ICE & Border Patrol must be funded fully & immediately.
These agencies keep America safe every day. If Congress does not act quickly, they will run out of money very soon, making our country less safe.
@SenateGOP will fund law enforcement without relying on a single Dem vote.
Beach landings are planned to a schedule that is set far ahead of time. They all have to be timed, in order for everything to mesh and for the following waves of troops to be standing off the beach and ready to land at the right moment.
As the landings are planned, some elements of the assault force are to break through quickly, push on inland, and attack the most obvious enemy strong points. It is usually the plan for units to be inland, attacking gun positions from behind, within a matter of minutes after the first men hit the beach.
I have always been amazed at the speed called for in these plans. You’ll have schedules calling for engineers to land at H-hour plus two minutes, and service troops at H-hour plus thirty minutes, and even for press censors to land at H-hour plus seventy-five minutes. But in the attack on this special portion of the beach where I am – the worst we had, incidentally – the schedule didn’t hold.
Our men simply could not get past the beach. They were pinned down right on the water’s edge by an inhuman wall of fire from the bluff. Our first waves were on that beach for hours, instead of a few minutes, before they could begin working inland.
You can still see the foxholes they dug at the very edge of the water, in the sand and the small, jumbled rocks that form parts of the beach.
Medical corpsmen attended the wounded as best they could. Men were killed as they stepped out of landing craft. An officer whom I knew got a bullet through the head just as the door of his landing craft was let down. Some men were drowned.
The first crack in the beach defenses was finally accomplished by terrific and wonderful naval gunfire, which knocked out the big emplacements. They tell epic stories of destroyers that ran right up into shallow water and had it out point-blank with the big guns in those concrete emplacements ashore.
When the heavy fire stopped, our men were organized by their officers and pushed on inland, circling machine-gun nests and taking them from the rear.
As one officer said, the only way to take a beach is to face it and keep going. It is costly at first, but it’s the only way. If the men are pinned down on the beach, dug in and out of action, they might as well not be there at all. They hold up the waves behind them, and nothing is being gained.
Our men were pinned down for a while, but finally they stood up and went through, and so we took that beach and accomplished our landing. We did it with every advantage on the enemy’s side and every disadvantage on ours. In the light of a couple of days of retrospection, we sit and talk and call it a miracle that our men ever got on at all or were able to stay on.
Before long it will be permitted to name the units that did it. Then you will know to whom this glory should go. They suffered casualties. And yet if you take the entire beachhead assault, including other units that had a much easier time, our total casualties in driving this wedge into the continent of Europe were remarkably low – only a fraction, in fact, of what our commanders had been prepared to accept.
And these units that were so battered and went through such hell are still, right at this moment, pushing on inland without rest, their spirits high, their egotism in victory almost reaching the smart-alecky stage.
Their tails are up. "We’ve done it again," they say. They figure that the rest of the army isn’t needed at all. Which proves that, while their judgment in this regard is bad, they certainly have the spirit that wins battles and eventually wars.
“A Pure Miracle” by Ernie Pyle:
NORMANDY BEACHHEAD, June 12, 1944 – Due to a last-minute alteration in the arrangements, I didn’t arrive on the beachhead until the morning after D-day, after our first wave of assault troops had hit the shore.
By the time we got here the beaches had been taken and the fighting had moved a couple of miles inland. All that remained on the beach was some sniping and artillery fire, and the occasional startling blast of a mine geysering brown sand into the air. That plus a gigantic and pitiful litter of wreckage along miles of shoreline.
Submerged tanks and overturned boats and burned trucks and shell-shattered jeeps and sad little personal belongings were strewn all over these bitter sands. That plus the bodies of soldiers lying in rows covered with blankets, the toes of their shoes sticking up in a line as though on drill. And other bodies, uncollected, still sprawling grotesquely in the sand or half hidden by the high grass beyond the beach.
That plus an intense, grim determination of work-weary men to get this chaotic beach organized and get all the vital supplies and the reinforcements moving more rapidly over it from the stacked-up ships standing in droves out to sea.
*
Now that it is over it seems to me a pure miracle that we ever took the beach at all. For some of our units it was easy, but in this special sector where I am now our troops faced such odds that our getting ashore was like my whipping Joe Louis down to a pulp.
In this column I want to tell you what the opening of the second front in this one sector entailed, so that you can know and appreciate and forever be humbly grateful to those both dead and alive who did it for you.
Ashore, facing us, were more enemy troops than we had in our assault waves. The advantages were all theirs, the disadvantages all ours. The Germans were dug into positions that they had been working on for months, although these were not yet all complete. A one-hundred-foot bluff a couple of hundred yards back from the beach had great concrete gun emplacements built right into the hilltop. These opened to the sides instead of to the front, thus making it very hard for naval fire from the sea to reach them. They could shoot parallel with the beach and cover every foot of it for miles with artillery fire.
Then they had hidden machine-gun nests on the forward slopes, with crossfire taking in every inch of the beach. These nests were connected by networks of trenches, so that the German gunners could move about without exposing themselves.
Throughout the length of the beach, running zigzag a couple of hundred yards back from the shoreline, was an immense V-shaped ditch fifteen feet deep. Nothing could cross it, not even men on foot, until fills had been made. And in other places at the far end of the beach, where the ground is flatter, they had great concrete walls. These were blasted by our naval gunfire or by explosives set by hand after we got ashore.
Our only exits from the beach were several swales or valleys, each about one hundred yards wide. The Germans made the most of these funnel-like traps, sowing them with buried mines. They contained, also, barbed-wire entanglements with mines attached, hidden ditches, and machine guns firing from the slopes.
This is what was on the shore. But our men had to go through a maze nearly as deadly as this before they even got ashore. Underwater obstacles were terrific. The Germans had whole fields of evil devices under the water to catch our boats. Even now, several days after the landing, we have cleared only channels through them and cannot yet approach the whole length of the beach with our ships. Even now some ship or boat hits one of these mines every day and is knocked out of commission.
The Germans had masses of those great six-pronged spiders, made of railroad iron and standing shoulder-high, just beneath the surface of the water for our landing craft to run into. They also had huge logs buried in the sand, pointing upward and outward, their tops just below the water. Attached to these logs were mines.
In addition to these obstacles they had floating mines offshore, land mines buried in the sand of the beach, and more mines in checkerboard rows in the tall grass beyond the sand. And the enemy had four men on shore for every three men we had approaching the shore.
And yet we got on.
Captain Frank Lillyman jumps out of Plane 1. It's 12.15am. He drops around 500 feet in 22 seconds and lands in a field, becoming the first American to arrive in France on D Day. He's smoking a stogie. Read more here: https://t.co/vXpbuZMmDI
"Think not of their passing. Remember the glory of their spirit." Company A, 116th Infantry Regiment, 29th Division. 34 of these men are from Bedford, Virginia. 19 Bedford Boys in gray here now have less than 24 hours of life left. #TheBedfordBoys. See more: https://t.co/kdNsJD04vx
Senate Republicans know that the first duty of government is to prioritize the safety of the American people. Today, we honored that commitment by passing the Secure America Act.
Every single Senate Democrat voted against this important bill. For months they blocked funding for Immigration and Customs Enforcement as well as Border Patrol. Democrats showed the nation that they are the party of open borders, protecting illegal immigrant criminals, and defunding the police.
Republicans will always prioritize the safety and security of America
@theoldworldshow@Will_Tanner_1 Another great read on this is the book Empire Express. The politics and backroom deals needed to build this triumph of American ingenuity is amazing.
Democrats failed to secure the border. They undermined our Border Patrol Agents. They turned our southern border into a turnstile.
@POTUS Trump and Republicans had the common sense and commitment to secure the border.
Republicans are committed to keeping America safe.
Today’s Democrat Party has turned its back on America’s safety and security. They opened the border and abandoned our communities to corruption, chaos, and illegal immigrant criminals.
Republicans stand for a safe and secure America. Republicans will not back down.
Look at the lifestyle alleged criminals enjoyed by living off your taxpayer dollars. The previous administration looked the other way. Thankfully we have President Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance.
Democrats have said ICE and Border Patrol are the problem.
ICE and Border Patrol are the professionals who secure our borders. They're the heroes who risk their lives to keep our communities safe.
They are not the problem. Defund the Police Democrats are the problem.
Victory alone was not enough to secure American liberty. Many nations have won independence only to lose it again.
America needed a man who understood that power must be restrained, even when it is rightfully his. George Washington had the character to surrender power when he could have kept it. That act helped establish a government of laws rather than men.
In our latest “Story of America,” Matthew Spalding of @HillsdaleInDC reflects on Washington’s indispensable role in the founding and the character that made American self-government possible.
Today, Senate Republicans will fund federal law enforcement, including the agency that defends our homeland and protects our borders. We are having to do this through an arcane process because Senate Democrats are unwilling to enforce our immigration laws and always side with illegal aliens over American citizens. They will offer a long series of unrelated amendments intended to sabotage the process. Their desperation to put foreign criminals above the security of the United States should be met with disdain and a united Republican vote to squash their grotesque agenda.
NEW: 86% of all Trump Accounts opened were by families earning less than $200,000 a year, according to the Treasury Department.
https://t.co/lKHDJMn22f
The first duty of government is to protect the American people, not illegal immigrants.
Republicans are committed to this duty.
Democrats have deliberately forsaken it.