Rick Ball

[JmRoyle #LFC #YNWA #BLM #RejoinEU @MyArrse]

10 years ago Jo Cox was shot and stabbed to death in Birstall by a far right thug.
Do you remember the Farage \ Tommy Robinson riots that followed it,
No me neither.

R.I.P. Jo

[Ladytron Fan Account @Lady_FanAccount]

"Bitter Sweet Symphony" uses a sample of a 1965 orchestral version of The Last Time by the Rolling Stones (arranged by Andrew Loog Oldham). After the success of the track, former Stones manager Allen Klein sued and forced The Verve to cede 100% of the copyright to Mick Jagger and Keith Richards. For 22 years the band did not earn a penny from the biggest hit of their career.

In 2019, Jagger and Richards generously returned all credits and royalties to Richard Ashcroft. The name of the song turned out to be very literal... bittersweet.

[Voices of WW2 @VoicesofWW2]

The Nazis cracked the secret code announcing D-Day, intercepted the warning live on air, and still got destroyed by an army of railway workers, teenage girls, and a house painter. Every detail of this story is real and it gets crazier the longer you read.

Start in 1943. A French house painter named René Duchez takes a redecorating job at a German engineering office in Caen. Sitting on a desk: a map of the Atlantic Wall defenses for the Normandy coast. He hides it behind a mirror on the wall, finishes the job like nothing happened, and walks out with it days later. The Resistance smuggles it to London in a cookie tin on a fishing boat. The Allies now have the blueprint of the wall they're about to climb.

He wasn't alone. For a year, ordinary French people built the most detailed picture of enemy defenses in military history. Fishermen noted gun positions. Farmers paced out minefields. Railway clerks copied German troop movements. Cleaning ladies memorized office paperwork. Thousands of reports flowed to London every month, hidden in baguettes, bicycle frames, and babies' diapers. When Allied planners sat down to design D-Day, they knew the Normandy coast better than the Germans defending it.

Meanwhile the RAF was secretly parachuting guns into French fields at night, tens of thousands of containers of rifles, Stens, and explosives, guided in by farmers holding flashlights. The Resistance was handed four sabotage plans and told to wait. Plan Green: destroy the railways. Plan Tortoise: block the roads. Plan Violet: cut the telephone lines. Plan Blue: kill the power grid. Each cell waits for its go signal, hidden among the fake "personal messages" the BBC reads every night. Nonsense phrases like "Jean has a long mustache." Each one meaningless to millions, life or death to a dozen.

June 1, 1944. The BBC reads the first line of a 19th century poem about autumn violins. It means the invasion is coming. June 5, 9:15 pm, the second line airs: go within 48 hours. Here's the insane part. German intelligence had tortured the code out of a captured Resistance leader. They knew exactly what those lines meant. They intercepted both, live. One German army went on full alert. The army actually defending Normandy was never told. Its commander had left for a war game. Rommel had driven home for his wife's birthday with a pair of Paris shoes in the car.

That night, while 13,000 paratroopers were still in the air, France exploded. The Resistance cut the rail network in over 950 places before dawn. They dropped bridges, derailed locomotives, and blew signal boxes. They dug up and severed the underground telephone cables, forcing German commanders onto the radio, where the Allies were reading their encrypted traffic. By sunrise on June 6, the German army in Normandy was blind, deaf, and stranded. Some units learned the largest invasion in history was happening from French civilians. Others, from lost American paratroopers landing in their gardens.

Then comes the masterpiece. The 2nd SS Panzer Division Das Reich, 15,000 battle-hardened troops and 200 tanks, is ordered north from Toulouse to crush the beachhead. The trip should take three days. It takes seventeen. Why? Weeks earlier, saboteurs working for a British agent had crept into the rail yards where the division's tank transporter flatcars sat, drained the axle oil, and replaced it with abrasive carborundum paste. Among the saboteurs: a teenage girl. When the panzers loaded up and rolled out, the railcars ground themselves to death within miles. Forced onto the roads, the tanks burned out their treads while the Resistance blew every bridge ahead of them, felled trees across the roads, ambushed the columns at river crossings, and sniped at them through every town, then melted into the hills. By the time Das Reich reached Normandy, the beachhead it was sent to destroy was unbreakable.

The Germans took revenge on civilians along the route, including massacres in towns that had nothing to do with the attacks. The Resistance knew the price of every cut cable and every blown bridge. They kept cutting. After D-Day they rose up across the whole country, liberating entire regions, taking surrenders of German units, and feeding the Allies intelligence all the way to Paris. Some paid in full, like the thousands who fought a doomed open battle on the Vercors plateau that July.

Eisenhower later judged the Resistance worth a full fifteen divisions of regular troops. Fifteen divisions. Of farmers, fishermen, train conductors, cleaning ladies, teenagers with carborundum paste, and one house painter who stole the Atlantic Wall off a Nazi desk and carried it past checkpoints in his paint van.

They had no tanks, no planes, no uniforms. They had poetry on the radio and the nerve to act on it. And it worked.

[Supertanskiii @supertanskiii]

What happened in Belfast was what Lucy Connolly called for in Southport.

She was, quite rightly jailed.

Only for Reform to give her a heroes welcome at their conference, which normalised and applauded racial incitement.

Now look at where we are.

It’ll be lynchings next.

[Derby County @dcfcofficial]

A Russell rocket. 🚀

We signed Johnny Russell #OnThisDay in 2013. 📆

[Derby County @dcfcofficial]

Brys became a Ram #OnThisDay 15 years ago. 🐏

Any excuse to watch this back...🍿

[🎸 Rock History 🎸 @historyrock_]

It's really hard to pick the best drummer of all time. But there's definitely one who stands out.

John Bonham worked wonders with his drumsticks 🥁

[Rick Ball @RickBall33]

@BlogWyatt …major fire on Bahrain command ship, RN MCMV docked next to it sent over 5 man fire fighting team. Found Americans standing around with uncharged hoses in hands. So FF team took charge, put fire out & came home. Small but significant

[Rick Ball @RickBall33]

@BlogWyatt Don’t get me wrong, there were some incredibly good Americans who were superb, but there were many that were careless, believed their own hype, such that they didn’t know how to get the best out of their wonderful kit…an example…

[Rick Ball @RickBall33]

@BlogWyatt I couldn’t agree more - that should have been a priority from at least the early 80s to be perfectly honest. Exercising with Europeans was always fruitful - sometimes not great kit, but highly professional. Exercising with Americans was exactly the opposite

[Rick Ball @RickBall33]

@BlogWyatt Finally carriers themselves are limited as aircraft have limited endurance without cats & traps

[Sophie Pedder @PedderSophie]

D-Day commemoration, Omaha Beach, June 6 2024

Zelensky arrived, the crowd applauded. And then this happened:

🇺🇸 veteran: You’re a saviour of the people

Zelensky: No, no, you saved Europe

🇺🇸 veteran: My hero

Zelensky: No, you are our hero

🇺🇸🇫🇷🇺🇦

[🎸 Rock History 🎸 @historyrock_]

Led Zeppelin performing at their legendary concert at Madison Square Garden in 1973

[Classic Rock In Pics @crockpics]

Led Zeppelin as kids.

[Rupert Myers @RupertMyers]

The late, great former head of MI6 Sir Alex Younger in his own words on Brexit

[Liz Webster @LizWebsterSBF]

Former MI6 chief Sir Alex Younger on Brexit: “Putin would have been absolutely delighted by our decision.”

“So would Xi. France has effectively eclipsed us. Brexit has marginalised us.” Most striking of all: “Just nobody mentions the UK.”

Very sad that Sir Alex Younger, chief of the Secret Intelligence Service, born on July 4, 1963, died of pancreatic cancer on June 2, 2026, aged 62

[Daniela Nadj @danielanadj77]

Being a member of the EU, was never just about reduced queues at airports. It was about freedom of movement, free goods, freedom of establishment and being part of a wider European project that arose out of the ashes of World War II. Because the EU is also a peace project.

[Rick Ball @RickBall33]

@NicholasTyrone It was focused entirely on that fascist arsehole because he made an ugly intervention. Starmer responded in exactly the right way - dignified, cold, quiet, fury. Come on Nick, you're better than this