On June 6, 1944, a 56-year-old general with a secret walked onto Utah Beach under fire, armed with a cane and a pistol.
The secret: his heart was failing. He had hidden it from the army doctors so they wouldn't pull him from the mission.
His name was Theodore Roosevelt Jr. Son of the President. He had begged three separate times to lead the first wave ashore at Normandy before his commanders finally said yes.
When his landing craft drifted 2,000 yards off course, every instinct said redirect the following waves to the correct zone. Instead, Roosevelt walked the beach himself, alone, under artillery fire, cane in hand, reading the terrain.
His verdict: "We'll start the war from right here."
He then stood on that beach and personally greeted every regiment that landed after him, pointing them inland, cracking jokes under shellfire, steadying 18-year-olds who had never seen combat. He did this for hours.
Years later, Omar Bradley was asked to name the single most heroic act he had ever witnessed in combat.
His answer, without hesitation: "Ted Roosevelt on Utah Beach."
Roosevelt's son, Captain Quentin Roosevelt II, also landed at Normandy that same morning. He was named after his uncle, Quentin Roosevelt, who had been shot down as a fighter pilot over France in World War I.
Three generations. Three wars. One family.
Theodore Roosevelt Jr. died in his sleep 36 days later. Heart attack. The thing he had been hiding finally won. He never learned he had been awarded the Medal of Honor.
He was buried at the Normandy American Cemetery.
In 1955, his family had his brother Quentin, killed in WWI, exhumed from where he fell in France and reinterred right beside him. Quentin is the only World War I soldier buried there.
Two brothers. Two world wars. The same French soil.
Their father had once said: "Do what you can, with what you have, where you are."
Both of his sons did exactly that.
This week I came across the obituary of a photographer named David Plowden. I was unfamiliar with his work, but decided to browse his website after reading that he specialized in photos of trains and industry.
I’m not much of an art guy, but these photos are astonishing. (1/4)
A saronic’s boat is a real accomplishment. Problem is it’s wrapped in a lie, a dangerous lie.
“A pace American shipbuilding hasn’t seen since World War II.”
Read that again. It only works if you’ve never visited an American boatyard.
Because the thing Saronic just did, design, build, and launch a 150-foot workboat in under a year, is not a once-in-eighty-years miracle. It’s not historically significant either.
American yards build tugs, towboats, ferries, patrol boats, crewboats, dredges, barges, and aluminum hulls on exactly these timelines, every year, by the hundreds. WorkBoat’s own survey tracked 925 U.S. vessels delivered, under construction, or on order in a single recent year. ShipbuildingHistory documents hundreds of American yards turning out vessels like this since 1945. This is not a revival. It’s a sector that never stopped.
We build so many worboats under 250 feet that the DOT can’t even track all of them.
Want proof of how alive the boatbuilding market is? The largest maritime trade show in America, by a mile, is the International WorkBoat Show in New Orleans every December. Over 1,000 exhibitors. Roughly 14,000 attendees last year…. A Record-breaking number.
There is no oceangoing shipbuilding show in this country that comes within shouting distance, because that is the part of the industry that’s actually dying. Workboats are the part that’s thriving.
And here’s the part Dino left out.
Saronic didn’t conjure this speed from nothing. It bought Gulf Craft, a Louisiana yard with a 60-year head start, and built the Marauder with that yard’s existing workers, slips, and know-how. The speed everyone is applauding was already sitting in a Franklin, Louisiana boatshed.
Saronic didn’t resurrect American shipbuilding. It rented the muscle the workboat sector has been quietly growing for generations, and then took the credit on X.
Let me be unmistakably clear: I am a fan. Saronic builds something the Navy genuinely needs, and I want Congress to fund it aggressively.
But WORDS MATTER. Especially these words, at this moment.
Because there are two ways this lie does real damage.
First, it lets a company thriving in a hot market siphon attention and budget from the deep-draft shipbuilders who are genuinely on life support, the ones who build the hulls, drydocks, and capital ships that workboats can never replace.
Shipbuilders that need massively expensive drydocks because they can’t sling their ships and hang them on a few straps.
Second, and worse: to a voter, a congressman, a tired staffer scrolling at midnight, this framing says Saronic saved the Navy. It didn’t. It can’t. A swarm of autonomous workboats is not a fleet. One Chinese-built containership moves more tonnage than every Marauder you could launch in a decade.
Saronic’s Marauder can carry 8 TEUs, China builds ships with a 24,200 TEU capacity.
That’s 3,025 TIMES the capacity.
You built an incredible company Dino. One that fills a real and urgent need. That is impressive on its own merits. It does not need a fairy tale stapled to it, least of all one that steps on the throat of the shipbuilders fighting to survive.
Tell the truth, Dino. It’s a better story anyway.
And it’s not just you. All your competitors are doing it too.
Stop lying.
Just stop.
> anon
> loves history
> posts for years on interesting topics
> to great success
> now, a show
An enormous victory. And an example for others to follow.
Congratulations @culturaltutor!
Always crazy to me that we export for refining. Cheapest energy in the world and we're exporting. SMH.
"The saleable gold concentrate will be shipped to a port on the west coast for shipping to a refinery, while the loaded carbon will be transported to the Company's Pan mine processing facility for further processing (refining)."
Nothing will shape your worldview as much as simply reading how humans from the past thought.
You realize very quickly that our time is a radical anomaly in human history.