| A Speech By Don Burgett, Sr.-Veteran of WWII |
Thank you for being here, thank you for inviting me, and my heartfelt thanks to Abigail Whittum, a tireless worker on behalf of the Republican Party. To introduce myself: I am one of the millions of the Greatest Generation of the Great Depression of the thirties. The few jobs to be had at that time paid from ten cents to thirty-five cents an hour. Most people were going hungry and lived wherever they could afford to live. Few had material possessions. The beginnings of a World War covering all of Europe and the South Pacific raged and grew as my generation became teenagers and whether America should or should not enter that war; became a primary question for every American. That question was soon answered when the Empire of Japan attacked America without warning. America was thrust into a World War. The question of whether or not to enter a war was answered without the consent of the people as all questions will be answered unless the people have the guts to stand up, be heard and be counted. We had no money, few owned homes, most were hungry, we wore hand me down clothes and our naval fleet lay destroyed on the bottom of the ocean. We had nothing to fight for. Except, - - - our Religion, our loved ones, our ideals, our freedoms, our way of life, our country - and every American had been violated by the attack on Pearl Harbor. Therefore, along with victory - we wanted revenge, and we rose as one people to face that war. Setting an example for all Americans to recognize a crisis and rise to the occasion to face that crisis. Or, meekly accept the end results even if it means slavery, gas chambers and crematoriums. As many of our teenagers had done before me, I joined our military on my eighteenth birthday, but I volunteered for a newly formed arm of our military, the paratroops. The training was, at that time the toughest in the world and our trainers told us each hour of each day, "We are going to make you quit." To which we replied, "You ain't bad enough to make me quit." And most of the volunteers made it through. On completion of our training when my regiment was shipped to Europe February 1944, WWWII was at it height. As our baptism to fire we parachuted into Normandy 6 June 1944 six hours before the beach landings came in. We fought in many head-on, hand-to-hand battles with rifles, pistols and trench knives. We turned the war back onto the invincible Germans; they came to call us, "Butchers With Big Pockets." We fought until we and our Allies were well entrenched in France. Three weeks out of Normandy, we parachuted into Holland to fight for seventy-two consecutive days behind enemy lines. As a result, my division, the 101st Airborne holds the record for having fought a continuous one on one land battle longer than any other division in United States history. My company held 170 men and officers going into Holland. Thirty-eight of us of those 170 men stayed whole to come out of those battles. Less than three weeks out of Holland, the Battle of the Bulge erupted and we were sent by open semi-trucks to Belgium to take and hold the key communication City of Bastogne, with the order, "There will be no surrender, no withdrawal and no retreat, we will hold Bastogne at all costs." My company had no overcoats, no overshoes, no gloves and many without weapons or ammunition. One man in my platoon had a large tree limb; from time to time he would step to the center of the narrow road as we marched the last miles on foot to Bastogne, and swing his club with a heavy blow on the black top. "I'll have a rifle by tonight." He would say. He was killed in our first attack. The temperature had dropped to minus twenty Celsius, or, four degrees below zero Fahrenheit. We held nine German armored and infantry divisions at bay by constantly attacking night and day into them keeping them off balance. My Battalion had thirteen officers and one hundred ninety nine men killed in our first four hours of battle, not counting our wounded. When our commander, General Anthony C. McAuliffe, replied "NUTS" to the German's demand for our surrender, we all cheered. For the next thirty days of continuous fighting we paid a heavy price in lives and limbs, but we won. We then fought in Alsace, the Ruhr Valley, the Rhineland, southern Germany and Austria. In southern Germany we liberated two labor camps One in Ragensburg, and one in Ravensburg. In Landsburg we liberated a concentration camp where multi-hundreds of starved bodies awaited their turn in the crematorium. Our medics had inlisted the aid of several nuns to help with the dying. I saw that several starved women in their last moments of life lie in filth on the ground they were smiling. I asked a nun, "They are dying, why are they smiling?" The nun answered, "They are smiling because they are dying in freedom." We entered Berchtesgaden, and the actual home of Adolph Hitler, where eleven of our troopers, all that was left of the original troopers that had parachuted into Normandy and had fought all the way across Europe to this point, we eleven, sat on Hitler's bed and drank the best schnapps available in Germany. After the war and our generation had returned home we said. " Don't get in our way. We came out of a depression and we are not going back into it. We are going to work." We married, we had children, we built homes, we made cars, we became doctors, lawyers, writers, carpenters and laborers and we created a financial tidal wave that has lasted over the years, until now. When discharged I had fought through four major campaigns, wounded three times and I could not vote, I could not sign a legal contract, or buy a beer, I was not old enough, I was twenty years old. "And we are still the Greatest Generation." I served two years, seven months and twenty-one days. Today those of our Greatest Generation feel as strongly toward our ideals as during those days that we fought, were wounded, lost body parts and died for our country. It was with great sorrow, and a shock one day that I witnessed that we had a new person sitting in our White House. Keeping in mind great countries that rose to ultimate power in the past including Greece and Rome, I admitted to myself that "We now have a 'Trojan Horse' in the White House, and there are cracks in the walls." We must not allow what happened to Greece, Rome and Europe to happen to America. The few short months since that day has proven, that one individual has created more damage to our great country than all the wars we have been through. The Trojan Horse was handed the keys to our vault and a shovel, more money has been wastefully broadcast through the cracks than our descendants will ever be able to repay. Our enemies abroad and at home have realized they cannot defeat us in the field and have injected a virus that is spreading defeat and destruction throughout our country. Bills and legislation are being signed into law without benefit of our Congress or Senate and without consideration, representation or consent of the people, who are the founders of our country, our Constitution, our Bill of Rights. Laws prohibiting guns and ammunition are in the works to disarm the American people. Only those who have reason to fear an armed citizen, who has fought on battlefields and has offered his life to protect America, its peoples, and their rights, know they have created self-serving reasons to fear loyal Americans. We Americans will not tolerate monarchy; we have proven that time and time again. We will pay any price and go any distance, I will not see my children, my grand children or my great grandchildren subjected to what I have witnessed first hand happen to other people in other countries. It is well past time to pluck the rotten apples from the barrel and rid ourselves of the self serving Democratic party and replace it with one that has proven in the past to be: "Of the people, for the people and by the people." The Republican Party. It all begins - and ends with the vote, the right to put a representative of the people into a seat where they will do just that, keeping the people in mind first and that they, the elected, are the servant. The people also have the right to remove those who place themselves above God or God's people. We cannot allow anyone to take away our rights or our country that my comrades and I fought, bled and died for. Remain loyal, vote REPUBLICAN. Donald R. Burgett, Sgt. WWII Able Company, 506 PIR., 101st Abn. Div.
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