Remembering Harry Patch

Sam Dickson, American Renaissance, October 2009

Harry Patch (Credit Image: Jim Ross / Wikipedia)

It is appropriate for us to mark the death on July 25th of Harry Patch. Aged 111, Harry Patch was the last surviving British soldier from our race’s First Peloponnesian War of the last century, that is to say, the First World War. These two fratricidal wars — like the original ones among the Greeks of Antiquity — may have accomplished the complete and possibly fatal wreck of our race and civilization.

Patch survived horrific service in the trenches of Flanders as a machine gunner and suffered severe wounds. For most of his life he was reticent about the war and his service in it, but after his 100th birthday Patch began speaking out against the war and the hatreds it engendered.

He said he was a reluctant soldier, noting that when he first came face to face with a German soldier, he could not help thinking of the commandment, “Thou shalt not kill.” He deliberately shot the German in the shoulder, making him drop his rifle, but the German kept running towards him. He then shot the man twice in the leg. “I had about five seconds to make the decision,” he said. “I brought him down, but I didn’t kill him.”

In July 2007, he was present at the 90th-anniversary commemoration of the beginning of the Battle of Passchendaele, in which he fought. He called the war a “calculated and condoned slaughter of human beings,” and said that “war isn’t worth one life.”.............To Read More......

My Take - How the author turned this into a racial issue is strange, but I posted it because this former soldier was right "....the war a “calculated and condoned slaughter of human beings,” and said that “war isn’t worth one life", and because that generation of soldiers who suffered so horribly at the hands of incompetant leaders are gone now.  Soon the WWII vets will be gone, and the insanity that's destroying civilization touched off by WWI is reaching it's climax.  

As an after thought it occured to me in my lifetime the last Civil War veteran, Albert Woolson, that last confirmed veteran of the US Civil War died on August 2, 1956..” The last living veteran of World War I (28 July 1914 – 11 November 1918) was Florence Green, a British citizen who served in the Allied armed forces, and who died 4 February 2012, aged 110. [1] The last combat veteran was Claude Choules who served in the British Royal Navy (and later the Royal Australian Navy) and died 5 May 2011, aged 110. [2] The last veteran who served in the trenches was Harry Patch ( British Army ) who died on 25 July 2009, aged 111.  And now the WWII vets are in their 90's. 

Another reason I posted this is because I'm quite emotional about these wars and the terrible suffering these men endured, during the war and after "peace" was attained.....at such a terrible price.

I wish more people read the Guns of August.