Spanking the MSM by correspondence

We get mail. Oh boy, do we get mail sometimes!

I couldn't have said it better myself:

One of my beefs about the Canadian media is its ignorance about military affairs (I must admit that is only one area where they show their ignorance). The 'journalist' who exemplifies total ignorance is Eric Margolis, an American who shills for the Sun Media chain.

He should refrain completely from commenting on military issues. His 7 June 2009 article in the Sun Media to mark the 65th anniversary of D Day was a gem. In it he made the absurd claim that: "The second largest amphibious operation in western Europe during the Second World War was the Wehrmacht's opposed crossing of the Rhine in June 1940."

This from a journalist who claims to be "a former instructor of military history and lover of history." I refer him to a Veterans Affairs booklet meant for primary school children which would have given him the correct facts. First, Germany launched her attack on 10 May, which as far as I know, occurs before June. Two weeks later the German army was deep inside France, and on 26 May the British army began its evacuation at Dunkirk. Belgium surrendered a few days later and the French army was crushed by early June.

Second, there was no requirement for the German army to make an "opposed crossing of the Rhine". The day war broke out, Germany controlled well over 350 kilometres of both banks of the Rhine and much of her invasion force already was on the west side of the river. Surely Margolis, who describes himself as an "experienced foreign correspondent", should know that major German cities such as Saarbrucken and Aachen are well to the west of the Rhine and that both ends of at least ten major bridges cross it, including those at Koln, Bonn, and Mainz had been in German territory since Hitler re-occupied the Rhineland in 1936.

Although the German army did cross the Rhine in the north when it invaded neutral Belgium and the Netherlands on 10 May, it relied largely on airborne and glider troops to secure the crossings, and its army drove across the captured bridges. The terror bombing of Rotterdam on 13 May forced the Dutch to capitulate the next day.

The Allied amphibious landings in Sicily and on the Italy mainland in 1943 and the Allied crossing of the Rhine in early 1944 were the second largest amphibious operations in western Europe, not the mythical German crossing of the Rhine in June 1940 which never happened.

Eric Margolis is just one of many ill-informed journalists who write on military affairs in Canada.

The most deliciously ironic point is that Margolis' piece was entitled "War history lost in the myth." I think Margolis is the one who myth-ed the mark...sorry, I couldn't resist!