How can anyone ever in service forget the welcome call to “Take 10 smoke ‘em if you got ‘em!” Or, how about the threatening tone of “Field strip that cigarette butt, Soldier!” (Break down the cigarette butt – scattering the tobacco and rolling the piece of paper into a tiny ball – like field stripping an M-1 rifle into its component parts.) Our British cousins “across the pond” had already been fighting for two years, and only they stood between Germany and its conquest of all of Europe. Just as the country began to get its economic footing, and life held a bit more promise for these young adults, war intervened in 1941, and they made even greater sacrifices in the next four years. These young men and women had grown to adulthood in one of the most turbulent and difficult financial times in America – the Great Depression. Tom Brokaw gave the well-deserved name to those young men and women who fought to defeat the Axis powers, regimes that will be remembered among the evilest in history. You will have an experience that you will remember forever. And if you visit Normandy, do not miss an opportunity to have him guide you across this hallowed ground. Please take a look at his website and consider subscribing to his virtual tours. Patrick has twice shown me around the beaches and hedgerows that were the sites of unbelievable battles, and to the American cemetery at Colleville sur Mer.Īt his website,, you can see his detailed and informative podcasts as he guides his visitors around these historic places. They are Brits who have made Normandy their home and who guide tours of the area. Fortunately, through mutual friends, I have had the pleasure of meeting Patrick Hilyer and his lovely wife Nicky. I have long been interested in the D-Day story and have visited Normandy many times. This story about tobacco is a mere sideline to the drama of that day and that war. These would send 156 thousand men ashore that day to begin the long-awaited fight to liberate Europe from the clutch of Nazi Germany. The sea force was supplemented by 2,395 aircraft, and 867 gliders. On the morning of June 6, 1944, 6,939 ships, the mightiest armada the world had ever seen, or probably ever will see, approached the beaches at Normandy. We will tell the World War II story about tobacco and eventually work backward through America’s war history. But we have recently observed June 6, the 77th anniversary of D-Day in Normandy, and it is timely to begin with World War II because of that most important anniversary. We could begin with tobacco in the Revolutionary War and trace its impact forward through time. And even the rare soldier who did not use tobacco found the cigarettes to be a convenient medium for barter, either with fellow troopers or the civilian population who loved the American cigarettes when they could get them. They were looking for anything that would get them through the next day, or perhaps the next ten minutes. At the time, the young men and women who put their lives on the line could not have been very concerned about the ill effects of tobacco that they might suffer in thirty or forty years. While this could be viewed as totally self-serving and cynical, the troops nevertheless appreciated the free cigarettes during the World Wars. So, the tobacco companies “wrapped themselves in the flag,” using advertising and free cigarettes to create a patriotic image as they expanded the market for tobacco products. The true health dangers from tobacco were still unrecognized, even when the Korean War was fought in the early 1950s. There was something about the nicotine that calmed the nerves, relieved the constant tension. From the Civil War through Vietnam, American troops discovered tobacco.
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