Indeed. You're darn lucky you even exist.
One-fifth of the casualties came from just one battalion: the Black Watch (Royal Highland Regiment) of Canada, who lost 300 of 320 men carrying out Simonds’s instructions to rush the ridge in broad daylight. The flood of casualty telegrams made clear that Canada’s most storied regiment (equivalent in Canadian terms to the American 101st and 82nd Airborne, the Big Red One or the 1st Marine Division) had suffered 94 percent casualties in fewer than four hours of fighting.https://www.nationalww2museum.org/war/articles/black-watch-verrieres-ridge-july-1944
And I'm happy for it!
My granduncle Willi was in Normandy in 1944. It was for him, as he always said, "
a good ending of the war" as he became a POW with the Brits, which back then with the
Wehrmacht was the luckiest draw you could get. His brother Karl (my grandfather on the mother's side) wasn't quite as lucky, Soviet captivity from 1944 onwards (until 1949, having NSDAP membership stamped in his
Soldatenausweis didn't help), but he survived as well. Willi picked up some skills with the Brits and became an electrician after the war. As nearly all German POWs held by the Brits, he was released early on (and returned better fed than his loved ones at home) - I don't recall him being a party member either, he was always the smarter one of the two brothers. He never stopped to consider himself lucky.
