WWII Vets Storm DC

The Nazis couldn’t stop them, neither could the Italians or the Japanese. They stormed the beaches of Normandy against all odds and raised the US flag at the Battle of Iwo Jima.

It would then be no surprise that the barricades reportedly being set up by four park service workers will be unlikely to stop the greatest generation.

A new wave of veterans were forced to move barricades at the WWII Memorial in Washington Wednesday morning to gain access during the government slimdown, a spokeswoman from Sen. Jerry Moran, R-Kan.

The WWII veterans, from Ohio, Kansas and Missouri, arrived at the memorial one day after another group relied on the assistance from elected officials to move the barricades to allow access. Parks police did not prevent the first group from entering, nor did they interfere with Wednesday’s group.

The veterans vowed to make the trek to D.C. regardless of the situation in Washington. When asked how they were going to visit the World War II Memorial when it’s closed, Ian Drake, a WWII veteran, the group will “find a way in, one way or another. We might have to climb or something. It’s no problem. Well work it out when we get there.”

The veterans are traveling as part of Honor Flight , a program that enables World War II veterans to partake in an expense-paid trip to view the memorial.

“It just goes to show you why we won World War II,” says Honor Flight of Northwest Ohio President Lee Armstrong.

Many elderly veterans, some in wheelchairs, broke through the barriers set up around the memorial, as police, park service employees, and tourists looked on. “The Germans and the Japanese couldn’t contain us. They weren’t going to let barriers contain them today. They wanted to see their memorial,” says Armstrong.

Honor Flight of Northwest Ohio has a trip scheduled to depart from Toledo next Wednesday, October 9.

“We will make the call this Friday to determine if the flight is still a go, or if we will have to re-schedule,” Armstrong explains.

He says they are considering going ahead with the trip even if the government is still on shutdown, but when he called the parks service, he was told they would face arrest. “I said, are you kidding me? You’re going to arrest a 90/91-year-old veteran from seeing his memorial? If it wasn’t for them it wouldn’t be there. She said, ‘That’s correct sir.'”

When Armstrong asked for her name, he says she did not give it to him and then promptly hung up the phone.

Both the WWII and Lincoln memorials are open air memorials. The Lincoln Memorial is open 24 hours a day, normally. If you’ll recall, it was wide open to having someone throw green paint on it in the evening a few months ago.

So that means the Obama administration is making a conscious effort to spend more in time and money to shut off something which is normally open.

How ridiculous is this effort by President Obama to make the people “hurt” so he can blame it on Republicans, just as he did with the sequester, which was also his idea?

We still don’t have access to the White House, the people’s house, allegedly because of the sequester, although Obama has spent countless of our millions since then on vacations, parties and golf.