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One Leg Up On D-Day With Paul Harvey and Harold’s Old-Time Radio · OneLegUpAlex Media

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  Here's your host, Alex Garrett. Well, as we settle in for a
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  long day of baseball and horse racing, it's the Belmont Steaks Day, and
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  of course I'm missing my dad, who would go with me almost every Belmont
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  Stakes there could possibly be the last twenty one years. But before we enjoy
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  all of those festivities, the Mets and Phillies in London, the Yanks and
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  Dodgers Game two tonight, and then of course the Belmont Stakes sandwich in between
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  one a day for Fox Sports and Channel five in New York. Before we
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  get to all that, though, I want to share something that another fellow
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  speaker, podcaster Harold and his old time radio channel, Harold's Old Time Radio.
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  I mean, from Paul Harvey to you bet your life with Groucho Marx
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  and so much more. You gotta tune into Harold's Old Time Radio because,
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  as we remember, commemorate D Day eighty years ago this week, he actually
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  posted this from Paul Harvey with the rest of the story. The rest of
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  the story, the invasion was precisely on schedule. You could have set your
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  watch by progress of the landing ship tanks as they approached the Long Sandy beaches,
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  and then suddenly, from the icy depths of the English Channel, all
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  hell broke loose. It began with a subsurface explosion at the hull of one
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  of the LST's, a torpedo blast, but from where British naval and air
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  defenses were supposed to be standing rear guard. That was the deal. The
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  invasion would fail if German torpedo boats began closing in from the open channel.
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  But incredibly they were there, lurking somewhere in the watery gloom. Commanders got
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  on their radios what had gone wrong? They demanded another crippling blast to an
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  LST, no doubt about it. Now a pack of U boats had drived
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  past, the Allied rear guard was moving in for the kill. Aboard the
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  Allied landing vessels. Panic such fear and confusion that within minutes some of the
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  LSTs were actually firing on one another. Two of the ships were sinking.
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  Now two more with deep damage are floundering. Standing on the forward deck of
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  one of those dying vessels was naval gunner Ralph Bartholomey. Stunned and helpless,
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  he watched the blue tracer shells exploding all around him. He felt the pulse
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  of the air shocked by machine gunfire. The LST was going under. There
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  was nothing left to do now with the abandoned ship, and swim for his
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  life. The water was cold, the waves were menacing, The sandy shore
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  seemed impossibly far more explosions, more screams in places. The channel itself had
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  become an ocean of oil fed flame into which terrified troops plunged. Nonetheless,
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  Ralph Bartholomey swam on and then inexplicably. At first the water in Ralph's path
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  became plotted with lumps of fabric. Long moments passed as he struggled to swim
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  through them, pondering what they were, and then he realized it was clothing,
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  uniforms, and bodies inside uniforms, hundreds of them. Though the English
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  Channel become in a lightning flash, a sea of the dead fifty years ago,
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  nineteen forty four. Yet what you were never told of that Allied invasion
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  half a century ago is that it failed, failed, outright and unequivocally.
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  Through the ensuing hours, the boys died in a steady stream. The channel
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  swallowed many of them whole, others in pieces. Three thousand Allied troops hastily
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  evacuated managed to get out with their lives. The rest, some seven hundred
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  and fifty of them, were fished from the gray water by rescue craft and
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  brought the shore and piled high. Some called it the most wretched sight of
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  the war. None who lived to tell told with a steady voice, for
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  the military invasion that you have just relived was not the normandy invasion now and
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  forever known as D Day. It was another invasion, one of which you
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  were never told until now, one that took place some five weeks prior,
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  on April twenty eighth, nineteen forty four, on the long beaches of Devon
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  in southwest England and Yelphanty triumph may be imagined amidst that tragedy, in which
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  four times more soldiers died than on Utah Beach. It would be that we
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  at least learned how not to do it when it counted. We learned from
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  the awful night German torpedo boats slipped past the Allies and opened fire on a
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  massive training maneuver code named Exercise Tiger, when D Day's dress rehearsal ended in
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  a body defeat for us. Now you know the rest of the store.
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  I mean there are things about Paul Harvey that he would always show the part's
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  untold as he just talked about. For instance, the paintings of by Courier
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  and Ives weren't always beautiful or plent of all that was sometimes gory. I
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  mean there were things that he got to tune into Harold's All Time Radio for
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  more of the Paul Harvey story. And I've not really heard of the Devon
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  storming until now, but it is always interesting to play Paul Harvey a moment
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  like that because he always does tell not just the rest of the story,
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  a whole other side to the story. So I highly recommend those in my
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  generation and younger look up Paul Harvey because that that man was journalism. He
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  was a storyteller unlike anybody else on the radio or television, and he certainly
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  did not deliver what we like to call in popular culture the fake news.
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  He was a news news guy. And I just admire Old Time Radio Harold
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  for continuing to post his work on all different subjects, very timely posting too.
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  If you look at it Harold's Old Time Radio. I will put his
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  page in the link. And while we're talking about Spreaker creators. By the
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  way, got to say, it is kind of sad that Radio Hope Mike
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  Myers has hung up his headphones and decided to retire basically from the podcasting world.
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  And you know, we always had fun in that eight am to nine
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  am hour Eastern time before he came on eight Am Central from Booneye. Well,
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  so, Radio Hope, I know you're you're not doing as well.
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  We're praying for you up here in New York and if you're up for it,
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  the door is always open for another interviewer. There, I say,
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  an exit interview from the podcasting world and just to catch up would be great.
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  Love your brother, and I hope you are well. And one last
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  thing to recap and to wrap up D day. It was very nice that
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  Lindsay Bera actually liked my post honoring her grandfather and my podcast, and I
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  found it. I found the signature of Yogi Bearra himself in this book of
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  Width that my dad gave to me, and out of all the signatures we
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  got over the many years, a few years ago he passed it down to
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  me and I'm so honored to have that book in this house of the likes
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  the sort of yes, Yogi Bearra, George Steinbrenner, Bob Yucker a collection
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  I'll always treasure. But I didn't find the page where he did that autograph
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  for me. And I'm so thankful that both Jogi and Carmen in that page
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  in that book and their autographs forever collected. So that's the rest of that
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  story with Yogi Barra, and I hope you enjoyed my commemoration of him and
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  his servants to not only baseball to the Yankees, but more importantly to our
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  country, the United States of America, and all those that storm Normandy and
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  did change the world. I'm looking at a globe right now and what a
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  different globe could have been. But I'm so thankful, and we should all
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  be thankful for those that eighty years risk their lives to storm the beaches of
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  Normandy to keep us safe, to keep our world safe as well. But
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  it is kind of funny that Philadelphia is in London, because remember remember whom
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  those in Philadelphia in seventeen seventy six and before broke away from the British and
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  now almost two hundred and forty eight years later, the Philadelphia Phillies are playing
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  in London. I would love to see them go back now. Actually I
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  want to see them playing in Philly on July fourth, twenty twenty six.
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  In fact, Major League Baseball does have the All Star Game in Philly the
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  year two fifty, year two fifty. But how funny a couple of years
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  earlier the Philadelphia Phillies as a history buff I have to say this, are
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  playing in London nearly a month before we honor the independence from that very country
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  and that very land. It's quite a world. And thank god we're allies
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  with London and England and all that, and of course the Royalty. I
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  just thought it would be funny to mention that, yes, Philly is playing
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  back in the land that there are founding fathers broke away from a month before
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  we celebrate our independence from that great Britain rule. Life is funny like that,
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  isn't it. I'm Alex Garrett. We'll talk to you soon on the
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  Alex Garrett podcast network. And before I go, I gotta say on the
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  D Day coverage, I did see. I did see a Christian Amenpour special
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  with story time with Papa Jake, who's now one hundred and one years old,
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  and he marked the eightieth anniversary of the Storming of Normandy, traveled over
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  there once again, and we are forever thankful that his granddaughter decided to keep
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  a page start a page of his stories so that the times of the eighty
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  years ago and that historic moment live on through the storytelling of Jake Larson.
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  God bless you to the Larson family and to Jay Larson for continuing to tell
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  his story at age one hundred and one. I'll drop the links to all
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  of this below. On the Alex Garrett podcast Network