adverse currents likewise pushed a significant number of landing craft away from their designated targets, into areas where commanding officers' maps were useless and supporting fires from friendly ships totally lacking.

Bombing attacks by Allied aircraft and assaults by naval gunfire designed to soften enemy positions did little to improve the situation. Blinded by heavy clouds and concerned lest poorly aimed bombs strike the landing force on the beach, bomber pilots overshot their targets and dropped their loads up to three miles inland. Naval gunners had difficulty zeroing in on their targets. Most of the radios required by artillery spotters ashore had gone down with landing craft that never reached the beach.

OMAHA itself was a tangle of obstructions: concrete cones, slanted poles, logs tilted seaward with mines lashed to their tips, and steel rails welded together at angles and so strongly set into the beach that their ends would stave in the bottoms of landing craft. The Germans had also made good use of a line of cliffs, four miles long and up to one hundred fifty feet in height, that paralleled the length of the landing zone. Dotting the ravines and draws that led through the bluffs with antitank and antipersonnel mines, they had scattered blockhouses, bunkers, and machine gun nests in strategic locations where they could dominate the shoreline below. Unknown to the Americans, the highly disciplined 352d Infantry Division manned many of those fortifications. Its presence in the area had been suspected by some intelligence analysts, but the evidence they presented had proved too uncertain to affect planning for the attack.

The effort to destroy the enemy's beach obstacles was only marginally successful. In the vanguard of the attack, members of the 6th Engineer Brigade and naval demolition units attempted to cut avenues of approach to the beach by blasting lanes through the obstructions. Despite a series of mishaps—of 16 bulldozers, for example, only 3 survived enemy fire and I was prevented from maneuvering freely by American riflemen who sought shelter from incoming rounds in its lee—they succeeded in opening six complete gaps. Even so, they could mark only one for use during high water because all the buoys and poles designated for that purpose had been destroyed by enemy artillery. Casualties for the engineering task force ran to 40 percent, most incurred in the first half-hour of the attack.

As the day lengthened, those conditions combined to produce a near-inferno on OMAHA. Enemy mortar and artillery batteries, unscathed by Allied fire, poured destruction upon the attackers while the invading force time and again appeared to fumble. Allied rocket ships responded, but from extreme range. When their missiles fell short, they hit the troops on the beach. Wreckage at the water's edge accumulated as timetables slipped and landing craft became hopelessly entangled in the barbed wire and projecting beams of uncleared beach obstructions. Even those craft that succeeded in ramming their way forward encountered difficulties. Riding a rising tide, most grounded on unforeseen sandbars located 50 to 100 yards from the surf's edge. There, enemy machine guns claimed a heavy toll of the debarking troops, who had to wade to shore with all their equipment through water that was often neck deep. In the end, perhaps a little more than one-third of the first wave of attackers reached dry land. Lacking most of their heavy weapons, those survivors had little choice but to huddle behind sand dunes and in the lee of a small seawall that ran along the base of the beach. Many soldiers were killed outright, but some, wounded and unable to move, drowned as the tide moved in.

The Germans were elated. Convinced that the attack was faltering, the commander of the 352d Division transferred some of his reserves to the east, where the British appeared a greater threat. General Bradley was distressed and for a time debated whether to cancel the assault and to move the remainder of his force to UTAH Beach.

If chaos ruled at first, order asserted itself as the day lengthened. In some areas, heavy smoke from grass fires and exploding ammunition obscured landing zones and blinded enemy gunners, allowing the attackers to advance largely unopposed. Here and there, as well, tanks arrived, rolling off landing craft that had somehow plowed their way through the obstacles. Bringing their guns to bear, they began to provide the fire support the men on the beach required. The remnants of three companies of Rangers who had come ashore with the first units also did good work. Assigned to destroy a battery of six partially casemated 155-mm. guns thought to be positioned atop a promontory named the Pointe du Hoe, those highly disciplined infantrymen scaled the nearly l00-foot height and cleared it of its German defenders. Although the guns had been moved a few hundred yards inland the Rangers still managed to spike them. They then held their position for two days against waves of counterattacking Germans, incurring losses that would reduce their combat effectives to about ninety men before reinforcements finally arrived.

Unit cohesion had disintegrated among the troops on the beach, especially within the inexperienced 29th Division, but leaders of all ranks asserted themselves and saved the day. "Two kinds of people are staying on this beach," the commander of the 1st Division's 16th Infantry Regiment, Col. George A. Taylor, exclaimed to his men, "the dead and those who are going to die. Now let's get the hell out of here." The sergeants were especially abrupt. Resorting to curses they had hoarded for years, they exhorted their men to get off the beach. The 29th Division's assistant commander, Brig. Gen. Norman D. Cota, was particularly effective. Ignoring enemy fire, he moved up and down the shoreline among his troops, cajoling, rallying, urging them forward through the bluffs.

As the invaders reorganized, Allied destroyers moved close to shore. Risking grounding and almost point-blank fire from enemy batteries, they raked the cliffs with their guns. More and more landing craft also pushed their way to the beach, bringing new troops, heavy weapons, radios, and ammunition.

====The push inland====
Although victorious against the first wave of invaders at OMAHA, the Germans could do little when the force on the beach began to renew itself. With many of their troops off in pursuit of the dummy paratroopers the Allies had dropped far to the rear, they could hold their own from fixed positions but lacked the numbers to drive the invaders back. Thus the Americans kept the ground they gained. Inch by inch they moved forward, up through the bluffs and onto the flatland above. In the absence of much room to maneuver, their attack had been unoriginal, a straightforward frontal assault, but the weight of their numbers and the enormous volume of supplies and equipment they began to bring to bear made the difference. By nightfall, 34,000 men were ashore on OMAHA. The beach itself was a shambles of burning and disabled vehicles, but almost all of the coastal villages located inland were in Allied hands.

The Germans, for their part, were in far worse condition than they seemed. Rommel's Seventh Army, commanded by Generaloberst Friedrich Dollmann, had succeeded in holding its own, but it had employed all of its resources in doing so and lacked the means to mount the sort of counterattack that might have driven the Allies back. Meanwhile, Hitler and Rundstedt remained reluctant to commit the reserves they held in the Pas de Calais because of the threat Patton's phantom army posed. Even if they had acted, Allied bombers might have decimated the force as it moved along the roads of France into Normandy. In the same way, the enemy retained sizable forces in Brittany, but German commanders refused to use them because a second landing from that direction seemed a clear possibility.

Allied losses had been high: 2,500 men at OMAHA alone, another 2,500 among the American airborne divisions, almost 1,100 for the Canadians, and some 3,000 for the British—more than 9,000 men in all, one-third of whom were killed in action. Even so, the number was less than Allied planners had expected. Concerned that Hitler would respond to the invasion with extreme violence and might even resort to poison gas, Eisenhower's chief surgeon, Maj. Gen. Albert W. Kenner, and the Chief Surgeon of the U.S. Army's European Theater of Operations, Maj. Gen. Paul R. Hawley, had prepared their staffs to process at least 12,000 killed and wounded in the First U.S. Army alone.

By the evening of 6 June 1944, Allied power had prevailed all across the Normandy beachhead. The British had failed to seize Caen. The Americans had yet to secure a lodgment far enough inland to keep enemy artillery from hitting supply dumps and unloading points they were building along the invasion beaches. Yet more than 100,000 men had come ashore, the first of millions who would follow.

==The following days==
In keeping with his concept of a mobile defense, Rundstedt wanted to attack the beachhead but Allied fighter-bombers imposed so many delays on the movement of his reserve panzer divisions that he had little choice but to defer the strike until 8 June. While he waited the units that might have formed the counterattack dribbled in piecemeal, and harried commanders plugged them into the line wherever the need was greatest. Filling gaps and sealing off areas of special concern, they never had a chance to deliver the blow Rundstedt had envisioned. The problem would recur time and again in the days that followed. Allied air interdiction efforts were so effective and enemy forces so hard pressed that German commanders were rarely able to mass enough strength in a single place to make a sustained advance.

Over time, Hitler's inflexibility compounded the problem. On 17 June Rundstedt and Rommel requested their leader's permission to withdraw their forces out of the range of naval gunfire before launching an armored attack on the flank of Montgomery's Second Army. Hitler refused. Convinced that the dogged efforts of soldiers who had stood and fought even when surrounded during the Battle of Moscow in 1941 had averted a German collapse, he believed the same would hold true in Normandy. He forbade his commanders to abandon any position voluntarily and ordered them to hold their ground at all costs. Despite their difficulties, the Germans still made good use of the advantages the bocage offered. They turned the region's sunken lanes into trenches and fortifications. The hedgerows—some more than five feet in height and several feet thick—became traps concealing riflemen, machine guns, and infantrymen armed with antitank weapons.

====The hedgerows====
Because they assumed that the Germans would withdraw toward the Seine and fight a delay along the river's lines, the invasion's planners had concentrated on the challenge of getting ashore and had paid scant attention to the impediments posed by the bocage. As a result, Bradley's First Army was unprepared for the difficulties it faced and paid a steep price for each foot of its advance into the region. The experience of the U.S. 90th Division was a case in point. Faced with hostile fire from an invisible enemy, the unit's commanders found the principles of fire and maneuver nearly impossible to apply in the hedgerows, especially the precept that an attacking force should move just behind its artillery in order to confront the enemy while he is still off balance. The division suffered heavy casualties as a result—150 officers and 2,315 enlisted men during June and 310 officers and 5,188 enlisted men during July. More experienced units also suffered terribly in the bocage. A U.S. Army survey of casualties in portions of the 1st, 4th, 9th, and 25th Infantry Divisions between 6 June and 31 July 1944 found that rifle companies lost nearly 60 percent of their enlisted men and over 68 percent of their officers.

The countryside in the British and Canadian sectors — a relatively open, flat, dry expanse stretching from Caen to Paris — was more favorable for offensive warfare. Paradoxically, those conditions made fighting there perhaps more difficult than in the American sector. The nature of the ground and the strategic importance of the area compelled the Germans to mass the bulk of their panzer units and their best troops in the path of Montgomery's forces. They turned the checkerboard of villages that dotted the region into an interlocking, mortar-and-concrete version of the bocage.

Montgomery's commanders appear to have been little more prepared than the Americans for the sort of resistance the Germans mounted. Poorly versed in combined arms tactics, they allowed their tanks to advance without the protection of accompanying infantry units. That approach gave German soldiers wielding highly effective Panzerfausts (the enemy version of the American bazooka) and teams firing formidable, high-velocity antitank cannons a relatively free hand in dealing with the advancing forces.

What Montgomery intended to do remains shrouded in controversy. Time and again he appeared to delay. The terrain and the heavy weight of the German defenses facing his forces were undoubtedly part of the reason. He may also all along have planned to allow the offensive to develop in the direction that time and circumstance dictated, whether in the American sector or his own. In that sense, it is possible that he decided Bradley's front offered the most opportunities and that his own army should concentrate on holding the enemy in place to allow his ally the fullest latitude. Or he may have thought that Allied advances elsewhere would allow him to achieve his objectives without incurring the level of casualties that had consumed an entire generation of his countrymen during World War I. He had been warned of a shortage of infantry replacements well before D-Day. During July the British Adjutant General had underscored the point by personally traveling to Normandy to notify him that some British battalions had already been divided to fill gaps in the line and that divisions might be next. Whatever the reason, Montgomery's forces, commanded by Lt. Gen. Sir Miles Dempsey, took the town of Bayeux and moved several miles inland but, despite three full-scale attempts between 6 June and 1 July, failed to take Caen.

Montgomery's intentions notwithstanding, British efforts were hardly without effect. The attacks his forces launched bled the Germans of strength they could ill afford to lose and kept the enemy's best units concentrated around Caen. That relieved some of the pressure on Bradley to the west, buying time and room for him to consolidate his beachhead on OMAHA and to turn his attention toward the capture of Cherbourg.

In fact, Bradley needed all the help he could get. With the enemy well concealed in the hedgerows, it took an average of five Americans to displace one German defender. Under normal circumstances, a ratio of three to one would have sufficed. "Prior to invasion33' he later wrote, "we had estimated that the infantry would incur 70 percent of the losses of combat forces. By August we had boosted that figure to 83 percent on the basis of our experience in the Normandy hedgerows." Bradley illustrated his point by noting that, in fifteen days of fighting around St. Lo, the 30th Division sustained 3,934 battle casualties, a loss rate of 25 percent for the unit as a whole but of 90 percent in its rifle platoons, where three out of every four casualties occurred.

====Towards Cherbourg====
The flooded marshes of the Merderet River also hampered American progress, as did a great storm that lashed the English Channel between 19 and 21 June. Besides destroying nearly 500 small craft and beaching another 800 well above the high-water mark, the gale slowed the effort to resupply American forces for a time by ruining the mulberry harbor at OMAHA Beach. On 18 June, just before the storm, Allied logisticians had achieved 72.8 percent of their targeted level of supplies to that date. By 22 June, as a result of the storm, that figure had fallen to 57.4 percent. The buildup in vehicle strength fell over the same period from 66 to 57 percent and in personnel from 88 to 77.7 percent. Nevertheless, those impediments proved only temporary. Bradley's logisticians quickly learned to bring what they needed directly across the beach. By the last week in June, OMAHA was averaging 13,500 tons of supplies per day, 115 percent of planned capacity. UTAH, meanwhile, had achieved 7,000 tons per day, 125 percent of its target.

By 18 June Maj. Gen. J. Lawton Collins' VII Corps had cut its way across the Cotentin Peninsula and had severed all roads leading into Cherbourg. Under orders from Hitler "to defend the last bunker and leave to the enemy not a harbor but a field of ruins," the remnants of five German divisions fought back stubbornly. The fighting around the city's main fortification, the Fort du Roule, embedded in a cliff overlooking the harbor, was particularly intense. Coming under attack on 25 June, the stronghold's defenders leveled heavy fire at the attackers from a number of pillboxes and artillery positions.

The fort held out until the men of the 314th, after capturing the upper battlements, crushed diehard resisters by dropping demolitions into the bastion's lower reaches. Shortly thereafter, the city's commander surrendered but, on orders from Hitler relayed by Rommel, refused to instruct his troops to do the same. American psychological warfare officers turned the trick. Dropping surrender leaflets that emphasized dwindling food supplies within the city, they announced that all who came across should bring their mess kits. That evening, twenty days after the offensive had begun, Cherbourg was in friendly hands.

By then, enemy engineers had so thoroughly demolished the city's harbor that it would take three weeks of rebuilding before the facility could open to even minimal shipping and months before it would be able to handle cargo in quantity. That being the case, the victory still provided a much needed boost to Allied morale. Progress had been so slow that Allied leaders had become concerned the attack might bog down into the sort of crippling stalemate that had prevailed on the Western Front during World War I.

As Allied morale rose, that of the Germans fell lower than ever. Hitler himself was unhappy. Exasperated with Rundstedt's continuing doubts and his desire to pull back to more defensible positions, he replaced the field marshal as Commander in Chief West on 2 July with Field Marshal Guenther von Kluge. Although at first optimistic, Kluge rapidly came to sympathize with Rundstedt's point of view.

The fall of Cherbourg offered only temporary consolation to the Allies. By I July they had established a beachhead 70 miles wide and had brought about a million men and 177,000 vehicles ashore. Yet, except around Cherbourg, their lodgment was in no place more than 25 miles deep, and in most areas it extended little more than 5 miles inland.

====Caen and St. Lo====
On 9 July Montgomery launched a massive air assault against Caen in hopes of clearing the way for an attack the following morning. Four hundred fifty heavy aircraft participated, dropping 2,500 tons of bombs, but the airmen negated most of the effect by releasing their loads well back from the forward line to avoid hitting their own troops. As a result, the city incurred heavy damage but German defenses went largely unscathed. In the two days of desperate fighting that followed, the Germans fought back viciously. Montgomery's forces entered Caen and took half the city but moved no farther. Casualty rates during the battle were appalling. Most infantry battalions sustained losses of 25 percent.

Bradley's advance on St. Lo was also an agony. Daily rains reduced visibility and negated much of the value of Allied air support. As with the British at Caen, the casualty rate was alarming. The 30th Division sustained some 3,000 killed and wounded between 7 and 20 July; the 9th suffered 2,500 between the 10th and the 20th.

Bradley's forces were nonetheless gradually learning how to fight in the bocage. Tank and infantry units began to support each other. The tanks supplied the heavy firepower needed to eliminate the enemy's well-sited firing positions while the infantry kept enemy soldiers with antitank weapons at bay. The tankers also found a way to cross the hedgerows without exposing their vehicles' vulnerable undersides to enemy fire. With huge iron teeth salvaged from German beach obstacles welded to the fronts of hundreds of tanks, they began to bull their way through the hedgerows, taking hours to advance through obstacles that would earlier have required days of fighting to overcome. From then on, the Rhinos, as the men named them, became an invaluable asset to Bradley. They allowed American armor to move across country at will while German tanks had to continue to make do with the roads.

By 15 July American forces had reached the outskirts of St. Lo, but the garrison holding the town refused yield. In a battle that inflicted carnage reminiscent of World War I, the Germans gave ground only gradually, house by house. On one occasion, as a result, American riflemen used a bulldozer to bury three German soldiers who refused to surrender their position. By 18 July the attackers had succeeded. A task force from the 29th Division under General Cota entered the town. Cota carried with him the body of Maj. Thomas D. Howie, who had commanded the 3d Battalion of the 116th Infantry. Several days earlier, Howie and his men had crept undetected through early morning mist to reinforce an isolated battalion less than 1,000 yards from St. Lo. Ordered to move his unit to the eastern edge of the town, despite his own exhaustion and that of his men, Howie had responded without hesitation, "Will do." A few moments later an enemy shell had ended his life. The commander of the 29th Division, Maj. Gen. Charles H. Gerhardt, considered Howie's response an example of the patriotic self-sacrifice that had carried the Army through to that point. By honoring Howie he could remind his men of the perseverance and courage of all those who had given their lives at St. Lo.

On the same day, the British launched a major attack beyond Caen but again allowed their tanks to advance without supporting infantry and failed to inflict a decisive blow. In response Kluge increased the concentration of German troops around the city, adding two armored divisions that might have done invaluable work against Bradley in the bocage. As a result, 7 panzer divisions and 4 heavy tank battalions guarded Caen while only 2 panzer divisions confronted the Americans. Even those forces were sorely depleted. By the last week in July, according to ULTRA intercepts of coded German radio communications, the enemy in Normandy had sustained casualties of more than 100,000 enlisted men and 2,360 officers killed and wounded. On 17 July misfortune touched Rommel himself. Two British Spitfire fighters attacked his open car—ironically, near a village named Ste. Foy de Montgommery—and drove it into a ditch. Thrown from the vehicle, Rommel suffered head injuries so grievous that he had to return to Germany for treatment. Kluge succeeded him, assuming command of Army Group B while retaining his position as Commander in Chief West.

The Allies, for their part, had brought four years of planning and hard work to completion. Exhausted and battle-worn, they had at last reached the Periers-St. Lo road. From there the land was dry and the country relatively open. The final act of the war, the great push through France into Germany itself, could now begin.

==Analysis==
It had been a grim fight. Six weeks of battle had left the Germans disheartened and susceptible to any farther blow the Allies might deliver. "It was casualty reports, casualty reports, casualty reports wherever you went," Rommel told his son Manfred from his sickbed. "I have never fought with such losses...And the worst of it is that it was all without sense or purpose." Indeed, Rommel continued, on some days the equivalent of a regiment of his men had fallen in Normandy—more than in a whole summer of fighting in Africa during 1942.

The days had been filled with mud, heartache, and pain for the Allies as well. From the very beginning, little had seemed to go right. The airborne assault on the night before the landing had sown confusion among the enemy and had provided an important diversion, but too many of the men had landed too far from their targets. As a result, the effort had only a marginal effect on the developing battle. Over the days that followed, rather than withdrawing beyond the Seine as Allied planners had expected, the Germans had hung on tenaciously, taking brutal losses but inflicting them upon the Allies as well. Meanwhile, Montgomery's careful plan for the attack had begun to unravel on D-Day itself. His forces failed to take Caen, the key to further operations in the open country to the south. Attacking time and again as the campaign developed, they had nonetheless held the cream of the German force in place, absorbing pressure that would almost inevitably have fallen upon Bradley's forces in the bocage.

As for the Americans, the landing on OMAHA Beach had been a near-disaster averted only by the courage of unsung sailors and soldiers. When air attacks and naval gunfire had failed to silence German guns and the momentum of the assault had begun to lag, those heroes had pushed their frail landing craft to shore despite the traps and obstacles blocking their way. Rallying to the directions of their commanders, they had then climbed the bluffs overlooking the beach and advanced inland, often at the cost of their own lives. In the same way, although Maj. Gen. J. Lawton Collins' VII Corps captured the port of Cherbourg on 29 June, the American advance bogged down in the hedgerows. Bradley's First Army absorbed forty thousand casualties while slowly advancing twenty miles to St. Lo.

Even so, enough went well for the campaign to succeed. Roosevelt, Marshall, Eisenhower, Churchill, and Montgomery were master communicators who bonded an unwieldy coalition into an extraordinary fighting machine. The plan they and their staffs devised failed to foresee every circumstance that would occur on the battlefield, particularly the difficulties Bradley's forces would encounter in the bocage, but it was still a masterpiece of innovation that provided ample means for Allied commanders to prevail. Cunning deceptions kept the Germans transfixed on the Pas de Calais until long after the real invasion had occurred; Allied airmen swept the skies clean of the enemy fighters and bombers that might have imposed a heavy toll upon the landing force; and the effort to build up the stocks of supplies and munitions necessary for an effective attack succeeded beyond the most optimistic expectation. In the end, notwithstanding, it was the heroism of infantrymen such as Major Howie, who rose day and night to the challenge despite almost overwhelming fear and fatigue, that afforded the critical margin for success.

A barely failed assassination attempt upon Hitler's life, implicating Rommel himself, brought about a purge of officers in Germany that would, for a time, strengthen Hitler's control over his armed forces. Although the Germans would fight on with resilience and determination for another ten months, their line in France would soon break, Patton's army would swing clear, Paris would fall, and Allied forces would approach the Rhine. The loss of France would deprive Germany not only of a major source of Mod, raw resources, and labor but also of seaports that had long sheltered its U-boats and of radar sites that had afforded early warning of Allied bomber attacks. More important, it would provide the Allies with the secure base they needed to launch their final offensive against the German heartland. As Rommel told his son, the future was clear and inevitable. The end of Hitler's Reich was at hand: "There is no longer anything we can do."

{| style="width: 100%; background:transparent; border: 2px solid #000099;" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="1"
!colspan=2 style="width: 100%; text-align: center; background-color: #000088; color: white; "|'''Copyright Details'''
|-
!style="background-color: #000088; color:white;"|License:
|style=" background-color: none;"| This work is in the [[Public Domain]] in the United States because it is a work of the United States Federal Government under the terms of Title 17, Chapter 1, Section 105 of the U.S. Code
|-
!style=" background-color: #000088; color:white;"|Source:
|style="background-color: none;border-top: 2px solid black"| File available from the {{{1|[[United States Federal Government]] [http://www.history.army.mil/brochures/normandy/nor-pam.htm]}}}.

{{DEFAULTSORT:Overlord, Operation}}
[[Category:World War II]]

David Cameron

2010-05-12T12:12:09Z

Darkmind1970:

{{Prime Minister
|image=674uyyhju.jpg
|seq=75
|term_start=May 11 2010
|term_end=present
|previous=Gordon Brown
|party=Conservative Party
|birth_date=October 6, 1966
|birth_place=London
|spouse=Samantha Sheffield
|religion=[[Church of England]]
}}
'''David Cameron''', born 9 October 1966, is the current Prime Minister of the [[United Kingdom]] and leader of the British [[Conservative Party]]. Following the May election, the Conservatives won the most seats but were short of a majority, resulting in a hung parliament. Labor Leader [[Gordon Brown]] resigned, and Cameron was appointed Prime Minister, leading a Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition government.

==Personal==

Cameron was born in [[London]], but spent his early years near Wantage in [[Oxfordshire]], [[England]], though his family's roots lie in [[Inverness]], [[Scotland]], and "Cameron" is well known in Britain as a Scottish name.

Cameron was educated at [[Eton College | Eton]], Britain's most prestigious public school (a "public school" in the UK referring to a privately run institution, as opposed to a "state school"), and at [[Brasenose College]], [[Oxford University|Oxford]], Britain's most ancient and prestigious university.

Cameron is self-described as "upper middle class", though his bloodline is noble, and he is a direct descendent of William IV, and thus a distant cousin of HRH Queen Elizabeth II. His family has historically been involved in finance and banking, with his great great grandfather being head of HSBC in the late 19th century, and worked alongside the Rothschilds to finance the Russo-Japanese war.

Cameron's leadership and indeed his own party are supported by businesses, as opposed to the liberal, socialist aligned Labour Party, led by the fellow Scotsman [[Gordon Brown]]; who are funded and largely controlled by the [[trade union]]s. Many intervening leaders have been middle-class ([[Edward Heath]], [[Margaret Thatcher]]) or even working-class ([[John Major]]).

Cameron's reluctance to discuss his past, citing the right to a private life before politics<ref>http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/4340328.stm</ref> has led to class-based attacks on his education and ancestry from a small proportion of media sources and opposition members of Parliament.

He has been married to Samantha since 1996. She is of direct noble bloodline, the daughter of 8th Baronet Sheffield, and a descendent of Charles II. They have two sons and a daughter. Their eldest son, Ivan Cameron, died on February 25, 2009.<ref>[[BBC News]] - [http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/7909562.stm Cameron's 'beautiful boy' dies]</ref>

==Political career==

Cameron's pre-parliamentary career included spells as a staffer for controversial Conservative politician [[Norman Lamont]] and as a PR executive.

Cameron was elected to Parliament as MP for Witney in Oxfordshire at the 2001 general election.

Cameron was elected leader of the [[Conservative Party]] in December 2005, succeeding [[Michael Howard]].

In late June 2007, at the end of then-Prime Minister [[Tony Blair]]'s final Prime Minister's Questions session in the [[House of Commons]], David Cameron led his opposition party in giving the outgoing leader a standing ovation.<ref>[http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1555758/Tony-Blair-steps-down-to-a-standing-ovation.html Tony Blair steps down to standing ovation] - Daily Telegraph, June 27, 2007</ref>

==Policies==

Cameron has attempted to move the Conservative party towards what is perceived by some to be the centre ground of British politics. While the party under his leadership has expressed support for some traditional elements of Conservative policy, such as the importance of the [[family]], Cameron has also expressed a passionate concern about [[global warming]]. He has suggested a move towards [[privatization]] within the strongly-socialist [[National Health Service]], in an attempt to combat the economic failures resulting from the flawed socialist ideas upon which the organisation is based. Designed and originated by the leftist [[Labour Party]], the organisation is notorious for its bureaucracy and the failure of its left-wing values in an economic sense.

Some traditional Conservatives, particularly those on the [[Thatcherism|Thatcherite]] wing of the party, have criticized Cameron for moving the party too far to the left. They point to surveys showing that many voters feel they no longer know what the Conservative Party stands for.<ref>http://www.yougov.com/archives/pdf/TEL060101018_1.pdf</ref> However, he has stated that he is "certainly a big [[Margaret Thatcher|Thatcher]] fan, but I don't know whether that makes me a Thatcherite."<ref name="new identity">[http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/4446864.stm "Cameron: Tories need new identity"], ''BBC News Online'', 17 November 2005, accessed 6 November 2006</ref> He has also described himself as a "liberal Conservative" (though "liberal" in British English does not have the same meaning as in the United States, and instead has the meaning of "centrist" or "moderate").<ref name="Rawnsley">Andrew Rawnsley, [http://observer.guardian.co.uk/focus/story/0,,1669957,00.html "'I'm not a deeply ideological person. I'm a practical one'"], ''Guardian Unlimited'', 18 December 2005, accessed 6 November 2006</ref> Some have gone so far as to claim that true conservatism is today represented in Britain not by the Conservative Party but by the [[UK Independence Party]]. On the other hand, the approval ratings of Cameron and his party continue to compare very favourably with those of the Labour Party and its leadership, which is undoubtedly unpopular.

Cameron has said: "My aim is to promote social justice, making sure that everyone has access to good schools, good healthcare and decent housing, take a lead in ending global poverty and do all we can to meet the great environmental threats of our age."<ref>http://www.conservatives.com/tile.do?def=david.cameron.about.page</ref> Some conservative politicians and commentators, notably [[Norman Tebbit]], have criticised him for prioritising issues of the environment and social justice over more traditionally Conservative policy areas, such as tax, immigration and foreign relations. Tebbit said: "Is he the party's [[Chairman Mao]] or [[Pol Pot]], intent on purging even the memory and name of [[Margaret Thatcher|Thatcherism]] before building a new modern compassionate green globally aware party somewhere on the left side of the middle?"<ref name="g1">[http://politics.guardian.co.uk/conservatives/story/0,,1698576,00.html Tories must retake centre ground says Cameron], ''Guardian Unlimited'', 31 January 2006</ref> However, Cameron has responded extensively to such criticisms by pointing out that the economic and social problems faced by modern-day Britain are radically different from those faced in the past; he has argued that the Conservative Party needs to re-take the [[centrist|centre ground]] of politics from the [[Labour Party]].<ref name="bbc1">[http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/4661024.stm Cameron denies 'betraying' Tories], BBC News, 30 January 2006</ref> He argued: "The change is not a betrayal. It is a recognition that the challenges faced by Britain are not the challenges of the 1970s. Social justice and economic efficiency are the common ground of British politics. We have to find the means of succeeding where the government has failed."<ref name="g1"/>

On August 16, 2008, Cameron followed President [[George Bush]] in criticising [[Russia]]'s invasion of [[Georgia]] during a visit to the war-torn region.<ref>[http://afp.google.com/article/ALeqM5jl825geip9c65_-FTHTC_3wzMy0Q Cameron in Georgia slams 'invading' Russia]</ref>

==References==

<References/>

==See also==

* [[British politics]]
* [[Conservative Party]]

==External Links==
[http://www.mydavidcameron.com/ Cameron Election Campaign 2010]

{{DEFAULTSORT: Cameron, David}}

[[Category: United Kingdom]]
[[Category: United Kingdom Prime Ministers]]
[[Category: Prime Ministers]]
[[category:British Politics]]

David Cameron

2010-05-12T12:06:50Z

Darkmind1970:

{{Prime Minister
|image=674uyyhju.jpg
|seq=75
|term_start=May 11 2010
|term_end=present
|previous=Gordon Brown
|party=Conservative Party
|birth_date=October 6, 1966
|birth_place=London
|spouse=Samantha Sheffield
|religion=[[Church of England]]
}}
'''David Cameron''', born 9 October 1966, is the current Prime Minister of [[England]] and leader of the British [[Conservative Party]]. Following the May election, the Conservatives won the most seats but were short of a majority, resulting in a hung parliament. Labor Leader [[Gordon Brown]] resigned, and Cameron was appointed Prime Minister, leading a Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition government.

==Personal==

Cameron was born in [[London]], but spent his early years near Wantage in [[Oxfordshire]], [[England]], though his family's roots lie in [[Inverness]], [[Scotland]], and "Cameron" is well known in Britain as a Scottish name.

Cameron was educated at [[Eton College | Eton]], Britain's most prestigious public school (a "public school" in the UK referring to a privately run institution, as opposed to a "state school"), and at [[Brasenose College]], [[Oxford University|Oxford]], Britain's most ancient and prestigious university.

Cameron is self-described as "upper middle class", though his bloodline is noble, and he is a direct descendent of William IV, and thus a distant cousin of HRH Queen Elizabeth II. His family has historically been involved in finance and banking, with his great great grandfather being head of HSBC in the late 19th century, and worked alongside the Rothschilds to finance the Russo-Japanese war.

Cameron's leadership and indeed his own party are supported by businesses, as opposed to the liberal, socialist aligned Labour Party, led by the fellow Scotsman [[Gordon Brown]]; who are funded and largely controlled by the [[trade union]]s. Many intervening leaders have been middle-class ([[Edward Heath]], [[Margaret Thatcher]]) or even working-class ([[John Major]]).

Cameron's reluctance to discuss his past, citing the right to a private life before politics<ref>http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/4340328.stm</ref> has led to class-based attacks on his education and ancestry from a small proportion of media sources and opposition members of Parliament.

He has been married to Samantha since 1996. She is of direct noble bloodline, the daughter of 8th Baronet Sheffield, and a descendent of Charles II. They have two sons and a daughter. Their eldest son, Ivan Cameron, died on February 25, 2009.<ref>[[BBC News]] - [http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/7909562.stm Cameron's 'beautiful boy' dies]</ref>

==Political career==

Cameron's pre-parliamentary career included spells as a staffer for controversial Conservative politician [[Norman Lamont]] and as a PR executive.

Cameron was elected to Parliament as MP for Witney in Oxfordshire at the 2001 general election.

Cameron was elected leader of the [[Conservative Party]] in December 2005, succeeding [[Michael Howard]].

In late June 2007, at the end of then-Prime Minister [[Tony Blair]]'s final Prime Minister's Questions session in the [[House of Commons]], David Cameron led his opposition party in giving the outgoing leader a standing ovation.<ref>[http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1555758/Tony-Blair-steps-down-to-a-standing-ovation.html Tony Blair steps down to standing ovation] - Daily Telegraph, June 27, 2007</ref>

==Policies==

Cameron has attempted to move the Conservative party towards what is perceived by some to be the centre ground of British politics. While the party under his leadership has expressed support for some traditional elements of Conservative policy, such as the importance of the [[family]], Cameron has also expressed a passionate concern about [[global warming]]. He has suggested a move towards [[privatization]] within the strongly-socialist [[National Health Service]], in an attempt to combat the economic failures resulting from the flawed socialist ideas upon which the organisation is based. Designed and originated by the leftist [[Labour Party]], the organisation is notorious for its bureaucracy and the failure of its left-wing values in an economic sense.

Some traditional Conservatives, particularly those on the [[Thatcherism|Thatcherite]] wing of the party, have criticized Cameron for moving the party too far to the left. They point to surveys showing that many voters feel they no longer know what the Conservative Party stands for.<ref>http://www.yougov.com/archives/pdf/TEL060101018_1.pdf</ref> However, he has stated that he is "certainly a big [[Margaret Thatcher|Thatcher]] fan, but I don't know whether that makes me a Thatcherite."<ref name="new identity">[http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/4446864.stm "Cameron: Tories need new identity"], ''BBC News Online'', 17 November 2005, accessed 6 November 2006</ref> He has also described himself as a "liberal Conservative" (though "liberal" in British English does not have the same meaning as in the United States, and instead has the meaning of "centrist" or "moderate").<ref name="Rawnsley">Andrew Rawnsley, [http://observer.guardian.co.uk/focus/story/0,,1669957,00.html "'I'm not a deeply ideological person. I'm a practical one'"], ''Guardian Unlimited'', 18 December 2005, accessed 6 November 2006</ref> Some have gone so far as to claim that true conservatism is today represented in Britain not by the Conservative Party but by the [[UK Independence Party]]. On the other hand, the approval ratings of Cameron and his party continue to compare very favourably with those of the Labour Party and its leadership, which is undoubtedly unpopular.

Cameron has said: "My aim is to promote social justice, making sure that everyone has access to good schools, good healthcare and decent housing, take a lead in ending global poverty and do all we can to meet the great environmental threats of our age."<ref>http://www.conservatives.com/tile.do?def=david.cameron.about.page</ref> Some conservative politicians and commentators, notably [[Norman Tebbit]], have criticised him for prioritising issues of the environment and social justice over more traditionally Conservative policy areas, such as tax, immigration and foreign relations. Tebbit said: "Is he the party's [[Chairman Mao]] or [[Pol Pot]], intent on purging even the memory and name of [[Margaret Thatcher|Thatcherism]] before building a new modern compassionate green globally aware party somewhere on the left side of the middle?"<ref name="g1">[http://politics.guardian.co.uk/conservatives/story/0,,1698576,00.html Tories must retake centre ground says Cameron], ''Guardian Unlimited'', 31 January 2006</ref> However, Cameron has responded extensively to such criticisms by pointing out that the economic and social problems faced by modern-day Britain are radically different from those faced in the past; he has argued that the Conservative Party needs to re-take the [[centrist|centre ground]] of politics from the [[Labour Party]].<ref name="bbc1">[http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/4661024.stm Cameron denies 'betraying' Tories], BBC News, 30 January 2006</ref> He argued: "The change is not a betrayal. It is a recognition that the challenges faced by Britain are not the challenges of the 1970s. Social justice and economic efficiency are the common ground of British politics. We have to find the means of succeeding where the government has failed."<ref name="g1"/>

On August 16, 2008, Cameron followed President [[George Bush]] in criticising [[Russia]]'s invasion of [[Georgia]] during a visit to the war-torn region.<ref>[http://afp.google.com/article/ALeqM5jl825geip9c65_-FTHTC_3wzMy0Q Cameron in Georgia slams 'invading' Russia]</ref>

==References==

<References/>

==See also==

* [[British politics]]
* [[Conservative Party]]

==External Links==
[http://www.mydavidcameron.com/ Cameron Election Campaign 2010]

{{DEFAULTSORT: Cameron, David}}

[[Category: United Kingdom]]
[[Category: United Kingdom Prime Ministers]]
[[Category: Prime Ministers]]
[[category:British Politics]]

Operation Overlord

2010-01-11T09:08:12Z

Darkmind1970:

[[Image:normandy.jpg|300px|thumb|right|American troops disembark under heavy fire at ''Omaha'', the code name for their section of the Normandy coastline]]
'''Operation Overlord''', also known as the '''Normandy Invasion''' or simply '''D-Day''', was the code name for the Allied invasion of northern [[Europe]] in [[World War II]]. It began with the landings on the beaches of [[Normandy]] in northwestern France on June 6, 1944, and accomplished the largest amphibious invasion in the history of mankind, using 200,000 men, 9,000 planes, and 5,000 ships.

==Strategic Setting==
The British Chiefs of Staff charged Admiral Lord [[Louis Mountbatten]] and his Combined Operations Headquarters in September 1941 with investigating the feasibility of amphibious operations in the European theater of the war. Earlier, Admiral Sir Roger Keyes had undertaken some planning for commando raids, but Mountbatten was to do more. "You are to prepare for the invasion of Europe," British Prime Minister [[Winston Churchill]] told him. "You must devise and design the appliances, the landing craft, and the technique...The whole of the South Coast of England is a bastion of defense against the invasion of Hitler; you've got to turn it into the springboard for our attack."

American planners began formal cooperation with Britain in December 1941, just after the Japanese attack at [[Attack on Pearl Harbor|Pearl Harbor]] and the German and Italian declarations of war against the United States. In compliance with earlier, informal understandings, the two partners agreed to put first the defeat of [[Germany]] and its ally [[Italy]] if forced to wage a two-front war against both those nations and Japan. Shortly thereafter, British planners drafted a proposal, code-named ROUNDUP, for an attack across the English Channel into France. The assault would come only after a series of major campaigns on the periphery of Europe, in [[Scandinavia]], the [[Mediterranean Sea]], the [[Balkans]], and the [[Soviet Union]], where the Germans would have difficulty massing their power. Once bombing, blockade, partisan uprisings, and the fighting on those other fronts had weakened the enemy sufficiently, ROUNDUP, or something like it, would begin.

Despite talk that a Continental invasion might come as early as 1942, Allied leaders in the end decided tentatively to make the assault in 1943, either through Western Europe or the Balkans. Because British forces would bear the burden of operations in Europe until the United States could complete its buildup for war, the decisions that came out of the conference hewed closely to Britain's preference for attacks on Germany's periphery. Although the British later accepted an American proposal, code-named BOLERO, for the establishment in Britain of a million-man force trained and equipped for the 1943 invasion, the United States agreed that during 1942 Allied forces should concentrate on wearing down Germany's resistance through air attacks, operations along the North African coast, and assistance to the Soviet Union.

====Initial disagreements====
Allied leaders honed their strategy further at a series of great conferences during 1942 and 1943—at Casablanca, [[Quebec]], [[Cairo]], and [[Tehran]]. Examining a range of alternatives, they gradually adopted the broad outlines of the attack they would launch. As planning continued, however, it became clear that the Americans disagreed ardently with the British desire to wear down the Germans before beginning a final confrontation on the Continent. Confident in the strength of their vast resources, American planners argued that "wars cannot be finally won without the use of land armies" and that only direct action against the main body of the German force could produce an Allied victory. Britain's peripheral approach, they asserted, would waste valuable assets on operations that could have at best an indirect effect on the outcome of the war. There was also the Soviet Union to consider, which had suffered millions of casualties in its fight with the Germans on the Eastern Front and might conceivably collapse and conclude a separate peace if Britain and the United States failed to relieve some of the pressure by attacking in the west. Soviet leader Joseph Stalin was already clamoring for a second front. To the Americans it seemed far better to seize the initiative from Germany with a bold assault than to allow the alliance's resources to dribble away in operations that would have little long-term effect on the enemy's will to resist.

====British views====
The British viewed the situation in Europe with an eye closely focused on their own circumstances and experience. As conscious of their nation's lack of resources as the Americans were of the vast wealth available to the United States, they had already withstood a disaster at Dunkirk in 1940, when the Germans had driven a British army off the Continent in defeat, and at the French seacoast town of [[Dieppe]] in August 1942, when the Germans, at great cost to the Allies, had repelled a Canadian landing. Their experiences with amphibious warfare during World War I had been little better. Their forces had endured a bloodletting at [[Gallipoli]] in the [[Dardanelles]], where landings championed by Churchill had failed. They had also lost an entire generation of young men to trench warfare on the stalemated Western Front in France. Britain's leaders thus had visions of catastrophe whenever the Americans raised the issue of a cross-Channel attack. If haste prevailed over reason, Churchill warned, the beaches of France might well be "choked with the bodies of the flower of American and British manhood."

If the British had agreed in principle at the [[Arcadia Conference]] to an early attack across the Channel, by the end of 1942 they had nevertheless succeeded in shifting many of the resources marked for Bolero to TORCH, an Allied invasion of North Africa much more in accord with their own point of view. The American military had little choice but to go along. They not only lacked the landing craft, warplanes, and shipping necessary to carry out a cross-Channel attack, they also had to contend with their commander in chief, President Roosevelt, who had become convinced that some sort of immediate action against Germany was necessary to divert the attention of the American people from the Pacific to the Atlantic side of the war.

The vehement German response to the assault at Dieppe, resulting in the loss of nearly a thousand British and Canadian lives, the capture of more than two thousand fighting men, and the destruction of better than one hundred aircraft, weighed heavily upon American planners. If the German response at Dieppe was any indication, an invasion of the Continent would require more meticulous preparation and more strength than a 1943 attack could possibly allow. Indeed, Allied planners and logisticians would have to create, field, and supply an organization that could meet and defeat the worst counterattack the enemy was capable of devising.

The British point of view prevailed for much of the next year, causing Allied forces to fight on the fringes of the enemy's power in Sicily and southern Italy. By the middle of 1943, however, with victory in North Africa in hand, the fall of Italy near, and the first Russian victories in the east, the Americans renewed their call for a cross-Channel attack. A crash effort in the United States to construct shallow-draft landing vessels and long-range fighter aircraft had assured that at least minimum resources would be available to move a major force onto the beaches of France and to protect it from air attack. Meanwhile, the success of the anti-U-boat campaign in the Atlantic had guaranteed that the vast supplies of ammunition and provisions necessary for the invasion could move safely from the United States to staging areas in Great Britain.

Although British leaders continued to advocate their peripheral strategy, the importance of American resources to the war effort had become so great that they had little choice but to go along with their ally. At the [[Casablanca Conference]] of January 1943 they thus agreed in principle to a 1944 invasion of the Continent. Shortly thereafter, the British General Staff appointed Lt. Gen. Frederick E. Morgan to be Chief of Staff (COS) to a still to be appointed Supreme Allied Commander (SAC) and gave him responsibility for planning the attack. By April 1943 Morgan had established an organization to carry out that task and had named it COSSAC after the initials in his new title. He warned his officers at that time to avoid thinking of themselves as planners and to see themselves instead as the embryo of a future supreme headquarters. "The term planning staff has come to have a most sinister meaning," he observed. "It implies the production of nothing but paper. What we must contrive to do somehow is to produce not only paper but action."

Under Churchill's influence, the British for a time continued to argue in favor of possible operations in the Balkans. The Americans, however, suspected that their ally was more interested in securing a postwar empire than in defeating Germany as soon as possible. Refusing further delays, they won agreement for a 1 May 1944 attack during the May 1943 Trident Conference in Washington. One month later, the Quadrant Conference in Quebec reaffirmed the decision.

Soviet Premier [[Joseph Stalin]] strengthened the Americans' hand during the Tehran Conference in November. He had reacted furiously to news after the Casablanca Conference that there would be no second front in 1943. At Tehran he welcomed the new emphasis on an attack and pushed vigorously for the appointment of a supreme commander to head the operation. From then on, the Americans were able to argue that any postponement of the invasion would constitute a breach of faith with the Russians. Wrangling continued over the Italian campaign and a possible invasion of southern France, code-named ANVIL, the flow of men and supplies to the Mediterranean theater slowed and the final buildup for the cross-Channel attack began in earnest.

====Selection of Eisenhower====
The selection of a commander for Allied forces required considerable thought. If the invasion had occurred early in the war, the British would have supplied the bulk of the resources and would have controlled the operation. Churchill had tentatively selected General Sir Alan Brooke for the task. But as the war lengthened and American resources became predominant, the selection of an American commander seemed appropriate. Roosevelt and Churchill first inclined toward the man who had played the principal role in coordinating the overall American military effort, U.S. Army Chief of Staff General [[George C. Marshall]]. When Roosevelt decided that Marshall's presence in Washington was indispensable, the Allies agreed on General [[Dwight D. Eisenhower]], another well-experienced officer and the commander of Allied forces in North Africa and the Mediterranean. In the end, Eisenhower would serve as Supreme Allied Commander in Europe and as commanding general of all U.S. forces in the European Theater of Operations.

Appointed as Supreme Commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force in December 1943, Eisenhower selected his former chief of staff in the Mediterranean, Lt. Gen. [[Walter Bedell Smith]], to be his chief of staff in Europe. Smith transformed COSSAC into the supreme headquarters Morgan had envisioned and installed Morgan as his deputy. Aware of British sensitivities and attuned to the political difficulties that might develop if American generals came to dominate Allied councils, Eisenhower selected his principal commanders from among the British. Air Chief Marshal Sir Arthur Tedder became the Deputy Supreme Allied Commander and principal coordinator of the theater's air forces, and Admiral Sir Bertram Ramsay served as naval commander for the invasion. An American, Lt. Gen. Carl Spaatz, commanded U.S. Strategic Air Forces in Europe, while an Englishman, Air Chief Marshal Sir Arthur T. Harris, commanded the Royal Air Force's Bomber Command. Air Chief Marshal Sir Trafford Leigh-Mallory headed those portions of the Allied air forces concerned with tactical air support.

If the tactical air forces for the invasion were clearly under Eisenhower, there was disagreement over whether he commanded the strategic air forces employed in bombing Germany. Spaatz and Harris were disposed to cooperate with Eisenhower but insisted on remaining independent in order to concentrate on destroying Germany's industrial base and air force. After considerable give and take, an arrangement suitable to all sides emerged. Subject to the oversight of the Combined Chiefs of Staff, a joint committee composed of the British Chiefs of Staff and their American counterparts, Eisenhower gained responsibility for the "direction" of strategic air forces. It was understood, however, that the cross-Channel attack, code-named Operation OVERLORD, would not absorb the entire bomber effort and that the air campaign against Germany would continue.

Eisenhower asked General Sir [[Bernard Law Montgomery]], who had led the Eighth Army in North Africa, Sicily, and Italy, and who had become the commander of the 21st Army Group for the invasion, to serve as pro tem commander of the Allied ground forces coming ashore in France. Montgomery would carry out final planning and coordinate the early phases of the attack. Two commanders would serve under Montgomery: Lt. Gen. [[Omar Nelson Bradley]] would head the American force, the First U.S. Army; General Sir Miles Dempsey would lead the Second British Army, composed of British, Canadian, and a handful of French troops. The Third U.S. Army, commanded by Lt. Gen. [[George S. Patton]], Jr., would enter the battle after the Allies had achieved a secure lodgment on the Continent. It would join the First U.S. Army, now commanded by Lt. Gen. Courtney Hodges, to form the 12th Army Group under Bradley. Lt. Gen. Henry D. G. Crerar's First Canadian Army would join Dempsey under Montgomery.

==Creating the general plan==
During the summer of 1943, COSSAC had formulated a tentative plan of attack that involved a force of from three to five divisions. That assault would depend for supply upon the development of two prefabricated harbors, called "mulberries", that were to be positioned along with breakwaters composed of scuttled ships just off the invasion beaches. The mulberries would give the Allies a measure of flexibility by allowing them to provision the force moving inland without having to rely upon the immediate capture of an established port.

====Landing site====
As COSSAC developed that plan, the question of where to land posed problems. The site would have to be within the range of fighter aircraft based in Great Britain but also on ground flat enough to construct the airfields that would become necessary once the invading force moved off the beaches and out of the range of its initial fighter support. The landing zones themselves would have to be sheltered from prevailing winds to facilitate around-the-clock resupply operations and would have to possess enough exits to allow the invading force to proceed inland with as little difficulty as possible. Similarly, the area behind the beaches would have to include a road network adequate to the needs of a force that intended to move rapidly. Since the region would ultimately form a base for the drive across France toward Germany, a series of large ports would also have to be close enough to facilitate the unloading of the massive quantities of supplies and ammunition that would be necessary to sustain the attack.

The most appropriate location, COSSAC's planners decided, lay directly across the English Channel from Dover in the Pas de Calais region. The area fulfilled many of the Allies' requirements and offered a direct route into the heart of Germany. Since the enemy had recognized that fact, however, and had already begun to construct heavy fortifications along the coast, an alternative had to be found. The most suitable stood farther to the west, along the Normandy coast near Caen and the Cotentin Peninsula. That region contained major ports at Cherbourg and Le Havre and offered a gateway to ports at Brest, Nantes, L'Orient, and St. Nazaire. Allied planners believed that the Germans would undoubtedly sabotage Cherbourg, forcing the invaders to place heavy initial reliance upon the mulberries, but the damage could be repaired and the region itself was less strongly defended than the Pas de Calais. Offering, as well, a satisfactory opening into the French interior, it became the site of the invasion.

====Looking towards Normandy====
As planning continued, both Eisenhower and Montgomery recognized that the three-to-five-division assault COSSAC had envisioned would have to be strengthened and spread over a larger area. Looking toward the early capture of Cherbourg and the secure flow of supplies that port would ensure, Montgomery argued in favor of a broad attack somewhat west of Caen. Stretching from the area below that city into the region beyond the town of St. Martin-de-Varreville, the front he envisioned would have a breadth of some sixty miles. When Morgan's planners responded that a bridgehead of that size would require resources far in excess of those available, Montgomery asserted that nothing less would work and that the Allies would either have to find the means or another commander.

Montgomery's insistence led to a sometimes acrimonious debate over the value of ANVIL, a plan to invade southern France that Eisenhower wanted to schedule simultaneously with OVERLORD. The invasion's planners considered the attack important and the conferees at Tehran had endorsed it, but the British — particularly Churchill — had never seen its merit. Hesitant at first to cancel the operation because it seemed a necessary diversion for the main effort in the Cotentin, Eisenhower in the end agreed to a postponement. Given the enlarged scope of OVERLORD, no other alternative seemed possible. There were too few landing craft to go around.

Although the debate over ANVIL continued, by 23 January 1944 the Allies had settled on a basic plan of attack for Normandy. The Americans would take the western flank closest to Cherbourg while the British operated to the east, on the approaches to Caen. Logistics determined the arrangement. American forces had arrived in Britain via the country's western ports and had positioned depots in those areas. It made sense for them to operate near those bases. In addition, responding to the congestion in Britain's ports brought on by preparations for the invasion, American logisticians planned to load ships in the United States for direct discharge onto the beaches of France, without an intermediate unloading in Britain. The western flank was closer to that line of supply.

====Finalizing the plan====
On the night before the invasion, the U.S. 82d and 101st Airborne Divisions would land by parachute and glider near the town of Ste. Mere-Eglise, securing the roads that led from the shoreline and obstructing enemy efforts to reinforce beach defenses. The next morning Bradley's First Army would arrive. The VII Corps would put the U.S. 4th Division ashore on UTAH Beach near les Dunes de Varreville.

To the east, the V Corps, composed of the U.S. 1st and portions of the 29th Infantry Divisions, would land on OMAHA Beach near the town of Vierville-sur-Mer. With a foothold secure in Normandy, V Corps would expand the beachhead to the south while VII Corps cut across the Contentin Peninsula and then wheeled north to capture Cherbourg. With the seaport in hand, VII Corps was to turn south and move toward the town of St. Lo. Once Bradley held the town and the St. Lo-Periers Road, he would have his army on dry ground suitable for offensive operations by mechanized forces. Patton's Third Army would then take to the field. Advancing into Brittany, it would seize Brest and other ports and cover the south flank when the First Army began an attack to the northeast toward Paris. To the east, the Second British Army would operate in the region between Bayeux and Caen, an area that possessed suitable sites for airfields and that offered a relatively unimpeded route to Paris. As in the American sector, an airborne division, the British 6th, would secure the northeastern flank of the operation, dropping during the hours before dawn near Caen and the mouth of the Orne River. At H-hour, the British 50th Division under the British 30 Corps would come ashore on GOLD Beach, near Bayeux and the American zone, while 1 Corps conducted a two-pronged attack farther to the east. There, the 3d Canadian Division would cross JUNO Beach near the town of Courseulles and the British 3d Division would come ashore at SWORD, near Lion-sur-Mer. "In the initial stages," Montgomery told his officers, "we should concentrate on gaining control quickly of the main centres of road communications. We should then push our armoured formations between and beyond these centres and deploy them on suitable ground. In this way it would be difficult for the enemy to bring up his reserves and get them past these armoured formations."

Over all, Allied planners intended to gain a lodgment between the Seine and Loire Rivers. Assuming that the Germans, after initial resistance, would choose to withdraw their forces behind the natural barrier provided by the Seine, they estimated that the task would take about ninety days. After a pause to regroup and resupply, the Allies would then begin an advance into the regions beyond the Seine and toward Germany.

====Troop buildup in England====
As planning continued, the BOLERO buildup in Britain, begun in 1942 to arm and provision the invasion, took on new momentum. With 39 divisions slated to participate in the invasion—20 American, 14 British, 3 Canadian, 1 French, and 1 Polish—along with hundreds of thousands of service troops, there was little time to waste. The number of U.S. fighting men based in Great Britain alone would double in the first six months of 1944, rising from 774,000 at the beginning of the year to 1,537,000 in the week preceding the final assault. More than 16 million tons of supplies would be needed to feed and supply those men and their allies: six and one-quarter pounds of rations per day per man; 137,000 jeeps, trucks, and half-tracks; 4,217 tanks and fully tracked vehicles; 3,500 artillery pieces; 12,000 aircraft; and huge stores of sundries—everything from dental [[amalgam]] for fillings to chewing gum and candy bars.

Quarters and depots to house the entire force mushroomed across the English countryside, many in just the seventeen weeks that preceded the invasion. The fields of Somerset and Cornwall became armories for the vast stores of bombs and artillery shells that the operation would require. The congestion extended to Britain's harbors, where ships laden with more supplies stood by. By the day of the attack, besides the immense force of fighting ships that would land the troops in Normandy and of cargo vessels that continued to ply Atlantic supply routes, more than 3 million deadweight tons of merchant shipping were in direct service to the invasion. The huge size of the buildup notwithstanding, landing craft were in such short supply that Eisenhower postponed the invasion for one month, from May to June.

While logisticians laid the base for the invasion, the Allied air forces opened the way for the attack itself by waging massive bombing campaigns in Germany and France. In Germany, between January and June 1944, Allied fighters swept the skies clear of German warplanes and took a heavy toll in pilots. As a result, by June 1944 the enemy lacked both the aircraft and the airmen to mount more than a token resistance to Allied plans.

==Deception==
Meanwhile, in France, as members of the French resistance cut railroad tracks, sabotaged locomotives, and targeted supply trains, Allied aircraft bombed roads, bridges, and rail junctions to prevent the Germans from moving reinforcements toward the invasion beaches. To deceive the enemy's intelligence agencies, the attacks occurred along the entire length of the Channel coast. By June, despite intelligence reports questioning the value of the attacks, all rail routes across the Seine River north of Paris were closed; the transportation system in France was at the point of collapse.

Deception was, indeed, a major part of the Allied campaign plan. To mislead the Germans into believing that the Pas de Calais, rather than the Cotentin, would be the site of the invasion, Eisenhower's staff created a mythical 1st Army Group, with an order of battle larger than that of Montgomery's 21st Army Group. Basing the phantom force near Dover, just across the Channel from the supposed target, the planners then set construction crews to building dummy installations of plywood and canvas and dotted them with an array of inflatable tanks and vehicles. They also anchored a vast armada of rubber landing craft in the Thames River estuary, where German reconnaissance aircraft were certain to spot them. Eisenhower assigned Patton, the American general the Germans most respected, to command the phantom army and saw to it that known enemy agents received information on the status of Patton's force. Allied naval units conducted protracted maneuvers off the Channel coast near the location of the shadow army, and components of Patton's fictitious command indulged in extensive radio trafficking to signal to German intelligence analysts that a major military organization was functioning. A careful plan of aerial bombardment complemented the ploy. During the weeks preceding the invasion, Allied airmen dropped more bombs on the Pas de Calais than anywhere else in France.

To protect the date of the invasion from prying German eyes, the Allies called it [[D-Day]], which carried no implications of any sort. NEPTUNE, the code name they used in place of OVERLORD on planning documents after September 1943, was similarly devoid of connotation. Although American commanders doubted that their ruses would have much effect, their schemes succeeded far beyond expectations. The Germans became so convinced that the Pas de Calais would be the Allied target that they held to the fiction until long after the actual attack had begun. As a result, nineteen powerful enemy divisions, to include important panzer reserves, stood idle on the day of the invasion, awaiting an assault that never came, when their presence in Normandy might have told heavily against the Allied attack.

==German planning==
For their part, enemy forces labored against problems generated by a long war and an autocratic political system. In May 1942 the Germans had adopted a policy that gave the Russian Front first priority for troops and garrisoned the west with those who, because of wounds or other disabilities, were unable to endure the rigors imposed by that theater. Over the year that followed, twenty-two infantry and six armored divisions left France for the Eastern Front, along with the best equipment and men from the divisions that stayed behind. They were replaced by soldiers who were over-age or convalescing from wounds and by units composed of Russian, Italian, and Polish defectors. A few first-line units were present on the Western Front, but most of the rest had been shattered in the east and required replacements and refitting. The weapons they used were often leftovers. The artillery, for example, consisted of more than twenty types of guns, many of Czech or French rather than German manufacture. Training lagged because the men were frequently employed in crash efforts to build fortifications rather than in exercises to sharpen their combat skills.

In theory, the German chain of command in the west was an example of good order. [[Adolf Hitler]] served as supreme commander of the Wehrmacht, the nation's armed forces. The High Command (OKW), led by Field Marshal [[Wilhelm Keitel]], ran the war everywhere except in the Soviet Union. Navy Group West and the Third Air Fleet, in turn, managed Germany's naval and air forces in Western Europe while the ground force, some 58 divisions, came under the Oberbefehlshaber West (OB West), headed by Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt. OB West controlled two army groups, Army Group G. which had charge of the Mediterranean and Atlantic coasts of France, and Army Group B under Field Marshal [[Erwin Rommel]], who had charge of anti-invasion forces along the Channel coast as far south as the Loire River. Rommel commanded two armies: the 15th, guarding the Pas de Calais and the Normandy coast to a line just south of the Seine River with 19 divisions (5 panzer), and the 7th, with 13 divisions (1 panzer), covering the coast from the boundary with the 15th Army to the Loire River.

====German weakness====
So logical on paper, those arrangements masked conditions in the field that were close to Byzantine. Using the operations staff of OKW as an intermediary, Hitler exercised direct control over Rundstedt's OR West. In theory a theater commander, Rundstedt had no authority over air force or naval units based within areas under his jurisdiction. The navy commanded most of the coastal artillery that would be called upon to repel an Allied attack, and the air force controlled the bulk of the antiaircraft and parachute units stationed in the region. Some armor units also came under the administrative supervision of the SS (Schutzstaffel), the elite political army that answered first to Hitler and Berlin rather than to its supposed commanders in the field.

The manner in which Rommel exercised authority at Army Group B was symptomatic of the debilities afflicting the German staff. Subordinate in theory to Rundstedt, Rommel was his equal in rank. Much more forceful than Rundstedt in personality, he came to exercise far more influence than his position would normally have dictated. In addition, as a field marshal, he had the privilege of communicating directly with Hitler outside the chain of command. Thus he had the ability to undercut his superior whenever he wished.

Rommel disagreed with Rundstedt over how best to repel an Allied invasion. Rundstedt placed great reliance on mechanized reserves that could respond quickly and flexibly to an enemy thrust. To that end, he stationed a newly created armored command, Panzer Group West, near Paris. From there, the force could move, as circumstances required, toward the site of an enemy assault in either the Pas de Calais or Normandy.

Understanding the ability of the Allied air forces to isolate a battlefield and inhibit the movement of ground troops, Rommel believed Allied air superiority in France prevented the sort of mobile response Rundstedt envisioned. If Eisenhower's forces gained even the barest foothold on the Continent, he reasoned, they would win the war. To prevent that, German forces would have to repel the invasion at the water's edge through the use of well-dug-in and stationary troop formations on the shoreline. Directing his efforts to that end, Rommel built beach defenses, laid down minefields, and constructed obstacles to entangle Allied landing craft before they reached land. He also applied personally to Hitler, over Rundstedt's head, for control of the panzer divisions he believed he needed to reinforce his design.

Hitler temporized. Agreeing to Rommel's request at first but then returning control of the reserves to Rundstedt when the latter objected, he finally compromised between the two approaches. Three of Panzer Group West's divisions went to Rommel, but OKW maintained control over four others that were to operate as a central reserve. Hitler's caution satisfied neither field marshal and deprived each of the decisive authority over armor that would become critical as the battle for France evolved.

The malaise gripping the Wehrmacht might have made little difference if Hitler had been more forceful in preparing for the inevitable invasion. Although his generals, misled by the Allied deception plan, believed that the main Allied assault would come in the Pas de Calais, he thought that the attack would occur near Caen, and he said as much during March. Yet he failed to push the idea with any vigor, perhaps because he doubted his intuition in the face of his generals' certainty. Lacking any impetus from Hitler, his subordinates took no action on his insight. Based on Allied naval activities, Germany's naval commander in France likewise predicted the true site of the invasion but also neglected to take adequate precautions. He reasoned that the Allies had yet to concentrate the weight of their air power on targets in the region and so were obviously unprepared to carry out the attack.

The ruse enacted by Patton's nonexistent 1st Army Group was not the only reason that German commanders failed to deduce the correct location of the Allied attack. By 1944 Britain's secret services had deprived Germany of its eyes by identifying and either turning or eliminating virtually every enemy agent assigned to their shores. Meanwhile, Allied warships had rendered German naval patrols in the English Channel ineffective, and Allied bombers had destroyed most of the German radar units that might have monitored air and naval traffic near the invasion beaches. A German spy working in the British embassy in Ankara had provided his mentors in Berlin with the code name for the invasion—OVERLORD but the revelation apparently carried little weight and led to no concrete action. German intelligence had also managed to learn that the British Broadcasting Corporation would transmit two lines of a poem by the nineteenth century author Paul Verlaine to warn the French Resistance that the attack was imminent. Even so, that finding was of little use without firm indications of where and when the invasion would occur.

The Luftwaffe might have made the difference by conducting reconnaissance flights over the coastal regions of Great Britain. The Allied buildup was proceeding at a frenzied pace, mainly in the south of England opposite Normandy. Yet no flights of the sort occurred during the critical early months of 1944. German air commanders were preoccupied with the wounds inflicted upon their forces by the Allied bombing campaign and loath to waste valuable pilots on an exercise that, given their enemy's air superiority, would spell virtually certain death for most of those involved.

Despite the impediments dogging German forces, Rommel and Rundstedt still possessed a number of tangible assets that would work to their advantage once the invasion began. The terrain in Normandy where the Allies would land consisted of small fields and pastures ringed by dense, tangled shrubbery, the so-called bocage. Each of them constituted a natural fortification and killing ground. In the same way, the overarching limbs of trees sheltered many rural lanes in the area. German commanders could use those byways as hidden corridors to move men and supplies. Even large, open areas were easily defended. Rommel peppered those that were suitable for the landing of gliders and paratroopers with mines, booby-trapped wooden stakes called Rommel's asparagus, and other obstructions. Since the regions near the mouths of Normandy's rivers and streams were often reclaimed marshlands, the field marshal had his engineers return them to their natural state by opening dikes and floodgates that held in check spring overflows. The deep inundations that followed would claim a number of the paratroopers who dropped into Normandy on the night of the invasion and would inhibit efforts to close the gap between the American forces fighting on OMAHA and UTAH Beaches.

For Hitler and his generals, the invasion represented a moment filled with danger and opportunity. If they failed, German defeat would become inevitable, but if they succeeded they would eliminate for a year or longer any threat to their power from the west. That would enable them to move the bulk of their divisions to the Russian Front, where their forces were sorely pressed. If the approach of the Normandy invasion thus evoked anxiety on the part of the Germans, it was also a source of high expectation.

==The invasion==
As the day of the invasion approached, the weather in the English Channel became stormy. Heavy winds, a five-foot swell at sea, and lowering skies compelled Eisenhower to postpone the assault from 5 to 6 June. Conditions remained poor, but when weathermen predicted that the winds would abate and the cloud cover rise enough on the scheduled day of the attack to permit a go-ahead, Eisenhower reluctantly gave the command. Expecting casualties of up to 80 percent among the airborne forces, he traveled to an air base at Newbury to bid farewell to the members of the 101st Airborne Division before their tow planes and gliders carried them off to battle. A newspaper man who accompanied Eisenhower later told friends he had seen tears in the general's eyes.

The weather actually worked to the Allied advantage. The BBC broadcast the lines from Verlaine's poem indicating commencement of the attack — ''"Blessent mon coeur d'une longueur monotone"'' ("The violins of autumn wound my heart with monotonous languor") — a code alerting the French Resistance that the invasion was imminent. Rommel's Army Group B headquarters in Normandy did nothing. The weather was so foul that no one believed an invasion possible. Indeed, many commanders at 7th Army had already left for Brittany to participate in an exercise designed, ironically, to simulate an Allied landing in Normandy. Rommel himself was in Germany celebrating his wife's birthday.

====Landing of airborne units====
[[Image:D-day 2.jpg|200px|thumb|right|Soldiers using German tank traps as cover]]
As planned, airborne units led the invasion. Shortly after midnight the British 6th Airborne Division dropped northeast of Caen, near the mouth of the Orne River, where it anchored the British eastern flank by securing bridges over the river and the Caen Canal. On the other side of the invasion area, the U.S. 101st and 82d Airborne Divisions dropped near Ste. Mere-Eglise and Carentan to secure road junctions and beach exits from which the VII Corps could push to capture Cherbourg.

Some of the American airborne troops came to ground near their objectives, but most were scattered over a wide area. A number drowned in the flooded lowlands. Others landed in the midst of German positions, where they were killed or captured. In the hours that followed, nevertheless, paratroopers from the 101st succeeded in clearing much of the way for VII Corps' move inland. The 3d Battalion, 505th Infantry, of the 82d Airborne Division meanwhile captured Ste. Mere-Eglise and cut the main enemy communications cable to Cherbourg.

Other units, entangled in the thickets and hedgerows of the region, failed to achieve their objectives, but by their very presence they sowed confusion in German ranks. Reports began to surface in enemy headquarters all along the line that paratroopers were landing, but little information was available to commanders on the size and meaning of the attack. Was it a probe to test Germany's defenses, a diversion for a larger assault in the Pas de Calais, or the long-awaited invasion itself? The Allies added to the confusion by parachuting dummies wired with firecrackers far to the rear of German positions. The trick drew major enemy units away from the landing zone, where their presence might have done considerable damage to the attackers.

As dawn neared, bombers began to strike up and down the coast, flying the first of what would become, by the end of the day, more than 11,000 sorties against enemy batteries, headquarters, railroad junctions, and troop concentrations. The gliders Eisenhower had watched depart also arrived. Those of the British landed on target as did most of those from the U.S. 101st Airborne Division. Fewer than half of the gliders assigned to the U.S. 82d Airborne reached their assigned landing zones. The rest lodged in hedgerows, struck German obstructions, or floundered in the swollen marshes. By midmorning, 4,000 men of the 82d were still unaccounted for, along with 60 percent of the equipment they had carried.
Although convinced that the disturbances were a diversion for an assault to come in the Pas de Calais, Rundstedt, at 0400 on 6 June, ordered two panzer divisions to move immediately toward Caen to guard against Allied amphibious operations in support of the airborne attack. The units, however, were in OKW reserve. Informed of the order, Rundstedt's superiors at OKW placed it on hold until Hitler himself could concur. Since he was asleep and disliked being awakened, approval took many hours to come and stalled what might have been a powerful German response. The few officers of Rommel's staff present in the area were more energetic. When they learned during the early morning hours that an enormous Allied fleet was approaching the coast, they ordered the 21st Panzer Division to Caen.

By first light at 0530, the entire horizon off Normandy between Caen and Vierville-sur-Mer had filled with the invasion armada. "They came, rank after relentless rank, ten lanes wide, twenty miles across, five thousand ships of every description," wrote one reporter that morning: "Coast Guard cutters, buoy-layers and motor launches," and "a formidable array of 702 warships." The naval bombardment began at 0550, detonating large German minefields and destroying many blockhouses and artillery positions.

====The Normandy landings====
Emerging from behind a screen of smoke, three German torpedo boats attempted briefly to contest the attack, but only one inflicted any damage, sinking the Norwegian destroyer ''Svenner''. It was the sole contribution of the German Navy to the fight that day. The Luftwaffe was equally absent, leading one young soldier to comment later, "We were all more or less expecting...dive bombers...continually backed by high level bombing. But no, nothing like that...The Luftwaffe is obviously smashed."

The Allied bombardment ended precisely on schedule but the landing craft ran late, giving the Germans a brief respite before the troops came ashore. That complicated matters for the British 1 and 30 Corps when they arrived on GOLD, JUNO, and SWORD Beaches at 0700 and for the American VII Corps, which began to debark on UTAH at 0630. On GOLD, the British 50th Division encountered intense German fire at first but rapidly worked its way forward and moved off the beach. On JUNO, the 3d Canadian Division also experienced early difficulties but by the end of the day had reached the Caen-Bayeux highway, inland from the landing zone. Confusion reigned on SWORD, where delivery schedules slipped and succeeding waves of landing craft piled a jumble of men and vehicles at the water's edge. Even so, the troops on SWORD were off the beach within an hour of landing and by dark had joined up with the forces of the British 6th Airborne Division. British and Canadian forces failed to seize Caen because the Germans threw the weight of their resources and their only available armored division, 21st Panzer, into the defense of the city, but they, too, had established themselves well ashore.

The forces that arrived on UTAH also performed ably. Elements of the 4th and 24th Cavalry Squadrons (132 men) of the 4th Cavalry Group landed on the St. Marcouf Islands flanking the beach at 0430, two hours in advance of the main attack. Directed to clear enemy minefields, control points, and observation posts, they found the islands heavily mined but otherwise unoccupied. During the main attack, German artillery managed to sink the U.S. destroyer Corry; swift currents carried the landing craft of the 4th Division well to the south of their target onto a portion of the beach that was only lightly defended; and thirty-two amphibious tanks assigned to land in the first wave of the attack were delayed by the loss of a control vessel that struck a mine. Those setbacks notwithstanding, the assaulting troops quickly took the upper hand. Within three hours the enemy force defending the beach had surrendered and Allied troops and supplies were moving inland. In all, some 23,000 men came ashore at UTAH, at a cost for the day of 197 casualties among the ground forces.

Many men distinguished themselves that morning, among them the 4th Division's Assistant Division Commander, Brig. Gen. Theodore Roosevelt, Jr. Going ashore with the first wave, Roosevelt contributed materially to the success of his forces by personally reconnoitering the area inland from the beach. He then returned to the beachhead time and again, without concern for his own life, to lead groups of his men over a seawall through enemy fire to safety. He earned a [[Medal of Honor]] for his gallantry.

====Omaha====
If the attack went well on UTAH, the situation was quite different on OMAHA. Maj. Gen. Leonard T. Gerow's V Corps came up against the worst conditions encountered that day. High seas swamped many landing craft during the ten-mile run from mother ships to shore. Survivors reached land seasick and wobbling. Well over half (fifty-seven of ninety-six) of the dual-drive amphibious tanks assigned to the landing also went down, victims of heavy seas they had not been designed to withstand. Strong winds and adverse currents likewise pushed a significant number of landing craft away from their designated targets, into areas where commanding officers' maps were useless and supporting fires from friendly ships totally lacking.

Bombing attacks by Allied aircraft and assaults by naval gunfire designed to soften enemy positions did little to improve the situation. Blinded by heavy clouds and concerned lest poorly aimed bombs strike the landing force on the beach, bomber pilots overshot their targets and dropped their loads up to three miles inland. Naval gunners had difficulty zeroing in on their targets. Most of the radios required by artillery spotters ashore had gone down with landing craft that never reached the beach.

OMAHA itself was a tangle of obstructions: concrete cones, slanted poles, logs tilted seaward with mines lashed to their tips, and steel rails welded together at angles and so strongly set into the beach that their ends would stave in the bottoms of landing craft. The Germans had also made good use of a line of cliffs, four miles long and up to one hundred fifty feet in height, that paralleled the length of the landing zone. Dotting the ravines and draws that led through the bluffs with antitank and antipersonnel mines, they had scattered blockhouses, bunkers, and machine gun nests in strategic locations where they could dominate the shoreline below. Unknown to the Americans, the highly disciplined 352d Infantry Division manned many of those fortifications. Its presence in the area had been suspected by some intelligence analysts, but the evidence they presented had proved too uncertain to affect planning for the attack.

The effort to destroy the enemy's beach obstacles was only marginally successful. In the vanguard of the attack, members of the 6th Engineer Brigade and naval demolition units attempted to cut avenues of approach to the beach by blasting lanes through the obstructions. Despite a series of mishaps—of 16 bulldozers, for example, only 3 survived enemy fire and I was prevented from maneuvering freely by American riflemen who sought shelter from incoming rounds in its lee—they succeeded in opening six complete gaps. Even so, they could mark only one for use during high water because all the buoys and poles designated for that purpose had been destroyed by enemy artillery. Casualties for the engineering task force ran to 40 percent, most incurred in the first half-hour of the attack.

As the day lengthened, those conditions combined to produce a near-inferno on OMAHA. Enemy mortar and artillery batteries, unscathed by Allied fire, poured destruction upon the attackers while the invading force time and again appeared to fumble. Allied rocket ships responded, but from extreme range. When their missiles fell short, they hit the troops on the beach. Wreckage at the water's edge accumulated as timetables slipped and landing craft became hopelessly entangled in the barbed wire and projecting beams of uncleared beach obstructions. Even those craft that succeeded in ramming their way forward encountered difficulties. Riding a rising tide, most grounded on unforeseen sandbars located 50 to 100 yards from the surf's edge. There, enemy machine guns claimed a heavy toll of the debarking troops, who had to wade to shore with all their equipment through water that was often neck deep. In the end, perhaps a little more than one-third of the first wave of attackers reached dry land. Lacking most of their heavy weapons, those survivors had little choice but to huddle behind sand dunes and in the lee of a small seawall that ran along the base of the beach. Many soldiers were killed outright, but some, wounded and unable to move, drowned as the tide moved in.

The Germans were elated. Convinced that the attack was faltering, the commander of the 352d Division transferred some of his reserves to the east, where the British appeared a greater threat. General Bradley was distressed and for a time debated whether to cancel the assault and to move the remainder of his force to UTAH Beach.

If chaos ruled at first, order asserted itself as the day lengthened. In some areas, heavy smoke from grass fires and exploding ammunition obscured landing zones and blinded enemy gunners, allowing the attackers to advance largely unopposed. Here and there, as well, tanks arrived, rolling off landing craft that had somehow plowed their way through the obstacles. Bringing their guns to bear, they began to provide the fire support the men on the beach required. The remnants of three companies of Rangers who had come ashore with the first units also did good work. Assigned to destroy a battery of six partially casemated 155-mm. guns thought to be positioned atop a promontory named the Pointe du Hoe, those highly disciplined infantrymen scaled the nearly l00-foot height and cleared it of its German defenders. Although the guns had been moved a few hundred yards inland the Rangers still managed to spike them. They then held their position for two days against waves of counterattacking Germans, incurring losses that would reduce their combat effectives to about ninety men before reinforcements finally arrived.

Unit cohesion had disintegrated among the troops on the beach, especially within the inexperienced 29th Division, but leaders of all ranks asserted themselves and saved the day. "Two kinds of people are staying on this beach," the commander of the 1st Division's 16th Infantry Regiment, Col. George A. Taylor, exclaimed to his men, "the dead and those who are going to die. Now let's get the hell out of here." The sergeants were especially abrupt. Resorting to curses they had hoarded for years, they exhorted their men to get off the beach. The 29th Division's assistant commander, Brig. Gen. Norman D. Cota, was particularly effective. Ignoring enemy fire, he moved up and down the shoreline among his troops, cajoling, rallying, urging them forward through the bluffs.

As the invaders reorganized, Allied destroyers moved close to shore. Risking grounding and almost point-blank fire from enemy batteries, they raked the cliffs with their guns. More and more landing craft also pushed their way to the beach, bringing new troops, heavy weapons, radios, and ammunition.

====The push inland====
Although victorious against the first wave of invaders at OMAHA, the Germans could do little when the force on the beach began to renew itself. With many of their troops off in pursuit of the dummy paratroopers the Allies had dropped far to the rear, they could hold their own from fixed positions but lacked the numbers to drive the invaders back. Thus the Americans kept the ground they gained. Inch by inch they moved forward, up through the bluffs and onto the flatland above. In the absence of much room to maneuver, their attack had been unoriginal, a straightforward frontal assault, but the weight of their numbers and the enormous volume of supplies and equipment they began to bring to bear made the difference. By nightfall, 34,000 men were ashore on OMAHA. The beach itself was a shambles of burning and disabled vehicles, but almost all of the coastal villages located inland were in Allied hands.

The Germans, for their part, were in far worse condition than they seemed. Rommel's Seventh Army, commanded by Generaloberst Friedrich Dollmann, had succeeded in holding its own, but it had employed all of its resources in doing so and lacked the means to mount the sort of counterattack that might have driven the Allies back. Meanwhile, Hitler and Rundstedt remained reluctant to commit the reserves they held in the Pas de Calais because of the threat Patton's phantom army posed. Even if they had acted, Allied bombers might have decimated the force as it moved along the roads of France into Normandy. In the same way, the enemy retained sizable forces in Brittany, but German commanders refused to use them because a second landing from that direction seemed a clear possibility.

Allied losses had been high: 2,500 men at OMAHA alone, another 2,500 among the American airborne divisions, almost 1,100 for the Canadians, and some 3,000 for the British—more than 9,000 men in all, one-third of whom were killed in action. Even so, the number was less than Allied planners had expected. Concerned that Hitler would respond to the invasion with extreme violence and might even resort to poison gas, Eisenhower's chief surgeon, Maj. Gen. Albert W. Kenner, and the Chief Surgeon of the U.S. Army's European Theater of Operations, Maj. Gen. Paul R. Hawley, had prepared their staffs to process at least 12,000 killed and wounded in the First U.S. Army alone.

By the evening of 6 June 1944, Allied power had prevailed all across the Normandy beachhead. The British had failed to seize Caen. The Americans had yet to secure a lodgment far enough inland to keep enemy artillery from hitting supply dumps and unloading points they were building along the invasion beaches. Yet more than 100,000 men had come ashore, the first of millions who would follow.

==The following days==
In keeping with his concept of a mobile defense, Rundstedt wanted to attack the beachhead but Allied fighter-bombers imposed so many delays on the movement of his reserve panzer divisions that he had little choice but to defer the strike until 8 June. While he waited the units that might have formed the counterattack dribbled in piecemeal, and harried commanders plugged them into the line wherever the need was greatest. Filling gaps and sealing off areas of special concern, they never had a chance to deliver the blow Rundstedt had envisioned. The problem would recur time and again in the days that followed. Allied air interdiction efforts were so effective and enemy forces so hard pressed that German commanders were rarely able to mass enough strength in a single place to make a sustained advance.

Over time, Hitler's inflexibility compounded the problem. On 17 June Rundstedt and Rommel requested their leader's permission to withdraw their forces out of the range of naval gunfire before launching an armored attack on the flank of Montgomery's Second Army. Hitler refused. Convinced that the dogged efforts of soldiers who had stood and fought even when surrounded during the Battle of Moscow in 1941 had averted a German collapse, he believed the same would hold true in Normandy. He forbade his commanders to abandon any position voluntarily and ordered them to hold their ground at all costs. Despite their difficulties, the Germans still made good use of the advantages the bocage offered. They turned the region's sunken lanes into trenches and fortifications. The hedgerows—some more than five feet in height and several feet thick—became traps concealing riflemen, machine guns, and infantrymen armed with antitank weapons.

====The hedgerows====
Because they assumed that the Germans would withdraw toward the Seine and fight a delay along the river's lines, the invasion's planners had concentrated on the challenge of getting ashore and had paid scant attention to the impediments posed by the bocage. As a result, Bradley's First Army was unprepared for the difficulties it faced and paid a steep price for each foot of its advance into the region. The experience of the U.S. 90th Division was a case in point. Faced with hostile fire from an invisible enemy, the unit's commanders found the principles of fire and maneuver nearly impossible to apply in the hedgerows, especially the precept that an attacking force should move just behind its artillery in order to confront the enemy while he is still off balance. The division suffered heavy casualties as a result—150 officers and 2,315 enlisted men during June and 310 officers and 5,188 enlisted men during July. More experienced units also suffered terribly in the bocage. A U.S. Army survey of casualties in portions of the 1st, 4th, 9th, and 25th Infantry Divisions between 6 June and 31 July 1944 found that rifle companies lost nearly 60 percent of their enlisted men and over 68 percent of their officers.

The countryside in the British and Canadian sectors — a relatively open, flat, dry expanse stretching from Caen to Paris — was more favorable for offensive warfare. Paradoxically, those conditions made fighting there perhaps more difficult than in the American sector. The nature of the ground and the strategic importance of the area compelled the Germans to mass the bulk of their panzer units and their best troops in the path of Montgomery's forces. They turned the checkerboard of villages that dotted the region into an interlocking, mortar-and-concrete version of the bocage.

Montgomery's commanders appear to have been little more prepared than the Americans for the sort of resistance the Germans mounted. Poorly versed in combined arms tactics, they allowed their tanks to advance without the protection of accompanying infantry units. That approach gave German soldiers wielding highly effective Panzerfausts (the enemy version of the American bazooka) and teams firing formidable, high-velocity antitank cannons a relatively free hand in dealing with the advancing forces.

What Montgomery intended to do remains shrouded in controversy. Time and again he appeared to delay. The terrain and the heavy weight of the German defenses facing his forces were undoubtedly part of the reason. He may also all along have planned to allow the offensive to develop in the direction that time and circumstance dictated, whether in the American sector or his own. In that sense, it is possible that he decided Bradley's front offered the most opportunities and that his own army should concentrate on holding the enemy in place to allow his ally the fullest latitude. Or he may have thought that Allied advances elsewhere would allow him to achieve his objectives without incurring the level of casualties that had consumed an entire generation of his countrymen during World War I. He had been warned of a shortage of infantry replacements well before D-Day. During July the British Adjutant General had underscored the point by personally traveling to Normandy to notify him that some British battalions had already been divided to fill gaps in the line and that divisions might be next. Whatever the reason, Montgomery's forces, commanded by Lt. Gen. Sir Miles Dempsey, took the town of Bayeux and moved several miles inland but, despite three full-scale attempts between 6 June and 1 July, failed to take Caen.

Montgomery's intentions notwithstanding, British efforts were hardly without effect. The attacks his forces launched bled the Germans of strength they could ill afford to lose and kept the enemy's best units concentrated around Caen. That relieved some of the pressure on Bradley to the west, buying time and room for him to consolidate his beachhead on OMAHA and to turn his attention toward the capture of Cherbourg.

In fact, Bradley needed all the help he could get. With the enemy well concealed in the hedgerows, it took an average of five Americans to displace one German defender. Under normal circumstances, a ratio of three to one would have sufficed. "Prior to invasion33' he later wrote, "we had estimated that the infantry would incur 70 percent of the losses of combat forces. By August we had boosted that figure to 83 percent on the basis of our experience in the Normandy hedgerows." Bradley illustrated his point by noting that, in fifteen days of fighting around St. Lo, the 30th Division sustained 3,934 battle casualties, a loss rate of 25 percent for the unit as a whole but of 90 percent in its rifle platoons, where three out of every four casualties occurred.

====Towards Cherbourg====
The flooded marshes of the Merderet River also hampered American progress, as did a great storm that lashed the English Channel between 19 and 21 June. Besides destroying nearly 500 small craft and beaching another 800 well above the high-water mark, the gale slowed the effort to resupply American forces for a time by ruining the mulberry harbor at OMAHA Beach. On 18 June, just before the storm, Allied logisticians had achieved 72.8 percent of their targeted level of supplies to that date. By 22 June, as a result of the storm, that figure had fallen to 57.4 percent. The buildup in vehicle strength fell over the same period from 66 to 57 percent and in personnel from 88 to 77.7 percent. Nevertheless, those impediments proved only temporary. Bradley's logisticians quickly learned to bring what they needed directly across the beach. By the last week in June, OMAHA was averaging 13,500 tons of supplies per day, 115 percent of planned capacity. UTAH, meanwhile, had achieved 7,000 tons per day, 125 percent of its target.

By 18 June Maj. Gen. J. Lawton Collins' VII Corps had cut its way across the Cotentin Peninsula and had severed all roads leading into Cherbourg. Under orders from Hitler "to defend the last bunker and leave to the enemy not a harbor but a field of ruins," the remnants of five German divisions fought back stubbornly. The fighting around the city's main fortification, the Fort du Roule, embedded in a cliff overlooking the harbor, was particularly intense. Coming under attack on 25 June, the stronghold's defenders leveled heavy fire at the attackers from a number of pillboxes and artillery positions.

The fort held out until the men of the 314th, after capturing the upper battlements, crushed diehard resisters by dropping demolitions into the bastion's lower reaches. Shortly thereafter, the city's commander surrendered but, on orders from Hitler relayed by Rommel, refused to instruct his troops to do the same. American psychological warfare officers turned the trick. Dropping surrender leaflets that emphasized dwindling food supplies within the city, they announced that all who came across should bring their mess kits. That evening, twenty days after the offensive had begun, Cherbourg was in friendly hands.

By then, enemy engineers had so thoroughly demolished the city's harbor that it would take three weeks of rebuilding before the facility could open to even minimal shipping and months before it would be able to handle cargo in quantity. That being the case, the victory still provided a much needed boost to Allied morale. Progress had been so slow that Allied leaders had become concerned the attack might bog down into the sort of crippling stalemate that had prevailed on the Western Front during World War I.

As Allied morale rose, that of the Germans fell lower than ever. Hitler himself was unhappy. Exasperated with Rundstedt's continuing doubts and his desire to pull back to more defensible positions, he replaced the field marshal as Commander in Chief West on 2 July with Field Marshal Guenther von Kluge. Although at first optimistic, Kluge rapidly came to sympathize with Rundstedt's point of view.

The fall of Cherbourg offered only temporary consolation to the Allies. By I July they had established a beachhead 70 miles wide and had brought about a million men and 177,000 vehicles ashore. Yet, except around Cherbourg, their lodgment was in no place more than 25 miles deep, and in most areas it extended little more than 5 miles inland.

====Caen and St. Lo====
On 9 July Montgomery launched a massive air assault against Caen in hopes of clearing the way for an attack the following morning. Four hundred fifty heavy aircraft participated, dropping 2,500 tons of bombs, but the airmen negated most of the effect by releasing their loads well back from the forward line to avoid hitting their own troops. As a result, the city incurred heavy damage but German defenses went largely unscathed. In the two days of desperate fighting that followed, the Germans fought back viciously. Montgomery's forces entered Caen and took half the city but moved no farther. Casualty rates during the battle were appalling. Most infantry battalions sustained losses of 25 percent.

Bradley's advance on St. Lo was also an agony. Daily rains reduced visibility and negated much of the value of Allied air support. As with the British at Caen, the casualty rate was alarming. The 30th Division sustained some 3,000 killed and wounded between 7 and 20 July; the 9th suffered 2,500 between the 10th and the 20th.

Bradley's forces were nonetheless gradually learning how to fight in the bocage. Tank and infantry units began to support each other. The tanks supplied the heavy firepower needed to eliminate the enemy's well-sited firing positions while the infantry kept enemy soldiers with antitank weapons at bay. The tankers also found a way to cross the hedgerows without exposing their vehicles' vulnerable undersides to enemy fire. With huge iron teeth salvaged from German beach obstacles welded to the fronts of hundreds of tanks, they began to bull their way through the hedgerows, taking hours to advance through obstacles that would earlier have required days of fighting to overcome. From then on, the Rhinos, as the men named them, became an invaluable asset to Bradley. They allowed American armor to move across country at will while German tanks had to continue to make do with the roads.

By 15 July American forces had reached the outskirts of St. Lo, but the garrison holding the town refused yield. In a battle that inflicted carnage reminiscent of World War I, the Germans gave ground only gradually, house by house. On one occasion, as a result, American riflemen used a bulldozer to bury three German soldiers who refused to surrender their position. By 18 July the attackers had succeeded. A task force from the 29th Division under General Cota entered the town. Cota carried with him the body of Maj. Thomas D. Howie, who had commanded the 3d Battalion of the 116th Infantry. Several days earlier, Howie and his men had crept undetected through early morning mist to reinforce an isolated battalion less than 1,000 yards from St. Lo. Ordered to move his unit to the eastern edge of the town, despite his own exhaustion and that of his men, Howie had responded without hesitation, "Will do." A few moments later an enemy shell had ended his life. The commander of the 29th Division, Maj. Gen. Charles H. Gerhardt, considered Howie's response an example of the patriotic self-sacrifice that had carried the Army through to that point. By honoring Howie he could remind his men of the perseverance and courage of all those who had given their lives at St. Lo.

On the same day, the British launched a major attack beyond Caen but again allowed their tanks to advance without supporting infantry and failed to inflict a decisive blow. In response Kluge increased the concentration of German troops around the city, adding two armored divisions that might have done invaluable work against Bradley in the bocage. As a result, 7 panzer divisions and 4 heavy tank battalions guarded Caen while only 2 panzer divisions confronted the Americans. Even those forces were sorely depleted. By the last week in July, according to ULTRA intercepts of coded German radio communications, the enemy in Normandy had sustained casualties of more than 100,000 enlisted men and 2,360 officers killed and wounded. On 17 July misfortune touched Rommel himself. Two British Spitfire fighters attacked his open car—ironically, near a village named Ste. Foy de Montgommery—and drove it into a ditch. Thrown from the vehicle, Rommel suffered head injuries so grievous that he had to return to Germany for treatment. Kluge succeeded him, assuming command of Army Group B while retaining his position as Commander in Chief West.

The Allies, for their part, had brought four years of planning and hard work to completion. Exhausted and battle-worn, they had at last reached the Periers-St. Lo road. From there the land was dry and the country relatively open. The final act of the war, the great push through France into Germany itself, could now begin.

==Analysis==
It had been a grim fight. Six weeks of battle had left the Germans disheartened and susceptible to any farther blow the Allies might deliver. "It was casualty reports, casualty reports, casualty reports wherever you went," Rommel told his son Manfred from his sickbed. "I have never fought with such losses...And the worst of it is that it was all without sense or purpose." Indeed, Rommel continued, on some days the equivalent of a regiment of his men had fallen in Normandy—more than in a whole summer of fighting in Africa during 1942.

The days had been filled with mud, heartache, and pain for the Allies as well. From the very beginning, little had seemed to go right. The airborne assault on the night before the landing had sown confusion among the enemy and had provided an important diversion, but too many of the men had landed too far from their targets. As a result, the effort had only a marginal effect on the developing battle. Over the days that followed, rather than withdrawing beyond the Seine as Allied planners had expected, the Germans had hung on tenaciously, taking brutal losses but inflicting them upon the Allies as well. Meanwhile, Montgomery's careful plan for the attack had begun to unravel on D-Day itself. His forces failed to take Caen, the key to further operations in the open country to the south. Attacking time and again as the campaign developed, they had nonetheless held the cream of the German force in place, absorbing pressure that would almost inevitably have fallen upon Bradley's forces in the bocage.

As for the Americans, the landing on OMAHA Beach had been a near-disaster averted only by the courage of unsung sailors and soldiers. When air attacks and naval gunfire had failed to silence German guns and the momentum of the assault had begun to lag, those heroes had pushed their frail landing craft to shore despite the traps and obstacles blocking their way. Rallying to the directions of their commanders, they had then climbed the bluffs overlooking the beach and advanced inland, often at the cost of their own lives. In the same way, although Maj. Gen. J. Lawton Collins' VII Corps captured the port of Cherbourg on 29 June, the American advance bogged down in the hedgerows. Bradley's First Army absorbed forty thousand casualties while slowly advancing twenty miles to St. Lo.

Even so, enough went well for the campaign to succeed. Roosevelt, Marshall, Eisenhower, Churchill, and Montgomery were master communicators who bonded an unwieldy coalition into an extraordinary fighting machine. The plan they and their staffs devised failed to foresee every circumstance that would occur on the battlefield, particularly the difficulties Bradley's forces would encounter in the bocage, but it was still a masterpiece of innovation that provided ample means for Allied commanders to prevail. Cunning deceptions kept the Germans transfixed on the Pas de Calais until long after the real invasion had occurred; Allied airmen swept the skies clean of the enemy fighters and bombers that might have imposed a heavy toll upon the landing force; and the effort to build up the stocks of supplies and munitions necessary for an effective attack succeeded beyond the most optimistic expectation. In the end, notwithstanding, it was the heroism of infantrymen such as Major Howie, who rose day and night to the challenge despite almost overwhelming fear and fatigue, that afforded the critical margin for success.

A barely failed assassination attempt upon Hitler's life, implicating Rommel himself, brought about a purge of officers in Germany that would, for a time, strengthen Hitler's control over his armed forces. Although the Germans would fight on with resilience and determination for another ten months, their line in France would soon break, Patton's army would swing clear, Paris would fall, and Allied forces would approach the Rhine. The loss of France would deprive Germany not only of a major source of Mod, raw resources, and labor but also of seaports that had long sheltered its U-boats and of radar sites that had afforded early warning of Allied bomber attacks. More important, it would provide the Allies with the secure base they needed to launch their final offensive against the German heartland. As Rommel told his son, the future was clear and inevitable. The end of Hitler's Reich was at hand: "There is no longer anything we can do."

{| style="width: 100%; background:transparent; border: 2px solid #000099;" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="1"
!colspan=2 style="width: 100%; text-align: center; background-color: #000088; color: white; "|'''Copyright Details'''
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!style="background-color: #000088; color:white;"|License:
|style=" background-color: none;"| This work is in the [[Public Domain]] in the United States because it is a work of the United States Federal Government under the terms of Title 17, Chapter 1, Section 105 of the U.S. Code
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!style=" background-color: #000088; color:white;"|Source:
|style="background-color: none;border-top: 2px solid black"| File available from the {{{1|[[United States Federal Government]] [http://www.history.army.mil/brochures/normandy/nor-pam.htm]}}}.

{{DEFAULTSORT:Overlord, Operation}}
[[Category:World War II]]

Barack Hussein Obama

2008-11-06T16:29:59Z

Darkmind1970:

'''Barack Hussein Obama II''' (born in Honolulu,<ref>[http://www.factcheck.org/UploadedFiles/birth_certificate_5.jpg Large, high-resolution picture of his birth certificate]</ref><ref>[http://www.kitv.com/politics/17860890/detail.html?rss=hon&psp=news KITV Honolulu report]</ref> August 4, 1961), is a [[Democratic Party]] member, junior senator from the state of Illinois, and president-elect of the United States, having won the 2008 Election over Arizona Senator John McCain. <ref>[http://www.democrats.org Democratic Party website]</ref> Obama has served as a freshman [[Democratic]] [[Senator]] from [[Illinois]] since 2004. On August 23 he chose [[Senator Joseph Biden]] as his running mate. On November 4th 2008 Senator Obama was elected as the 44th President of the United States of America. He will take office on January 20, 2009.

====Liberalism and Socialism====
In 2007, Obama was rated the most [[liberal]] Senator by the National Journal, who had rated [[Senator John Kerry]] the most liberal senator during his presidential run as well.<ref>http://nj.nationaljournal.com/voteratings/</ref> Obama pretends he's not a socialist, but his own memoir admits that he chose his "friends carefully .... The more politically active black students. The foreign students. The Chicanos. The Marxist professors and structural feminists."<ref>http://elections.foxnews.com/2008/10/28/obama-affinity-marxists-dates-college-days/</ref> He was previously a member of a socialist political party, and appears to have strong socialist tendencies.<ref>WorldNetDaily.com, ''Newspaper shows Obama belonged to socialist party, Democrat's campaign denied allegations, but new evidence indicates membership'', October 24, 2008, by Aaron Klein [http://www.worldnetdaily.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=78945]</ref>

====Law Enforcement Record====
The October 2008 crimes against Academy Award winner Jennifer Hudson's family highlight Obama's record against law and order, as he voted against making it a crime in Illinois "for convicts on probation or on bail to have contact with a street gang".<ref>[http://thehill.com/leading-the-news/obamas-crime-votes-are-fodder-for-rivals-2007-03-13.html]</ref> The person of interest in the murders of Hudson's mother, brother, and 7-year-old nephew is the estranged husband of Hudson's sister and a convicted felon who had violated his parole conditions. <ref>[http://www.chicagotribune.com/chi-julian-king-autopsy-1029,0,2752431.story]</ref> "More people have been murdered in Chicago this year than in New York - even though New York's population is three times greater. When Hudson's mother, brother and nephew were killed last month, they pushed the city's homicide total for the year to 436 and counting. New York has had 430 homicides. ... 'We've got 75,000 gang members - that's almost six gang members to one police officer.'"<ref>[http://www.nydailynews.com/news/us_world/2008/11/01/2008-11-01_chicago_buried_in_murders.html]</ref>

[[Image:Democrat Obama during the Pledge.jpg|325px|thumb|right|Obama, on the campaign trail, stands with folded hands while [[Bill Richardson]] and [[Hillary Clinton]] honor the flag by placing their hands over their heart during the [[National Anthem]]. [http://rawstory.com/news/2007/Obama_doesnt_put_hand_over_heart_1022.html See Video] ]]

====Relationship with Terrorist [[William Ayers]]====
Obama is the first person having ties to a known terrorist to gain control over America's nuclear weapons.<ref>http://www.clevelandleader.com/node/7127</ref><ref>http://elections.foxnews.com/2008/08/26/obama-associate-bill-ayers-unrepentant-for-acts-of-terror/</ref> Author and blogger Jack Cashill compared the writing style of Bill Ayers' 2001 memoir, ''Fugitive Days'', with Barak Obama's earlier 1995 book, ''Dreams From My Father'', and came to the conclusion that Ayres had ghostwritten Dreams.<ref>www.cashill.com, ''Who Wrote “Dreams From My Father"?'', by Jack Cashill, October 9, 2008, retrieved on 10/16/2008 [http://www.cashill.com/natl_general/who_wrote_dreams_from.htm] Jack Cashill compared the writing style of Bill Ayers' 2001 memoir, ''Fugitive Days'', with Barack Obama's earlier 1995 book, ''Dreams From My Father'', and came to the conclusion that Ayers had ghostwritten ''Dreams''. Cashill states that a computer comparison of Obama's so-called autobiography with that of the terrorist Bill Ayers, supports the theory that Ayers actually wrote parts of Obama's book. "In assessing the signature of sample passages from Dreams," the experienced analyst found "a very strong match to all of the Ayers samples" that he processed. He did not address the possibility that Ayers had plagiarized from Obama's earlier book.</ref> <ref>[http://wnd.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=77815]</ref> Dr. Peter Millican, who was hired to do a computer analysis comparing the two works, called the charges "very implausible". <ref>[http://elections.foxnews.com/2008/11/02/report-professor-paid-g-prove-ayers-wrote-obamas-autobiography/comments/]"Dr. Peter Millican -- a distinguished philosophy professor at Hertford College in Oxford, England -- ... was reportedly paid to use a computer software program to find suspected similarities between Obama's best-selling 2004 autobiography "Dreams from My Father" and Ayers' memoir "Fugitive Days." But Millican called the charges "very implausible" after a preliminary review of the two works."</ref> Ayers admitted that he was "guilty as hell" in planting bombs in the 1970s, and that he has no regrets and felt he "should have done more."<ref>[http://www.clevelandleader.com/node/7127]</ref>

====Abortion====
Catholic Archbishop Charles Chaput of Denver, where Obama received his Democratic Party nomination, recently criticized Obama as the "most committed" [[abortion]]-supporting candidate "since the ''[[Roe v. Wade]]'' abortion decision in 1973.<ref>http://www.catholicnewsagency.com/new.php?n=14088</ref> Obama said "the first thing I'd do as president is sign the Freedom of Choice Act."<ref>[http://christiannewswire.com/news/560716251.html]</ref> That bill "would invalidate virtually all state and federal limitations on abortion, and would make partial-birth abortion legal again."<ref>[http://www.lifenews.com/nat3961.html], http://www.lifenews.com/nat3961.html, Pro-Life Voters Must Work Overtime to Stop Pro-Abortion Barack Obama, June 4, 2008</ref> Indeed, Obama was upset with the decision of the [[United States Supreme Court|Supreme Court]] not to strike down the law passed by the [[United States Congress]] to prohibit partial-birth abortion, believing that partial-birth abortion is guaranteed right of the [[United States Constitution|Constitution]] and that there should be no ability to legislate against it.

====Mind Control====
Doctors from the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons have stated that Obama uses techniques of mind control in his speeches and campaign symbols. For example, one speech declared, "a light will shine down from somewhere, it will light upon you, you will experience an epiphany, and you will say to yourself, 'I have to vote for Barack.'"<ref name="mind control">http://www.aapsonline.org/newsoftheday/0089</ref> The doctors observe that "Obama's logo is noteworthy. It is always there, a small one in the middle of the podium, providing a point of visual fixation ... [that] resembles a crystal ball, a favorite of hypnotists."<ref name="mind control"/>

==Obama would be the first Muslim President==
[[Image:OBAMA MUSULMAN.jpg|thumb|First Muslim President?]]
If elected, Obama would likely become the first [[Muslim]] [[President]], and could use the [[Koran]] to be sworn into office.<ref>Christian Science Monitor, ''At swearing in, congressman [Keith Ellison, D Minnesota, who is a Muslim] wants to carry Koran. Outrage ensues.'', by Jane Lampman, December 07, 2006, retrieved on 10/16/2008 [http://www.csmonitor.com/2006/1207/p01s03-uspo.html]"In Congress, newly elected representatives do not put their left hands on any book. They raise their right hands, and are sworn in together as the speaker of the House administers the oath of office. Some do carry a book, according to House historians, and some choose to photograph a private swearing-in afterward with their hand on the Bible."</ref><ref>Obama hoped to become President when he was sworn in as U.S. Senator in 2004, and did not use a Koran at that time. Subsequently Democratic House member Keith Ellison established the precedent for being sworn in using the Koran, and there is no guarantee that Obama would not do likewise if sworn in as President. [http://www.factcheck.org/elections-2008/sliming_obama.html FactCheck.org, Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania, ''Sliming Obama'', January 10, 2008, retrieved on 10/16/2008]</ref> The evidence that he is a Muslim includes:

*Obama's background and education are [[Muslim]], and fewer than 1% of Muslims convert to Christianity.<ref>http://www.religionnewsblog.com/17736/barack-obama-2</ref><ref>http://www.faithfreedom.org/oped/sina31103.htm. During the third and fourth grades, Obama learned about Islam for two hours each week in religion class, according to the LATimes. [http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/nation/bal-te.obama16mar16,0,1634059,print.story?coll=bal_news_nation_promo Campaign downplays his connection during boyhood in Indonesia, Baltimore Sun, March 16, 2007]</ref>
*Obama's middle name (Hussein) references its namesake Husayn, who was the grandson of [[Muhammad]], which most Christians would not retain.<ref> Oxford Dictionary of First Names, 2nd edition (2007).[http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/277459/al-Husayn-ibn-Ali]. After Obama became politically ambitious, he declared himself to be a [[Christian]], yet he never replaced his [[Muslim]] name "Hussein" with a Christian one as most do when they undergo a religious conversion. For example, when Saul became a Christian, he changed his name to "Paul"; when the famous boxer Cassius Clay converted to [[Islam]], he took the Muslim name of [[Muhammad Ali]]. "It is common for those converting to a new religion to change their name on conversion"[http://www.ukdp.co.uk/pages/religiousconversion.php] or adopt a Christian name at [[baptism]].[http://www.answers.com/topic/christian-name]</ref>
*Obama recently referred to his "Muslim faith."<ref>Obama declared, "John McCain has not talked about my Muslim faith.[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iQqIpdBOg6I]</ref>
*Obama stated that the autobiography of Malcolm X, a Nation of Islam leader who became a Muslim, inspired him in his youth.<ref>For example, Obama writes in his own autobiography, "Only Malcolm X's autobiography seemed to offer something different. His repeated acts of self-creation spoke to me. The blunt poetry of his words, his unadorned insistence on respect, promised a new and uncompromising order, martial in its discipline, forged through sheer force of will. ... [E]ven as I imagine myself following Malcolm's call, one line in the book stayed with me. He spoke of a wish he'd once had, the wish that the white blood that ran through him, there by an act of violence, might somehow be expunged."[http://www.americanthinker.com/2008/04/does_obama_know_america.html]</ref>
*Obama raised nearly $1 million and campaigned for a [[Kenyan]] presidential candidate who had a written agreement with [[Muslim]] leaders promising to convert Kenya to an Islamic state that bans Christianity.<ref> [http://www.worldnetdaily.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=78324] Text of the agreement, as three images: [http://www.worldnetdaily.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=78323]</ref>
*Obama's claims of conversion to Christianity arose after he became politically ambitious, lacking a date of conversion or baptism.<ref>In his book, Obama oddly claims to have been baptized without giving his age or date, and later gave a date that postdates his political ambition (1992).</ref>
*On the campaign trail Obama has been reading "The Post-American World" by Fareed Zakaria,<ref>http://www.canada.com/topics/news/world/story.html?id=fa8cf1bf-2cc8-4d6e-b72d-a07d406e19ff</ref> which is written from a Muslim point-of-view.<ref>http://www.villagevoice.com/2005-08-09/news/the-interpreter/</ref>
*Contrary to [[Christianity]], the Islamic doctrine of [[taqiyya]] encourages adherents to deny they are Muslim if it advances the cause of Islam.
*Obama uses the Muslim Pakistani pronunciation for "Pakistan" rather than the common American one.<ref>Obama repeatedly pronounced "Pakistan" as "Pokiston" in the first presidential debate.</ref>
*Many of Obama's statements about religion conflict with Christianity, leading one group to demonstrate with a 7-part video series, "Why Barack Obama is Not a Christian."<ref>http://www.christianadc.org/pages/page.asp?page_id=23073&articleId=3249</ref>
*Obama was thoroughly exposed to Christianity as an adult in Chicago prior to attending law school, yet no one at law school saw him display any interest in converting. Obama unabashedly explained how he became "churched" in a 2007 speech: "It's around that time [while working as an organizer for the Developing Communities Project (DCP) of the Calumet Community Religious Conference (CCRC) in Chicago] that some pastors I was working with came around and asked if I was a member of a church. 'If you're organizing churches,' they said, 'it might be helpful if you went to a church once in a while.' And I thought, 'I guess that makes sense.'"<ref>[http://www.speroforum.com/site/article.asp?id=15363 Obama, ACORN, and the churches] SperoNews, October 7, 2008</ref>

Obama downplays his [[Islamic]] background by claiming that his [[Kenya|Kenyan]] [[Muslim]] father was a "confirmed [[atheist]]" before Obama was born, but in fact less than 1% of Kenyans are atheists, agnostics or non-religious.<ref>http://www.adherents.com/Na/Na_14.html</ref> There is apparently no evidence of any Christian activities or local church participation by Obama while he was in Massachusetts from 1988 to 1991. Finally, Obama abruptly left his church in Chicago in 2008 when it became politically controversial, without first finding another church to join.

__TOC__ 

==Obama and Elitism==

Asked to explain why working-class [[Democrats]] do not support him while campaigning for the [[Pennsylvania]] primary, Obama replied "it's not surprising, then, they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations."<ref>http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/7344532.stm</ref> In response to outrage when his remarks were unexpectedly publicized, Obama replied, I "didn't say it as well as I should have."<ref>http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/7344532.stm</ref> Although many rural counties went for McCain, Obama carried the state with 54.6% of the vote, compared to 44.3% for John McCain.<ref>[http://www.electionreturns.state.pa.us/ElectionsInformation.aspx?FunctionID=13&ElectionID=28&OfficeID=1]</ref>

To counter the view by many that Obama is an elitist, he began running campaign ads claiming that he "worked his way through college and Harvard Law." This claim was an exaggeration, as Obama only held summer jobs while in college and law school<ref>http://www.factcheck.org/elections-2008/obamas_work_claim.html</ref>, and he would have likely benefited from special scholarships not available to most students.

Obama almost always reads from prepared text on a [[teleprompter]] and rarely allows tough questions.<ref>After one debate against [[Hillary Clinton]] in Philadelphia, the Obama campaign announced that the questions were too difficult and that Obama would not agree to future debates with her.</ref><ref name="teleprompter">The Daily Standard, ''Obama Unplugged Lost without a Teleprompter'', by Dean Barnett, 02/12/2008[http://www.weeklystandard.com/content/public/articles/000/000/014/728ofzey.asp]</ref> Indeed, when unable to read from prepared text he often fails at articulating his positions and is caught tripping over his own feet.<ref>This was first displayed in the Saddleback Forum, and has occurred subsequently also.</ref> His most recent debate performances illustrate that he may have been extensively coached over the course of 2008, although he still repeatedly fumbles at moments where he moves off his memorized remarks.

==Insights==

Obama displayed ignorance about American history when he said, "Throughout our history, America's confronted constantly evolving danger, from the oppression of an empire, to the lawlessness of the frontier, '''from the bomb that fell on Pearl Harbor''', to the threat of nuclear annihilation."<ref>http://www.weeklystandard.com/weblogs/TWSFP/2008/07/obama_ignorance_watch_1.asp</ref>

Obama has described himself as a constitutional law professor at the University of Chicago.<ref>[http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2007/03/30/politics/p132303D74.DTL&type=politics]</ref> He held the position of Lecturer, an adjunct position, from 1992 to 1996.<ref>[http://www.law.uchicago.edu/media/index.html]</ref> He held the position of Senior Lecturer from 1996 until his election to the senate in 2004.<ref>[http://www.law.uchicago.edu/media/index.html]</ref> Dan Ronayne, a spokesman for the Republican National Committee, has pointed that Obama was only a senior lecturer and not a full professor. <ref>[http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2007/03/30/politics/p132303D74.DTL&type=politics]</ref>The University states that Senior Lecturers are regarded as professors, although not full-time or tenure track.<ref>[http://www.law.uchicago.edu/media/index.html]</ref>

In his 1995 memoir, ''Dreams from My Father'', Obama admitted using illegal drugs, including cocaine and marijuana, which he referred to as "blow" and "pot" respectively, in his high school years and into his college years, before claiming to choose a different path in life.<ref>http://www.nbc5.com/politics/3444371/detail.html</ref><ref>http://www.boston.com/news/nation/articles/2008/02/26/obamas_senate_foreign_relations_work/</ref>

Obama wore an American flag lapel pin after [[9/11]], but later stopped wearing it without adequate explanation.<ref>http://www.swamppolitics.com/news/politics/blog/2007/10/when_did_obama_stop_wearing_a.html</ref> Presumably it would have hurt him with anti-military campaign donors.<ref>In 2007, at critical moments in his campaign for the nomination, Obama had difficulties securing the support of anti-war activists. [http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2007/04/04/politics/main2645861.shtml]</ref> Recently, he has begun wearing one again for reasons that are likely political pandering.

In his memoirs, Obama claimed a ''[[Life]]'' magazine article about a man who had become ill after trying to lighten his skin color by chemical means had a major impact on him. In fact, ''Life'' never published any such article.<ref>http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/03/26/AR2007032601583.html</ref><ref>"Then there's the copy of Life magazine that Obama presents as his racial awakening at age 9. In it, he wrote, was an article and two accompanying photographs of an African-American man physically and mentally scarred by his efforts to lighten his skin. In fact, the Life article and the photographs don't exist, say the magazine's own historians." [http://newsbusters.org/node/11641]</ref>

Obama said that "[t]here was something stirring across the country because of what happened in Selma, [[Alabama]], because some folks are willing to march across a bridge. So they got together and Barack Obama Jr. was born." In fact, Obama was born in 1961 and the Selma march took place in 1965.<ref>http://michellemalkin.com/2008/05/21/barack-obama-gaffe-machine/</ref>

Obama states that he has consistently opposed the [[Iraq War]] since 2002, a claim and position that former President [[Bill Clinton]] criticized as "the biggest fairy tale I've ever seen."<ref>http://www.reuters.com/article/politicsNews/idUSN1131516320080111</ref> In his famous 2002 speech<ref>http://www.barackobama.com/2002/10/02/remarks_of_illinois_state_sen.php</ref> at an anti-war rally, Obama said that he was against "dumb wars" and expressed some reservations about the Iraq War because he disagrees with the ideological agendas of the Bush administration, but he did not explicitly oppose the war. In his 2004 Democrat Convention speech, Obama said that he did not know how he would have voted on the Iraq War.

Obama's campaign "is proud to be actively participating in over 60 local and state wide [[homosexual]] Pride events over the summer."<ref>http://my.barackobama.com/page/community/post/jcitron/gG5VLs</ref>

Obama claimed to have visited 57 states while campaigning for president of the United States.<ref> [http://www.mediaresearch.org/BozellColumns/newscolumn/2008/col20080528.asp Barack Potatoe Obama?]</ref> <ref>http://www.stoptheaclu.com/archives/2008/05/12/obamas-freudian-slip-there-are-57-islamic-states/</ref>

==Obama and Socialism==

Obama has espoused the socialist idea of "spreading the wealth" in other words raising the tax rates on business and the wealthy to a burdensome level in order to redistribute their income to low income individuals, many of whom don't currently pay taxes. From which John McCain replied "He's running for redistributor in chief, I'm running for commander in chief." <ref>[http://elections.foxnews.com/2008/10/31/mccain-hungry-upset-obama-eyes-landslide/ McCain Attacks Obama's Faith in Americans] Fox News, 10-31-2008</ref> The slogan "From each according to their ability to each according to their need" is an idea originally proposed by [[Karl Marx]]. In addition, his health care plan forces employers to purchase health care or pay a fine and will force many into a poorly run single payer system. The socialization of health care will force taxpayers to pay for healthcare for those who refuse to purchase it themselves. He favors closer ties with Cuba, China, and Venezuela, all abusive communist regimes.

==Charitable Giving==

In the years 2000 through 2004, before becoming a United States Senator and being in the public spotlight, Obama gave 1% of his earnings to charity even though he made $250,000 per year. Since becoming a national figure, that amount has jumped to 6%.<ref>http://patterico.com/2008/10/31/obama-and-bidens-charitable-giving-they-dont-want-to-spread-their-own-wealth-around/</ref>

==Aunt is in the United States Illegally==

At the end of October 2008 it came to light that Obama's aunt is in the United States illegally and has been since 2004 when her request for asylum was turned down. She is living in public housing in Boston paid for by the government. It does bring up why it took so long for this to surface and how Obama would handle the issue of illegal immigration as President if his own extended family flaunts the law and, of course, what did Obama himself know?<ref>[http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/27481680 Obama's Aunt Living in US Illegally]</ref> The Obama campaign has since stated that they had no knowledge of this situation and that they would return the money that she gave to his campaign. It is illegal to accept money from people who are not United States citizens.<ref>http://www.cnn.com/2008/POLITICS/11/01/obama.aunt/index.html</ref>

==Statements==
Obama has been noted by several independent sources as misquoting historical events and statements by famous persons. A notable example came after Obama's win in the [[North Carolina]] democratic primary. Obama was quoted as saying, "I trust the American people to understand that it is not weakness, but wisdom to talk not just to our friends, but to our enemies as Roosevelt did, and Kennedy did, and Truman did." (Franklin Delano) Roosevelt spoke with none of the [[Axis]] or [[Japanese]] leaders and the the only communication that was sent to them was unconditional surrender. (President) [[Harry Truman]] took over for FDR and continued his unconditional surrender philosophy as well as ending [[World War II]] with an atomic bomb.<ref>http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2008/05/obama_needs_to_study_history_b.html</ref>

==Early life and education==
Barack Hussein Obama II is said to have been born in [[Honolulu]], [[Hawaii]] to Barack Sr. and Ann Dunham in 1961, but there is some evidence that he may have actually been born in Kenya. In 1967, he moved with his mother and new stepfather to Jakarta, [[Indonesia]]. He attended a [[Catholic]] elementary school for two years, followed by an Indonesian public school for two years. Media scrutiny in the light of Obama's campaign for President revealed that the Indonesia public school was not a madrassa, teaching Islam. His days off of school in observance of Islamic holidays were spent praying in a Mosque with his stepfather. <ref>[http://www.newsmax.com/insidecover/pipes_obama_muslim/2008/10/09/138898.html Obama 'Lying' About Muslim Past, Expert Says] NewsMax, October 9, 2008</ref> After Indonesia, he returned to the United States with his mother where he attended the Punahou School, the leading private preparatory school in [[Hawaii]], until he graduated in 1979.

For college, Obama initially attended Occidental College in Los Angeles, [[California]], before transferring to [[Columbia University]] in New York, [[New York]] and graduating without honors with a Bachelor of Arts degree, majoring in political science. Obama refuses to describe his academic performance at Columbia despite commenting about New York during this period and despite disclosures of the academic record for all other major-party presidential candidates since at least 2000.<ref>http://www.nysun.com/new-york/obamas-years-at-columbia-are-a-mystery/85015/</ref>

After working as a community organizer in New York City and Chicago, Illinois, Obama enrolled at [[Harvard]] Law School. He became a member of the ''Harvard Law Review'', which uses racial quotas, in 1989. He was then elected by popular vote as its first African American president in 1990, a story that was immediately promoted in the [[New York Times]].<ref>http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9C0CE2DC1631F935A35751C0A966958260&scp=3&sq=Obama%201990&st=cse</ref> He graduated ''magna cum laude'' with his J.D. in 1991, but did not serve in a clerkship. Federal clerkships are the typical post-graduate position for top law students.

Obama has described himself as a constitutional law professor at the University of Chicago.<ref>[http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2007/03/30/politics/p132303D74.DTL&type=politics]</ref> He held the position of Lecturer, an adjunct position, from 1992 to 1996.<ref>[http://www.law.uchicago.edu/media/index.html]</ref> He held the position of Senior Lecturer from 1996 until his election to the senate in 2004.<ref>[http://www.law.uchicago.edu/media/index.html]</ref> Dan Ronayne, a spokesman for the Republican National Committee, has pointed that Obama was only a senior lecturer and not a full professor. <ref>[http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2007/03/30/politics/p132303D74.DTL&type=politics]</ref>The University states that Senior Lecturers are regarded as professors, although not full-time or tenure track.<ref>[http://www.law.uchicago.edu/media/index.html]</ref>

==Legal career==
Following law school, Obama continued his work as a community organizer in Chicago as the director of Illinois Project Vote. In 1993 he was hired as an associate at the Chicago law firm Miner, Barnhill & Galland, P.C., and began lecturing in Constitutional Law at the University of Chicago Law School. He remains on the faculty on leave of absence through today. During this time he wrote his first book, ''Dreams from My Father'', detailing his background, his youth, and his education. ''Dreams'' was published in 1995.

==Senate career==
Obama was elected to the Illinois State Senate for the first time in 1996 and served there for the next eight years. Following a failed campaign for the House of Representatives, Obama ran for the open Senate seat from Illinois in 2004. Obama delivered the keynote address at the 2004 Democratic National Convention. He won a seat in the [[U.S. Senate]] after [[liberals]] obtained the release of confidential and personally embarrassing divorce records of his opponent, Jack Ryan, forcing him to resign from the race and be replaced by the out-of-state candidate [[Alan Keyes]].

A March 16th, 2005 AP article puts Senator Obama on record to ban oil drilling in the Alaska frontier known as ANWR <ref>http://www.commondreams.org/headlines05/0316-13.htm</ref>

His 2007 voting record in the U.S. [[Senate]] makes him as its most [[liberal]] member. Among fellow Senate Democrats, he was further left than liberals like [[Ted Kennedy]], [[John Kerry]], [[Dianne Feinstein]], [[Charles Schumer]], [[Russ Feingold]], [[Carl Levin]], [[Joseph Biden]] and [[Harry Reid]].<ref>[http://nationaljournal.com/voteratings/sen/lib_cons.htm?o1=lib_composite&o2=desc]</ref> He has grown steadily more liberal since arriving at the Senate: the same analysis assessed him as 10th most liberal in 2006<ref>[http://www.nationaljournal.com/members/news/2007/voteratings/sen/lib_cons.htm?o1=lib_composite&o2=desc]</ref> and 16th most liberal in 2005.<ref>[http://www.nationaljournal.com/members/news/2007/voteratings/sen/lib_cons.htm?o1=lib_composite&o2=desc]</ref>

In late 2006, Obama's second book, ''The Audacity of Hope'', was published. Its title was supplied by the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr., a minister who has stated that "racism is how this country was founded and how this country was run .... We believe in white supremacy and black inferiority and believe it more than we believe in God."<ref>http://blog.washingtonpost.com/the-trail/2008/03/14/obama_condemns_pastors_remarks.html</ref> The book contains more of Senator Obama's personal story including the roles of both family and politics. ''Audacity'' spent 30 weeks on the ''New York Times'' Nonfiction Best Sellers list.<ref>[http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/27/books/bestseller/0527besthardnonfiction.html?_r=1&oref=slogin New York Times Best Sellers Non Fiction]</ref>

Senator Obama is the chairman of an important subcommittee that has oversight of our efforts in Afghanistan. He has not held a single hearing on Afghanistan even though American forces are risking their lives in a theatre of war. Since joining Foreign Relations, Obama has missed three meetings on a "new strategy" in [[Afghanistan]], a country he only visited in 2008.<ref>[http://thehill.com/leading-the-news/obama-absent-at-afghanistan-hearings-2008-03-01.html</ref> Barack Obama clinched his party's nomination for President after 16 straight months of campaigning.

In June 2008, Obama voted with the Democratic party to kill the sunset provision of the [[Bush]] tax cuts. By letting these tax cuts expire, single mothers with two kids will pay an additional $1,800 annually. Married couples with incomes of $50,000 will pay an additional $2,180 annually. Elderly couples will pay an additional $2,000 annually and a family of four will pay 191% more per year in taxes. Barack Obama often claims to be for taxing the rich their fair share. By voting to eliminate the Bush tax cuts, Obama is taxing most middle class and blue collar families.

Obama and the Democratic-led Congress has voted for the upgraded GI Bill despite the opposition from the President, the Secretary of Defense, the Pentagon, the generals in combat zones and the GOP Presidential nominee. It was crafted to increase veteran benefits. Yet, the strain on our military is great.<ref>[http://marcambinder.theatlantic.com/archives/2008/05/mccain_to_obama_dont_demagogue.php] http://marcambinder.theatlantic.com/archives/2008/05/mccain_to_obama_dont_demagogue.php , McCain To Obama: Don't Demagogue The GI Bill, May 22, 2008</ref> The bill would cost $2.8 to $4 billion per month. Some argue that this bill depletes the US's volunteer military personnel by enticing them to leave service rather than be re-deployed.

As senator, Obama has requested nearly $936 million in earmarks which averages to $500,000. per day over four years, <ref>[http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122108935141721343.html?mod=googlenews_wsj Obama Can't Win Against Palin] Wall Street Journal, September 11, 2008</ref> for which the Council for Citizens Against Government Waste has given him a rating of 10% in 2007 (18% lifetime).<ref>[http://councilfor.cagw.org/site/DocServer/2007_Senate_Ratings_Final.pdf?docID=3242 2007 Senate Scorecard]</ref> A score of 100% represents voting against all pork, and 0% represents voting ''for'' all pork. Democrats averaged 5% in 2007, whereas Republicans averaged 60%. <ref>[http://councilfor.cagw.org/site/News2?abbr=CCAGW_&page=NewsArticle&id=11590 CCAGW Releases ''2007 Congressional Ratings'']</ref>

According to a Fox News report on October 5th, Obama has taken more than $126,000. in campaign contribution from [[Fannie Mae]] in a little over three years. This ranks him second, only Chris Dodd has received more campaign contribution dollars from Fannie Mae.

=== Bills co-sponsored ===
Obama's principal legislation was S. 2433, which was an attempt to force the U.S. to increase its foreign aid by hundreds of billions of dollars under the guise of reducing global poverty, which was subsequently blocked by [[conservatives]].<ref>http://www.cnsnews.com/ViewPolitics.asp?Page=/Politics/archive/200802/POL20080225a.html</ref>

Obama did support and co-sponsor a bill championed by [[Tom Coburn]] and known as the Coburn-Obama Government Transparency Act of 2006, which was signed into law by President [[George W. Bush]] on Sept. 9, 2006. This law created a website that will list the federal government's grants and contracts.<ref> http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2006/09/20060926.html</ref>

Between Jan 13, 2007 and March 13, 2008, Sen. Obama has sponsored 120 mostly [[liberal]] resolutions and bills in the Senate.<ref>http://thomas.loc.gov/</ref> His supporters cite the following less liberal examples, but this list is not representative:{{fact}}

*S.117 : A bill to amend titles 10 and 38, United States Code, to improve benefits and services for members of the Armed Forces, veterans of the Global War on Terrorism, and other veterans, to require reports on the effects of the Global War on Terrorism, and for other purposes.

*S.133 : A bill to promote the national security and stability of the economy of the United States by reducing the dependence of the United States on oil through the use of alternative fuels and new technology, and for other purposes.

*S.453 : A bill to prohibit deceptive practices in Federal elections.

*S.713 : A bill to ensure dignity in care for members of the Armed Forces recovering from injuries.

=== Accomplishments while serving on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee ===

In February 2008, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee approved Obama's proposal on a new strategy to reduce poverty throughout the world.

Obama worked with Sen. Lugar writing legislation aimed at improving conventional and nuclear non-proliferation efforts. This legislation was signed by [[George W. Bush|President Bush]] in January 2008.

In June 2007 the Senate passed his resolution condemning violence by the [[Zimbabwe]] government. It also passed legislation co-sponsored by Obama that financed a Special Court for Sierra Leone to prosecute former [[Liberia | Liberian]] President [[Charles Taylor]]. <ref> http://www.boston.com/news/nation/articles/2008/02/26/obamas_senate_foreign_relations_work/ </ref>

Barack Obama continued to collect money for a 2010 Senate re-election campaign as late as June 2008, and has filed reports recently indicating that money is still pouring into this fund. This is especially notable because it is an efficient way of sidetracking donations from his Presidential race. The website<obamasenate2010.gov> is now defunct.

==Presidential campaign==
[[Image:obama.jpg|thumb|right|Senator Barack Obama]]
Senator Obama began his candidacy for President of the United States on February 10, 2007, in Springfield, Illinois. His announcement speech largely avoided specific campaign issues and focused on his general political message of hope for the future. It also attempted to strongly invoke the memory of Abraham Lincoln and his "House Divided" speech.<ref>[http://www.cnn.com/2007/POLITICS/02/10/obama.president/index.html "Obama declares he's running for president"] 11 February 2007, www.CNN.com </ref>

Obama's campaign has been financed largely by [[leftist]] donors opposed to the war and to the [[American]] military in general. Obama has encouraged this by refusing to wear the customary flag on his lapel during appearances (asserting that he would prefer his patriotism to be represented through his actions rather than an arbitrary symbol) and by other less-than-patriotic gestures and symbols, such as declining to put his hand over his heart during a patriotic recitation. In an appearance on May 16 where he addressed President Bush's statements that some politicians would prefer appeasing terrorists through negotiations, Senator Obama once again wore the flag pin as he did following 9-11.

By early April 2007, his campaign generated over $25 million from over 100,000 contributors. $23.5 million of that money will be available for the Democratic Primary.<ref>[http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/05/us/politics/05obama.html Obama Shows His Strength in a Fund-Raising Feat on Par With Clinton], 4 April 2007, Jeff Zeleny and Patrick Healy,'' The New York Times''</ref> After the first Democratic presidential debate in Columbia, South Carolina, Obama's image as an "articulate" spokesman came into question after his failure to state right away that he would retaliate in case of further terrorist strikes against the United States.<ref>[http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/04/27/AR2007042702162.html?hpid=moreheadlines Clinton Campaign Tries to Keep Heat on Obama Over Debate Response], Dan Balz, ''Washington Post'' April 28, 2007.</ref><ref>Chicago Sun-Times,
[http://www.suntimes.com/news/sweet/362269,CST-NWS-sweet29.article 'I was a little nervous' at debate'], Lynn Sweet,
April 29, 2007,</ref>

During a fund raising event in Virginia in May 2007 Obama told donors,
{{Cquote|This week there was a tragedy in Kansas. Ten thousand people died. An entire town destroyed.<ref>[http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,271357,00.html Transcript: 'Special Report with Brit Hume,' May 9, 2007], retrieved from ''FOX News'', 06/13/07.</ref>}}

In reality, the tornado which touched down in Kansas cost the lives of nine people in the town of Greensburg, and twelve overall in Kansas.

Speaking regarding his knowledge of the Afghanistan conflict, Obama points the finger at U.S. troops and American policy "...just airraiding villages and killing civilians, which is causing enormous problems there." <ref>[http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,293365,00.html Barack Obama Caught on Tape Accusing U.S. Troops of 'Killing Civilians'] Fox News, August 15, 2007</ref> [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wrW4fOGIMVY See Video]

By August it appeared Obama was running to be left off the ticket completely rather than the much ballyhooed Hillary/Obama ticket the [[mainstream media]] was pushing. After a series of ill-advised foreign policy statements, Obama was openly criticized as a lightweight even by liberals, in much the same vein as [[John Edwards]] and [[Dan Quayle]] had been depicted. First, Obama said he would have face-to-face meetings with two of Florida's most feared enemies, [[Fidel Castro]] and [[Hugo Chavez]]. Florida is a key state to any presidential ambitions. Then Obama claimed that he would be willing to invade the sovereign territory of a U.S. ally without prior consultation. Finally, Obama broke the cardinal rule of declaring he would not use nuclear weapons, removing the element of bluff U.S. Presidents had vitally depended upon throughout the [[Cold War]] era. The incidents all added up to a picture of a candidate ill-prepared and ill-advised, lacking in a basic understanding of the office of the presidency, and failing to surround himself with appointees able to make up for his deficiencies. However, Obama won the Iowa Democratic caucuses, pushing [[Hillary Clinton]] into third place, and went on to become the unofficial Democratic nominee.

At a campaign event in Elkhart, Indiana, a seven-year-old girl asked Barack Obama why he wants to be President. He replies,
'''"America is …, uh, is no longer, uh … what it could be, what it once was. And I say to myself, I don’t want that future for my children."''' <ref>[http://newsbusters.org/blogs/tom-blumer/2008/08/09/mostly-mia-obamas-downer-america-delivered-7-year-old Media Mostly MIA on Obama's 'America No Longer What It Once Was' Downer Delivered to 7 Year-Old] Newsbusters.org, August 9, 2008</ref>

Obama became the presumptive Democratic nominee on June 3rd after receiving a majority of pledged delegates and superdelegates. His only remaining primary opponent, [[Hillary Clinton]], conceded the race on June 7th. On August 23, Joe Biden was announced as Obama's vice-presidential nominee. Obama became the official Democratic nominee on August 27 at the Democratic National Convention, when Hillary Clinton's motion to end the roll call vote of the states and select Obama by acclamation was passed.

On June 5th, Obama spoke at Briston, Virginia- Healthcare Town Hall forum regarding Political Action Committees and his campaign. "Well, we’re here today because we know that if we’re going to make real progress, this time must be different. Throughout my career, in Illinois and the United States senate, I’ve worked to reduce the power of the special interests by leading the fight for ethics reform. I’ve sent a strong signal in this campaign by refusing the contributions of registered federal lobbyists and PACs. And today, I’m announcing that going forward, the Democratic National Committee will uphold the same standard and won’t take another dime from Washington lobbyists or special interest PACs. They do not fund my campaign. They will not fund our party. And they will not drown out the voices of the American people when I’m President of the United States."

On June 6th, an [[AP]] article <ref>[http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/D/DEMOCRATS_MONEY?SITE=KING&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT Transcript: 'Democratic Party returns lobbyist, PAC money ,' June 6, 2008]</ref> presented the rules for lobbyist donations to the DNC and for the Presidential nominee. Obama does accept money from lobbyists who do not do business with the federal government and he also accepts money from spouses and family members of lobbyists. And the DNC ban is also not retroactive, which means the DNC will keep lobbyist and PAC contributions it received earlier in the election cycle. Retroactive period being the date Barack Obama started his campaign, February 10, 2007. The DNC possibly the day after the November 2006 Congressional elections until June 5th, 2008. In addition, Barack Obama's ban does not apply to the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee nor to the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee. Unlike [[John McCain]], Barack Obama has not disclosed the lobbyists working in his campaign.

Senator Obama visited U.S. troops in Iraq in 2006<ref>[http://abclocal.go.com/wls/story?section=news/local&id=3794382 Obama visits troops in Iraq]</ref> and in Afghanistan and Kuwait in 2008<ref>[http://abclocal.go.com/wls/story?section=news/local&id=3794382 Obama visits troops and officials in Afghanistan and Kuwait]</ref>

Obama's tax plan calls for increasing taxes on the wealthiest 1% of Americans, while cutting taxes for the middle class. According to the non-partisan [[Tax Policy Center]], most Americans would pay less taxes than under Senator McCain's plan.<ref>[http://www.taxpolicycenter.org/publications/url.cfm?ID=411749 An Updated Analysis of the 2008 Presidential Candidates' Tax Plans: Updated September 12, 2008]</ref> According to another non-partisan group, Americans for Tax Reform, tax-payers would clearly be burdened by an Obama presidency.<ref>[http://www.atr.org/content/html/2008/june/0616-obama_mccaintaxes.html McCain vs. Obama on Taxes] Americans For Tax Reform, June 2008</ref>

===Campaign financing===
Obama is the first presidential candidate to reject public financing. He broke his promise to accept it in the hope that his powerful fund-raising machine would generate far more money than the $84.1 million McCain is getting in public funding. Indeed, on August 14th, the Obama campaign announced it had received donations from 2 million individuals, setting new records. Obama raised $272 million for the primaries and expects to raise $300 million for the general election. However the Republican National Committee has been raising much more than the Democratic National Committee and each candidate had about $100 million in cash on September 1. Each expects to spend about $300 million by November. However, Obama is obliged to devote much of his time to fund raising among supporters rather than campaigning among undecided voters.<ref> see [http://blog.newsweek.com/blogs/stumper/archive/2008/09/09/was-obama-right-to-opt-out-of-public-financing.aspx Andrew Romano, "Was Obama Right to Opt Out of Public Financing?," ''Newsweek'' (Sept. 9, 2008) online]</ref> Among his backers is homosexual pornography baron [[Terrence Bean]].

===Secrecy===

The Democratic party feels it necessary to keep all questions about Obama at a safe distance. It is an unprecedented move to keep secrets about a Presidential candidate. The following questions remain sealed from the public. <ref>[http://obamawtf.blogspot.com/2008/08/who-sent-obama-why-has-he-refused-to.html Who sent Obama? Why has he refused to release these basic documents?] ObamaWTF.blogspot.com</ref>

# Certified Copy of original Birth certificate(see certificate controversy below)
# Columbia College records
# Columbia Thesis paper
# Campaign donor analysis requested by 7 major watchdog groups
# [[Harvard]] College records
# Illinois State Senate records
# [[Illinois]] State Senate schedule
# [[Law]] practice client list and billing records/summary
# Locations and names of all half-siblings and step-mothers
# Medical records (only the one page summary released so far)
# Occidental College records
# Parent's [[Marriage]] Certificate
# Record of baptism
# Selective Service Registration
# Trips schedules for trips outside of the United States before 2007
# Scholarly articles
# Access to his Grandmother (Obama's Grandmother has since passed away from cancer [http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5g3m4YaeYwDHXS6hHdZJi8pm6cZdAD947RJKO0])
# List of all campaign workers that are lobbyists

Obama keeps donations secret by exploiting a loophole that allows campaigns to refuse to divulge donations under $200.00. This is useful to the candidate because many of his contributions are from dubious foreign or illegal sources. It is described as the "largest pool of unidentified money that has ever flooded into the U.S. election system, before or after the McCain-Feingold campaign finance reforms of 2002." <ref>http://www.newsmax.com/timmerman/Obama_fundraising_illegal/2008/09/29/135718.html</ref>

===Tone===

Many observers have criticized Obama's campaign for its incivility. For instance, John McCain's wife Cindy noted that Obama is running "the dirtiest campaign in American history."

Obama's smears usually fall into two categories: race-baiting and distortions. On October 10, 2008, Obama surrogate Rep. John Lewis (D-GA) typified the campaign by comparing Sen. McCain to racial segregationists and Klansmen. "Sen. McCain and Gov. Palin are sowing the seeds of hatred and division," Lewis exclaimed before comparing Sen. McCain to segregationist Democrat George Wallace, further noting that he, "...never fired a gun, but he created the climate and the conditions that encouraged [the attacks in which] four little girls were killed on Sunday morning when a church was bombed in Birmingham, Alabama." <ref>http://edition.cnn.com/2008/POLITICS/10/11/mccain.lewis/index.html?eref=rss_politics</ref> This is particularly harsh to Sen. McCain because he fondly admires Lewis. <ref>http://www.rickwarrennews.com/transcript/civil_forum_transcript-04.txt</ref>

As for the distortions and personal attacks, Obama mocks Sen. McCain's for his age and Gov. Palin for being a woman and outsider. For instance, Obama responded with a subtle reference to Alzheimer's disease when Sen. McCain criticized his foreign policy in May 2008, alleging that Sen. McCain "lost his bearings" <ref>http://www.politico.com/blogs/bensmith/0508/Obama_McCain_offensive_losing_his_bearings.html</ref>. Senior Adviser Mark Salter noted, "He used the words 'losing his bearings' intentionally, a not particularly clever way of raising John McCain's age as an issue. This is typical of the Obama style of campaigning." <ref>http://marcambinder.theatlantic.com/archives/2008/05/salter_obama_attacked_mccains.php</ref>. In reference to Gov. Palin, Obama was caught for his quiet hiring of Winner & Associates to disseminate a sexist smear video against her. <ref>http://mypetjawa.mu.nu/archives/194057.php</ref> Some argue this is a FEC violation because it lacked obligatory label denoting it was sponsored by the Obama Campaign. <ref>http://eclipseweb.blogspot.com/2008/09/vicious-anti-sarah-palin-smear-campaign.html</ref> One of the biggest distortions by Obama is that 95% of all taxpayers will get a tax cut. <ref>[http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122385651698727257.html?mod=googlenews_wsj Obama's 95% Illusion] Wall Steet Journal, October 13, 2008</ref> Without the distortion, Obama is proposing income re-distribution because those families that pay no taxes, one-third, will get money from the wealthy top 5%.

Another feature of the Obama campaign is the unruly audience. CNN reported in October of 2008 <ref>http://www.findinternettv.com/Video,item,3565842635.aspx</ref>, that people are calling John McCain a terrorist at these events. According to Sen. McCain, "I've heard the [label terrorist], unfortunately, at Senator Obama's rallies being said about me. There's always a fringe element." Other eyewitness reports are harsher <ref>http://theinvigilator.blogspot.com/2008/10/on-front-of-disgust.html</ref>.

== Positions and Qualifications ==
Obama is [[pro-abortion]]. The leading abortion providers and PAC supporters have wholeheartedly endorsed Barack Obama. The National Abortion Rights Action League [[NARAL]] has given Barack a 100% rating for his efforts in Congress 2005, 2006 and 2007 <ref>http://www.prochoiceamerica.org/elections/statements/obama.html</ref>. EMILY's List, a political action committee that funds female candidates who support abortion rights backs Barack Obama<ref> [http://www.boston.com/news/politics/politicalintelligence/2008/06/emilys_list_bac.html],EMILY's List backs Obama, June 6,2008</ref> The nation's largest abortion business, Planned Parenthood has begun the process necessary to endorse pro-abortion presidential candidate Barack Obama. <ref>[http://www.lifenews.com/nat3971.html], http://www.lifenews.com/nat3971.html, Planned Parenthood Begins Process to Endorse Pro-Abortion Barack Obama, June 10,2008</ref>The board of directors of the pro-abortion group's political operation met on Friday June 6, 2008 and unanimously voted to recommend an endorsement for Obama. Obama has steadfastly advocated support for partial birth abortion as an Illinois legislator. Barack's wife, Michelle Obama, wrote a fundraising letter<ref>[http://www.prolifeblogs.com/articles/archives/2006/10/post_5.php], http://www.prolifeblogs.com/articles/archives/2006/10/post_5.php, February 17,2004</ref> in support of partial birth abortion and against the proposed ban. Barack voted against the Born Alive Infant Protection Act to give a child who survived an abortion procedure life support healthcare. Obama wanted the life terminated even if he or she survived outside the mother's womb.<ref>[http://www.citizenlink.org/content/A000007034.cfm], http://www.citizenlink.org/content/A000007034.cfm, Obama Blocked Born Alive Infant Protection Act</ref> With Obama no longer in the state Senate, the Born Alive legislation passed in 2005.

In the context of sex, he quipped about his daughters, <ref>http://michellemalkin.com/2008/03/30/sunday-meditation-obama-and-the-punishment-of-unborn-life/</ref>{{QuoteBox|"If they make a mistake, I don't want them punished with a baby."}} Obama makes it clear if his daughters had an unplanned pregnancy, he would support terminating the life of his grandchild and it is undeniable that Michelle Obama agrees with that decision.
[[Image:Features ayers1.jpg|175px|thumb|right|[[Weather Underground]] co-founder Bill Ayers<ref>http://foia.fbi.gov/weather/weath1a.pdf</ref> stomps on the American flag in this 2001 pose for Chicago Magazine.]]

Obama, having been asked about his associations with [[William Ayers]], an unrepentant [[terrorist]],<ref>[http://www.chicagomag.com/Chicago-Magazine/August-2001/No-Regrets/]</ref> he explained that the views of his associates are not necessarily his own. Ayers and his wife, [[Bernardine Dohrn]], hosted a fundraiser for Obama in their home in 1995 at the start of Obama's political career. Obama compares his friendship with Ayers whose actions led to the loss of a life to his friendship with pro-life doctor and representative Tom Coburn<ref>[http://www.lifenews.com/nat3894.html]http://www.lifenews.com/nat3894.html, LifeNews.com, April 25,2008</ref>
Obama explained that his friendship with Ayers, shouldn't be construed as implying he endorsed the terrorist-like tactics Ayers used to drive home his political point. Barack Obama brought up the pro-life colleague to make the dubious comparison that he's friends with other people who take "extreme" positions or would use terrorist tactics.
"The fact is, is that I'm also friendly with Tom Coburn, one of the most conservative Republicans in the United States Senate, who during his campaign once said that it might be appropriate to apply the death penalty to those who carried out abortions"

Obama has no military or executive experience and little foreign policy experience.<ref>"Fresh doubts over Barack Obama's foreign policy credentials were expressed on both sides of the Atlantic last night, after it emerged that he had made only one brief official visit to London – and none elsewhere in Western Europe or Latin America. ... Mr. Obama had failed to convene a single policy meeting of the Senate European subcommittee, of which he is chairman."[http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/us_and_americas/article3080794.ece]</ref> Yet he is the favorite of the leftist attack site "MoveOn.org" for the [[Democratic]] nomination for [[President of the United States]] in the [[2008 Presidential Election|2008 election]],<ref>MoveOn.org reportedly favored Obama by 70-30% over Clinton. [http://www.swamppolitics.com/news/politics/blog/2008/02/moveonorg_obama.html]</ref> campaigning to the left of [[Hillary Clinton]].<ref>For example, Obama promised not to use nuclear weapons against terrorists, a promise Hillary Clinton refused to make. [http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/08/02/AR2007080202288.html]</ref>

He has no clear personal achievement that cannot be explained as the likely result of [[affirmative action]]. Some examples border on the absurd: Obama has no background in [[physics]], yet it is claimed that "Obama analyzed and integrated [[Albert Einstein|Einstein]]'s [[theory of relativity]], the [[Heisenberg uncertainty principle]], as well as the concept of curved space as an alternative to [[gravity]], for a Law Review article that Tribe, for whom Obama worked as a research assistant, wrote titled, 'The Curvature of Constitutional Space'." <ref>http://cbs2chicago.com/politics/barack.obama.harvard.2.334825.html</ref> Obama's "research" for Constitutional Law Professor Tribe on this article also raises issues about preferences, as Obama had not yet even completed any law school courses<ref>Obama did not start his second year of law school until September 1989, the earliest he could have taken constitutional law, yet this article must have been written, submitted and accepted prior to that time to be published in the November 1989 issue of the Law Review.</ref> on the [[Constitution]].<ref>The liberal Professor Tribe saw the best law students for several decades, yet insisted that Obama was the "best student I ever had" and the "most exciting research assistant." [http://www.cmonitor.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20071114/NEWS01/711140429/1217/NEWS98]</ref>

Throughout his career, Obama repeatedly ducked controversial stands in a transparent attempt to make it easier to be elected to higher office. In example, as a state senator in [[Illinois]], he voted "present" rather than "aye" or "nay" nearly an astounding 130 times.<ref>http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/20/us/politics/20obama.html</ref> During that same period, he was planning to run for the [[House of Representatives]], which was unsuccessful, and then for [[U.S. Senate]], which was successful after his opponent Jack Ryan, a millionaire school teacher, was smeared with a court-ordered disclosure of confidential divorce records that both he and his ex-wife wanted to remain sealed. A newspaper that favored Obama took the unusual step of suing to force the confidential divorce information to become public, and a California judge opened the records at a pivotal time in the campaign.<ref>http://www.nbc5.com/politics/2898641/detail.html</ref><ref>http://www.nbc5.com/news/3289561/detail.html</ref><ref>http://www.nbc5.com/politics/3444371/detail.html</ref>

Barack Obama is often praised for his speeches, except when he is not able to read them from a [[teleprompter]]. "Shorn of his Teleprompter, we saw a different Obama. His delivery was halting and unsure. ... The prepared text for his remarks, as released on his website, sounded a lot like a typical Obama speech. ... [But with] no Teleprompter signaling the prepared text, Obama failed to deliver the speech in his characteristically flawless fashion."<ref name="teleprompter" /> The [[New York Times]] noted that "Mr. Obama excels at inspirational speeches read from a teleprompter before television cameras, critics have noted, but many of his other speeches on the campaign trail have failed to electrify."<ref>http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/20/fashion/20speechwriter.html?_r=2&ex=1358485200&en=bb179297e5f61acb&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss&oref=slogin&oref=slogin</ref> When Obama ridiculed [[Hillary Clinton]] for being like [[Annie Oakley]], it is apparent that he was not writing his own speeches.<ref>"Some Obama adviser probably earned his or her dollars for that cut," the USA Today wrote. [http://www.usatoday.com/news/opinion/columnist/raasch/2008-04-17-2008-04-17-raasch_N.htm]</ref>

Obama often makes reference to his "two decades of experience" in public service work. During most of that time he claims experience, he was either going to school, working for a law firm, writing a book, or organizing community events.

== Political views ==
Obama's political views have been subjected to controversy even before he put himself forward as a presidential candidate. Former House majority leader [[Tom DeLay]] has described Obama's record in the Illinois Senate as that of a [[Communism|“Marxist leftist".]]<ref>[http://www.rushlimbaugh.com/home/daily/site_121306/content/stop_the_tape.guest.html|Sexy Rock Star Obama Whines About His Ears], RushLimbaugh.com, December 13 2006</ref> In May 2007, Obama (and Sen. Hillary Clinton) voted against funding the Iraq War for the first time.<ref>[http://uspolitics.about.com/od/legislatio1/a/HR2206.htm HR 2206 - Emergency Appropriations], Kathy Gill, Your Guide to U.S. Politics: Current Events. May 26 2007.</ref><ref>[http://more.gov.mtopgroup.com/2007/05/votes-hr-2206-iraq-supplemental.html Votes - H.R. 2206: Iraq Supplemental], May 28, 2007. Retrieved from Deeper Inside the Mountain, June 4, 2007.</ref>

Obama's views on [[gun control]] is focused on an opinion article in the [[Wall Street Journal]]:<ref>David Kopel, "The Democrats and Gun Control," Wall St.J., Page A19, April 17, 2008 [http://online.wsj.com/article_email/SB120839466717921537-lMyQjAxMDI4MDE4NzMxOTc0Wj.html]</ref>

:As a state senate candidate in 1996, Mr. Obama endorsed a complete ban on all handguns in a questionnaire. The Obama campaign has claimed he "never saw or approved the questionnaire," and that an aide filled it out incorrectly. But a few weeks ago, Politico.com found an amended version of the questionnaire. It included material added in Mr. Obama's handwriting.

After [[D.C. v. Heller]], Obama claimed to support Second Amendment rights.

Obama has said, "Doing the Lord's work is a thread that runs through our politics since the very beginning," and "it puts the lie to the notion that [[separation of church and state]] in America means somehow that faith should have no role in public life."<ref>[http://www.siouxcityjournal.com/articles/2007/06/17/news/iowa/8db7c1a17d2b51f9862572fd000fc9f4.txt Obama says religion has place in politics], By Todd Dorman, ''Sioux City Journal'', June 18, 2007.</ref>

He believes children should be taught sex education in kindergarten, although in what he refers to as "an age-appropriate manner".<ref>"Barack Obama reaffirmed to [[Planned Parenthood]] this week that he believes elements of sex education should begin in kindergarten." [http://abcnews.go.com/print?id=3395856 (ABC News)] July 20, 2007 </ref>

Obama spoke at the May 1, 2006, illegal immigration march in Chicago.<ref>http://nomoreblather.com/barack-obama-and-the-immigration-marches Immigration marches</ref>

::''We are hungry for change!'' S.C. January 26, 2008.

Barack Obama, in his short stint as Senator of Illinois, has made clear his opposition to the [[U.S. Military]] in policy and in rhetoric. Obama has spent much energy to argue that the Iraq War should have never been waged and that we should not be there at all, in any way. In 2002, as an unknown Chicago representative to the state of Illinois, he declared his opposition to "dumb wars". At the time, America was united in the stance against terrorism and the prospects of a rogue enemy with WMD worried the United States. Obama, has said that he does not know whether he would have voted for or against the Iraq War. Since elected to Congress, he voted against the Emergency War Supplemental. Obama did not oppose his party debating the bill long past the timeframe requested. This action directly affects troop deployment in combat zones. Obama has repeatedly called for the return of troops in Iraq. Barack Obama has a no confidence vote for the 'Surge' before the measure was put forth by General Petraeus to Congress. Obama would not denounce MoveOn.org's slander NY Times advertising against the General.

Senator Obama often refers to the office that he seeks, without the proper respect of those that came before him. When talking of the President, he frequently refuses to call him [[George W. Bush|President George Bush]] or even Mr. George Bush. Obama has also disrespectfully called him 'George Bush'. Oddly, when Bill Clinton spoke with Obama on September 11th, 2008 predicting he would win handily, Obama responded, "There you go, you can take it from the president of the United States."<ref>http://www.cnn.com/2008/POLITICS/09/11/campaign.wrap/index.html</ref> It appears Obama will use the term for a former President, but will not do the same for the actual President. Examples of Obama's treatment of our current President:
* "I am happy to have a debate with John McCain and George Bush about foreign policy," Obama said <ref>[http://www.cnn.com/2008/POLITICS/05/16/obama.bush.mccain/], CNN Obama blasts Bush McCain, May 16, 2008</ref>
* "For all his talk about independence, the centerpiece of John McCain's economic plan amounts to a full-throated endorsement of George Bush's policies," <ref>[http://www.boston.com/news/nation/articles/2008/06/10/obama_takes_the_offensive_vs_mccain/] Boston Globe Obama takes offensive vs. McCain, June 10, 2008</ref>
* "George Bush knows that I have never supported engagement with terrorists." <ref>[http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/7403386.stm], BBC Obama attacks Bush over Iran , May 15, 2008</ref>
* Obama called the U.S. economy a disaster thanks to "John McCain's president, George W. Bush" <ref>[http://www.newsmax.com/insidecover/obama_mccain/2008/08/18/122924.html No More Hugs: Obama Tears Into McCain] AP, August 18, 2008</ref> Side note, George W. Bush is also Barack Obama's President.

== Foreign policy experience ==
In his presidential campaign, Obama bragged<ref>http://www.huffingtonpost.com/mayhill-fowler/obama-says-no-to-foreign_b_95357.html</ref> that "foreign policy is the area where I am probably most confident" and then cited "having lived in Indonesia for four years, having family that is impoverished in small villages in Africa". He lived in Indonesia from age 6 to 10, and he later discovered that his father had some other kids in Africa.

While campaigning, he has visited several foreign countries. In [[Russia]] and the former Soviet republics, he met with representatives of the International Republican Institute and National Democratic Institute to discuss democracy in the former Soviet republics. He also met with Russian military officials and visited several nuclear and biological weapons destruction sites in Russia, [[Ukraine]], and [[Azerbaijan]] with Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Richard Lugar (R-IN). On the same tour, he visited London, UK, and met with [[Tony Blair]], sitting UK Prime Minister.<ref>http://obama.senate.gov/press/050823-obama_to_visit/</ref>

Obama visited South Africa, Kenya, Ethiopia, Djibouti, and Chad; he discussed his tour of Robben Island prison, met with U.S. troops, and visited refugee camps of the people fleeing Darfur. He also addressed Africa's growing [[AIDS]] epidemic. <ref>http://obama.senate.gov/podcast/060906-090606_africa_t/</ref>

During a ten-day-long tour of the Middle East, he talked with government leaders in Qatar, Kuwait, Iraq, Jordan, and Israel. <ref> http://obama.senate.gov/news/060113-obama_wraps_up/</ref>

==Religious affiliations==

Obama and his wife (reared a Baptist) have been active members since 1988 at the Trinity [[United Church of Christ]]<ref>http://www.tucc.org/about.htm</ref> in Chicago. The church embraces [[black liberation theology]] and its emphasis on empowering oppressed groups against establishment forces. This denomination was the first in America to ordain gays, women and blacks as ministers.<ref>[http://www.mcclatchydc.com/227/story/31079.html], http://www.mcclatchydc.com/227/story/31079.html, Obama's church pushes controversial doctrines, March 20, 2008</ref> According to his sister, Obama was baptized at this church the same year.<ref>[http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/04/30/america/30obama.php?page=2 http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/04/30/america/30obama.php?page=2]</ref> Obama describes his conversion in ''The Audacity of Hope''. The title of this book is taken from one of Pastor Wright's sermons.
In April 2008, Obama disavowed Pastor Wright's views. In May 2008, Obama left his church. His response blames the media and not the rhetoric on display <ref>[http://elections.foxnews.com/2008/05/31/obama-resigns-church-membership-in-chicago/], Obama Drops Church Membership in Chicago, may 31, 2008</ref>{{QuoteBox|“It’s not fair to the other members of the church who seek to worship in peace..."}} Wright had been making inflammatory comments and posting his sermons online for sale. These include the statements "G-d damn America" and describing the September 11th attacks, he said "We have supported state terrorism against the Palestinians and black South Africans, and now we are indignant because the stuff we have done overseas is now brought right back to our own front yards. America's chickens are coming home to roost."<ref>[ http://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/Story?id=4443788 Obama's Pastor: G-d Damn America, U.S. to Blame for 9/11]</ref> In addition, Rev. Wright blamed America saying "We supported Zionism shamelessly while ignoring the Palestinians and branding anybody who spoke out against it as being anti-Semitic."

[[Image:Barack Obama Jeremiah Wright.jpg|thumb|Barack Obama and Jeremiah Wright.]]

[[Daniel Pipes]] claims that Obama was raised a [[Muslim]] because he attended classes on the Koran while attending a Muslim school.<ref>[http://www.danielpipes.org/article/5286 Was Barack Obama a Muslim</ref> Obama did attend a school administrated by Muslims but [[CNN]] reports that it was a non-religious public school attended by students of many faiths, not a [[madrassa]].<ref>http://www.cnn.com/2007/POLITICS/01/22/obama.madrassa/</ref>

{{QuoteBox|In Indonesia, I'd spent 2 years at a Muslim school, 2 years at a Catholic school. In the Muslim school, the teacher wrote to tell mother I made faces during Koranic studies. In the Catholic school, when it came time to pray, I'd pretend to close my eyes, then peek around the room. Nothing happened. No angels descended. Just a parched old nun and 30 brown children, muttering words. Sometimes the nun would catch me, and her stern look would force my lids back shut. But that didn't change how I felt inside."}}<ref>Dreams from My Father, by Barack Obama, p.142 Aug 1, 1996 </ref>

Obama has described his upbringing as occurring in a non-religious environment.

{{QuoteBox|In sum, my mother viewed religion through the eyes of the anthropologist that she would become; it was a phenomenon to be treated with a suitable respect, but with a suitable detachment as well. Moreover, as a child I rarely came in contact with those who might offer a substantially different view of faith. My father was almost entirely absent from my childhood, having been divorced from my mother when I was 2 years old; in any event, although my father had been raised a Muslim, by the time he met my mother he was a confirmed atheist, thinking religion to be so much superstition.

And yet for all her professed secularism, my mother was in many ways the most spiritually awakened person that I've ever known. She had an unswerving instinct for kindness, charity, and love, and spent much of her life acting on that instinct, sometimes to her detriment. Without the help of religious texts or outside authorities, she worked mightily to instill in me the values that many Americans learn in Sunday school: honesty, empathy, discipline, delayed gratification, and hard work. She raged at poverty and injustice.}}<ref>[http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1546579-4,00.html My Spiritual Journey] Time Magazine, October 2006</ref>

== Books ==

* ''Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance.'' (B. Obama and, allegedly, William Ayers) ISBN 0307383415
* ''The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream.'' (B. Obama) ISBN 0307455874
* ''Barack Obama in His Own Words.'' (B. Obama and Lisa Rogak) ISBN 0786720573
* ''Change We Can Believe In. Barack Obama's Plan to Renew America's Promise.'' (B. Obama)
* ''The Case Against Barack Obama. The Unlikely Rise and Unexamined Agenda of the Media's Favorite Candidate. '' (David Freddso) ISBN 1596985666
* ''The Obama Nation. Leftist Politics and the Cult of Personality.'' (Jerome R. Corsi) ISBN 1416598065
* ''Obama Unmasked. Did Slick Hollywood Handlers Create the Perfect Candidate?'' (Floyd Brown and Lee Trexler) ISBN 0936783591
* ''Obama: The Man Behind The Mask.'' (Andy Martin) ISBN 0965781240
* ''The Audacity of Deceit. Barack Obama's War on American Values.'' (Brad O'Leary) ISBN 1935071025

==Published criticism==
On April 11, 2007, staff writers of ''The Boston Globe'' reported the criticisms of several black commentators regarding Obama's apparent hesitation to join the race to condemn acclaimed radio personality [[Don Imus]],<ref>[http://www.boston.com/news/nation/articles/2007/04/11/obamas_silence_on_imus_alarms_some_blacks/ Obama's silence on Imus alarms some blacks], Rick Klein and Joseph Williams, ''The Boston Globe'', April 11, 2007.</ref> who made a racially insensitive remark<ref>[http://www.reuters.com/article/industryNews/idUSN1237895620070412|title=Furor over Imus puts heat on other broadcasters], Daniel Trotta, Reuters, 2007-04-12.</ref> on the air during the April 4 broadcast. Obama did not comment on Imus's remarks until well after prominent civil rights leaders [[Al Sharpton]] and [[Jesse Jackson]] had called Imus to account and after Imus was suspended by MSNBC and CBS Radio. Obama later weighed in on April 10 by saying, "The comments of Don Imus were divisive, hurtful, and offensive to Americans of all backgrounds." 

The ''Globe'' reported that Obama's perceived delay in addressing Don Imus's remarks was described by Melissa Harris Lacewell, a professor of politics and African-American studies at Princeton University, as "miss[ing] an opportunity to prove himself to blacks and white liberals who would have wanted Obama take the lead in denouncing Imus."<ref>[http://www.boston.com/news/nation/articles/2007/04/11/obamas_silence_on_imus_alarms_some_blacks/ Obama's silence on Imus alarms some blacks], Rick Klein and Joseph Williams, ''The Boston Globe'', April 11, 2007.</ref><ref>[http://time-blog.com/real_clear_politics/2007/04/obama_race_and_the_election.html Obama, Race, and The Election,] ''Real Clear Politics.com''</ref>

In June 2007 the ''Chicago Sun-Times'' reported Obama had actually received nearly three times more campaign cash from indicted slum landlord Tony Rezko<ref>[http://www.suntimes.com/news/metro/353829,CST-NWS-rez23.article Barack Obama and his slumlord patron], Tim Novak, Chicago Sun-Times, April 23, 2007.</ref> and his associates than Obama has publicly acknowledged.<ref>[http://www.suntimes.com/news/politics/432197,CST-NWS-obama18.article Rezko cash triple what Obama says], Chris Fusco and Tim Novak, ''Chicago Sun-Times'', June 18, 2007.</ref>

Executive vice president Wayne LaPierre of the [[NRA]] accuses Barack Obama of "mouthing pro-Second amendment words and pandering to gun owners" on the campaign trail.<ref>[http://www.gopusa.com/news/2008/may/0514_nra_mccain.shtml], http://www.gopusa.com/news/2008/may/0514_nra_mccain.shtml, NRA chief stresses common ground with McCain, Associated Press, May 14, 2008</ref>

[[McCain]] Aide Says Obama Has Sept. 10 Mind-Set "an extremely dangerous and extremely naive approach toward terrorism" <ref>[http://www.newsmax.com/politics/mccain_obama/2008/06/17/105265.html], AP McCain Aide Says Obama Has Sept. 10 Mind-Set, June 17, 2008</ref>

===Birth Certificate Controversy===
During the democratic primaries the Clinton Campaign lead a smear campaign against the validity of Barrack Obama's Hawaii Birth cirtificate, claiming that it is false and that he is intelligible for presidency. <ref>[http://campaignspot.nationalreview.com/post/?q=ZTgxZmIwNTg0OWVhMWJkODNmZjI4ZjY4Mjg2OWRmNzI= http://campaignspot.nationalreview.com/post/?q=ZTgxZmIwNTg0OWVhMWJkODNmZjI4ZjY4Mjg2OWRmNzI=]</ref> After initially refusing to produce a birth certificate in response to such rumors, the Obama campaign eventually endorsed a document posted on the Daily Kos as
authentic.<ref>[http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2008/6/12/11012/6168/320/534616 Obama's Birth Certificate]</ref> The response is split regarding the birth certificate. Some commentators, such as those at the National Review, are satisfied with the document.<ref>[http://campaignspot.nationalreview.com/post/?q=NWVjN2I1MjlhM2ZjZjRjYzBkODAxZjZkZGQyYWNkMDk= http://campaignspot.nationalreview.com/post/?q=NWVjN2I1MjlhM2ZjZjRjYzBkODAxZjZkZGQyYWNkMDk=]</ref> However, some analysts claim that the birth certificate is false.<ref>[http://web.israelinsider.com/Articles/Politics/12939.htm http://web.israelinsider.com/Articles/Politics/12939.htm]</ref>

On August 21st, 2008, Factcheck.org published an article regarding the controversy.<ref>[http://www.factcheck.org/elections-2008/born_in_the_usa.html Born in the U.S.A.]</ref> The site stated, "FactCheck.org staffers have now seen, touched, examined and photographed the original birth certificate. We conclude that it meets all of the requirements from the State Department for proving U.S. citizenship." In addition, the site posted high-resolution photographs of the birth certificate, which clearly showed the raised seal, stamp of Hawaii state registrar Alvin T. Onaka, and certificate number. The birth date corresponds to a birth announcement published in the ''Honolulu Advertiser '' on Sunday, August 13, 1961. <ref>http://texasdarlin.wordpress.com/2008/07/23/obama-was-born-in-hawaii-wrong-can-of-worms/</ref>

A Philadelphia attorney, Phillip Berg, has filed a lawsuit against the DNC and Barack Obama. Berg maintains that Sen. Obama is not a natural born U.S. citizen or that, if he ever was, he lost his citizenship when he was adopted in Indonesia. Berg also cites what he calls "dual loyalties" due to his citizenship and ties with Kenya and Indonesia. The "dual loyalties" which have not been shown to exist do not violate any constitutional or legal precedents and would make Sen. Obama a poor choice for president, not an invalid choice.

Obama website Fight The Smears has confirmed that Obama was once a Kenyan citizen until 1982. Attorney Philips Berg's lawsuit is being challenged by the Obama Campaign. Instead of producing the original birth certificate in court and paying a number of legal fees and taking several days out of his busy campaigning schedule the Obama campaign had the case dropped on the grounds that it lacked any supporting evidence. <ref>http://neighbors.denverpost.com/viewtopic.php?t=10815605</ref> The fact that Mr. Berg's dual arguments were mutually contradictory may also have contributed.

The state of Hawaii announced that the document is legitimate and official, Since the state of Hawaii is the issuing body they have ultimate authority with regards to the matter.<ref>http://www.honoluluadvertiser.com/article/20081031/BREAKING01/81031064/0/BREAKING04</ref> If states are no longer regarded as a valid authority on citizenship of those born within them then no one is eligible for president because no one can prove that they are natural born citizens.

==See also==
*[[Previous Breaking News/Barack Obama|Articles about '''Barack Obama''' from previous "Breaking News"]]
*[[Essay: The Special Interests Candidate]]
*[[The Honorable James David Manning]]
*[[Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN)]]
*[[New Party]]

==Further reading==
*[[Peter Hitchens|Hitchens, Peter]] [http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/news/worldnews.html?in_article_id=511901&in_page_id=1811 ''The Black Kennedy: But does anyone know the real Barack Obama?''] [[Daily Mail]]. Accessed 4 February 2008.

==Sources==

*[http://www.barackobama.com/ Offical Obama for President Website]
*[http://obama.senate.gov/about/ Official Senate Website]
*[http://www.opensecrets.org/pfds/pfd2005/N00009638_2005.pdf Barack Obama Personal Financial Disclosures Summary: 2005], retrieved from opensecrets.org 17 June 2007.
*[http://bioguide.congress.gov/scripts/biodisplay.pl?index=O000167 Biographical Directory of the United States Congress]
*[http://www.law.uchicago.edu/faculty/obama/cv.html University of Chicago Law School] Faculty Listing
*[http://www.biography.com/search/article.do?id=12782369 Barack Obama Biography] from Biography.com
*[http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/o/barack_obama/index.html?inline=nyt-per New York Times Topics, Barack Obama]
*[http://youtube.com/watch?v=zUdjhKbImwE Documentary on Barack Hussein Obama]
*[http://www.votesmart.org/voting_category.php?can_id=9490 Voting Record of Barack Hussein Obama]

==References==
{{reflist}}

{{DEFAULTSORT:Obama, Barrack}}

{{2008 presidential candidates}}

[[Category:United States Senators]]
[[Category:Democratic Party]]
[[Category:Liberals]]
[[Category:Muslims]]

Habeas corpus

2008-09-19T15:29:53Z

Darkmind1970:

'''Habeas corpus''' refers to the right of a private citizen to challenge their government to present a reason for his criminal or civil detention. This right was first secured by British citizens against their King with the signing of the [[Magna Carta]] in 1215, a document upon which all Western [[democracy]] is based, and upon which the [[Founding Fathers]] of the [[United States of America]] heavily relied.

Specifically, "habeas corpus" is the name of a writ having for its object to bring a person before a court. In Latin, the phrase translates roughly as "[we order that] you produce the body".

Explained another way, '''habeas corpus''' is [[Latin]] for "you have the body." A writ of habeas corpus generally is a judicial order forcing law enforcement authorities to produce a prisoner they are holding, and to justify the prisoner's continued confinement. Federal judges receive petitions for a writ of habeas corpus from state prison inmates who say their state prosecutions violated federally protected rights in some way.

The right to ''habeas corpus'' is phrased as a [[writ]], making reference to the arcane system of writs by which legal claims were adjudicated prior to the 1900s (e.g., the "writ of replevin," or "writ of mandamus"). Thus, the right is referred to as "the writ of ''habeas corpus''," or, "the Great Writ."

The [[United States Constitution]] guarantees that the "privilege of the Writ of Habeas Corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion the public Safety may require it," in Article I, Section 9.<ref>[[U.S. Constitution]], Art I, Sec. 9</ref>

== United States ==
In the [[United States]], a detainee may request a writ of Habeas Corpus review with any court that has jurisdiction. If accepted by the court, the judge issues a writ of Habeas Corpus ordering the individual with custody of the detainee to produce the detainee for a hearing. During the hearing, the judge reviews the lawfulness of the detention, and if found unlawful, orders the detainee released. If, before the hearing, the custodian refuses to produce the body, it is at risk of being found in contempt of court, with potential consequences leading up to and including detention for the custodian until the body is produced.

Former [[United States]] [[Attorney General]] [[Alberto Gonzales]] argued that there is no expressed grant of ''habeas corpus'' in the [[Constitution]].<ref>http://baltimorechronicle.com/2007/011907Parry.shtml</ref> Currently, U.S. law states that the privilege may be withheld if the defendant is declared as an "[[enemy combatant]]," though recently the [[Supreme Court]] held this was not enforceable.<ref>http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/13/washington/13scotus.html?_r=2&adxnnl=1&oref=slogin&adxnnlx=1213359600-p5A1VL5o1oc0SqfVz31OnQ&oref=slogin</ref>

== References ==
<references/>
[[Category:Latin Legal Terms]][[Category:Law]]
[[Category:Legal Terms]]

Talk:Leif Erikson

2008-08-05T15:13:45Z

Darkmind1970:

I am not certain if you grasped the nuance of Jeff Bolster's argument. Archaeological evidence for a Viking presence in North America, circa 1000 AD does exist, in Newfoundland. However, there is no evidence for a Viking presence in New England, Minnesota, and Kansas. Part of the suspicion regrading claims of a pre-Columbian European presence goes back to the nineteenth century, when Scandinavian-American societies, citing Norse myth, claimed that Leif Erikson landed in North American centuries before Cristobal Colon (his proper name). Some individuals went so far as to plant archaeological forgeries in Minnesota and Kansas, that have come to be known as rune stones. They are large rocks with inscriptions made on them by metal tools. Close examination revealed them as modern fakes (the nineteenth century, BTW, saw many archaeological frauds. A number of "artifacts" of supposedly Etruscan origin surfaced in western Michigan in the 1890s).
So, while scholars like Julius E. Olson and Edward Gaylord Bourne did not accept that the Norse had landed in North America, they still included excerpts from the Vinland saga in their edited volume ''The Northmen, Columbus, and Cabot, 985-1503'' (Scribner's, 1906).
However, the controversy about a Norse presence was finally laid to rest in 1960, when artifacts of Scanadiavian orign, dating to about 1000 AD were discovered in Newfoundland.[http://www.mnh.si.edu/vikings/1137.html]
[http://www.pc.gc.ca/lhn-nhs/nl/meadows/index_e.asp]
[http://www.cdli.ca/CITE/v_lanse.htm]
[http://www.pitt.edu/~dash/vinland.html]
[http://whc.unesco.org/en/list/4]--[[User:JBoley|JBoley]] 10:36, 3 August 2008 (EDT)

: I looked at your initial cites and found nothing persuasive. One or two tiny artifacts can be easily forged or misunderstood, and are not evidence for an actual settlement.--[[User:Aschlafly|Aschlafly]] 10:40, 3 August 2008 (EDT)

:::I find it unpersuasive that Aschlafly actually read the cites I provided in four minutes. Perhaps, as Dr. Lenski noted, reading is not your strongest suit?--[[User:JBoley|JBoley]] 10:44, 3 August 2008 (EDT)

::::Yeah, insult Andy with a non sequitur. That's the way to win him over. [[User:Jinxmchue|Jinxmchue]] 10:47, 3 August 2008 (EDT)

:::::Non sequiter? What he said is essentially along the same lines as "I found your performance of the task I gave you lacking. Maybe it's like Susan said - you can't be trusted to do chores correctly?" It's not non sequiter at all. [[User:Wandering|Wandering]] 15:49, 3 August 2008 (EDT)

:"Cristobal Colon (his proper name)" An Italian whose "proper name" is Spanish? [[User:Jinxmchue|Jinxmchue]] 10:41, 3 August 2008 (EDT)

:::I care about history and the truth. Andy said he did not find the cites persuasive, without even looking at them. Perhaps Dr. Lenski had a point?--[[User:JBoley|JBoley]] 10:51, 3 August 2008 (EDT)

::::You say you care about history and the truth, but provide a Spanish name for an Italian and claim it's his "proper name." How does that jive? [[User:Jinxmchue|Jinxmchue]] 13:09, 3 August 2008 (EDT)

:::::Sorry, I was thinking of the original agreement between Columbus and the Spanish Crown, which referred to him a Cristobal Colon. However, it still stands that the assertion that the Norse did not reach North America is obviously incorrect. --[[User:JBoley|JBoley]] 13:30, 3 August 2008 (EDT)

:Mr Schlafly, it is not correct that there were only found "one or two tiny artifacts". Actually, the excavations have unearthed eight buildings, including three Norse-style longhouses for habitation, and several hundred different artifacts. --[[User:AKjeldsen|AKjeldsen]] 15:34, 3 August 2008 (EDT)
::Archaeologists are notorious for only seeing what they want to see, a fault shared with many of our [[Liberal]] friends here. [[User:Bugler|Bugler]] 16:05, 3 August 2008 (EDT)

Im a Norweigan myself, and Id love to think that we discovered america, but when the facts speak against it I have nothing to do but concede. It doesnt have to be harder than reading the sources provided. Even in norway people are starting to realize "we" didnt do it. Im going to try and find some more good sources to confirm that.
[[User:PerWilly|PerWilly]] 19:09, 3 August 2008 (EDT)

The evidence rests primarily on two tiny artifacts identified by the much younger wife of a prominent archaeologist from Norway. Nothing larger of significance was found, aside from speculation that arose beginning with those artifacts.

Sadly, the planting of small artifacts is a fact of life and has been proven in other circumstances. There is powerful evidence against any such settlement, and no documentary support.--[[User:Aschlafly|Aschlafly]] 19:34, 3 August 2008 (EDT)

: Indeed, the more one looks at the details, the more it appears to be an archaeological wannabee trying to acquire the fame and respect of her older husband.--[[User:Aschlafly|Aschlafly]] 19:51, 3 August 2008 (EDT)

:: It's a pity there's no proof of their deception, eh? [[User:Wandering|Wandering]] 20:09, 3 August 2008 (EDT)
:::I'd just like to know how eight buildings and hundreds of artifacts can suddenly turn into "two tiny artifacts". Maybe [[deceit]]ful [[liberal]] [[Professor values|professors]] stole the rest? --[[User:AKjeldsen|AKjeldsen]] 20:13, 3 August 2008 (EDT)

:::: Why are there no artifacts bigger than what can be easily carried in one hand?--[[User:Aschlafly|Aschlafly]] 20:29, 3 August 2008 (EDT)
:::::Because they took the big and valuable items with them when they left again? --[[User:AKjeldsen|AKjeldsen]] 20:33, 3 August 2008 (EDT)
:::::: Or because it's the small things that tend to get lost in everyday life - and then re-emerge centuries later in archaeological digs. Or things like pins break with repeated usage, needles snap, pots chip or break... that's the flotsam and jetsam of history. [[User:Darkmind1970|Darkmind1970]] 11:13, 5 August 2008 (EDT)

::::: I must say, what I find most interesting about the proposition that the site was built and seeded by the Ingstads (and the international team of archaeologists that accompanied them) was the fact that Parks Canada either willingly or unwittingly colluded in the matter when they performed [url=http://www.pc.gc.ca/lhn-nhs/nl/meadows/natcul/fouilles_excavate_e.asp]their own excavations[/url]. [[User:Wandering|Wandering]] 20:51, 3 August 2008 (EDT)

==Recent edit==
"One of those artifacts was used by Norse women in their chores, but there is no explanation for how or why Norse women would have gone to Newfoundland."

The vikings, including, women used boats to travel, and women were essential to the creation of settlements. Unless an objection is raised, I'll be removing that sentence. [[User:Wandering|Wandering]] 19:20, 3 August 2008 (EDT)

Leif Erikson

2008-08-05T15:08:53Z

Darkmind1970:

[[Image:Lief Ericson.jpg|300px|right|thumb]]
'''Leif Erikson''' (or Leifur Eiríksson) was born in [[Iceland]] in 970 and died in 1020. He was son of [[Eric the Red]] who lived on the West Coast of Greenland and was an outlaw from [[Norway]]. Leif's friend, Lars Almvig, told a saga of a land far to the west that had been seen through a mist by a Viking band led by Bjarni Herjulfsson in 986 that had been blown off course. Encouraged by the constant need of land to farm, Leif organized a voyage and bought Bjarni's ship and headed west in about A.D. 990. He followed Bjarni's route in reverse, making three landfalls after about 4 1/2 days.

The first of these he named Helluland or Flat-Stone Land which is now Labrador.

==L'Anse aux Meadows==

In 1960 a Norwegian explorer and writer, Helge Ingstad, came upon the site at L'Anse aux Meadows, Newfoundland, after being led there by a local inhabitant. Over the course of the next eight years, Ingstad, his wife, and an international team of archaeologists excavated the site and found the remains of eight Norse buildings from the 11th century. The walls and roofs had been of sod, laid over a supporting frame. The buildings were of the same kind as those used in Iceland and Greenland just before and after the year 1000. Long narrow fireplaces in the middle of the floor served for heating, lighting and cooking. Several artifacts of Norse origin were found as well.<ref>http://www.pc.gc.ca/lhn-nhs/nl/meadows/natcul/decouverte_discovery_e.asp</ref>

Some of the artifacts were those used by Norse women, and along with the discovery of an iron forge, indicated that the site was used as a settlement for extended stays. Subsequent excavations by Parks Canada in the 1970's uncovered an iron smithy by the forge, and a building where timber was cut and prepared for transport as lumber. This corresponds to descriptions in the Nordic sagas of timber being prepared to take back to Greenland, which was a scarce and valuable resource there. <ref>http://www.pc.gc.ca/lhn-nhs/nl/meadows/natcul/fouilles_excavate_e.asp</ref>

Why this settlement was abandoned is not known, but one suggested reason was harassment from the native Americans, who outnumbered the settlers despite the fighting prowess of the Norse. Another explanation is economic - while the region offered valuable resources, in practical terms Europe was as close as Vinland and had more to offer.<ref>http://www.pc.gc.ca/lhn-nhs/nl/meadows/natcul/vinland_e.asp</ref>

==Conversion to Christianity==

According to the available documentary source, the Nordic sagas, Erikson was a [[Christian]] convert, and spread his new religion to his colonies.<ref>[http://www.gutenberg.org/files/17946/17946-h/17946-h.htm#chap_4 Saga of Erik the Red, chapter 4]</ref> His conversion took place during a visit to Norway in 999 A.D., where he was converted by King Olaf I, and instructed to carry the faith to Greenland. <ref>http://www.bartleby.com/65/le/LeifEric.html The Columbia Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition. 2001-07</ref>

==Return to Greenland==

Leif returned to Greenland in 1001. Leif never returned and attempts at settlement of Vinland were unsuccessful due to the native North Americans.

(Excerpted for "Norwegian Explorers on the ODIN website, produced for the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs.)
Compton's Interactive Encyclopedia, 1995 ed. "Leif Ericson."

== References ==

<references/>

{{DEFAULTSORT:Erikson, Leif}}
{{Nb_explorers}}

Talk:Operation Overlord

2008-07-24T22:25:24Z

Darkmind1970:

Article could use expanding. British, French, and Canadian troops were well-represented and fought as heroically as the Americans. [[User:Karajou|Karajou]] 13:39, 31 December 2007 (EST)
:I agree. I've tinkered a bit, but it needs a lot more. [[User:Darkmind1970|Darkmind1970]] 11:08, 1 February 2008 (EST)
::This page is looking a lot better. [[User:Darkmind1970|Darkmind1970]] 18:25, 24 July 2008 (EDT)

Operation Overlord

2008-07-24T22:21:11Z

Darkmind1970: /* German weakness */

[[Image:normandy.jpg|300px|thumb|right|American troops disembark under heavy fire at ''Omaha'', the code name for their section of the Normandy coastline]]
'''Operation Overlord''', also known as the '''Normandy Invasion''' or simply '''D-Day''', was the code name for the Allied invasion of northern [[Europe]] in [[World War II]]. It began with the landings on the beaches of [[Normandy]] in northwestern France on June 6, 1944, and accomplished the largest amphibious invasion in the history of mankind, using 200,000 men, 9,000 planes, and 5,000 ships.

==Strategic Setting==
The British Chiefs of Staff charged Admiral Lord [[Louis Mountbatten]] and his Combined Operations Headquarters in September 1941 with investigating the feasibility of amphibious operations in the European theater of the war. Earlier, Admiral Sir Roger Keyes had undertaken some planning for commando raids, but Mountbatten was to do more. "You are to prepare for the invasion of Europe," British Prime Minister [[Winston Churchill]] told him. "You must devise and design the appliances, the landing craft, and the technique...The whole of the South Coast of England is a bastion of defense against the invasion of Hitler; you've got to turn it into the springboard for our attack."

American planners began formal cooperation with Britain in December 1941, just after the Japanese attack at [[Attack on Pearl Harbor|Pearl Harbor]] and the German and Italian declarations of war against the United States. In compliance with earlier, informal understandings, the two partners agreed to put first the defeat of [[Germany]] and its ally [[Italy]] if forced to wage a two-front war against both those nations and Japan. Shortly thereafter, British planners drafted a proposal, code-named ROUNDUP, for an attack across the English Channel into France. The assault would come only after a series of major campaigns on the periphery of Europe, in [[Scandinavia]], the [[Mediterranean Sea]], the [[Balkans]], and the [[Soviet Union]], where the Germans would have difficulty massing their power. Once bombing, blockade, partisan uprisings, and the fighting on those other fronts had weakened the enemy sufficiently, ROUNDUP, or something like it, would begin.

Despite talk that a Continental invasion might come as early as 1942, Allied leaders in the end decided tentatively to make the assault in 1943, either through Western Europe or the Balkans. Because British forces would bear the burden of operations in Europe until the United States could complete its buildup for war, the decisions that came out of the conference hewed closely to Britain's preference for attacks on Germany's periphery. Although the British later accepted an American proposal, code-named BOLERO, for the establishment in Britain of a million-man force trained and equipped for the 1943 invasion, the United States agreed that during 1942 Allied forces should concentrate on wearing down Germany's resistance through air attacks, operations along the North African coast, and assistance to the Soviet Union.

====Initial disagreements====
Allied leaders honed their strategy further at a series of great conferences during 1942 and 1943—at Casablanca, [[Quebec]], [[Cairo]], and [[Tehran]]. Examining a range of alternatives, they gradually adopted the broad outlines of the attack they would launch. As planning continued, however, it became clear that the Americans disagreed ardently with the British desire to wear down the Germans before beginning a final confrontation on the Continent. Confident in the strength of their vast resources, American planners argued that "wars cannot be finally won without the use of land armies" and that only direct action against the main body of the German force could produce an Allied victory. Britain's peripheral approach, they asserted, would waste valuable assets on operations that could have at best an indirect effect on the outcome of the war. There was also the Soviet Union to consider, which had suffered millions of casualties in its fight with the Germans on the Eastern Front and might conceivably collapse and conclude a separate peace if Britain and the United States failed to relieve some of the pressure by attacking in the west. Soviet leader Joseph Stalin was already clamoring for a second front. To the Americans it seemed far better to seize the initiative from Germany with a bold assault than to allow the alliance's resources to dribble away in operations that would have little long-term effect on the enemy's will to resist.

====British views====
The British viewed the situation in Europe with an eye closely focused on their own circumstances and experience. As conscious of their nation's lack of resources as the Americans were of the vast wealth available to the United States, they had already withstood a disaster at Dunkirk in 1940, when the Germans had driven a British army off the Continent in defeat, and at the French seacoast town of Dieppe in August 1942, when the Germans, at great cost to the Allies, had repelled a Canadian landing. Their experiences with amphibious warfare during World War I had been little better. Their forces had endured a bloodletting at [[Gallipoli]] in the [[Dardanelles]], where landings championed by Churchill had failed. They had also lost an entire generation of young men to trench warfare on the stalemated Western Front in France. Britain's leaders thus had visions of catastrophe whenever the Americans raised the issue of a cross-Channel attack. If haste prevailed over reason, Churchill warned, the beaches of France might well be "choked with the bodies of the flower of American and British manhood."

If the British had agreed in principle at the [[Arcadia Conference]] to an early attack across the Channel, by the end of 1942 they had nevertheless succeeded in shifting many of the resources marked for Bolero to TORCH, an Allied invasion of North Africa much more in accord with their own point of view. The American military had little choice but to go along. They not only lacked the landing craft, warplanes, and shipping necessary to carry out a cross-Channel attack, they also had to contend with their commander in chief, President Roosevelt, who had become convinced that some sort of immediate action against Germany was necessary to divert the attention of the American people from the Pacific to the Atlantic side of the war.

The vehement German response to the assault at Dieppe, resulting in the loss of nearly a thousand British and Canadian lives, the capture of more than two thousand fighting men, and the destruction of better than one hundred aircraft, weighed heavily upon American planners. If the German response at Dieppe was any indication, an invasion of the Continent would require more meticulous preparation and more strength than a 1943 attack could possibly allow. Indeed, Allied planners and logisticians would have to create, field, and supply an organization that could meet and defeat the worst counterattack the enemy was capable of devising.

The British point of view prevailed for much of the next year, causing Allied forces to fight on the fringes of the enemy's power in Sicily and southern Italy. By the middle of 1943, however, with victory in North Africa in hand, the fall of Italy near, and the first Russian victories in the east, the Americans renewed their call for a cross-Channel attack. A crash effort in the United States to construct shallow-draft landing vessels and long-range fighter aircraft had assured that at least minimum resources would be available to move a major force onto the beaches of France and to protect it from air attack. Meanwhile, the success of the anti-U-boat campaign in the Atlantic had guaranteed that the vast supplies of ammunition and provisions necessary for the invasion could move safely from the United States to staging areas in Great Britain.

Although British leaders continued to advocate their peripheral strategy, the importance of American resources to the war effort had become so great that they had little choice but to go along with their ally. At the [[Casablanca Conference]] of January 1943 they thus agreed in principle to a 1944 invasion of the Continent. Shortly thereafter, the British General Staff appointed Lt. Gen. Frederick E. Morgan to be Chief of Staff (COS) to a still to be appointed Supreme Allied Commander (SAC) and gave him responsibility for planning the attack. By April 1943 Morgan had established an organization to carry out that task and had named it COSSAC after the initials in his new title. He warned his officers at that time to avoid thinking of themselves as planners and to see themselves instead as the embryo of a future supreme headquarters. "The term planning staff has come to have a most sinister meaning," he observed. "It implies the production of nothing but paper. What we must contrive to do somehow is to produce not only paper but action."

Under Churchill's influence, the British for a time continued to argue in favor of possible operations in the Balkans. The Americans, however, suspected that their ally was more interested in securing a postwar empire than in defeating Germany as soon as possible. Refusing further delays, they won agreement for a 1 May 1944 attack during the May 1943 Trident Conference in Washington. One month later, the Quadrant Conference in Quebec reaffirmed the decision.

Soviet Premier [[Joseph Stalin]] strengthened the Americans' hand during the Tehran Conference in November. He had reacted furiously to news after the Casablanca Conference that there would be no second front in 1943. At Tehran he welcomed the new emphasis on an attack and pushed vigorously for the appointment of a supreme commander to head the operation. From then on, the Americans were able to argue that any postponement of the invasion would constitute a breach of faith with the Russians. Wrangling continued over the Italian campaign and a possible invasion of southern France, code-named ANVIL, the flow of men and supplies to the Mediterranean theater slowed and the final buildup for the cross-Channel attack began in earnest.

====Selection of Eisenhower====
The selection of a commander for Allied forces required considerable thought. If the invasion had occurred early in the war, the British would have supplied the bulk of the resources and would have controlled the operation. Churchill had tentatively selected General Sir Alan Brooke for the task. But as the war lengthened and American resources became predominant, the selection of an American commander seemed appropriate. Roosevelt and Churchill first inclined toward the man who had played the principal role in coordinating the overall American military effort, U.S. Army Chief of Staff General [[George C. Marshall]]. When Roosevelt decided that Marshall's presence in Washington was indispensable, the Allies agreed on General [[Dwight D. Eisenhower]], another well-experienced officer and the commander of Allied forces in North Africa and the Mediterranean. In the end, Eisenhower would serve as Supreme Allied Commander in Europe and as commanding general of all U.S. forces in the European Theater of Operations.

Appointed as Supreme Commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force in December 1943, Eisenhower selected his former chief of staff in the Mediterranean, Lt. Gen. [[Walter Bedell Smith]], to be his chief of staff in Europe. Smith transformed COSSAC into the supreme headquarters Morgan had envisioned and installed Morgan as his deputy. Aware of British sensitivities and attuned to the political difficulties that might develop if American generals came to dominate Allied councils, Eisenhower selected his principal commanders from among the British. Air Chief Marshal Sir Arthur Tedder became the Deputy Supreme Allied Commander and principal coordinator of the theater's air forces, and Admiral Sir Bertram Ramsay served as naval commander for the invasion. An American, Lt. Gen. Carl Spaatz, commanded U.S. Strategic Air Forces in Europe, while an Englishman, Air Chief Marshal Sir Arthur T. Harris, commanded the Royal Air Force's Bomber Command. Air Chief Marshal Sir Trafford Leigh-Mallory headed those portions of the Allied air forces concerned with tactical air support.

If the tactical air forces for the invasion were clearly under Eisenhower, there was disagreement over whether he commanded the strategic air forces employed in bombing Germany. Spaatz and Harris were disposed to cooperate with Eisenhower but insisted on remaining independent in order to concentrate on destroying Germany's industrial base and air force. After considerable give and take, an arrangement suitable to all sides emerged. Subject to the oversight of the Combined Chiefs of Staff, a joint committee composed of the British Chiefs of Staff and their American counterparts, Eisenhower gained responsibility for the "direction" of strategic air forces. It was understood, however, that the cross-Channel attack, code-named Operation OVERLORD, would not absorb the entire bomber effort and that the air campaign against Germany would continue.

Eisenhower asked General Sir [[Bernard Law Montgomery]], who had led the Eighth Army in North Africa, Sicily, and Italy, and who had become the commander of the 21st Army Group for the invasion, to serve as pro tem commander of the Allied ground forces coming ashore in France. Montgomery would carry out final planning and coordinate the early phases of the attack. Two commanders would serve under Montgomery: Lt. Gen. [[Omar Nelson Bradley]] would head the American force, the First U.S. Army; General Sir Miles Dempsey would lead the Second British Army, composed of British, Canadian, and a handful of French troops. The Third U.S. Army, commanded by Lt. Gen. [[George S. Patton]], Jr., would enter the battle after the Allies had achieved a secure lodgment on the Continent. It would join the First U.S. Army, now commanded by Lt. Gen. Courtney Hodges, to form the 12th Army Group under Bradley. Lt. Gen. Henry D. G. Crerar's First Canadian Army would join Dempsey under Montgomery.

==Creating the general plan==
During the summer of 1943, COSSAC had formulated a tentative plan of attack that involved a force of from three to five divisions. That assault would depend for supply upon the development of two prefabricated harbors, called "mulberries", that were to be positioned along with breakwaters composed of scuttled ships just off the invasion beaches. The mulberries would give the Allies a measure of flexibility by allowing them to provision the force moving inland without having to rely upon the immediate capture of an established port.

====Landing site====
As COSSAC developed that plan, the question of where to land posed problems. The site would have to be within the range of fighter aircraft based in Great Britain but also on ground flat enough to construct the airfields that would become necessary once the invading force moved off the beaches and out of the range of its initial fighter support. The landing zones themselves would have to be sheltered from prevailing winds to facilitate around-the-clock resupply operations and would have to possess enough exits to allow the invading force to proceed inland with as little difficulty as possible. Similarly, the area behind the beaches would have to include a road network adequate to the needs of a force that intended to move rapidly. Since the region would ultimately form a base for the drive across France toward Germany, a series of large ports would also have to be close enough to facilitate the unloading of the massive quantities of supplies and ammunition that would be necessary to sustain the attack.

The most appropriate location, COSSAC's planners decided, lay directly across the English Channel from Dover in the Pas de Calais region. The area fulfilled many of the Allies' requirements and offered a direct route into the heart of Germany. Since the enemy had recognized that fact, however, and had already begun to construct heavy fortifications along the coast, an alternative had to be found. The most suitable stood farther to the west, along the Normandy coast near Caen and the Cotentin Peninsula. That region contained major ports at Cherbourg and Le Havre and offered a gateway to ports at Brest, Nantes, L'Orient, and St. Nazaire. Allied planners believed that the Germans would undoubtedly sabotage Cherbourg, forcing the invaders to place heavy initial reliance upon the mulberries, but the damage could be repaired and the region itself was less strongly defended than the Pas de Calais. Offering, as well, a satisfactory opening into the French interior, it became the site of the invasion.

====Looking towards Normandy====
As planning continued, both Eisenhower and Montgomery recognized that the three-to-five-division assault COSSAC had envisioned would have to be strengthened and spread over a larger area. Looking toward the early capture of Cherbourg and the secure flow of supplies that port would ensure, Montgomery argued in favor of a broad attack somewhat west of Caen. Stretching from the area below that city into the region beyond the town of St. Martin-de-Varreville, the front he envisioned would have a breadth of some sixty miles. When Morgan's planners responded that a bridgehead of that size would require resources far in excess of those available, Montgomery asserted that nothing less would work and that the Allies would either have to find the means or another commander.

Montgomery's insistence led to a sometimes acrimonious debate over the value of ANVIL, a plan to invade southern France that Eisenhower wanted to schedule simultaneously with OVERLORD. The invasion's planners considered the attack important and the conferees at Tehran had endorsed it, but the British — particularly Churchill — had never seen its merit. Hesitant at first to cancel the operation because it seemed a necessary diversion for the main effort in the Cotentin, Eisenhower in the end agreed to a postponement. Given the enlarged scope of OVERLORD, no other alternative seemed possible. There were too few landing craft to go around.

Although the debate over ANVIL continued, by 23 January 1944 the Allies had settled on a basic plan of attack for Normandy. The Americans would take the western flank closest to Cherbourg while the British operated to the east, on the approaches to Caen. Logistics determined the arrangement. American forces had arrived in Britain via the country's western ports and had positioned depots in those areas. It made sense for them to operate near those bases. In addition, responding to the congestion in Britain's ports brought on by preparations for the invasion, American logisticians planned to load ships in the United States for direct discharge onto the beaches of France, without an intermediate unloading in Britain. The western flank was closer to that line of supply.

====Finalizing the plan====
On the night before the invasion, the U.S. 82d and 101st Airborne Divisions would land by parachute and glider near the town of Ste. Mere-Eglise, securing the roads that led from the shoreline and obstructing enemy efforts to reinforce beach defenses. The next morning Bradley's First Army would arrive. The VII Corps would put the U.S. 4th Division ashore on UTAH Beach near les Dunes de Varreville.

To the east, the V Corps, composed of the U.S. 1st and portions of the 29th Infantry Divisions, would land on OMAHA Beach near the town of Vierville-sur-Mer. With a foothold secure in Normandy, V Corps would expand the beachhead to the south while VII Corps cut across the Contentin Peninsula and then wheeled north to capture Cherbourg. With the seaport in hand, VII Corps was to turn south and move toward the town of St. Lo. Once Bradley held the town and the St. Lo-Periers Road, he would have his army on dry ground suitable for offensive operations by mechanized forces. Patton's Third Army would then take to the field. Advancing into Brittany, it would seize Brest and other ports and cover the south flank when the First Army began an attack to the northeast toward Paris. To the east, the Second British Army would operate in the region between Bayeux and Caen, an area that possessed suitable sites for airfields and that offered a relatively unimpeded route to Paris. As in the American sector, an airborne division, the British 6th, would secure the northeastern flank of the operation, dropping during the hours before dawn near Caen and the mouth of the Orne River. At H-hour, the British 50th Division under the British 30 Corps would come ashore on GOLD Beach, near Bayeux and the American zone, while 1 Corps conducted a two-pronged attack farther to the east. There, the 3d Canadian Division would cross JUNO Beach near the town of Courseulles and the British 3d Division would come ashore at SWORD, near Lion-sur-Mer. "In the initial stages," Montgomery told his officers, "we should concentrate on gaining control quickly of the main centres of road communications. We should then push our armoured formations between and beyond these centres and deploy them on suitable ground. In this way it would be difficult for the enemy to bring up his reserves and get them past these armoured formations."

Over all, Allied planners intended to gain a lodgment between the Seine and Loire Rivers. Assuming that the Germans, after initial resistance, would choose to withdraw their forces behind the natural barrier provided by the Seine, they estimated that the task would take about ninety days. After a pause to regroup and resupply, the Allies would then begin an advance into the regions beyond the Seine and toward Germany.

====Troop buildup in England====
As planning continued, the BOLERO buildup in Britain, begun in 1942 to arm and provision the invasion, took on new momentum. With 39 divisions slated to participate in the invasion—20 American, 14 British, 3 Canadian, 1 French, and 1 Polish—along with hundreds of thousands of service troops, there was little time to waste. The number of U.S. fighting men based in Great Britain alone would double in the first six months of 1944, rising from 774,000 at the beginning of the year to 1,537,000 in the week preceding the final assault. More than 16 million tons of supplies would be needed to feed and supply those men and their allies: six and one-quarter pounds of rations per day per man; 137,000 jeeps, trucks, and half-tracks; 4,217 tanks and fully tracked vehicles; 3,500 artillery pieces; 12,000 aircraft; and huge stores of sundries—everything from dental amalgam for fillings to chewing gum and candy bars.

Quarters and depots to house the entire force mushroomed across the English countryside, many in just the seventeen weeks that preceded the invasion. The fields of Somerset and Cornwall became armories for the vast stores of bombs and artillery shells that the operation would require. The congestion extended to Britain's harbors, where ships laden with more supplies stood by. By the day of the attack, besides the immense force of fighting ships that would land the troops in Normandy and of cargo vessels that continued to ply Atlantic supply routes, more than 3 million deadweight tons of merchant shipping were in direct service to the invasion. The huge size of the buildup notwithstanding, landing craft were in such short supply that Eisenhower postponed the invasion for one month, from May to June.

While logisticians laid the base for the invasion, the Allied air forces opened the way for the attack itself by waging massive bombing campaigns in Germany and France. In Germany, between January and June 1944, Allied fighters swept the skies clear of German warplanes and took a heavy toll in pilots. As a result, by June 1944 the enemy lacked both the aircraft and the airmen to mount more than a token resistance to Allied plans.

==Deception==
Meanwhile, in France, as members of the French resistance cut railroad tracks, sabotaged locomotives, and targeted supply trains, Allied aircraft bombed roads, bridges, and rail junctions to prevent the Germans from moving reinforcements toward the invasion beaches. To deceive the enemy's intelligence agencies, the attacks occurred along the entire length of the Channel coast. By June, despite intelligence reports questioning the value of the attacks, all rail routes across the Seine River north of Paris were closed; the transportation system in France was at the point of collapse.

Deception was, indeed, a major part of the Allied campaign plan. To mislead the Germans into believing that the Pas de Calais, rather than the Cotentin, would be the site of the invasion, Eisenhower's staff created a mythical 1st Army Group, with an order of battle larger than that of Montgomery's 21st Army Group. Basing the phantom force near Dover, just across the Channel from the supposed target, the planners then set construction crews to building dummy installations of plywood and canvas and dotted them with an array of inflatable tanks and vehicles. They also anchored a vast armada of rubber landing craft in the Thames River estuary, where German reconnaissance aircraft were certain to spot them. Eisenhower assigned Patton, the American general the Germans most respected, to command the phantom army and saw to it that known enemy agents received information on the status of Patton's force. Allied naval units conducted protracted maneuvers off the Channel coast near the location of the shadow army, and components of Patton's fictitious command indulged in extensive radio trafficking to signal to German intelligence analysts that a major military organization was functioning. A careful plan of aerial bombardment complemented the ploy. During the weeks preceding the invasion, Allied airmen dropped more bombs on the Pas de Calais than anywhere else in France.

To protect the date of the invasion from prying German eyes, the Allies called it [[D-Day]], which carried no implications of any sort. NEPTUNE, the code name they used in place of OVERLORD on planning documents after September 1943, was similarly devoid of connotation. Although American commanders doubted that their ruses would have much effect, their schemes succeeded far beyond expectations. The Germans became so convinced that the Pas de Calais would be the Allied target that they held to the fiction until long after the actual attack had begun. As a result, nineteen powerful enemy divisions, to include important panzer reserves, stood idle on the day of the invasion, awaiting an assault that never came, when their presence in Normandy might have told heavily against the Allied attack.

==German planning==
For their part, enemy forces labored against problems generated by a long war and an autocratic political system. In May 1942 the Germans had adopted a policy that gave the Russian Front first priority for troops and garrisoned the west with those who, because of wounds or other disabilities, were unable to endure the rigors imposed by that theater. Over the year that followed, twenty-two infantry and six armored divisions left France for the Eastern Front, along with the best equipment and men from the divisions that stayed behind. They were replaced by soldiers who were over-age or convalescing from wounds and by units composed of Russian, Italian, and Polish defectors. A few first-line units were present on the Western Front, but most of the rest had been shattered in the east and required replacements and refitting. The weapons they used were often leftovers. The artillery, for example, consisted of more than twenty types of guns, many of Czech or French rather than German manufacture. Training lagged because the men were frequently employed in crash efforts to build fortifications rather than in exercises to sharpen their combat skills.

In theory, the German chain of command in the west was an example of good order. [[Adolf Hitler]] served as supreme commander of the Wehrmacht, the nation's armed forces. The High Command (OKW), led by Field Marshal [[Wilhelm Keitel]], ran the war everywhere except in the Soviet Union. Navy Group West and the Third Air Fleet, in turn, managed Germany's naval and air forces in Western Europe while the ground force, some 58 divisions, came under the Oberbefehlshaber West (OB West), headed by Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt. OB West controlled two army groups, Army Group G. which had charge of the Mediterranean and Atlantic coasts of France, and Army Group B under Field Marshal [[Erwin Rommel]], who had charge of anti-invasion forces along the Channel coast as far south as the Loire River. Rommel commanded two armies: the 15th, guarding the Pas de Calais and the Normandy coast to a line just south of the Seine River with 19 divisions (5 panzer), and the 7th, with 13 divisions (1 panzer), covering the coast from the boundary with the 15th Army to the Loire River.

====German weakness====
So logical on paper, those arrangements masked conditions in the field that were close to Byzantine. Using the operations staff of OKW as an intermediary, Hitler exercised direct control over Rundstedt's OR West. In theory a theater commander, Rundstedt had no authority over air force or naval units based within areas under his jurisdiction. The navy commanded most of the coastal artillery that would be called upon to repel an Allied attack, and the air force controlled the bulk of the antiaircraft and parachute units stationed in the region. Some armor units also came under the administrative supervision of the SS (Schutzstaffel), the elite political army that answered first to Hitler and Berlin rather than to its supposed commanders in the field.

The manner in which Rommel exercised authority at Army Group B was symptomatic of the debilities afflicting the German staff. Subordinate in theory to Rundstedt, Rommel was his equal in rank. Much more forceful than Rundstedt in personality, he came to exercise far more influence than his position would normally have dictated. In addition, as a field marshal, he had the privilege of communicating directly with Hitler outside the chain of command. Thus he had the ability to undercut his superior whenever he wished.

Rommel disagreed with Rundstedt over how best to repel an Allied invasion. Rundstedt placed great reliance on mechanized reserves that could respond quickly and flexibly to an enemy thrust. To that end, he stationed a newly created armored command, Panzer Group West, near Paris. From there, the force could move, as circumstances required, toward the site of an enemy assault in either the Pas de Calais or Normandy.

Understanding the ability of the Allied air forces to isolate a battlefield and inhibit the movement of ground troops, Rommel believed Allied air superiority in France prevented the sort of mobile response Rundstedt envisioned. If Eisenhower's forces gained even the barest foothold on the Continent, he reasoned, they would win the war. To prevent that, German forces would have to repel the invasion at the water's edge through the use of well-dug-in and stationary troop formations on the shoreline. Directing his efforts to that end, Rommel built beach defenses, laid down minefields, and constructed obstacles to entangle Allied landing craft before they reached land. He also applied personally to Hitler, over Rundstedt's head, for control of the panzer divisions he believed he needed to reinforce his design.

Hitler temporized. Agreeing to Rommel's request at first but then returning control of the reserves to Rundstedt when the latter objected, he finally compromised between the two approaches. Three of Panzer Group West's divisions went to Rommel, but OKW maintained control over four others that were to operate as a central reserve. Hitler's caution satisfied neither field marshal and deprived each of the decisive authority over armor that would become critical as the battle for France evolved.

The malaise gripping the Wehrmacht might have made little difference if Hitler had been more forceful in preparing for the inevitable invasion. Although his generals, misled by the Allied deception plan, believed that the main Allied assault would come in the Pas de Calais, he thought that the attack would occur near Caen, and he said as much during March. Yet he failed to push the idea with any vigor, perhaps because he doubted his intuition in the face of his generals' certainty. Lacking any impetus from Hitler, his subordinates took no action on his insight. Based on Allied naval activities, Germany's naval commander in France likewise predicted the true site of the invasion but also neglected to take adequate precautions. He reasoned that the Allies had yet to concentrate the weight of their air power on targets in the region and so were obviously unprepared to carry out the attack.

The ruse enacted by Patton's nonexistent 1st Army Group was not the only reason that German commanders failed to deduce the correct location of the Allied attack. By 1944 Britain's secret services had deprived Germany of its eyes by identifying and either turning or eliminating virtually every enemy agent assigned to their shores. Meanwhile, Allied warships had rendered German naval patrols in the English Channel ineffective, and Allied bombers had destroyed most of the German radar units that might have monitored air and naval traffic near the invasion beaches. A German spy working in the British embassy in Ankara had provided his mentors in Berlin with the code name for the invasion—OVERLORD but the revelation apparently carried little weight and led to no concrete action. German intelligence had also managed to learn that the British Broadcasting Corporation would transmit two lines of a poem by the nineteenth century author Paul Verlaine to warn the French Resistance that the attack was imminent. Even so, that finding was of little use without firm indications of where and when the invasion would occur.

The Luftwaffe might have made the difference by conducting reconnaissance flights over the coastal regions of Great Britain. The Allied buildup was proceeding at a frenzied pace, mainly in the south of England opposite Normandy. Yet no flights of the sort occurred during the critical early months of 1944. German air commanders were preoccupied with the wounds inflicted upon their forces by the Allied bombing campaign and loath to waste valuable pilots on an exercise that, given their enemy's air superiority, would spell virtually certain death for most of those involved.

Despite the impediments dogging German forces, Rommel and Rundstedt still possessed a number of tangible assets that would work to their advantage once the invasion began. The terrain in Normandy where the Allies would land consisted of small fields and pastures ringed by dense, tangled shrubbery, the so-called bocage. Each of them constituted a natural fortification and killing ground. In the same way, the overarching limbs of trees sheltered many rural lanes in the area. German commanders could use those byways as hidden corridors to move men and supplies. Even large, open areas were easily defended. Rommel peppered those that were suitable for the landing of gliders and paratroopers with mines, booby-trapped wooden stakes called Rommel's asparagus, and other obstructions. Since the regions near the mouths of Normandy's rivers and streams were often reclaimed marshlands, the field marshal had his engineers return them to their natural state by opening dikes and floodgates that held in check spring overflows. The deep inundations that followed would claim a number of the paratroopers who dropped into Normandy on the night of the invasion and would inhibit efforts to close the gap between the American forces fighting on OMAHA and UTAH Beaches.

For Hitler and his generals, the invasion represented a moment filled with danger and opportunity. If they failed, German defeat would become inevitable, but if they succeeded they would eliminate for a year or longer any threat to their power from the west. That would enable them to move the bulk of their divisions to the Russian Front, where their forces were sorely pressed. If the approach of the Normandy invasion thus evoked anxiety on the part of the Germans, it was also a source of high expectation.

==The invasion==
As the day of the invasion approached, the weather in the English Channel became stormy. Heavy winds, a five-foot swell at sea, and lowering skies compelled Eisenhower to postpone the assault from 5 to 6 June. Conditions remained poor, but when weathermen predicted that the winds would abate and the cloud cover rise enough on the scheduled day of the attack to permit a go-ahead, Eisenhower reluctantly gave the command. Expecting casualties of up to 80 percent among the airborne forces, he traveled to an air base at Newbury to bid farewell to the members of the 101st Airborne Division before their tow planes and gliders carried them off to battle. A newspaper man who accompanied Eisenhower later told friends he had seen tears in the general's eyes.

The weather actually worked to the Allied advantage. When the BBC broadcast the lines from Verlaine's poem indicating commencement of the attack — ''"Blessent mon coeur d'une longueur monotone"'' ("The violins of autumn wound my heart with monotonous languor") — the 15th Army in the Pas de Calais went on alert, but Rommel's Army Group B headquarters in Normandy did nothing. The weather was so foul that no one believed an invasion possible. Indeed, many commanders at 7th Army had already left for Brittany to participate in an exercise designed, ironically, to simulate an Allied landing in Normandy. Rommel himself was in Germany celebrating his wife's birthday.

====Landing of airborne units====
[[Image:D-day 2.jpg|200px|thumb|right|Soldiers using German tank traps as cover]]
As planned, airborne units led the invasion. Shortly after midnight the British 6th Airborne Division dropped northeast of Caen, near the mouth of the Orne River, where it anchored the British eastern flank by securing bridges over the river and the Caen Canal. On the other side of the invasion area, the U.S. 101st and 82d Airborne Divisions dropped near Ste. Mere-Eglise and Carentan to secure road junctions and beach exits from which the VII Corps could push to capture Cherbourg.

Some of the American airborne troops came to ground near their objectives, but most were scattered over a wide area. A number drowned in the flooded lowlands. Others landed in the midst of German positions, where they were killed or captured. In the hours that followed, nevertheless, paratroopers from the 101st succeeded in clearing much of the way for VII Corps' move inland. The 3d Battalion, 505th Infantry, of the 82d Airborne Division meanwhile captured Ste. Mere-Eglise and cut the main enemy communications cable to Cherbourg.

Other units, entangled in the thickets and hedgerows of the region, failed to achieve their objectives, but by their very presence they sowed confusion in German ranks. Reports began to surface in enemy headquarters all along the line that paratroopers were landing, but little information was available to commanders on the size and meaning of the attack. Was it a probe to test Germany's defenses, a diversion for a larger assault in the Pas de Calais, or the long-awaited invasion itself? The Allies added to the confusion by parachuting dummies wired with firecrackers far to the rear of German positions. The trick drew major enemy units away from the landing zone, where their presence might have done considerable damage to the attackers.

As dawn neared, bombers began to strike up and down the coast, flying the first of what would become, by the end of the day, more than 11,000 sorties against enemy batteries, headquarters, railroad junctions, and troop concentrations. The gliders Eisenhower had watched depart also arrived. Those of the British landed on target as did most of those from the U.S. 101st Airborne Division. Fewer than half of the gliders assigned to the U.S. 82d Airborne reached their assigned landing zones. The rest lodged in hedgerows, struck German obstructions, or floundered in the swollen marshes. By midmorning, 4,000 men of the 82d were still unaccounted for, along with 60 percent of the equipment they had carried.
Although convinced that the disturbances were a diversion for an assault to come in the Pas de Calais, Rundstedt, at 0400 on 6 June, ordered two panzer divisions to move immediately toward Caen to guard against Allied amphibious operations in support of the airborne attack. The units, however, were in OKW reserve. Informed of the order, Rundstedt's superiors at OKW placed it on hold until Hitler himself could concur. Since he was asleep and disliked being awakened, approval took many hours to come and stalled what might have been a powerful German response. The few officers of Rommel's staff present in the area were more energetic. When they learned during the early morning hours that an enormous Allied fleet was approaching the coast, they ordered the 21st Panzer Division to Caen.

By first light at 0530, the entire horizon off Normandy between Caen and Vierville-sur-Mer had filled with the invasion armada. "They came, rank after relentless rank, ten lanes wide, twenty miles across, five thousand ships of every description," wrote one reporter that morning: "Coast Guard cutters, buoy-layers and motor launches," and "a formidable array of 702 warships." The naval bombardment began at 0550, detonating large German minefields and destroying many blockhouses and artillery positions.

====The Normandy landings====
Emerging from behind a screen of smoke, three German torpedo boats attempted briefly to contest the attack, but only one inflicted any damage, sinking the Norwegian destroyer ''Svenner''. It was the sole contribution of the German Navy to the fight that day. The Luftwaffe was equally absent, leading one young soldier to comment later, "We were all more or less expecting...dive bombers...continually backed by high level bombing. But no, nothing like that...The Luftwaffe is obviously smashed."

The Allied bombardment ended precisely on schedule but the landing craft ran late, giving the Germans a brief respite before the troops came ashore. That complicated matters for the British 1 and 30 Corps when they arrived on GOLD, JUNO, and SWORD Beaches at 0700 and for the American VII Corps, which began to debark on UTAH at 0630. On GOLD, the British 50th Division encountered intense German fire at first but rapidly worked its way forward and moved off the beach. On JUNO, the 3d Canadian Division also experienced early difficulties but by the end of the day had reached the Caen-Bayeux highway, inland from the landing zone. Confusion reigned on SWORD, where delivery schedules slipped and succeeding waves of landing craft piled a jumble of men and vehicles at the water's edge. Even so, the troops on SWORD were off the beach within an hour of landing and by dark had joined up with the forces of the British 6th Airborne Division. British and Canadian forces failed to seize Caen because the Germans threw the weight of their resources and their only available armored division into the defense of the city, but they, too, had established themselves well ashore.

The forces that arrived on UTAH also performed ably. Elements of the 4th and 24th Cavalry Squadrons (132 men) of the 4th Cavalry Group landed on the St. Marcouf Islands flanking the beach at 0430, two hours in advance of the main attack. Directed to clear enemy minefields, control points, and observation posts, they found the islands heavily mined but otherwise unoccupied. During the main attack, German artillery managed to sink the U.S. destroyer Corry; swift currents carried the landing craft of the 4th Division well to the south of their target onto a portion of the beach that was only lightly defended; and thirty-two amphibious tanks assigned to land in the first wave of the attack were delayed by the loss of a control vessel that struck a mine. Those setbacks notwithstanding, the assaulting troops quickly took the upper hand. Within three hours the enemy force defending the beach had surrendered and Allied troops and supplies were moving inland. In all, some 23,000 men came ashore at UTAH, at a cost for the day of 197 casualties among the ground forces.

Many men distinguished themselves that morning, among them the 4th Division's Assistant Division Commander, Brig. Gen. Theodore Roosevelt, Jr. Going ashore with the first wave, Roosevelt contributed materially to the success of his forces by personally reconnoitering the area inland from the beach. He then returned to the beachhead time and again, without concern for his own life, to lead groups of his men over a seawall through enemy fire to safety. He earned a [[Medal of Honor]] for his gallantry.

====Omaha====
If the attack went well on UTAH, the situation was quite different on OMAHA. Maj. Gen. Leonard T. Gerow's V Corps came up against the worst conditions encountered that day. High seas swamped many landing craft during the ten-mile run from mother ships to shore. Survivors reached land seasick and wobbling. Well over half (fifty-seven of ninety-six) of the dual-drive amphibious tanks assigned to the landing also went down, victims of heavy seas they had not been designed to withstand. Strong winds and adverse currents likewise pushed a significant number of landing craft away from their designated targets, into areas where commanding officers' maps were useless and supporting fires from friendly ships totally lacking.

Bombing attacks by Allied aircraft and assaults by naval gunfire designed to soften enemy positions did little to improve the situation. Blinded by heavy clouds and concerned lest poorly aimed bombs strike the landing force on the beach, bomber pilots overshot their targets and dropped their loads up to three miles inland. Naval gunners had difficulty zeroing in on their targets. Most of the radios required by artillery spotters ashore had gone down with landing craft that never reached the beach.

OMAHA itself was a tangle of obstructions: concrete cones, slanted poles, logs tilted seaward with mines lashed to their tips, and steel rails welded together at angles and so strongly set into the beach that their ends would stave in the bottoms of landing craft. The Germans had also made good use of a line of cliffs, four miles long and up to one hundred fifty feet in height, that paralleled the length of the landing zone. Dotting the ravines and draws that led through the bluffs with antitank and antipersonnel mines, they had scattered blockhouses, bunkers, and machine gun nests in strategic locations where they could dominate the shoreline below. Unknown to the Americans, the highly disciplined 352d Infantry Division manned many of those fortifications. Its presence in the area had been suspected by some intelligence analysts, but the evidence they presented had proved too uncertain to affect planning for the attack.

The effort to destroy the enemy's beach obstacles was only marginally successful. In the vanguard of the attack, members of the 6th Engineer Brigade and naval demolition units attempted to cut avenues of approach to the beach by blasting lanes through the obstructions. Despite a series of mishaps—of 16 bulldozers, for example, only 3 survived enemy fire and I was prevented from maneuvering freely by American riflemen who sought shelter from incoming rounds in its lee—they succeeded in opening six complete gaps. Even so, they could mark only one for use during high water because all the buoys and poles designated for that purpose had been destroyed by enemy artillery. Casualties for the engineering task force ran to 40 percent, most incurred in the first half-hour of the attack.

As the day lengthened, those conditions combined to produce a near-inferno on OMAHA. Enemy mortar and artillery batteries, unscathed by Allied fire, poured destruction upon the attackers while the invading force time and again appeared to fumble. Allied rocket ships responded, but from extreme range. When their missiles fell short, they hit the troops on the beach. Wreckage at the water's edge accumulated as timetables slipped and landing craft became hopelessly entangled in the barbed wire and projecting beams of uncleared beach obstructions. Even those craft that succeeded in ramming their way forward encountered difficulties. Riding a rising tide, most grounded on unforeseen sandbars located 50 to 100 yards from the surf's edge. There, enemy machine guns claimed a heavy toll of the debarking troops, who had to wade to shore with all their equipment through water that was often neck deep. In the end, perhaps a little more than one-third of the first wave of attackers reached dry land. Lacking most of their heavy weapons, those survivors had little choice but to huddle behind sand dunes and in the lee of a small seawall that ran along the base of the beach. Many soldiers were killed outright, but some, wounded and unable to move, drowned as the tide moved in.

The Germans were elated. Convinced that the attack was faltering, the commander of the 352d Division transferred some of his reserves to the east, where the British appeared a greater threat. General Bradley was distressed and for a time debated whether to cancel the assault and to move the remainder of his force to UTAH Beach.

If chaos ruled at first, order asserted itself as the day lengthened. In some areas, heavy smoke from grass fires and exploding ammunition obscured landing zones and blinded enemy gunners, allowing the attackers to advance largely unopposed. Here and there, as well, tanks arrived, rolling off landing craft that had somehow plowed their way through the obstacles. Bringing their guns to bear, they began to provide the fire support the men on the beach required. The remnants of three companies of Rangers who had come ashore with the first units also did good work. Assigned to destroy a battery of six partially casemated 155-mm. guns thought to be positioned atop a promontory named the Pointe du Hoe, those highly disciplined infantrymen scaled the nearly l00-foot height and cleared it of its German defenders. Although the guns had been moved a few hundred yards inland the Rangers still managed to spike them. They then held their position for two days against waves of counterattacking Germans, incurring losses that would reduce their combat effectives to about ninety men before reinforcements finally arrived.

Unit cohesion had disintegrated among the troops on the beach, especially within the inexperienced 29th Division, but leaders of all ranks asserted themselves and saved the day. "Two kinds of people are staying on this beach," the commander of the 1st Division's 16th Infantry Regiment, Col. George A. Taylor, exclaimed to his men, "the dead and those who are going to die. Now let's get the hell out of here." The sergeants were especially abrupt. Resorting to curses they had hoarded for years, they exhorted their men to get off the beach. The 29th Division's assistant commander, Brig. Gen. Norman D. Cota, was particularly effective. Ignoring enemy fire, he moved up and down the shoreline among his troops, cajoling, rallying, urging them forward through the bluffs.

As the invaders reorganized, Allied destroyers moved close to shore. Risking grounding and almost point-blank fire from enemy batteries, they raked the cliffs with their guns. More and more landing craft also pushed their way to the beach, bringing new troops, heavy weapons, radios, and ammunition.

====The push inland====
Although victorious against the first wave of invaders at OMAHA, the Germans could do little when the force on the beach began to renew itself. With many of their troops off in pursuit of the dummy paratroopers the Allies had dropped far to the rear, they could hold their own from fixed positions but lacked the numbers to drive the invaders back. Thus the Americans kept the ground they gained. Inch by inch they moved forward, up through the bluffs and onto the flatland above. In the absence of much room to maneuver, their attack had been unoriginal, a straightforward frontal assault, but the weight of their numbers and the enormous volume of supplies and equipment they began to bring to bear made the difference. By nightfall, 34,000 men were ashore on OMAHA. The beach itself was a shambles of burning and disabled vehicles, but almost all of the coastal villages located inland were in Allied hands.

The Germans, for their part, were in far worse condition than they seemed. Rommel's Seventh Army, commanded by Generaloberst Friedrich Dollmann, had succeeded in holding its own, but it had employed all of its resources in doing so and lacked the means to mount the sort of counterattack that might have driven the Allies back. Meanwhile, Hitler and Rundstedt remained reluctant to commit the reserves they held in the Pas de Calais because of the threat Patton's phantom army posed. Even if they had acted, Allied bombers might have decimated the force as it moved along the roads of France into Normandy. In the same way, the enemy retained sizable forces in Brittany, but German commanders refused to use them because a second landing from that direction seemed a clear possibility.

Allied losses had been high: 2,500 men at OMAHA alone, another 2,500 among the American airborne divisions, almost 1,100 for the Canadians, and some 3,000 for the British—more than 9,000 men in all, one-third of whom were killed in action. Even so, the number was less than Allied planners had expected. Concerned that Hitler would respond to the invasion with extreme violence and might even resort to poison gas, Eisenhower's chief surgeon, Maj. Gen. Albert W. Kenner, and the Chief Surgeon of the U.S. Army's European Theater of Operations, Maj. Gen. Paul R. Hawley, had prepared their staffs to process at least 12,000 killed and wounded in the First U.S. Army alone.

By the evening of 6 June 1944, Allied power had prevailed all across the Normandy beachhead. The British had failed to seize Caen. The Americans had yet to secure a lodgment far enough inland to keep enemy artillery from hitting supply dumps and unloading points they were building along the invasion beaches. Yet more than 100,000 men had come ashore, the first of millions who would follow.

==The following days==
In keeping with his concept of a mobile defense, Rundstedt wanted to attack the beachhead but Allied fighter-bombers imposed so many delays on the movement of his reserve panzer divisions that he had little choice but to defer the strike until 8 June. While he waited the units that might have formed the counterattack dribbled in piecemeal, and harried commanders plugged them into the line wherever the need was greatest. Filling gaps and sealing off areas of special concern, they never had a chance to deliver the blow Rundstedt had envisioned. The problem would recur time and again in the days that followed. Allied air interdiction efforts were so effective and enemy forces so hard pressed that German commanders were rarely able to mass enough strength in a single place to make a sustained advance.

Over time, Hitler's inflexibility compounded the problem. On 17 June Rundstedt and Rommel requested their leader's permission to withdraw their forces out of the range of naval gunfire before launching an armored attack on the flank of Montgomery's Second Army. Hitler refused. Convinced that the dogged efforts of soldiers who had stood and fought even when surrounded during the Battle of Moscow in 1941 had averted a German collapse, he believed the same would hold true in Normandy. He forbade his commanders to abandon any position voluntarily and ordered them to hold their ground at all costs. Despite their difficulties, the Germans still made good use of the advantages the bocage offered. They turned the region's sunken lanes into trenches and fortifications. The hedgerows—some more than five feet in height and several feet thick—became traps concealing riflemen, machine guns, and infantrymen armed with antitank weapons.

====The hedgerows====
Because they assumed that the Germans would withdraw toward the Seine and fight a delay along the river's lines, the invasion's planners had concentrated on the challenge of getting ashore and had paid scant attention to the impediments posed by the bocage. As a result, Bradley's First Army was unprepared for the difficulties it faced and paid a steep price for each foot of its advance into the region. The experience of the U.S. 90th Division was a case in point. Faced with hostile fire from an invisible enemy, the unit's commanders found the principles of fire and maneuver nearly impossible to apply in the hedgerows, especially the precept that an attacking force should move just behind its artillery in order to confront the enemy while he is still off balance. The division suffered heavy casualties as a result—150 officers and 2,315 enlisted men during June and 310 officers and 5,188 enlisted men during July. More experienced units also suffered terribly in the bocage. A U.S. Army survey of casualties in portions of the 1st, 4th, 9th, and 25th Infantry Divisions between 6 June and 31 July 1944 found that rifle companies lost nearly 60 percent of their enlisted men and over 68 percent of their officers.

The countryside in the British and Canadian sectors — a relatively open, flat, dry expanse stretching from Caen to Paris — was more favorable for offensive warfare. Paradoxically, those conditions made fighting there perhaps more difficult than in the American sector. The nature of the ground and the strategic importance of the area compelled the Germans to mass the bulk of their panzer units and their best troops in the path of Montgomery's forces. They turned the checkerboard of villages that dotted the region into an interlocking, mortar-and-concrete version of the bocage.

Montgomery's commanders appear to have been little more prepared than the Americans for the sort of resistance the Germans mounted. Poorly versed in combined arms tactics, they allowed their tanks to advance without the protection of accompanying infantry units. That approach gave German soldiers wielding highly effective Panzerfausts (the enemy version of the American bazooka) and teams firing formidable, high-velocity antitank cannons a relatively free hand in dealing with the advancing forces.

What Montgomery intended to do remains shrouded in controversy. Time and again he appeared to delay. The terrain and the heavy weight of the German defenses facing his forces were undoubtedly part of the reason. He may also all along have planned to allow the offensive to develop in the direction that time and circumstance dictated, whether in the American sector or his own. In that sense, it is possible that he decided Bradley's front offered the most opportunities and that his own army should concentrate on holding the enemy in place to allow his ally the fullest latitude. Or he may have thought that Allied advances elsewhere would allow him to achieve his objectives without incurring the level of casualties that had consumed an entire generation of his countrymen during World War I. He had been warned of a shortage of infantry replacements well before D-Day. During July the British Adjutant General had underscored the point by personally traveling to Normandy to notify him that some British battalions had already been divided to fill gaps in the line and that divisions might be next. Whatever the reason, Montgomery's forces, commanded by Lt. Gen. Sir Miles Dempsey, took the town of Bayeux and moved several miles inland but, despite three full-scale attempts between 6 June and 1 July, failed to take Caen.

Montgomery's intentions notwithstanding, British efforts were hardly without effect. The attacks his forces launched bled the Germans of strength they could ill afford to lose and kept the enemy's best units concentrated around Caen. That relieved some of the pressure on Bradley to the west, buying time and room for him to consolidate his beachhead on OMAHA and to turn his attention toward the capture of Cherbourg.

In fact, Bradley needed all the help he could get. With the enemy well concealed in the hedgerows, it took an average of five Americans to displace one German defender. Under normal circumstances, a ratio of three to one would have sufficed. "Prior to invasion33' he later wrote, "we had estimated that the infantry would incur 70 percent of the losses of combat forces. By August we had boosted that figure to 83 percent on the basis of our experience in the Normandy hedgerows." Bradley illustrated his point by noting that, in fifteen days of fighting around St. Lo, the 30th Division sustained 3,934 battle casualties, a loss rate of 25 percent for the unit as a whole but of 90 percent in its rifle platoons, where three out of every four casualties occurred.

====Towards Cherbourg====
The flooded marshes of the Merderet River also hampered American progress, as did a great storm that lashed the English Channel between 19 and 21 June. Besides destroying nearly 500 small craft and beaching another 800 well above the high-water mark, the gale slowed the effort to resupply American forces for a time by ruining the mulberry harbor at OMAHA Beach. On 18 June, just before the storm, Allied logisticians had achieved 72.8 percent of their targeted level of supplies to that date. By 22 June, as a result of the storm, that figure had fallen to 57.4 percent. The buildup in vehicle strength fell over the same period from 66 to 57 percent and in personnel from 88 to 77.7 percent. Nevertheless, those impediments proved only temporary. Bradley's logisticians quickly learned to bring what they needed directly across the beach. By the last week in June, OMAHA was averaging 13,500 tons of supplies per day, 115 percent of planned capacity. UTAH, meanwhile, had achieved 7,000 tons per day, 125 percent of its target.

By 18 June Maj. Gen. J. Lawton Collins' VII Corps had cut its way across the Cotentin Peninsula and had severed all roads leading into Cherbourg. Under orders from Hitler "to defend the last bunker and leave to the enemy not a harbor but a field of ruins," the remnants of five German divisions fought back stubbornly. The fighting around the city's main fortification, the Fort du Roule, embedded in a cliff overlooking the harbor, was particularly intense. Coming under attack on 25 June, the stronghold's defenders leveled heavy fire at the attackers from a number of pillboxes and artillery positions.

The fort held out until the men of the 314th, after capturing the upper battlements, crushed diehard resisters by dropping demolitions into the bastion's lower reaches. Shortly thereafter, the city's commander surrendered but, on orders from Hitler relayed by Rommel, refused to instruct his troops to do the same. American psychological warfare officers turned the trick. Dropping surrender leaflets that emphasized dwindling food supplies within the city, they announced that all who came across should bring their mess kits. That evening, twenty days after the offensive had begun, Cherbourg was in friendly hands.

By then, enemy engineers had so thoroughly demolished the city's harbor that it would take three weeks of rebuilding before the facility could open to even minimal shipping and months before it would be able to handle cargo in quantity. That being the case, the victory still provided a much needed boost to Allied morale. Progress had been so slow that Allied leaders had become concerned the attack might bog down into the sort of crippling stalemate that had prevailed on the Western Front during World War I.

As Allied morale rose, that of the Germans fell lower than ever. Hitler himself was unhappy. Exasperated with Rundstedt's continuing doubts and his desire to pull back to more defensible positions, he replaced the field marshal as Commander in Chief West on 2 July with Field Marshal Guenther von Kluge. Although at first optimistic, Kluge rapidly came to sympathize with Rundstedt's point of view.

The fall of Cherbourg offered only temporary consolation to the Allies. By I July they had established a beachhead 70 miles wide and had brought about a million men and 177,000 vehicles ashore. Yet, except around Cherbourg, their lodgment was in no place more than 25 miles deep, and in most areas it extended little more than 5 miles inland.

====Caen and St. Lo====
On 9 July Montgomery launched a massive air assault against Caen in hopes of clearing the way for an attack the following morning. Four hundred fifty heavy aircraft participated, dropping 2,500 tons of bombs, but the airmen negated most of the effect by releasing their loads well back from the forward line to avoid hitting their own troops. As a result, the city incurred heavy damage but German defenses went largely unscathed. In the two days of desperate fighting that followed, the Germans fought back viciously. Montgomery's forces entered Caen and took half the city but moved no farther. Casualty rates during the battle were appalling. Most infantry battalions sustained losses of 25 percent.

Bradley's advance on St. Lo was also an agony. Daily rains reduced visibility and negated much of the value of Allied air support. As with the British at Caen, the casualty rate was alarming. The 30th Division sustained some 3,000 killed and wounded between 7 and 20 July; the 9th suffered 2,500 between the 10th and the 20th.

Bradley's forces were nonetheless gradually learning how to fight in the bocage. Tank and infantry units began to support each other. The tanks supplied the heavy firepower needed to eliminate the enemy's well-sited firing positions while the infantry kept enemy soldiers with antitank weapons at bay. The tankers also found a way to cross the hedgerows without exposing their vehicles' vulnerable undersides to enemy fire. With huge iron teeth salvaged from German beach obstacles welded to the fronts of hundreds of tanks, they began to bull their way through the hedgerows, taking hours to advance through obstacles that would earlier have required days of fighting to overcome. From then on, the Rhinos, as the men named them, became an invaluable asset to Bradley. They allowed American armor to move across country at will while German tanks had to continue to make do with the roads.

By 15 July American forces had reached the outskirts of St. Lo, but the garrison holding the town refused yield. In a battle that inflicted carnage reminiscent of World War I, the Germans gave ground only gradually, house by house. On one occasion, as a result, American riflemen used a bulldozer to bury three German soldiers who refused to surrender their position. By 18 July the attackers had succeeded. A task force from the 29th Division under General Cota entered the town. Cota carried with him the body of Maj. Thomas D. Howie, who had commanded the 3d Battalion of the 116th Infantry. Several days earlier, Howie and his men had crept undetected through early morning mist to reinforce an isolated battalion less than 1,000 yards from St. Lo. Ordered to move his unit to the eastern edge of the town, despite his own exhaustion and that of his men, Howie had responded without hesitation, "Will do." A few moments later an enemy shell had ended his life. The commander of the 29th Division, Maj. Gen. Charles H. Gerhardt, considered Howie's response an example of the patriotic self-sacrifice that had carried the Army through to that point. By honoring Howie he could remind his men of the perseverance and courage of all those who had given their lives at St. Lo.

On the same day, the British launched a major attack beyond Caen but again allowed their tanks to advance without supporting infantry and failed to inflict a decisive blow. In response Kluge increased the concentration of German troops around the city, adding two armored divisions that might have done invaluable work against Bradley in the bocage. As a result, 7 panzer divisions and 4 heavy tank battalions guarded Caen while only 2 panzer divisions confronted the Americans. Even those forces were sorely depleted. By the last week in July, according to ULTRA intercepts of coded German radio communications, the enemy in Normandy had sustained casualties of more than 100,000 enlisted men and 2,360 officers killed and wounded. On 17 July misfortune touched Rommel himself. Two British Spitfire fighters attacked his open car—ironically, near a village named Ste. Foy de Montgommery—and drove it into a ditch. Thrown from the vehicle, Rommel suffered head injuries so grievous that he had to return to Germany for treatment. Kluge succeeded him, assuming command of Army Group B while retaining his position as Commander in Chief West.

The Allies, for their part, had brought four years of planning and hard work to completion. Exhausted and battle-worn, they had at last reached the Periers-St. Lo road. From there the land was dry and the country relatively open. The final act of the war, the great push through France into Germany itself, could now begin.

==Analysis==
It had been a grim fight. Six weeks of battle had left the Germans disheartened and susceptible to any farther blow the Allies might deliver. "It was casualty reports, casualty reports, casualty reports wherever you went," Rommel told his son Manfred from his sickbed. "I have never fought with such losses...And the worst of it is that it was all without sense or purpose." Indeed, Rommel continued, on some days the equivalent of a regiment of his men had fallen in Normandy—more than in a whole summer of fighting in Africa during 1942.

The days had been filled with mud, heartache, and pain for the Allies as well. From the very beginning, little had seemed to go right. The airborne assault on the night before the landing had sown confusion among the enemy and had provided an important diversion, but too many of the men had landed too far from their targets. As a result, the effort had only a marginal effect on the developing battle. Over the days that followed, rather than withdrawing beyond the Seine as Allied planners had expected, the Germans had hung on tenaciously, taking brutal losses but inflicting them upon the Allies as well. Meanwhile, Montgomery's careful plan for the attack had begun to unravel on D-Day itself. His forces failed to take Caen, the key to further operations in the open country to the south. Attacking time and again as the campaign developed, they had nonetheless held the cream of the German force in place, absorbing pressure that would almost inevitably have fallen upon Bradley's forces in the bocage.

As for the Americans, the landing on OMAHA Beach had been a near-disaster averted only by the courage of unsung sailors and soldiers. When air attacks and naval gunfire had failed to silence German guns and the momentum of the assault had begun to lag, those heroes had pushed their frail landing craft to shore despite the traps and obstacles blocking their way. Rallying to the directions of their commanders, they had then climbed the bluffs overlooking the beach and advanced inland, often at the cost of their own lives. In the same way, although Maj. Gen. J. Lawton Collins' VII Corps captured the port of Cherbourg on 29 June, the American advance bogged down in the hedgerows. Bradley's First Army absorbed forty thousand casualties while slowly advancing twenty miles to St. Lo.

Even so, enough went well for the campaign to succeed. Roosevelt, Marshall, Eisenhower, Churchill, and Montgomery were master communicators who bonded an unwieldy coalition into an extraordinary fighting machine. The plan they and their staffs devised failed to foresee every circumstance that would occur on the battlefield, particularly the difficulties Bradley's forces would encounter in the bocage, but it was still a masterpiece of innovation that provided ample means for Allied commanders to prevail. Cunning deceptions kept the Germans transfixed on the Pas de Calais until long after the real invasion had occurred; Allied airmen swept the skies clean of the enemy fighters and bombers that might have imposed a heavy toll upon the landing force; and the effort to build up the stocks of supplies and munitions necessary for an effective attack succeeded beyond the most optimistic expectation. In the end, notwithstanding, it was the heroism of infantrymen such as Major Howie, who rose day and night to the challenge despite almost overwhelming fear and fatigue, that afforded the critical margin for success.

A barely failed assassination attempt upon Hitler's life, implicating Rommel himself, brought about a purge of officers in Germany that would, for a time, strengthen Hitler's control over his armed forces. Although the Germans would fight on with resilience and determination for another ten months, their line in France would soon break, Patton's army would swing clear, Paris would fall, and Allied forces would approach the Rhine. The loss of France would deprive Germany not only of a major source of Mod, raw resources, and labor but also of seaports that had long sheltered its U-boats and of radar sites that had afforded early warning of Allied bomber attacks. More important, it would provide the Allies with the secure base they needed to launch their final offensive against the German heartland. As Rommel told his son, the future was clear and inevitable. The end of Hitler's Reich was at hand: "There is no longer anything we can do."

{| style="width: 100%; background:transparent; border: 2px solid #000099;" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="1"
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{{DEFAULTSORT:Overlord, Operation}}
[[Category:World War II]]

Operation Overlord

2008-07-24T22:16:21Z

Darkmind1970: /* British views */

[[Image:normandy.jpg|300px|thumb|right|American troops disembark under heavy fire at ''Omaha'', the code name for their section of the Normandy coastline]]
'''Operation Overlord''', also known as the '''Normandy Invasion''' or simply '''D-Day''', was the code name for the Allied invasion of northern [[Europe]] in [[World War II]]. It began with the landings on the beaches of [[Normandy]] in northwestern France on June 6, 1944, and accomplished the largest amphibious invasion in the history of mankind, using 200,000 men, 9,000 planes, and 5,000 ships.

==Strategic Setting==
The British Chiefs of Staff charged Admiral Lord [[Louis Mountbatten]] and his Combined Operations Headquarters in September 1941 with investigating the feasibility of amphibious operations in the European theater of the war. Earlier, Admiral Sir Roger Keyes had undertaken some planning for commando raids, but Mountbatten was to do more. "You are to prepare for the invasion of Europe," British Prime Minister [[Winston Churchill]] told him. "You must devise and design the appliances, the landing craft, and the technique...The whole of the South Coast of England is a bastion of defense against the invasion of Hitler; you've got to turn it into the springboard for our attack."

American planners began formal cooperation with Britain in December 1941, just after the Japanese attack at [[Attack on Pearl Harbor|Pearl Harbor]] and the German and Italian declarations of war against the United States. In compliance with earlier, informal understandings, the two partners agreed to put first the defeat of [[Germany]] and its ally [[Italy]] if forced to wage a two-front war against both those nations and Japan. Shortly thereafter, British planners drafted a proposal, code-named ROUNDUP, for an attack across the English Channel into France. The assault would come only after a series of major campaigns on the periphery of Europe, in [[Scandinavia]], the [[Mediterranean Sea]], the [[Balkans]], and the [[Soviet Union]], where the Germans would have difficulty massing their power. Once bombing, blockade, partisan uprisings, and the fighting on those other fronts had weakened the enemy sufficiently, ROUNDUP, or something like it, would begin.

Despite talk that a Continental invasion might come as early as 1942, Allied leaders in the end decided tentatively to make the assault in 1943, either through Western Europe or the Balkans. Because British forces would bear the burden of operations in Europe until the United States could complete its buildup for war, the decisions that came out of the conference hewed closely to Britain's preference for attacks on Germany's periphery. Although the British later accepted an American proposal, code-named BOLERO, for the establishment in Britain of a million-man force trained and equipped for the 1943 invasion, the United States agreed that during 1942 Allied forces should concentrate on wearing down Germany's resistance through air attacks, operations along the North African coast, and assistance to the Soviet Union.

====Initial disagreements====
Allied leaders honed their strategy further at a series of great conferences during 1942 and 1943—at Casablanca, [[Quebec]], [[Cairo]], and [[Tehran]]. Examining a range of alternatives, they gradually adopted the broad outlines of the attack they would launch. As planning continued, however, it became clear that the Americans disagreed ardently with the British desire to wear down the Germans before beginning a final confrontation on the Continent. Confident in the strength of their vast resources, American planners argued that "wars cannot be finally won without the use of land armies" and that only direct action against the main body of the German force could produce an Allied victory. Britain's peripheral approach, they asserted, would waste valuable assets on operations that could have at best an indirect effect on the outcome of the war. There was also the Soviet Union to consider, which had suffered millions of casualties in its fight with the Germans on the Eastern Front and might conceivably collapse and conclude a separate peace if Britain and the United States failed to relieve some of the pressure by attacking in the west. Soviet leader Joseph Stalin was already clamoring for a second front. To the Americans it seemed far better to seize the initiative from Germany with a bold assault than to allow the alliance's resources to dribble away in operations that would have little long-term effect on the enemy's will to resist.

====British views====
The British viewed the situation in Europe with an eye closely focused on their own circumstances and experience. As conscious of their nation's lack of resources as the Americans were of the vast wealth available to the United States, they had already withstood a disaster at Dunkirk in 1940, when the Germans had driven a British army off the Continent in defeat, and at the French seacoast town of Dieppe in August 1942, when the Germans, at great cost to the Allies, had repelled a Canadian landing. Their experiences with amphibious warfare during World War I had been little better. Their forces had endured a bloodletting at [[Gallipoli]] in the [[Dardanelles]], where landings championed by Churchill had failed. They had also lost an entire generation of young men to trench warfare on the stalemated Western Front in France. Britain's leaders thus had visions of catastrophe whenever the Americans raised the issue of a cross-Channel attack. If haste prevailed over reason, Churchill warned, the beaches of France might well be "choked with the bodies of the flower of American and British manhood."

If the British had agreed in principle at the [[Arcadia Conference]] to an early attack across the Channel, by the end of 1942 they had nevertheless succeeded in shifting many of the resources marked for Bolero to TORCH, an Allied invasion of North Africa much more in accord with their own point of view. The American military had little choice but to go along. They not only lacked the landing craft, warplanes, and shipping necessary to carry out a cross-Channel attack, they also had to contend with their commander in chief, President Roosevelt, who had become convinced that some sort of immediate action against Germany was necessary to divert the attention of the American people from the Pacific to the Atlantic side of the war.

The vehement German response to the assault at Dieppe, resulting in the loss of nearly a thousand British and Canadian lives, the capture of more than two thousand fighting men, and the destruction of better than one hundred aircraft, weighed heavily upon American planners. If the German response at Dieppe was any indication, an invasion of the Continent would require more meticulous preparation and more strength than a 1943 attack could possibly allow. Indeed, Allied planners and logisticians would have to create, field, and supply an organization that could meet and defeat the worst counterattack the enemy was capable of devising.

The British point of view prevailed for much of the next year, causing Allied forces to fight on the fringes of the enemy's power in Sicily and southern Italy. By the middle of 1943, however, with victory in North Africa in hand, the fall of Italy near, and the first Russian victories in the east, the Americans renewed their call for a cross-Channel attack. A crash effort in the United States to construct shallow-draft landing vessels and long-range fighter aircraft had assured that at least minimum resources would be available to move a major force onto the beaches of France and to protect it from air attack. Meanwhile, the success of the anti-U-boat campaign in the Atlantic had guaranteed that the vast supplies of ammunition and provisions necessary for the invasion could move safely from the United States to staging areas in Great Britain.

Although British leaders continued to advocate their peripheral strategy, the importance of American resources to the war effort had become so great that they had little choice but to go along with their ally. At the [[Casablanca Conference]] of January 1943 they thus agreed in principle to a 1944 invasion of the Continent. Shortly thereafter, the British General Staff appointed Lt. Gen. Frederick E. Morgan to be Chief of Staff (COS) to a still to be appointed Supreme Allied Commander (SAC) and gave him responsibility for planning the attack. By April 1943 Morgan had established an organization to carry out that task and had named it COSSAC after the initials in his new title. He warned his officers at that time to avoid thinking of themselves as planners and to see themselves instead as the embryo of a future supreme headquarters. "The term planning staff has come to have a most sinister meaning," he observed. "It implies the production of nothing but paper. What we must contrive to do somehow is to produce not only paper but action."

Under Churchill's influence, the British for a time continued to argue in favor of possible operations in the Balkans. The Americans, however, suspected that their ally was more interested in securing a postwar empire than in defeating Germany as soon as possible. Refusing further delays, they won agreement for a 1 May 1944 attack during the May 1943 Trident Conference in Washington. One month later, the Quadrant Conference in Quebec reaffirmed the decision.

Soviet Premier [[Joseph Stalin]] strengthened the Americans' hand during the Tehran Conference in November. He had reacted furiously to news after the Casablanca Conference that there would be no second front in 1943. At Tehran he welcomed the new emphasis on an attack and pushed vigorously for the appointment of a supreme commander to head the operation. From then on, the Americans were able to argue that any postponement of the invasion would constitute a breach of faith with the Russians. Wrangling continued over the Italian campaign and a possible invasion of southern France, code-named ANVIL, the flow of men and supplies to the Mediterranean theater slowed and the final buildup for the cross-Channel attack began in earnest.

====Selection of Eisenhower====
The selection of a commander for Allied forces required considerable thought. If the invasion had occurred early in the war, the British would have supplied the bulk of the resources and would have controlled the operation. Churchill had tentatively selected General Sir Alan Brooke for the task. But as the war lengthened and American resources became predominant, the selection of an American commander seemed appropriate. Roosevelt and Churchill first inclined toward the man who had played the principal role in coordinating the overall American military effort, U.S. Army Chief of Staff General [[George C. Marshall]]. When Roosevelt decided that Marshall's presence in Washington was indispensable, the Allies agreed on General [[Dwight D. Eisenhower]], another well-experienced officer and the commander of Allied forces in North Africa and the Mediterranean. In the end, Eisenhower would serve as Supreme Allied Commander in Europe and as commanding general of all U.S. forces in the European Theater of Operations.

Appointed as Supreme Commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force in December 1943, Eisenhower selected his former chief of staff in the Mediterranean, Lt. Gen. [[Walter Bedell Smith]], to be his chief of staff in Europe. Smith transformed COSSAC into the supreme headquarters Morgan had envisioned and installed Morgan as his deputy. Aware of British sensitivities and attuned to the political difficulties that might develop if American generals came to dominate Allied councils, Eisenhower selected his principal commanders from among the British. Air Chief Marshal Sir Arthur Tedder became the Deputy Supreme Allied Commander and principal coordinator of the theater's air forces, and Admiral Sir Bertram Ramsay served as naval commander for the invasion. An American, Lt. Gen. Carl Spaatz, commanded U.S. Strategic Air Forces in Europe, while an Englishman, Air Chief Marshal Sir Arthur T. Harris, commanded the Royal Air Force's Bomber Command. Air Chief Marshal Sir Trafford Leigh-Mallory headed those portions of the Allied air forces concerned with tactical air support.

If the tactical air forces for the invasion were clearly under Eisenhower, there was disagreement over whether he commanded the strategic air forces employed in bombing Germany. Spaatz and Harris were disposed to cooperate with Eisenhower but insisted on remaining independent in order to concentrate on destroying Germany's industrial base and air force. After considerable give and take, an arrangement suitable to all sides emerged. Subject to the oversight of the Combined Chiefs of Staff, a joint committee composed of the British Chiefs of Staff and their American counterparts, Eisenhower gained responsibility for the "direction" of strategic air forces. It was understood, however, that the cross-Channel attack, code-named Operation OVERLORD, would not absorb the entire bomber effort and that the air campaign against Germany would continue.

Eisenhower asked General Sir [[Bernard Law Montgomery]], who had led the Eighth Army in North Africa, Sicily, and Italy, and who had become the commander of the 21st Army Group for the invasion, to serve as pro tem commander of the Allied ground forces coming ashore in France. Montgomery would carry out final planning and coordinate the early phases of the attack. Two commanders would serve under Montgomery: Lt. Gen. [[Omar Nelson Bradley]] would head the American force, the First U.S. Army; General Sir Miles Dempsey would lead the Second British Army, composed of British, Canadian, and a handful of French troops. The Third U.S. Army, commanded by Lt. Gen. [[George S. Patton]], Jr., would enter the battle after the Allies had achieved a secure lodgment on the Continent. It would join the First U.S. Army, now commanded by Lt. Gen. Courtney Hodges, to form the 12th Army Group under Bradley. Lt. Gen. Henry D. G. Crerar's First Canadian Army would join Dempsey under Montgomery.

==Creating the general plan==
During the summer of 1943, COSSAC had formulated a tentative plan of attack that involved a force of from three to five divisions. That assault would depend for supply upon the development of two prefabricated harbors, called "mulberries", that were to be positioned along with breakwaters composed of scuttled ships just off the invasion beaches. The mulberries would give the Allies a measure of flexibility by allowing them to provision the force moving inland without having to rely upon the immediate capture of an established port.

====Landing site====
As COSSAC developed that plan, the question of where to land posed problems. The site would have to be within the range of fighter aircraft based in Great Britain but also on ground flat enough to construct the airfields that would become necessary once the invading force moved off the beaches and out of the range of its initial fighter support. The landing zones themselves would have to be sheltered from prevailing winds to facilitate around-the-clock resupply operations and would have to possess enough exits to allow the invading force to proceed inland with as little difficulty as possible. Similarly, the area behind the beaches would have to include a road network adequate to the needs of a force that intended to move rapidly. Since the region would ultimately form a base for the drive across France toward Germany, a series of large ports would also have to be close enough to facilitate the unloading of the massive quantities of supplies and ammunition that would be necessary to sustain the attack.

The most appropriate location, COSSAC's planners decided, lay directly across the English Channel from Dover in the Pas de Calais region. The area fulfilled many of the Allies' requirements and offered a direct route into the heart of Germany. Since the enemy had recognized that fact, however, and had already begun to construct heavy fortifications along the coast, an alternative had to be found. The most suitable stood farther to the west, along the Normandy coast near Caen and the Cotentin Peninsula. That region contained major ports at Cherbourg and Le Havre and offered a gateway to ports at Brest, Nantes, L'Orient, and St. Nazaire. Allied planners believed that the Germans would undoubtedly sabotage Cherbourg, forcing the invaders to place heavy initial reliance upon the mulberries, but the damage could be repaired and the region itself was less strongly defended than the Pas de Calais. Offering, as well, a satisfactory opening into the French interior, it became the site of the invasion.

====Looking towards Normandy====
As planning continued, both Eisenhower and Montgomery recognized that the three-to-five-division assault COSSAC had envisioned would have to be strengthened and spread over a larger area. Looking toward the early capture of Cherbourg and the secure flow of supplies that port would ensure, Montgomery argued in favor of a broad attack somewhat west of Caen. Stretching from the area below that city into the region beyond the town of St. Martin-de-Varreville, the front he envisioned would have a breadth of some sixty miles. When Morgan's planners responded that a bridgehead of that size would require resources far in excess of those available, Montgomery asserted that nothing less would work and that the Allies would either have to find the means or another commander.

Montgomery's insistence led to a sometimes acrimonious debate over the value of ANVIL, a plan to invade southern France that Eisenhower wanted to schedule simultaneously with OVERLORD. The invasion's planners considered the attack important and the conferees at Tehran had endorsed it, but the British — particularly Churchill — had never seen its merit. Hesitant at first to cancel the operation because it seemed a necessary diversion for the main effort in the Cotentin, Eisenhower in the end agreed to a postponement. Given the enlarged scope of OVERLORD, no other alternative seemed possible. There were too few landing craft to go around.

Although the debate over ANVIL continued, by 23 January 1944 the Allies had settled on a basic plan of attack for Normandy. The Americans would take the western flank closest to Cherbourg while the British operated to the east, on the approaches to Caen. Logistics determined the arrangement. American forces had arrived in Britain via the country's western ports and had positioned depots in those areas. It made sense for them to operate near those bases. In addition, responding to the congestion in Britain's ports brought on by preparations for the invasion, American logisticians planned to load ships in the United States for direct discharge onto the beaches of France, without an intermediate unloading in Britain. The western flank was closer to that line of supply.

====Finalizing the plan====
On the night before the invasion, the U.S. 82d and 101st Airborne Divisions would land by parachute and glider near the town of Ste. Mere-Eglise, securing the roads that led from the shoreline and obstructing enemy efforts to reinforce beach defenses. The next morning Bradley's First Army would arrive. The VII Corps would put the U.S. 4th Division ashore on UTAH Beach near les Dunes de Varreville.

To the east, the V Corps, composed of the U.S. 1st and portions of the 29th Infantry Divisions, would land on OMAHA Beach near the town of Vierville-sur-Mer. With a foothold secure in Normandy, V Corps would expand the beachhead to the south while VII Corps cut across the Contentin Peninsula and then wheeled north to capture Cherbourg. With the seaport in hand, VII Corps was to turn south and move toward the town of St. Lo. Once Bradley held the town and the St. Lo-Periers Road, he would have his army on dry ground suitable for offensive operations by mechanized forces. Patton's Third Army would then take to the field. Advancing into Brittany, it would seize Brest and other ports and cover the south flank when the First Army began an attack to the northeast toward Paris. To the east, the Second British Army would operate in the region between Bayeux and Caen, an area that possessed suitable sites for airfields and that offered a relatively unimpeded route to Paris. As in the American sector, an airborne division, the British 6th, would secure the northeastern flank of the operation, dropping during the hours before dawn near Caen and the mouth of the Orne River. At H-hour, the British 50th Division under the British 30 Corps would come ashore on GOLD Beach, near Bayeux and the American zone, while 1 Corps conducted a two-pronged attack farther to the east. There, the 3d Canadian Division would cross JUNO Beach near the town of Courseulles and the British 3d Division would come ashore at SWORD, near Lion-sur-Mer. "In the initial stages," Montgomery told his officers, "we should concentrate on gaining control quickly of the main centres of road communications. We should then push our armoured formations between and beyond these centres and deploy them on suitable ground. In this way it would be difficult for the enemy to bring up his reserves and get them past these armoured formations."

Over all, Allied planners intended to gain a lodgment between the Seine and Loire Rivers. Assuming that the Germans, after initial resistance, would choose to withdraw their forces behind the natural barrier provided by the Seine, they estimated that the task would take about ninety days. After a pause to regroup and resupply, the Allies would then begin an advance into the regions beyond the Seine and toward Germany.

====Troop buildup in England====
As planning continued, the BOLERO buildup in Britain, begun in 1942 to arm and provision the invasion, took on new momentum. With 39 divisions slated to participate in the invasion—20 American, 14 British, 3 Canadian, 1 French, and 1 Polish—along with hundreds of thousands of service troops, there was little time to waste. The number of U.S. fighting men based in Great Britain alone would double in the first six months of 1944, rising from 774,000 at the beginning of the year to 1,537,000 in the week preceding the final assault. More than 16 million tons of supplies would be needed to feed and supply those men and their allies: six and one-quarter pounds of rations per day per man; 137,000 jeeps, trucks, and half-tracks; 4,217 tanks and fully tracked vehicles; 3,500 artillery pieces; 12,000 aircraft; and huge stores of sundries—everything from dental amalgam for fillings to chewing gum and candy bars.

Quarters and depots to house the entire force mushroomed across the English countryside, many in just the seventeen weeks that preceded the invasion. The fields of Somerset and Cornwall became armories for the vast stores of bombs and artillery shells that the operation would require. The congestion extended to Britain's harbors, where ships laden with more supplies stood by. By the day of the attack, besides the immense force of fighting ships that would land the troops in Normandy and of cargo vessels that continued to ply Atlantic supply routes, more than 3 million deadweight tons of merchant shipping were in direct service to the invasion. The huge size of the buildup notwithstanding, landing craft were in such short supply that Eisenhower postponed the invasion for one month, from May to June.

While logisticians laid the base for the invasion, the Allied air forces opened the way for the attack itself by waging massive bombing campaigns in Germany and France. In Germany, between January and June 1944, Allied fighters swept the skies clear of German warplanes and took a heavy toll in pilots. As a result, by June 1944 the enemy lacked both the aircraft and the airmen to mount more than a token resistance to Allied plans.

==Deception==
Meanwhile, in France, as members of the French resistance cut railroad tracks, sabotaged locomotives, and targeted supply trains, Allied aircraft bombed roads, bridges, and rail junctions to prevent the Germans from moving reinforcements toward the invasion beaches. To deceive the enemy's intelligence agencies, the attacks occurred along the entire length of the Channel coast. By June, despite intelligence reports questioning the value of the attacks, all rail routes across the Seine River north of Paris were closed; the transportation system in France was at the point of collapse.

Deception was, indeed, a major part of the Allied campaign plan. To mislead the Germans into believing that the Pas de Calais, rather than the Cotentin, would be the site of the invasion, Eisenhower's staff created a mythical 1st Army Group, with an order of battle larger than that of Montgomery's 21st Army Group. Basing the phantom force near Dover, just across the Channel from the supposed target, the planners then set construction crews to building dummy installations of plywood and canvas and dotted them with an array of inflatable tanks and vehicles. They also anchored a vast armada of rubber landing craft in the Thames River estuary, where German reconnaissance aircraft were certain to spot them. Eisenhower assigned Patton, the American general the Germans most respected, to command the phantom army and saw to it that known enemy agents received information on the status of Patton's force. Allied naval units conducted protracted maneuvers off the Channel coast near the location of the shadow army, and components of Patton's fictitious command indulged in extensive radio trafficking to signal to German intelligence analysts that a major military organization was functioning. A careful plan of aerial bombardment complemented the ploy. During the weeks preceding the invasion, Allied airmen dropped more bombs on the Pas de Calais than anywhere else in France.

To protect the date of the invasion from prying German eyes, the Allies called it [[D-Day]], which carried no implications of any sort. NEPTUNE, the code name they used in place of OVERLORD on planning documents after September 1943, was similarly devoid of connotation. Although American commanders doubted that their ruses would have much effect, their schemes succeeded far beyond expectations. The Germans became so convinced that the Pas de Calais would be the Allied target that they held to the fiction until long after the actual attack had begun. As a result, nineteen powerful enemy divisions, to include important panzer reserves, stood idle on the day of the invasion, awaiting an assault that never came, when their presence in Normandy might have told heavily against the Allied attack.

==German planning==
For their part, enemy forces labored against problems generated by a long war and an autocratic political system. In May 1942 the Germans had adopted a policy that gave the Russian Front first priority for troops and garrisoned the west with those who, because of wounds or other disabilities, were unable to endure the rigors imposed by that theater. Over the year that followed, twenty-two infantry and six armored divisions left France for the Eastern Front, along with the best equipment and men from the divisions that stayed behind. They were replaced by soldiers who were over-age or convalescing from wounds and by units composed of Russian, Italian, and Polish defectors. A few first-line units were present on the Western Front, but most of the rest had been shattered in the east and required replacements and refitting. The weapons they used were often leftovers. The artillery, for example, consisted of more than twenty types of guns, many of Czech or French rather than German manufacture. Training lagged because the men were frequently employed in crash efforts to build fortifications rather than in exercises to sharpen their combat skills.

In theory, the German chain of command in the west was an example of good order. [[Adolf Hitler]] served as supreme commander of the Wehrmacht, the nation's armed forces. The High Command (OKW), led by Field Marshal [[Wilhelm Keitel]], ran the war everywhere except in the Soviet Union. Navy Group West and the Third Air Fleet, in turn, managed Germany's naval and air forces in Western Europe while the ground force, some 58 divisions, came under the Oberbefehlshaber West (OB West), headed by Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt. OB West controlled two army groups, Army Group G. which had charge of the Mediterranean and Atlantic coasts of France, and Army Group B under Field Marshal [[Erwin Rommel]], who had charge of anti-invasion forces along the Channel coast as far south as the Loire River. Rommel commanded two armies: the 15th, guarding the Pas de Calais and the Normandy coast to a line just south of the Seine River with 19 divisions (5 panzer), and the 7th, with 13 divisions (1 panzer), covering the coast from the boundary with the 15th Army to the Loire River.

====German weakness====
So logical on paper, those arrangements masked conditions in the field that were close to Byzantine. the operations staff of OKW as an intermediary, Hitler exercised direct control over Rundstedt's OR West. In theory a theater commander, Rundstedt had no authority over air force or naval units based within areas under his jurisdiction. The navy commanded most of the coastal artillery that would be called upon to repel an Allied attack, and the air force controlled the bulk of the antiaircraft and parachute units stationed in the region. Some armor units also came under the administrative supervision of the SS (Schutzstaffel), the elite political army that answered first to Hitler and Berlin rather than to its supposed commanders in the field.

The manner in which Rommel exercised authority at Army Group B was symptomatic of the debilities afflicting the German staff. Subordinate in theory to Rundstedt, Rommel was his equal in rank. Much more forceful than Rundstedt in personality, he came to exercise far more influence than his position would normally have dictated. In addition, as a field marshal, he had the privilege of communicating directly with Hitler outside the chain of command. Thus he had the ability to undercut his superior whenever he wished.

Rommel disagreed with Rundstedt over how best to repel an Allied invasion. Rundstedt placed great reliance on mechanized reserves that could respond quickly and flexibly to an enemy thrust. To that end, he stationed a newly created armored command, Panzer Group West, near Paris. From there, the force could move, as circumstances required, toward the site of an enemy assault in either the Pas de Calais or Normandy.

Understanding the ability of the Allied air forces to isolate a battlefield and inhibit the movement of ground troops, Rommel believed Allied air superiority in France prevented the sort of mobile response Rundstedt envisioned. If Eisenhower's forces gained even the barest foothold on the Continent, he reasoned, they would win the war. To prevent that, German forces would have to repel the invasion at the water's edge through the use of well-dug-in and stationary troop formations on the shoreline. Directing his efforts to that end, Rommel built beach defenses, laid down minefields, and constructed obstacles to entangle Allied landing craft before they reached land. He also applied personally to Hitler, over Rundstedt's head, for control of the panzer divisions he believed he needed to reinforce his design.

Hitler temporized. Agreeing to Rommel's request at first but then returning control of the reserves to Rundstedt when the latter objected, he finally compromised between the two approaches. Three of Panzer Group West's divisions went to Rommel, but OKW maintained control over four others that were to operate as a central reserve. Hitler's caution satisfied neither field marshal and deprived each of the decisive authority over armor that would become critical as the battle for France evolved.

The malaise gripping the Wehrmacht might have made little difference if Hitler had been more forceful in preparing for the inevitable invasion. Although his generals, misled by the Allied deception plan, believed that the main Allied assault would come in the Pas de Calais, he thought that the attack would occur near Caen, and he said as much during March. Yet he failed to push the idea with any vigor, perhaps because he doubted his intuition in the face of his generals' certainty. Lacking any impetus from Hitler, his subordinates took no action on his insight. Based on Allied naval activities, Germany's naval commander in France likewise predicted the true site of the invasion but also neglected to take adequate precautions. He reasoned that the Allies had yet to concentrate the weight of their air power on targets in the region and so were obviously unprepared to carry out the attack.

The ruse enacted by Patton's nonexistent 1st Army Group was not the only reason that German commanders failed to deduce the correct location of the Allied attack. By 1944 Britain's secret services had deprived Germany of its eyes by identifying and either turning or eliminating virtually every enemy agent assigned to their shores. Meanwhile, Allied warships had rendered German naval patrols in the English Channel ineffective, and Allied bombers had destroyed most of the German radar units that might have monitored air and naval traffic near the invasion beaches. A German spy working in the British embassy in Ankara had provided his mentors in Berlin with the code name for the invasion—OVERLORD but the revelation apparently carried little weight and led to no concrete action. German intelligence had also managed to learn that the British Broadcasting Corporation would transmit two lines of a poem by the nineteenth century author Paul Verlaine to warn the French Resistance that the attack was imminent. Even so, that finding was of little use without firm indications of where and when the invasion would occur.

The Luftwaffe might have made the difference by conducting reconnaissance flights over the coastal regions of Great Britain. The Allied buildup was proceeding at a frenzied pace, mainly in the south of England opposite Normandy. Yet no flights of the sort occurred during the critical early months of 1944. German air commanders were preoccupied with the wounds inflicted upon their forces by the Allied bombing campaign and loath to waste valuable pilots on an exercise that, given their enemy's air superiority, would spell virtually certain death for most of those involved.

Despite the impediments dogging German forces, Rommel and Rundstedt still possessed a number of tangible assets that would work to their advantage once the invasion began. The terrain in Normandy where the Allies would land consisted of small fields and pastures ringed by dense, tangled shrubbery, the so-called bocage. Each of them constituted a natural fortification and killing ground. In the same way, the overarching limbs of trees sheltered many rural lanes in the area. German commanders could use those byways as hidden corridors to move men and supplies. Even large, open areas were easily defended. Rommel peppered those that were suitable for the landing of gliders and paratroopers with mines, booby-trapped wooden stakes called Rommel's asparagus, and other obstructions. Since the regions near the mouths of Normandy's rivers and streams were often reclaimed marshlands, the field marshal had his engineers return them to their natural state by opening dikes and floodgates that held in check spring overflows. The deep inundations that followed would claim a number of the paratroopers who dropped into Normandy on the night of the invasion and would inhibit efforts to close the gap between the American forces fighting on OMAHA and UTAH Beaches.

For Hitler and his generals, the invasion represented a moment filled with danger and opportunity. If they failed, German defeat would become inevitable, but if they succeeded they would eliminate for a year or longer any threat to their power from the west. That would enable them to move the bulk of their divisions to the Russian Front, where their forces were sorely pressed. If the approach of the Normandy invasion thus evoked anxiety on the part of the Germans, it was also a source of high expectation.

==The invasion==
As the day of the invasion approached, the weather in the English Channel became stormy. Heavy winds, a five-foot swell at sea, and lowering skies compelled Eisenhower to postpone the assault from 5 to 6 June. Conditions remained poor, but when weathermen predicted that the winds would abate and the cloud cover rise enough on the scheduled day of the attack to permit a go-ahead, Eisenhower reluctantly gave the command. Expecting casualties of up to 80 percent among the airborne forces, he traveled to an air base at Newbury to bid farewell to the members of the 101st Airborne Division before their tow planes and gliders carried them off to battle. A newspaper man who accompanied Eisenhower later told friends he had seen tears in the general's eyes.

The weather actually worked to the Allied advantage. When the BBC broadcast the lines from Verlaine's poem indicating commencement of the attack — ''"Blessent mon coeur d'une longueur monotone"'' ("The violins of autumn wound my heart with monotonous languor") — the 15th Army in the Pas de Calais went on alert, but Rommel's Army Group B headquarters in Normandy did nothing. The weather was so foul that no one believed an invasion possible. Indeed, many commanders at 7th Army had already left for Brittany to participate in an exercise designed, ironically, to simulate an Allied landing in Normandy. Rommel himself was in Germany celebrating his wife's birthday.

====Landing of airborne units====
[[Image:D-day 2.jpg|200px|thumb|right|Soldiers using German tank traps as cover]]
As planned, airborne units led the invasion. Shortly after midnight the British 6th Airborne Division dropped northeast of Caen, near the mouth of the Orne River, where it anchored the British eastern flank by securing bridges over the river and the Caen Canal. On the other side of the invasion area, the U.S. 101st and 82d Airborne Divisions dropped near Ste. Mere-Eglise and Carentan to secure road junctions and beach exits from which the VII Corps could push to capture Cherbourg.

Some of the American airborne troops came to ground near their objectives, but most were scattered over a wide area. A number drowned in the flooded lowlands. Others landed in the midst of German positions, where they were killed or captured. In the hours that followed, nevertheless, paratroopers from the 101st succeeded in clearing much of the way for VII Corps' move inland. The 3d Battalion, 505th Infantry, of the 82d Airborne Division meanwhile captured Ste. Mere-Eglise and cut the main enemy communications cable to Cherbourg.

Other units, entangled in the thickets and hedgerows of the region, failed to achieve their objectives, but by their very presence they sowed confusion in German ranks. Reports began to surface in enemy headquarters all along the line that paratroopers were landing, but little information was available to commanders on the size and meaning of the attack. Was it a probe to test Germany's defenses, a diversion for a larger assault in the Pas de Calais, or the long-awaited invasion itself? The Allies added to the confusion by parachuting dummies wired with firecrackers far to the rear of German positions. The trick drew major enemy units away from the landing zone, where their presence might have done considerable damage to the attackers.

As dawn neared, bombers began to strike up and down the coast, flying the first of what would become, by the end of the day, more than 11,000 sorties against enemy batteries, headquarters, railroad junctions, and troop concentrations. The gliders Eisenhower had watched depart also arrived. Those of the British landed on target as did most of those from the U.S. 101st Airborne Division. Fewer than half of the gliders assigned to the U.S. 82d Airborne reached their assigned landing zones. The rest lodged in hedgerows, struck German obstructions, or floundered in the swollen marshes. By midmorning, 4,000 men of the 82d were still unaccounted for, along with 60 percent of the equipment they had carried.
Although convinced that the disturbances were a diversion for an assault to come in the Pas de Calais, Rundstedt, at 0400 on 6 June, ordered two panzer divisions to move immediately toward Caen to guard against Allied amphibious operations in support of the airborne attack. The units, however, were in OKW reserve. Informed of the order, Rundstedt's superiors at OKW placed it on hold until Hitler himself could concur. Since he was asleep and disliked being awakened, approval took many hours to come and stalled what might have been a powerful German response. The few officers of Rommel's staff present in the area were more energetic. When they learned during the early morning hours that an enormous Allied fleet was approaching the coast, they ordered the 21st Panzer Division to Caen.

By first light at 0530, the entire horizon off Normandy between Caen and Vierville-sur-Mer had filled with the invasion armada. "They came, rank after relentless rank, ten lanes wide, twenty miles across, five thousand ships of every description," wrote one reporter that morning: "Coast Guard cutters, buoy-layers and motor launches," and "a formidable array of 702 warships." The naval bombardment began at 0550, detonating large German minefields and destroying many blockhouses and artillery positions.

====The Normandy landings====
Emerging from behind a screen of smoke, three German torpedo boats attempted briefly to contest the attack, but only one inflicted any damage, sinking the Norwegian destroyer ''Svenner''. It was the sole contribution of the German Navy to the fight that day. The Luftwaffe was equally absent, leading one young soldier to comment later, "We were all more or less expecting...dive bombers...continually backed by high level bombing. But no, nothing like that...The Luftwaffe is obviously smashed."

The Allied bombardment ended precisely on schedule but the landing craft ran late, giving the Germans a brief respite before the troops came ashore. That complicated matters for the British 1 and 30 Corps when they arrived on GOLD, JUNO, and SWORD Beaches at 0700 and for the American VII Corps, which began to debark on UTAH at 0630. On GOLD, the British 50th Division encountered intense German fire at first but rapidly worked its way forward and moved off the beach. On JUNO, the 3d Canadian Division also experienced early difficulties but by the end of the day had reached the Caen-Bayeux highway, inland from the landing zone. Confusion reigned on SWORD, where delivery schedules slipped and succeeding waves of landing craft piled a jumble of men and vehicles at the water's edge. Even so, the troops on SWORD were off the beach within an hour of landing and by dark had joined up with the forces of the British 6th Airborne Division. British and Canadian forces failed to seize Caen because the Germans threw the weight of their resources and their only available armored division into the defense of the city, but they, too, had established themselves well ashore.

The forces that arrived on UTAH also performed ably. Elements of the 4th and 24th Cavalry Squadrons (132 men) of the 4th Cavalry Group landed on the St. Marcouf Islands flanking the beach at 0430, two hours in advance of the main attack. Directed to clear enemy minefields, control points, and observation posts, they found the islands heavily mined but otherwise unoccupied. During the main attack, German artillery managed to sink the U.S. destroyer Corry; swift currents carried the landing craft of the 4th Division well to the south of their target onto a portion of the beach that was only lightly defended; and thirty-two amphibious tanks assigned to land in the first wave of the attack were delayed by the loss of a control vessel that struck a mine. Those setbacks notwithstanding, the assaulting troops quickly took the upper hand. Within three hours the enemy force defending the beach had surrendered and Allied troops and supplies were moving inland. In all, some 23,000 men came ashore at UTAH, at a cost for the day of 197 casualties among the ground forces.

Many men distinguished themselves that morning, among them the 4th Division's Assistant Division Commander, Brig. Gen. Theodore Roosevelt, Jr. Going ashore with the first wave, Roosevelt contributed materially to the success of his forces by personally reconnoitering the area inland from the beach. He then returned to the beachhead time and again, without concern for his own life, to lead groups of his men over a seawall through enemy fire to safety. He earned a [[Medal of Honor]] for his gallantry.

====Omaha====
If the attack went well on UTAH, the situation was quite different on OMAHA. Maj. Gen. Leonard T. Gerow's V Corps came up against the worst conditions encountered that day. High seas swamped many landing craft during the ten-mile run from mother ships to shore. Survivors reached land seasick and wobbling. Well over half (fifty-seven of ninety-six) of the dual-drive amphibious tanks assigned to the landing also went down, victims of heavy seas they had not been designed to withstand. Strong winds and adverse currents likewise pushed a significant number of landing craft away from their designated targets, into areas where commanding officers' maps were useless and supporting fires from friendly ships totally lacking.

Bombing attacks by Allied aircraft and assaults by naval gunfire designed to soften enemy positions did little to improve the situation. Blinded by heavy clouds and concerned lest poorly aimed bombs strike the landing force on the beach, bomber pilots overshot their targets and dropped their loads up to three miles inland. Naval gunners had difficulty zeroing in on their targets. Most of the radios required by artillery spotters ashore had gone down with landing craft that never reached the beach.

OMAHA itself was a tangle of obstructions: concrete cones, slanted poles, logs tilted seaward with mines lashed to their tips, and steel rails welded together at angles and so strongly set into the beach that their ends would stave in the bottoms of landing craft. The Germans had also made good use of a line of cliffs, four miles long and up to one hundred fifty feet in height, that paralleled the length of the landing zone. Dotting the ravines and draws that led through the bluffs with antitank and antipersonnel mines, they had scattered blockhouses, bunkers, and machine gun nests in strategic locations where they could dominate the shoreline below. Unknown to the Americans, the highly disciplined 352d Infantry Division manned many of those fortifications. Its presence in the area had been suspected by some intelligence analysts, but the evidence they presented had proved too uncertain to affect planning for the attack.

The effort to destroy the enemy's beach obstacles was only marginally successful. In the vanguard of the attack, members of the 6th Engineer Brigade and naval demolition units attempted to cut avenues of approach to the beach by blasting lanes through the obstructions. Despite a series of mishaps—of 16 bulldozers, for example, only 3 survived enemy fire and I was prevented from maneuvering freely by American riflemen who sought shelter from incoming rounds in its lee—they succeeded in opening six complete gaps. Even so, they could mark only one for use during high water because all the buoys and poles designated for that purpose had been destroyed by enemy artillery. Casualties for the engineering task force ran to 40 percent, most incurred in the first half-hour of the attack.

As the day lengthened, those conditions combined to produce a near-inferno on OMAHA. Enemy mortar and artillery batteries, unscathed by Allied fire, poured destruction upon the attackers while the invading force time and again appeared to fumble. Allied rocket ships responded, but from extreme range. When their missiles fell short, they hit the troops on the beach. Wreckage at the water's edge accumulated as timetables slipped and landing craft became hopelessly entangled in the barbed wire and projecting beams of uncleared beach obstructions. Even those craft that succeeded in ramming their way forward encountered difficulties. Riding a rising tide, most grounded on unforeseen sandbars located 50 to 100 yards from the surf's edge. There, enemy machine guns claimed a heavy toll of the debarking troops, who had to wade to shore with all their equipment through water that was often neck deep. In the end, perhaps a little more than one-third of the first wave of attackers reached dry land. Lacking most of their heavy weapons, those survivors had little choice but to huddle behind sand dunes and in the lee of a small seawall that ran along the base of the beach. Many soldiers were killed outright, but some, wounded and unable to move, drowned as the tide moved in.

The Germans were elated. Convinced that the attack was faltering, the commander of the 352d Division transferred some of his reserves to the east, where the British appeared a greater threat. General Bradley was distressed and for a time debated whether to cancel the assault and to move the remainder of his force to UTAH Beach.

If chaos ruled at first, order asserted itself as the day lengthened. In some areas, heavy smoke from grass fires and exploding ammunition obscured landing zones and blinded enemy gunners, allowing the attackers to advance largely unopposed. Here and there, as well, tanks arrived, rolling off landing craft that had somehow plowed their way through the obstacles. Bringing their guns to bear, they began to provide the fire support the men on the beach required. The remnants of three companies of Rangers who had come ashore with the first units also did good work. Assigned to destroy a battery of six partially casemated 155-mm. guns thought to be positioned atop a promontory named the Pointe du Hoe, those highly disciplined infantrymen scaled the nearly l00-foot height and cleared it of its German defenders. Although the guns had been moved a few hundred yards inland the Rangers still managed to spike them. They then held their position for two days against waves of counterattacking Germans, incurring losses that would reduce their combat effectives to about ninety men before reinforcements finally arrived.

Unit cohesion had disintegrated among the troops on the beach, especially within the inexperienced 29th Division, but leaders of all ranks asserted themselves and saved the day. "Two kinds of people are staying on this beach," the commander of the 1st Division's 16th Infantry Regiment, Col. George A. Taylor, exclaimed to his men, "the dead and those who are going to die. Now let's get the hell out of here." The sergeants were especially abrupt. Resorting to curses they had hoarded for years, they exhorted their men to get off the beach. The 29th Division's assistant commander, Brig. Gen. Norman D. Cota, was particularly effective. Ignoring enemy fire, he moved up and down the shoreline among his troops, cajoling, rallying, urging them forward through the bluffs.

As the invaders reorganized, Allied destroyers moved close to shore. Risking grounding and almost point-blank fire from enemy batteries, they raked the cliffs with their guns. More and more landing craft also pushed their way to the beach, bringing new troops, heavy weapons, radios, and ammunition.

====The push inland====
Although victorious against the first wave of invaders at OMAHA, the Germans could do little when the force on the beach began to renew itself. With many of their troops off in pursuit of the dummy paratroopers the Allies had dropped far to the rear, they could hold their own from fixed positions but lacked the numbers to drive the invaders back. Thus the Americans kept the ground they gained. Inch by inch they moved forward, up through the bluffs and onto the flatland above. In the absence of much room to maneuver, their attack had been unoriginal, a straightforward frontal assault, but the weight of their numbers and the enormous volume of supplies and equipment they began to bring to bear made the difference. By nightfall, 34,000 men were ashore on OMAHA. The beach itself was a shambles of burning and disabled vehicles, but almost all of the coastal villages located inland were in Allied hands.

The Germans, for their part, were in far worse condition than they seemed. Rommel's Seventh Army, commanded by Generaloberst Friedrich Dollmann, had succeeded in holding its own, but it had employed all of its resources in doing so and lacked the means to mount the sort of counterattack that might have driven the Allies back. Meanwhile, Hitler and Rundstedt remained reluctant to commit the reserves they held in the Pas de Calais because of the threat Patton's phantom army posed. Even if they had acted, Allied bombers might have decimated the force as it moved along the roads of France into Normandy. In the same way, the enemy retained sizable forces in Brittany, but German commanders refused to use them because a second landing from that direction seemed a clear possibility.

Allied losses had been high: 2,500 men at OMAHA alone, another 2,500 among the American airborne divisions, almost 1,100 for the Canadians, and some 3,000 for the British—more than 9,000 men in all, one-third of whom were killed in action. Even so, the number was less than Allied planners had expected. Concerned that Hitler would respond to the invasion with extreme violence and might even resort to poison gas, Eisenhower's chief surgeon, Maj. Gen. Albert W. Kenner, and the Chief Surgeon of the U.S. Army's European Theater of Operations, Maj. Gen. Paul R. Hawley, had prepared their staffs to process at least 12,000 killed and wounded in the First U.S. Army alone.

By the evening of 6 June 1944, Allied power had prevailed all across the Normandy beachhead. The British had failed to seize Caen. The Americans had yet to secure a lodgment far enough inland to keep enemy artillery from hitting supply dumps and unloading points they were building along the invasion beaches. Yet more than 100,000 men had come ashore, the first of millions who would follow.

==The following days==
In keeping with his concept of a mobile defense, Rundstedt wanted to attack the beachhead but Allied fighter-bombers imposed so many delays on the movement of his reserve panzer divisions that he had little choice but to defer the strike until 8 June. While he waited the units that might have formed the counterattack dribbled in piecemeal, and harried commanders plugged them into the line wherever the need was greatest. Filling gaps and sealing off areas of special concern, they never had a chance to deliver the blow Rundstedt had envisioned. The problem would recur time and again in the days that followed. Allied air interdiction efforts were so effective and enemy forces so hard pressed that German commanders were rarely able to mass enough strength in a single place to make a sustained advance.

Over time, Hitler's inflexibility compounded the problem. On 17 June Rundstedt and Rommel requested their leader's permission to withdraw their forces out of the range of naval gunfire before launching an armored attack on the flank of Montgomery's Second Army. Hitler refused. Convinced that the dogged efforts of soldiers who had stood and fought even when surrounded during the Battle of Moscow in 1941 had averted a German collapse, he believed the same would hold true in Normandy. He forbade his commanders to abandon any position voluntarily and ordered them to hold their ground at all costs. Despite their difficulties, the Germans still made good use of the advantages the bocage offered. They turned the region's sunken lanes into trenches and fortifications. The hedgerows—some more than five feet in height and several feet thick—became traps concealing riflemen, machine guns, and infantrymen armed with antitank weapons.

====The hedgerows====
Because they assumed that the Germans would withdraw toward the Seine and fight a delay along the river's lines, the invasion's planners had concentrated on the challenge of getting ashore and had paid scant attention to the impediments posed by the bocage. As a result, Bradley's First Army was unprepared for the difficulties it faced and paid a steep price for each foot of its advance into the region. The experience of the U.S. 90th Division was a case in point. Faced with hostile fire from an invisible enemy, the unit's commanders found the principles of fire and maneuver nearly impossible to apply in the hedgerows, especially the precept that an attacking force should move just behind its artillery in order to confront the enemy while he is still off balance. The division suffered heavy casualties as a result—150 officers and 2,315 enlisted men during June and 310 officers and 5,188 enlisted men during July. More experienced units also suffered terribly in the bocage. A U.S. Army survey of casualties in portions of the 1st, 4th, 9th, and 25th Infantry Divisions between 6 June and 31 July 1944 found that rifle companies lost nearly 60 percent of their enlisted men and over 68 percent of their officers.

The countryside in the British and Canadian sectors — a relatively open, flat, dry expanse stretching from Caen to Paris — was more favorable for offensive warfare. Paradoxically, those conditions made fighting there perhaps more difficult than in the American sector. The nature of the ground and the strategic importance of the area compelled the Germans to mass the bulk of their panzer units and their best troops in the path of Montgomery's forces. They turned the checkerboard of villages that dotted the region into an interlocking, mortar-and-concrete version of the bocage.

Montgomery's commanders appear to have been little more prepared than the Americans for the sort of resistance the Germans mounted. Poorly versed in combined arms tactics, they allowed their tanks to advance without the protection of accompanying infantry units. That approach gave German soldiers wielding highly effective Panzerfausts (the enemy version of the American bazooka) and teams firing formidable, high-velocity antitank cannons a relatively free hand in dealing with the advancing forces.

What Montgomery intended to do remains shrouded in controversy. Time and again he appeared to delay. The terrain and the heavy weight of the German defenses facing his forces were undoubtedly part of the reason. He may also all along have planned to allow the offensive to develop in the direction that time and circumstance dictated, whether in the American sector or his own. In that sense, it is possible that he decided Bradley's front offered the most opportunities and that his own army should concentrate on holding the enemy in place to allow his ally the fullest latitude. Or he may have thought that Allied advances elsewhere would allow him to achieve his objectives without incurring the level of casualties that had consumed an entire generation of his countrymen during World War I. He had been warned of a shortage of infantry replacements well before D-Day. During July the British Adjutant General had underscored the point by personally traveling to Normandy to notify him that some British battalions had already been divided to fill gaps in the line and that divisions might be next. Whatever the reason, Montgomery's forces, commanded by Lt. Gen. Sir Miles Dempsey, took the town of Bayeux and moved several miles inland but, despite three full-scale attempts between 6 June and 1 July, failed to take Caen.

Montgomery's intentions notwithstanding, British efforts were hardly without effect. The attacks his forces launched bled the Germans of strength they could ill afford to lose and kept the enemy's best units concentrated around Caen. That relieved some of the pressure on Bradley to the west, buying time and room for him to consolidate his beachhead on OMAHA and to turn his attention toward the capture of Cherbourg.

In fact, Bradley needed all the help he could get. With the enemy well concealed in the hedgerows, it took an average of five Americans to displace one German defender. Under normal circumstances, a ratio of three to one would have sufficed. "Prior to invasion33' he later wrote, "we had estimated that the infantry would incur 70 percent of the losses of combat forces. By August we had boosted that figure to 83 percent on the basis of our experience in the Normandy hedgerows." Bradley illustrated his point by noting that, in fifteen days of fighting around St. Lo, the 30th Division sustained 3,934 battle casualties, a loss rate of 25 percent for the unit as a whole but of 90 percent in its rifle platoons, where three out of every four casualties occurred.

====Towards Cherbourg====
The flooded marshes of the Merderet River also hampered American progress, as did a great storm that lashed the English Channel between 19 and 21 June. Besides destroying nearly 500 small craft and beaching another 800 well above the high-water mark, the gale slowed the effort to resupply American forces for a time by ruining the mulberry harbor at OMAHA Beach. On 18 June, just before the storm, Allied logisticians had achieved 72.8 percent of their targeted level of supplies to that date. By 22 June, as a result of the storm, that figure had fallen to 57.4 percent. The buildup in vehicle strength fell over the same period from 66 to 57 percent and in personnel from 88 to 77.7 percent. Nevertheless, those impediments proved only temporary. Bradley's logisticians quickly learned to bring what they needed directly across the beach. By the last week in June, OMAHA was averaging 13,500 tons of supplies per day, 115 percent of planned capacity. UTAH, meanwhile, had achieved 7,000 tons per day, 125 percent of its target.

By 18 June Maj. Gen. J. Lawton Collins' VII Corps had cut its way across the Cotentin Peninsula and had severed all roads leading into Cherbourg. Under orders from Hitler "to defend the last bunker and leave to the enemy not a harbor but a field of ruins," the remnants of five German divisions fought back stubbornly. The fighting around the city's main fortification, the Fort du Roule, embedded in a cliff overlooking the harbor, was particularly intense. Coming under attack on 25 June, the stronghold's defenders leveled heavy fire at the attackers from a number of pillboxes and artillery positions.

The fort held out until the men of the 314th, after capturing the upper battlements, crushed diehard resisters by dropping demolitions into the bastion's lower reaches. Shortly thereafter, the city's commander surrendered but, on orders from Hitler relayed by Rommel, refused to instruct his troops to do the same. American psychological warfare officers turned the trick. Dropping surrender leaflets that emphasized dwindling food supplies within the city, they announced that all who came across should bring their mess kits. That evening, twenty days after the offensive had begun, Cherbourg was in friendly hands.

By then, enemy engineers had so thoroughly demolished the city's harbor that it would take three weeks of rebuilding before the facility could open to even minimal shipping and months before it would be able to handle cargo in quantity. That being the case, the victory still provided a much needed boost to Allied morale. Progress had been so slow that Allied leaders had become concerned the attack might bog down into the sort of crippling stalemate that had prevailed on the Western Front during World War I.

As Allied morale rose, that of the Germans fell lower than ever. Hitler himself was unhappy. Exasperated with Rundstedt's continuing doubts and his desire to pull back to more defensible positions, he replaced the field marshal as Commander in Chief West on 2 July with Field Marshal Guenther von Kluge. Although at first optimistic, Kluge rapidly came to sympathize with Rundstedt's point of view.

The fall of Cherbourg offered only temporary consolation to the Allies. By I July they had established a beachhead 70 miles wide and had brought about a million men and 177,000 vehicles ashore. Yet, except around Cherbourg, their lodgment was in no place more than 25 miles deep, and in most areas it extended little more than 5 miles inland.

====Caen and St. Lo====
On 9 July Montgomery launched a massive air assault against Caen in hopes of clearing the way for an attack the following morning. Four hundred fifty heavy aircraft participated, dropping 2,500 tons of bombs, but the airmen negated most of the effect by releasing their loads well back from the forward line to avoid hitting their own troops. As a result, the city incurred heavy damage but German defenses went largely unscathed. In the two days of desperate fighting that followed, the Germans fought back viciously. Montgomery's forces entered Caen and took half the city but moved no farther. Casualty rates during the battle were appalling. Most infantry battalions sustained losses of 25 percent.

Bradley's advance on St. Lo was also an agony. Daily rains reduced visibility and negated much of the value of Allied air support. As with the British at Caen, the casualty rate was alarming. The 30th Division sustained some 3,000 killed and wounded between 7 and 20 July; the 9th suffered 2,500 between the 10th and the 20th.

Bradley's forces were nonetheless gradually learning how to fight in the bocage. Tank and infantry units began to support each other. The tanks supplied the heavy firepower needed to eliminate the enemy's well-sited firing positions while the infantry kept enemy soldiers with antitank weapons at bay. The tankers also found a way to cross the hedgerows without exposing their vehicles' vulnerable undersides to enemy fire. With huge iron teeth salvaged from German beach obstacles welded to the fronts of hundreds of tanks, they began to bull their way through the hedgerows, taking hours to advance through obstacles that would earlier have required days of fighting to overcome. From then on, the Rhinos, as the men named them, became an invaluable asset to Bradley. They allowed American armor to move across country at will while German tanks had to continue to make do with the roads.

By 15 July American forces had reached the outskirts of St. Lo, but the garrison holding the town refused yield. In a battle that inflicted carnage reminiscent of World War I, the Germans gave ground only gradually, house by house. On one occasion, as a result, American riflemen used a bulldozer to bury three German soldiers who refused to surrender their position. By 18 July the attackers had succeeded. A task force from the 29th Division under General Cota entered the town. Cota carried with him the body of Maj. Thomas D. Howie, who had commanded the 3d Battalion of the 116th Infantry. Several days earlier, Howie and his men had crept undetected through early morning mist to reinforce an isolated battalion less than 1,000 yards from St. Lo. Ordered to move his unit to the eastern edge of the town, despite his own exhaustion and that of his men, Howie had responded without hesitation, "Will do." A few moments later an enemy shell had ended his life. The commander of the 29th Division, Maj. Gen. Charles H. Gerhardt, considered Howie's response an example of the patriotic self-sacrifice that had carried the Army through to that point. By honoring Howie he could remind his men of the perseverance and courage of all those who had given their lives at St. Lo.

On the same day, the British launched a major attack beyond Caen but again allowed their tanks to advance without supporting infantry and failed to inflict a decisive blow. In response Kluge increased the concentration of German troops around the city, adding two armored divisions that might have done invaluable work against Bradley in the bocage. As a result, 7 panzer divisions and 4 heavy tank battalions guarded Caen while only 2 panzer divisions confronted the Americans. Even those forces were sorely depleted. By the last week in July, according to ULTRA intercepts of coded German radio communications, the enemy in Normandy had sustained casualties of more than 100,000 enlisted men and 2,360 officers killed and wounded. On 17 July misfortune touched Rommel himself. Two British Spitfire fighters attacked his open car—ironically, near a village named Ste. Foy de Montgommery—and drove it into a ditch. Thrown from the vehicle, Rommel suffered head injuries so grievous that he had to return to Germany for treatment. Kluge succeeded him, assuming command of Army Group B while retaining his position as Commander in Chief West.

The Allies, for their part, had brought four years of planning and hard work to completion. Exhausted and battle-worn, they had at last reached the Periers-St. Lo road. From there the land was dry and the country relatively open. The final act of the war, the great push through France into Germany itself, could now begin.

==Analysis==
It had been a grim fight. Six weeks of battle had left the Germans disheartened and susceptible to any farther blow the Allies might deliver. "It was casualty reports, casualty reports, casualty reports wherever you went," Rommel told his son Manfred from his sickbed. "I have never fought with such losses...And the worst of it is that it was all without sense or purpose." Indeed, Rommel continued, on some days the equivalent of a regiment of his men had fallen in Normandy—more than in a whole summer of fighting in Africa during 1942.

The days had been filled with mud, heartache, and pain for the Allies as well. From the very beginning, little had seemed to go right. The airborne assault on the night before the landing had sown confusion among the enemy and had provided an important diversion, but too many of the men had landed too far from their targets. As a result, the effort had only a marginal effect on the developing battle. Over the days that followed, rather than withdrawing beyond the Seine as Allied planners had expected, the Germans had hung on tenaciously, taking brutal losses but inflicting them upon the Allies as well. Meanwhile, Montgomery's careful plan for the attack had begun to unravel on D-Day itself. His forces failed to take Caen, the key to further operations in the open country to the south. Attacking time and again as the campaign developed, they had nonetheless held the cream of the German force in place, absorbing pressure that would almost inevitably have fallen upon Bradley's forces in the bocage.

As for the Americans, the landing on OMAHA Beach had been a near-disaster averted only by the courage of unsung sailors and soldiers. When air attacks and naval gunfire had failed to silence German guns and the momentum of the assault had begun to lag, those heroes had pushed their frail landing craft to shore despite the traps and obstacles blocking their way. Rallying to the directions of their commanders, they had then climbed the bluffs overlooking the beach and advanced inland, often at the cost of their own lives. In the same way, although Maj. Gen. J. Lawton Collins' VII Corps captured the port of Cherbourg on 29 June, the American advance bogged down in the hedgerows. Bradley's First Army absorbed forty thousand casualties while slowly advancing twenty miles to St. Lo.

Even so, enough went well for the campaign to succeed. Roosevelt, Marshall, Eisenhower, Churchill, and Montgomery were master communicators who bonded an unwieldy coalition into an extraordinary fighting machine. The plan they and their staffs devised failed to foresee every circumstance that would occur on the battlefield, particularly the difficulties Bradley's forces would encounter in the bocage, but it was still a masterpiece of innovation that provided ample means for Allied commanders to prevail. Cunning deceptions kept the Germans transfixed on the Pas de Calais until long after the real invasion had occurred; Allied airmen swept the skies clean of the enemy fighters and bombers that might have imposed a heavy toll upon the landing force; and the effort to build up the stocks of supplies and munitions necessary for an effective attack succeeded beyond the most optimistic expectation. In the end, notwithstanding, it was the heroism of infantrymen such as Major Howie, who rose day and night to the challenge despite almost overwhelming fear and fatigue, that afforded the critical margin for success.

A barely failed assassination attempt upon Hitler's life, implicating Rommel himself, brought about a purge of officers in Germany that would, for a time, strengthen Hitler's control over his armed forces. Although the Germans would fight on with resilience and determination for another ten months, their line in France would soon break, Patton's army would swing clear, Paris would fall, and Allied forces would approach the Rhine. The loss of France would deprive Germany not only of a major source of Mod, raw resources, and labor but also of seaports that had long sheltered its U-boats and of radar sites that had afforded early warning of Allied bomber attacks. More important, it would provide the Allies with the secure base they needed to launch their final offensive against the German heartland. As Rommel told his son, the future was clear and inevitable. The end of Hitler's Reich was at hand: "There is no longer anything we can do."

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!colspan=2 style="width: 100%; text-align: center; background-color: #000088; color: white; "|'''Copyright Details'''
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!style="background-color: #000088; color:white;"|License:
|style=" background-color: none;"| This work is in the [[Public Domain]] in the United States because it is a work of the United States Federal Government under the terms of Title 17, Chapter 1, Section 105 of the U.S. Code
|-
!style=" background-color: #000088; color:white;"|Source:
|style="background-color: none;border-top: 2px solid black"| File available from the {{{1|[[United States Federal Government]] [http://www.history.army.mil/brochures/normandy/nor-pam.htm]}}}.

{{DEFAULTSORT:Overlord, Operation}}
[[Category:World War II]]

Erwin Rommel

2008-07-24T15:42:57Z

Darkmind1970:

[[Image:Rommel.jpg|thumb|300px|Erwin Rommel (center)]]

'''Erwin Rommel''' (1891-1944) was a German [[field marshal]] during [[World War II]]. He was nicknamed the "Desert Fox" for his tactical genius as commander of the [[Afrika Corps]] from 1941 to 1943.

Rommel was first noticed by [[Adolf Hitler]] in 1937. He was then appointed command of HQ of [[Czechoslovakia]] and then later in [[Poland]]. After this he was given command of the 7th [[Panzer]] division, because of his wonderful work at HQ. His army moved through [[France]] in June 1940 at a blistering pace, fitting the description of [[Blitzkrieg]]. After his great success in France he was appointed to command the newly formed Deutsches [[Afrika Korps]] and successfully drove the [[British 8th Army]] out of [[Libya]]. His greatest victory was at the [[Battle of Gazala]] in June 1942. [[German]] and [[Italian]] troops defeated a British force which was more than twice as large. Ninety-eight thousand [[British Empire]] troops were killed, wounded or captured. He later went on to [[El Alamein]], [[Egypt]], but had been hampered by a lack of supplies and was defeated at the First Battle of El Alamein. A later attempt at breaking through ended in defeat at the Battle of Alam Halfa. Rommel was then forced onto the defensive and was forced to retreat in the wake of the Commonwealth victory at the Second Battle of El Alamein.
Rommel's retreat took him the length of North Africa and ended in Tunisia, where the last stand of Axis Forces on the African continent took place at the start of 1943. He was ordered to fly out of Tunisia by [[Adolf Hitler]] after Rommel expressed pessimism about the chances of a successful defence of North Africa.
He was in charge of Army Group B in Normandy when the [[D-Day]] operation began, but was not present when the invasion itself began. After being wounded, he was implicated in the July 1944 plot to assassinate Hitler. Given a choice between reprisals against his family or quietly committing suicide, he chose suicide.

{{DEFAULTSORT:Rommel, Erwin}}
[[Category:World War II Commanders]]
[[Category:German People]]

Talk:John McCain

2008-05-28T15:49:49Z

Darkmind1970: /* Hate speech laws */

This article seems to have many unsourced claims and needless speculation. Statements such as "The Bush administration was rumored to have..." or "The media could damage..." are clearly not rooted in provable fact, but merely in likelihoods and possibilities (in the case of the Bush rumor, libelous ones). I suggest the author(s) provide news reports or other reliable publications to directly support the claims and speculation in the article. --[[User:Daniel B. Douglas|Daniel B. Douglas]] 21:56, 11 March 2007 (EDT)

Why remove the "this article needs citations" thingy? This article is *clearly* in need of citations, and, quite frankly, serious editing to remove the gossip. A "citations needed" flag gives readers an extra "heads up" to be extra-critical in their reading - important if the site is to be used by high school students. --[[User:Hsmom|Hsmom]] 01:19, 12 March 2007 (EDT)

Fixed minor spelling mistakes on the page. I also agree that this page is disgraceful to Conservapedia. It has no references cited. It breaks both commandments #2 and #6 as it currently stands, and quite possibly #1. The authors/contributors to the information in this article need to add their citations and make certain they are also not adding their own opinions. Serious revision must be undertaken quickly. --[[User:Dikaiosune|Dikaiosune]] 00:23, 12 March 2007 (CST)

I agree with all of the above. The article also participates in speculation (what the media and Democrats will bring up regarding his health) and it is factually inaccurate (Reagan was 70 when he assumed office, not 72, and so most Republicans would not use that as a defense). [[User:Myk|Myk]] 15:36, 15 March 2007 (EDT)
:Ok... so no one cared enough to remove the uncited opinion from the article so I went ahead and did it. I left the uncited fact because that is less egregious. I have no idea how to make references look nice. [[User:Myk|Myk]] 18:17, 16 March 2007 (EDT)

:: Myk, it's lookin' good to me. You're building an article of facts with citations, rather than gossip, opinions, and speculation - much improved, IMHO. --[[User:Hsmom|Hsmom]] 21:25, 16 March 2007 (EDT)

== What is this page going to be? ==

Aschafly, all of the things you just listed under electability may be true and verifiable but are they encyclopedic? What encyclopedia has items on how electable someone is? Is this going to be a biography of the man or a list of reasons why not to vote.

His age at primary time is easily discernible by subtracting the year of his birth from the year of his election. His cancer is something easily added to his personal life section (or create a personal life section as I didn't add one thinking it would be gossipy). His conduct during the Keating Five incidient could be cited and sourced and put in his political career section. And, as he is a public figure, the Dobson quote can be placed in a "criticism" section. There is a way to make this at least look like an encyclopedia article rather than a "reason why Aschlafly doesn't want him nominated" page. [[User:Myk|Myk]] 15:06, 17 March 2007 (EDT)

*Perhaps, Andy, you would entertain the idea of changing the title block from "Electability" to something else? Or, in fairness, we should add the same, highly subjective information to each of the potential candidates? Personally I think that would be pissing on our own shoes. If you agree, I can create a "Quick Facts" area for your information, incorporate other pertinent information, and present it as I did in the Margaret Thatcher page. Let me know your thoughts. --[[User:TK|TK]] 17:53, 17 March 2007 (EDT)

We could add Electability as one of the Conservapedia debates, such as "Which of the Republican candidates is most electable?" At the very least, it's something I would be interested in discussing. [[User:MountainDew|MountainDew]] 01:27, 3 April 2007 (EDT)

:Well, looks as if Geo beat you to it, dude, lol --~ [[User:TK|TerryK]] [[User_talk:TK|MyTalk]] 05:24, 3 April 2007 (EDT)

== Sources ==

This is a featured article. The unsourced comment should either be removed or given a citation. It is a clear violation of the Second Commandment. There are only seven commandments, we should follow them. Especially on featured articles. [[User:Myk|Myk]] 02:30, 3 April 2007 (EDT)

*Gee, I wonder who made it the featured article? If he doesn't care, or doesn't think its that big of deal, and it's his place, why do you? What comment are you talking about? Maybe it was removed before I read this? --~ [[User:TK|TerryK]] [[User_talk:TK|MyTalk]] 05:23, 3 April 2007 (EDT)

::Political Record 1-10. And if he doesn't feel it's a problem, great, but I never want to see any other "facts" removed because they didn't have a source. Conservapedia would lend an awfully bad name for conservatives if the leader of the site could just flaunt the rules like that.

::Also, there's no mention that his cancer is in remission, no source for cancer hurting Paul Tsongas, and no where in the article cited does it mention anything about poor fundraising being a sign of weakness. That's commentary.[[User:Myk|Myk]] 11:30, 3 April 2007 (EDT)

== Need for personal/family section ==

The article should mention that McCain has seven children, of whom two are today in the U. S. military. [[Duncan Hunter]] is the only other candidate who can claim even one. [[User talk:Amyz|Amyz]] 18:17, June 8, 2007 (EDT)

== RE: Political Record ==

I'm not doubting that there are sources for the information in this section, however considering much of it is in opposition to what his election platform is, I think it might be a good idea to show sources. In fact, it would lend a lot of credibility to this site, and raise usefulness. Any intelligent person would have to realize that McCain's position is inconsistent with his track-record. This is what killed Kerry for a lot of people, including me. Who knows what he's going to do when gets to be president, nothing is truthful. At the very least his platform could be considered deceitful being that it would be in conflict with his actual behavior. I would say, it would be out right lying! --[[User:Puellanivis|Puellanivis]] 18:37, 3 December 2007 (EST)

== Fundraising ==

The "Fundraising" section is really irrelevant at this point. Delete it? [[User:Dadsnagem2|Dadsnagem2]] 12:34, 5 March 2008 (EST)

== Living symbol of the honor and sacrifice of America's armed forces ==

{{cquote|McCain is a living symbol of the honor and sacrifice of America's armed forces, and has the greatest claim of any of the candidates to be Commander-in-Chief.}}
This... doesn't look encyclopedic, I'm sorry. Why don't we say "He is the second-greatest American who ever lived (just after Ronald Reagan)" while we're at it?

I normally would have reworded it (or tried to find a source so we can say "X said that he can be considered..."), but I see that some other bloke just got a 1-week block for edit warring in this sentence, and I don't really want to join him. So I'll just file my protest here and hope that somebody will pick it up. --[[User:DHayes|DHayes]] 18:07, 12 March 2008 (EDT)

==Another Image==
Not that it's a big deal, but I was wondering if a Sysop can add one or two small images for McCain. Like McCain with Reagan, or McCain campaigning for President.[[User:Chippeterson|Chippeterson]]

:I agree, Chip...I will find some, and ask someone to upload them, unless you have something in mind. --[[User:TK|₮K]][[User_Talk:TK|/Talk]] 22:45, 8 April 2008 (EDT)

==Hate speech laws==
McCain supports hate speech laws. Is this really the guy today's conservatives want? [[User:CaptainRoemer|CaptainRoemer]] 11:00, 3 May 2008 (EDT)

On a related note, is the vocal opposition to McCain by some conservative political commentators significant enough to merit mention in the article? --[[User:Benp|Benp]] 19:43, 12 May 2008 (EDT)

: Don't know if any are criticizing him now. We keep current here.--[[User:Aschlafly|Aschlafly]] 19:52, 12 May 2008 (EDT)

::Ann Coulter's still pretty critical of him. Her most recent column, after mentioning that it's the end of the road for Hillary, follows with "Now we just have to get rid of the other two" and describes the remaining choice as being between "a young liberal who is friendly with terrorists or an old liberal who is friendly with Teddy Kennedy." Again, not sure if it's significant enough to merit inclusion, but she's a fairly influential media personality.

::--[[User:Benp|Benp]] 19:58, 12 May 2008 (EDT)
:::Yes, but Ann Coulter is a joke of a media personality. Every time she opens her mouth people wince. [[User:Darkmind1970|Darkmind1970]] 11:49, 28 May 2008 (EDT)

Talk:Dinosaur

2008-04-21T12:30:07Z

Darkmind1970: /* Dinosaurs are not Reptiles */

[[Talk:Dinosaur/Archive1]]|
[[Talk:Dinosaur/Archive2]] 



==Day 6 Creation Mechanisms?==

The article states, "Young Earth Creationists believe...that dinosaurs were created on Day 6 of the creation week". I wonder if the article could explain the theories suggested for the actual mechanism of Dinosaur creation? The evidence seems to suggest that there were a lot of dinsosaurs, of many different types, and in many different places on the planet - I don't think YEC's dispute that, although I could be wrong. Did God 'wave a wand' and the creatures (like us) 'pop into existence', or is there a suggestion that God evolved them very rapidly, within the same day? Did they come into existence fully formed, in multiple locations over the planet, or did they distribute themselves rapidly? What, basically, was the sequence of events on Day 6 of The Creation? I wonder what the theories suggest might have happened? [[User:50something|50something]] 20:33, 28 May 2007 (EDT)

:The Bible doesn't explain much at all about that, and creationists have speculated very little on it.
:There is no suggestion at all that there was rapid evolution. The basic information is that God spoke them into existence. But apart from there being different "[[baramin|kinds]]", how many there were and how widespread they were is not indicated.
:The only clue that might be gleaned is from the more-detailed description of the creation of man, yet even there, there is a hint that man was not created in the same way as the animals, fish, and birds.
:One thing can be deduced, however, and that is that they were created as fish, birds, and animals, not as eggs and embryos (so which came first, the chicken or the egg? The chicken), and presumably mature ones at that, consistent with Adam and Eve who were created in a mature state.
:[[User:Philip J. Rayment|Philip J. Rayment]] 02:44, 29 May 2007 (EDT)

:That's really interesting Philip. I'm glad you responded. But it makes me wonder? Like, for example, why haven't creationists speculated more about this? And what is the actual mechanism of being spoken into existence'? It seems kind of important to know about that, no? And another thing - if they were created as mature creatures, how would they have learned how to eat, walk, breathe or anything else - since instinct is presumably inherited, and if they had no parents, there would have been no creatures to inherit traits from? [[User:50something|50something]] 03:38, 29 May 2007 (EDT)
::Why haven't they speculated more? In the case of the method of creation, perhaps because there is so little to go on. In the case of the distribution, I suspect because the changes wrought by the flood would have wiped out any evidence of their original distribution, so such speculation would be fairly pointless.
::Another thing to keep in mind is that creationists, for all intents and purposes, get no government and very little private funding, and there is simply far more important things to research with the meagre resources available. Perhaps one day there will be some research or at least speculation into these matters.
::If instinct is indeed inherited, that means that it's in the genes, which God would have built them with, so parents would not be necessary. But a more general answer is simply that God created them already knowing those things, just as clearly must have been the case with Adam and language; from pretty well the moment that Adam was created, God was talking with him. Who taught Adam language? Clearly God created him with that ability.
::[[User:Philip J. Rayment|Philip J. Rayment]] 11:30, 29 May 2007 (EDT)

I wonder if birds - even dinosaur birds - were created in mid-air, flying? It seems hard to believe they were spoken into existence on the ground, and then took off, never having flown before? It's such a big change of state for them. And now that I think about it, I wonder is there any evidence of baramins that were created in the wrong location? Did God make mistakes? - probably not, but if he was speaking trillions of creatures into existence over an entire planet in a matter of minutes or seconds, it would be unbelievable that there wouldn't be one or two errors? Could this, for example, be any explanation of penguins, i.e. underwater birds?

I find this whole subject fascinating, and Conservapedia is the best resource on these subjects I've found yet. [[User:50something|50something]] 12:33, 29 May 2007 (EDT)

I've heard this theory before - that penguins actually came into existence underwater by accident, and that's why they are birds that can't fly but swim. I think you're right about instinct PJR - if the animals were spoken into existence while flying, it would mean they would immediately naturally acquire the ability to fly. Anyway, I think some of these theories should go into the article, no? Do we have any links or anything? [[User:Feichineejits|Feichineejits]] 18:50, 29 May 2007 (EDT)

:I don't find it hard to believe that they took off from the ground, never having flown before, but at the moment I can't think of a really good reason why they couldn't have been created in flight.
:God doesn't make mistakes, and God is not bound by time, because He doesn't exist in time; it is something that He created. So it is incorrect to say that He did all this in a matter of minutes or seconds in the sense that that is some sort of constraint for him.
:As far as penguins go, I'd suggest that they are simply one example (of many) of creatures that don't fit the idea of an evolutionary tree, but fit the idea of God creating creatures in more of a "table" arrangement than a "tree" arrangement, whereby some creatures have features that are otherwise found in completely separate branches of the evolutionary tree. Evolutionists call this [[types of evolution#convergent evolution|convergence]], but convergence has been described as simply a term to explain things that don't fit the evolutionary explanation.
:I'm not sure what any of this has to do with ''this'' article, and I wouldn't want to put it in any article without some evidence that creationary scientists have been discussing these sorts of thing.
:[[User:Philip J. Rayment|Philip J. Rayment]] 23:01, 29 May 2007 (EDT)

:You said "it is incorrect to say that He did all this in a matter of minutes or seconds in the sense that that is some sort of constraint for him", which is fair enough, I completely agree. But just to be clear - this did all happen in 24 hours on Day 6, yes? That's what the article says, anyway. [[User:Feichineejits|Feichineejits]] 23:19, 29 May 2007 (EDT)
::The key point is, "in the sense that it is some sort of constraint for him". He did do it all within a few 24-hour days ''as would be measured on Earth''. Birds and fish (or probably more accurately, creatures that fly and creatures that swim in the sea) were created on day 5, with land animals on day 6. [[User:Philip J. Rayment|Philip J. Rayment]] 23:39, 29 May 2007 (EDT)

But if birds and fish were created on Day 5, what about the sea-living dinosaurs or flying dinosaurs like Pterodactyls? Were they created on Day 5, not Day 6? I'm confused! [[User:50something|50something]] 23:53, 29 May 2007 (EDT)

:Note that I said "creatures that fly and creatures that swim in the sea", rather than "birds and fish". This would indicate that [[plesiosaur]]s and the like, and [[pterodactyl]]s and the like were created on day 5, not six. And although they tend to get lumped in with dinosaurs, they are not strictly classified as dinosaurs. [[User:Philip J. Rayment|Philip J. Rayment]] 02:40, 30 May 2007 (EDT)

:Point of information. There weren't any marine dinosaurs, nor were pterodactyls dinosaurs. See the TolWeb page for [http://tolweb.org/Archosauria/14900 archosauria]. You can see that dinosauria and pterosauria share a common ancestor, but neither group contains the other. Trace the ancestors back to diapsida, and you can see that icthyosaurs and sauropterygia (including plesiosaurs) apparently branched off even earlier than the dino/ptero split. Once the dinosaurs got onto dry land, they stayed there, at least until they learned to fly.--[[User:All Fish Welcome|All Fish Welcome]] 05:12, 30 May 2007 (EDT)

All Fish Welcome - the point of CP is to fight for the underfunded and underepresented views of The Creation, which are suppressed by the MSM and scientists. Your suggestions are based on the presumption that 'branching' from common ancestors occurred - and that's what we disagree with here. PJR - do you have any evidence to refute the evolutionist viewpoint above? And does no-one here have any more information on the Creation mechanisms? I'm really interested in seeing if we can really be detailed in this (and other articles) - at present it seems like this article dances around these events, wihtout really explaining, or attempting to explain, what may have happened on these Creation Days. [[User:50something|50something]] 18:55, 30 May 2007 (EDT)
:All Fish Welcome was making the same point that I was making, that sea-dwelling and flying "dinosaurs" are not actually categorised as dinosaurs. He illustrated his point with evolutionary assumptions, but the point itself is valid.
:I've already indicated that I don't think we know enough to write anything more about what actually happened on the creation days.
:[[User:Philip J. Rayment|Philip J. Rayment]] 22:01, 30 May 2007 (EDT)

::But if we don't know anything about them, how can we put it in an encyclopedia? Don't you think it's exactly the trap the evolutionists want to find us in - for us to make a claim and not be able back it up? Surely the point was to show not just the what, but the how of our beliefs? That's what I understood anyway. [[User:50something|50something]] 22:41, 30 May 2007 (EDT)
::: We are not putting them in an encyclopedia; that's been my point. That is, we are not putting anything about the creation ''mechanisms'' in Conservapedia. But that doesn't mean that we can't put anything at all about creation in. Since when do we have to be able to explain every last detail before we can include anything? [[User:Philip J. Rayment|Philip J. Rayment]] 01:21, 31 May 2007 (EDT)
::Well, of course not, no, you're right! But where CAN I find out about this topic? I had thought that CP would have been the perfect place to learn (and teach others) about these things, having had my interest sparked by all the articles here on CP that talk about it. Do you know anywhere I can learn about the subject? Is there a resource on the internet that describes what is actually being proposed? [[User:50something|50something]] 04:03, 31 May 2007 (EDT)
:::I suggest that you try Creation Ministries International[http://www.creationontheweb.com/content/view/4094/101/]. If there has been any research into these things, they would be among the most likely to know about it. [[User:Philip J. Rayment|Philip J. Rayment]] 05:21, 31 May 2007 (EDT)
::PFR - Well, this is proving tricky. I searched and searched through CMI's site, and while there's plenty of interesting research there, it seems there's nothing at all about 'What Actually Happened'. I mean, there's lots and lots of articles that debunk ToE theories and they're all excellent, but there doesn't seem to be a single article that actually lays out the Creation Events - this happened, then this happened, etc. (Or, 'it is propsed that this happened, then this may have happened' - I suppose we can never know exactly). They do explain that the days were in fact 24 hour days. And there's a good article about how creationism is the most likely mechanism behind proteins, etc, but even that article says that proteins and higher life forms aare enormously complex and take a long, long time to build. But if that's the case, how could trillions of complex creatures have been created in billions of locations all around the planet, within 24 hours? I'm even more confused now! Anyone who has any links, please post them for me, I'm a woman on an educational misison now! God bless, [[User:50something|50something]] 14:19, 1 June 2007 (EDT)
:::Sorry, I wasn't clear. I didn't expect you to find anything on their site. The link was to the page where you can ask them questions; I thought that was your best chance of finding an answer. Proteins only take a long time to build if they are occurring naturally, not if they are created supernaturally. [[User:Philip J. Rayment|Philip J. Rayment]] 03:54, 2 June 2007 (EDT)

== What is the evidence that Dinosaurs only ate plants ==

Can someone please explain the root of the "All Dinosaurs were vegetarians" opinion that many creationists hold? As far as I know is the only evidence of what they ate are the shape of teeth and what appears to be remains of animals found in stomachs, and since there are many large meat eating animals today, aswell as many meat eating reptiles, there doesn't seem to be an obvious reason why it shouldn't be possible.

I'm not looking for a debate, it's just that it's always confused me and when I've asked before all I got was "someone else told me". --[[User:Ned|Ned]] 07:19, 11 October 2007 (EDT)

:I found this in the [[Tyrannosaurus rex]] article:
{{cquote|T-rex had forward-facing eyes, which gave it binocular vision. Binocular vision is usually present in carnivores, as it gives them better depth perception and helps them catch their prey, therefore it is very likely that Tyrannosaurus was a carnivore. Young earth creationists believe that the Tyrannosaurus, along with all other carnivores, was herbivorous in the Garden of Eden before the Fall, but afterwards it adapted to be carnivorous.}}
:That might point you in the right way... --[[User:Jenkins|Jenkins]] 07:28, 11 October 2007 (EDT)

:As Jenkins indicates, creationists believe that dinosaurs, along with all other creatures, were vegetarian, on the basis of the historical account (i.e. the Bible). [[User:Philip J. Rayment|Philip J. Rayment]] 07:24, 12 October 2007 (EDT)

::They adapted, eh? I don't know what scientific theory that sounds like....--[[User:hmuckabee|hmuckabee]]
::: They adapted but remained Dinosaurs. So sounds to me like Young-Earth creationism. [[User:Philip J. Rayment|Philip J. Rayment]] 17:28, 14 January 2008 (EST)
::::The bible is not a reference. [[User:Wisdom89|Wisdom89]] 19:42, 14 January 2008 (EST)
::::: Is that supposed to be a reply to my previous post? If so, I don't get the connection. But why can't the Bible be a reference (for anything?)? [[User:Philip J. Rayment|Philip J. Rayment]] 19:50, 14 January 2008 (EST)!
:::::: Well, just in general it really can't, unless you're quoting scripture. With regards to hmuckabee, he/she wanted to know what reference supports the supposed vegetarian diet of the dinosaurs according to some creationist beliefs. You didn't actually provide one, you merely indicated that it was a YEC belief - which coincides with those who read the bible in a literal manner. That wouldn't be the proper reference to use - it would be a secondary source from a creation scientist of some sort. That's all I meant. [[User:Wisdom89|Wisdom89]] 00:28, 15 January 2008 (EST)
::::::: "Quoting" is (roughly) the same as "citing". "The Bible" is "scripture", so citing the Bible as a reference ''is'' (effectively) "quoting scripture". But what's wrong with that? To support an argument about history, we often quote historical documents. That's exactly what the Bible is. So it ''can'' be used as a reference.
::::::: I disagree about hmuckabee. He was insinuating that adaptation (which I implied creationists believe in) was an ''evolutionary'' concept, implying that creationists actually believe in a form of evolution. My response was a roundabout way of saying that just because adaptation is a process in evolution doesn't mean that it's exclusive to evolution. Adaptation is also a process in the creationary model. Therefore his insinuation was baseless.
::::::: [[User:Philip J. Rayment|Philip J. Rayment]] 07:45, 15 January 2008 (EST)

:::::::: The Bible is a historical account of the earth? Does that mean YECs read Revelations in a straightforward manner? [[User:Wisdom89|Wisdom89]] 10:47, 15 January 2008 (EST)
::::::::: Yes, and Revelation is not narrative like Genesis. [[User:Philip J. Rayment|Philip J. Rayment]] 17:32, 15 January 2008 (EST)

==Evaluating the stature of resources==

Much as I respect the fervor of Jack Chick's fundamentalism, there is a question whether we -- as an encyclopedia -- want to endorse his scholarship as a primary source.

http://www.conservapedia.com/index.php?title=Dinosaur&curid=6394&diff=319463&oldid=319380&rcid=345294

Surely his good ideas are not unique, so we ought to be able to find other sources which say substantially the same thing. --[[User:Ed Poor|Ed Poor]] [[User talk:Ed Poor|Talk]] 16:16, 19 October 2007 (EDT)

:In general he only presents ideas which are already out there, so I'm sure it's possible, but I certainly wouldn't know where to look. Chick tracts are written for the purpose of spiritual guidance, not facts, so, while the facts might be true, they don't need to be most of the time to prove his point. This is why I removed the reference. As the final nail in the coffin, the claim itself seemed rather... large to be presented with no explanation (heh, no pun intended). [[User:HelpJazz|Help]][[User talk:HelpJazz|Jazz]] 16:24, 19 October 2007 (EDT)
::I've been studying the issue for over 30 years, and I don't recall ever reading a claim that the dinosaurs died out due to a lack of oxygen. The idea is likely related to the "canopy theory" that the tract also endorses, which theory has been rejected by most leading creationists anyway. Besides, the tract's story of a dinosaur trying to hide in the cloud is ridiculous anyway. [[User:Philip J. Rayment|Philip J. Rayment]] 22:29, 21 October 2007 (EDT)
:::Thanks for the clarification, Philip. I know very little about the issue and didn't want to say something was wrong when I really didn't know. Also I didn't actually read the tract, so I didn't see the dino in the clouds thing :) [[User:HelpJazz|Help]][[User talk:HelpJazz|Jazz]] 22:48, 21 October 2007 (EDT)

== Search window ==

This little window in the Main page is too down at present. --[[User:Joaquín Martínez]], [[User talk:Joaquín Martínez|talk]] 22:15, 3 November 2007 (EDT)

== Chicago University incorrect reference ==

The article refers to Chicago University which does not exist. Is this a reference to some specific university located in Chicago? If so, which one? Clarification needed. {{unsigned|Star}}
:The referenced source mentions the "University of Chicago", and a Google search shows that there is one of them, so I've changed the article. Thanks for pointing it out. [[User:Philip J. Rayment|Philip J. Rayment]] 01:05, 3 December 2007 (EST)

== Remove Soft Tissue Claim ==

I would do it myself but I know it would be reverted so perhaps a syop could remove the claim that the tissue find throws doubt on the age of dinosaurs. If it were true that would mean that all dinosaur remains would contain soft tissue which they do not.
[[User:MetcalfeM|MetcalfeM]]
:There are ways younger dinosaurs can lose tissue. The important part is that some have it.[[User:RobertK|RobertK]] 20:46, 22 January 2008 (EST)

: You are correct, MetcalfeM: if you removed it, it would be reverted. And the reason is, because the claim is accurate and relevant. The claim is "Creationists cite a number of reasons to believe that dinosaurs have existed until relatively recent times...The recent dinosaur tissue find is a strong rebuttal of the claim that dinosaurs lived millions of years ago.". Creationists ''do'' claim this (there is a reference provided), so the comment in the article is accurate ''even if the creationists are wrong''. Secondly, as RobertK indicates, it is an error of logic to claim that because soft tissue shows dinosaurs are young, therefore all dinosaur remains will contain soft tissue. That simply doesn't follow. [[User:Philip J. Rayment|Philip J. Rayment]] 21:00, 22 January 2008 (EST)

I think it is important to note that A)of all dinosaur remains found there has never been tissue discovered - if this was proof that dinosaurs were alive recently then we'd find more of it and B) "soft tissue" does not mean it was soft. It means it was fossilised soft tissue. Like a fossiled ear for arguements sake. It wouldnt be soft but it is soft tissue.
[[User:MetcalfeM|MetcalfeM]]
: The soft tissue that was found was only found because a large T-rex bone had to be broken in two for helicopter transport. Researchers are now wondering if there is more soft tissue to be found in other bones. But until recently, nobody's looked.
: And you are incorrect. It was actual soft tissue, it was able to be stretched and it snapped back into place. Perhaps you should try reading the reference.
: [[User:Philip J. Rayment|Philip J. Rayment]] 21:03, 22 January 2008 (EST)

::<nowiki>*</nowiki>deep sigh*
::have a look at answersincreation.org
::[[User:MetcalfeM|MetcalfeM]]

Metcalfe, you keep making a mistake in saying that "if this, then all similar situations must be true." Evidence doesn't have to be complete, just interesting, relevant, and true. Time will tell.[[User:RobertK|RobertK]] 21:21, 22 January 2008 (EST)

sigh.....Found these showing it was not "Soft and stretchy..
I found this on National Geographic news (not a dubious creation site which your ref comes from) "First the dinosaur body had to escape predators, scavengers, and degradation by weather and water. Then a chemical process must have mineralized the tissue before bacteria ate it. And finally, the remains had to survive millions of years undamaged."
It was not soft an stetchy. It was mineralised. And this from Washingtonpost
"It's a dinosaur that was turned into stone, essentially," said Lyson, 24, now a graduate student in paleontology at Yale University."
NOT soft and stretchy
So why is this not included in the article?
[[User:MetcalfeM|MetcalfeM]]

"had to survive millions of years"---that's an unwarranted assumption.[[User:RobertK|RobertK]] 21:33, 22 January 2008 (EST)

But thats not what I am pointing out. I am pointing out that the claim of "Soft tissue" does not mean "soft" as shown by 2 credible resources above. I can find more with ease so why does no-one revert this soft tissue claim?
[[User:MetcalfeM|MetcalfeM]]

:: deeper sigh
:: The [http://www.answersincreation.org/argument/D612_creation_science.htm AnswersInCreation response] is terribly lightweight and answers nothing.
:: Their objections have already been answered [http://www.creationontheweb.com/content/view/3427/ here].
:: To briefly answer AnswersInCreation's four points:
::# That it was portrayed that way is rejected, is a matter of opinion anyway, and does not address the actual claims.
::# That soft tissue could survive is nothing more than an unsupported ''ad hoc'' explanation: ''It is that old so it must have been able to survive somehow''. Actual scientific evidence on the survivability of biological material refutes this argument.
::# That more would contain soft tissue has not yet been investigated to any extent, as mentioned above. This is an argument from silence, and thus invalid.
::# This is not a criticism of the claim, but a counter-claim.
:: So in summary, there's actually nothing of substance there in the way of a rebuttal!
:: Your claim that the creation site is dubious is nothing more than you showing your anti-creationist bigotry.
:: The soft tissue was contained in a mineralised matrix, which had to be dissolved. But it's simply not true that something hard was made soft and stretchy by the demineralisation process. You can't make rock soft and stretchy.
:: [[User:Philip J. Rayment|Philip J. Rayment]] 21:46, 22 January 2008 (EST)
:::Except magma is soft and stretchy, but anything in it that isn't rock probably isn't going to do so good.[[User:RobertK|RobertK]] 21:50, 22 January 2008 (EST)
:::: Soft, yes, but I wouldn't think that magma is stretchy in the sense of being able to stretch it and having it snap back. But then I've never tried it! [[User:Philip J. Rayment|Philip J. Rayment]] 21:54, 22 January 2008 (EST)

From a USgov website - "The tissue was once elastic and stretchy, and had the capacity to be dehydrated and rehydrated many times without losing this characteristic. “Although the preservation of soft tissue such as this is not unique in the geologic record, this occurrence goes well beyond what has been observed in the past for dinosaurs, and reinforces the evolutionary link of dinosaurs to birds,” said Barrera." And rock of course cannot be demineralised in this sense becuase, well, it never was organic in the first place.
But nevermind. National Geo and other well known academia are obviously rubbish compared to a creation site or sites. Forget it then.
[[User:MetcalfeM|MetcalfeM]]
: I'm not sure exactly what your quote from the unnamed US government website is getting at, but it does indicate that the ability to be stretchy was still there. And the connection with birds seems to be a leap into the dark; how on Earth does it show that? A normal fossil has the tissue (whether soft tissue or hard tissue such as bone) ''replaced'' by rock (minerals). There is no way that it can then still be soft and stretchy, or again made to be soft and stretchy. The only way the material can be soft and stretchy is if it is still the original (perhaps a little deteriorated) biological material, and ''not'' mineralised. And that's the point: It was not mineralised, but still (after removing the mineralisation around the material) ''soft and stretchy''. Yet test show that such material could not survive for anything even remotely approaching 65 million years, meaning either that (a) the preservation is exceedingly exceptional to have survived for 65 million years, despite tests showing otherwise, or (b) it is not 65 million years old. Evolutionists opt for (a), whilst creationists quite legitimately opt for (b). One item of evidence does not prove (or even disprove) an entire theory, but it is nevertheless totally valid for creationists to use this as one bit of evidence supporting their point of view.
: National Geographic is no less biased than academic creationist groups. And remember that the creationists are quoting the evolutionary researchers who made the discoveries; they're not making this stuff up. The creationists have produced arguments to defend their point of view. You, on the other hand, are trying to belittle them rather than answer their arguments. Yes, you have produced some counter views, but you have not actually pointed out the flaws in the creationist arguments that I linked to. It's like your attitude is "ignore what the creationists say and just quote what someone from the other side says, without even checking whether it really answers what the creationists are saying".
: [[User:Philip J. Rayment|Philip J. Rayment]] 00:56, 23 January 2008 (EST)

== Adaptation and evolution ==
(Rather than allow the sections to grow indefinitely, I've moved these latest posts out of the "Day 6 Creation Mechanisms?" section. The last post in that section was many months ago, and the first new post did not follow directly from the last one there. However, I invite the poster (Entheogenicorder) to add an introduction to his 16:35, 31 January post referencing what in that earlier section he is replying to, if he wishes.)

Adaptation and Evolution are the same thing - you can't claim that 'something adapted (because of changes to it's environment)' and then deny the validity of the Theory of Evolution. That is using a slight varient in words to suit your needs, not presenting facts to prove or disprove anything.
I was brought up with proper Christian morals, not concerned with politics, but the real Christian morals of caring for others out of kindness and treating every person as the same; the morals as taught by Christ. I am not a true Christian, in the Creationist, Church going sense, as I feel spiritual discovery is too subjective to be institutionalized, but the value of the lessons of the Bible are not lost on me and I will seek out my own spiritual awakening. That does not mean that I deny the idea of God. The further you delve into molecular and astrological science, the more you realise that we are part of a greater plan, a bigger scheme, but that we in no way comprehend what it is yet. We are just learning, moving forward and we are finding answers. If you believe in God, do him justice, DO NOT simplify the beauty of what he has created, the intrinsic, interconnected nature of everything. IT IS NO MISTAKE. But do not preach false truths of simplified realities, because to me, it is just sinful and wicked. If there is a God, he will want us to fully understand the beauty of his creation, not deny it.

I believe that most of the 'Christians' on this website cannot truthfully call themselves that. They are the opposite, Devils sent here to guide us towards the temptation of accepting the easy, second-grade theories over scientific proof. Maybe I'm wrong, but in my heart of hearts, I feel right. Let you not be the judge, for the Great Spirit, God, whatever name you give, he will be the judge. [[User:Entheogenicorder|Entheogenicorder]] 16:35, 31 January 2008 (BWT)

:Haha. Very passionate, but, in any case, wrong. Adaptation does not equal evolution. Adaptation can be found in the science of microevolution, a scientific fact many ''real'' Christians agree with. Also, I don't know how you equate macroevolution with "scientific proof". Not even the most-learned, ''intelligent'' scientist would make any assumption that presumes that the Theory of Evolution is any more than that - a ''theory''. Notice I said intelligent; there are some "scientists" who would like to believe otherwise. Nevertheless, I enjoyed your little rant, but let's try to focus on the facts, ok? Thanks. --[[User:David R|David R]][[User talk:David R|talk]] 11:59, 31 January 2008 (EST)

::Haha. Where's your passion in what you believe? In the instance I was refering to (apologies for not citing it here), which I believe can be seen earlier in this discussion, was that Dinosaurs adapted to become carnivores after leaving The Garden of Eden, where they were herbivores. This requires a large amount of adaptation to the digestive make-up of the dinosaur, as can be seen by the differences between herbivores and carnivores today. It would be a biological change, as a result of changing the environment/circumstance, which could be looked upon as evoulution... I don't believe the 'Theory of Evolution' is anything more than a theory, but probable evidence of it can be seen in the massive variety of plant and animal life around the world; especially in instances where secularized sub-species have evolved massively from their more common brothers, e.g. on secluded Islands. My main point was that if God created the Big Bang, foresaw evolution and guided the Earth in its history, isn't that the most brilliant thing? Wouldn't it be blasphemous to deny him of this splendour? I enjoyed my little rant, and would love to focus on the facts, if there were any that could be conclusively proved, thanks! :-D [[User:Entheogenicorder|Entheogenicorder]] 18:15, 31 January 2008 (BWT)

:::I have enough passion in what I believe. I just don't let it adversely affect my thinking. So you are telling me that you cannot conclusively prove what you say is true? Well, I commend your honesty. I ''do'' in fact believe that removing God from any part of Creation is blasphemy. If the Bible said that God created the "Big Bang" and people were trying to tell me that he created each species in the beginning, then I would have to say what they spoke was a form of blasphemy. However, I also believe saying God did something, when the Bible says He did something else would be blasphemous as well. Wouldn't you agree? --[[User:David R|David R]][[User talk:David R|talk]] 14:54, 31 January 2008 (EST)

I'm going to have to disagree with DavidR on a couple of his points, but then I will address the more substantial problems with Entheogenicorder's posts.

Leading creationists recommend that we ''don't'' talk about micro- vs. macro-evolution, as it obscures what the real problem is. The real problem is the ''type'' (or ''direction'') of change, not the ''size'' of the change.

Secondly, evolutionary scientists do in fact claim evolution to be a ''fact''. In science, the word "theory" does ''not'' imply something uncertain.

Now on to Entheogenicorder's posts:

"''Adaptation and Evolution are the same thing''": As DavidR has pointed out, this is simply not true, although it does depend on how one [[Definitions of evolution|defines evolution]] (read that). Adaptation can have a few mechanisms, but microbe-to-man evolution is not the same as adaptation.

"''If you believe in God, do him justice, DO NOT simplify the beauty of what he has created, the intrinsic, interconnected nature of everything.''", "''Wouldn't it be blasphemous to deny him of this splendour?''": I don't believe at all that creationists are doing that. But I would add, as DavidR has mentioned, DO NOT reject the clear things that God has told us. He [[creation Week|''clearly'' told us that He created the world in six days]] (among other things that He said that contradict evolution). How about "doing Him justice" by taking Him at His Word? It would be blasphemy to deny what He clearly said.

"''...accepting the easy, second-grade theories over scientific proof.''": No, we are accepting what God has clearly said about the ''history'' of this world over ''man-made'' theories by ''scientists'' trying to give us an alternative ''history''. They are not only therefore fallible men contradicting God, but they are speaking outside their area of expertise (e.g. biologists talking about ''history'').

"''[The change from herbivory to carnivory] requires a large amount of adaptation to the digestive make-up of the dinosaur, as can be seen by the differences between herbivores and carnivores today''": First, the Bible specifically says that God made some changes at the time of the fall. He doesn't specifically mention carnivory, and I'm not putting that forward as ''the'' explanation, but it is a ''possible'' explanation. Second, many supposed carnivores survive quite well on a herbivorous diet. There's not that much difference. Third, herbivores, such as sheep and cows, have been seen acting as carnivores. Fourth, there are examples where two closely-related species have one being carnivorous and one being herbivorous—there's not necessarily large amounts of adaptation involved at all.[http://www.creationontheweb.com/content/view/279/] Sixth, some creatures classified on the basis of their morphology as carnivorous are herbivorous (e.g. fruit bat, same reference).

"''I enjoyed my little rant, and would love to focus on the facts, if there were any that could be conclusively proved, thanks!''": So you are rejecting what God has clearly said on the basis of something that cannot be conclusively proved? I think you have your priorities a bit wrong.

[[User:Philip J. Rayment|Philip J. Rayment]] 21:28, 31 January 2008 (EST)

:If that is your take of things, I don't see why you have any problem with what I said. You may have misread my post, but I did not say anything about the ''size'' of an evolutionary change. Furthermore, I do not think microevolution takes size into consideration, rather it is influenced by type, as you stated. If you think that microevolution is change ''within'' a species, I cannot disagree. Also, you assume I think scientists who interpret the Theory of Evolution as scientific law are thinking clearly; I don't. In addition, a theory ''may'' not be something un''certain'', but it is certainly something un''proven''. That is all. I hope I cleared things up. :\ --[[User:David R|David R]][[User talk:David R|talk]] 22:22, 31 January 2008 (EST)

::I don't think you understand what a theory is-- It's not an unfounded guess. It's the closest you get to "THIS IS ABSOLUTELY TOTALLY TRUE" in science. [[User:Barikada|Barikada]] 22:24, 31 January 2008 (EST)

:: DavidR, I apologise for not being careful enough in my post. It's not that you said anything explicit about the size of the change, but size is what is implied in talking about ''micro''evolution vs. ''macro''evolution. Perhaps you didn't mean it that way, but that's what people will likely understand from the user of those terms. It's not a matter of what I think microevolution is. The term is imprecise.
:: Nothing in science is considered ''proven'', so prepending "theory" to it does not downgrade it at all.
:: In case ''I'' need to clear anything up, I was disagreeing with you on those two points only; overall, I agreed with you.
:: [[User:Philip J. Rayment|Philip J. Rayment]] 03:07, 1 February 2008 (EST)

::: Thank you all for taking the time to discuss this.

:::“''I don't believe at all that creationists are doing that. But I would add, as DavidR has mentioned, DO NOT reject the clear things that God has told us. He clearly told us that He created the world in six days (among other things that He said that contradict evolution). How about "doing Him justice" by taking Him at His Word? It would be blasphemy to deny what He clearly said''” God has not clearly said anything to me, has He told you in person? What is in the Bible is many thousands of years old and has been endlessly translated from one language to another. It is quite conceivable that much of the original meaning is lost in these translations. For example, it is widely accepted that Roman historical records prove the existence of Jesus at roughly the same time as we base our calendar around. Therefore, from studying similar Roman records from a later date, it should be considered that some time later, as is historically recorded, Roman scholars may well have changed the Bible to make it more compatible with the Pagan beliefs that many of their subjects held. Therefore – for me – it is very difficult to be sure exactly what God told us. Please also see below.

:::“''We are accepting what God has clearly said about the history of this world over man-made theories by scientists trying to give us an alternative history. They are not only therefore fallible men contradicting God, but they are speaking outside their area of expertise (e.g. biologists talking about history).” '' I’m sorry but that is accepting what other Men have interpreted God as having said, not what God has directly said to you (unless he has?). The Bible is apparently divided between the literal and metaphorical. I find it very difficult to differentiate between the two sometimes, especially when some manipulate these religious texts so that they can only mean one thing, and then deny that another part of the same text implies something else because 'it is not the literal meaning’. In this case, I have always thought the story of creation was metaphorical, not a popular view here I imagine but that is my understanding of it. For me that means the six days of creation could represent anything from a literal six-day working week to a massive time scale over billions of years, representing levels of development and culminating in our evolution. With regards to your second point, because you’re religious, does that qualify you over a scientist to discuss multiple fields? You may argue that Religion covers all aspects of life, but a Physicist will probable tell you that so does Physics, and I would argue that so does Philosophy.

:::If you believe in a complete and literal translation of the Bible, I would like to know the proposed size of Noah’s arc, if it had also to be filled with dinosaurs. I believe that even if you took one of each of the animals alive today, discounting dinosaurs, there would have been no way of building a boat large enough to safely transport and accommodate them all for 40 days and 40 nights, especially if you take into account that the animals would have needed fresh food, fresh water, fresh hay to sleep on and of course, room to exercise.

:::“''Second, many supposed carnivores survive quite well on an herbivorous diet. There's not that much difference. Third, herbivores, such as sheep and cows, have been seen acting as carnivores.”'' The differences between carnivores and herbivores are huge. In order to break down the complex cellulose in leaves, herbivores use either ‘symbiotic bacteria or protozoa’ in the gut, or ‘grind the plant's digestible protoplasm out of its cellulose-walled cells’. Carnivores have no mechanism for this. I have never seen a sheep or cow eat meat personally, but I don’t deny that they may have at some point in history!

:::On the basis of scientific evidence, dinosaurs existed millions of years ago, long before any human – or mammal – remains have been found. This idea is rejected by Creationists, who claim the science is wrong. I’d like to know the scientific background to this bold claim and would like to see and understand the scientific theory that attempts to explain the actual age of the earth. [[User:Entheogenicorder|Entheogenicorder]] 16:23, 1 February 2008 (BWT)

:::: I see that you've been doing what Andy refers to as [[liberal deceit]]. You make out that you believe at least some of the Bible ("I was brought up with ... the morals as taught by Christ", and "DO NOT simplify the beauty of what he has created, the intrinsic, interconnected nature of everything"), now show your true colours, in that you don't think the Bible is reliable enough to take any notice of!
:::: "''God has not clearly said anything to me...''": He has, in the Bible, whether you choose to accept that or not.
:::: "''What is in the Bible is many thousands of years old ...''": Which is consistent with it being written at the time the events happened, which makes it more reliable than something written much later. So that's a ''good'' thing. Strike 1.
:::: "''...and has been endlessly translated from one language to another''": Incorrect, in the sense that you are implying. Modern English translations of the Bible have been translated ''directly'' from the original languages. Again, that supports the idea that it is accurate. Strike 2.
:::: "''It is quite conceivable that much of the original meaning is lost in these translations.''": You can "conceive" anything you want with a vivid enough imagination, but the ''evidence'' is that the manuscripts have been handed down ''accurately''. Strike 3; you're out.
:::: "''...Roman scholars may well have changed the Bible to make it more compatible with the Pagan beliefs that many of their subjects held''": There's your imagination running away again. The evidence is otherwise.
:::: "''I’m sorry but that is accepting what other Men have interpreted God as having said...''": Nonsense. If you want to argue that when God said that He created the world in six days, that that is just an interpretation of what He said, then you are basically claiming that words have no meaning and language is useless. In which case I can claim that you're not really saying that "Roman scholars may well have changed the Bible"; rather that is just my interpretation of what you said. See how the argument is nonsense?
:::: "''The Bible is apparently divided between the literal and metaphorical. I find it very difficult to differentiate between the two sometimes...''": Perhaps your difficulty stems from trying to read the literal as metaphorical. Or else you simply know little about making such distinctions. But your inability to do this does not give you ''carte blanche'' to pick and choose what to believe. The experts agree, for example, that the creation account was meant to be understood literally. The language is not that of metaphor. An example of metaphor is elsewhere in the Old Testament where is says that the trees clapped their hands.
:::: "''...especially when some manipulate these religious texts so that they can only mean one thing, and then deny that another part of the same text implies something else because 'it is not the literal meaning’.''": Examples please?
:::: "''In this case, I have always thought the story of creation was metaphorical...For me that means the six days of creation could represent anything from a literal six-day working week to a massive time scale over billions of years.''": Well, you are wrong, as mentioned above, and as the link to [[Creation Week]] above explains. Did you read that?
:::: "''...because you’re religious, does that qualify you over a scientist to discuss multiple fields?''": Oh dear, another lack of comprehension. I wasn't talking about ''discussing'' multiple fields, but speaking ''authoritatively'' about them. Those scientists can discuss ''history'' as much as they like, but they have no more ''authority'' on the subject than me, and I'm not claiming any. I'm quoting other authorities and offering evidence, not claiming that I'm an authority. You can quote other scientists' arguments as much as you like, but the case stands or falls on the strength of their arguments, not their authority, because when it comes to ''history'', they have none.
:::: "''If you believe in a complete and literal translation of the Bible...''": I don't. I accept that there are parables, metaphors, etc. in the Bible. But the Flood account is history, so...
:::: "''I would like to know the proposed size of Noah’s arc...''": ''Proposed'' size? Are you so ignorant of the idea that you dismiss so readily that you are not even aware that the Bible records the size of the ark?
:::: "''I believe that even if you took one of each of the animals alive today, discounting dinosaurs, there would have been no way of building a boat large enough to safely transport and accommodate them all...''": Hey! Terrific argument! You don't know how big the ark was, you haven't got any figures on how many animals would need to have been on it, yet you can conclude that it's not big enough! I must stand in awe of your immense intelligence! (Sorry for the sarcasm, but you asked for it.)
:::: "''...for 40 days and 40 nights...''": Showing your ignorance again? The Bible records that they were on the ark for just over a year.
:::: "''The differences between carnivores and herbivores are huge.''": Another assertion ignoring the evidence I offered to the contrary.
:::: "''In order to break down the complex cellulose in leaves, herbivores use either ‘symbiotic bacteria or protozoa’ in the gut, or ‘grind the plant's digestible protoplasm out of its cellulose-walled cells’''": What you are hinting at is that it's harder to eat vegetable matter than meat. Which means that a carnivore would have problems eating vegetable matter, but a herbivore would not have the same problems eating meat. Which means that the biblical account of going from herbivory to carnivory does not present any great problems, although the contrary change would.
:::: "''Carnivores have no mechanism for this''": Yet some carnivores survive quite satisfactorily on a herbivorous diet.
:::: "''I have never seen a sheep or cow eat meat personally, but I don’t deny that they may have at some point in history!''": There's been recent accounts of them doing so.
:::: "''On the basis of scientific evidence, dinosaurs existed millions of years ago...''": No, that's on the basis of the evolutionary theory, not the scientific evidence.
:::: "''This idea is rejected by Creationists, who claim the science is wrong.''": No, they claim that the philosophy underlying evolution is wrong, not the science.
:::: "''I’d like to know the scientific background to this bold claim and would like to see and understand the scientific theory that attempts to explain the actual age of the earth.''": See [http://www.creationontheweb.com/ here]. I wouldn't normally direct you to an entire web-site for an answer to a specific question, but in your case, you are trying to argue against ideas (creationism, the accuracy of the Bible, etc.) that you know next to nothing about, and the right and proper thing is to actually do some study and learn about the subject before you go around criticising it. Okay? I trust that you won't return here with more arguments until you have actually learnt a reasonable amount about the subject.
:::: [[User:Philip J. Rayment|Philip J. Rayment]] 22:34, 1 February 2008 (EST)

:::::Admittedly I thought I was clearer at the start in saying that despite being brought up as a Christian, I do not follow the Religion in any institutionalized sense. I would like to point out that it was not a case of me consciously practising [[liberal deceit]]. I was brought up a Christian and I do believe that to deny the true nature of the universe is to take something away from the idea of God. I do believe in what the Bible has to say about loving your brother, equality among all men and many of the other important lessons which are put together into stories. My point here was to ask you to examine your own beliefs and for me to examine my own. As [[Socrates]] once said ‘a life unexamined is a life not worth living.’

:::::From what I have read, ‘the experts’ generally agree very little on the true nature of Genesis, and for a large part it depends on their religious orientation. Many understand the main creation story literally, but others don’t. A small group of Christians, apparently known as '[[Progressive Creationists]]' have spoken to me about the 6-days of creation existing in a metaphorical sense, and this is where much of my confusion arises; if one group of Christians says it means one thing and then another tells me that without doubt it means another, then I’m confused before I get to reading the first page. What I can gather is that to some it is a literal text peppered with metaphors and parables; just to cover all eventualities! I can understand the points in the [[Creation Week]] link, as long as you take what is written in the Bible as the perfect word of God, but my point is about the writing down of the Bible; it may be just my curious nature to question everything, but I would question; would Moses understand anything conveyed to him by a perfect and omnipotent being? Would God have had the same concept of a day as we do? With regards to the reference to morning and evening; if Moses understood the days as God told him to be 24 hours, did he try to clarify this to the next reader by adding the reference? And even though it is partially covered in the [[Creation Week]] link, could it not still have been poetic? After all, much contemporary poetry does not follow implicit rules and often with revelatory texts, seeks to break with tradition.

:::::You may believe that God spoke to you through The Bible and I may believe that he has, but I may also believe that Buddha has passed on some of his enlightened wisdom in his texts when he says; ‘do not believe on the faith of Sages of the past’. My point was that Moses (and others) traditionally wrote much of the Old Testament, and Moses was a man. Men often create or imagine figures of God or ideas of Spirituality in order to persuade themselves that they are inspired by a higher power. They also create ideas in order to manipulate groups of people into abiding by their will. Men are also often wrong. Therefore, my point is that you cannot be sure that what Moses said and wrote is the word of God, even if you believe that the Bible is exactly what Moses (etc.) said and wrote. As you well know, the first five books of the Old Testament are known as the "Pentateuch". Tradition states these books to have been written by Moses. This is improbable, since these books speak of Moses in the third person throughout and also more conclusively, they tell of the death of Moses in Deuteronomy 34:5. I find that while many Christians are quick to accept archaeological data that verifies a piece of Biblical history, and are quick to accept scholars' conclusions on the questionable nature of scriptures of other religions, they downplay a critical study of their own scripture, the Bible.

:::::My small point about translation (your Strike 1, 2 & 3) was questioning – as you point out the language is quite loose; ‘isn’t it conceivable that…over thousands of years’ etc. If you read the King James Version, it is most likely that you have as accurate version as possible. As historians (or part-time historians), we cannot know what has happened in the past, we can only critically examine the evidence we have to create an idea of what has or might have happened, that is what history is. To claim that anything in the past is definite is to speak outside of your authority whether you are a historian, scientist, philosopher or anything, so even one translation to English could have been changed in some ways.

:::::''Nonsense. If you want to argue that when God said that He created the world in six days, that that is just an interpretation of what He said, then you are basically claiming that words have no meaning and language is useless. In which case I can claim that you're not really saying that "Roman scholars may well have changed the Bible"; rather that is just my interpretation of what you said. See how the argument is nonsense?'' Please let me demonstrate how my argument was fairly sound, but yours is a logical fallacy. I wrote, directly from me, that ‘Roman scholars may well have changed the Bible.’ You could only use this argument if I had said it to another person, who had then written it down and conveyed it to you. As I am saying it directly to you, there is less scope for my meaning to be lost. If I said it to an acquaintance of mine, who then thought about it and then passed it on to you, he may not convey my entire message. He may give you the gist of it, but not all of the intricate details, he may wish to elaborate on it, or even change some of the ideas if he couldn’t understand them, or he may even include his own ideas. So you see the difference I’m trying to establish; if God spoke to you in the same way he did Moses, then you would know that what he had said to you was the authentic Word of God, although there’s a fair chance you’d be called a maniac for preaching it. If God says something to Moses, who then writes it into stories and commentaries, or passes them on through generations of oral story telling as is argued by some scholars, then some of His meaning might be lost, confused, misinterpreted etc.

:::::''The differences between carnivores and herbivores are huge.” Another assertion ignoring the evidence I offered to the contrary… What you are hinting at is that it's harder to eat vegetable matter than meat… …Which means that the biblical account of going from herbivory to carnivory does not present any great problems, although the contrary change would.”'' Firstly, it isn’t an assertion because I offered some evidence. I provided a brief summation of characteristics usually associated with herbivores, I didn’t mean to over-generalize because obviously there are some exceptions, but many dinosaur fossils found display the same attributes, for example, as elephants do, for grinding the plant's digestible protoplasm out of its cellulose-walled cells. There are also obvious examples of dinosaurs whose physiology is generally geared towards hunting. Secondly, theoretically this is so, but moreover I was trying to examine the differences there can be between herbivores and carnivores. I don’t think a dinosaur with flat, blunt teeth, a long neck and weak jaws would have been very good at hunting, so it would have had to have changed in order to suit a carnivorous diet.

:::::''On the basis of scientific evidence, dinosaurs existed millions of years ago…” : No, that's on the basis of the evolutionary theory, not the scientific evidence…” …this idea is rejected by Creationists, who claim the science is wrong.: No, they claim that the philosophy underlying evolution is wrong, not the science.”'' I’m sorry but that is pure ignorance. It is not proved or disproved on the basis of the evolutionary theory; it is on the basis of fossil evidence and dating methods. If you can give me your scientific opposition to the various methods of dating, which have been used to accurately measure the ages of various buildings and relics around the world then please, let me know, but don’t try and discredit what I’m saying by using the evolutionary theory argument, because that is not relevant here. Christians often use carbon or radiometric dating as evidence that events occurred at a time in-keeping with that in the Bible, as seen [http://www.s8int.com/edom.html here], however when it is used to prove the age of the dinosaurs is millions of years, it is repudiated, often citing that dinosaur bones are ‘too old to be accurately dated’ or ‘the methods are inaccurate’, though most leading scientists maintain that these claims are [http://www.actionbioscience.org/evolution/benton.html unfounded]. Please don’t say tell me that carbon dating cannot date anything beyond 70,000 years, because I know. It is the dating techniques using ‘rubidium/strontium, thorium/lead, potassium/argon, argon/argon, or uranium/lead, all of which have very long half-lives, ranging from 0.7 to 48.6 billion years’ to which I am referring.

::::: ''Proposed size? Are you so ignorant of the idea that you dismiss so readily that you are not even aware that the Bible records the size of the ark?'' No I’m not that ignorant, to be honest I didn’t really know what a ‘cubit’ was and I admit I could have phrased the question better. 300 x 50 x 30 cubits could have meant anything to me; I thought maybe you could provide me with a useful answer of how big that would be in terms of commonly used measurements today, rather than attack the wording and theory of my question. Please also do not accuse me of readily dismissing anything; it is with some consideration and a desire for truth that I look beyond what I have been taught. Having researched it further it seems that, contrary to my earlier claim, that Noah’s ark may well have been of the size required to carry all of the kinds of creatures, not species, that are on the earth today. That is, as long as such a large vessel could have been constructed (one would not have been seen again until the 19th Century). And of course as long as there weren’t hundreds of 50ft lizards marauding through the corridors!

:::::''You don't know how big the ark was, you haven't got any figures on how many animals would need to have been on it, yet you can conclude that it's not big enough...'' Being English I love a good bit of sarcasm and that was pretty tasty! It was a sweeping generalization admittedly, but the reason for the ambiguity in figures is that as you can see above, I had no idea how big the stated size of the ark actually meant it was, and also because there is often confusion as to whether the reference to ‘each kind’ in the Bible is referring to each individual species to the smallest variation, or a more general division.

:::::''I trust that you won't return here with more arguments until you have actually learnt a reasonable amount about the subject.'' Please don't accuse me of knowing next to nothing about a subject you only understand from one point of view. I can accept that some of the things I have written are probably wrong, and others have been phrased badly. I hope you can as well. My original post here had no real agenda, and this has now developed very much into a two person discusion of providing counter-arguments for each other without getting far. Whilst I have found it useful and also very interesting, I had hoped to find more of a discussion with a lot more theoretical and philosophical musings. I find it very frustrating that we, as humans, unconditionally rely on unproven science and theoretical history to prove our own points, whilst dismissing other science because it is only theoretical. That is the very point of science, and the very nature of it since Aristotle first set out a logical way of thinking. You observe, predict, then experiment and adjust; it is an ongoing process of refining and defining. Once you have created a theory, as a scientist the very first thing you should do is to examine it under the conditions it is most likely to be proved false. That is science; it doesn’t claim to know the ultimate answers, just guide you towards what’s right. While this is completely off-topic again, I found it very [http://members.aol.com/projbin/plerdyn.htm interesting]. I hope you don't find my points or arguments offensive because they aren't meant to be. As I have said before, my purpose here is understanding, hoping both to be understood and to understand. [[User:Entheogenicorder|Entheogenicorder]] 15:57, 5 February 2008 (BWT)

::::::"''From what I have read, ‘the experts’ generally agree very little on the true nature of Genesis''": It depends on what "experts" you are referring to. There are many who claim to know what it means, but have little claim to the title "expert". The experts I was referring to were the ones mentioned in the Barr quote in [[Creation Week]]: professors of Hebrew or Old Testament at world-class universities. According to Barr, they are all agree on the meaning of the text, that it was six ordinary days.
::::::"''...for a large part it depends on their religious orientation.''": For many of the so-called "experts", probably true. But the experts that Barr was quoting would not, for the most part, believe the account to be literally true. Barr himself is theologically liberal, I believe, but he is explaining what the text is saying, even though he doesn't believe that to be a true and accurate account.
::::::"''...if one group of Christians says it means one thing and then another tells me that without doubt it means another, then I’m confused before I get to reading the first page''": In that sense, your confusion is understandable. But you need to go beyond just noting that different groups have different beliefs and see how good their arguments are.
::::::"''What I can gather is that to some it is a literal text peppered with metaphors and parables; just to cover all eventualities!''": That's being unkind (ascribing to them the motive of beleiving what suits them). Most non-fiction texts are literal peppered with metaphors. Take a newspaper, for example. You are meant to understand the news as literal events, but even that newspaper will include metaphors in the text, as metaphors are a normal everyday part of language. So there's nothing odd about the Bible being that way. Also, metaphors are discernable by the context. If the newspaper said that so-and-so had passed away after a heart attack, you know that "passed away" is a metaphor for "died", and you have no reason to wonder if "heart attack" is literal or metaphorical. Acknowledging that the Bible contains metaphor is not an argument of convenience, but a simple recognition of the nature of the text.
::::::"''I can understand the points in the Creation Week link, as long as you take what is written in the Bible as the perfect word of God...''": You don't need to do that, for most of them at least. The points are mostly to do with understanding the language.
::::::"''...would Moses understand anything conveyed to him by a perfect and omnipotent being?''": Surely a perfect and omnipotent (and omniscient) being would have the capability of describing things in a way that Moses could understand?
::::::"''...Would God have had the same concept of a day as we do?''": Wouldn't God use language that Moses understood? Besides, from what we understand of God, He doesn't experience day and night: That is something that He created as part of His creation, so He would ''have to be'' talking about earthly days, not any other ones.
::::::"''...if Moses understood the days as God told him to be 24 hours, did he try to clarify this to the next reader by adding the reference?''": Why? Why explain the meaning of words to people who already understand the language?
::::::"''...could it not still have been poetic? After all, much contemporary poetry does not follow implicit rules ...''": In order for something to be called "poetry", it has to follow ''some'' rules, else you could call any text poetry. Sure, the rules might differ in different cultures and at different times in history, but there's still got to be rules. There's no point proposing that a text is poetry without having some reason for doing so, and I don't consider a desire to not take the text literally to be such a reason.
::::::"'''Therefore, my point is that you cannot be sure that what Moses said and wrote is the word of God...''": I can be sure. That is, I believe that there is quite sufficient evidence of God's ultimate authorship of it to be convinced of that. You, of course, may not be so convinced. Some will never be convinced, because they will refuse to believe no matter what. But this is not the place to get into the evidence for that.
::::::"''Tradition states these books to have been written by Moses. This is improbable, since these books speak of Moses in the third person throughout and also more conclusively, they tell of the death of Moses in Deuteronomy 34:5.''": I would not be the first nor the last time that someone has written of themselves in the third person. And it's more than tradition that it was written by Moses, including Jesus Himself testifying to that. Of course that doesn't mean that a later person (e.g. Joshua) didn't append an epilogue to it to record Moses' death, so that fact is not reason to reject Moses' authorship.
::::::"''I find that while many Christians are quick to accept archaeological data that verifies a piece of Biblical history, and are quick to accept scholars' conclusions on the questionable nature of scriptures of other religions, they downplay a critical study of their own scripture, the Bible.''": I also find Christians to be somewhat inconsistent like that, but I also find many sceptics, such as yourself, using loaded language, such as referring to people who believe the Bible as "Christians" and those who question it as "scholars". It is nonsense like this, along with many stupid and inconsistent arguments against the Bible, that causes sceptics to have little credibility even with Christians who are more open to examining critical views. A classic example is Thomas Paine using the very point that you used about Deuteronomy recording Moses' death meaning that Moses could not have written the book, yet he acknowledged in his own book that a previous edition ''contained something that he had not himself written''! Did he therefore reject his own authorship of his book? Or acknowledge that he was inconsistent in denying Mosaic authorship? Of course not. When it comes to criticising the Bible, very often anything goes, including inconsistency.
::::::"''As historians (or part-time historians), we cannot know what has happened in the past...''": So I guess you don't know when you were born?
::::::"''...we can only critically examine the evidence we have to create an idea of what has or might have happened, that is what history is''": We can "know" what happened about as well as we can know anything. How do I know that man has been to the moon (which happened in my lifetime)? Because I saw evidence and heard that it happened from people I considered to be reliable. How do I know what happened during World War II (which happened before I was born)? The same answer. How do I know what happened 2000 years ago? The same answer. Sure, for much of history the evidence is quite scant, and so we can't be sure, but that's not true all the time, so in many cases we can be as sure of it as we can be of almost anything.
::::::"''To claim that anything in the past is definite is to speak outside of your authority whether you are a historian...''": Not true. If the evidence is scant, a historian may not have much to go on, but it ''is'' his area of authority.
::::::"''...even one translation to English could have been changed in some ways.''": Because words in two different languages don't have a one-to-one correspondence, this is inevitable in a sense. But given the number of different experts (translators, etc.) who have studied this, the worst that can be said is that the English translations don't 100% convey every subtlety of the original languages. But that's a whole lot different to claiming that there is any substantial change that has occurred, and to therefore questioning the veracity of the Bible.
::::::"''Please let me demonstrate how my argument was fairly sound, but yours is a logical fallacy. (rest snipped)''": The problem with your rebuttal is that it is a straw-man argument. If you wrote something down and gave it to your friend, and your friend carefully rewrote it verbatim and passed it on to me, there is no more chance of misunderstanding arising than if you had written it and given it directly to me. So my argument was not logically flawed. What you probably assumed before but have now stated explicitly is that the Bible was passed down by oral tradition. There's two problems with this. One is that the people at the time were quite practiced at accurately passing things on orally, as that was a common way of passing on information. The second problem is that I know of no reason why the Bible was ever passed on orally, and believe that it was always written down.
::::::"''...it isn’t an assertion because I offered some evidence.''": If you didn't offer evidence, it would have been an ''unsubstantiated assertion'', but providing evidence doesn't mean that it wasn't an assertion.
::::::"''I don’t think a dinosaur with flat, blunt teeth, a long neck and weak jaws would have been very good at hunting, so it would have had to have changed in order to suit a carnivorous diet.''": I don't see your point. I'm not claiming that all dinosaurs were carnivorous. God created creatures herbivorous. Some time later, some started eating meat (which, because of the reduced digestive requirements, should not pose any problems). As far as catching the meat is concerned, some creatures would be better at that than other creatures, specifically those that already had sharper teeth, for example. Furthermore, creationists claim that God provided a fair amount of built-in variability in the genes, so possibly there was already the capability of, for example, a variety of teeth forms so that some creatures might develop teeth better suited for carnivory, and natural selection then favours those creatures. You might think that this is evolution, but the distinction is that the "better" teeth required nothing new, as the genetic information already existed.
::::::"''I’m sorry but that is pure ignorance. It is not proved or disproved on the basis of the evolutionary theory; it is on the basis of fossil evidence and dating methods.''": The dating methods are based on evolutionary theory (or naturalism, to be more precise) and the fossils do not show evolution.
::::::"''If you can give me your scientific opposition to the various methods of dating...''": See [[radiometric dating]].
::::::"''Christians often use carbon or radiometric dating as evidence that events occurred at a time in-keeping with that in the Bible, as seen here...''": Carbon dating, yes, but rarely if ever other forms. Carbon dating is able to be calibrated with artefacts of known age for the last few thousand years, so creationists don't take issue with those dates, but get beyond a few thousand years and the methods can't be calibrated.
::::::"''...often citing that dinosaur bones are ‘too old to be accurately dated’...''": I don't recall ''ever'' seeing that particular claim.
::::::"''Please don’t say tell me that carbon dating cannot date anything beyond 70,000 years, because I know.''": Well, that puts you ahead of many of the evolutionists who argue with me!
::::::"''No I’m not that ignorant, to be honest I didn’t really know what a ‘cubit’ was and I admit I could have phrased the question better.''": Modern translations have it in modern measurements, in footnotes if not the actual text. And it's really not that hard to find out what a cubit was anyway, and not my job to tell you something that you could so easily find for yourself.
::::::"''Having researched it further it seems that, contrary to my earlier claim, that Noah’s ark may well have been of the size required to carry all of the kinds of creatures, not species, that are on the earth today. That is, as long as such a large vessel could have been constructed (one would not have been seen again until the 19th Century). And of course as long as there weren’t hundreds of 50ft lizards marauding through the corridors!''": Not only those alive today, but those that have gone extinct as well. The average size of a dinosaur was about that of a chicken, if I recall correctly. Only relatively few were really large creatures, and it would have been better (for reproduction after the flood) to take young dinosaurs onto the ark, not fully grown ones. But I'm glad to see that you have learnt something! I don't think you're totally correct about the size of ancient boats, though.
::::::"''...also because there is often confusion as to whether the reference to ‘each kind’ in the Bible is referring to each individual species to the smallest variation...''": If you read what the leading young-Earth creationists claim, instead of their critics and people who haven't really studied it, there would have been no reason for your confusion.
::::::"''Please don't accuse me of knowing next to nothing about a subject you only understand from one point of view.''": What makes you think I only know it from one point of view? I get evolution thrust at me in the media, on the Internet, in endless debates with sceptics, in science journals and magazines, and books. I know quite a bit about both sides of the issue. You, on the other hand, have shown that you have relatively little knowledge of the creationist side of the issue. Hence my comment was justified. How much reading of the creationist view ''have'' you done?
::::::[[User:Philip J. Rayment|Philip J. Rayment]] 00:54, 6 February 2008 (EST)

== Dinosaurs are not Reptiles ==

Please remove that. >_< [[User:ProserpinaFC|ProserpinaFC]]
:Why aren't they reptiles? I can find a number of sources that say that they are. [[User:Philip J. Rayment|Philip J. Rayment]] 21:16, 4 February 2008 (EST)

:: Philip, reptiles are cold-blooded. The size and location of dinosaur remains, as well as their internal bone structures, have resulted in the discovery that dinosaurs were warm-blooded. [[User:Darkmind1970|Darkmind1970]] 08:30, 21 April 2008 (EDT)

== Why does this page and these thoeries ignore Megafauna? ==

Do you guys even know about megafauna? Why do you automaticlly assume that if antiquity mentions large animals, they are mentioning dinosaurs?

What about the megalania? Or the giant sharks, turtles and crocs of 30,000 years ago? [[User:ProserpinaFC|ProserpinaFC]]
: I know about megafauna, but what I don't know is what relevance they have to this article. Perhaps you could explain yourself more clearly. [[User:Philip J. Rayment|Philip J. Rayment]] 21:17, 4 February 2008 (EST)

==Loch Ness Should Be Removed==

I dont want to get in to the debate of whether or not dino's were around with people or not but I think the Loch Ness section should be removed. Numerous reseachers have scoured the Loch and found nothing, no concrete evidence has been found and the famous "Surgeons picture" was admitted as fake by the surgeon on his deathbed. I may not agree with the premise of this article however I do believe it should a least remain *credible*.
[[User:MetcalfeM|MetcalfeM]] 19:29, 19 February 2008 (EST)
: I'm not an expert on the Loch Ness monster, but I would have thought that there were a number of other claimed sightings that a particular picture being faked doesn't change a lot. The entry is already there in a qualified way rather than a definite way, so I don't think it matters a lot, and is (as far as I know) accurate in that people who believe it exists think that it could be a plesiosaur. But removing it wouldn't bother me too much. Anyway, I've unlocked the article. [[User:Philip J. Rayment|Philip J. Rayment]] 20:33, 19 February 2008 (EST)

I'll take it out. Also, if there was a pleisour there it would have to be very old and there is not enough food to support a large carnivore such as a dinosaur. Thanks.
[[User:MetcalfeM|MetcalfeM]] 21:11, 19 February 2008 (EST)

Talk:Barack Hussein Obama

2008-03-27T11:53:18Z

Darkmind1970: /* This Article is Ridiculous */

{{unprotect|Ed Poor}}

==Second Picture's caption==
The caption on the second picture should read "...during the national anthem." Also, I believe the picture was taken from here: http://www.time.com/time/photogallery/0,29307,1662530_1446035,00.html. [[User:Shiritai|Shiritai]] 08:21, 7 November 2007 (EST)

== Who here would mind Obama as president?==
I'll admit it, i am a moderate on the conservative slanted site. Be as my politcal views span both sides, i am hoping for Obama to win the election. I'm sure that some people here have criticisms of him, some of which may even be valid. So have at it people: Why not Obama, the man sent to lead America to greatness?--[[User:Fpresjh|Fpresjh]] 20:10, 15 March 2007 (EDT)

I must remind you, this is a conservative encyclopedia. most conservatives can't handle the idea of a black man as superior to them! [[User:GodlessLiberal|GodlessLiberal]] 21:09, 20 March 2007 (EDT)

No right-thinking people could possible support having a black as President, let alone in their neighborhood. [[User:GodisGreat|GodisGreat]] 15:27, 21 March 2007 (PST).

I think it would be great if he won, I can't stand Hilary...--[[User:Flax+|Flax+]] 21:32, 20 March 2007 (EDT)

I'm one of the most liberal people I know... and I cannot stand the woman. [[User:GodlessLiberal|GodlessLiberal]] 21:35, 20 March 2007 (EDT)

In that case, get to those primaries and vote (especially if you live in Iowa or NH). I believe that there are worthy candidates on the Republicans as well, but i want to ensure the best man for the job gets the democratic nomination.--[[User:Fpresjh|Fpresjh]] 23:26, 20 March 2007 (EDT)

To be honest... He would be better than that anti-video gaming [[fascist]]. No offense to anybody. --[[User:Eiyuu Kou|Eiyuu Kou]] 23:27, 20 March 2007 (EDT)

Personally, I feel Obama may be too inexperienced for the job. However, I still would like to see him elected. In reality, the president doesn't need to be very smart or experienced to BE president. He has a Cabinet of advisors and a whole staff to make decisions for him. Ergo, Obama doesn't really NEED the experience. He's plenty smart enough, and he come off as highly educated and eloquent. Really though, what makes him a good candidate is that he is well liked. What we need right now is a president who is willing to go around to all the European countries we have angered and make kissy-face with them, thus patching up our foreign policy. Hillary isn't going to do that, and I doubt a Republican president would. If we don't get our foreign policy out of the toilet, I think we're going to be in a lot of trouble soon.--[[User:Elamdri|Elamdri]] 23:32, 20 March 2007 (EDT)

:That reminds me of Bush Jr... --[[User:Eiyuu Kou|Eiyuu Kou]] 23:34, 20 March 2007 (EDT)

::I agree completely!
No person with the name hussein will become president[[User:Albobsman|Albobsman]] 12:53, 10 August 2007 (EDT)

I understand why American terrorists would want Hussein Obama to be President. How obtuse can you be not to understand he is the Al-Qaeda candidate? I will not surrender willingly to Barack Hussein Obama. [[User:GettingItRight|GettingItRight]] 22:30, 7 November 2007 (EST)
::Exactly, because obviously an American sounding name makes a great president. Look at George Walker Bush. [[User:Kip|Kip]] 07:26, 7 March 2008 (EST)

== Sources ==

Can't we get a better source for his voting record than an opinion piece? [[User:Myk|Myk]] 02:12, 28 March 2007 (EDT)

*You can't turn a pigs ear into a silk purse dude......he doesn't have much of one. --~ [[User:TK|TerryK]] [[User_talk:TK|MyTalk]] 05:27, 3 April 2007 (EDT)

::I'm not saying how to judge his voting record, I'm saying that an opinion piece doesn't merit a good source. A good rule of thumb is that if there's a little picture next to an article, it's a column or an opinion piece, not an article. [[User:Myk|Myk]] 17:51, 3 April 2007 (EDT)

Now that flew right over my head...I even heard the air noise! --~ [[User:TK|TerryK]] [[User_talk:TK|MyTalk]] 19:50, 3 April 2007 (EDT)

# I asked for people who were going to discuss his voting record to use an actual source, not an opinion piece as it is now
# You made a joke about his lack of a voting record
# I said that wasn't what I was talking about, I was talking about sources. Columns, op-eds, editorials are not sources. [[User:Myk|Myk]] 20:26, 3 April 2007 (EDT)

*Oh, okay, so my cracking a joke meant I didn't understand what you meant, and might have distracted the readers, so they wouldn't know either? Got it. --~ [[User:TK|TerryK]] [[User_talk:TK|MyTalk]] 09:30, 4 April 2007 (EDT)
::From the ass' butt to it's mouth, http://www.senate.gov/legislative/LIS/roll_call_lists/vote_menu_109_1.htm for last session. --[[User:Rob Pommer| Cracker]][[User_talk:Rob_Pommer|talk]] 09:39, 4 April 2007 (EDT)

== Recommend ==

[[Conservapedia:Manual_of_Style/Politicians]] - [[User:Myk|Myk]] 02:18, 3 April 2007 (EDT)

==Breaking News!!!!==

Barack has just raised 25 million dollars for his campaign making his in competiton with Hiliary Clinton!! [http:// http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/17946727/25 million!!!!]

== Controversial ? ==

Why is Barack Obama's biographical entry a "controversial" topic for Conservapedia, and locked out from editing?
:Because people who don't feel like contributing useful information see fit to compare his name to those of terrorists. [[User:GodlessLiberal|GodlessLiberal]] 20:42, 4 April 2007 (EDT)
::It was vandalized twice in 48 hours. I asked for it to be unlocked. [[User:Myk|Myk]] 20:43, 4 April 2007 (EDT)
:::OK. It look presentable. I left in the material about how liberal he is, though I doubt its value. At least it looks nice. [[User:Myk|Myk]] 01:44, 6 April 2007 (EDT)

*The political leanings of any politician are the most important of all. Their stated goals mean nothing, their idealogy everything. --~ [[User:TK|Sysop-TerryK]] [[User_talk:TK|MyTalk]] 01:57, 6 April 2007 (EDT)

:I don't disagree, but I doubt the veracity of saying X is Y more liberal than Z. Liberalness is not a quanitfiable value. There are better ways to describe his political agenda than by saying "look who he is more liberal than." [[User:Myk|Myk]] 01:59, 6 April 2007 (EDT)

:*Well, Myk, it's your MSM who does it, the Liberal news organizations, lol. --~ [[User:TK|Sysop-TerryK]] [[User_talk:TK|MyTalk]] 02:01, 6 April 2007 (EDT)

::I don't know if I'd call the National Journal, a publication with an almost $2000 per year subscription rate, mainstream. I tend to avoid it when I hear it, just as I tend to avoid editorial commentary. A far better judge of whether or not a candidate fits your bill is to look issue by issue. And it may be the "Main Stream Media" that started it, but it was the Rocky Mountain News which reported it (in a column) and Conservapedia who repeated it. [[User:Myk|Myk]] 02:21, 6 April 2007 (EDT)

::How is this locked? I can still edit this. Maybe that's because i have proven myself in being able to see Obama for the wonderous person he really is. Or not (since i may get banned for a comment like that, him being a non-conservative)--[[User:Fpresjh|Fpresjh]] 01:13, 8 April 2007 (EDT)

::Things change on a wiki, dude. It got unlocked. [[User:Myk|Myk]] 09:47, 8 April 2007 (EDT)

== Goofy Article ==

I understand that B.O. hits a lot of people's hot buttons, but this article is a mess. "half-African, half-Caucasian"? What's up with that? Why not use the generally-accepted and perfectly accurate term "African-American"? Or ditch it altogether, unless we're going to start classifying all politicos by race/ethnicity ("Irish-Caucasoid Ted Kennedy", or "Texan-American George Bush"). Better still, ignore the race issue until it is relevant to the article ("Obama is the the first African-American to...").

Too, do we really need three sentences establishing Obama's exact degree of liberlosity? Can't we just say "liberal Democrat", or just describe his positions ("show, don't tell").--[[User:WJThomas|WJThomas]] 11:36, 5 April 2007 (EDT)

*I took all that away once, have been overruled by another Sysop, evidently. I changed it back once, to African-American, but some felt it important to note he was Mulatto. An archaic term, if ever there was one. Mixed-race would be acceptable today. --~ [[User:TK|Sysop-TerryK]] [[User_talk:TK|MyTalk]] 02:00, 6 April 2007 (EDT)

== Michael Richards and Jimmy the Greek ==

Why are we discussing Michael Richards (not Kramer by the way) and Jimmy the Greek (real name Jimmy Snyder) on Barack Obama's page? The Boston Globe criticized him, black leaders criticized him... that's relevant. Imus' career and the issues surround Richards and Snyder are not. I would change this myself but it was protected again. [[User:Myk|Myk]] 13:02, 11 April 2007 (EDT)

:And while it's still off topic here, it might be pertinent for the [[Don Imus]] article to note that CBS Radio suspended him for two weeks, not a few affiliates. [[User:Myk|Myk]] 13:07, 11 April 2007 (EDT)

::TK, please tell me where Obama's intellect vs. the intellect of civil rights leaders is mentioned in the source. And please tell me why refering to the old civil rights era is not redundant as the civil rights era is generally considered to be the era of MLK, Malcolm X, and Rosa Parks. That's already old, TK. [[User:Myk|Myk]] 16:47, 11 April 2007 (EDT)

:::Perhaps to you, perhaps to me, but not necessarily to readers. Our "job" is to make things clear for them, not us. I think my change to old-guard makes it much clearer. Your additions were borderline denigration, to Hill's advantage, I would say. --~ [[User:TK|TK]] [[User_talk:TK|MyTalk]] 16:50, 11 April 2007 (EDT)

::::So this is a wiki. We create a link for Civil Rights Era and then we make the article. His disconnection from Civil Rights figures is well publicized, just google Sharpton AND Obama. Or Obama AND black AND enough. Never is his intellect brought up. That's your opinion and is not sourced. I have no reason to want to support Hillary Clinton. Never been a fan. [[User:Myk|Myk]] 16:57, 11 April 2007 (EDT)

*Someone reading his curriculum vitae cannot escape his intellect, no? Since we currently have in place a "Civil Rights" leadership, it isn't necessairly old, is it? Jackson and Sharpton (both bigots, IMO) are from the old-guard civil rights era, and that is germain, is it not, since Obama's age was brought into the argument? Are you really incensed at that one word addition, which is sourced by the rest of the page, or that it was me adding to it? I will be happy to add a cite for what you consider an assumption, later today. --~ [[User:TK|TK]] [[User_talk:TK|MyTalk]] 17:02, 11 April 2007 (EDT)

:::::I just think it's redundant. His disconnect is with the era. He was too young to participate in it and as he is not a descendant of slaves, he is considered to not be a part of the CRE culture. As for the intellect thing, that has no part of his disconnection. You are either saying Obama is smarter or stupider than Civil Rights Leaders, something of which you have no proof. [[User:Myk|Myk]] 17:09, 11 April 2007 (EDT)

*Myk, the "proof" that Obama is "smarter" is in the public record, IMO. Disconnect is a pejorative word, used by reporter and political scum to smear people without appearing to overtly do so. Did you not know that? --~ [[User:TK|TK]] [[User_talk:TK|MyTalk]] 17:12, 11 April 2007 (EDT)
**I read the article to say Obama wants to be known as a "national leader", not a "Black leader", to paraphrase moreless. Hence a sort of parting of the ways with traditional well known "Black civil rights leaders", so to speak. [[User:RobS|RobS]] 17:24, 11 April 2007 (EDT)

:::Agreed. He views things, seemingly, unlike the older leaders, as not just black and white issues. Obviously due to his age, upbringing in a multi-cultural society, and his education....--~ [[User:TK|TK]] [[User_talk:TK|MyTalk]] 17:29, 11 April 2007 (EDT)

::::Still, by referring to leadership in quotes, and comparing their intellect unfavorably to Obama's you are painting a whole bunch of folks with a wide pejorative brush. Jackson and Sharpton are not representative of the whole of the CRE activists. And, of course, the Obama entry is not the appropriate place for a broadside against JJ, AS, and so forth.--[[User:WJThomas|WJThomas]] 17:38, 11 April 2007 (EDT)

*Agreed, WJT, however they are allowed/painted/claimed to be "the leaders" both in the press and educational circles. --~ [[User:TK|TK]] [[User_talk:TK|MyTalk]] 17:44, 11 April 2007 (EDT)
**This is indeed an important point, Obama's greatest fear is being marginalized as just another "Black leader"; he's counting on what Republicans call the 'color blind society" to elevate him as an equal, respected national figure and leader. [[User:RobS|RobS]] 17:48, 11 April 2007 (EDT)

::Well he certainly has my attention and support in doing that, and ridding us at long last of the hobgoblins of the past, and wresting the power away from the merchants of fear and hate. --~ [[User:TK|TK]] [[User_talk:TK|MyTalk]] 17:50, 11 April 2007 (EDT)

== Off Page Discussion ==

Regarding the published criticism of Barack Obama, don't you think the majority of that link would be better served in an article about Don Imus or about Racism in Broadcasting? It seems to me that the relevant bit is that the Boston Globe and some prominent black leaders question Obama's handling of the situation, not the digression towards Michael Richard and Jimmy the Greek. Myk 15:42, 11 April 2007 (EDT)

You convinced me. You wanna do it? RobS 15:43, 11 April 2007 (EDT)
It was locked last time I checked. Myk 15:50, 11 April 2007 (EDT)
Ok, I'll unprotect you so you can fix it; but i may have to reprotect quickly cause actually I don;t know what's going on on that page. RobS 16:09, 11 April 2007 (EDT)
That you'd have to take up with TK. He thinks the candidate pages are being excessively vandalized. I have been unable to persuade him otherwise. Myk 16:15, 11 April 2007 (EDT)
Done. Check it out to make sure it still fits with what you wanted to say. I am an Obama supporter so I tried to keep it to the source as much as possible. Searching for Obama AND Imus actually comes up with a lot of comments about Imus and McGuirk (sp?) making derogatory comments about Obama himself. Those weren't helpful. Myk 16:35, 11 April 2007 (EDT)
Real good. Couldn't have done better myself. Say, while I got you here, would you mind discussing why you support Obama just to answer some personal curiousity. I got two questions off the top (a) what age group do you fall into (18-24, 25-30, 30-45, 45+),and (b) when and/or where did you first hear of Obama? Thanks. RobS 16:39, 11 April 2007 (EDT)
I'm narrowly into the 30-45 category. And I first heard Obama at the 04 convention. Went out and got his first book and then Audacity when it came out. Myk 16:42, 11 April 2007 (EDT)
Question 3: Do you think he can (a) defeat Hillary in the primaries and go on to win the General election, and/or (b) is just running for the VP spot? RobS 16:48, 11 April 2007 (EDT)
(Undent) I don't think people on the right fully appreciate how disenchanted a lot of Democrats are with Hillary. I think when the two of them are on the same stage in a debate the differences will become overwhelming. Obama is both charismatic and smart. As for the general... well, obviously he's going to be a polarizing figure just because of his race and his name... but far less polarizing than Clinton. I think Hillary is much more beatable in a general than Obama. Myk 16:53, 11 April 2007 (EDT)

Good observations, and I agree with all of it. Hillary is the Newt Gingrich of the Democratic Party--42% will come out to vote for her, and 42% will come out to vote for whoever can beat her.
So as to the question of electability, Richardson & Obama got her beat. I just quickly reread Obama & Kerry's convention speeches, cause I recall at the time much of what Obama said was directly contradicted on successive nights by a host of successive speakers. Let's look at these two excisions:
Obama:tonight, there is not a liberal America and a conservative America -- there is the United States of America. There is not a Black America and a White America and Latino America and Asian America -- there’s the United States of America. [23]
Kerry:after September 11th all our people rallied to President Bush's call for unity to meet the danger. There were no Democrats. There were no Republicans. There were only Americans. And how we wish it had stayed that way. [24]
Now, is this just meaningless election rhetoric on the part of both speakers, or is there some way to reconcile these divergent passages? RobS 17:12, 11 April 2007 (EDT)
A lot comes down to genuineness (I think I just made up a word). When Obama uses rhetoric, I believe it. At least in a way that I never do from Kerry or Clinton. The position of president entails a mix of issues, ability and inspiration. Issues are always going to be split based on ideology. Ability is where Obama's going to take a hit due to his lack of national / executive experience but he clearly has the intellect. If he can handle that question, which I think he can, then his ability to inspire will make him a daunting force. Think Bill Clinton without the smarm. And hopefully without the personal problems. As it stands now, Romney and Giuliani are the only GOP candidates I see capable of taking on Obama and then only if they don't prompt a more conservative third party candidate.
The fact that Obama chose to give a unifying speech at a historically polarizing venue took a lot of courage. Compare his keynote address to Zell Miller's. Regardless of your thoughts on the issues, Miller's speech was a heckuva lot more abrasive. Myk 17:27, 11 April 2007 (EDT)
Guilani doesn't have a prayer. GOP will not nominate an East Coast liberal in favor of abortion. The question is who can beat McCain? Richardson may, Hillary can't, and Obama probably can't either. (Incidentally, new item this morning says Fred Thompson has lymphoma, so that leaves Huckabee as the only other Bible-belt GOP candidate, and Bible-belt candidates, GOP or Dem, are the only ones who can win nowadays).
Let me give a gut instinct on Obama, he's probably running for VP, which is a mistake. His problem is, if he doesn't win the whole prize, which is a long shot right now, no one will ever take him serious again. He will not be viable in 2012 or ever after. (Just as Edwards doesn't have a prayer, or Gary Hart, etc. Candidates really have a short shelf life). You can't run on failure. I think he's in now for the following reason:
Both parties recognize a young person's poltical views are molded by parents & teachers, but not really hardened until they reach about age 25. So between 18-25 they are still approachable and winnable. Once they turn about 25, whatever party reaches them has a voter then for life--for the next 40 or 50 years. So there is always this sort of outreach to younger voters, to get their interest, enthusiasm, and commitment. I think Obama (a) knows he being used this way with the prospect of being a VP candidate for Hillary (b) doesn't mind the prospect that he will never get elected President in 2008 or ever after that by agreeing to this scheme. But he is getting rewarded. Ultimately in the end though, he will disappoint his followers by being a failure, which of course can always be blamed on Americans entrenched racist attitudes, and everyones's a victim.
This is how the game of politics is played. RobS 17:43, 11 April 2007 (EDT)
Yes, that is how it is played, usually, like this, away from the article talk page, to the exclusion of those not specifically "watching" the page. :p --~ TK MyTalk 17:46, 11 April 2007 (EDT)
OK, I'll cut and paste it over there. RobS 17:50, 11 April 2007 (EDT)
McCain has alienated both the left and the right. I don't think he has a shot for the nomination and the only thing that can save him in the general would be an abrupt upturn in the war. Myk 18:34, 11 April 2007 (EDT)
Retrieved from "http://www.conservapedia.com/User_talk:RobS"

==Another take==
Let me give a gut instinct on Obama, he's probably running for VP, which is a mistake. His problem is, if he doesn't win the whole prize, which is a long shot right now, no one will ever take him serious again. He will not be viable in 2012 or ever after. (Just as Edwards doesn't have a prayer, or Gary Hart, etc. Candidates really have a short shelf life). You can't run on failure. I think he's in now for the following reason:

Both parties recognize a young person's poltical views are molded by parents & teachers, but not really hardened until they reach about age 25. So between 18-25 they are still approachable and winnable. Once they turn about 25, whatever party reaches them has a voter then for life--for the next 40 or 50 years. So there is always this sort of outreach to younger voters, to get their interest, enthusiasm, and commitment. I think Obama (a) knows he being used this way with the prospect of being a VP candidate for Hillary (b) doesn't mind the prospect that he will never get elected President in 2008 or ever after that by agreeing to this scheme. But he is getting rewarded. Ultimately in the end though, he will disappoint his followers by being a failure, which of course can always be blamed on America's entrenched racist attitudes, and everyones's a victim.

This is how the game of politics is played. [[User:RobS|RobS]] 17:52, 11 April 2007 (EDT)

:I don't think he's running for VP. I think even being elected for VP would marginalize the accomplishment. And he's certainly not fundraising like a VP. [[User:Myk|Myk]] 17:53, 11 April 2007 (EDT)

::*One doesn't ever "run" for Vice President. However when Hillary is nominated, her asking him to take the job is pretty much a mandatory yes from him. Especially if he ever wants to run for President again. Refusing would term him out as a Senator, and strip him of any future party leadership. --~ [[User:TK|TK]] [[User_talk:TK|MyTalk]] 17:59, 11 April 2007 (EDT)
:::*Libby Dole did 2000.

:::*See, now we need to understand how the fundraising law operates (which can't be briefly explained right here). He's got $20+ million; as an Illinois Senator, he's not up for another 5 years, and needs maybe 6-10 million by then. So this is one way he's being rewarded, he's basically got enough cash to hold that Senate seat for the next 24 years right now, in addition to being able to contribute to other candidates, i.e. build a politcal machine. This is how the game of politics really operates, and if you look beneath the surface, follow events, and see where Obama ends up in the next 18 to 24 months (and several decades after), you really can get some insight on the inner workings that are often hazy and mysterious. [[User:RobS|RobS]] 18:01, 11 April 2007 (EDT)

*Obama isn't Senator Dole, with her political pedigree, it is indeed apples and oranges. I do have friends who are managing Obama, since its a very small world at that level of handling, and he has a decent shot. But in my opinon, and that of Dick Morris (albeit a Hillary hater, but most certainly a FOB.) he will possibly be offered the VP shot. If not too throughly destroyed by the Clintons long before the convention. --~ [[User:TK|TK]] [[User_talk:TK|MyTalk]] 18:08, 11 April 2007 (EDT)
**The name of the game is beat McCain. Right now McCain beats all hands down (as he has for two years now). McCain controls big donors, party apparatcheks, old Perot & Colin Powell middle of the roaders, and a few Democrats. But the dirty little secret is GOP rank and file core constituents, the tax cutters and the religious right, are not that enthusiastic about McCain. His biggest problem is in his own party. If Hillary is the nominee, then the core rank & file will come out to vote for McCain to stop Hillary. And a VP candidate such as Obama, as the record shows, adds nothing to the ticket. This however, is where Bill Richardson can win. If it’s McCain vs Richardson, and GOP rank & file stay home, Richardson could actually pull off the win, cause he doesn’t have the “high negatives”, as they are called, that candidates like Hillary & Gingrich have. High negatives motive people to go out and vote against a candidate. This is were the polling on McCain is deceptive, if it’s McCain vs Hillary, the Republicans will come out in force to stop Hillary; if it’s McCain vs Richardson, many Republicans will stay home rather than soil their conscience by voting for someone or something they detest. [[User:RobS|RobS]] 18:39, 11 April 2007 (EDT)

:*I look forward to beating the pants off of McCain! Newt has the hearts and minds of the GOP, and many, many Democratic voters, with his commmon-sense, almost Reagan-like approach. --~ [[User:TK|TK]] [[User_talk:TK|MyTalk]] 19:32, 11 April 2007 (EDT)
:**Right now, 2008 looks like a Democratic year; the only thing that could screw it up is--Hillary Clinton. [[User:RobS|RobS]] 20:46, 11 April 2007 (EDT)

I agree, again. However, have you looked at newt.org and some of the bipartisan initiatives he has launched? BTW I added some backgound on that scum reporter, some other interviews she gave and her own posts, discrediting her being bipartisan, or even fair, where Obama is concerned. I smell one of Bill's cigars at work. ;-) --~ [[User:TK|TK]] [[User_talk:TK|MyTalk]] 21:48, 11 April 2007 (EDT)

:I'd have Newt's baby if I were a women, but he's not going anywhere. And I recently read somewhere he's not serious anyway. The mold of modern Presidents is a Southern Governor, or at least a Southerner. This has been true since Lyndon Johnson. Nixon & Reagan were from California, but the demographics of California since the Dust Bowl era have been Southern (remember, Grapes of Wrath, the Okies headed west, etc). So California is really much more like the South than it is the Midwest or the East. Southerners do not vote by party, they vote for "one of their own", i.e. one who talks and sounds like them. Easterners & Midwesterners don;t vote like this, they are more ideological of party driven the by the common culture and history that Southerners share. Ironic, even thought the South lost the Civil War, they have come to dominate the Presidency since the 60s. Bill Richardson fits this mold. So do Huckabee & McCain. Fred Thompson & the guy from Kansas also. I suspect Hillary, cosmopolitan New Yorker that she has become, along with Pennsyvlania & Chicago roots, will really resurrect her Southern drawl she gave up nearly 15 years ago now in the next coming months. This will be comical to watch, listening to her Eastern & Midwest accent when she's DC or NY, but pouring on the the good 'ol drawl when she's out on the trail, cause she smart enough to know how Presidential elections are won. [[User:RobS|RobS]] 22:18, 11 April 2007 (EDT)

::Rob, Newt is from Georgia. --~ [[User:TK|TK]] [[User_talk:TK|MyTalk]] 02:02, 12 April 2007 (EDT)

:::Gingrich and Hillary have the identical problem: "high negatives". Both enjoy 42% over all support; both have 42% "unfavorable" ratings. In other words, it's a wash. +42% - 42% = 0 net positive. Neither can win.

:::What "high negatives" do is motivate voters to get out an ''vote against'' a candidate. Typically, voters a motivated by a candidates ''charisma'' so to speak, like Clinton or Reagan, where voters are motivated to ''vote for'' the candidate; when candidates fail to inspire, like Dole, Dukakis, ''et al'', voters stay home. But a candidate like Gingrich or Hillary with high negatives motivates voters to get out and defeat them by voting for whatever uninspiring, uncharismatic candidate stands the best chance to beat them. This is why uninspired Rebublicans ''will'' vote for McCain to defeat Hillary, with a high turnout, whereas in a McCain/Richardson contest, Republicans voters will stay home and a Democrat then can win. [[User:RobS|RobS]] 10:11, 12 April 2007 (EDT)

== Political Blog or an encyclopedia? ==

Would like to know if this is now officially an political blog, or are we still trying to make an encyclopedia? If the goal of the site hasn't changed, why are there entryes like: "Obama's image as an "articulate" spokesman came into question after his failure to state right away that he would retaliate in case of further terrorist strikes against the United States." ? Are we next going to collect President Bushes slips in his speeches and post them here under his article? Tell me if this is the new trend and ill go collect some. Would lenghten the article nicely. [[User:Timppeli|Timppeli]] 21:10, 2 May 2007 (EDT)

*Someone so obviously discontent with Conservapedia, makes one wonder why they are here at all. I mean, I am not wanting you to leave, if you think you can do productive work, most certainly. However I can only judge from my own feelings, which would mean if I was that unhappy, I wouldn't waste my breath on it. You are an extraordinary man, being able to do productive editing and be so displeased. --[[User:TK|Sysop-TK]] [[User_talk:TK|/MyTalk]] 07:06, 12 May 2007 (EDT)

::nevermind --'''''[[User:Andersmusician|Andersmusician]]''''' 23:13, 22 July 2007 (EDT)~

*Gosh, you waited all this time to respond, and had to make a sock to do it? :O --[[User:TK|Sysop-TK]] [[User_talk:TK|/MyTalk]] 23:27, 22 July 2007 (EDT)

== GSmiley ==

Great additions here today! Thanks for your effort. --[[User:TK|Sysop-TK]] [[User_talk:TK|/MyTalk]] 07:09, 12 May 2007 (EDT)

==Gossip==

"Former House Majority leader Tom DeLay has described Obama's record in the Illinois Senate as that of a “Marxist leftist.”"

I thought Conservapedia reached its recent page view goal without indulging in the gossip common on wikipedia? This is something I have seen on a number of political biographies here, but mainly on Democrats. [[User:Graham|Graham]] 18:40, 22 September 2007 (EDT)

== Drug Use ==

I was shocked that Obama's admitted cocaine use [http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/01/02/AR2007010201359_pf.html] isn't mentioned in this article. [[User:Physicsnut|Physicsnut]] 14:48, 17 December 2007 (EST)

: Our [[rules]] prohibit [[gossip]]. [[Gossip]] has zero educational value, for example.--[[User:Aschlafly|Aschlafly]] 15:10, 17 December 2007 (EST)

:: How does one define gossip? He wrote about it himself - making it not private, no? [[User:Physicsnut|Physicsnut]] 15:19, 17 December 2007 (EST)

== Liberal Rankings Reference ==

I would like to see the reference for Obama being the 10th most liberal senator changed to this
http://nationaljournal.com/voteratings/sen/lib_cons.htm?o1=lib_composite&o2=desc
because this is what the other reference refers to and because this site is very informative as it lists other senators scores and votes. Thanks! --[[User:PhineasBogg|PhineasBogg]] 18:30, 29 December 2007 (EST)

:Unprotected, so do it yourself. --[[User:Ed Poor|Ed Poor]] [[User talk:Ed Poor|Talk]] 18:31, 29 December 2007 (EST)

Done! Reprotect again if you like. Thanks! --[[User:PhineasBogg|PhineasBogg]] 18:35, 29 December 2007 (EST)

== Rumours ==
This article is somewhat sloppy in its attributions and quotes. The part about the allegations about Obama's childhood are a good case in point. Surely it should be made clear that the allegations that he attended a madrassa are lies? [[User:Darkmind1970|Darkmind1970]] 19:18, 2 January 2008 (EST)

== Suggest Protection ==

There's a vandal who was blocked once today for targeting presidential candidate entries. Since the primary is tonight (fingers crossed for Huck!) I expect vandalism to go up on these articles, before it goes down! I would recommend protecting articles like this for a week, maybe?-[[User:MexMax|MexMax]] 18:11, 8 January 2008 (EST)

: No need for protection. We'll be watching.--[[User:Aschlafly|Aschlafly]] 18:38, 8 January 2008 (EST)

== Affirmative action in summary ==

I'm sorry about not discussing the recent change I made- I didn't see how it was major, as MexMax suggests, or even arguable. Here's why I did it:

The summary contains an anti-Obama statement claiming he is nothing more than a black man, who gained his status due to affirmative action. I removed the section because this very article states that he not only graduated Harvard Law, but did so magna cum laude ("with highest honors"). I can understand someone having issue with the possibility of his getting accepted due to his race, but graduating at the top of his class is far from proven to be race-based.

Regarding the paper he wrote, it's just fluff. His lack of a background in physics is unrelated since he was not authoring a paper in physics. He was writing about law, using physics as an analogy of legal matters. If the editor who put this text here actually bothered to read the reference, they would have seen that the context of the quote was actually a compliment Tribe: "...he was certainly the most all-around impressive student I had seen in decades." Again, where is affirmative action in this?

Conservapedia is about truth, not spreading propaganda (correct me if my impression is mistaken). I understand that Obama does not share conservative values but lying is morally wrong as well and we should not tolerate it here.

-- [[User:NepotisMonachus|NepotisMonachus]] 12:00, 30 January 2008 (EST)

: Obama's record and support is full of puffery, preferences, and advantages based on his race. Your comments above only reinforce some of them, rather than rebut them. He was credited with analyzing a paper on physics, without any background in the topic. In fact, he apparently had no formal background in constitutional law at the time either! We're going to tell the truth here.--[[User:Aschlafly|Aschlafly]] 15:08, 30 January 2008 (EST)

:: You should be a bit careful, though, Andy. You don't want to get hung out to dry like you did over Dawkins. A word to the wise! [[User:MatthewHopkins|MatthewHopkins]] 15:13, 30 January 2008 (EST)

:Removed the personal opinion on Tribe's remarks regarding Obama. Tribe can state whatever he wants regarding Obama, and if it's going to be referenced, do so straight up. CP isn't the place to debate Tribe's remark as he can't respond. If we include his remark (or the reference) we shouldn't be expounding on it. I didn't think an encyclopedia should contain personal opinion. --[[User:Jdellaro|Jdellaro]] 15:17, 30 January 2008 (EST)

:: Accounts will be blocked if they remove facts or quotes here, or in the Dawkins entry.--[[User:Aschlafly|Aschlafly]] 15:26, 30 January 2008 (EST)

:::How is "absurdly insisted" a fact and not an opinion? If it just said insisted, that's a fact because it was a direct quote. But to add the adverb "absurdly", that makes it opinion.--[[User:Jdellaro|Jdellaro]] 15:27, 30 January 2008 (EST)

:::: You deleted the Tribe quotes also, which is unacceptable. If you want to remove "absurdly" then insert "liberal" next to Tribe's name so that readers can see for themselves how ridiculous the quotes are.--[[User:Aschlafly|Aschlafly]] 15:31, 30 January 2008 (EST)

::::Jdellaro's right, you know. [[User:MatthewHopkins|MatthewHopkins]] 15:29, 30 January 2008 (EST)

::::: "MatthewHopkins", you seem to love to talk, talk, talk. I'm going to check your edits now to see if there is any substance there.--[[User:Aschlafly|Aschlafly]] 15:31, 30 January 2008 (EST)
:::::: That's rich. Check away, old horse. You'll find good stuff there, and most of the talk is attempting to argue sense into [[Liberals]]. [[User:MatthewHopkins|MatthewHopkins]] 16:05, 30 January 2008 (EST)

::::: Aschalfly- First, we can't change things without talking, now Matt gets slammed because he tried to discuss the issue. You claim this is a meritocracy, but you push people around just because you don't know them. Your action here is that of a tyrant- threatening someone who is only trying to help the encyclopedia. I know you are concerned about liberals defacing the encyclopedia, but I don't think you've found one in this case. I've checked his edits without malice, and he seems to deserve good standing. You should be ashamed when you finish your witch hunt and apologize. [[User:NepotisMonachus|NepotisMonachus]] 07:44, 31 January 2008 (EST)

Mr. S, this is really weird. I mean, Obama might be just left of Lenin, but I don't get the affirmative action thing. Do we know his SATs, LSATs, etc? Do we have any evidence that his "achievements" are based on AA? If not, then this will look to any sane person like a racist piece of poo article. I mean, c'mon, let's get this guy on the facts, not on bizarre assumptions. Just cuz he's black doesn't mean he benefited from AA. He may have, and if he did, where's the citation? Otherwise, it's racist gossip.[[User:RobertK|RobertK]] 16:56, 1 February 2008 (EST)

: Agreed- this nonsense makes the article looks more like a smear campaign that a fact-based biography. Due to the absence of any evidence, I will be removing much of the AA material later this week. I am halfway through reading the law review article, and there's nothing wrong with it. You may have a different opinion, but the essay is solid- liberal in its views perhaps, but certainly not absurd. There is none of this alleged analysis of physics, only a well cited collection of the physics issues described so that a layman can understand the importance of their discovery and their effects on modern scientific thought. Note that these effects are the key point and they have more to do with the history of science than science itself, and do not require the absurd call for a background in physics. The credits cite Barack for being the last of five persons providing "analytic and research assistance", but do not specify his contribution, which could have been anywhere from analytic to gofering to the law library to make photocopies. It also mentions a Harvard physics professor as a source of technical comments, so the physics are probably sound. If Obama was a major contributor to this essay, he should be commended for a job well done, but the current evidence doesn't allow for either congratulations or condemnation. Please provide comments and present supporting evidence. If you want to comment on the article, try reading it first: Harvard Law Review- Volume 103 November 1989, Number 1. [[User:NepotisMonachus|NepotisMonachus]] 13:28, 4 February 2008 (EST)

:: Some childish heavy-handed coward anonymously and secretly blocked my account instead of using discussion to come to a conclusion on this matter. Whoever you are, you can't shut me up by clicking a check box. Give me a fair trial for violating site policy or prove me wrong. Keep blocking new accounts only proves your contempt for truth and free speech. [[User:NepotisMonachusB|NepotisMonachusB]] 08:46, 14 February 2008 (EST)

Im sorry but that AA thing is complete bigotry, you can be black and still achieve. This is very offencive , only a racist would be happy with it, no wonder only moderates and liberals will stand a chance of winning the election, be it McCain, clinton or obama, the conservative voice will never again take prominance in politics. Maybe after seeing this im quite releaved. --[[User:Realist2|Realist2]] 12:02, 15 February 2008 (EST)

== Reversion explained ==

The total number of votes cast by Obama is meaningless, since the vast majority of them would be on non-controversial issues.--[[User:Aschlafly|Aschlafly]] 15:08, 30 January 2008 (EST)
:Not a problem; I was just trying to add a bit of perspective to the point. However, you might want to reconsider or reformulate the second part of the paragraph (which you also reverted). It's unclear who exactly "opponent" refers to--I understand it means Jack Ryan, but Obama's main Dem primary rival came to a similar end (dropped out of the race when details of his divorce became public). Further, readers might recall that Obama defeated Alan Keyes in the general election and wrongly believe the sexual allegations refer to him. Hence, my phrasology of "initial Republican" and "dropped out". Also, thanks for (re)clarifying the research citation.--[[User:RossC|RossC]] 17:12, 30 January 2008 (EST)

== "He has no clear personal achievement that cannot be explained as the likely result of affirmative action" ==

Seems a little harsh (and uncited). Could it maybe be reworded slightly? His race is perhaps one factor, but ''surely'' it's not implied that Obama's entire life has consisted of coasting on a combination of his ethnicity and [[liberal]] [[affirmative action]]. [[User:Feebasfactor|Feebasfactor]] 22:28, 30 January 2008 (EST)
:That's extremely harsh, I agree, and veering towards the biased. Of all the thousands of people who have voted for him, surely what he has to say, what he has written and what he has done have all had a bigger impact than affirmative action? If affirmative action was in place, then why isn't Alan Keyes the Republican front-runner? [[User:Darkmind1970|Darkmind1970]] 10:54, 1 February 2008 (EST)

:: Republican voters do not support [[affirmative action]], and do care about military and other experience in choosing a Commander in Chief. Many (not all) Democratic voters care more about promoting [[racial quotas]]. Got it now?--[[User:Aschlafly|Aschlafly]] 11:10, 1 February 2008 (EST)

::: Aschlafly- you've avoided the point with more anti-liberal statements. While I'm happy to sling those around with you, bias is the question here. I'll try to make Feebasfactor's point a little clearer for you: Is there bias in the affirmative action statement, or is the accusation verifiable? If proof cannot be provided, how are we better are than the liberals on Wikipedia, who we bash daily on their bias? Do we even care anymore or have we abandoned Conservapedia's founding principles? [[User:NepotisMonachus|NepotisMonachus]] 16:46, 1 February 2008 (EST)

:: Aschafly - If Republicans care about military experience, then why choose Reagan or G. W Bush, whose experience of warfare was minimal? And if I can point out something with my tongue firmly in my cheek, why are the current Republican candidates for the Oval Office all themselves from minorities - a Mormon, an Old Age Pensioner, an Evangelical, an African-American and a... a whatever the heck Ron Paul is? Isn't that affirmative action too? [[User:Darkmind1970|Darkmind1970]] 19:03, 1 February 2008 (EST)

:::Aschafly - Let's say all the Democratic candidates for President are black. (Bear with me here.) These are all people who graduated from a prestigious school with high honors, worked as a lawyer, and served as a Congressman, governor, or mayor. Would you then say that all of them got to where they were as a result of affirmative action and nothing else? That none of the things they accomplished came as a result of their talent, or perhaps their intelligence? That successful minorities must be viewed upon with suspicion?

:::Kinda stupid hypothetical situation, I know, but I hope it gets my point across, however stupid you think that point may be. [[User:Gillespie|Gillespie]] 20:29, 1 February 2008 (EST)
::::Let's say there's a young white guy, not bad-looking, but not all that original a thinker. His parent is a famous theocrat and a founder of the new Religious Right in the late 70s/early 80s. Despite his lack of original thinking and intelligence, he manages to get into an ivy league school, and despite that, his greatest accomplishment is a bizarre blogwiki hybrid on which he spreads hate and fear to children. Isn't that affirmative action?
::::Never mind, it's too weird to contemplate.[[User:RobertK|RobertK]] 20:54, 1 February 2008 (EST)

Peggy Noonan, that well-known leftist, in the well-known leftist publication The Wall Street Journal:

"He is the brilliant young black man as American dream. No consultant, no matter how opportunistic and hungry, will think it easy--or professionally desirable--to take him down in a low manner. If anything, they've learned from the Clintons in South Carolina what that gets you.
(I add that yes, there are always freelance mental cases, who exist on both sides and are empowered by modern technology. They'll make their YouTubes. But the mad are ever with us, and this year their work will likely stay subterranean.)"

Possibly she means you guys. I merely suggest. "He has no clear personal achievement that cannot be explained as the likely result of affirmative action" is at least good enough to have been written by David Duke.
Archer070

I'm removing that line until a citation of some kind is given. If there was an affirmative action program for congress in place I am sure that its Conservapedia entry would be even more popular than the one on Homosexuality. [[User:NoraReed|NoraReed]] 23:49, 26 February 2008 (EST)

== African american ==

In this article is says that:"He is, as of 2007, the only African American serving in the United States Senate"
but
"Obama was born on August 4, 1961 in Honolulu, Hawaii"
He is most certainly not african american.

He is not African American because he was born in Hawaii? You MUST be joking. O__O I mean, I have heard "He is not the descendant of African slaves, so he isn't really African American." and I have heard "Living all over the world, he surely isn't in touch with African American life." but I think you have taken the petty distinctions to a new low.[[User:ProserpinaFC|ProserpinaFC]] 12:31, 1 February 2008 (EST)

== Foreign Policy Experience ==

Found a great article while searching for W's foreign policy experience before the war. The full article is here:
<ref>http://www.cnn.com/ALLPOLITICS/stories/1999/06/24/president.2000/foreign.policy/</ref>

Here's the relevant portions:

<blockquote>
Just how much do new presidents need to know about international affairs?

Franklin Roosevelt had experience and led successfully during World War II. But when he died, the presidency passed to Harry Truman, who was so out of things Roosevelt had never even told him about the atomic bomb. But Truman had many foreign policy successes: the end of World War II; the Marshall Plan to rebuild Western Europe; the policy of containing the Soviet Union; the Berlin airlift when the Soviets tried to cut the city off; the United Nations; and so on.

He couldn't end the Korean War, but in foreign policy, he had many more pluses than minuses. Dwight Eisenhower had lots of experience. He was the allied commander in World War II; ended the Korean War; demanded, successfully that Britain, France and Israel abandon their seizure of the Suez Canal. Successes.

John Kennedy grew up on foreign policy. His father was ambassador to Britain. And JFK wrote a study of British policy between world wars called "While England Slept."

As president, he had one big failure: the botched Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba. But it was followed by a big success: resolving the Cuban missile crisis by getting Nikita Khrushchev to remove Soviet Missiles from Cuba in exchange for withdrawing U.S. missiles from Turkey.

Lyndon Johnson had no direct experience aside from Senate debates. His administration passed historic domestic legislation: the civil rights and voting rights acts. But the unresolved war in Vietnam destroyed his presidency.

Richard Nixon had experience as Eisenhower's vice president and had solid success: detente with the Soviet Union, opening relations with China after decades of silence.
Carter
Former President Jimmy Carter

Jimmy Carter had no experience, failed to free American hostages held in Iran, and said he was surprised when the Soviets invaded Afghanistan.

Ronald Reagan was completely inexperienced and had great success: negotiated arms reduction with the Soviets, urged Mikhail Gorbachev to tear down the Berlin wall, which actually happened during George Bush's presidency.

Does experience matter? Yes, if you look at Johnson or Carter; no, if you look at Truman or Reagan.
</blockquote>

Seems that Reagan and W had about as much experience as Obama.

==References==
{{reflist|2}}

== removed false information ==

While Obama is left of Stalin on some matters, the Affirmative Action statement is blatant racism without some example given. Further, the Harvard law Review is hardly "liberal', as it counts among it's alum Supreme Court Justice Scalia, Chief Justice Roberts, and Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. And IT DOES NOT HAVE A QUOTA!

We can disagree with his policies, but we are not going to lie about him.

Having the same issues as reported above this is the second time I've had to remove the affirmative action statement, which is completely unquantifiable. I've also made edits removing language which is somewhat misleading and gives the article a very bias anti-Obama slant. If this site is dedicated to eliminating bias, it should not turn a blind-eye to conservative bias or in this case blatant racial discrimination. I have also expanded upon the issue surrounding his voting "present" so often. As stated in the article, voting "present" is commonplace in the Illinois Senate on both sides of the aisle. I kindly ask that [[Aschlafly]] stops reverting the article back to its previous biased and misleading state. If you disagree with the edits I've made write on my talk page or respond on the article's talk page instead of simply eliminating my changes, all of which seek to further expand the information in the article and maintain neutrality as best as possible.--[[User:ElliottRosewater|ElliottRosewater]] 11:39, 17 February 2008 (EST)

: The Harvard Law review is extremely liberal, and it does have racial quotas in its admission. Your false accusation of lying are not appreciated and will not be allowed.

: The statement about [[affirmative action]] is accurate and will remain in the entry. Repeated attempts to remove it without justification will result in blocking.--[[User:Aschlafly|Aschlafly]] 15:28, 17 February 2008 (EST)

Justified how? Saying that Obama's life amounts to nothing more than lucking out with affirmative action isn't a quantifiable statement...at all. It is nothing more than a completely biased statement and does in fact convey a sense of bigotry. The edits I've made to the article have not introduced some virile liberal bias, I've simply elaborated on contentious issues and removed language and phrasing which is decidedly opinionated. Just because someone disagrees with you [[Aschlafly]] does not make that person wrong. Stop using the power which you have been granted out of good faith by the rest of this site to act like the NKVD, censoring whatever you feel like, and threatening those who disagree with you through bans or some other reprimands when they have only sought to maintain neutrality and expand factuality.--[[User:ElliottRosewater|ElliottRosewater]] 15:45, 17 February 2008 (EST)

: Your racial bullying is not going to work here. [[Affirmative action]] is a big part of Obama's career and his support. Don't delete it from the entry and don't deny that the Harvard Law Review is a very liberal institution that uses [[racial quotas]].--[[User:Aschlafly|Aschlafly]] 15:51, 17 February 2008 (EST)

: Racial bullying? I'm sorry my defective leftist brain must not be able to comprehend your superior Divine logic. But I'm not the one throwing baseless affirmative action rants into what should be a neutral and factual article. Even Clarence Thomas would tell you just how bigoted and perposturous such a claim is.--[[User:ElliottRosewater|ElliottRosewater]] 16:03, 17 February 2008 (EST)

== Aschlafly: Enforcer of <s>Truth</s> ==

So, after having edited the Obama article for the third time to remove some of the more opinionated wording, removing the baseless affirmative action claim, and expanding on the procedures of the Illinois Senate to give people a better understanding of why Obama voted "present" 129 times, Conservapedia Fuhrer [[Aschlafly]] has threatened to ban me if I edit the article again, despite the neutrality and factuality of my edits. Does anybody else think this is somewhat of an abuse of power as well as an attempt to enforce his own opinion on the rest of the site, and, is there someway that we could replace him with someone who is not a fanatical reactionary.--[[User:ElliottRosewater|ElliottRosewater]] 16:03, 17 February 2008 (EST)
:It's Andy's site. [[User:HelpJazz|Help]][[User talk:HelpJazz|Jazz]] 17:49, 17 February 2008 (EST)
: :Agree it's Andy's site. Of course Andy should be ashamed of himself; but it's still his site. Andy has no clear personal achievement that cannot be explained as the likely result of his mom's clout. ;-) [[User:Archer070]]
::: It's Andy's site?!?!?! I was under the opinion it was an encyclopedia![[User:ProserpinaFC|ProserpinaFC]] 09:57, 20 February 2008 (EST)

This is the reason liberals will win the whitehouse , people are tired of these attitudes , people need to move into the 21st century .... quickly. --[[User:Realist2|Realist2]] 18:46, 18 February 2008 (EST)

== It's ASTOUNDING! . . . Why? Don't you people know how Congress works? ==

"For example, as a state senator in Illinois, he voted "present" rather than "aye" or "nay" nearly an astounding 130 times."

Why is that astounding? That is an incredibly SMALL number. Congresspersons vote on thousands of issues each TERM. And for Barack Obama to have been a Senator for EIGHT YEARS and to only not vote 130 times... lol.[[User:ProserpinaFC|ProserpinaFC]]

:"As for his voting performance, Obama liked sitting on the fence. He is recalled for taking full advantage of an Illinois rule that lets you vote "present" if you don't want to commit yourself. Illinois State Senator Bill Brady recalled: "I learned very quickly that the 'present' vote, where the button you press is very appropriately coloured yellow, is the chicken's way out." ([http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/news/worldnews.html?in_article_id=511901&in_page_id=1811 ''The Black Kennedy: But does anyone know the real Barack Obama?''])[[Image:User Fox.png|10px]] [[User:Fox|Fox]] ([[User talk:Fox|talk]]|[[Special:Contributions/Fox|contribs]]) 10:14, 20 February 2008 (EST)

: Voting "present" 130 times is NOT a small number. It is an astounding large number of times to duck important issues, so large that even [[Hillary Clinton]] has ridiculed it.--[[User:Aschlafly|Aschlafly]] 00:02, 23 February 2008 (EST)

::It's a fair point, but I'd suggest that the article should nonetheless give some concept of scale. 130 "present" votes translates to about 3% of the votes cast, which quite frankly isn't a lot. [[User:PeterS|PeterS]] 19:06, 23 February 2008 (EST)

::: It is enormous. A politician is serving only himself, and not his constituents, by ducking so many important issues. You won't find any earnest politician voting "present" so many times and ducking so many important issues.--[[User:Aschlafly|Aschlafly]] 19:10, 23 February 2008 (EST)

::: But those statements that you make, Andrew, are all opinions that aren't sourced from cited sources. I'm not trying to pick a fight here, merely trying to ensure that we have the most accurately cited article we can have; all I'm saying is that in order to support the claim that voting present 3% of the time - which purely quantitatively doesn't '''seem''' like much to the average obsever - you'd actually need to give '''a solid, cited example''' of an "earnest politician" who hasn't voted present on a comparable proportion of issues. [[User:PeterS|PeterS]] 06:34, 29 February 2008 (EST)

== Reversion explained ==

The reversion removed a silly, self-serving quote that only filled the entry with junk. This is not Wikipedia.--[[User:Aschlafly|Aschlafly]] 00:03, 23 February 2008 (EST)

The reversion this morning reinserted a liberal deletion.--[[User:Aschlafly|Aschlafly]] 08:38, 23 February 2008 (EST)

== Introduction to article ==

I don't disagree with the subject matter, but I think there's a problem with the introduction. Most of the information seems to relate to his ideological/political stances, and so would be better placed in the body of the article rather than posted up front. [[User:PeterS|PeterS]] 18:58, 23 February 2008 (EST)

: We put the important stuff first here. But thanks for your comment.--[[User:Aschlafly|Aschlafly]] 19:08, 23 February 2008 (EST)

Some things need altering like the affirmative action thing. --[[User:Realist2|Realist2]] 15:22, 26 February 2008 (EST)

: What's the problem? No [[liberals]] have any problems in complaining about alleged special preferences for [[conservatives]]. When someone gets special treatment and then seeks to become president on that basis, it's fair game to criticize the special treatment.--[[User:Aschlafly|Aschlafly]] 15:32, 26 February 2008 (EST)

:: Maybe he DID get SOME special treatment , but the article suggests that everything he`s achieved in life is a result of AA. Maybe it needs a little tinkering with, it comes across too strongly , there is no problem saying that AA helped him but to say thats the only reason he got anywhere in life is a big jump. If he becomes president (trust me there is a good chance of it) are you going to say he only became president as a result of AA? Thats just not possible, people voted for him because they liked him and his ideas not because they felt sorry for him for past racism towards black people.--[[User:Realist2|Realist2]] 06:58, 27 February 2008 (EST)

:: To be fair, "no clear personal achievement that cannot be explained ... [by] affirmative action" is a much stronger statement than, say, "he could not have achieved the heights he has in the absence of affirmative action." The former claims he has _no_ achievements of his own, which seems so exaggerated that I'd believe it was written by a troll if you weren't defending it yourself. I would never consider entering politics, and even I have what might reasonably called "personal achievements." I'm sure Obama has some too. The latter statement merely (rightly!) observes that his achievements would never have elevated him to the status he's achieved, if it were not for liberal affirmative action; isn't that more like what you mean? [[User:Coas|Coas]] 16:31, 27 February 2008 (EST)

== Needs a major overhaul... ==

On the whole, this article, I believe, needs a major overhaul. Firstly, too much of this, while true, is written in so many ways like gossip. A glaring error that any serious writer would immediatly reject is the phrase: "Obama is SO pro-abortion..." It sounds like some high-school kid exaggerating to a friend. While it may be true, to phrase it in such a way is very unprofessional, and degrades the credibility of the article.

Also, while I understand that many see this article as an outlet to vent frustration at an inexperienced, unproven candidate, to write the entire article in a highly critical light errodes the circumstantiated tone that I assume Conservapedia strives for. Those not well informed might see this article as bigoted and hateful, whith spurious and unsubstantiated claims. My advice is to write these facts in a neutral, detatched style, as is the case with most encyclopedias. To do otherwise detracts from Conservapedia as a whole.

A few suggestions just from the very beginning:

1. "Obama is so pro-abortion..." should be changed to something like: "Obama has a well-noted stance of pro-abortion, demostrated in cases such as his blocking of the Illinois version of the Born Alive Infants protection act, which was unanimously supported by the U.S. Senate."

2. "Obama has absolutely no military..." needs to be reworked into something more or less as follows: "Obama has a distinct lack of military, executive, and foreign policy experience as evidenced by..." and include some example of how he simply has not been in a position where he could gain any of this experience.

3. "Throughout his career, he has repeatedly ducked..." has too much opinion attached to it, and the "...in an apparent attempt..." part reeks of unprofessionalism. A good alternative would be "Obama has many times abstained from taking a controversial stand on certain issues, voting 'present' instead of 'aye' or 'nay' a substantial 130 times during his career as an Illinois state senator."

Much, much more needs to be done for this to sound like an authoritative encyclopedic article instead of an opinionated rant.
--[[User:Churro|Churro]] 01:18, 27 February 2008 (EST)

== Foreign Policy Experience ==
I'd like to add a few paragraphs about Obama's foreign policy experience. Any chance the article can be unprotected? --Jimmy 21:29, 4 March 2008 (EST)

: The article was unprotected for a long time, and endured repeated attempts at liberal bias. How about suggesting your edits here first?--[[User:Aschlafly|Aschlafly]] 21:43, 4 March 2008 (EST)

::== Foreign Policy Experience ==
::Sen. Obama has been a member of the U.S. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations since his election to the Senate. <ref>http://www.senate.gov/~foreign/about.html </ref>

::He has visited many countries in his capacity as a Senator.

::Russia and former Soviet republics: Met with representatives of the International Republican Institute and National Democratic Institute to discuss democracy in the former Soviet republics. Also met with Russian military officials and visited numerous nuclear/biological weapons destruction sites in Russia, Ukraine and Azerbaijan with Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Richard Lugar (R-IN).
::United Kingdom: Met with Prime Minister Tony Blair during visit with Sen. Lugar. <ref>http://obama.senate.gov/press/050823-obama_to_visit </ref>

::Visited South Africa, Kenya, Ethiopia, Djibouti and Chad: Discussed his tour of Robben Island prison, met with U.S. troops, visited refugee camps of the people fleeing Darfur and addressed Africa's growing AIDS epidemic. <ref>http://obama.senate.gov/podcast/060906-090606_africa_t/ </ref>

::Ten day tour of the Middle East: Talked with government leaders in Qatar, Kuwait, Iraq, Jordan and Israel. <ref> http://obama.senate.gov/news/060113-obama_wraps_up/ </ref>--Jimmy 22:14, 4 March 2008 (EST)

==Completely incorrect information in Foreign Policy==

The information provided is completely incorrect. Senator Obama has indeed visited Continental Europe on official business - he visited Eastern Europe in August 2005, taking in Russia, Ukraine, Azerbaijan and the UK[http://obama.senate.gov/press/050823-obama_to_visit/]. Please correct the article.

Not only is the article factually incorrect, but the suggestion is made that this 'lack of travel experience' would make him unsuitable for the Presidency. To which I would point out that the current President George W. Bush, had NEVER visited Europe until a year '''after''' taking the Presidency. [[User:MakeTime|MakeTime]] 13:32, 11 March 2008 (EDT)

== Political Views section ==

I don't know whether this is a valid criticism to make, but it occurred to me while reading the article that the "Political Views" seection is rather short and vague. Although it's great to make concise comments on issues such as illegal immigration etc., it doesn't really give us a good picture of exactly what he stands for (and no jokes about not standing for anything, please!). What I mean is: the second sentence claims that Obama has the record of a Marxist leftist, but nothing after that point under that section really justifies that statement. Indeed, much of it seems to be better placed under the next section "Faith and Values". It might be pertinent to have a more detailed analysis of individual parts of his policies and stances. [[User:PeterS|PeterS]] 18:39, 10 March 2008 (EDT)

: Obama's stances keep changing depending on which state is next in the primaries. It's a waste of time to attach any significance to his stated positions, other than to recognize how [[liberal]] he is.--[[User:Aschlafly|Aschlafly]] 18:43, 10 March 2008 (EDT)

:: Perhaps pointing out these changes would be a better idea, Andy. --[[User:Ampersand|Ampersand]] 20:34, 10 March 2008 (EDT)

::: I don't view this as a priority, as Obama's supporters only care about his positions against the war and for abortion and don't care about much else, and those positions are spelled out. I'll unlock the entry for you if you'd like to add objective material that shows how he changes his position so often. Godspeed.--[[User:Aschlafly|Aschlafly]] 20:41, 10 March 2008 (EDT)

I know nothing of Obama's war opinion (aside troop withdrawal) and nothing of him pro-abortion position. Yet, I am still an Obama supporter, despite being non-US, as he is the only one who is not part of the great Washington machinery. It is time for change and the old stalwarts like McCain and Clinton need to go. Change can be good, not always but why not give it a chance?
Also, Bush Jnr had waaaaaaay less experience than Obama.
[[User:MetcalfeM|MetcalfeM]] 21:23, 12 March 2008 (EDT)

== Can we un-lock, this artical needs to be updated ==

There is no information at all about how Obama was linked to the radical Afro-Centric "Church" in Chicago whose Pastor endorses crazy racialist theorys about Whites, the CIA did AIDS, Jews did 9/11, etcetera. ANd then of course he makes one silly speech that doesnt really say anything, and the liberal media fall over each other to praise him like the secnod coming of jesus. (btw, this isnt really my area of expertise, but I understand some American theologians have seriously considered whether he could be the anti-christ. i don't know if that's enough of a seriously taken theory but you folks should decide whether to mention it at least.

I dont understand why so many pages i try to edit are locked.

:: I think it is because reality has a well known liberal bias. (I joke, I joke) It just that liberals don't understand how to interpret reality but keep insisting that they do. It isn't like this problem is going away either.--[[User:Jroyale|Jroyale]] 21:44, 24 March 2008 (EDT)

Étienne Léger
:Are you referring to Pastor Wright? [[User:Karajou|Karajou]] 08:16, 21 March 2008 (EDT)
::Yes Jeremiah Wright is his name, he is basically an "afro-centric" race bigot who openly associates with Louis "Hitler was a great man" Farrakhan, he was Obama's chief Spiritual Advisor for many years except now he tries to deny it.

::: Please propose an encyclopedic-like addition, with a citation. Thanks.--[[User:Aschlafly|Aschlafly]] 17:49, 21 March 2008 (EDT)

Agree: not sure why this article would be locked when it clearly needs to be updated to ensure the tone is encyclopedic and not simply derogatory. Otherwise, the reputation of this effort as a "trustworthy encyclopedia" will continue to be severely undermined.

: Im starting to think that it is too late to save this site. Its hard to take it seriously with articles like this . . . [[User:FernoKlump|FernoKlump]] 18:16, 25 March 2008 (EDT)

== This Article is Ridiculous ==

For God's sake, with articles like this Conservapedia is never going to be taken seriously. A “Marxist leftist"? This is just stupid, he's basically pro-life moderate conservative. [[User:FernoKlump|FernoKlump]] 23:19, 22 March 2008 (EDT)

: Wow, you really are in the wrong place if you think anyone here is going to be fooled by your comment.--[[User:Aschlafly|Aschlafly]] 23:46, 22 March 2008 (EDT)

::Fooled? I don't even especially like Barack Obama. Can you honestly say that Obama is a communist? [[User:FernoKlump|FernoKlump]] 00:47, 23 March 2008 (EDT)

::: Oh I see, my bad, i meant pro-choice . . . Can i change it? [[User:FernoKlump|FernoKlump]] 00:49, 23 March 2008 (EDT)

Could someone with access add something like "According to the Political Compass, Barack Obama would be better described as a moderate conservative <ref>http://politicalcompass.org/usprimaries2008</ref>" after the Marxist comment? [[User:FernoKlump|FernoKlump]] 11:05, 24 March 2008 (EDT)

::I agree that in no way can Obama be described a Marxist leftist. I've met Marxist leftists and argued with them a great deal (they tend to have very fixed ideals and observe an astonishing range of fallacies about the very unlamented Soviet Union) and compared to them Obama's a solid centrist. [[User:Darkmind1970|Darkmind1970]] 07:53, 27 March 2008 (EDT)

Talk:Venus

2008-03-14T13:18:03Z

Darkmind1970:

The physical location of hell? Did all those NASA probes miss something? [[User:Maestro|Maestro]] 16:19, 12 October 2007 (EDT)

Shouldn't Venus's immensely thick atmosphere be mentioned? One of the reasons for the lack of impact craters is the fact that bolides tend to break up very high up in its atmosphere, where a runaway greenhouse effect has resulted in the planet being so hot that lead would melt on its surface. [[User:Darkmind1970|Darkmind1970]] 09:18, 14 March 2008 (EDT)

Joseph Stalin

2008-03-12T11:57:13Z

Darkmind1970: /* Stalin's Terror */

{{uncited2}}

[[Image:Josephstalin.jpg|right|thumb|Joseph Stalin.]]
'''Joseph Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili ''' (Russian ''Ио́сиф Виссарио́нович Джугашви́ли'', better known as '''Joseph Stalin''' (December 6, 1878 - March 5, 1953) was the General Secretary of the [[Communist Party]] of the [[Soviet Union]] ([[CPSU]]) from 1922 until his death. He was the son of a poor Georgian cobbler and a former seminary student who became a Bolshevik and one of [[Lenin|Lenin's]] closest allies during the their take-over of the Kerensky regime. During the [[Russian Civil War]] Stalin, who chose his name from the Russian word for steel, held the city of Tsaritsen on the Volga from counter-revolutionary forces. Stalin later re-named Tsaritsen [[Stalingrad]] in honor of his victory; Stalingrad would be the site of [[Germany]]'s massive defeat in [[World War II]].

==Rise to Power==
[[Image:Stalin-Lenin.jpg|right|thumb|[[Lenin]] left, Stalin right]]
Stain was tapped by the Okhrana, the Tsarist secret police, as a low-level informer shortly after he was expelled from the Tiflis seminary in 1899. Stalin then began to systematically inform on revolutionary comrades in party organizations in Tiflis, Baku, and Batum over the next few years. He acquired a highly unsavory reputation among the [[Social Democrats]] of these cities and was finally arrested for cover purposes in 1902 when suspicions about him were about to boil over. It was the Okhrana that furnished the invisible means of support for the family he acquired after 1904.

In 1917, the Commissariat of Nationalities was formed with Stalin as its Commissar (Minister). The Commissariat addressed the question of the nationalities of the Russian Empire, and helped integrate them into the [[Soviet Union]]. From 1919-1922 he was also the People's Commissar of the Workers' and Peasants' Inspection (Rabkrin, from the Russian), which was founded to be a check on the burgeoning Soviet bureaucracy.

In 1922, Lenin named Stalin General Secretary of the CPSU. In 1924 Stalin in turn created the "Secret Department," a unit of 94 of his personal functionaries that maintained special privileges as the ''[[nomenklatura]]'', or a list of trusted individuals. He also appointed regional party secretaries who all, of course, supported Stalin. Through the Secret Department Stalin gained control of the [[Red Army]] after removing [[Leon Trotsky|Lev Trotsky]] in 1925 and the OGPU (later, [[KGB]]) when its leader [[Felix Dzerzhinsky]] died in 1926. Lenin had foreseen all of this and had warned in his last testament that Stalin should be removed from General Secretary because the position's power was unlimited.

Stalin, however, did not allow this to happen. His most powerful rival, Lev Trotsky, who was the commander of the Red Army, was painted as a danger to the Revolution, because he continued to push the idea of international revolution; the "left opposition." Other Soviet leaders, like [[Zinoviev]], leader of the [[Comintern]], and [[Kaminev]], the head of the Communist Party in Moscow, were painted with the same brush because they supported Trotsky and did not wish to expel him from the CPSU in 1927. Later, he accused his ally [[Bukharin]] of being a member of the "right opposition," i.e. he was in favor of a more capitalistic economic system, as seen under the [[New Economic Policy]] (NEP) of the early 1920s. Trotsky was murdered in Mexico in 1940 by [[Ramón Mercader]] in an extensive conspiracy that included underground operatives from the [[Communist Party of the United States]] (CPUSA). Zinoviev, Kaminev, and Bukharin were the center of the famous "[[Great Purge|show trials]]" of the 1930s. All were put to death.

==Objectives of the Comintern==

In 1932, [[Sergei Ivanovich Gussev]], who had served as [[Comintern]] agent and Stalin's personal representative in the United States, "commanded the [[Communist Party of the United States|Communists in the United States]] to take up four tasks. Two of them were the defence of the Soviet Union and the furtherance of Red conquest of [[China]]." In 1933 the notorious [[Gerhart Eisler]] "was secretly sent into the United States by Moscow to make sure these orders were carried out." <ref>[[Louis F. Budenz]], ''The Techniques of Communism'', (Chicago: Henry Regnery and Company, 1954), pp. 162-163.</ref> [[Edgar Snow]] wrote in his 1937 book, ''Red Star Over China,'' "The political ideology, tactical line and theoretical leadership of the [[Chinese Communists]] have been under the close guidance, if not positive direction, of the Communist International, which during the last decade has become virtually a bureau of the [[Russian Communist Party]]. In the final analysis this means that for better or worse, the policies of the Chinese Communists, like the Communists in every other country, have had to fall in line with, and usually subordinate themselves to, the broad strategic requirements of [[Soviet Russia]], under the dictatorship of Stalin."<ref>''Red Star Over China'' by Edgar Snow, New York, 1937, pg. 374.</ref>

==Catch and Overtake==
In 1928 Stalin decided that the Soviet Union was not properly industrialized to enjoy a communist future, so he initiated the First Five Year Plan and the campaign to collectivize agriculture in order to "build socialism," and to "catch and overtake" the capitalist world. Stalin fanned the fires of collectivization, claiming that peasants had been hording grain and that they needed to be controlled. Under this program, rich peasants (kulaks), were exiled or killed for being enemies of the people, and peasants' land was taken in order to introduce collective farming to expedite grain appropriations. Many were called kulaks by jealous neighbors, while the peasants who remained were often the laziest and most ill suited to producing enough grain. Collectivization caused massive famine in Russia, particularly in [[Ukraine]] (see [[Holodomor]]), where Stalin ordered the Red Army to blockade certain regions and take grain by force. It is estimated that the famine of 1931-33 killed 6-7 million people, while 20 million starved.

The First Five Year Plan was a program of crash-industrialization. After [[World War I]] and the Russian Civil War Russia had an industrial capacity equal to that of its 1861 capacity. The only way for Russia to be able to break the "capitalist encirclement," Stalin declared, was to industrialize. Brigades of shock workers were formed to work faster and harder than the world had ever seen. Most of this, however, was pure propaganda, although the shock workers did set the record for concrete poured in a single shift. Compared to the capitalist world which was experiencing the Great Depression, Soviet growth was impressive. Between 1929 and 1937, 8,000 factories were constructed, average GDP growth was around 10%, and the official unemployment statistics, which included gulag detainees, was 0. In 1936, after the Second Five Year Plan, Stalin declared socialism "built." Nevertheless, the capitalist world lived better than the Soviet Union, despite the Great Depression. [[John Scott]], an American CPUSA member and Comintern operative who was living in the Soviet Union during the Five Year Plans, notes this in his memoirs of that period "Behind the Urals." The legacy of the Five Year Plans (most of which Stalin declared "completed" in 4 years) injured the Soviet's production models, because the encouraged quantity and speed over quality. However, the planning of the 1930s enabled the Russians to defeat the Nazis in the 1940s. <ref>Suvorov, Viktor. ''Icebreaker: Who Started the Second World War?// (Viking Press/Hamish Hamilton; 1990) ISBN 0241126223.</ref>

==Stalin's Terror==
Between 1936 and 1938, [[Joseph Stalin]] launched his purges to rid the Soviet Union of "fifth columnists," or spies who were loyal to the [[capitalist]] world. During the Terror 3 million people were arrested on various and often made-up charges, while 750,000 were executed. Due to the interrogation techniques of the NKVD (later, KGB), which often were torturous, most of those arrested confessed and were sent to work camps, called the [[Gulag]] for 10 years and sometimes even 25. Here, prisoners were forced to labor in mines, to log forests, or to do construction, as the Gulag system became an increasingly important part of the Soviet economy. Few lived through their sentences.

In early 1937, a senior officer of the OGPU (KGB) stumbled upon a highly classified file in the old archives of the Tsarist secret police, the Okhrana. It detailed the work of one J. V. Djugashvili as an informant and agent provocateur for the Okhrana inside the Bolshevik Party before the Russian Revolution. The OGPU officer, Stein, was shocked. Djugashvili was the true name of Stalin who was now purging the Old Bolsheviks on charges of being foreign spies and counter-revolutionaries.

Stein took the file to a close friend, the head of the OGPU in the Ukraine, who went over it carefully with his trusted deputy, Zinovy Katsnelson, a cousin and close friend of Alexander Orlov. Convinced of its authenticity, they shared it with Jonah Yakir, commander of the Red Army in the Ukraine, and Stanislav Kossior, secretary of the Communist Party in the Ukraine. Alarmed by the file’s revelations, Yakir flew to Moscow and revealed its contents to [[Mikhail Tukhachevsky]], Supreme Commander of the Red Army. They brought his deputy, Yan Gamarnik, into their confidence and decided to overthrow Stalin in a coup d’etat, denounce him and execute him.

As the coup plan was being developed, Katsnelson traveled to Paris and informed Orlov. The plot was foiled and Orlov’s fate was sealed.

The infamous show trials of former leaders of the Soviet Union occurred during this period, where they were accused of working with Trotsky or sabotaging the Soviet Union. Stalin also eviscerated the high command of the Red Army, killing 90% of the leadership. The minions of oppression were not spared either; of the NKVD's 809 officials, 43 lived through the purges. The leadership of the communist party was persecuted as well. For example, in 1934 130 members of the 139-member Central Committee were arrested. The Terror forever made Russians afraid to speak out against the government, and also made sure that no one but Stalin could ever rule the Soviet Union as effectively.

==Famine of 1933==
{{main|Holodomor}}
* "This famine was deliberately engineered by the regime of [[Josef Stalin]] {{years since|1933}} years ago claimed millions of lives, mostly in [[Ukraine]] but also in some other parts of the [[Soviet Union]]. It is today considered one of the worst [[atrocities]] of the Soviet regime and a terrifying act of [[genocide]]. Even so, the famine of 1933 is relatively unknown. ... Estimates of how many people died in Stalin's engineered [[famine]] of 1933 vary. But they are staggering in their scale -- between seven and 11 million people."<ref>[http://www.ukemonde.com/news/rferl.html Stalin's Starvation of Ukraine – Seventy Years Later, World Still Largely Unaware Of Tragedy], By Askold Krushelnycky, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Prague, 8 April 2003.</ref>

==World War II==
To avoid war with [[Germany]], Stalin ordered the Foreign Minister of the Soviet Union, [[Molotov]], to sign a non-aggression pact with [[Adolf Hitler]], named the [[Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact]], on August 19, 1939. The treaty detailed the agreement to split up [[Poland]] between Germany and the Soviet Union, give Stalin the Baltic Republics of [[Latvia]], [[Lithuania]], and [[Estonia]], and to allow the Soviets to wage war on [[Finland]], a war that ended in a humiliating Soviet defeat. Both sides, however, knew that they would eventually engage in hostilities.

It seems that Stalin anticipated this less than Hitler, who, in June of 1941 invaded the Soviet Union with the largest land army ever assembled. It consisted of 170 divisions, or 3.5 million troops. Stalin was caught off guard, and the [[Nazis]] blazed a path through the Ukraine and European Russia. Reaching [[Moscow]] in October 1941, the Nazis threatened Stalin and the entire Soviet Union with defeat. In only 6 months, the Nazis controlled one third of the Soviet economy, a total of 5% of the Earth's surface. Hitler's troops were defeated at Moscow during the winter of 1941-42 after Stalin appointed [[Yorky Zhukov]] as commander of the Red Army. A spy in the German embassy in Tokyo, [[Richard Sorge]], informed Stalin that Japan was not going to attack [[Siberia]], freeing thousands of winter ski-troops to move to Moscow to defeat the Nazis. It was during this time that Stalin famously invoked the name of [[God]] and allowed religious services to be conducted after 20 plus years of repression. Also, 1500 factories were evacuated and restored in Siberia and 12-15 million workers were moved east of the [[Urals]], where Soviet production was higher than Germany's in 1942, despite Germany holding some 50% of Soviet industry.

The Red Army went on the offensive after the defense of Moscow, but soon the Nazis gained the advantage and pushed to Stalingrad. More than one million troops fought on each side in urban combat. Hitler refused to allow surrender, and eventually the Nazis were encircled and routed. After turning the tide of war in Stalingrad, the 1943 [[Kursk]] tank battle was decisive in pushing the Nazis from European Russia. In two years, the Red Army pushed the Nazis all the way back to [[Berlin]]. Stalin used his control of Eastern Europe to extract concessions from [[President Roosevelt]] at Allied conferences, including control over the region. [[Winston Churchill]] warned against this very control, for he greatly feared Soviet hegemony in Europe. Victorious, Stalin named himself Generalissimo and became more popular than ever in the Soviet Union and more dangerous than ever to the capitalist world.

Over the course of World War II, around 25 million Russians died. Twenty million were in the armed services. The total number of 25 million reflects half of the worldwide losses of human life during World War II. The population did not recover until 1956. Many Soviet POWs, like famous writer [[Alexander Solzhenitsyn]], were sent to the Gulag after the war because they had fallen into German hands, and were accused of being spies. This swelled the prison camps by the thousands.

==Post-War Period and Death==
Similar to the 1930s, Stalin undertook a harsh campaign of industrialization, which hurt the Soviets as much as it helped them rebuild. Money was devalued to one-tenth of its previous value, 2 million German and Japanese POWs were forced to stay in the Soviet Union and rebuild the country, and 10% of investment from 1945-46 was from looted machinery. The crops produced by household plots were collected by the government to sell, and a famine in 1947 caused by drought and Soviet single-crop farming killed 2 million. The recovery was built on the Soviet subjects.
[[Image:Stalinfuneral.jpg|250px|right|thumb|''Right to left:'' Lavrenti Beria, Georgi Malenkov, Vassily Stalin, V.M. Molotov, Nikolai Bulganin]]
After World War II, Stalin's [[cult of personality]] emerged as the dominant force of Soviet life. He was credited as the savior of the Soviet Union and the architect of victory, though it was really General Zhukov who was responsible for most of this. The communist youth group, the [[Komsomol]], devoted songs to "the Father of All Nations" or "the Driver of the Locomotive of History." Party membership increased by one million people between 1945 and 1953. Books quoted Stalin as an expert in communism, while he was often photographed surrounded by children to make him seem friendlier. This all served to form a deep, personal connection with Stalin for many Soviets. Indeed, he was loved by the Soviets. When he died in 1953 an anxious mob at his viewing crushed and trampled some mourners to death. Dissidents like Sakharov, the man forced in a prison to build the Soviet atom bomb, cried upon hearing that Stalin had died, despite their intense hatred of him. Despite his terror, he had convinced millions that he was their father.

Following a stroke on March 1, 1953, Stalin died on March 5 after a period of declining performance. Between 1949 and 1952 Stalin increasingly took vacations and met with the [[Politburo]] less and less. When he died a short power struggle ensued, one which led to the execution of KGB head [[Beria]] as a spy. Eventually [[Khrushchev]] became the General Secretary of the CPSU and denounced Stalin's repressive tactics, his purges, gulags, and his cult of personality in the [[Secret Speech]] at the 20th Party Congress of 1956. Gulags were dismantled and the political climate was slightly less tense, but Soviet oppression still continued. The period following Stalin's rule is called the "thaw," the start of life again after a long winter.

==Quotes==
"The death of one man is a tragedy, the death of millions is a statistic." ~ to Churchill, 1945.

==References==
<references/>
Though this isn't footnoted, it is culled from the following sources:

Hosking, Geoffrey. The First Socialist Society: A History of the Soviet Union from Within. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992.

Kotkin, Stephen. Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as Civilization. Berkley, CA: University of California Press, 1995.

Scott, John. ''Behind the Urals: An American Worker in Russia’s City of Steel''. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1989.

Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr Isaevich, ''The Gulag Archipelago, 1918-1956''; an experiment in literary investigation'', Translated from the Russian by Thomas P. Whitney, Publisher New York, Harper & Row (1974-78), 1st Edition, pg. 67n.
{{DEFAULTSORT:Stalin, Joseph}}
[[category:communists]]
[[Category:Mass murderers]]
[[Category:Dictators]]

{{DEFAULTSORT:Stalin, Josef}}

Vladimir Lenin

2008-03-12T11:54:49Z

Darkmind1970:

[[Image:Khvhkgfiy.jpg|right|thumb|Lenin]]
'''Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, Lenin''' (Russian: Владимир Ильич Улянов, Ленин) (1870-1924) was the 1st Premier of the [[USSR]]. (Lenin's grandfather, Israel Blank, was born about 1804 in Staro-Konstantynov, Ukraine, to Moshke (son of Isaac) Blank, a Jewish businessman, and his wife, Miriam. <ref>[http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9E0CE7D8123EF936A3575BC0A964958260 Lenin and the Search for Jewish Roots] NYTimes.com</ref>)

==Revolution==

In November 1917, Lenin, the leader of the [[Communist Party]], led a [[Proletarian Revolution]] to overthrew the [[Provisional Government]] that had replaced the [[Russian Empire]] (His elder brother was hanged for the attempted assassination of [[Czar Alexander III]]).

Lenin was one of the most devious persons in all of history. He was a revolutionary, [[atheist]], and mass murderer. In 1889, he became a [[Marxist]] (as previously formulated by [[Karl Marx]]). He obtained a law degree shortly afterwards, and by 1895 was a [[subversion (political)|subversive]] who was arrested and sent to [[Siberia]] as punishment. Once he served his time he left for Western [[Europe]], where he developed his plans further and became a leader of the [[Bolsheviks]]. He returned to Russia after the [[tsar]] abdicated in March 1917, and led the Bolsheviks to power in the "[[October Revolution]]" (November in the Gregorian calendar) by overthrowing the government. (In the night of July 16-17, 1918, a squad of Bolshevik secret police murdered Russia's last emperor, Tsar Nicholas II, along with his wife, Tsaritsa Alexandra, their 14-year-old son, Tsarevich Alexis, and their four daughters.)<ref>[http://www.ihr.org/jhr/v14/v14n1p-4_Weber.html Assessing the Grim Legacy of Soviet Communism]</ref> He then ruled the [[Soviet Union]] under Marxism-Leninism, until 1922, when he retired due to ill health. Lenin's government was notable for placing a woman, Alexandra Kollontai, as Commissar of Social Welfare at a time when positions of authority routinely went to men. She resigned early the following year over a difference of opinion where she was in the minority, but continued to be active in Soviet politics.<ref>[http://www.marxists.org/archive/kollonta/into.htm]</ref>. Lenin's government also denounced anti-Semitism by the old Russian government in a speech in March 1919 <ref>[http://www.politicalaffairs.net/article/articleview/718/1/78]</ref>.

Lenin died in 1924 following a series of progressively more serious strokes.

Lenin used [[concentration camp]]s and "reeducation" to impose the atheistic ideology upon the population.

{{Cquote|A wide campaign of "education" was undertaken to show the people why "workers' rule" meant, in practice, [[Nomenklatura|managers]]' rule. Where necessary, the education by the word was supplemented with education by [[firing squad]] or [[concentration camp]] or forced labour battalion. <ref>James Burnham, ''The Managerial Revolution'', Indiana University Press, Bloomingham 1966.</ref> }}

The régime of [[Josef Stalin]], the next [[Premier]] of the USSR, continued the oppression of the masses initiated by Lenin.

== See also ==

*[[Karl Marx]]
*[[Baldomero Ortoneda]]

==References==
<references/>

{{DEFAULTSORT:Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich}}

[[Category:Russian People]]
[[Category:Communists]]
[[Category:Mass murderers]]

Yellowstone National Park

2008-03-05T12:43:18Z

Darkmind1970:

[[Image:Geyser.jpg|thumb|300px|Castle Geyser in Yellowstone National Park]]

'''Yellowstone National Park''' is a [[National Park]] located mostly in the state of [[Wyoming]], with small portions of the park in [[Idaho]] and [[Montana]]. The park is known for its [[geothermal]] features such as [[geyser]]s, [[hot spring]]s, and [[mud volcano]]s. These form part of the Yellowstone Caldera, a supervolcano fed by a mantle plume welling up from beneath the Earth's crust.

==External Links==
* [http://www.nps.gov/yell Yellowstone National Park - official website]
* [http://www.nps.gov/archive/yell/oldfaithfulcam.htm Old Faithful webcam]

[[category:National Park Service]]

Yellowstone National Park

2008-02-12T23:37:21Z

Darkmind1970:

[[Image:Geyser.jpg|thumb|300px|Castle Geyser in Yellowstone National Park]]

'''Yellowstone National Park''' is a [[National Park]] located mostly in the state of [[Wyoming]], with small portions of the park in [[Idaho]] and [[Montana]]. The park is known for its [[geothermal]] features such as [[geyser]]s, [[hot spring]]s, and [[mud volcano]]s, which form the most visible part of the Yellowstone supervolcano, which had has erupted periodically and catastrophically over the past 1.8 million years.

==External Links==
* [http://www.nps.gov/yell Yellowstone National Park - official website]
* [http://www.nps.gov/archive/yell/oldfaithfulcam.htm Old Faithful webcam]

[[category:National Park Service]]

Enigma

2008-02-11T14:07:04Z

Darkmind1970:

[[Image:Nsa-enigma.jpg|right|thumb|200px|A German-built Enigma machine.]]
The '''Enigma''' was a portable cipher machine, roughly the size of a typewriter, which could encrypt and decrypt secret messages. It used electro-mechanical rotors to convert a message to a secret code, and then another machine could decode that same message and print out the original message. This machine was commercially available beginning in the early 1920s. The Nazi German military version generated codes widely thought to be unbreakable.

The Enigma machine was an electromechanical device, equipped with a 26-letter keyboard, with one light per letter of the alphabet. Inside the machine was a set of wired drums for scrambling the input. To encipher or encrypt a letter, the operator pushed the relevant key and observed which of the lights lit. The communication between two operators required that each had an Enigma machine set up in the same way as each other. The large number of possibilities for setting the rotors (and a plugboard that could swap letters) made for an astronomical number of possible configurations, each producing a different cipher. The Germans changed the settings daily, such that the machine had to be rebroken each day in order to decrypt the messages.

Decryption required an understanding of how Enigma functioned, the wiring of the rotors and the daily settings (both rotors and plugboard).

Nazi Germany used the Enigma before and during World War II to send messages about its military maneuvers. But in 1932 a 27-year-old Polish mathematician (cryptologist) named Marian Rejewski had used advanced mathematics (permutation theory with some group theory) to secretly break ("crack") the Enigma codes. He then helped design working "doubles" of the Enigmas that could find the keys necessary for decryption. By 1938 the Poles were decrypting most of the German messages. However, the Poles were forced to share their codebreaking techniques with Great Britain and France after the Germans brought in a new variant on Enigma that made it haredr to decipher.

Following the German invasion of Poland work on breaking the Enigma codes moved to France and Great Britain. French efforts were ended by the Fall of France in 1940, but in Great Britain Enigma was finally cryptographically broken thanks to the work done by code-breaking experts in the secret Bletchley Park facility, where some of the earliest and crudest computers were built to work on the millions of code combinations used by Enigma.

The breakthrough enabled the Allies to anticipate German military maneuvers, although sometimes the Allies would allow an attack to occur successfully in order to avoid signaling to the Germans that their code had been broken. The [[Allied]] code-breaking effort was known as "Ultra", as in "ultra-secret".

At the end of the war, Allied General Dwight Eisenhower said that Ultra was "decisive" to the Allied victory over Germany. British Prime Minister Winston Churchill also declared, "It was thanks to Ultra that we won the war." The breaking of the German codes prevented it from completely blockading Britain with U-boats and enabled the Allied forces to make key strategic decisions throughout the war.
[[category:technology]]

Talk:Flood Geology

2008-02-07T16:50:18Z

Darkmind1970: /* You Just Gotta Be Kidding Me */

== List of criticisms ==

Despite suggesting that this is the place for criticisms of flood geology, I'm deleting the list that Cgday put in this article for the following reasons:
# Because it is a copy and paste from a discussion forum on [http://uselessjunk.net/viewtopic.php?p=2459938&sid=3fc7ec562d310602fdb812187fb662ab another web-site]. Conservapedia articles are supposed to be original content.
# Because a list of this format and length is not appropriate for an encyclopedia article.
# The list is introduced with the comment, "'This list is to establish that those criticisms have been raised, not to suggest they have any weight". If that is all, then ''mentioning'' the fact and putting a link in a footnote is sufficient.
# Also on that comment, and to use an analogy, an article on the moon landings that listed criticisms (that they were faked) simply on the grounds that they have been raised is ludicrous. Surely the criticisms should have some validity before being included/mentioned/etc.
# I doubt that a forum post would be considered an acceptable source even for linking to in a footnote.
[[User:Philip J. Rayment|Philip J. Rayment]] 06:36, 11 April 2007 (EDT)

:: just as a point of clarification - it's not copied from there but they did copy that from my original source. Never mind, I'll construct the list from scratch - Peer reviewed journals are fine as sources right? --[[User:Cgday|Cgday]] 06:41, 11 April 2007 (EDT)

:::I shouldn't worry. If we start to put too much science in User:Conservative will lock the page and replace it with quotes. [[User:Nematocyte|Nematocyte]] 06:59, 11 April 2007 (EDT)

::: That site was the only one that showed up on a Google search, although another search earlier in the day (probably with a slightly different search string) did show up another one that was very similar. But I'm not disputing you on that point.
::: Yes, peer-reviewed journals are okay as sources. But please keep in mind comments 2, 3, and 4 in my post above.
::: Also, please avoid arguments that rely on assuming uniformitarian geology to be true, as that is the logical fallacy of begging the question. A number of the arguments on that list did that.
::: [[User:Philip J. Rayment|Philip J. Rayment]] 07:28, 11 April 2007 (EDT)

==Dating==
From the Article: "'''On this basis, archaeological dates which purport to show civilisations and artifacts being older than the Flood cannot be used to invalidate the date of the flood because they are based on the presumption that there was no Flood.'''"

But we know that there ''were'' civilisations before the flood?
Just checking. [[User:Rob Pommer| Cracker]][[User_talk:Rob_Pommer|talk]] 10:58, 11 April 2007 (EDT)

:Good point; I'll have to clarify that. (By the way, it is still a work in progress.) [[User:Philip J. Rayment|Philip J. Rayment]] 11:06, 11 April 2007 (EDT)

::Actually, archaeological dates that purport to show that any civilization ''spanned'' the year of the [[Great Flood]] ought not be used, because they presume that there was no Flood. Yes, at least one civilization existed before the Flood. But the Flood destroyed it. An artifact--called an [[out-of-place artifact]]--might persist from that [[antediluvian civilization]]. But it would not be part of any ''post''-diluvian civilization.--[[User:TerryH|TerryH]][[User talk:TerryH|Talk]] 15:36, 17 April 2007 (EDT)

:::Actually, when you think about who needs to provide the burden of proof on this matter those who believe that there was a flood need to provide the proof. Those who do not believe that there was a flood only has to be shown proof that there was a flood. To discredit evidence on the basis that there was a flood and therefore the evidence is not valid due to the impossibility of existence because of the flood leads to forming the research around the idea instead of forming the idea around the observations. This is contrary to impartial research.--[[User:Tims|TimS]] 15:47, 17 April 2007 (EDT)

::::You haven't explained why it is that the burden of proof is on supporters of the flood.
::::I wonder what "those who do not believe that there was a flood" would consider to be "proof". I suspect that they would not be convinced even if a lot of supportive evidence was offered.
::::Your comment about discrediting evidence on the basis that there was a flood misses TerryH's point. First, a date is not "evidence" itself (you don't dig up dates), it is a calculation based on evidence and assumptions. Second, TerryH was talking about such dates that are calculated ''presuming'' that there was no flood. To use dates based on the ''presumption'' that there was no flood to show that there was no flood is a circular argument, and it is quite proper to exclude them.
::::[[User:Philip J. Rayment|Philip J. Rayment]] 23:18, 17 April 2007 (EDT)

:::::Philip the reason why the burden of proof falls on the shoulders of those who say there was a flood is because of a basic principle of scientific reasoning, that claiming that something happened requires evidence of the event passing while claiming that nothing had happened requires a lack of evidence that the event happened. So in other words without evidence that there was a world flood then those who said it did not happen are supported whereas with evidence of the world flood those who claim no flood occurred would be shown false.
:::::I know I would be convince that there was a world flood if
::::::1. The divergence in species (both human and animal) could have happened in that short of a time after the flood, assuming the 2 of every animal.
::::::2. If the water chemistry supported a flood.
::::::3. If the evidence of a superstructure (ark) were found.
::::::4. If humanoid fossils could be proven to be younger than the flood.
::::::5. If the glacier erosion of the great lakes was shown to be false.
::::::6. If the diversification of plant life could be explained within the time frame after the flood.
::::::7. If the earth's strata showed a single mineral deposit band consistent with a flood on all land masses today within the same geological time frame.
::::::8. A model could be provided of how the flood occurred that would not have reasonably destroyed the Ark (falling stones and water pressure from the crack idea), Starved the animals (how did the animals live without several times their body weight in food), and explained where the water went in such a short time (if the land masses split and rose the strata would show it on surfaced landmasses as well as oceanic strata cores).--[[User:Tims|TimS]] 12:05, 18 April 2007 (EDT)
:::::Philip about the date thing, this is forming the research around the idea and not the idea around the research. Dates are arbitrary, that is true however time between events is not arbitrary, it can be used for scientific research. When TerryH said that we should not count the evidence that presumes that there was no flood it leads to a biased research. The evidence that is dated older than the flood should be counted and verified with the evidence supporting a flood. This is the only way to prevent unbiased research. Evidence is not biased, it is the person interpreting the evidence that is. To ignore evidence on the basis that it is in conflict with your idea is like a drug company saying that a product is safe even though it has killed 18 out of 100 clinical trial patients. For research to be trustworthy it must explore all practical and available routes within the scope of its study.--[[User:Tims|TimS]] 12:05, 18 April 2007 (EDT)

:::::: As far as the burden of proof is concerned, you may be right in your argument, but I'm not sure, because the alternative is not "nothing happened". In theory it may be, but in practice secular geology proposes that ''something'' happened. So we have two competing theories of ''something'' happening. From that point of view, why should the burden of proof be on one of those "somethings" and not the other?
:::::: As for you numbered points:
::::::# Speciation has been observed happening within a few generations, so I would argue that points 1 and 6 have been shown to be possible.
::::::# I don't understand this one.
::::::# I hope they find it one day!
::::::# See my comments below about dating.
::::::# I believe that this does not need to be false; it could be consistent with flood geology.
::::::# See No. 1.
::::::# This is not what flood geology proposes, so is a straw-man. See also my comments below about dating.
::::::# There might be a bit of a straw-man in this one, but the rest has been answered. See the book ''A Feasibility Study of Noah's Ark'' by John Woodmorappe.
:::::: Dates are a time between two events (being the event being dated and the present) adjusted to a common reference. So when we are talking about dates, it is really the time between events that we are discussing.
:::::: I agree that evidence is not biased but the interpreters of the evidence are. But dates are not evidence. They are a calculation done by a biased interpreter of the evidence. And his biases can affect that calculation. So we are not saying that evidence should be ignored; we are saying that dates that are calculated according to opposing biases should be ignored.
:::::: I agree that "''for research to be trustworthy it must explore all practical and available routes within the scope of its study''", which means that naturalistic science that excludes some ideas (such as flood geology) on the basis that it involves a supernatural being are not trustworthy.
:::::: Finally, thanks for the civil discussion; it makes a change from many that I've had.
:::::: [[User:Philip J. Rayment|Philip J. Rayment]] 22:12, 18 April 2007 (EDT)

:::::::As far as “nothing happened” I may have understated this. Since the variables that are being tested are based on the logic of what is changed from the current norm. In other woods since we have not see a global flood since the declaration of a flood, it is considered a one time event then the proof is to be based on the change. For example, the meteor impact idea that a meteor supposedly landed in what is now the Gulf of Mexico and caused 200 foot tidal waves that washed out the southern part of now the US. This idea had to provide the proof of a meteor and impact speeds and size for it to gain any ground in the scientific community. We know that meteors hit the planet several times each year, so that was not implausible, however for one of this size and did this much damage there needed to be proof, much like a world flood. We know that there are floods on the planet several times each year but a flood of this size and this damage would need to have evidence to convince the scientific community that it happened.--[[User:Tims|TimS]] 09:56, 19 April 2007 (EDT)
::::::::Just to point out a couple of things,
::::::::# While speciation had been observed happening within a few generations it has never been shown to happen so rapidly and to include such diversity. Consider this, if Noah had 10 types of grass on the ark to reach the rough 10,000 we have today there would have been at least 1.6 new species each year. Now keep in mind this is for grass only, an organism that can change rapidly due to selective breeding (When I mean rapidly I mean within 20 to 30 years) we would have to apply this to trees and other plants as well. Consider the number of species of plants we have in the world today (excluding the aquatic plants, however fresh water aquatic plants would have died) it is highly unlikely that 6K years would produce enough change without some unstable environment that would be rapidly mutating the plants to produce the 1M plus species of plants we see today. If this was the case, (free radicals, UV light and other mutagens) it would have affected humans as well.
::::::::# The water chemistry is based on the saturation of salts and minerals, with the addition of the water to the already existing ocean and in conjunction with the idea that the water was removed from land by placement within the oceans would mean that the salinity of the preexisting oceans would have been so high that only the most primitive forms of bacteria could have lived in it. On that same note fish would have had to adjust within a year to the decrease of salinity in order to survive, this is highly unlikely since anyone with experience in marine chemistry and marine biology knows that fish are highly sensitive to changes in alkalinity and salinity in their environments, enough that only a few increases in PPM is enough to kill them.
::::::::# I do as well
::::::::# I agree as well about dates but the time that had passed should not be ignored. To do so would discredit ideas that a based on timelines, like creationism.
::::::::# It is the speed at which the glaciers move. Not to mention the concept of an ice age occurring between the time of the flood and modern time. For an ice age to have occurred to create the glaciers large enough to form the great lakes it would have had to lower the global temperature significantly, enough that it would have been noticed by civilizations, even at the equator. As for the speed, the glacier formation and the advancing and retreating of the glacier to develop the lakes would have taken thousands of years to achieve. The only way for it to not have is if the earth went through a series of freeze thaws with high precipitation during the freezes to accumulate enough snow pack to form a glacier and that allows enough time for glacier movement then thaw the glacier away to do the cycle once more. This would have been detrimental to any and all wildlife in the area not to mention the extreme climate foliations that would have been felt globally.
::::::::# Mentioned above.
::::::::# Maybe this would be of interest with the strata argument. Why is most sediment on high ground? Most sediment is carried until the water slows down or stops. If the water stopped in the oceans, we should expect more sediment there. Baumgardner's own modeling shows that, during the Flood, currents would be faster over continents than over ocean basins <ref> Baumgardner, John R., 1994. Patterns of ocean circulation over the continents during Noah's Flood. Proceedings of the third international conference on creationism, technical symposium sessions, pp. 77-86 </ref> so sediments should, on the whole, be removed from continents and deposited in ocean basins. Yet sediments on the ocean basin average 0.6 km thick, while on continents (including continental shelves), they average 2.6 km thick. <ref> Poldervaart, Arie, 1955. Chemistry of the earth's crust. pp. 119-144 In: Poldervaart, A., ed., Crust of the Earth, Geological Society of America Special Paper 62, Waverly Press, MD.</ref>
::::::::# I have read the book, it was interesting but there where a lot of holes in the idea. Mostly about waste management and animal handling for 15,754 animals. It did not however answer how the ark could have survived the turbulent nature of the flood with the upheaval of the earth’s crust to form new land masses as well as the energy released from the mantle in such a process.
::::::::I must comment about the supernatural. The search for the supernatural is considered scientific since it is falsifiable, we find evidence of the supernatural or not (why SETI is scientifically based) but to use the supernatural to explain an observation is not scientific due to the lack of falsifiablity of the research unless the supernatural entity has been shown to A. exist and B. contribute to the event.
:::::::: I am glad you enjoy the discussion. I do believe that evidence tends to speak for itself as long as it is looked at objectively, which can be hard for some. I know that some feel that debating is negative, mostly due to insecurities of background knowledge of a topic (ToE for example), and try to prevent the opposing POV from presenting its evidence. I do hope to continue this discussion, for I am very interested in gleaning why a person believes as they do.--[[User:Tims|TimS]] 09:56, 19 April 2007 (EDT)
:::::::::The way I see it is this:
:::::::::* Most people/scientists/geologists accepted the global flood until about 200 years ago.
:::::::::* Then James Hutton ''declared'' that geology should be based on processes that we see in the present. This simply wiped flood geology off the radar without disproving it. Surely by your logic, the onus on him was to ''demonstrate'' his non-flood geology. But he didn't.
:::::::::* So now secular geology tries to put the onus on flood geologists to convincingly demonstrate ''their'' case, despite the fact that secular geology never convincingly demonstrated its case in the first place.

::::::::::Those are excellent points, I have to mention something though, about 200 years ago scientists were still using the bible as a frame of reference. This was due to the indoctrination of the educational system at the time. Many of the universities and schools where sciences were taught were run by the church. It took a considerable effort for scientists to break from the norm and apply their observations instead of relating them in accordance to scripture. “James Hutton, after considerable observation, proposed an idea that placed him into opposition with Abraham Werner. He opened up the concept of deep time for scientific purposes, in opposition to Catastrophism. Rather than accepting that the earth was no more than a few thousand years old, he maintained that the Earth must be much older. His main line of argument was that the tremendous displacements and changes he was seeing did not happen in a short period of time by means of catastrophe, but that processes still happening on the Earth in the present day had caused them. As these processes were very gradual, the Earth needed to be ancient, in order to allow time for the changes. Scientific inquiries provoked by his claims had pushed back the age of the earth into the millions of years” He did demonstrate non-flood geology. His understanding of rock formation and the time that had to pass in order to form the rock and strata was convincing enough that other geologists followed suit and began experimentation under the mindset that the earth had to be older since what was observed was in contradiction to what had been thought. The irony of all of this is that the only reason why Neptunisum had existed was through the formulation of data to support the idea and not the idea supporting the data. When you look at modern geology there are only a hand full of scientists that even consider the flood as valid, a huge turn from 200 years ago. Perhaps we should ask ourselves why the reversal if their logic, observation and experimentation is flawed?--[[User:Tims|TimS]] 17:20, 20 April 2007 (EDT)

:::::::::Despite me questioning why the onus of proof is on Flood Geology, I claim that the evidence to support it ''is'' there. The problem is not a lack of evidence, but a worldview that refuses to see the evidence that way.
:::::::::1. Grass likely survived off the ark on floating mats of vegetation, and there could have been a lot more than ten types surviving the flood. In addition, and even assuming only ten surviving the flood, those 1.6 species per year (actually about 2.2 per year, as the flood was about 4,500 years ago) do not need to happen sequentially. How do you know that there aren't two or three new species all around the world this year? Additionally, you are putting speciation all down to mutations. It can and does happen through genetic bottlenecks and natural selection, a sorting out and elimination of genes in given population groups produces new species. Mutations are an ''additional'' method.

::::::::::Yes this could be logarithmic and rapidly advance speciation, however consider what we know of mutation, if the environment was not ever changing then the mutations would be far fewer in fact natural selection would be reduced unless the environmental stresses were greater. Keep in mind though, that genetic bottlenecks and natural selection have a much slower rate of adding to speciation since they are reducing the species through environmental castration. This would greatly hinder the time needed to produce such a large verity of species of plant life. Now another matter is, how did we go from grass to a tree in such a short time, or even from an oak to a pine with the possibility that there were possible seeds on the ark? Another note would be based on the different species found in differencing climates around the world? How long would it take to diversify the little plant life on the ark and provide something like the Amazon rainforest within 4500 years with the understanding that the land masses had already divided and that certain plants can not survive such an infusion of water? (Cacti in the Mojave Desert). --[[User:Tims|TimS]] 17:20, 20 April 2007 (EDT)
::::::::::: "''...if the environment was not ever changing...''" I expect that's exactly what it would be doing following a global flood.

::::::::::::Wow this is getting long:). The environment changing, if it was changing so much that the mutations were causing the rapid diversification of animals and plants then the same should have happened to humans.--[[User:Tims|TimS]] 10:27, 24 April 2007 (EDT)
:::::::::::::Not necessarily, for two reasons. One, humans may not have had as much genetic potential for diversity. Two, speciation works best in small populations under environmental pressure, which would be the case with animals and plants spreading out over a post-flood world. Humans, on the other hand, refused to spread out until God forced the issue at the tower of Babel. [[User:Philip J. Rayment|Philip J. Rayment]] 12:35, 24 April 2007 (EDT)

::::::::::: From grass to a tree? What? We are talking about diversification within a created kind, not evolution. You don't need to go from grass to trees, nor oaks to pines, as you would have had both to start with.
::::::::::: The post-flood ice age would have had lower sea levels, creating land bridges where there are none now. Floating mats of vegetation would be one way of keeping plants and seeds out of the water.
::::::::::: [[User:Philip J. Rayment|Philip J. Rayment]] 05:24, 22 April 2007 (EDT)

::::::::::::You need to go from grass to trees when tree seedlings would not be able to survive the conditions on the ark nor in the water for the length of time. Many common tree species seen today would have died out in the humidity conditions that would have existed on an ark and the water would have destroyed the seeds if they were on a mat of vegetation. This is important due to the verity of tree species found today that can not exist in water logged conditions. In regards to land bridges, there is no evidence of a land bridge to Australia. Not to mention that many animal species could not survive the land bridge between the Americas and Asia in their current forms, the reptiles for example could not survive the temperature to migrate.--[[User:Tims|TimS]] 10:27, 24 April 2007 (EDT)
:::::::::::::I doubt that you can be sufficiently sure of the conditions to rule out seeds surviving, and you are still overlooking that the trees that are around today are (for the most part) ''not'' the ones that survived the flood, but more-specialised descendants of them. There might not have been a land bridge to Australia, but the water gap would have been much smaller. I don't know about the reptiles getting to the Americas via the Bering Strait area, but it's amazing what creatures can achieve at times. [[User:Philip J. Rayment|Philip J. Rayment]] 12:35, 24 April 2007 (EDT)

:::::::::2. Flood geologists believe that the salt content prior to the flood was ''smaller'' than now, not larger. We don't know how much water was added to the oceans, but likely a lot of salt was added at the same time, and has been added since (salt entering the oceans exceeds the quantity leaving). Also, the ice age (see below) would have reduced the water content, concentrating the salt a bit in the remaining water.

::::::::::Very good point, as the water escaped from the ground it would have a higher salt content due to the dissolved minerals. This still would change the salinity of the water and would have caused such a drastic change that is would have killed off the aquatic life. Unlike plants, animals reproduce much slower and in a year’s time the fish population would have been destroyed. Something to note however is that the salt content would remain the same, “A detailed analysis of sodium shows that 35.6 x 1010 kg/yr come into the ocean, and 38.1 x 1010 kg/yr are removed (Morton 1996). Within measurement error, the amount of sodium added matches the amount removed.”<ref>http://www.asa3.org/archive/evolution/199606/0051.html</ref>--[[User:Tims|TimS]] 17:20, 20 April 2007 (EDT)
:::::::::::Yes, the salinity would change, but it is not as clear cut as that. How much would it change? I don't know that anyone's done the calculations on that yet. For one thing, nobody knows how salty it was before the flood. Your comment about the fish surviving presumes that they have the same sensitivity as fish today. See [http://www.creationontheweb.com/images/pdfs/cabook/chapter14.pdf here] regarding that. As for Morton's analysis, apart from the fact that it has been rebutted [http://www.answersingenesis.org/home/area/feedback/2006/0331.asp here], he is discussing something entirely different: how long it would take to reach today's level of saltiness ''without'' a flood. [[User:Philip J. Rayment|Philip J. Rayment]] 05:24, 22 April 2007 (EDT)

::::::::::::If the fish did not have the same or similar sensitivity as today that is quite the evolutionary advancement, lol. There are other factors as well such as pressure changes due to the upheaval that would have killed many of the deep species we find in the ocean today as well as the turbity issue in the water due to the massive land changes, most gill systems can not tolerate particle counts over 2 to 3 ppm over their normal environment. Not to mention the differences between fresh and salt and fresh water fish. Yes, Ichthyologists will admit there are several species of fish that can go between fresh and salt waters as long as the ppm change is slight and that the progression into the differing waters is done slowly. With the flood this would not have happened as slowly nor do all fish species have this ability.--[[User:Tims|TimS]] 10:27, 24 April 2007 (EDT)
:::::::::::::No, not an evolutionary advancement at all. Rather, a backwards step, where the fish have ''lost'' the capability of surviving in a wider range of salinity. The vast majority of all fossils are marine, indicating that many of them ''did'' perish, likely due to the factors you mentioned. But enough survived. [[User:Philip J. Rayment|Philip J. Rayment]] 12:35, 24 April 2007 (EDT)

:::::::::3. —
:::::::::4. What time that has passed? Are you still talking about uniformitarian-based time calculations?

::::::::::I am saying the time that had to pass in order to cause certain geographical features to evolve. For example, the Appalachian mountains vs. the Rocky Mountains. If these two mountain ranges had been formed at the same time, during the upheaval then why the erosion difference? This can be verified by the strata found in both mountain ranges. We could attest the erosion to be based on weather patterns but to do so would be inverse to what we observe, the Rockies would be far more eroded than the Appalachian due to the direction of the weather systems as well as the moisture patterns. So how are we to conclude the difference without using time calculations? (Just to point out that the vegetation and weather eroding would require hundreds of thousands of years to develop the Appalachians into what we see today.) Another point in regards to time would be found in caves. The fast-growing stalactites form via processes very different from calcium carbonate stalactites found in limestone caves. Limestone is not soluble in water. When carbon dioxide (from decaying plants in the soil above the cave) mixes with water, it forms a very weak carbonic acid. This turns the calcium carbonate into calcium bicarbonate, which dissolves. When drips are exposed to air in the cave, a little carbon dioxide escapes from them into the atmosphere, which reverses the process and precipitates a small amount of calcium carbonate. The upper average rate for limestone stalactite growth is ten centimeters per thousand years, with lower growth rates outside of tropical areas. Fast-growing stalactites, on the other hand, either grow from gypsum through an evaporative process, or they form from concrete or mortar. When water is added to concrete, one product is calcium hydroxide, which is about 100 times more soluble than calcite. The calcium hydroxide absorbs carbon dioxide from the atmosphere to reconstitute calcium carbonate.<ref>Dorale, J. A. Dorale, R. L. Edwards, E. Ito and Luis A. González, 1998. Climate and vegetation history of the mid-continent from 75 to 25 ka: A speleothem record from Crevice Cave, Missouri, USA. Science 282: 1871-1874. <?ref> The time for stalactite growth also has to allow for time for the cave to dissolve in the first place, which is a very slow process, sometimes on the order of tens of millions of years. Then the geological conditions have to change so that the cave is no longer under water. Only then can stalactite growth begin.<ref>Ford, Derek C. and Carol A. Hill, 1999. Dating of speleothems in Kartchner Caverns, Arizona. Journal of Cave and Karst Studies 61(2): 84-88. http://www.caves.org/pub/journal/PDF/V61/v61n2-Ford.pdf </ref> Direct measurement via radiometric dating gives stalactite ages over 190,000 years (Ford and Hill 1999). Other deposits in caves have been dated to several million years old. For example, argon-argon dating of alunite (an aluminum sulfate mineral) gives an age of 11.3 million years for a cave near Carlsbad Caverns (Polyak et al. 1998).<ref>Polyak, V. J., W. C. McIntosh, N. Güven and P. Provencio, 1998. Age and origin of Carlsbad Cavern and related caves from 40Ar/39Ar of alunite. Science 279: 1919-1922. See also Sasowsky, I. D., 1998. Determining the age of what is not there. Science 279: 1874. </ref> Oxygen isotope measurements in stalactites give an indication of outside temperatures. They are consistent with the coming and going of ice ages back at least 160,000 years (Dorale et al. 1998; Wang et al. 2001; Zhang et al. 2004). <ref>Wang, Y. J. et al., 2001. A high-resolution absolute-dated Late Pleistocene monsoon record from Hulu Cave, China. Science 294: 2345-2348. Zhang, M., D. Yuan, Y Lin, H. Cheng, J. Qin and H Zhang, 2004. The record of paleoclimatic change from stalagmites and the determination of termination II in the south of Guizhou Province, China. Science in China Ser. D 47(1): 1-12. http://www.karst.edu.cn/publication/Zhang%20Ml200401.pdf </ref>--[[User:Tims|TimS]] 17:20, 20 April 2007 (EDT)
:::::::::::Why the erosion difference between the Appalachian and Rocky Mountains? I would figure because they happened at different times during the flood and/or different conditions applicable to them. Part of your argument for the stalactites relies on dating methods that creationists have demonstrated to be unreliable and subject to assumptions that wouldn't apply with a Flood model. Interesting that you should use the Carlsbad caves as an example. A caver there said the following:
{{QuoteBox|From 1924 to 1988, there was a visitor’s sign above the entrance to Carlsbad Caverns, that said Carlsbad was at least 260 million years old. In 1988 the sign was changed to read 7–10 million years old. Then, for a little while, the sign read that it was 2 million years old. Now the sign is gone.[http://www.creationontheweb.com/content/view/722]}}
:::::::::::That's just one of example of dates being changed (not just refined). [[User:Philip J. Rayment|Philip J. Rayment]] 05:24, 22 April 2007 (EDT)

::::::::::::Yes, I loved the caver story but it still does not change the observed geology in the formation of stalactites, not to mention that most of the caves are run by independent owners that put what they will to attract tourists. You should see Seneca caverns or smoke hole caverns in the eastern US and you will see what I am talking about. The erosion difference between the mountain ranges shows a 200 million year time passing. For the erosion to happen in a shorter time the environment would have been unlivable by the animal and plant life there today, not to mention that the weather conditions that would have eroded the Appalachian Mountains would have been noticed by the civilizations that were on the Americas. The difference between the two mountain ranges in terms of erosion to their current states would have been by time or very severe isolated weather conditions.--[[User:Tims|TimS]] 10:27, 24 April 2007 (EDT)
:::::::::::::The "observed geology"? Who observed these stalactites growing for 190,000 years? There are many other examples of artifacts being redated after being dated by supposedly reliable radiometric dating methods; the cave example is not unique. Besides, what motive would the cave owners have for changing it? You say that "for the erosion to happen in a shorter time the environment would have been unlivable by the animal and plant life there today". Yep; it would be unlivable during a global flood. That's why there was an ark. Not that there were any civilisations there during the flood to notice the extreme weather conditions. [[User:Philip J. Rayment|Philip J. Rayment]] 12:35, 24 April 2007 (EDT)

:::::::::5. An ice age could occur in the several hundred years after the flood. Lower temperatures globally would not produce an ice age, because of the lower evaporation hence lower precipitation. Higher temperatures globally would not produce an ice age because the precipitation would be rain, not snow. However, lower land temperatures with still-warm oceans following the flood ''would'' produce an ice age. The flood is the best (only?) mechanism that could produce one. Despite it not being as drastic as you indicate, civilisation did notice; Job makes reference to the vast storehouses of ice in the north.

::::::::::Adding heat to a system tends to make it hotter. The falling moisture would have been a hot rain, not snow. You must not forget that all the heat lost to evaporation returns when the water condenses again and that more latent heat is then released in the freezing. A proper ice age cannot fit into the 4500 year timescale. For a continent-scale glacier to form, advance enough to change the landscape, and retreat takes centuries or more, not a decade. Cores from ice sheets reveal annual layers that date back 160,000 years in places. Volcanic eruptions recorded in the top few thousand years match historic records. The top 4,000 or so layers have to be annual layers. It is unlikely that the other 156,000 layers were laid down in just a few years (Brinkman 1995).<ref> Lindsay, Don, 1997. Astronomical cycles. http://www.don-lindsay-archive.org/creation/astro_cycles.html </ref> The earth under the ice sheets is isostatically adjusted to the mass of ice. Even if 10,000 or more feet of ice were dropped on Greenland and Antarctica in only a few years about 4,000 years ago, it would take over 12,000 years to reach the observed (today) degree of adjustment. Scandinavia and Canada are still rebounding from the disappearance of glaciers covering them at the end of the last ice age (Strahler 1987, chap. 27). It would have taken thousands of additional years for the weight of the ice to push them down in the first place.<ref> Shackleton, Nicholas J., 2000. The 100,000-year ice-age cycle identified and found to lag temperature, carbon dioxide, and orbital eccentricity. Science 289: 1897-1902.</ref> --[[User:Tims|TimS]] 17:20, 20 April 2007 (EDT)
:::::::::::Why would the precipitation be rain rather than snow? The heat is lost as it is lifted into the atmosphere. Ice core dating is not as certain as we are led to believe, and the layers may not always be annual. You make a number of assertions there which seem to be simply stating secular views, and such things (secular views) have turned out to be wrong before, because they are presuming a different scenario. Sorry my answers are not more specific here, but I've already shown that much of the secular argument presumes no Flood, and I've no reason to think the same doesn't apply here. If you want to read more of the creationist arguments on this, see [http://www.creationontheweb.com/content/view/3011/ here]. [[User:Philip J. Rayment|Philip J. Rayment]] 05:24, 22 April 2007 (EDT)

:::::::::::The physics of heat loss and specific gravity of water explain why the water would return as rain instead of snow. Ice core dating is pretty sound, the determination of the age of layers is not done by the microcrystal structure but also the residue found in the layers. Each year the jet stream drops above the Sahara and causes great dust clouds to be lifted into the atmosphere, this has been observed by satellite as well in dust composition found around the Gulf of Mexico. This is an annual even caused by the tilt of the earth forcing a change in warm zones on the planet. The ice cores can be read due to similar events being deposited on to the ice in layers. The only way this would be misleading is if the earth had and extremely unstable wobble that could cause massive shifts in temperature to affect deposition of materials. If this were the case there would be greater issues that would have resulted and affected life on the planet due to unstable seasonal changes. I suggest looking into how ice core data is extrapililated. Its reliability is often better than radio dating.--[[User:Tims|TimS]] 10:27, 24 April 2007 (EDT)
::::::::::::"''The physics of heat loss and specific gravity of water explain why the water would return as rain instead of snow''". I was kinda hoping that ''you'' would explain, because Mr. physics doesn't seem to be too good at explaining it to me. :-) On ice-core dating, see [http://www.creationontheweb.com/content/view/1573 here], if you haven't already. Saying that its better than radiometric dating doesn't fill me with confidence! [[User:Philip J. Rayment|Philip J. Rayment]] 12:35, 24 April 2007 (EDT)

:::::::::6. —
:::::::::7. Your argument assumes that the existing ocean basins were the ocean basins of the time. I don't know the detail of the Flood model on this point, but part of it is that "the mountains rose and the valleys sank" (Psalms, somewhere) as part of the flood. So the sediments were deposited in the low areas, which subsequently rose to make the continents, while the hight points without the sediments dropped to become the ocean basins. That may not be accurate, but it may be the explanation.

::::::::::No, I was meaning the deposition of sediment while the water was retreating into the newly formed oceans. What we see in the sediment layers is contrary to what we should have seen according to the flood model.
:::::::::::I've seen little evidence that you understand what the flood model would predict, so I don't give that statement much weight. [[User:Philip J. Rayment|Philip J. Rayment]] 05:24, 22 April 2007 (EDT)

::::::::::::It would depend on which flood model you were referencing. I am using the hydroplate theory by Walt Brown. If you are using a different model please let me know. All of the science I have used has been based on Walt Brown's assumptions.--[[User:Tims|TimS]] 10:27, 24 April 2007 (EDT)
:::::::::::::Does Walt Brown's theory include "a single mineral deposit band consistent with a flood on all land masses today within the same geological time frame"? I wouldn't think so. Regardless, I don't know of any creationary scientist, at least connected with the main creationist organisations, who accepts the Hydroplate theory, so no, I'm not talking about that one. [[User:Philip J. Rayment|Philip J. Rayment]] 12:35, 24 April 2007 (EDT)

:::::::::8. I wasn't sure if the book talked much about the structural strength of the ark, but that or something like that has been studied by Korean naval architects.

::::::::::It did talk a little about the architecture, but I am not an engineer so wrapping my head around that would have done no good lol. I just looked at the biology and the mechanics at which he proposed the handling of the wastes and food uptake. I did notice however that his understanding of the heat produced by that much biomass was a little understated. That boat would have been easily at 100+ degrees. At that temp and humidity I am sure there would have been bacteriological issues with infection, especially with the stall conditions and the primitive waste handling, no water sprayers.--[[User:Tims|TimS]] 17:20, 20 April 2007 (EDT)

::::::::: Very few people I've discussed this with will say that the search for the supernatural is scientific. But one does not have to observe or test the supernatural to see the results of the actions of the supernatural, so there should be nothing unscientific about concluding that a supernatural being was responsible. But naturalistic science will not even consider that possibility, so it not being objective.

::::::::::I do not understand how you could state this and keep a scientific frame of mind. I could shoot someone and make the claim that Satan forced me to do it. How can that be tested? Science is willing to modify its claims as long as there is evidence. The supernatural does not provide evidence and there for is not scientific. As such using the term that something supernatural caused something to happen without providing a mechanism as to how it happened or how the supernatural enmity could have affected the event without showing how, can not be tested by science therefore not considered scientific.--[[User:Tims|TimS]] 17:20, 20 April 2007 (EDT)

::::::::::: There are two ways to test the Satan claim. (1) See if it is consistent with what we know about Satan. (2) See if there are other possible explanations. The latter will not prove that Satan forced you, but failure to find any other explanation will leave that as the only option. And of course it will not "prove" that Satan did force you, but remember that science can't prove anything anyway, and it will make it the most likely explanation. The creation view ''does'' have evidence, including evidence that can only be explained by the supernatural. But perhaps there is an unscientific element to creation in that regard, but the same applies to evolution/naturalism; you can't test the concept of naturalism either. [[User:Philip J. Rayment|Philip J. Rayment]] 05:24, 22 April 2007 (EDT)

::::::::::::I must say I like the way your phrased the above, it was very thoughtful. Only issue is in reference to what we know about Satan. Outside of the bible there is no evidence of Satan. So if we were to live in a village in the Amazon and had never read nor hear of Satan would we come to the same conclusion? Chances are unlikely, however if the event was scientific then no mater the situation the conclusions would be similar if not the same through the reductionism effort applied to understand the event. That is one of the reasons why the supernatural is not a plausible explanation when it comes to scientific reasoning. What we know about the world around us in scientific terms comes from observation, what I observer here with the weather from the clouds would be the same that a person in the Amazon would see. Over time as the scientific method was applied we would come to the same conclusion, independent of our world views. This is not possible is the supernatural is assumed. It has been recorded in many cultures that those who took a logical view of the world around them had similar conclusions no matter their background. It would be just a matter of time and refining of the idea to come to the same conclusion. Evolution follows this same setup due to multiple cultures and background when using a logical observed mindset have come to similar conclusions. The premise of the supernatural is that the entity must be understood or part of the world view of the culture for it to apply to the event whereas the naturalist would only use what was observed, thus something independent of a worldview, to make conclusions.--[[User:Tims|TimS]] 10:27, 24 April 2007 (EDT)

:::::::::::::I'd say that there is ''plenty'' of evidence for Satan: all the evil in the world. And if we lived in a village in the Amazon and had never read nor heard of Satan, why do you think that we would be doing science anyway? A lack of information in a specific group of people doesn't negate my argument. In any case, that was only one of two approaches. The other one is still applicable.
:::::::::::::"''the supernatural is not a plausible explanation when it comes to scientific reasoning''". On the contrary, you can deduce a Creator from the available evidence, because things don't make themselves, so something outside of the natural (i.e. supernatural) must have made the natural.
:::::::::::::"''Over time as the scientific method was applied we would come to the same conclusion, independent of our world views. This is not possible is the supernatural is assumed.''". Yet modern science arose ''because'' of a Christian worldview, so this statement is clearly incorrect (contrary to the evidence).
:::::::::::::Evolution is not assumption-free. It assumes no god, for a start. It assumes no miracles, yet invokes processes that have never been observed. Or rather, processes ''opposite'' to those that have been observed.
:::::::::::::[[User:Philip J. Rayment|Philip J. Rayment]] 12:35, 24 April 2007 (EDT)

::::::::: Evidence does not really speak for itself. We understand (interpret) the evidence within our worldview or paradigm.

::::::::::That is true, how else could we understand it? Human minds work off comparisons.--[[User:Tims|TimS]] 17:20, 20 April 2007 (EDT)
::::::::: [[User:Philip J. Rayment|Philip J. Rayment]] 10:59, 19 April 2007 (EDT)

You seem to argue here that assuming part of your argument takes analysis outside the realm of science - at least that's what TerryH argues, when he says that "assuming there was no flood" makes it not good science. Conceding this point ''arguendo'', I'd like to cross apply your reasoning, and broaden its scope: assuming part of an argument does invalidate the argument, I will phrase it. Applying this to creation science, which Philip concedes assumes a creator, it is clear that [[creation science]] is also bad science.-'''AmesG'''[http://www.conservapedia.com/User_talk:AmesG yo!] 23:22, 17 April 2007 (EDT)
:If that comment is a response to mine, I don't know what you are referring to, as I didn't mention anything about "the realm of science". [[User:Philip J. Rayment|Philip J. Rayment]] 23:27, 17 April 2007 (EDT)
Realm of science, meaning, "good science."-'''AmesG'''[http://www.conservapedia.com/User_talk:AmesG yo!] 23:27, 17 April 2007 (EDT)
:I didn't mention anything about "good science" either, so that answer was less than helpful. [[User:Philip J. Rayment|Philip J. Rayment]] 05:40, 18 April 2007 (EDT)
:: I think that he's referring to Occam's razor, and that invisible pink elephant that's hovering over your shoulder. Go on, prove it isn't there! :-) Wikinterpreter'''[http://www.conservapedia.com/User_talk:Wikinterpreter talk?]
::: I can prove that there is no invisible pink elephant hovering over my shoulder in two ways; logical and according to the laws of physics.
::: Logical, because something cannot be both pink and invisible at the same time, so it is logically impossible for an invisible pink elephant to exist.
::: According to the laws of physics, and assuming that this invisible pink elephant differs from normal elephants only in that it is pink, invisible, and able to hover, because (a) I can't feel it, and (b) there is not enough space in this room I'm in for an elephant to fit.
::: As for any serious aspect to your comment is concerned, it hasn't enlightened me to what AmesG was getting at one bit.
::: [[User:Philip J. Rayment|Philip J. Rayment]] 11:07, 18 April 2007 (EDT)
: Sorry - it's a philosophical example used to demonstrate that it's fairly shaky on a logical ground to say that something happened and then use it to justify itself. For example, I think the issue here is that your explanation of how flood geology works requires one to assume the correctness of flood geology theory to work. -- Wikinterpreter'''[http://www.conservapedia.com/User_talk:Wikinterpreter talk?]
::I still don't see what that has to do with AmesG's comment (if you meant that). But as for your point itself, I totally agree that it is illogical to use an assumption to justify itself. That was my very point about dates that supposedly prove that the flood didn't happen. But despite your comment on what you "think" the issue is, you have not demonstrated that what you "think"—that flood geology requires the assumption of flood geology—is actually the case. Just saying that you "think" it is, is not a argument of any substance. [[User:Philip J. Rayment|Philip J. Rayment]] 11:23, 19 April 2007 (EDT)

==Subterranean Salt Deposits==

There is a band of sea-deposited salt that underlies many sedimentary rocks stretching from West of Ireland into Russia. Would any 'flood-geologist' please explain this.{{unsigned|LateralQuercus}}

:I'm not a geologist but I know a bit about flood geology. But not knowing the deposits that you are referring to, this is not enough information on which to comment. [[User:Philip J. Rayment|Philip J. Rayment]] 23:23, 17 April 2007 (EDT)
Why not?-'''AmesG'''[http://www.conservapedia.com/User_talk:AmesG yo!] 23:23, 17 April 2007 (EDT)

::Probably because he doesn't want to comment on something about which he doesn't possess information? Can't blame him for it.--[[User:M|M]] 10:41, 18 April 2007 (EDT)

:::I would have to support Philip in this as well. Without the information, weblink would be nice, I would not want to make a guess either.--[[User:Tims|TimS]] 11:05, 18 April 2007 (EDT)

I apologise for my tardiness in replying and for not signing my first post.

Rocksalt or Halite occurs throughout the world, often in very thick layers and interspersed with sedimentary rocks, and even overlain with igneous rock from volcanic eruptions, I hope these links are of some help.

http://www.mindat.org/click.php?enc=aHR0cDovL3JydWZmLmdlby5hcml6b25hLmVkdS9kb2NsaWIvaG9tL2hhbGl0ZS5wZGY%3D
--http://www.mindat.org/min-1804.html

http://www.saltinstitute.org/images/map.pdf
--http://www.mii.org/Minerals/photosalt.html

http://www.britannica.com/eb/article-9038903/halite
--http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=halite&hl=en&safe=off&client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&hs=1et&start=10&sa=N

I hope these show up OK, I'm not very good at this yet. [[User:LateralQuercus|LateralQuercus]] 17:35, 20 April 2007 (EDT)

== You Just Gotta Be Kidding Me ==

I have argued many times with fundamentalists about why flood geology is just ludacris and watched them slip out from my arguments, usually due to lack of understanding what I am saying, but I just recently had a revelation.

a couple of weeks ago, it hit me that I was arguing with people about rather or not scientific evidence supported a story about:
a guy who built an [[Noah's Ark|ark]] bigger than any wooden boat built today (modern attempts were significantly smaller) out of gohper wood pretty much by himself,
took this boat and went to the vast corners of the earth to collect species of animals such as the koala bear (ultimately taking many animals out of their required habitats) when the world didn't even know that [[Australia]] existed,
was able to not only feed these animals, with such vastly different eating habits, during his hunt to collect them all, but for an entire year,
that somehow animals that have lifespans of less than a year were able to survive, on top of the fact that none of them died from disease, etc.,
then released them, and carnivores somehow survived without eating, since eating any animal would mean that specie's extinction,
and herbivores somehow survived, speaking as how a global flood would demolish all plant life, even though a bird got a fig leaf from a freaking mountain top,
and then these animals returned to their remote locations while Noah's family ran to and from all these places committing rampant incest, since human culture was so spread out just shortly after this.

Now I kind of feel like i was arguing with 1st graders as to rather or not [[Santa Claus]] existed. If you believe this, you are probably beyond help and definitely beyond logic.{{Unsigned|Muchodelcrazy}}

:Oh dear. Here we have yet another person who is willing to criticise and idea that he clearly knows next to nothing about. Much of his description of the flood story is simply of his own invention or misunderstanding, and is therefore a straw-man argument. Why don't people try to actually find out about the ideas that they so readily criticise? [[User:Philip J. Rayment|Philip J. Rayment]] 23:33, 13 May 2007 (EDT)

Lol. Just readin' the Bible, man. Would you mind clarifying then?

Maybe if Genesis wasn't so vague, and if it didn't seem like it was written by a 3rd grader, i'd just be able to see the "clear meaning."

Or maybe I have to go study for 4 or 5 years, learn Greek, locate ancient manuscripts, analyze them, etc., before God's divine word becomes anything more than nonsense to me. Some religion for all.[[User:Muchodelcrazy|Muchodelcrazy]] 18:59, 14 May 2007 (EDT)

:You did NOT get that from "just readin' the Bible". It would be good for a start if you actually ''did'' read the Bible and see what it says, but to go beyond that to the scientific creation model, have a read of [http://www.creationontheweb.com/content/view/4018/ this]. [[User:Philip J. Rayment|Philip J. Rayment]] 07:04, 15 May 2007 (EDT)

Yeah. That's what the Bible said. Everything else I said is just what had to have happened for it to be true. We still have koala bears. They had to have been taken on the ark. And guess where they live exclusively?

It doesn't matter anyway. Jesus never came back, so this is all nonsense to talk about. Since a lot of you believe that the earth is 6000 years old, I don't count 1/3 of all existence as "soon" for his second coming, despite how many times the NT says it would be soon.[[User:Muchodelcrazy|Muchodelcrazy]] 19:34, 16 May 2007 (EDT)

:"''Everything else I said is just what had to have happened for it to be true''". Which is an admission that I was right, that you did NOT get that from "just readin' the Bible". Furthermore, at least one thing you said was ''contrary'' to the biblical account, so you have not simply added to the account, but ignored (or rejected) some of what it said. By the way, [[koala]]s are not bears. [[User:Philip J. Rayment|Philip J. Rayment]] 22:48, 16 May 2007 (EDT)

Wow. You did your research. Everybody knows they're marsupials (and most closely related to the wombat). You see, "koala bears" is what us non-believers call slang. Kind of how a gila monster is not a "monster" and a bat is not a bird (like in the Bible). See the problems taking everything's meaning word-for-word?

You got me genius. I'm a fraud, and God is real based on the grounds that a koala is not a bear. Still, how do "[[koala]]s" exist? And what did I falsify?

I'm going to make a prophesy that you will avoid, or work around, my question in your next response. [[User:Muchodelcrazy|Muchodelcrazy]] 15:59, 17 May 2007 (EDT)
:Oh dear. You make a prediction on whether I will answer your question, yet you honed in on a passing remark of mine and almost totally ignored the substantive points.
:What did you get wrong? For one, you said that "a guy who built an ark ..., took this boat and went to the vast corners of the earth to collect species of animals such as the koala bear". Show me where in the Bible it either says that or how that is a necessary consequence of the account.
:I'm not sure which part you think I'll avoid or work around, but in case it's your question about how koalas exist, they exist by eating, just like any other creature. Or was perhaps your question meant to be something other than what you actually asked?
:[[User:Philip J. Rayment|Philip J. Rayment]] 23:10, 17 May 2007 (EDT)

::I think that his very valid point is why are there Koala bears in Australia, but not in Asia, or Africa, or anywhere else? Come to that, why are there marsupials in Australia but not Africa or India, if everything came from the ark? The Biblical account of the flood is a very nice tale from the Bronze Age, but that's it. Saying that it's the literal truth is highly dubious. Every culture has a flood myth, because floods are terribly destructive things. Saying that many flood myths = one universal flood is shaky reasoning at best. Dating the flood to the third millennium BC is also shaky, given the amount of evidence to the contrary. Rapid plate tectonics? Blaming the reversals of the Earth's magnetic field on the flood? This is scientifically stretching the facts until they fit an argument. Gave me a good giggle, though so thanks! [[User:Darkmind1970|Darkmind1970]] 09:05, 11 January 2008 (EST)
::: If evolution is true, why are there platypuses (or platypi if you prefer) only in Australia? It's not as though they evolved there, as a fossil platypus tooth has been found in South America. Whether you are a creationist or an evolutionist, you can't claim to have solved every last problem.
::: Yes, every culture has a flood account, but they agree on so many points (despite disagreeing on quite a few also) that to argue they they are ''not'' all of the same event is stretching credulity. The developer of the world's leading 3D computer model of plate tectonics believes that it happened rapidly during Noah's flood. Magnetic reversals have been shown in some cases to have occurred in weeks—as predicted by a creationist on the basis of Flood Geology. Sorry, the science (as opposed to the opinion of scientists) is not as opposed to Flood Geology as you might like to think.
::: [[User:Philip J. Rayment|Philip J. Rayment]] 04:54, 12 January 2008 (EST)
:::: Congratulations - you have just made my point for me. Marsupials used to be more widespread, but they were out-evolved by mammals. South America used to be linked to Australia, but plate tectonics moved the two apart. The marsupials in South America were out-evolved by mammals. Australia had disconnected and moved away by then. Which took millions of years. Oh and please cite this so-called leader of 3d plate tectonics modelling, because I have never heard of her/him/it. I live in the UK, and Flood Geology is not cited as a serious scientific study. Apologies for being caustic.
:::: [[User:Darkmind1970|Darkmind1970]] 19:27, 13 January 2008 (EST)
::::: If you recognise you are being caustic and apologise for it, why do it in the first place?
::::: The "so-called" expert—your contempt despite your ignorance is glaring—is Dr. [[John Baumgardner]].
::::: Of course Flood Geology is not cited as a serious scientific study—it's censored out of the mainstream journals because it implies that the Bible is correct, which means that people are answerable to their Creator, and they don't want that.
::::: If you knew much about Flood Geology, you would know of Baumgardner. That you doesn't means that you don't really know much about the idea that you are so willing to dismiss and disparage. How about investing a bit of effort into learning about it if you are going to continue to publicly reject it? Will you do that?
::::: [[User:Philip J. Rayment|Philip J. Rayment]] 19:48, 13 January 2008 (EST)

:::::: I wrote my reply at about midnight, UK time, when I was tired and bad-tempered, two things that I only diagnosed as I was finishing my post. My apology was a bit tardy. Thank you for your link to Baumgardner. I read his theory, which intrigued me - but for the wrong reasons.
:::::: Three major problems with his theory are apparent. First things first - the amount of heat that would have been released from such rapid subduction would have basically boiled the oceans of the world. Secondly - citing mantle tectonics on Venus and comparing it to Earth is like comparing apples and oranges. The Earth has very active plate tectonics, with subduction being helped - or perhaps lubricated would be a better word - by water. Venus has no water and no plate tectonics, something which leads to heat building up in the mantle that can only be released by catastrophic mantle upwellings that seem to resurface the face of the planet periodically. Thirdly, and most fatally for Baumgardner, there's the little issue of the seamounts and islands that form volcanic island chains like Hawaii. Rapid subduction should have led to huge gaps in the chain. The problem is that there aren't any. You can trace the chain from Hawaii to Midway. I think that it goes northwards along the Emperor Seamount chain from there. I'm sorry, but I do not find Baumgardner at all plausible. Thank you for the link though. [[User:Darkmind1970|Darkmind1970]] 09:06, 15 January 2008 (EST)
::::::: Baumgardner himself admits that not all the problems with his model have been solved. But the same is true of evolutionary/uniformitarian/materialistic/naturalistic scenarios. They have unsolved problems also. The point is that we have a respected scientist who has a model of tectonic plate movement that works ''best'' (albeit not without problems) as a rapid process (i.e. within the year of the flood). So your comment that prompted this line of discussion ("Rapid plate tectonics? Blaming the reversals of the Earth's magnetic field on the flood? This is scientifically stretching the facts until they fit an argument. ") was nothing more than your bigotry showing. Neither side has all the answers, but that doesn't mean that creationists are abusing science. They simply have a different theory about what happened, and there's absolutely nothing wrong with that, and it doesn't deserve derision. [[User:Philip J. Rayment|Philip J. Rayment]] 09:23, 15 January 2008 (EST)

:::::::: Yes, but no-one else has supported his work, and Baumgardner's theory suffers from the problems that I outlined above - and I'm just an amateur geologist. For his theory to be right, everything that we know about sciences like geology, vulcanology, plate tectonics, hydrogeology, palaeontology and so on, have to be massively wrong. Now, science isn't perfect and it does admit its mistakes - but Baumgardners theory is massively at variance with mainstream thought. For his theory to be right, there must be some links, some proof, to connect it with the mainstream, as that's the way that evidence works. But there aren't, as far as I can see. The point I mentioned about the sea mounts and island chains is a killer for his theory - it just cannot explain it. For that amount of subduction to have taken place, then the amount of vulcanism must have also increased, as the old sea floor melts in the mantle, but it hasn't. Come to that, the sea floor must all be the same age - but it's not. I'm sorry that you see my disbelief as derision, but I just don't think that this works as a concept. Plus I must stop writing comments when I'm tired and cranky. [[User:Darkmind1970|Darkmind1970]] 11:55, 15 January 2008 (EST)
::::::::: Baumgardner's work is supported by some other scientists.
::::::::: Your second sentence is derisory nonsense.
::::::::: Yes, Baumgardner's work is at variance with ''mainstream'' though. So what? Are you saying that only the majority can be correct?
::::::::: You are judging his model according to how well it fits with your idea—and that is not a valid argument. That's what your argument about the age of the sea floor is.
::::::::: [[User:Philip J. Rayment|Philip J. Rayment]] 17:55, 15 January 2008 (EST)

:::::::::: Ok. Please name and cite these scientists that support Baumgardner's work, because so far, after some digging around, I myself cannot find any. It could be that I'm looking in the wrong places.
:::::::::: As for my second sentence, which you seem to find so offensive, I stand by it. Rapid subduction does go against a large number of sciences. We are talking about continents splitting apart in a very short amount of time - I think that you mentioned a year in one of your posts above. ''Italic text''A year.''Italic text'' That is a very small amount of time given the fact that at the moment I think that fingernails grow faster than some some continents are moving. As for vulcanology - which I note that you have not adressed in your post above - I will state this again: BaumGardner's theory does NOT explain the existence of the Pacific hotspot and the chain of evidence in the form of islands, atolls and seamounts that it has left. These could only have formed over millions of years - not a year. It's just not possible. Before you ask about how I know this, my speciality as an amateur geologist is vulcanology (partly because my wife was brought up near Mount Hood in Oregon) which fascinates me. Palaeontology - flood geology essentially demands that all that we know about palaeolithic and neolithic culture is flat-out wrong. All of this comes under geology.
:::::::::: I am not saying that only the mainstream can be correct. I am saying that logic dictates that if something is correct then the evidence to prove that it is correct correlates with other evidence. The mainstream does not connect with flood geology. There is no other evidence, anywhere, that links with it to provide a coherent whole. The dating process for gauging the ages of deposits, fossils and rocks has stood the test of time. It works. Flood geology does not provide links to the mainstream, it stands totally outside it and also does not provide any evidence. It therefore does not fit in.
:::::::::: I fail to see your last point. The age of the sea bed varies from place to place. We know its age based on the amount of sedimentation and the existence of the magnetic stipes that show magnetic field reversals. The closer you get to the mid-Atlantic ridge, the younger the rocks. The further away the older. That is not my idea - that is the evidence. [[User:Darkmind1970|Darkmind1970]] 19:05, 15 January 2008 (EST)
::::::::::: How much effort should I spend explaining an idea to you that you criticise before understanding it? Shouldn't you have the responsibility of finding out about the idea first? Nevertheless, I'll try to briefly answer your points, but after that you really should spend some time and effort yourself acquainting yourself with the view you so readily criticise—from the people who believe it, not their opponents, by the way. An excellent resource is [http://www.creationontheweb.com here].
::::::::::: The scientists (yes, scientists) who support Baumgardner are other young-Earth creation scientists.
::::::::::: The problem with your second sentence was the comprehensiveness of it: "everything ... have (sic) to be massively wrong". This is you speaking from your ignorance. Flood geology accepts much of what geology, vulcanology, plate tectonics, hydrogeology, and palaeontology has taught us. Sure, it doesn't accept ''everything'' that experts in those fields believe, but it accepts a fair bit. In fact, some (if not all) of those fields were started by creationists!
::::::::::: "''That is a very small amount of time given the fact that at the moment I think that fingernails grow faster than some some continents are moving''": But what does ''present'' rates have to do with it? See, this is one of the differences. Hutton introduced the principle that the Earth has been shaped by processes we see happening ''today'' ("uniformitarianism"). In doing so, he declared the previous view, catastrophism, to be wrong. This was an axiom, not a deduction from the evidence. Since then, geologists have been forced to return somewhat to catastrophism. Most haven't returned to the point of accepting a world-wide flood, but the point is that what you believe about much of geology depends on your starting position, such as uniformitarianism or catastrophism. Uniformitarianism would say that you use present-day movements to explain the positions of continents. Flood geology (a form of catastrophism) would say that you ''don't'' use present-day movements to explain them. But both positions are starting premises, or assumptions, not facts. You are arguing that Flood Geology, based on a presumption of catastrophism, is wrong because it doesn't fit with ''your'' presumption of uniformitarianism. That's not to say that either view is equally valid. Certainly one can test both views to see which is more consistent with the evidence, but that's what needs to be done: comparing the views to the evidence, not to a particular starting presumption.
::::::::::: No, I didn't directly address the vulcanology point, but then you haven't actually explained how it doesn't fit, simply declaring it to be so. As for the timescale, more on that below.
::::::::::: "''I am saying that logic dictates that if something is correct then the evidence to prove that it is correct correlates with other evidence. The mainstream does not connect with flood geology.''": So what are you comparing it to? evidence, or mainstream views? The point is that you seem to be saying that mainstream views are the same thing as the evidence. That's a non-sequitur. Sure, compare his views to the evidence, but not to whether it fits with mainstream views.
::::::::::: "''There is no other evidence, anywhere, that links with it to provide a coherent whole.''": Incorrect. What you mean is that there is no other evidence ''that you know of'', but as you have already shown that you don't have much of a clue about the creation model, that's not saying much.
::::::::::: "''The dating process for gauging the ages of deposits, fossils and rocks has stood the test of time. It works.''": No it hadn't and no it doesn't. The radiodating methods are based on unprovable assumptions, cannot be calibrated against artifacts of known age (for the most part) and have often been shown to be incorrect and/or inconsistent.
::::::::::: As far as the age of the seabed is concerned, you are again judging Flood geology by how well it fits with uniformitarianism. The amount of sediment is quite consistent with a short time frame if you accept a global flood. Such a flood would obviously deposit large amounts of sediment in a short time. I'd agree that the rocks closer to the mid-Atlantic ridge are younger than those further away, but the question is how much younger. I'd say months younger, not hundreds of thousands of years. You haven't offered any evidence of your claim. That is, you mentioned magnetic stripes showing reversals, but didn't explain how this shows the ages you claim. Were you aware (I'm sure that you are not) that a creationary scientist made a prediction on the basis of the creation model (yes, the creationary model has predictive value) that we would find fossil evidence of magnetic reversals with a timescale in the order of days or weeks? And did you know that non-creationary geologists subsequently found fossil evidence of magnetic reversals with a timescale of weeks?
::::::::::: Okay, that wasn't so brief, but how about you spend some effort studying the creation model before attempting to refute it any further? Good idea?
::::::::::: [[User:Philip J. Rayment|Philip J. Rayment]] 20:02, 15 January 2008 (EST)
I'm not sure what to say about this, although I do know what it's like to start typing what you think is a short answer and then it turns out to be a long one! I have looked again at a few creationist websites, like Answers In Genesis, in an effort to understand such thinking. I do not think that it's possible for us to come to an understanding on this, as I find these sites to be... well, unscientific. I know, I know, you find their answers compelling. I do not.

Radiometic dating. I have never seen any doubts about this. The few problems that I have seen have been in the order of a few years here and there. But as this is seen as a reliable form of dating by the vast majority of authorities, such as the Benfield Hazard Research Centre (which I have regular access to), please tell me why it is seen as being suspect by creationists.

Vulcanology. Apologies for not explaining this further, as this is a passion of mine. The chain of seamounts that stretch backwards from Hawaii are significant because of the length of time that it takes to build a sea volcano. If you look at Hawaii itself and its size then you begin to see the size of the problem. Hawaii - as measured from the sea floor to the tip of its volcanic peaks, is the highest mountain on earth. It's bigger than Everest (or, if there are any K2 fans lurking here, K2). The problem with undersea volcanoes is that they take time to build - magma that erupts underwater tends to form what is called pillow lava. It oozes out, it flows downhill and it builds up, layer on layer. The Hawaiian hotspot tends to be, well, highly runny, so it builds shield volcanoes - as they resemble old-fashioned shields laid flat on the ground. The Hawaiian hotspot is currently driving not just the current ongoing eruption on Kiluaea, but is also building the next island in the chain, whose name escapes me for the moment. It hasn't reached the surface of the sea yet, but it's there and will poke its snout about the surface of the sea in a few hundred years. Now if you look at a map of the Hawaiian Islands, then you'll see that they tend to diminish in size as you go look at them from southeast to north west. This is because as each island moves away from the hotspot, driven by plate tectonics, then two things start to impact it. It can no longer be added to with fresh lava, so it starts to erode. And it starts to sink slightly, as the sheer pressure of rock drags it down. The older the island, the more eroded and the more low-lying it is, until in the end you have atolls, like Midway, where the coral starts to grow on the lip of the submerged rim of the old, long-dead volcano. Beyond that you have seamounts, great volcanic fingers of rock, the remnants of volcanoes in the chain that have long since vanished under the waves. Everyone of these volcanoes, active, dormant and long-extinct, takes time to build. Kilauea has been erupting since 1983, and it's still going. My point here is that rapid subduction fails to explain these seamounts and fails to explain Hawaii. If the flood took a year, or months, then this would simply not have been enough time to build these volcanoes. The ocean floor would have been moving too fast over the seamount to form more than lava domes or very small hills - not a chain of mountains that, if you drained the water in the Pacific away, would be the highest in the world. And let's not forget that these volcanoes start to form at the bottom of the ocean, under a vast amount of pressure - they cannot grow quickly.

Oh and by the way, why do you dismiss all mainstream evidence?

I think this was supposed to be a shortish response - obviously not! [[User:Darkmind1970|Darkmind1970]] 19:52, 18 January 2008 (EST)

: Why (in what way) do you find the articles on creationist web-sites to be unscientific? Admittedly many of the articles are written as layman articles, not scientific papers, but apart from that...?
: If you've never seen doubts about radiometric dating, it makes me wonder just how much you have looked at creationist web-sites. There's plenty there. YECs of course have a problem with it because it contradicts the biblical account, but they have also produced a fair bit of argument and evidence to show that it has problems. Most scientists only see radiometric dating as reliable when it gives them dates that they concur with. Have a look at the history of dating [[Mungo Man]] for an example where there were not happy with the dates. (What that article doesn't highlight is that one team went back and redated the fossil because they didn't agree with the date that the other team got.) There's also this comment from an archaeologist (quoted from [http://www.creationontheweb.com/content/view/5026/ here]):
{{QuoteBox|If a C14 date supports our theories, we put it in the main text. If it does not entirely contradict them, we put it in a footnote. And if it is completely ‘out of date’, we just drop it.}}
: Okay, I understand your vulcanology argument much better now, but it seems to rely very much on the rates that things have been observed happening. Specifically, you have eruptions occurring every ''x'' years (or decades) adding ''y'' amount of material. Couldn't you imagine a scenario where the eruptions were much larger and more frequent building the islands in a shorter time? And it doesn't all have to be in the year of the flood. As you say, it is still going on, so we have 4,500 years to work with, not just one year. I don't know enough about it to give more of an answer to that, but I've seen many other examples of processes that supposedly took a long amount of time being shown to not need that time. Sedimentary layers were supposed to form at the rate of one a year, and in places there are hundreds of thousands of such layers, meaning that they must have taken hundreds of thousands of years to form. Yet the explosion of Mt. St. Helens saw hundreds of layers deposited ''in one day'', blowing that theory out of the water.
: I don't reject all mainstream evidence. Creationists simply have a different ''explanation'' for the evidence than evolutionists have. It's all the same evidence.
: [[User:Philip J. Rayment|Philip J. Rayment]] 21:09, 18 January 2008 (EST)

::I'm afraid that vulcanology doesn't work that way. The problem we're dealing with here is one that it is very hard for people to grasp - the sheer scale of geological time. Humans, by the scale of our paltry lifetimes, tend to think that 10 years or 50 years or 100 years are quite long periods of time. Volcanoes - and the world that powers them - tend to think in terms of thousands of years. There is no potential scenario that I can think of that can take into account the seamount-island chain in terms of YEC thinking. The powerhouse for a volcano is its magma chamber. The bigger it is, the larger the eruption, or at least the larger the potential eruption. To erupt the amount of material that makes up the Pacific seamount-atoll-island chain is vast. That either requires a vast magma chamber - bigger than anything that has ever been discovered so far, or a long-period series of eruptions. Let's look at the large magma chamber option. The problem here is that once a magma chamber empties due to a huge eruption, it then leaves a hole, into which the surrounding rock collapses, forming a void, or to give it it's right name, a caldera. The largest of these have been named supervolcanoes, and there are three of these in the US - Yellowstone, Long Valley and Valdez.
::But the Pacific hotspot has left a series of islands, not caldera, so this points to a more gradual series of building events, not a catastrophic series of limited eruptions. The creation of an island like Hawaii - the ones that preceded it - is not easy. Underwater volcanoes exist under conditions of extreme pressure. Don't forget that Hawaii is bigger than Everest. That's a huge amount of material, and requires thousands of years of eruptions - and that's just at the end of the current chain. There are hundreds of other volcanic edifices in Hawaii's wake, making the path of the hotspot. For each one to reach the surface requires again a huge amount of material. And even then, reaching the surface is just the start of the battle to build an island. When a vent approaches the surface of the sea then it can start oparting under conditions of low water pressure - and thus blowing material to the surface. Magma tends to fragment at this point as it cools, forming ashes or scoiria - small fragments. Unfortunately this stuff can be washed away by the sea very easily - look up what happened to the early versions of the isle of Surtsey off Iceland, or a seamount that broached the surface off the coast of Sicily in 1831, and which was promptly claimed by the UK, France, Italy, and Spain, before it was eroded back under the sea in 1832 when the eruption stopped. You need lots of liquid lava to cement everything in place, and again this takes time. Hawaii has made it, obviously. Again, this took time.
::As for your comment about sedimentary layers, I'm afraid that claiming that the 1980 Mount St Helens eruption blows the length of time out of the water is a bit premature. Every eruption of a volcano results in the venting of ash - which is finely pulverised magma. Every eruption is from magma that tends to be slightly different from the last. We can tell this by the chemical composition of the ash. Examining the layers around Mount St Helens show lots and lots of layers - but all are from the same magma source, created at the same time, and with the same chemical signature. Worse still, these layers tend to be from events like pyroclastic flows, which are very common to volcanoes. Pompeii and Herculaneum were hit by these things, with the latter also being hit by lahars, or hot mud flows. Again, these can occur again and again in one eruption event.
::By the way I have a question - why is it that the northern and southern hemispheres are scarred by valleys that were scarred by glaciers and not water?
::Another short post! You're right, these things can just suck you in. [[User:Darkmind1970|Darkmind1970]] 18:31, 21 January 2008 (EST)
::: I don't know much about vulcanology, so can't respond too specifically, but just looking at your argument, much of it amounts to "it would take an awful lot of material, and that would take a lot of time". You back up your "awful lot of material" claim fairly well, and I accept that, but the "lot of time" argument is then simply tacked on at the end as self-evident. And you start off by presuming your point of view, that there is such a thing as vast amounts of geological time.
::: Flood geology has the oceans deepening near the end of the Flood. Perhaps the Hawaiian volcanoes started erupting before the ocean was as deep as now and therefore under less pressure? You say that you can't imagine a scenario, but perhaps that's because you can't look at it from a young-Earth perspective, being largely ignorant of that.
::: I've heard similar post-hoc explanations of the Mt. St. Helens layers before, but the point is that prior to Mt. St. Helens, mainstream geologists didn't recognise that such multiple layers can form quickly, and this evidence was a surprise to them. And the point of that is that I've ''often'' (this was but one example) seen evidence of things that supposedly take a long time can occur over a much shorter time.
::: Why is it that there are valleys that were scarred by glaciers and not water? Because there was lots of ice! Your point?
::: [[User:Philip J. Rayment|Philip J. Rayment]] 03:04, 22 January 2008 (EST)

:::: My apologies, I must stop tacking thoughts onto the end of long posts without explaining them. My point was, how does flood geology explain the highly distinctive U-shaped valleys that are present in the northern and southern hemispheres, which are the clear result of long-term glaciation? When a valley full of water freezes, it doesn't really scar the sides that much. When a valley is filled with a glacier that's something very different - and the results, in terms of the shape of the valley afterwards, are also very different. How does flood geology address the existence of glaciers?
:::: I still don't understand why there is this reluctance to accept the principle of vast amounts of time when it comes to erosion and other issues. I have looked into the creationist arguments against radiometric dating, and I find them deeply problematic. Gentry's arguments have been refuted by Wakefield. There is also a YEC argument about what is called the 'helium problem'. These too have been refuted (B.C Shizgal & G.C. Arkos, 1996). Can I also add that radiometric dating has evolved steadily over the years, becoming far more refined and accurate as time goes by.
:::: Your comment on the depths of the ocean increasing at the end of the flood really confused me. How is that possible? Ocean depths tend to increase the further away you get from mid-ocean ridges, as gravity drags things down as a result of pressure - which is the result of time again!. As for the seafloor magnetic stripes, yes some of these are quite short, but others are very wide. The Earth's magnetic field is hard to understand.
:::: I think that we are going to have to agree to disagree, because to me YEC geology makes no sense when I look at the evidence that I have seen. I stand by the mainstream view. Sorry. [[User:Darkmind1970|Darkmind1970]] 19:17, 23 January 2008 (EST)
::::: Flood geology explains the glacial valleys as being the result of glaciers! The difference, to a fair extent, would be simply the timescale. As I indicated above, many people have been led to believe that certain things ''require'' vast amounts of time, but in many cases, it has been shown that the required time is much less. Glacier movement rates are high enough to account for the lower ends of glaciers being at the upper ends within the last few thousand years, I believe. Furthermore, creationists say that only the biblical flood account can adequately explain the (one) ice age. Lower temperatures world-wide would not produce the ice sheets of the ice age, as there would be reduced evaporation and thus reduced precipitation. Higher temperatures world-wide would increase evaporation and precipitation, but it would be too warm for the ice sheets to develop. However, a cool Earth with warm oceans following the flood would have high evaporation and therefore precipitation, but ice sheets would form on the cooler land masses.
::::: You say that gravity drags things down as a result of pressure, and that this takes time, but of course it depends both on time ''and the rate'' of drag. In many such cases creationists will agree with non-creationists (or the other way around) on ''what'' happened, but not on ''how fast'' it happened.
::::: I suggest that YEC geology makes no sense to you because you simply have very little idea of it. If you are interested in learning more, I suggest that you read some of the geology papers published in the [http://www.creationontheweb.com/content/view/2011/ ''Journal of Creation'']. You could also check out [http://www.biblicalgeology.net/ this]. But of course you would need to read more than just a paper or two to get a good understanding.
::::: [[User:Philip J. Rayment|Philip J. Rayment]] 22:01, 23 January 2008 (EST)
::::::No, I do have a very clear idea of what YEC geology is like, because I have actually done some research on it. Thanks for your comments, which have helped me to take a good hard look at it, and pointed me to some interesting aspects of it that I hadn't seen before. It still makes no logical sense in terms of science. I apologise for these comments, but this is what I feel about this.
::::::Everything that I have read, seen and understood so far leads me to believe that flood geology seems to be deeply flawed and based upon one main premise - YEC geology believes in an early creation and the flood. And that's it.
::::::But every other piece of evidence that contradicts this worldview, this conception, is immediately dismissed by YEC believers. Geology points to a world that is billions of years older? No, there has to be a mistake with radiometric dating. Plate tectonics points to billions of years of continental drift? No, it can all be explained with rapid subduction, with anomalies like the Pacific Hotspot, the fact that such rapid subduction would have - by Baumgardners own admission - have boiled the oceans being explained away at some future time.
::::::Erosion? The Flood. Sedimentation? The flood. The discovery of fossils? Animals that didn't make it onto the ark.
::::::It's like... YEC people start off with a fixed idea and then they either ignore those facts that contradict their own ideas, or they try to bend those facts to fit their own world view. That's not science. It's manipulating reality to fit their own view. I stand by the mainstream not out of rigidity, not out of fixation, but because it fits the facts. Like I said, let's agree to disagree. [[User:Darkmind1970|Darkmind1970]] 18:54, 24 January 2008 (EST)
::::::: You clearly didn't have good idea of YEC views to start with, and although it's just as clear that you have expanded your knowledge of that considerably, I find it too hard to believe that in this short time you've really got a good understanding of it.
::::::: I don't know what you mean by "every other" piece of evidence contradicting this worldview (other than ''what'', specifically?), but there are many bits of evidence that are more consistent with the creationary worldview than the evolutionary worldview, and your simplistic and dismissive attitude does you no credit. For example, creationists do not just dismiss radiometric dating by "there has to be a mistake"; they actually do scientific research to test their ideas, and produce much evidence in support of their claims.
::::::: Creationists willingly acknowledge that their views are based on the Bible, but also point out that atheists base their views on their belief in no god, and that is their starting assumption. So if creation is not science for that reason, then neither is evolution.
::::::: [[User:Philip J. Rayment|Philip J. Rayment]] 01:06, 25 January 2008 (EST)

::::The age of the Erath has been very well documented. According to the United States Geological Survey: "Ancient rocks exceeding 3.5 billion years in age are found on all of Earth's continents. The oldest rocks on Earth found so far are the Acasta Gneisses in northwestern Canada near Great Slave Lake (4.03 Ga) and the Isua Supracrustal rocks in West Greenland (3.7 to 3.8 Ga), but well-studied rocks nearly as old are also found in the Minnesota River Valley and northern Michigan (3.5-3.7 billion years), in Swaziland (3.4-3.5 billion years), and in Western Australia (3.4-3.6 billion years)." Different studies have yielded consistent dates. But I have not seen any scientific evidence from any creationist source that addresses these dates. Instead they state that the Earth's age is measured in thousands of years, not in billions of years. As I said above, the most notable argument criticising radiometric data was used by Gentry - whose criticisms were addressed by Wakefield. And you seem to make a key logical fallacy. Creation contradicts science. Evolution fits in with science. Equating one with the other doesn't work. My mother for example believes in God, but also believes in evolution - and she studied biology in Nottingham University.
::::You mention that observed geological processes might differ from past ones. Again, that doesn't fit in with what we know. How does flood geology fit with the effects of glaciation? How can the glaciers of the last ice age form under the flood geology model? We're talking about sheets of ice that were kilometers thick, creeping down over the hemispheres. These scarred the landscapes - hell, Scandinavia is still rebounding upwards thousands of years after the last ice age, because the ice sheet pressed down on the area for so long. Scotland's Highlands are barren because of the amount of soil that was stripped off them and taken south.
::::How does flood geology address the iridium found at the K-T Boundary? Or the mass extinction of the ammonites? Or the dates we get from analysing - by multiple independent sources - the different rock layers? Come to that, how does flood geology explain the fact that if rapid subduction did take place, this would also mean that there would be a corresponding massive uptick in earthquakes and volcanic activity? Mount Ararat is a volcano by the way. If the Ark landed there it would have contained a lot of dead people and animals quite rapidly. [[User:Darkmind1970|Darkmind1970]] 08:49, 29 January 2008 (EST)

::::: There is a logical circularity, and hidden assumptions, in using the earth to date the earth. But you omit them. [[Radiometric dating]] depends on assuming that decay rates have always been constant. But plainly that is false.--[[User:Aschlafly|Aschlafly]] 09:03, 29 January 2008 (EST)

:::::: The argument from radiometric dates is flawed for another reason. It assumes that the methodology of radiometric dating is sound. And it is anything but sound. It assumes that the earth is already old, and is therefore circular in its reasoning. It also assumes that the starting composition of rocks is establishable, and that has already been falsified.
:::::: Austin and colleagues, in 1996, submitted samples of dacite from the [[Mount St. Helens]] lava dome to Geochron Laboratories, Inc. for dating. Now bear in mind that Mount St. Helens had erupted a scant ten years earlier. Geochron gave back five different dates for those rocks--dates that varied above and beyond the rated tolerances for those dates--dates that varied from half a million years to two million eight hundred thousand years.
:::::: If a hospital laboratory had made a mistake like that, it would be shut down for its pains. As it is, Geochron later abandoned the [[potassium]]-[[argon]] dating method that had produced the wildly preposterous dates.
:::::: Dr. Austin published his findings in the ''Creation Ex Nihilo Technical Journal''. But more than that, he and about a dozen of his colleagues formed Project RATE--for '''R'''adioisotopes and the '''A'''ge of '''T'''he '''E'''arth. Those men have developed findings that ought to shock everyone who reads them--findings that destroy all of the uniformitarian assumptions about how old we think rocks are.
:::::: And--funny that someone here should cite the US Geological Survey. By their own admission, the "youngest" rock ever dates had an apparent age of 700,000 years. ''They couldn't reliably date the eruption of [[Mount Vesuvius]] and the destruction of [[Pompeii]]'' did we not have the diary of [[Pliny the Younger]] to work with.--[[User:TerryH|TerryH]][[User talk:TerryH|Talk]] 09:27, 29 January 2008 (EST)

::::::: [[Circular reasoning]], like that used on the [[radiometric dating]], does fool a lot of people. I honestly think some have trouble seeing the defect in [[circular reasoning]]. Of course, others see the flaw but persist anyway, knowing that others will be fooled by it.--[[User:Aschlafly|Aschlafly]] 10:03, 29 January 2008 (EST)

::::::: For more on [[radiometric dating]], see that article. Changed rates of decay are only one of the problems.
::::::: There's been plenty of examples produced to show that radiometric dating is inconsistent or plain wrong. So even if you show that it often ''is'' consistent, the fact that it's often ''not'' consistent shows that it is not reliable.
::::::: "''But I have not seen any scientific evidence from any creationist source that addresses these dates. Instead they state that the Earth's age is measured in thousands of years, not in billions of years.''": I'm not sure off the top of my head if creationists have addressed ''the particular dates you quote'', but they have done more than "state" the age of the Earth; they have ''addressed'' the issue of dating generally.
::::::: "''And you seem to make a key logical fallacy.''": Where?
::::::: "''Creation contradicts science. Evolution fits in with science.''": Because you say so? Bals assertion does not make it so, and clearly creationists disagree with those assertions.
::::::: "''Equating one with the other doesn't work. My mother for example believes in God, but also believes in evolution - and she studied biology in Nottingham University.''": How much did she study the Bible? Evolution ''does not'' fit with the Bible. You can invent any "god" you want, but evolution does not fit with the God of the Bible. For example, the Bible says that God created everything ''in six days'': That is simply contrary to evolution. Both cannot be true.
:::::::"''You mention that observed geological processes might differ from past ones. Again, that doesn't fit in with what we know.''": Er, yes it does. There are no observed geological processes producing sedimentary or lava fields hundreds and thousands of square kilometres in extent.
:::::::"''How can the glaciers of the last ice age form under the flood geology model?''": I've already answered that earlier in this page.
::::::: [[User:Philip J. Rayment|Philip J. Rayment]] 21:57, 29 January 2008 (EST)

PJR - you state "...the Bible says that God created everything ''in six days'': That is simply contrary to evolution. Both cannot be true." Indeed so - both cannot be true. But attempting to fit the evidence to the theory that the Earth was created in six days is clearly an exercise in [[circular reasoning]] - 'The Earth took six days to form (or 6000 years), therefore we must develop theories to explain that theory'.

Look at the two arguments. One approach attempts to explain how everything came about, fitting the theories to a specific (and minority) interpretation of a particular book. The other approach continuously re-evaluates its estimates over hundreds of years, and new evidence changes the results. There was no book that said that the Earth was created 6 billion years ago. Were scientists to tell us tomorrow that the Earth is in fact ten billion years old, or two billion years old, no-one would be be much surprised. Yet no matter what evidence is presented to holders of the Creationist viewpoint, the age of the Earth remains the same.

Doesn't that strike you as odd? Doesn't that strike you as the ultimate example of [[circular reasoning]]?. [[User:Reasonableperson|Reasonableperson]] 23:12, 29 January 2008 (EST)

:That is not circular reasoning. Circular reasoning would go like this:
:# The Bible says that the world is 6,000 years old.
:# The evidence (e.g. rock layers) is explained ''on that basis''.
:# The explanation is offered as proof that the Bible is correct.
: Just the first two points by themselves (i.e. your 'The Earth took six days to form (or 6000 years), therefore we must develop theories to explain that theory') is not circular reasoning, and there's nothing wrong with the first two points. It's only when you go to the third point that you have a circle, and that's where the argument becomes invalid.
: But creationists don't do that. They do argue that the evidence ''fits better'' with a 6,000-year model, but they don't offer the explanation as proof of the presumption.
: Evolutionists, on the other hand, ''do'' use this circular reasoning:
:# The biblical history is wrong, so there was no global flood, for example.
:# Dating methods are developed ''on this basis'' (e.g. assuming no global flood).
:# The dates derived by this method are used as proof that there was no global flood (e.g. civilisations are older than the supposed date of the Flood).
: "''One approach attempts to explain how everything came about, fitting the theories to a specific (and minority) interpretation of a particular book.''": This is (a) misleading, and (b) misrepresenting what creationists claim. It's misleading because the "interpretation" is (i) the way it's been understood by almost every reader until prior to about 200 years ago (and many readers within the last 200 years), and (ii) the way that the experts in Hebrew and the Old Testament say that it was meant to be understood. It's misrepresenting what creationists claim because they claim it to be not just "a particular book", but the infallible revelation of the omniscient God. So what is wrong with trying to see how the evidence fits with what is (supposed to be) ''accurate history''? Answer: There's nothing wrong with that. The only valid question is whether or not it ''is'' accurate history, but you're not (directly) questioning that. Rather, you're trying to avoid that question by questioning the veracity of the source.
: "''The other approach continuously re-evaluates its estimates over hundreds of years, and new evidence changes the results.''": Which might tend to suggest that they really can't be certain they've yet got it right, which means that they can't be certain that the biblical account is wrong.
: "''Were scientists to tell us tomorrow that the Earth is in fact ten billion years old, or two billion years old, no-one would be be much surprised.''": Er, I think a lot of people would be surprised, actually.
: "''There was no book that said that the Earth was created 6 billion years ago.''": Being pedantic, and ignoring that the age is actually believed to be 4.5 billion years, lots of books ''do'' say that. But your point is that the age is not an underlying presumption. True, but instead there is the underlying presumption ''that the cause was naturalistic'', rather than it being created. That makes the secular view no better than the biblical view.
: "''Yet no matter what evidence is presented to holders of the Creationist viewpoint, the age of the Earth remains the same.''": You say that as though there is something wrong with that. But if they are correct, ''there is nothing wrong with that''! So your argument is circular, because ''it presumes what you are trying to prove'': that the Bible and therefore the creationists are wrong.
: "''... no matter what evidence is presented ...''": The problem is not the evidence, but the explanation of the evidence. A rock is evidence. The isotope ratios are evidence. A date is not evidence, but part of the explanation of the evidence.
: "''Doesn't that strike you as odd? Doesn't that strike you as the ultimate example of circular reasoning?''": No, because you have not demonstrated a circle.
: [[User:Philip J. Rayment|Philip J. Rayment]] 01:23, 30 January 2008 (EST)

Philip I believe your example is a bit misleading. For example
: Evolutionists, on the other hand, ''do'' use this circular reasoning:
:# The biblical history is wrong, so there was no global flood, for example.
:# Dating methods are developed ''on this basis'' (e.g. assuming no global flood).
:# The dates derived by this method are used as proof that there was no global flood (e.g. civilizations are older than the supposed date of the Flood).
Your first line about the bible, how would a scientist in feudal china (who had not heard of Christianity) make a conclusion that the history of the bible is wrong? This is the difference, to use the scientific method correctly you must eliminate as much of a world view as possible so that predispositions you would assume due to your world view would not have as much of an impact on your studies. That is one reason why it was not until 200 years or so that things began to change in the scientific community, because scientists at that time were using the world view offered to them through their religious upbringing. This of course causes issues when you are collaborating with scientists with different world views hence the reason why science is based on the burden of proof not the lack of. This is where your analogy is misleading, you started by saying that the bible said (the hypothesis) then performed the experiment (Except you commented "on that basis", assuming an insertion of your personal world view) then made your conclusion to support your hypothesis. The scientist does not make the hypothesis of the biblical history is wrong, their hypothesis is based on observation first (I see that the strata here that is 150 feet deep is the same over there at 150 feet deep) then they experiment (I dig somewhere else at 150 feet deep) then they draw their conclusions. Just to explain the differences if they are not so clear, the scientist assumes nothing at first, just observes, then hypothesis, then experiments, then concludes. Your analogy is based on the assumption that the scientist has a predisposition to disprove the bible, which is far from the truth since the scientific method ignores religion. Ignoring religion is not the same as disproving it.
The primary difference is that where the bible literalist will try to equate their observations to the bible the scientist trys to equate their hypothesis to their observations. As such the scientist’s observations can not be circular since they begin with nothing but their worldview (which by use of the scientific method is limited) whereas the observations of the bible literalist can be circular since with their base of equating their observations with the bible, they always interpret the data with a biblical view. As such they tend to be circular. For a logical example try this,
#Who created the universe?
Bible literalist: God, because the bible says god created it.
Scientist: We do not know who created it but evidence supports the conjecture of how it developed.
Do you see the logic? The literalist, because of the biblical preconceived notion can only apply circular reasoning whereas the scientist can not since they have no preconceived notion. All they can offer is what conjectures they have based on observations.
#How did man come to be?
Bible literalist: God created man in his image as stated in the bible.
Scientist: We conjecture that man evolved through a series of steps to its current form by slight mutation as observed in other life forms as well as supported in the fossil record.
Notice how the bible literalist would provide a definitive answer whereas the scientist would not, a conjecture is not an absolute. This again is a prime example as to why the scientist (who uses the scientific method) can not employ circular reasoning since they start with nothing in terms of worldview (as limited by the scientific method) and the bible literalist must equate all observations to the bible.--[[User:Able806|Able806]] 16:10, 30 January 2008 (EST)
:Your point of what a scientist in feudal China would conclude would have some validity if there actually were scientists in feudal China who came to the conclusion that the world was millions of years old. But there weren't, so the example proves nothing.

:Much of the rest of your argument presumes that evolutionary scientists are as objective as possible and don't let their ideas intrude into their science, whilst creationary scientists are not so rigorous. But this is merely painting a rosy picture of evolutionary scientists that doesn't match reality.
:In reality, evolutionary scientists are every bit as influenced by their worldview as creationary scientists. Evolutionary scientists work on the principle that matter is all there is (i.e materialism). This is not an ''observation'', but an ''assumption''. Take for example this quote from Richard Lewontin:
{{QuoteBox|We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism. It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counter-intuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is an absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door.}}
:Also, when talking about "the burden of proof", keep in mind that we are not talking about empirical science so much as ''history''. We're not talking about laboratory experiments to see if we can tranform a reptile into a bird, but about whether this event actually happened millions of years ago. Even if we found that we ''could'' transform a reptile into a bird, it does not logically follow that it necessarily happened millions of years ago. That is a fact (or fallacy) of ''history'', not empirical science.
:And the views of people such as Gould and Michael Ruse are that evolution was the result of ''rejecting'' the biblical account. It wasn't a dispassionate look at the evidence, but was based on a worldview that was hostile to God. Yes, the ''scientific method'' ignores religion, but the scientists practicing it very often don't.
:As I tried to explain, using an argument based on an assumption to claim that the assumption is thereby proved is a circular argument. Simply making an argument within the framework of a particular worldview is not a circular argument. Again, your "who created the universe" argument is a conclusion based on the Bible (or not), but is not a "circular argument"—''there is no circle''!
: Your "how did man come to be" example is also fallacious. First, since when is it wrong to be certain of one's conclusions? You seem pretty certain that what you are saying is correct, yet criticise "Bible literalists" (an incorrect term anyway) for being sure of their views! Secondly, almost every scientist will insist that the evolutionary story is definitely correct. They will be prepared to accept that some of the details could be changed, but not the basic premise. (Creationists will also accept that some of the details could be changed.)
: So in summary, your idealistic word picture of unbiased objective evolutionary scientists vs. biased, unobjective creationists is nothing but a fantasy.
: [[User:Philip J. Rayment|Philip J. Rayment]] 01:25, 31 January 2008 (EST)

Philip, my example about feudal Chinese scientists is about world view not if the world was millions or billions of years old. I was showing how the relationship of scientific research is not limited by personal world view. Let’s change my analogy a bit, to show how a preconceived notion can cause a huge difference in conclusions. A geologist walks through the desert and happens upon several pillars with large stones sitting on them tens of feet in the air. Wondering how these stones happen to come to rest upon the pillars the geologist measures the pillars, the base of the stones, looks at how the stones rest upon the pillars and checks the composition of the stones and compares them to the pillars. His research allows him to conjecture that the stones upon the pillars were of the same composition of the pillars and that the stones were actually formed due to the high wind in the desert eroding the pillars and that the stones were not placed upon the pillars at all. Now let us see how this scenario changes when the worldview is changed. A Native American comes across the same formation and wonders about how the stone came to rest upon the pillars. He looks at the pillars and stones and measures them. With the understanding of the Great Spirit he concludes that nothing could have placed the stones upon the pillars so they must have been formed by the Great Spirit upon the pillars. See the difference? Which one is testable?
 
As for my painting a rosy picture here is the difference, scientists in general are under much scrutiny for their work and conclusions. To report false information has drastic affects in the scientific community (such as losing positions, funding is cut from projects and a host of other issues that result from the scientist’s work being false). Evolutionary scientists, geologists, biologists, chemists and the like all fall under this. The exception would be the theologians since their work does not provide a medium to which it can be measured. In the case of creationary scientists it is their worldview that defines them “creationary” is not just a term to describe the science that they are studying it is what they are trying to equate their discoveries with.
 
As for materialism, I would agree that evolutionary scientists and primordial chemists work on the principle that matter is all there is. If they did not then their research would be convoluted with unlimited possibilities preventing them from pinpointing anything. Take for example the differences between astronomy and astrology. Astronomy is based on a materialist view of the universe where astrology is based on a spiritual view, which is considered a science? But that is not what this argument is about; it is about the worldview of a creation scientist vs. the worldview of non-creation scientist.
 
The fact is there are a few scientists that do mix their worldview with their work, which happens to cause the scientific community to correct the work by rebuttal and refuting it. The creation scientist on the other hand fully allow their world view to influence their work, for example the world can not be billions of years old because the bible says so therefore all work that shows otherwise is suspect. The problem with this is that the matter of empirical data. To support much of what is claimed by creation scientists would mean that several basic principles of physics have changed over time, the issue is that these principles are not something that can be tested since most claims are based on one time events and current measurements of these factors show no conclusive change.
 
Your comment about burden of proof, whereas you are correct about talking about history and not empirical science conjectures can be made and supported by evidence to increase the probability of something occurring. For example a forensic scientist is not at the crime when it is committed but through the collection of data and evidence the scientist can offer a conjecture to limit the doubt of how something occurred. Evolutionary biology and paleontology are much like forensic science where it is based on reductionism, reducing the observations to such fine detail that conjectures can be formed. They would not be considered pure sciences (as in chemistry, physics but not biology) for all they can offer are conjectures with reasonable proof. So I do not disagree with you that they study history and therefore are not empirical sciences but I disagree with your assumption of lack of accuracy and precession.
 
I am glad you admit that the scientific method ignores religion, and I will agree that not all scientists do not (Dawkins for example) however that is why in actual research publications you do not find unsubstantiated claims about the scientist’s worldviews, to do so would be publication suicide.
 
I do find it interesting how you mention the views of Gould and Ruse, we saw this year the view of Watson and I must say it really had no affect on my understanding of DNA. This is the misconception, scientists’ personal views are one thing but the scientific community views are another. As for a hostile worldview to God, that is a matter of interpretation. For the most part Gould and Ruse could careless about God. You could consider this hostile but most would consider it apathetic.
 
The circular argument examples I listed above follow the logic of a circular argument. Let us evaluate
:For some proposition ''p'',
:''p'' implies ''q''
:suppose ''p''
:therefore, ''q''.
For example, here is an attempt to prove the earth is not billions of years old,
:Suppose the bible is true
:The bible says the world is not millions of years old
:Therefore the world is not millions of years old.
My example, Who created the universe?
:Suppose the bible is true
:The bible says that god created the universe
:Therefore god created the universe.
My other example: How did man come to be?
:Suppose the bible is true
:The bible says that god created man
:Therefore god created man.
Starting to see a pattern? The only difference is that the hypothesis and conclusions of creation scientists are based on 'p'' implies ''q'' which is the base for circular reasoning. Scientists do not have this base, they have nothing to equate 'p'' implies ''q'' therefore effectively preventing circular reasoning when the scientific method is used.
 
As for the issue of certainty, scientists can not say they are 100% certain of anything, to do so would imply they know every little detail of the study and therefore have evaluated all possibilities. This is impossibility since our techniques and technologies are always evolving to allow for finer degrees of understanding. For me to state that we are 100% certain of anything would be a lie. Yes, we have a very high degree of certainty that the basic premise of evolution is true; however we can never be 100% certain. My criticism of bible literalists (Darwinist is an incorrect term as well) is that be rejecting any evidence contrary to their belief they are by default implying that their view is 100% certain, that my friend is the difference.
"So in summary, your idealistic word picture of unbiased objective evolutionary scientists vs. biased, unobjective creationists is nothing but a fantasy." I am sorry but the logic and evidence says it is more truth than fantasy (athough there are exceptions).--[[User:Able806|Able806]] 12:44, 31 January 2008 (EST)

: "''my example about feudal Chinese scientists is about world view not if the world was millions or billions of years old. I was showing how the relationship of scientific research is not limited by personal world view''": I understand that, but what if Chinese scientists, not explicitly rejecting the biblical view (because, as you say, they didn't have the Bible) also came up with the idea that the world was only thousands of years old? My point is that the reason that European scientists came up with millions of years was because they rejected the biblical history. Chinese scientists, not rejecting biblical history, would not (in my opinion) come up with millions of years.
:"''Let’s change my analogy a bit, [big snip] Which one is testable? ''": Neither. Both are supposed to have happened in the unobserved past. Some details ''are'' testable, but this applies to both. The geologist can test rates of erosion to see if his story is consistent with that, but by the same token the Indian can test his idea that "nothing could have placed the stones upon the pillars" to see if he can, like a good scientist, disprove that statement.
:"''...scientists in general are under much scrutiny for their work and conclusions. To report false information has drastic affects...''": In theory, and in practice up to a point. But read [http://www.creationontheweb.com/content/view/5613/ this]. Your picture was rosier than reality.
:"''...theologians['] ... work does not provide a medium to which it can be measured''": Huh? The Bible is the standard that their work is measured by, so you are wrong.
:"''...the case of creationary scientists it is their worldview that defines them ...''": Just as evolutionists are defined by "naturalism". So what's the difference?
:"''I would agree that evolutionary scientists and primordial chemists work on the principle that matter is all there is.''": Then you agree that they are rejecting possible explanations ''a priori'', and therefore give up any claim to have considered all possibilities.
:"''If they did not then their research would be convoluted with unlimited possibilities preventing them from pinpointing anything.''": Not true. Accepting that there are more possibilities than just the material doesn't mean that ''anything'' is possible. That's a non-sequitur.
:"''Astronomy is based on a materialist view of the universe where astrology is based on a spiritual view, which is considered a science?''": Archaeology rejects the view that matter can explain all it's findings and is prepared to invoke the idea of an intelligent creator (for stone tools, etc.). Yet it is still considered a science. The difference is not material vs. spiritual, but evidence vs. no evidence.
:"''The fact is there are a few scientists that do mix their worldview with their work...''": No, they all do, to some extent. Part of a scientist's worldview is that he can trust his senses to make observations. All scientists "mix" this part of their worldview with their work, else they would not be scientists. Most also mix in their worldview that matter is all that they have to consider.
:"''... which happens to cause the scientific community to correct the work by rebuttal and refuting it.''": Unless they agree with it.
:"''The problem with this is that the matter of empirical data.''": That is a problem for both sides when discussing ''history'', which is what microbes-to-man evolution is.
:"''To support much of what is claimed by creation scientists would mean that several basic principles of physics have changed over time...''": Oh? The only proposals I can recall that basic principles of physics have changed have been by evolutionary scientists in talking about the first few moments after the Big Bang.
:"''...I disagree with your assumption of lack of accuracy and precession.''": As we are talking about accuracy, should I point out that the other word is "precision"? :-) Seriously, I can't remember talking about accuracy and precision, and a search of this page doesn't show those words being used except by you.
:"''...in actual research publications you do not find unsubstantiated claims about the scientist’s worldviews...''": Perhaps not, but just because they don't put their worldviews in as part of their argument doesn't mean that it doesn't underpin their thinking and arguments.
:"''...scientists’ personal views are one thing but the scientific community views are another...''": That doesn't really make sense. If we are talking about the "scientific community's" ''views'', then we are talking about the ''views'' of the majority of the individual scientists. Sure some views will differ from the majority, but others will ''be'' the "community's" views.
:"''For the most part Gould and Ruse could careless about God.''": True, but that is irrelevant to their views about what part religion had to play in the views of others such as Darwin.
:Your circular argument description is wrong. The logic you describe is valid logic, not circular reasoning. Here are two example of a logically-valid argument (from [http://www.creationontheweb.com/content/view/1860/ here]):
::1) All whales have backbones;
::2) Moby Dick is a whale;
::∴ Moby Dick has a backbone
:
::1) All dogs are reptiles;
::2) All reptiles have scales;
::∴ All dogs have scales.
: The second one has a false premise, and a false conclusion, but it is still a valid argument. Your examples are all of ''valid'' arguments, but for which you question the premise.
:A circular argument, by contrast, is of the form "P is true because Q is true, and Q is true because P is true."[http://www.christianlogic.com/articles/short_list_of_fallacies.htm]. To provide an example:
::Creation is not science, therefore creationists are not true scientists, therefore no true scientist supports creation, therefore creation is not science. See how the conclusion was the starting premise? This is a circular argument, because the conclusion assumes itself as the premise.
:But your examples are not following this form.
:"''My criticism of bible literalists ... is that be rejecting any evidence contrary to their belief ...''": This is a straw-man argument. Creationists have ''different explanations'' for the evidence; they don't ''reject'' the evidence.
:"''[by] rejecting any evidence contrary to their belief they are by default implying that their view is 100% certain''": Apart from the straw-man I've just mentioned, this is false. Rejecting an explanation does not mean that they are 100% certain that they are correct, and in any case the same argument can be used of evolutionists: By rejecting the creationary explanation "they are by default implying that their view is 100% certain"
:"''...that my friend is the difference...''": But there is no difference!
:[[User:Philip J. Rayment|Philip J. Rayment]] 09:16, 6 February 2008 (EST)

::I finally succumbed to one of the bugs that has been going around my wife's school a week ago, so I have been unable to respond to this until now. Apologies. I would like to suggest that schools install sheepdips by the main entrance to make the little buggers more hygenic.
:: Anyway - TerryH, your comments made me groan a great deal. The supposed problems with the age of the old lava dome at Mt St Helens is a very old chestnut that was exploded years ago. Let's start off with basic vulcanology - it is a massive mistake to think that dating a volcanic eruption depends on analysing the lava, as there are some problems with that. For one thing - what on earth makes you think that the lava that is erupting is formed then and there? Mt St Helens is erupting right now, it has been for the past 4 years. So far all its doing is pushing up lava that is identical to the lava of the 1980-1986 eruption. It's basically clearing its throat, before fresher lava comes up (sorry for the metaphor, but it works). That lava was not formed in 1980. It's been down there for a while. That's the way that it works - magma collects in the main magma chamber as it seeps up from far below. Mt St Helens is a part of the Cascades subduction zone - the magma there is the light, relatively frothy rock that was scraped off the ocean crust as it descended below the North American Plate a very long time ago - as much as 500,000 to 1 million years ago. It rose into the magma chamber, pooled there, and was finally erupted. Saying that lava seems to be old for an eruption that happened 20 years ago is merely pointing out the way that vulcanology works - you're actually underlining the fact that this is an old world and that volcanic eruptions are, chemically speaking, not instant events! So thanks, TerryH, you just proved my point!
::As for the so-called problems with the K-AR method, there aren't any. Asking anyone to use the K-AR method to get the age of the 1980-86 eruption is like using Big Ben to measure how tall an ant is. The half-life of potassium-40 is rather long - 1,250 million years. Plus a few thousand years are not enough time for 40Ar to accumulate in a sample at high enough concentrations to be detected and assessed. As a result, the K-Ar method cannot be used to date samples that are much younger than 6,000 years old.
::As I said, this old chestnut has long been exploded. [[User:Darkmind1970|Darkmind1970]] 18:10, 6 February 2008 (EST)
:::Now let me get this straight: you're only ''now'' saying that the lava that appears at an eruption should still contain a great deal of daughter nuclide? That doesn't make a bit of sense to me. I think you're misrepresenting the science here, and I demand that you produce a citation that the rest of us can check out for a comment that I consider outrageous.--[[User:TerryH|TerryH]][[User talk:TerryH|Talk]] 19:01, 6 February 2008 (EST)

::: One of the main problems with Darkmind1970's post is that he's essentially explaining why radiometric dates can be wrong (because the rock material is older than when it was laid down), which is really a tacit admission, that you can't rely on radiometric dates, just as the creationists have been claiming for years! A second problem is that he essentially claims that you need to know how old an object is before you can use a dating method to see how old it is! Kinda defeats the purpose, I would think! Third, he fails to adequately explain ''why'' K-Ar dating cannot be used on young objects. If a few thousand years is insufficient to accumulate enough argon to detect, how come they detected it and were therefore able to supply a date? Surely his logic means that anything younger than 6,000 years would give an age of zero? But it didn't! His argument is self-defeating. If you date a sample at 2,800,000 years (which TerryH quoted above), according to Darkmind1970, it could be (a) 2,800,000 years old (i.e. the method works when used correctly), or (b) younger than 6,000 years (i.e. the method didn't work because it wasn't used correctly). So how do you decide which it is? If he is correct, then ''such dating methods cannot be used to demonstrate that items are more than 6,000 years old''! [[User:Philip J. Rayment|Philip J. Rayment]] 21:33, 6 February 2008 (EST)

::::Actually I'm saying nothing of the kind. What I am saying is that K-AR dating of relatively recent events will give you somewhat fuzzy data because it's hard to be date something that's a few tens of years old when the half-life of potassium-40 is 1,250 million years. There are other forms of radiometric dating that will give better result, by using elements that have a far shorter half-life. Using K-AR dating on relatively recent material is like using a 12-inch ruler to measure the length of a bacterium.
::::TerryH - please read up on some basic vulcanology, as what I said was not outrageous. I may not have phrased it very well, as I was exhausted when I wrote it, but it's still true. You want a citation - here's one. http://www.noanswersingenesis.org.au/mt_st_helens_dacite_kh.htm

[[User:Darkmind1970|Darkmind1970]] 08:44, 7 February 2008 (EST)

Neither you ([[User:Darkmind1970|Darkmind1970]]) nor Dr. Henke understand the issue. And Dr. Henke's excuses are the lamest I have ever seen. "The mass spec was dirty." That's practically an admission that Geochron's quality control stinks! No wonder they don't do [[Potassium|K]]-[[Argon|Ar]] dating anymore--maybe they ''did'' lose accreditation, as any hospital laboratory would have lost its accreditation had they made a comparable error.

Dr. Henke makes several other logical errors that are more debilitating:{{Cquote|In contrast to Austin ''et al.'''s juvenile attacks on K-Ar dating, geochronologists confirm the reality of radiometric dates by using multiple methods...and/or comparing their results with fossil, paleomagnetic or astronomical data.}}
First of all, if several clocks just happen to agree on a value, that doesn't make the value correct; it could simply mean that the clocksetters colluded on the same erroneous consensus or that they all consulted the same erroneous clock. And in fact, multiple methods ''have'' proved less than consistent. See Snelling, Andrew, "[http://www.icr.org/i/pdf/imp/imp-376.pdf Radioisotope Dating of Grand Canyon Rocks: Another Devastating Failure for Long-Age Geology]," ''Institute for Creation Research'', Impact Article 376. That last article is part of a body of research designed to investigate the basis for old "apparent ages"--and the inconsistency of radiocarbon and radiomineral dates obtained from specimens collected at the same site.

Can you name ''any'' radiomineral dating method that would be ''at all'' suitable for showing that any given mineral is young? What is the youngest rock that anyone has ever dated? I'll answer that question for you: that "youngest rock" has an apparent age of 700,000 years. ''You couldn't even reliably date the eruption of Mount Vesuvius'' did you not have [[Pliny the Younger]]'s diary of the destruction and evacuation of [[Pompeii]].--[[User:TerryH|TerryH]][[User talk:TerryH|Talk]] 09:23, 7 February 2008 (EST)

:Actually we can very easily date the eruption of AD79 without Pliny. We've got all the evidence from Pompeii and Herculaneum. Which can be very precisely dated by the coins, pottery, etc. Context. And please keep it civil. You may not agree with what I have to say, but shouting about citations and not knowing what I'm talking about is hardly reasoned discourse. Look at Henke's other arguments if you find his talk of a dirty mass spec laughable. It doesn't change the fact that dating lava is interesting because it contains old and new elements. [[User:Darkmind1970|Darkmind1970]] 11:50, 7 February 2008 (EST)

Talk:Flood Geology

2008-02-07T13:44:00Z

Darkmind1970: /* You Just Gotta Be Kidding Me */

Talk:Flood Geology

2008-02-06T23:10:56Z

Darkmind1970: /* You Just Gotta Be Kidding Me */

Adolf Hitler

2008-02-02T01:09:24Z

Darkmind1970: /* Poland */

[[Image:Hitler7.JPG|right|300px|thumb|Adolf Hitler, giving a hint as to the violence to come.]]
'''Adolf Hitler''' was the Austrian-born Chancellor and President of [[Germany]] from January 30, 1933 until his death on April 30, 1945. He was also the leader (German: ''Der Führer'') of the National Socialist German Workers Party (''National-sozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei'', or Nazi Party) which gained political power through threat, intimidation, and outright violence throughout Germany in the aftermath of the First World War. Hitler’s policies and beliefs resulted in the mass extermination of the [[Jews]], Gypsies, and other peoples he considered “inferior” throughout central and eastern [[Europe]]. This was directly responsible for the outbreak of [[World War II]], causing the deaths of untold millions on and off the battlefield, and ending only with his own death in his Berlin bunker.

==Early life==
Hitler was born on April 20, 1889, in Braunau am Inn, [[Austria]]. Hitler's father, Alois (born 1837), was a customs official who was himself born illegitimate, carrying for a time his mother's name, Schicklgruber. By 1876 he had his baptismal entry corrected in his church records, establishing his father as Johan Heidler, which was altered slightly to Hitler.

When his father retired the family moved to Linz, Austria, where it remained a favorite for young Adolf for the rest of his life, and where he gave his wish to be buried. When Alois died in 1903 he left enough of a pension to support his wife and children; Adolf would take his and live off of it in Vienna after leaving school, dreaming of becoming an artist. Although somewhat competent as a painter of landscapes and architecture, his renderings of humans were considered “lifeless” and “crude” by the standards of the Academy of Fine Arts, and his application was rejected twice. Remaining in [[Vienna]], he moved from one cheap flop house to another, painting postcards and advertisements to earn a meager living after his allowance had dried up. By then he had developed traits which characterized his life as a whole: secretiveness, loneliness, a Spartan mode of everyday life, and a hatred of the cosmopolitan, multinational character that was the makeup of Vienna.

==Who And What He Was==
'''[[Elie Wiesel]] wrote famously, and most eloquently about Hitler in 1998:''' <blockquote>
"At the same time that he terrorized his adversaries, he knew how to please, impress and charm the very interlocutors from whom he wanted support. Diplomats and journalists insist as much on his charm as they do on his temper tantrums. The savior admired by his own as he dragged them into his madness, the Satan and exterminating angel feared and hated by all others, Hitler led his people to a shameful defeat without precedent. That his political and strategic ambitions have created a dividing line in the history of this turbulent and tormented century is undeniable: there is a before and an after. By the breadth of his crimes, which have attained a quasi-ontological dimension, he surpasses all his predecessors: as a result of Hitler, man is defined by what makes him inhuman. With Hitler at the head of a gigantic laboratory, life itself seems to have changed. </blockquote>

<blockquote>
How did this Austrian without title or position manage to get himself elected head of a German nation renowned for its civilizing mission? How to explain the success of his cheap demagogy in the heart of a people so proud of having inherited the genius of a Wolfgang von Goethe and an Immanuel Kant? </blockquote>

<blockquote>
Was there no resistance to his disastrous projects? There was. But it was too feeble, too weak and too late to succeed. German society had rallied behind him: the judicial, the educational, the industrial and the economic establishments gave him their support. Few politicians of this century have aroused, in their lifetime, such love and so much hate; few have inspired so much historical and psychological research after their death. Even today, works on his enigmatic personality and his cursed career are best sellers everywhere. Some are good, others are less good, but all seem to respond to an authentic curiosity on the part of a public haunted by memory and the desire to understand.</blockquote>

<blockquote>
We think we know everything about the nefarious forces that shaped his destiny: his unhappy childhood, his frustrated adolescence; his artistic disappointments; his wound received on the front during World War I; his taste for spectacle, his constant disdain for social and military aristocracies; his relationship with [[Eva Braun]], who adored him; the cult of the very death he feared; his lack of scruples with regard to his former comrades of the SA, whom he had assassinated in 1934; his endless hatred of [[Jews]], whose survival enraged him — each and every phase of his official and private life has found its chroniclers, its biographers. </blockquote>

<blockquote>
And yet. There are, in all these givens, elements that escape us. How did this unstable paranoid find it within himself to impose gigantic hope as an immutable ideal that motivated his nation almost until the end? Would he have come to power if Germany were not going through endless economic crises, or if the winners in 1918 had not imposed on it conditions that represented a national humiliation against which the German patriotic fiber could only revolt? ''We would be wrong to forget: Hitler came to power in January 1933 by the most legitimate means. His Nationalist Socialist Party won a majority in the parliamentary elections.'' The aging [[Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg]] had no choice but to allow him, at age 43, to form the new government, marking the end of the Weimar Republic. And the beginning of the Third Reich, which, according to Hitler, would last 1,000 years. </blockquote>

<blockquote>
From that moment on, events cascaded. The burning of the [[Reichstag]] came only a little before the openings of the first concentration camps, established for members of the opposition. Fear descended on the country and squeezed it in a vise. Great writers, musicians and painters went into exile to France and the U.S. Jews with foresight emigrated toward Palestine. The air of Hitler's Germany was becoming more and more suffocating. Those who preferred to wait, thinking that the Nazi regime would not last, could not last, would regret it later, when it was too late. </blockquote>

<blockquote>
The fact is that Hitler was beloved by his people — not the military, at least not in the beginning, but by the average Germans who pledged to him an affection, a tenderness and a fidelity that bordered on the irrational. It was idolatry on a national scale. One had to see the crowds who acclaimed him. And the women who were attracted to him. And the young who in his presence went into ecstasy. Did they not see the hateful mask that covered his face? Did they not divine the catastrophe he bore within himself?"[http://www.time.com/time/time100/leaders/profile/hitler.html]
</blockquote>

===War===
[[Image:Hitler munich1914.jpg|right|200px|thumb|Hitler in the crowd in Munich, 1914, reacting to the news of Germany's entry in the First World War.]]
By 1913 Hitler was in Munich, Germany, with war clouds on the horizon. Classified as unfit for service in the Austrian army (possibly by faking, as he did not like the thought of serving Austria) in 1914, he volunteered for the German army, joining the 16th Bavarian Reserve Infantry Regiment, greeting the war with enthusiasm, and finding the military discipline and comradeship satisfying. He served during the entire First World War as a messenger carrying dispatches between units, and often at the front lines under fire; he was wounded in 1916, and gassed in 1918. His bravery during this time earned him the Iron Cross, 2nd Class, in December, 1914, and in August 1918 he was awarded the Iron Cross, 1st Class – a rare decoration for a corporal. But the gassing would take him out of the war and into a hospital, where he would be told the heart-wrenching news of Germany’s defeat the following November.

==Path to power==
After the war ended, Hitler's future seemed uncertain. There was much discontent among demobilized veterans because of the lack of employment. The German military had felt it had not been defeated; indeed, the German Army stood on foreign soil when the Armistice was signed November 11, 1918 and not a square inch of German soil had been occupied. This was despite the fact that the German Army's strongest position, the Hindenburg line, had been broken by the Allies, and the German Army itself was in full retreat. However, the Army felt they had done their job, and the nation had been "stabbed in the back" by a gang of traitors who sought to lay hands on the Fatherland. The "myth" that Germany had been defeated was the "big lie" Hitler spoke of, as if repeating it often enough would cause people to believe it.

After his discharge from the hospital, Hitler acted as an army political agent, assigned in Munich to gather information on the various political parties which had spring up amid the social chaos following Germany’s defeat. In September, 1919, he was given orders to investigate the relatively-minor German Workers’ Party (''Deutsche Arbeiterpartei''); intrigued by the party’s apparatus and its racial, pan-German nationalism, he joined, becoming its 55th member; he left the army soon after and devoted himself to improving the party’s propaganda, as well as his own position within.

Conditions in Germany fostered the development of the party. Economic woes brought widespread discontent, added to the furor surrounding the loss of the war and the harsh terms heaped upon Germany by the Allied Powers in the Versailles Peace Treaty. Bavaria’s traditional separatism from the central government in Berlin made current conditions especially sharp, and Hitler was savvy enough to take full advantage of them. When he joined, he found the party ineffective in leadership and uncertain as to its aims; he accepted the party program, but regarded it as a means to an end. He caused friction with other members of the party, and their attempts to control him caused a threat of resignation; realizing that the future of the party now depended on Hitler, who clearly had a talent of organization, fund collecting, and above all, speaking, they declined to accept it; from July, 1921 Hitler was regarded as the party leader with nearly unlimited power. From his party newspaper, ''Völkischer Beobachter'' (“Popular Observer”), he spewed out endless propaganda. His meetings where he spoke grew from handfuls to hundreds, and then on to thousands. A man of charismatic personality, he quickly attracted a circle of loyal and devoted followers: Julius Streicher, Alfred Rosenberg, Hermann Göring, and Rudolf Hess.

Munich was also a gathering place for former servicemen dissatisfied with conditions in the country; members of the Freikorps, which had been organized after the war from army units that refused to return to civilian life; and those civilians who plotted against the republic. Many of these men joined the Nazi Party. Among them was a staff member of the district command who had joined the German Workers’ Party before Hitler, Ernst Röhm, a pudgy man with a scared face who saw his own ambition in helping further Hitler’s rise within the party. Röhm recruited what came to be known as the “Brown Shirts”, the violent squads used to attack socialists and communists, and to protect party meetings whenever Hitler was speaking. By 1921 they were organized into a private army called the ''Sturmabteilung'', abbreviated to S.A.

==The Beer Hall Putsch==
Germany in 1923 was marked by social and political unrest caused by hyperinflation. In this time Hitler was able convince [[Erich Ludendorff]], an accomplished general and leader of the German forces in the first World War, to join him in a coup d'etat (''Putsch'' in German). When Hitler learned that the nationalist prime minister of Bavaria was giving a speech to 3000 officials in one of Munich's biggest beer halls (the Haufbrau Haus), he ordered his paramilitaries to surround the building. Hitler went inside and took the prime minister hostage, announced a revolution, and attempted to convince him to join the coup against Berlin and become member in his new administration. The Bavarian prime minister agreed under pressure, but informed the nation via radio later that night that he did not support Hitler. The prime minister also informed the federal government in Berlin; the putsch had begun to fail.

The next morning, 9 November 1923, Hitler and Ludendorff were marching with approximately 2000 partly armed supporters through Munich in a show of strength to regain the momentum. In the ensuing fight between Hitler's marchers and a cordon of police and army units at least 14 Nazi supporters and three policemen were killed and hundreds wounded. Ludendorff handed himself over to the authorities, while Hitler fled soon after the fighting began. Hitler was arrested a few days later at a friend's house, were had been in hiding since the failed coup. Ludendorff was acquitted of all charges, while Hitler was sentenced to 5 years in prison (he would do eight months). <ref>http://history1900s.about.com/cs/thirdreich/a/beerhallputsch_2.htm</ref><ref>http://www.historyplace.com/worldwar2/timeline/putsch2.htm</ref> The Bavarian prime minister, who foiled the plan, was killed in 1934 in the "Night of the Long Knives".

===''Mein Kampf''===

Hitler had his inner circle as frequent visitors in his prison cell, which was made more comfortable due to his celebrity. While there, he dictated to Rudolf Hess the first volume of ''Mein Kampf'' (“My Struggle”), his political autobiography and a compendium of his many ideas.

Hitler believed in the inequality of the races, nations, and individuals as part of the natural order of mankind, and chief among them was the exalted “Aryan race”, and the greatest of the Aryans were the Germans. It was the German, according to Hitler, that gave the world civilization and the arts; to safeguard the German people as a race (the “Volk”), they would need to be united under a single leader (the Führer), where they would be protected from their three principle enemies: Marxism, which included social democracy as well as communism; democracy and its mob-rule, as shown by the failings of the Weimar Republic; and above all what Hitler called the poisoners of humanity, the Jews. “Rational anti-Semitism must lead to systematic legal opposition,” he wrote in 1919. “Its final objective must be the removal of the Jews altogether.” In Mein Kampf, he told the world that the Jew was the “destroyer of culture,” “a parasite within the nation,” and “a menace.”

==Rebuilding the Nazi Party==
[[Image:Hitler_speech.jpg|thumb|200px|right|Hitler speaking; he would often employ physical gesturing to emphasize a point.]]
[[Image:Hitler-3.jpg‎ |right|200px|thumb|Hitler in car, saluting passing S.A. at one of many parades.]]
Internal dissention within the party caused it to languish while Hitler was in prison. When he was released he saw difficulties in the country that had not existed before the Putsch, namely currency reform that brought economic stability, and the scaling back of the war reparations as a result of the Dawes Plan. Hitler was also forbidden to speak in public, which remained in force until 1928; however, he wasn’t about to stop his rebuilding of the party nor of his re-establishing his own position within it as leader, despite Gregor Strasser’s opposition in northern Germany. By 1927 the number of Nazis was in the hundreds of thousands.

A new period of political and economic instability with the onset of the Great Depression which threw millions out of work in Europe and North America. To campaign against the [[Young Plan]] (a second renegotiation of war reparations payments) Hitler made an alliance with one of Germany’s leading nationalists, Alfred Hugenberg, whose newspapers enabled Hitler to reach a national audience for the first time. The alliance also had another advantage: it enabled him to seek support from many in business and industry who controlled funds going into politics, and who themselves were desirous of seeing Germany under the control of a strong anti-Soviet and Communist subversion regime. The subsidies Hitler received placed the Nazy Party on a strong financial footing, enabling him to make his emotional appeal to the lower middle class and the unemployed in his faith that Germany would recover from its suffering and be a great nation once more. The alliance with the industrialists also demonstrated another aspect of Hitler, a skill of effectively using those that would use him, which many would discover when it was too late.

The electoral strength of the Nazis grew during the Depression, as unceasing propaganda accused the government of failing to improve conditions for the working man. By the fall of 1930 the Nazis captured more than 18 percent of the vote, compared to just 2.6 percent in 1928. Hitler captured 36.8 percent of the vote when he opposed Paul von Hindenburg in the 1932 presidential election; his mass following put him in such a strong position that he entered a series of closed-door intrigues with Franz von Papen, Oskar Hindenburg, and Otto Meissner, all sharing a fear and loathing of a communist government. Despite the party losing votes in the November, 1932 election, Hitler insisted on nothing less than the office of chancellor for himself. For him, it was all or nothing. Hindenburg offered it to him on January 30, 1933.

==In power==
Almost immediately, Hitler established himself as dictator. Less than a month after taking office, on February 27 the Reichstag building was set on fire under mysterious circumstances (but officially blamed on a feeble-minded Dutch communist, Marinus van der Lubbe); Hitler soon after succeeded in getting several decrees passed removing much of the guarantees of freedom in the name of state security, and which also allowed an intensified campaign of violence against dissidents. Incredibly, in a special election set in those conditions on March 5, the Nazis pulled 43.9 percent of the vote. On March 21, the new Reichstag assembled at the Potsdam Church, as much a show of unity between the old guard under Hindenburg and the Nazis as it was a show of peace. Two days later the Enabling Act was passed, giving Hitler full powers; with the exception of the Nazis, all other political parties, including those which had helped pass the Enabling Act, ceased to exist within three months. Many of their leaders were tossed in concentration camps.

===Night of the Long Knives===
[[Image:HitlerRohm1933.JPG|right|200px|thumb|Hitler with Ernst Röhm in 1933]]
Hitler, however, did not wish to start an immediate revolution. He still needed the support of the one agency he needed to implement his ideas: the army. But he did have one growing problem that was a thorn in the army’s side, the million-plus men of the S.A. and their leader, Ernst Röhm, who wanted nothing less than the merger of the S.A. into the army, with himself in overall command. At first, Hitler tried getting Röhm’s support by persuasion, but Hitler’s inner circle was for removing him by any means possible. On June 29, 1934, Hitler ordered a purge, flew towards a resort near Munich where a number of S.A. leaders were vacationing, and had them all arrested; many would be shot without trial. Refusing to shoot himself when offered, Röhm was killed in his cell at Dachau, his last words, ironically, “Mein Führer, mein Führer!” [http://www.historyplace.com/worldwar2/timeline/roehm.htm][http://www.adolfhitler.ws/lib/nsdap/Rohm.html] [http://www.dhm.de/lemo/html/nazi/innenpolitik/roehm/index.html]
On July 13, Hitler gave speech in the Reichstag, announcing that some seventy-four individuals had been shot for threatening the stability of the Reich.
:''"If anyone reproaches me and asks why I did not resort to the regular courts of justice, then all I can say is this: In this hour I was responsible for the fate of the German people, and thereby I became the supreme judge of the German people…It was no secret that this time the revolution would have to be bloody; when we spoke of it we called it 'The Night of the Long Knives.' Everyone must know for all future time that if he raises his hand to strike the State, then certain death is his lot." ''
Hitler also used this event to settle his account with other opponents, such as Georg Strasser, who stood for a more socialist and less racist national socialism, and the former Bavarian prime minister who foiled the Beer Hall Putsch in 1923. Satisfied that the S.A. leadership was thoroughly broken up (thousands of S.A. members were either arrested or killed that night), the army approved of Hitler’s actions. Hindenburg died a few days later on August 2, and Hitler merged the office of president with the chancellorship, and with it the supreme command of the German armed forces. During this time the world was slowly recovering economically from the Depression, but it quickened in Germany, coincidently with Hitler’s rise to power. Taking credit for the recovery made him very popular, bringing him a 90 percent approval rating in a voter plebiscite that year.

===Beginnings of expansion===
In matters of state, the running of domestic affairs was left to subordinates, which was something Hitler had little attention for. Foreign policy always peaked his interest, in so much as to the advantages of a “Greater Germany”, which was his chief ambition. The first part of realizing this, according to ''Mein Kampf'', was to be a reunion of the German peoples within Europe; the second would be an expansion of Germany to the east (lebensraum). Expanding would mean a renewed conflict with the Slavic peoples, whom Hitler intended to serve as slaves to the “New German Order.” To follow through on his ambitions, he would have to remove Poland and the Soviet Union as countries; France also would have to be stabilized in the west, as she was Germany’s enemy for more than a century. He counted as possible allies Italy, with its fascist government under [[Benito Mussolini]], and Britain, whom he regarded as having a similar, Teutonic heritage.
[[Image:Hitler6-thumb.jpg|right|200px|thumb|Hitler with his dog, Blondie. He regarded dogs as better than people.]]
Before any of his ambitions could take place, there was one thing he detested which needed immediate removal: the restrictions placed upon Germany by the Treaty of Versailles at the end of World War I. Posing as a man of peace to allay suspicions, he insisted that he was a champion of Europe wishing only for the removal of the inequalities leveled by the treaty, and posturing as a shield against Bolshevism. In October, 1933, he had Germany withdraw from the [[League of Nations]]. The following January he signed a non-aggression treaty with Poland. His individual repudiations of parts of the treaty were followed by offers of negotiations for new agreements, while maintaining Germany’s limited ambitious nature.

While this was going on, Germany was steadily building up the armed forces. Rigorous training using wooden guns and trucks marked as “tanks” got needed battlefield training for officers. Potential fighter pilots began their training in gliders at public demonstrations – Germany, under terms of the treaty, was not allowed an air force – and later they would fly in new civilian stunt planes and transports, which on the drawing board were designed to be rapidly turned into fighters and bombers. Conscription was introduced in January, 1935, and in June of that year Hitler successfully signed a naval treaty with Britain, giving him rights to a respectable navy; but even while the ink was drying, Germany was secretly building a large U-boat fleet.

The matter of reuniting the German peoples came into being in July, 1934, and here Hitler overreached. German organizations were covertly aiding Austrian Nazis in the overthrow of their government, culminating in an attempted revolt as well as murdering Chancellor Engelbert Dollfuss. When the attempt clearly failed, Hitler denied involvement. In January, 1935, a plebecite was introduced in the Saarland; more than 90 percent voted to return the territory to Germany. Then in March, 1936, came his greatest slap to the Versailles Treaty: against the advice of his generals, and in open defiance of France and Britain, he ordered troops into the demilitarized Rhineland. Germany was once again becoming the leading power in continental Europe. By October, 1936, Germany had signed an alliance with Italy, proclaiming a “Rome-Berlin axis,” followed by the Anti-Comintern Pact with Japan. All three countries would sign a single, mutual alliance pact, the following year.

==Anschluss==

Removed from their offices in January 1938 were Hjalmar Schacht (economic ministry); Werner von Fritsch (soldiers’ representative); and Konstantin von Neurath (foreign office); the reason being was they were not fully accepting of Nazism. Beginning his plans of German conquest, he started with Austria. Kurt von Schuschnigg, the Austrian chancellor, was invited to Berchtesgaden in February, where he was browbeaten and forced to sign an agreement placing Austrian Nazis in the government. When Schuschnigg resisted and announced a plebiscite for Austrian voters concerning independence, Hitler ordered German troops into Austria, completely taking over the country within days. His return to Vienna was in triumph; enthusiastic crowds greeted him by the tens of thousands, in sharp contrast to the scenes of privation he had gone through there in his youth. Austria was annexed (Anschluss) to the Reich a short time later.

While the Anschluss was going on, Hitler was speaking in friendly terms with Czechoslovakia; nearly as soon as Austria ceased to exist, Hitler proceeded with his plans against the Czechs. The northwestern region of Czechoslovakia was the Sudetenland, inhabited by a German minority, and the leader of them, Konrad Henlein, was instructed to make impossible demands for those Germans on the Czech government. In the interest of preventing a general war (which Hitler wanted), Mussolini and British prime minister Neville Chamberlain concluded a peaceful agreement in Munich on September 30, giving Hitler the Sudetenland without firing a shot. Chamberlain would return to Britain, waving the agreement signed between himself and Hitler, declaring it to be “peace for our time”, but his act of appeasement would ensure the peace would last only a few more months. Despite assurances that the Sudetenland was his last territorial demands, “Czechia”, as the remainder of Czechoslovakia was called, became a German protectorate on March 15, 1939, when Hitler ordered it occupied. Just over a week later, Lithuania was forced to cede to Germany the territory of Memel (Klaipeda), on the border of East Prussia.

==Poland==
Poland’s turn was next, and listening to the rumblings was France and Britain, which signed guarantees of mutual assistance to the Polish nation should it be attacked by Germany. Hitler also signed pacts: a “Pact of Steel” with Italy, strengthening the alliance between Rome and Berlin, and then a treaty that caught many off-guard: a non-aggression pact with the Soviet Union on August 23. A secret clause in the pact allowed for the simultaneous invasion of Poland, and the division of the country in the center from north to south. Poland was invaded on September 1; two days later, Britain and France declared war on Germany.

Hitler assumed his own war strategy. Poland was conquered within weeks, and when a desired peace accord with Britain failed to materialize, he ordered the army to prepare for a western offensive. Norway was invaded and occupied, forestalling a British move on that country; Denmark was occupied by April, 1940. Hitler than adopted General Erich von Manstien’s plan for an offensive against France itself, which would move through neutral Belgium’s Ardenne Forest on May 10, taking that country as a matter of convenience, as well as avoiding the static fortifications of France’s Maginot Line. The German forces, extremely successful in their operations, reached the coastal ports on the English Channel in 10 days; Holland and Belgium both surrendered within days. But south of Dunkirk was where the army was ordered to halt. Hitler had hoped even at this stage in the battle that Britain would commit to peace; instead, the halting of the German army allowed the British to remove 170,000 fighting men.

On June 10, Italy entered the war as German tanks were sweeping across northern France. Hitler signed an armistice with France on June 22, the signing taking place in the same rail car at the same site where the Germans surrendered in 1918.

Having failed in getting the British to sign an armistice, Hitler prepared his forces for “Operation Sea Lion,” the invasion of Britain. However, the Luftwaffe was defeated in its attempt to gain air superiority over British airspace, also known as the Battle Of Britain, which forced the permanent postponement of Sealion.

Facing the failure of the British to give in, Hitler started to prepare to double-cross his erstwhile partner in the Poland conquest, Joseph Stalin and the Soviet Union. Then Mussolini invaded Greece, got bogged down in the Balkans, and the threat loomed that he would lose his whole army there. Hitler found it necessary to come to his aid, while at the same time taking direct control of Yugoslavia in the wake of the overthrow of the pro-Nazi government.

==Barbarossa==
The attack on Soviet Russia began June 22, 1941. Rapid in its advancement, the German army captured a large swath of territory between the Baltic and Black seas, and captured close to 3,000,000 prisoners. But Hitler, already micro-managing military operations, became overbearing to his generals; he preferred to go after many targets, while his generals argued for a single objective. A few miles in front of Moscow, the German army was halted by a Russian offensive in December, as well as something he had absolutely no control over: the severe Russian winter.

In the lands already occupied by German forces, S.S. chief Heinrich Himmler was preparing the ground for Hitler’s new German order. Expelling the Jews from Germany was the first step, and this was carried out by laws and decrees beginning in 1933; the Germans would switch to outright force in 1939, as Jews were first deported en-masse to Poland, then walled into ghettos after the occupation began. By 1941, a policy crafted under S.S. general Reinhard Heydrich had changed expulsion for extermination in what was called "a final solution to the Jewish question" (''die Endlösung der Judenfrage''). The system of concentration camps was supplemented by the creation of specialized killing centers in the occupied countries, especially in Poland, where camps such as Auschwitz, Treblinka, Sobibor, and Belzac “processed” thousands of victims daily. Some six million Jews died during what was called the [[Holocaust]], as well as an additional five million Slavs, Gypsies, the handicapped, the aged, and many others that the Nazis considered “subhuman” in accordance with German racial policies. [http://www.historyplace.com/worldwar2/riseofhitler/burns.htm]

==Beginning of the end==
[[Image:Adolf_hitler6.jpg‎ |right|200px|thumb|Hitler in 1944, by now looking like a tired, strained man.]]
Hitler grew increasingly strained by the end of 1942, depending on large amounts of drugs supplied by his physician, Theodor Morell, as a result of the twin defeats of El Alamein (which he lost the bulk of his Afrika corps to British general Montgomery), and Stalingrad (where he lost an entire army of 250,000 men to the Russians). He spent more time in his headquarters in East Prussia, and his time in the public eye ceased to exist. He refused to visit bombed German cities, and, as with Stalingrad, refused to allow German armies to withdraw from the battlefield when the situation was lost. Still, he could make stunning, decisive decisions when called for, such as the commando raid that resulted in the rescue of Benito Mussolini from Italian partisans in July, 1943.

But the defeat of Germany in the war was looming closer. Hitler’s relations with his leading commanders grew strained, the more so as he allowed units of the S.S. to take positions traditionally held by the army. The line at the eastern front was slowly being pushed back by the Soviets, while in the Atlantic his U-boats campaign had faltered. German cities were constantly being bombed, and a successful invasion on the Normandy coast of France in June, 1944 marked the beginning of the end.

===Assassination attempt===
[[Image:NWT Hitler dead.jpg|left|200px|thumb|Hitler's death as covered by the ''New York Times'', May 2, 1945.]]
Seeing Germany’s chances of surviving the war were desperate, a group of officers plotted to assassinate Hitler, planning several attempts in 1943-44, but nearly successful on July 20, 1944, when a bomb hidden in a briefcase by Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg went off under a table that Hitler and others were leaning over; four were killed outright, several suffered injuries, but Hitler escaped relatively unharmed (the bomb itself was set down away from Hitler behind a solid oak table leg, saving him). The conspirators were quickly rounded up; Stauffenberg was shot. The remainder were put on show trials and condemned to hang on meat hooks with piano wire. It was said that Hitler enjoyed watching film of their executions. As a result of the bomb, Nazi members were employed at key positions within the army, removing any trace of the army’s independence.

Within months nearly all of the territory occupied by Germany was now in Allied hands. A last offensive in December, 1944 to take the port of Antwerp, Belgium, failed. Hitler had by them grown ill; his hopes for a German victory bordered on the fantastical and the imagination. By January, 1945 he had moved into his command bunker in Berlin, where he gave orders deploying fictional divisions to counter the ever-closer Soviets. When all seemed lost, he gave out his final orders: first, appointing Admiral Karl Dönitz as head of the state and his successor, and Josef Goebbels as chancellor; and second, dictating his last political will which was an attempt to justify his life’s work.

On April 29, he committed the one truly-chivalrous act of his life: he married Eva Braun, his long-time mistress. After retiring to his room in the bunker the next day, Eva took poison, and Hitler put a bullet in his head. In accordance with his wishes, both bodies were burned. His Third Reich would outlive him for another week.

[[Elie Wiesel]] wrote the following in [[Time Magazine]] regarding Hitler:
{{cquote|Adolf Hitler or the incarnation of absolute evil; this is how future generations will remember the all-powerful Fuehrer of the criminal Third Reich. Compared with him, his peers [[Mussolini]] and [[Franco]] were novices. Under his hypnotic gaze, humanity crossed a threshold from which one could see the abyss. "Before Hitler, we thought we had sounded the depths of human nature," argues Ron Rosenbaum, author of "Explaining Hitler." "He showed how much lower we could go, and that's what was so horrifying. It gets us wondering not just at the depths he showed us but whether there is worse to come. The power of Hitler was to confound the modernist notion that judgments about good and [[evil]] were little more than matters of taste, reflections of social class and power and status. Although some modern scholars drive past the notion of evil and instead explain Hitler's conduct as a reflection of his childhood and self-esteem issues, for most survivors of the 20th century he is confirmation of our instinctive sense that evil does exist. It moves among us; it leads us astray and deploys powerful, subtle weapons against even the sturdiest souls." <ref>http://www.time.com/time/time100/leaders/profile/hitler.html</ref>}}

==Hitler and the Theory of Evolution==
[[Image:Hitlerrisetopower.jpg|right|225px|thumb]]
The staunch evolutionist Stephen Gould admitted the following:
{{cquote|[[Ernst Haeckel|Haeckel]] was the chief apostle of evolution in [[Germany]].... His evolutionary racism; his call to the German people for racial purity and unflinching devotion to a "just" state; his belief that harsh, inexorable laws of evolution ruled human civilization and nature alike, conferring upon favored races the right to dominate others; the irrational mysticism that had always stood in strange communion with his brave words about objective science - all contributed to the rise of Nazism. - Stephen J. Gould, "Ontogeny and Phylogeny," Belknap Press: Cambridge MA, 1977, pp.77-78). <ref>http://members.iinet.net.au/~sejones/social.html</ref>}}

In regards to evolutionary racism [[Adolph Hitler]] wrote the following in his work [[Mein Kampf]]:
{{cquote|The Germans were the higher race, destined for a glorious evolutionary future. For this reason it was essential that the [[Jew]]s should be segregated, otherwise mixed marriages would take place. Were this to happen, all nature’s efforts “to establish an evolutionary higher stage of being may thus be rendered futile.”<ref>http://www.creationontheweb.com/content/view/1675</ref>}}

Hitler also wrote in Mein Kampf:
{{cquote|The stronger must dominate and not blend with the weaker, thus sacrificing his own greatness. Only the born weakling can view this as cruel, but he, after all, is only a weak and limited man; for if this law did not prevail, any conceivable higher development (Hoherentwicklung) of organic living beings would be unthinkable.<ref>http://www.icr.org/index.php?module=articles&action=view&ID=268</ref>}}

Dr. Robert E.D. Clark wrote in his work ''Darwin, Before and After'' the following regarding Hitler and the theory of evolution: “Adolf Hitler’s mind was captivated by evolutionary teaching — probably since the time he was a boy. Evolutionary ideas — quite undisguised — lie at the basis of all that is worst in Mein Kampf — and in his public speeches”.<ref>http://www.christiancourier.com/articles/read/the_holocaust_why_did_it_happen</ref>

Richard Hickman in his work ''Biocreation'' concurs and wrote the following:
{{cquote|It is perhaps no coincidence that Adolf Hitler was a firm believer in and preacher of evolutionism. Whatever the deeper, profound, complexities of his [[psychosis]], it is certain that [the concept of struggle was important for]. . . his book, Mein Kampf clearly set forth a number of evolutionary ideas, particularly those emphasizing struggle, survival of the fittest and extermination of the weak to produce a better society. <ref>http://www.creationism.org/csshs/v08n3p24.htm</ref>}}

Noted evolutionary [[anthropology|anthropologists]] Sir [[Arthur Keith]] conceded the following in regards to Hitler: “The German Fuhrer, as I have consistently maintained, is an evolutionist; he has consciously sought to make the practices of Germany conform to the theory of evolution”.<ref>http://www.christiancourier.com/articles/read/the_holocaust_why_did_it_happen</ref>

[[Pulitzer Prize]] winning author [[Marilynne Robinson]] wrote the following regarding Hitler's racism in the November 2006 issue of [[Harper’s Magazine]]:
{{cquote|While it is true that persecution of the Jews has a very long history in [[Europe]], it is also true that science in the twentieth century revived and absolutized persecution by giving it a fresh rationale — Jewishness was not religious or cultural, but genetic. Therefore no appeal could be made against the brute fact of a Jewish grandparent.

[[Richard Dawkins|Dawkins]] deals with all this in one sentence. Hitler did his evil "in the name of. . . an insane and unscientific [[eugenics]] theory." But eugenics is science as surely as totemism is religion. That either is in error is beside the point. Science quite appropriately acknowledges that error should be assumed, and at best it proceeds by a continuous process of criticism meant to isolate and identify error. So bad science is still science in more or less the same sense that bad religion is still religion. That both of them can do damage on a huge scale is clear. The prestige of both is a great part of the problem, and in the modern period the credibility of anything called science is enormous. As the history of eugenics proves, science at the highest levels is no reliable corrective to the influence of cultural prejudice but is in fact profoundly vulnerable to it.

There is indeed historical precedent in the [[Spanish Inquisition]] for the notion of hereditary Judaism. But the fact that the worst religious thought of the sixteenth century can be likened to the worst scientific thought of the twentieth century hardly redounds to the credit of science."<ref>http://solutions.synearth.net/2006/10/20</ref><ref>http://www.uncommondescent.com/intelligent-design/someone-finally-said-it-dawkinss-hysterical-scientism/</ref>}}

==References==
{{reflist|2}}

==Sources==
*[http://www.nizkor.org/hweb/people/h/hitler-adolf/oss-papers/text/profile-index.htmlA Psychological Analysis of Adolf Hitler, His Life and Legend], Walter C. Langer, Office of Strategic Services, Washington, D.C.
{{DEFAULTSORT: Hitler, Adolf}}
[[Category:Dictators]]
[[Category:Fascists]]
[[Category:Conspiracy theorists]]
[[Category:Mass murderers]]
[[Category:Nazis]]

Adolf Hitler

2008-02-02T01:02:27Z

Darkmind1970: /* Path to power */

[[Image:Hitler7.JPG|right|300px|thumb|Adolf Hitler, giving a hint as to the violence to come.]]
'''Adolf Hitler''' was the Austrian-born Chancellor and President of [[Germany]] from January 30, 1933 until his death on April 30, 1945. He was also the leader (German: ''Der Führer'') of the National Socialist German Workers Party (''National-sozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei'', or Nazi Party) which gained political power through threat, intimidation, and outright violence throughout Germany in the aftermath of the First World War. Hitler’s policies and beliefs resulted in the mass extermination of the [[Jews]], Gypsies, and other peoples he considered “inferior” throughout central and eastern [[Europe]]. This was directly responsible for the outbreak of [[World War II]], causing the deaths of untold millions on and off the battlefield, and ending only with his own death in his Berlin bunker.

==Early life==
Hitler was born on April 20, 1889, in Braunau am Inn, [[Austria]]. Hitler's father, Alois (born 1837), was a customs official who was himself born illegitimate, carrying for a time his mother's name, Schicklgruber. By 1876 he had his baptismal entry corrected in his church records, establishing his father as Johan Heidler, which was altered slightly to Hitler.

When his father retired the family moved to Linz, Austria, where it remained a favorite for young Adolf for the rest of his life, and where he gave his wish to be buried. When Alois died in 1903 he left enough of a pension to support his wife and children; Adolf would take his and live off of it in Vienna after leaving school, dreaming of becoming an artist. Although somewhat competent as a painter of landscapes and architecture, his renderings of humans were considered “lifeless” and “crude” by the standards of the Academy of Fine Arts, and his application was rejected twice. Remaining in [[Vienna]], he moved from one cheap flop house to another, painting postcards and advertisements to earn a meager living after his allowance had dried up. By then he had developed traits which characterized his life as a whole: secretiveness, loneliness, a Spartan mode of everyday life, and a hatred of the cosmopolitan, multinational character that was the makeup of Vienna.

==Who And What He Was==
'''[[Elie Wiesel]] wrote famously, and most eloquently about Hitler in 1998:''' <blockquote>
"At the same time that he terrorized his adversaries, he knew how to please, impress and charm the very interlocutors from whom he wanted support. Diplomats and journalists insist as much on his charm as they do on his temper tantrums. The savior admired by his own as he dragged them into his madness, the Satan and exterminating angel feared and hated by all others, Hitler led his people to a shameful defeat without precedent. That his political and strategic ambitions have created a dividing line in the history of this turbulent and tormented century is undeniable: there is a before and an after. By the breadth of his crimes, which have attained a quasi-ontological dimension, he surpasses all his predecessors: as a result of Hitler, man is defined by what makes him inhuman. With Hitler at the head of a gigantic laboratory, life itself seems to have changed. </blockquote>

<blockquote>
How did this Austrian without title or position manage to get himself elected head of a German nation renowned for its civilizing mission? How to explain the success of his cheap demagogy in the heart of a people so proud of having inherited the genius of a Wolfgang von Goethe and an Immanuel Kant? </blockquote>

<blockquote>
Was there no resistance to his disastrous projects? There was. But it was too feeble, too weak and too late to succeed. German society had rallied behind him: the judicial, the educational, the industrial and the economic establishments gave him their support. Few politicians of this century have aroused, in their lifetime, such love and so much hate; few have inspired so much historical and psychological research after their death. Even today, works on his enigmatic personality and his cursed career are best sellers everywhere. Some are good, others are less good, but all seem to respond to an authentic curiosity on the part of a public haunted by memory and the desire to understand.</blockquote>

<blockquote>
We think we know everything about the nefarious forces that shaped his destiny: his unhappy childhood, his frustrated adolescence; his artistic disappointments; his wound received on the front during World War I; his taste for spectacle, his constant disdain for social and military aristocracies; his relationship with [[Eva Braun]], who adored him; the cult of the very death he feared; his lack of scruples with regard to his former comrades of the SA, whom he had assassinated in 1934; his endless hatred of [[Jews]], whose survival enraged him — each and every phase of his official and private life has found its chroniclers, its biographers. </blockquote>

<blockquote>
And yet. There are, in all these givens, elements that escape us. How did this unstable paranoid find it within himself to impose gigantic hope as an immutable ideal that motivated his nation almost until the end? Would he have come to power if Germany were not going through endless economic crises, or if the winners in 1918 had not imposed on it conditions that represented a national humiliation against which the German patriotic fiber could only revolt? ''We would be wrong to forget: Hitler came to power in January 1933 by the most legitimate means. His Nationalist Socialist Party won a majority in the parliamentary elections.'' The aging [[Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg]] had no choice but to allow him, at age 43, to form the new government, marking the end of the Weimar Republic. And the beginning of the Third Reich, which, according to Hitler, would last 1,000 years. </blockquote>

<blockquote>
From that moment on, events cascaded. The burning of the [[Reichstag]] came only a little before the openings of the first concentration camps, established for members of the opposition. Fear descended on the country and squeezed it in a vise. Great writers, musicians and painters went into exile to France and the U.S. Jews with foresight emigrated toward Palestine. The air of Hitler's Germany was becoming more and more suffocating. Those who preferred to wait, thinking that the Nazi regime would not last, could not last, would regret it later, when it was too late. </blockquote>

<blockquote>
The fact is that Hitler was beloved by his people — not the military, at least not in the beginning, but by the average Germans who pledged to him an affection, a tenderness and a fidelity that bordered on the irrational. It was idolatry on a national scale. One had to see the crowds who acclaimed him. And the women who were attracted to him. And the young who in his presence went into ecstasy. Did they not see the hateful mask that covered his face? Did they not divine the catastrophe he bore within himself?"[http://www.time.com/time/time100/leaders/profile/hitler.html]
</blockquote>

===War===
[[Image:Hitler munich1914.jpg|right|200px|thumb|Hitler in the crowd in Munich, 1914, reacting to the news of Germany's entry in the First World War.]]
By 1913 Hitler was in Munich, Germany, with war clouds on the horizon. Classified as unfit for service in the Austrian army (possibly by faking, as he did not like the thought of serving Austria) in 1914, he volunteered for the German army, joining the 16th Bavarian Reserve Infantry Regiment, greeting the war with enthusiasm, and finding the military discipline and comradeship satisfying. He served during the entire First World War as a messenger carrying dispatches between units, and often at the front lines under fire; he was wounded in 1916, and gassed in 1918. His bravery during this time earned him the Iron Cross, 2nd Class, in December, 1914, and in August 1918 he was awarded the Iron Cross, 1st Class – a rare decoration for a corporal. But the gassing would take him out of the war and into a hospital, where he would be told the heart-wrenching news of Germany’s defeat the following November.

==Path to power==
After the war ended, Hitler's future seemed uncertain. There was much discontent among demobilized veterans because of the lack of employment. The German military had felt it had not been defeated; indeed, the German Army stood on foreign soil when the Armistice was signed November 11, 1918 and not a square inch of German soil had been occupied. This was despite the fact that the German Army's strongest position, the Hindenburg line, had been broken by the Allies, and the German Army itself was in full retreat. However, the Army felt they had done their job, and the nation had been "stabbed in the back" by a gang of traitors who sought to lay hands on the Fatherland. The "myth" that Germany had been defeated was the "big lie" Hitler spoke of, as if repeating it often enough would cause people to believe it.

After his discharge from the hospital, Hitler acted as an army political agent, assigned in Munich to gather information on the various political parties which had spring up amid the social chaos following Germany’s defeat. In September, 1919, he was given orders to investigate the relatively-minor German Workers’ Party (''Deutsche Arbeiterpartei''); intrigued by the party’s apparatus and its racial, pan-German nationalism, he joined, becoming its 55th member; he left the army soon after and devoted himself to improving the party’s propaganda, as well as his own position within.

Conditions in Germany fostered the development of the party. Economic woes brought widespread discontent, added to the furor surrounding the loss of the war and the harsh terms heaped upon Germany by the Allied Powers in the Versailles Peace Treaty. Bavaria’s traditional separatism from the central government in Berlin made current conditions especially sharp, and Hitler was savvy enough to take full advantage of them. When he joined, he found the party ineffective in leadership and uncertain as to its aims; he accepted the party program, but regarded it as a means to an end. He caused friction with other members of the party, and their attempts to control him caused a threat of resignation; realizing that the future of the party now depended on Hitler, who clearly had a talent of organization, fund collecting, and above all, speaking, they declined to accept it; from July, 1921 Hitler was regarded as the party leader with nearly unlimited power. From his party newspaper, ''Völkischer Beobachter'' (“Popular Observer”), he spewed out endless propaganda. His meetings where he spoke grew from handfuls to hundreds, and then on to thousands. A man of charismatic personality, he quickly attracted a circle of loyal and devoted followers: Julius Streicher, Alfred Rosenberg, Hermann Göring, and Rudolf Hess.

Munich was also a gathering place for former servicemen dissatisfied with conditions in the country; members of the Freikorps, which had been organized after the war from army units that refused to return to civilian life; and those civilians who plotted against the republic. Many of these men joined the Nazi Party. Among them was a staff member of the district command who had joined the German Workers’ Party before Hitler, Ernst Röhm, a pudgy man with a scared face who saw his own ambition in helping further Hitler’s rise within the party. Röhm recruited what came to be known as the “Brown Shirts”, the violent squads used to attack socialists and communists, and to protect party meetings whenever Hitler was speaking. By 1921 they were organized into a private army called the ''Sturmabteilung'', abbreviated to S.A.

==The Beer Hall Putsch==
Germany in 1923 was marked by social and political unrest caused by hyperinflation. In this time Hitler was able convince [[Erich Ludendorff]], an accomplished general and leader of the German forces in the first World War, to join him in a coup d'etat (''Putsch'' in German). When Hitler learned that the nationalist prime minister of Bavaria was giving a speech to 3000 officials in one of Munich's biggest beer halls (the Haufbrau Haus), he ordered his paramilitaries to surround the building. Hitler went inside and took the prime minister hostage, announced a revolution, and attempted to convince him to join the coup against Berlin and become member in his new administration. The Bavarian prime minister agreed under pressure, but informed the nation via radio later that night that he did not support Hitler. The prime minister also informed the federal government in Berlin; the putsch had begun to fail.

The next morning, 9 November 1923, Hitler and Ludendorff were marching with approximately 2000 partly armed supporters through Munich in a show of strength to regain the momentum. In the ensuing fight between Hitler's marchers and a cordon of police and army units at least 14 Nazi supporters and three policemen were killed and hundreds wounded. Ludendorff handed himself over to the authorities, while Hitler fled soon after the fighting began. Hitler was arrested a few days later at a friend's house, were had been in hiding since the failed coup. Ludendorff was acquitted of all charges, while Hitler was sentenced to 5 years in prison (he would do eight months). <ref>http://history1900s.about.com/cs/thirdreich/a/beerhallputsch_2.htm</ref><ref>http://www.historyplace.com/worldwar2/timeline/putsch2.htm</ref> The Bavarian prime minister, who foiled the plan, was killed in 1934 in the "Night of the Long Knives".

===''Mein Kampf''===

Hitler had his inner circle as frequent visitors in his prison cell, which was made more comfortable due to his celebrity. While there, he dictated to Rudolf Hess the first volume of ''Mein Kampf'' (“My Struggle”), his political autobiography and a compendium of his many ideas.

Hitler believed in the inequality of the races, nations, and individuals as part of the natural order of mankind, and chief among them was the exalted “Aryan race”, and the greatest of the Aryans were the Germans. It was the German, according to Hitler, that gave the world civilization and the arts; to safeguard the German people as a race (the “Volk”), they would need to be united under a single leader (the Führer), where they would be protected from their three principle enemies: Marxism, which included social democracy as well as communism; democracy and its mob-rule, as shown by the failings of the Weimar Republic; and above all what Hitler called the poisoners of humanity, the Jews. “Rational anti-Semitism must lead to systematic legal opposition,” he wrote in 1919. “Its final objective must be the removal of the Jews altogether.” In Mein Kampf, he told the world that the Jew was the “destroyer of culture,” “a parasite within the nation,” and “a menace.”

==Rebuilding the Nazi Party==
[[Image:Hitler_speech.jpg|thumb|200px|right|Hitler speaking; he would often employ physical gesturing to emphasize a point.]]
[[Image:Hitler-3.jpg‎ |right|200px|thumb|Hitler in car, saluting passing S.A. at one of many parades.]]
Internal dissention within the party caused it to languish while Hitler was in prison. When he was released he saw difficulties in the country that had not existed before the Putsch, namely currency reform that brought economic stability, and the scaling back of the war reparations as a result of the Dawes Plan. Hitler was also forbidden to speak in public, which remained in force until 1928; however, he wasn’t about to stop his rebuilding of the party nor of his re-establishing his own position within it as leader, despite Gregor Strasser’s opposition in northern Germany. By 1927 the number of Nazis was in the hundreds of thousands.

A new period of political and economic instability with the onset of the Great Depression which threw millions out of work in Europe and North America. To campaign against the [[Young Plan]] (a second renegotiation of war reparations payments) Hitler made an alliance with one of Germany’s leading nationalists, Alfred Hugenberg, whose newspapers enabled Hitler to reach a national audience for the first time. The alliance also had another advantage: it enabled him to seek support from many in business and industry who controlled funds going into politics, and who themselves were desirous of seeing Germany under the control of a strong anti-Soviet and Communist subversion regime. The subsidies Hitler received placed the Nazy Party on a strong financial footing, enabling him to make his emotional appeal to the lower middle class and the unemployed in his faith that Germany would recover from its suffering and be a great nation once more. The alliance with the industrialists also demonstrated another aspect of Hitler, a skill of effectively using those that would use him, which many would discover when it was too late.

The electoral strength of the Nazis grew during the Depression, as unceasing propaganda accused the government of failing to improve conditions for the working man. By the fall of 1930 the Nazis captured more than 18 percent of the vote, compared to just 2.6 percent in 1928. Hitler captured 36.8 percent of the vote when he opposed Paul von Hindenburg in the 1932 presidential election; his mass following put him in such a strong position that he entered a series of closed-door intrigues with Franz von Papen, Oskar Hindenburg, and Otto Meissner, all sharing a fear and loathing of a communist government. Despite the party losing votes in the November, 1932 election, Hitler insisted on nothing less than the office of chancellor for himself. For him, it was all or nothing. Hindenburg offered it to him on January 30, 1933.

==In power==
Almost immediately, Hitler established himself as dictator. Less than a month after taking office, on February 27 the Reichstag building was set on fire under mysterious circumstances (but officially blamed on a feeble-minded Dutch communist, Marinus van der Lubbe); Hitler soon after succeeded in getting several decrees passed removing much of the guarantees of freedom in the name of state security, and which also allowed an intensified campaign of violence against dissidents. Incredibly, in a special election set in those conditions on March 5, the Nazis pulled 43.9 percent of the vote. On March 21, the new Reichstag assembled at the Potsdam Church, as much a show of unity between the old guard under Hindenburg and the Nazis as it was a show of peace. Two days later the Enabling Act was passed, giving Hitler full powers; with the exception of the Nazis, all other political parties, including those which had helped pass the Enabling Act, ceased to exist within three months. Many of their leaders were tossed in concentration camps.

===Night of the Long Knives===
[[Image:HitlerRohm1933.JPG|right|200px|thumb|Hitler with Ernst Röhm in 1933]]
Hitler, however, did not wish to start an immediate revolution. He still needed the support of the one agency he needed to implement his ideas: the army. But he did have one growing problem that was a thorn in the army’s side, the million-plus men of the S.A. and their leader, Ernst Röhm, who wanted nothing less than the merger of the S.A. into the army, with himself in overall command. At first, Hitler tried getting Röhm’s support by persuasion, but Hitler’s inner circle was for removing him by any means possible. On June 29, 1934, Hitler ordered a purge, flew towards a resort near Munich where a number of S.A. leaders were vacationing, and had them all arrested; many would be shot without trial. Refusing to shoot himself when offered, Röhm was killed in his cell at Dachau, his last words, ironically, “Mein Führer, mein Führer!” [http://www.historyplace.com/worldwar2/timeline/roehm.htm][http://www.adolfhitler.ws/lib/nsdap/Rohm.html] [http://www.dhm.de/lemo/html/nazi/innenpolitik/roehm/index.html]
On July 13, Hitler gave speech in the Reichstag, announcing that some seventy-four individuals had been shot for threatening the stability of the Reich.
:''"If anyone reproaches me and asks why I did not resort to the regular courts of justice, then all I can say is this: In this hour I was responsible for the fate of the German people, and thereby I became the supreme judge of the German people…It was no secret that this time the revolution would have to be bloody; when we spoke of it we called it 'The Night of the Long Knives.' Everyone must know for all future time that if he raises his hand to strike the State, then certain death is his lot." ''
Hitler also used this event to settle his account with other opponents, such as Georg Strasser, who stood for a more socialist and less racist national socialism, and the former Bavarian prime minister who foiled the Beer Hall Putsch in 1923. Satisfied that the S.A. leadership was thoroughly broken up (thousands of S.A. members were either arrested or killed that night), the army approved of Hitler’s actions. Hindenburg died a few days later on August 2, and Hitler merged the office of president with the chancellorship, and with it the supreme command of the German armed forces. During this time the world was slowly recovering economically from the Depression, but it quickened in Germany, coincidently with Hitler’s rise to power. Taking credit for the recovery made him very popular, bringing him a 90 percent approval rating in a voter plebiscite that year.

===Beginnings of expansion===
In matters of state, the running of domestic affairs was left to subordinates, which was something Hitler had little attention for. Foreign policy always peaked his interest, in so much as to the advantages of a “Greater Germany”, which was his chief ambition. The first part of realizing this, according to ''Mein Kampf'', was to be a reunion of the German peoples within Europe; the second would be an expansion of Germany to the east (lebensraum). Expanding would mean a renewed conflict with the Slavic peoples, whom Hitler intended to serve as slaves to the “New German Order.” To follow through on his ambitions, he would have to remove Poland and the Soviet Union as countries; France also would have to be stabilized in the west, as she was Germany’s enemy for more than a century. He counted as possible allies Italy, with its fascist government under [[Benito Mussolini]], and Britain, whom he regarded as having a similar, Teutonic heritage.
[[Image:Hitler6-thumb.jpg|right|200px|thumb|Hitler with his dog, Blondie. He regarded dogs as better than people.]]
Before any of his ambitions could take place, there was one thing he detested which needed immediate removal: the restrictions placed upon Germany by the Treaty of Versailles at the end of World War I. Posing as a man of peace to allay suspicions, he insisted that he was a champion of Europe wishing only for the removal of the inequalities leveled by the treaty, and posturing as a shield against Bolshevism. In October, 1933, he had Germany withdraw from the [[League of Nations]]. The following January he signed a non-aggression treaty with Poland. His individual repudiations of parts of the treaty were followed by offers of negotiations for new agreements, while maintaining Germany’s limited ambitious nature.

While this was going on, Germany was steadily building up the armed forces. Rigorous training using wooden guns and trucks marked as “tanks” got needed battlefield training for officers. Potential fighter pilots began their training in gliders at public demonstrations – Germany, under terms of the treaty, was not allowed an air force – and later they would fly in new civilian stunt planes and transports, which on the drawing board were designed to be rapidly turned into fighters and bombers. Conscription was introduced in January, 1935, and in June of that year Hitler successfully signed a naval treaty with Britain, giving him rights to a respectable navy; but even while the ink was drying, Germany was secretly building a large U-boat fleet.

The matter of reuniting the German peoples came into being in July, 1934, and here Hitler overreached. German organizations were covertly aiding Austrian Nazis in the overthrow of their government, culminating in an attempted revolt as well as murdering Chancellor Engelbert Dollfuss. When the attempt clearly failed, Hitler denied involvement. In January, 1935, a plebecite was introduced in the Saarland; more than 90 percent voted to return the territory to Germany. Then in March, 1936, came his greatest slap to the Versailles Treaty: against the advice of his generals, and in open defiance of France and Britain, he ordered troops into the demilitarized Rhineland. Germany was once again becoming the leading power in continental Europe. By October, 1936, Germany had signed an alliance with Italy, proclaiming a “Rome-Berlin axis,” followed by the Anti-Comintern Pact with Japan. All three countries would sign a single, mutual alliance pact, the following year.

==Anschluss==

Removed from their offices in January 1938 were Hjalmar Schacht (economic ministry); Werner von Fritsch (soldiers’ representative); and Konstantin von Neurath (foreign office); the reason being was they were not fully accepting of Nazism. Beginning his plans of German conquest, he started with Austria. Kurt von Schuschnigg, the Austrian chancellor, was invited to Berchtesgaden in February, where he was browbeaten and forced to sign an agreement placing Austrian Nazis in the government. When Schuschnigg resisted and announced a plebiscite for Austrian voters concerning independence, Hitler ordered German troops into Austria, completely taking over the country within days. His return to Vienna was in triumph; enthusiastic crowds greeted him by the tens of thousands, in sharp contrast to the scenes of privation he had gone through there in his youth. Austria was annexed (Anschluss) to the Reich a short time later.

While the Anschluss was going on, Hitler was speaking in friendly terms with Czechoslovakia; nearly as soon as Austria ceased to exist, Hitler proceeded with his plans against the Czechs. The northwestern region of Czechoslovakia was the Sudetenland, inhabited by a German minority, and the leader of them, Konrad Henlein, was instructed to make impossible demands for those Germans on the Czech government. In the interest of preventing a general war (which Hitler wanted), Mussolini and British prime minister Neville Chamberlain concluded a peaceful agreement in Munich on September 30, giving Hitler the Sudetenland without firing a shot. Chamberlain would return to Britain, waving the agreement signed between himself and Hitler, declaring it to be “peace for our time”, but his act of appeasement would ensure the peace would last only a few more months. Despite assurances that the Sudetenland was his last territorial demands, “Czechia”, as the remainder of Czechoslovakia was called, became a German protectorate on March 15, 1939, when Hitler ordered it occupied. Just over a week later, Lithuania was forced to cede to Germany the territory of Memel (Klaipeda), on the border of East Prussia.

==Poland==
Poland’s turn was next, and listening to the rumblings was France and Britain, which signed guarantees of mutual assistance to the Polish nation should it be attacked by Germany. Hitler also signed pacts: a “Pact of Steel” with Italy, strengthening the alliance between Rome and Berlin, and then a treaty that caught many off-guard: a non-aggression pact with the Soviet Union on August 23. A secret clause in the pact allowed for the simultaneous invasion of Poland, and the division of the country in the center from north to south. Poland was invaded on September 1; two days later, Britain and France declared war on Germany.

Hitler assumed his own war strategy. Poland was conquered within weeks, and when a desired peace accord with Britain failed to materialize, he ordered the army to prepare for a western offensive. Norway was invaded and occupied, forestalling a British move on that country; Denmark was occupied by April, 1940. Hitler than adopted General Erich von Manstien’s plan for an offensive against France itself, which would move through neutral Belgium’s Ardenne Forest on May 10, taking that country as a matter of convenience, as well as avoiding the static fortifications of France’s Maginot Line. The German forces, extremely successful in their operations, reached the coastal ports on the English Channel in 10 days; Holland and Belgium both surrendered within days. But south of Dunkirk was where the army was ordered to halt. Hitler had hoped even at this stage in the battle that Britain would commit to peace; instead, the halting of the German army allowed the British remove 170,000 fighting men.

On June 10, Italy entered the war as German tanks were sweeping across northern France. Hitler signed an armistice with France on June 22, the signing taking place in the same rail car at the same site where the Germans surrendered in 1918.

Having failed in getting the British to sign an armistice, Hitler prepared his forces for “Operation Sea Lion,” the invasion of Britain; at the same time, he was also preparing to double-cross his erstwhile partner in the Poland conquest, Joseph Stalin and the Soviet Union. Then Mussolini invaded Greece, got bogged down in the Balkans, and the threat loomed that he would lose his whole army there. Hitler found it necessary to come to his aid, while at the same time taking direct control of Yugoslavia in the wake of the overthrow of the pro-Nazi government.

==Barbarossa==
The attack on Soviet Russia began June 22, 1941. Rapid in its advancement, the German army captured a large swath of territory between the Baltic and Black seas, and captured close to 3,000,000 prisoners. But Hitler, already micro-managing military operations, became overbearing to his generals; he preferred to go after many targets, while his generals argued for a single objective. A few miles in front of Moscow, the German army was halted by a Russian offensive in December, as well as something he had absolutely no control over: the severe Russian winter.

In the lands already occupied by German forces, S.S. chief Heinrich Himmler was preparing the ground for Hitler’s new German order. Expelling the Jews from Germany was the first step, and this was carried out by laws and decrees beginning in 1933; the Germans would switch to outright force in 1939, as Jews were first deported en-masse to Poland, then walled into ghettos after the occupation began. By 1941, a policy crafted under S.S. general Reinhard Heydrich had changed expulsion for extermination in what was called "a final solution to the Jewish question" (''die Endlösung der Judenfrage''). The system of concentration camps was supplemented by the creation of specialized killing centers in the occupied countries, especially in Poland, where camps such as Auschwitz, Treblinka, Sobibor, and Belzac “processed” thousands of victims daily. Some six million Jews died during what was called the [[Holocaust]], as well as an additional five million Slavs, Gypsies, the handicapped, the aged, and many others that the Nazis considered “subhuman” in accordance with German racial policies. [http://www.historyplace.com/worldwar2/riseofhitler/burns.htm]

==Beginning of the end==
[[Image:Adolf_hitler6.jpg‎ |right|200px|thumb|Hitler in 1944, by now looking like a tired, strained man.]]
Hitler grew increasingly strained by the end of 1942, depending on large amounts of drugs supplied by his physician, Theodor Morell, as a result of the twin defeats of El Alamein (which he lost the bulk of his Afrika corps to British general Montgomery), and Stalingrad (where he lost an entire army of 250,000 men to the Russians). He spent more time in his headquarters in East Prussia, and his time in the public eye ceased to exist. He refused to visit bombed German cities, and, as with Stalingrad, refused to allow German armies to withdraw from the battlefield when the situation was lost. Still, he could make stunning, decisive decisions when called for, such as the commando raid that resulted in the rescue of Benito Mussolini from Italian partisans in July, 1943.

But the defeat of Germany in the war was looming closer. Hitler’s relations with his leading commanders grew strained, the more so as he allowed units of the S.S. to take positions traditionally held by the army. The line at the eastern front was slowly being pushed back by the Soviets, while in the Atlantic his U-boats campaign had faltered. German cities were constantly being bombed, and a successful invasion on the Normandy coast of France in June, 1944 marked the beginning of the end.

===Assassination attempt===
[[Image:NWT Hitler dead.jpg|left|200px|thumb|Hitler's death as covered by the ''New York Times'', May 2, 1945.]]
Seeing Germany’s chances of surviving the war were desperate, a group of officers plotted to assassinate Hitler, planning several attempts in 1943-44, but nearly successful on July 20, 1944, when a bomb hidden in a briefcase by Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg went off under a table that Hitler and others were leaning over; four were killed outright, several suffered injuries, but Hitler escaped relatively unharmed (the bomb itself was set down away from Hitler behind a solid oak table leg, saving him). The conspirators were quickly rounded up; Stauffenberg was shot. The remainder were put on show trials and condemned to hang on meat hooks with piano wire. It was said that Hitler enjoyed watching film of their executions. As a result of the bomb, Nazi members were employed at key positions within the army, removing any trace of the army’s independence.

Within months nearly all of the territory occupied by Germany was now in Allied hands. A last offensive in December, 1944 to take the port of Antwerp, Belgium, failed. Hitler had by them grown ill; his hopes for a German victory bordered on the fantastical and the imagination. By January, 1945 he had moved into his command bunker in Berlin, where he gave orders deploying fictional divisions to counter the ever-closer Soviets. When all seemed lost, he gave out his final orders: first, appointing Admiral Karl Dönitz as head of the state and his successor, and Josef Goebbels as chancellor; and second, dictating his last political will which was an attempt to justify his life’s work.

On April 29, he committed the one truly-chivalrous act of his life: he married Eva Braun, his long-time mistress. After retiring to his room in the bunker the next day, Eva took poison, and Hitler put a bullet in his head. In accordance with his wishes, both bodies were burned. His Third Reich would outlive him for another week.

[[Elie Wiesel]] wrote the following in [[Time Magazine]] regarding Hitler:
{{cquote|Adolf Hitler or the incarnation of absolute evil; this is how future generations will remember the all-powerful Fuehrer of the criminal Third Reich. Compared with him, his peers [[Mussolini]] and [[Franco]] were novices. Under his hypnotic gaze, humanity crossed a threshold from which one could see the abyss. "Before Hitler, we thought we had sounded the depths of human nature," argues Ron Rosenbaum, author of "Explaining Hitler." "He showed how much lower we could go, and that's what was so horrifying. It gets us wondering not just at the depths he showed us but whether there is worse to come. The power of Hitler was to confound the modernist notion that judgments about good and [[evil]] were little more than matters of taste, reflections of social class and power and status. Although some modern scholars drive past the notion of evil and instead explain Hitler's conduct as a reflection of his childhood and self-esteem issues, for most survivors of the 20th century he is confirmation of our instinctive sense that evil does exist. It moves among us; it leads us astray and deploys powerful, subtle weapons against even the sturdiest souls." <ref>http://www.time.com/time/time100/leaders/profile/hitler.html</ref>}}

==Hitler and the Theory of Evolution==
[[Image:Hitlerrisetopower.jpg|right|225px|thumb]]
The staunch evolutionist Stephen Gould admitted the following:
{{cquote|[[Ernst Haeckel|Haeckel]] was the chief apostle of evolution in [[Germany]].... His evolutionary racism; his call to the German people for racial purity and unflinching devotion to a "just" state; his belief that harsh, inexorable laws of evolution ruled human civilization and nature alike, conferring upon favored races the right to dominate others; the irrational mysticism that had always stood in strange communion with his brave words about objective science - all contributed to the rise of Nazism. - Stephen J. Gould, "Ontogeny and Phylogeny," Belknap Press: Cambridge MA, 1977, pp.77-78). <ref>http://members.iinet.net.au/~sejones/social.html</ref>}}

In regards to evolutionary racism [[Adolph Hitler]] wrote the following in his work [[Mein Kampf]]:
{{cquote|The Germans were the higher race, destined for a glorious evolutionary future. For this reason it was essential that the [[Jew]]s should be segregated, otherwise mixed marriages would take place. Were this to happen, all nature’s efforts “to establish an evolutionary higher stage of being may thus be rendered futile.”<ref>http://www.creationontheweb.com/content/view/1675</ref>}}

Hitler also wrote in Mein Kampf:
{{cquote|The stronger must dominate and not blend with the weaker, thus sacrificing his own greatness. Only the born weakling can view this as cruel, but he, after all, is only a weak and limited man; for if this law did not prevail, any conceivable higher development (Hoherentwicklung) of organic living beings would be unthinkable.<ref>http://www.icr.org/index.php?module=articles&action=view&ID=268</ref>}}

Dr. Robert E.D. Clark wrote in his work ''Darwin, Before and After'' the following regarding Hitler and the theory of evolution: “Adolf Hitler’s mind was captivated by evolutionary teaching — probably since the time he was a boy. Evolutionary ideas — quite undisguised — lie at the basis of all that is worst in Mein Kampf — and in his public speeches”.<ref>http://www.christiancourier.com/articles/read/the_holocaust_why_did_it_happen</ref>

Richard Hickman in his work ''Biocreation'' concurs and wrote the following:
{{cquote|It is perhaps no coincidence that Adolf Hitler was a firm believer in and preacher of evolutionism. Whatever the deeper, profound, complexities of his [[psychosis]], it is certain that [the concept of struggle was important for]. . . his book, Mein Kampf clearly set forth a number of evolutionary ideas, particularly those emphasizing struggle, survival of the fittest and extermination of the weak to produce a better society. <ref>http://www.creationism.org/csshs/v08n3p24.htm</ref>}}

Noted evolutionary [[anthropology|anthropologists]] Sir [[Arthur Keith]] conceded the following in regards to Hitler: “The German Fuhrer, as I have consistently maintained, is an evolutionist; he has consciously sought to make the practices of Germany conform to the theory of evolution”.<ref>http://www.christiancourier.com/articles/read/the_holocaust_why_did_it_happen</ref>

[[Pulitzer Prize]] winning author [[Marilynne Robinson]] wrote the following regarding Hitler's racism in the November 2006 issue of [[Harper’s Magazine]]:
{{cquote|While it is true that persecution of the Jews has a very long history in [[Europe]], it is also true that science in the twentieth century revived and absolutized persecution by giving it a fresh rationale — Jewishness was not religious or cultural, but genetic. Therefore no appeal could be made against the brute fact of a Jewish grandparent.

[[Richard Dawkins|Dawkins]] deals with all this in one sentence. Hitler did his evil "in the name of. . . an insane and unscientific [[eugenics]] theory." But eugenics is science as surely as totemism is religion. That either is in error is beside the point. Science quite appropriately acknowledges that error should be assumed, and at best it proceeds by a continuous process of criticism meant to isolate and identify error. So bad science is still science in more or less the same sense that bad religion is still religion. That both of them can do damage on a huge scale is clear. The prestige of both is a great part of the problem, and in the modern period the credibility of anything called science is enormous. As the history of eugenics proves, science at the highest levels is no reliable corrective to the influence of cultural prejudice but is in fact profoundly vulnerable to it.

There is indeed historical precedent in the [[Spanish Inquisition]] for the notion of hereditary Judaism. But the fact that the worst religious thought of the sixteenth century can be likened to the worst scientific thought of the twentieth century hardly redounds to the credit of science."<ref>http://solutions.synearth.net/2006/10/20</ref><ref>http://www.uncommondescent.com/intelligent-design/someone-finally-said-it-dawkinss-hysterical-scientism/</ref>}}

==References==
{{reflist|2}}

==Sources==
*[http://www.nizkor.org/hweb/people/h/hitler-adolf/oss-papers/text/profile-index.htmlA Psychological Analysis of Adolf Hitler, His Life and Legend], Walter C. Langer, Office of Strategic Services, Washington, D.C.
{{DEFAULTSORT: Hitler, Adolf}}
[[Category:Dictators]]
[[Category:Fascists]]
[[Category:Conspiracy theorists]]
[[Category:Mass murderers]]
[[Category:Nazis]]

Talk:Barack Hussein Obama

2008-02-02T00:03:57Z

Darkmind1970: /* "He has no clear personal achievement that cannot be explained as the likely result of affirmative action" */

Talk:Operation Overlord

2008-02-01T16:08:41Z

Darkmind1970:

Operation Overlord

2008-02-01T16:08:00Z

Darkmind1970:

Talk:Barack Hussein Obama

2008-02-01T15:54:36Z

Darkmind1970: /* "He has no clear personal achievement that cannot be explained as the likely result of affirmative action" */

Talk:Liberal denial

2008-02-01T15:45:43Z

Darkmind1970:

One might say there's a such thing as conservative denial as well. One just might. [[User:Maestro|Maestro]] 14:13, 5 June 2007 (EDT)
:Surely the collapse of the Soviet Bloc due to its utter inability to manage a moder economy had a bigger impact that Reagan's words? Come on, this is facile at best. [[User:Darkmind1970|Darkmind1970]] 18:59, 24 January 2008 (EST)

:: See? You help illustrate our point!--[[User:Aschlafly|Aschlafly]] 19:05, 24 January 2008 (EST)

::: Uh? What he's saying sounds far more logical. With the Soviet Union in pieces, there was no reason for them to be controlling half of Germany. Thus, Germany was reunited,and the wall dismantled. Claiming it was simply Reagen's command that did it is... Well, bloody stupid at best. [[User:Barikada|Barikada]] 19:14, 24 January 2008 (EST)

:::: Um, Reagan called on Gorbachev to tear the Berlin Wall down in 1987. The Wall fell in November 1989. When George HW Bush was President. And when the Soviet Union had realised that its hold on Eastern Europe was no longer possible, due to its economic collapse. [[User:Darkmind1970|Darkmind1970]] 19:18, 31 January 2008 (EST)

::::: Really??? You mean that the Wall didn't fall the very next day after Reagan's speech??? Thanks for demonstrating how this point is an example of [[liberal denial]].--[[User:Aschlafly|Aschlafly]] 22:58, 31 January 2008 (EST)

:::::: ... Either you never learned proper English, or you really need to crack open a textbook, man. I strongly advise rewriting that so it doesn't look like you're accusing him of denying the Berlin Wall (I assume that's what you meant, and not the Pink Floyd movie) fell the day after Reagan's speech, as if that was what happened. [[User:Barikada|Barikada]] 23:20, 31 January 2008 (EST)

::::::: Quite correct, the wall did not fall the next day - or the next week, or the next month. It fell almost two and a half years later. You might as well credit President Kennedy for its fall by objecting to it in 1963 with his "Ich Bin Ein Berliner" speech. [[User:Darkmind1970|Darkmind1970]] 10:45, 1 February 2008 (EST)

== Not Fair! ==

Come on people, this is meant to be an encyclopedia, not a summary of an [[Ann Coulter]] book [[User:DLerner|DLerner]]

:Oh come on, we all know democracy had nothing to do with the Greeks or the Iroquois. [[User:Barikada|Barikada]] 23:24, 31 January 2008 (EST)

:Aside from that, the entire concept is a catch-22: Anyone who denies any of those things is automatically a liberal, and if they deny that, well, that's only further proof they're liberals. [[User:Barikada|Barikada]] 23:26, 31 January 2008 (EST)

:Barikada, how do the Greeks fit here?
[[User:DLerner|DLerner]]

::The first democractic system resembling current democracy was implemented by the Greeks, if evil public schooling hasn't lied to me. [[User:Barikada|Barikada]] 23:30, 31 January 2008 (EST)

== Abortions and breast cancer ==

Is it ''plainly true'' that abortion increases the likelihood of breast cancer?

My understanding is that such a claim is not supported by the medical literature. --[[User:GDewey|GDewey]] 00:02, 1 February 2008 (EST)

: Your understanding is from [[liberal denial]]s. Yes, it is "plainly true" and undeniable, just as no one denies that childbirth reduces the incidence of breast cancer. Don't be fooled by liberal denials - the truth shall set you free.--[[User:Aschlafly|Aschlafly]] 00:17, 1 February 2008 (EST)

::See? Catch-22. Do you have a reputable medical source for this, Mr. Schlafly? [[User:Barikada|Barikada]] 00:19, 1 February 2008 (EST)

:::I was thinking of this: http://www.cancer.gov/cancertopics/factsheet/Risk/abortion-miscarriage for example (although I note that it is a few years old). It concludes that there is no increase in risk. It seems to me that if the National Cancer Institute says there is no increase in the risk then it is a bit of a stretch to say that it is ''plainly true'' that the risk increase exists. Surely you can't really call something plainly true when it goes against wht the experts are saying. --[[User:GDewey|GDewey]] 00:29, 1 February 2008 (EST)