Distillation of relevant parts of WW II

June 6, 1944, the Allies stormed the Omaha Beach in Normandy.  A thousand soldiers died from German machine guns.  The allies prevailed and chased the Germans out of France.  General Patton told General Eisenhower that he pissed in the Rhine River.  August 26, 1944, Charles DeGaul marched down the Champs Elyse’es in liberated Paris.  For them the war was over!  However, on December 16, 1944, Adolph Hitler launched a counter offensive from Germany from the north into France.  Just eight days later on December 24,1944, Uberlieutenant Gerhard Meyer fired a torpedo from U-486 into the SS Leopoldville, killing my uncle Carl Ralph Bonde, Jr. outright.  April 30, 1945, Hitler squeezed the trigger of a pistol in his mouth, killing himself.  Germany surrendered 8 days later. Russia, under Stalin, had surrounded Berlin from the East back in January, 1945.  My friend, Bert Pfeiffer, a WWII veteran and professor of physiology in Missoula at the University, remained a Stalinist Communist until his death.  Some could not understand his allegiance to the Communists.  The FBI, under J. Edgar Hoover, wire tapped his telephone.  Later, in 1978, Bert received a check from the government to compensate him for the intrusion into his privacy.