82 years ago today, some of the bravest people in human history stormed the beaches of Normandy to confront absolute evil and back those who had been battling it street by street for nearly a decade.
Thanks to the Soviet Union, who's Russia originally shook hands with Hitler helping trigger the devastating world war, and to the 14 other soviet republics that fought bravely to undo that asinine mistake, those being Ukraine, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Georgia, Azerbaijan, Lithuania, Moldova, Latvia, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Armenia, Turkmenistan, and Estonia, whose 27 million dead and Operation Bagration sixteen days later made Normandy possible by tying down two-thirds of the Wehrmacht on the Eastern Front. Belarus lost roughly a quarter of its population. Ukraine lost an estimated 7 million.
Thanks to the UK, which supplied most of the naval force, most of the air force, the planning, the airfields, and around 61,000 troops on Gold and Sword.
Thanks to Canada, whose 14,000 troops on Juno achieved nearly a total victory and the deepest penetration of any beach on the first day.
Thanks to Free France, whose 177 commandos of Philippe Kieffer's unit at Sword (the only French force to land on French soil on 6 June), the cruisers Georges Leygues and Montcalm shelling Omaha, and the destroyer La Combattante in the screen.
Thanks to Poland, whose navy (Błyskawica, Piorun, Dragon, Ślązak) covered the landings, whose pilots flew air cover (303 Squadron had the highest kill rate of any RAF unit in the Battle of Britain), and whose 1st Armoured Division under General Maczek closed the Falaise Pocket weeks later at Hill 262.
Thanks to Norway, the Netherlands, and Greece, whose navies sailed with the Royal Navy as government-in-exile forces in Operation Neptune.
Thanks to Czechoslovakia, whose 310, 312, and 313 Squadrons flew with the RAF.
Thanks to Belgium, whose pilots flew with the RAF and whose Piron Brigade landed in Normandy in early August.
Thanks to Newfoundland, then a separate dominion, whose artillery served in the Normandy campaign and whose sailors served across the Royal Navy.
Thanks to Australian, New Zealand, South African, and Indian airmen in RAF squadrons, and to the Royal Australian Navy ship that sailed with the bombardment force.
Thanks to Australian, New Zealand, South African, and Indian airmen in RAF squadrons.
And thanks to the United States, whose 73,000 troops landed at Utah and Omaha, and fought bravely despite a decade of isolationism (the Neutrality Acts of 1935 to 1939), an 'America First' movement whose figurehead Charles Lindbergh accepted a medal from Göring in 1938 and made openly antisemitic speeches, a Henry Ford who took the Grand Cross of the German Eagle the same year and whose antisemitic writings Hitler quoted in Mein Kampf, and US corporations (Ford, GM/Opel, IBM, Standard Oil, ITT, Chase) doing business with Nazi Germany, some of which kept operating well into the war and continue to do business with the tyrants of today.
Sainsbury's boss eyes bumper £7.3m payday as shoppers reel from higher food prices.
Up from £5.4m last year – 200 times average employee pay.
Govts preach pay restraint to workers, silence on exec pay, shareholder returns.
Let workers vote on exec pay.
https://t.co/S0tClkOEur
The first duty of any government is to keep our country safe.
That's why we're delivering the biggest sustained increase in defence spending since the Cold War.
"Picturesque river polluted with sewage just 13 days after being given official bathing status."
Yep the River Avon at Salisbury was designated as a bathing spot on 15th May and just 13 days later on the 28th the EA have to issue a pollution warning due to E. coli levels. What a shambles.
https://t.co/nC3WWbwgt6
Your ICE agents shot an unarmed US citizen in the head. A mother.
Then they shot another man for standing in the street.
The US government murders its own citizens.
Whilst chair of @Ofcom Michael Grade bent over backwards to allow GB News to become Reform's version of der Völkischer Beobachter.
Was this ideological or was it financial?
https://t.co/fMRXxHwJ3c
Hence the disappearing Farage since the comments
He crossed a line that he cannot uncross and nor can he try and talk his way out of - a mistake that has cut through with the public
Why is #Bbclaurak platforming Zia Yusuf again?!
He’s an unelected millionaire who basically rage baits from his mum’s basement.
It’s almost as if the BBC is sponsored by Reform!
The constant banging on about DEI is an infuriating American import into the UK.
In the UK we call it EDI. And EDI training is essentially summed up like this:
‘Don’t be a knob to other people, and realise some people face barriers you don’t.’
It’s not some woke conspiracy.
Now Vance has joined in the US/MAGA disinformation campaign around British "two-tier policing", here's the EU DisinfoLab matrix of FIMI activities - I've highlighted every technique encountered from Farage, Robinson and their MAGA backers around the Southampton riot... 1/2
If @PeteHegseth were in charge of D-Day, every Allied soldier would have drowned on the way to the beach, and Trump would have secretly alerted Hitler it was coming.
It really wasn’t. It was an outright abuse of Henry’s father’s wishes.
And the US government is hardly in a place to reprimand the UK on police brutality, racism or error.