80 years ago today, in late May of 1944, the greatest seaborne landing force ever assembled was preparing to cross the English channel to land in Normandy. It known in history as D-Day. Hundreds of thousands of sailors, soldiers and pilots were coordinated to invade France from the sea and the air. Men charged onto a beach into the face of withering machine gun fire. Men jumped out of perfectly good airplanes. Some men, including a college professor I had at BGSU, were in gliders that were towed over the channel and then basically crashed into France.
Despite years of preparation, success was by no means certain. While everyone remembers Eisenhower’s message to the invading force…
Not many people know Ike had a brief note jotted down in case the landings didn’t succeed where he would take all of the blame.
“Our landings in the Cherbourg-Havre area have failed to gain a satisfactory foothold and I have withdrawn the troops. My decision to attack at this time and place was based on the best information available. The troops, the air, and the navy did all that bravery and devotion to duty could do. If any blame or fault attaches to the attempt it is mine alone.”
The landings did succeed and D-Day marks one of the seminal moments in American history. Despite my misgivings about American involvement in the war, more on that on the actual day of the 80th anniversary of D-Day, the success of the Normandy invasion in a era when technology was primitive by our modern standards, was the high point of the American experience. No other country could have pulled it off. England didn’t have the manpower or the resources. The Soviets advanced into Germany on the strength of sheer numbers and a willingness to feed an unlimited number of men into the meatgrinder. Only America could have pulled off D-Day.
Fast forward to 2024.
Biden’s $320M Gaza Pier Has Detached & Drifted Onto Israeli Beach
A section of the $320 million floating pier built and erected off Gaza’s coast has broken off and floated onto an Israeli beach. The Saturday mishap is the latest setback for the US humanitarian aid project, after three US troops were reported injured aboard the pier two days prior, including one critically.
The Times of Isreal’s military correspondent Emanuel Fabian has reported that “An American vessel used to unload humanitarian aid from ships into the Gaza Strip via a floating pier disconnected from a small boat tugging it this morning due to stormy seas, leading it to get stuck on the coast of Ashdod, eyewitnesses say.”
The recovery operation has not gone well either, as “Another ship was then sent to try and extract the stuck vessel, but also got beached,” Fabian writes.
And yet a second US Army vessel also got stuck in shallow waters while trying to rescue the pier section. Overnight US ships had been moving two pieces of the floating pier to the Port of Ashdod in southern Israel when the now beached section detached and drifted away. American troops can be seen in footage standing helplessly on the beach.
As I suspect that this pier will also be used to load Palestinian “refugees” bound for America, I applaud it floating away.
Even still, it is pretty embarrassing that the military under the same flag that landed on Normandy, not to mention crossing rivers on the way to Germany, now apparently can’t even execute something seemingly as simple installing a pier that cost 1/3 of a billion dollars.
The future is bright indeed for “America”.
The navy – even more than other branches of AINO’s military – has a LOT of blacks and women. Swimming skills are optional, as is traditional navigation (i.e. using one’s brain as opposed to the magic computer). On the one hand, I feel marginally sorry for any White still in the military due to its overall incompetence. On the other hand, since they bought the faux patriotism and equity crap, as well as took the clotshots, zero f**ks given. My late father-in-law was a career army officer and my husband says – in light of AINO today – his father’s entire career was a waste of time.
That is a major change, at a job fair when I was a senior in college I spoke briefly to some Navy recruiters and they said if I didn’t have some sort of technical degree like engineering, there was no place for me. Maybe that was just for officer candidates.
Unfortunately, this was just a single piece of the pier but one can hope the whole thing fails so it can’t be used to load refugees.
We know it is coming. It has already been discussed publicly.
Not a good look for US Navy competence for sure. Pier section breaking off is one thing but beaching multiple craft in what appears to be a full on circus is not a good look.
If the Russians finally call our bluff, it will get ugly and fast
Well, all I can say is that we are blessed that the Mossad has neither frogmen, underwater demolition men, nor allies within the US gov’t or military. I am so happy that this happened in Palestine territory, beyond the reach of Israeli clandestine forces, and could not have possibly been set up for failure by the Arms Industry corporations who planned it and billed the FedGov for it.
I am at total peace, knowing that we have done “our best” to feed and care for the oppressed, and we have made a strong stand against genocide and ethnic violence.
Shame that shit happens, amirite?
The USN needs to bring back the Village People to boost their faltering recruitment numbers.
In the navy
Yes, you can sail the seven seas.
In the navy
Yes, we’ll embrace your gay disease.
In the navy
Homosexuals, make a stand.
In the navy, in the navy
Can’t you see we’re out of hand?
In the navy
Come on, pervert the motherland
In the navy
Penetrate your fellow man,
In the navy
Come on people, the USS Harvey Milk,
In the navy (In the navy), in the navy (Oh).
That is a pretty catchy jingle
It’s not a little ironic when you think that in the 1940s the much more industrially capable USA had a population of about 140 million, and today with 330+, we can’t build shit. You can’t even begin to count all the fake jobs and useless eaters in AINO today.
It won’t be long before we won’t be able to even keep the current stuff running.
The last members of my extended family who served in the military just got out last year. For the first time in my entire life, there is currently no member of the fam in active service. And by all indications, there won’t be any more. All the nieces, nephews, cousins and their kids have no interest whatsoever. Who can blame them? They are White, and would only enter as second-class citizens with virtually zero chance for advancement. Let the left fight their own wars with their own kin. Not mine.
You would have to be crazy to enlist now just to fight for a country that hates you.
In 1981 I learned how to cut retail meat from a Vietnam vet who served in the brown water navy as a 50 cal gunner on a PBR. He was decades ahead of his time, and he taught me things that were far beyond the state of the art in the eighties. He was the biggest single factor in my successes as a retail meat cutter and meat department manager. He spoke alot about his experiences in the Navy, and when I see how degraded our military has become-morally and in terms of competencies-it makes me sick. TPTB have made FUSA weak and ripe for the picking by our overt/covert communist foes.
Someone will call our bluff soon and then we will find out how bad things have gotten when the body bags start coming home
In the 70’s I did 4 years in an airborne mechanized combat engineer unit in Germany and the one pik above appears to be what was called in the Army an M4T6 Floating Class 60 Pontoon Bridge.
Our entire battalion (1000 doods – no females at all) built that kind of bridge all the time based out of Wildflecken, Germany. We bridged the Rhein river many times and it is a fast moving river. Yes, the combat engineers have bridge boats. Small tugboats with the swivel engine right in the middle and can go in any direction at anytime, for maneuvering bridge sections into place. Class 60 was the highest capacity type bridge capable of handling every piece of equipment the Army had.
We built an M4T6 across the Rhein once and after completion 3 M60 tanks were driven out onto the bridge and stopped. Explosive charges along the bridge were detonated and blew all the pontoons out. The bridge continued to float because all of the treadway bult, though they weighed 600 lbs each and hundreds were used on the bridge, were filled with styrofoam allowing it to hold all of the structural members of the bridge as well as the tanks afloat. The tank treads were a couple feet underwater.
The above mentioned project in gaza could have been handled with success by the well experienced men of the 54th Engineer Battalion of which I was a member 1974-1978. “Top of the Rock – Cold Steel Country”
Today’s US military is a total embarrassment and will continue to fail at all levels until the final bottom is achieved. Then all of us are on our own. “Essayons et Faisons”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/54th_Engineer_Battalion_(United_States)
That should say “treadway BULK” not bult.
Proofread Prior to Posting
Sometimes I regret not serving. I got out of high school in the mid-80’s, had I signed up I would have been in the first Iraqi shitstorm (Desert Storm?) where enemy soldiers basically lined up to surrender and and A-10 Warthogs were chewing up enemy tanks by the dozens. I had several buddies who went at the time. Looking back today, I guess it was probably for the best that I didn’t serve, but still. Now though? Fuck that.
Occasionally we get engineers come thru who served in the Navy. It’s always a mixed bag cause engineers are, first, a little off from normal and second, generally at least 1 std dev above normal intelligence, which might explain why they’re off from normal. I can’t quite say if their service was an advantage or not, excepting that management provides a buttload of ass-kissing on the one or two days a year we honor the service.
And I can also add that those who I know that went are absolutely crap at shooting. Long story, but military service doesn’t mean shit when it comes to ability.
The Invasion of Normandy was without question an impressive and unprecedented achievement, but we forget that subsequent amphibious invasions in the Pacific Theater of the war were far-larger and moreover, much farther away from CONUS, than the northern coast of France. Okinawa dwarfed anything seen up to that time. Although there was a British-CW (commonwealth) presence, the operation was almost totally an American one: British ships took part in the invasion operation, but only American forces went ashore.
Our men, thousands of miles from home, lacked for nothing in terms of material needed for war or simply to sustain themselves; the hard-pressed Japanese, close to their homeland, starved and did without many of the things they needed to fight and live under anything other than primitive conditions.
No other nation on earth could have even considered mounting such an operation, let alone actually pulling it off with the success that the U.S. had.
In 1945, U.S. industrial output was fully one-half ~ fifty percent ~ of that of the entire world!
Bracken predicted this would happen during an interview several weeks ago. He said the first time a storm kicked up that pier would be toast.
Bone simple logic when he explains the why and how.
I wonder what those men would say and do if they could see of what has happened to the USA and the european countries?
In 2009 the brits published a book where their veterans were asked:
The Unknown Warriors by Nicholas Pringle
Ike was a hook nose desk general?
Hitler had the great quote about a Jewie and Negrofied republic in name only won’t last long.
Herr Goebbels, the intellect, said that Pimping for Shekels and Hymie were the noble ideas of the Kwanstain or FUSA.
It was always a big steaming pile of red white and blue bullshit but now it can’t be hidden.
If we could only use that pier to send all of the muslims home.
If I could only afford to send half of them back, I would send all of them halfway.