Skippy

[Skippy @skippy_63]

@Donna_Rachel_ You’re using the victims to attack someone over the wording in a report. While also using it to further yourself like you blame the others of doing.

That makes you a cunt.

[Skippy @skippy_63]

I got my promotion across a desk. Nobody will ever believe then this happened…

[Daniel J. Devane 🇬🇧 @DanielJDevane]

The King promotes three Guardsmen to Lance Corporal.

[Daniel J. Devane 🇬🇧 @DanielJDevane]

The King promotes three Guardsmen to Lance Corporal.

[Skippy @skippy_63]

Incredible

[The British Prince @freedom_007__]

His Majesty King Charles III addresses his Guards ahead of Trooping The Colour today 💂🏻

“I am very proud of you.” 🥹

[Skippy @skippy_63]

I did the troop twice and watch it every year from Australia. Good to see some Micks on parade!

[Skippy @skippy_63]

@BLAIMGame The same gimps moaning now ridiculed tories for saying vote reform get labour.

Maybe, just maybe, actually think about your candidates & stand for something & you might get more votes.

[Voices of WW2 @VoicesofWW2]

June 5, 1944. You've been in this bunker for four months.

You are 20 years old. You grew up in a small town outside Munich. You were on the Eastern Front before this -- Stalingrad's outer ring, two Russian winters -- and you were transferred to Normandy in the spring to recover. Physically, you mostly have. Psychologically, you're not sure you ever will.

This posting was supposed to be easy. France. Coastal garrison duty. Your officers called it "the milk run." You stand watch, you maintain the gun, you sleep in a concrete room that smells like mold and diesel, and the war stays far away. That was the promise.

The man beside you in the bunker isn't German. He's Ukrainian. His name is something you can't pronounce so everyone calls him something else. He was captured on the Eastern Front and given a choice: fight for us or rot in a camp. So here he is, beside you, staring at the same gray Channel. He doesn't talk much. You don't blame him.

Your position is Widerstandsnest 62. A strongpoint dug into the bluffs above a beach the Germans call "Fox Green." There are MG-42 machine gun positions, a 75mm artillery piece, mortars, and a clear line of fire down to the waterline 450 meters below. Your orders, if an invasion comes, are simple: wait until they are knee-deep. Then open fire.

You've run that scenario in your head a hundred times at this post. You've tried not to think too hard about what it means.

At 0100 on June 6, the paratroopers start falling.

Not a lot of them at first. Just reports crackling through the radio: airborne troops landing behind the lines, scattered all across the peninsula. Your lieutenant wakes everyone up. The alarm goes out across the division. And then, almost immediately, the confusion starts.

Your division commander is not at his headquarters. General Falley is on the road to Rennes for a war-game exercise, a planning drill that Command scheduled to simulate responding to an Allied landing. Every division commander in your sector had left that morning. They are all on the road, racing back now, but they are an hour away in the dark. Half your chain of command is in a car.

Higher up, it is worse.

Rommel, who commands Army Group B and who has spent the last two months driving personally from bunker to bunker demanding improvements, is not in France. He went home yesterday. June 6 is his wife's birthday. He is in Germany. He can be reached by phone, but every decision has to be relayed through his chief of staff, and every answer takes time, and in war, time is the only thing you cannot get back.

The Panzer reserves, two full armored divisions that could be at the coast in hours, sit idle. They cannot move without Hitler's personal authorization. No one will wake Hitler. He took a sedative last night. His staff knows better than to disturb him without absolute certainty, and absolute certainty will not arrive until it is too late. The Panzers will sit in their staging areas until afternoon, waiting for a phone call from a sleeping man.

None of this reaches you in your bunker. You just know that paratroopers are landing somewhere and nobody is giving clear orders and the Channel is making strange sounds in the dark.

Then comes the bombardment.

You have never heard anything like it. The naval guns start at 0500 and the world simply ceases to be a quiet place. The concrete walls of your bunker absorb the shockwaves but they cannot absorb the noise, and after 20 minutes of continuous shelling, you can feel it in your teeth and behind your eyes. The man across from you, Franz, is pressing his palms flat against his ears and it isn't helping.

The bombs come next. You can hear the planes but you can't see them. Thousands of them, the sound like a sustained roll of thunder that never stops. Somewhere inland, the earth is being turned over by 13,000 bombs.

Then it goes quiet.

And in the quiet, your sergeant opens the bunker's forward observation slit, and you look out at the sea, and you see them.

You will never find words for this. Not then. Not for the rest of your life.

Five thousand ships. The Channel, which has been gray and empty every morning for four months, is full from horizon to horizon. Battleships. Destroyers. Transport vessels. Landing craft already moving in lines toward the shore. More ships than you knew existed. More ships than you think the whole world could build.

You look at it for a long time without speaking.

Your sergeant says, quietly, that it doesn't matter how many ships there are. The wall holds or it doesn't. Get on the gun.

You get on the gun.

The orders are to wait. Wait until they are knee-deep. Let them come. Let them believe the bombardment worked. Let the first wave reach shallow water, and then the MG-42 does what the MG-42 does: 1,200 rounds per minute, pre-sighted firing lanes, interlocking fields of fire from a dozen positions up and down the bluff. On paper, this beach is impregnable. On paper, no army in history could cross it.

You wait.

The ramps drop.

You open fire.

What happens next is something you will carry for the rest of your life and never once speak about publicly until you are an old man, and even then the words will not come easily. You are following orders. You are doing your job. You are doing exactly what you were trained to do. And none of those facts help you. Not that morning and not ever.

They keep coming.

That is the thing no one told you. You fire and fire and fire and they keep coming. They bunch up behind the steel beach obstacles. They fall and get up. They crawl on their hands and knees through the surf. They are dying in numbers that have no meaning, and they keep coming. A burning landing craft drifts sideways in the tide. The beach below fills with green wool uniforms that stop moving. And still more ramps drop and still more men pour out.

By midmorning, something shifts.

Your 75mm gun takes a direct hit from a destroyer that has driven itself to within 800 yards of the beach, close enough that you can see the hull number. The gun crew is gone. The radio takes shrapnel from a mortar round and goes silent. Your lieutenant is trying to reach higher command through runners, and the runners aren't coming back.

Small groups of Americans are reaching the wire.

This was not supposed to happen. The wall was impregnable. You heard this so many times in the last four months that you believed it. You had to believe it. Believing it was the only way to make the waiting bearable. And now you are watching men climb the bluffs with their bare hands, in the smoke, through fields you mined yourself, and they are still coming.

By afternoon the strongpoint is in danger of being flanked.

Your sergeant gives the order to pull back.

You take the MG-42 off its mount and you carry it inland and you do not look back at the beach. The Ukrainian is beside you, still not talking. Franz is limping. Two other men in your squad who were at their posts this morning are not with you now. You don't yet know if they are prisoners or dead. You won't know for weeks.

You reach a farmhouse a kilometer inland as the sun is going down. The hedgerows are thick here, sunken lanes between fields enclosed by earthen walls with roots in them so old and dense that a tank can't push through. You know this terrain. You've walked it. It is a defender's ground, and it is where this war goes next.

You eat nothing that night. You sit against a stone wall with the gun across your lap and you listen to the distant naval fire and you think about the ships on the horizon that morning, the full channel, the numbers that made no sense.

You think about the Eastern Front. Three years of war consuming everything Germany had. Millions dead in the Russian snow. The army that Rommel needed for the beaches is buried in the steppe outside Kursk and Stalingrad and a hundred other places no one back home can find on a map.

You think about what you saw from the bunker today. The ramps dropping. The men in the water.

You think about what this day means.

You have been told since 1939 that Germany is winning. You stopped believing it somewhere in Russia. But you kept fighting because what else does a 20-year-old do when the army has him? You kept fighting and you came to France and you waited in a concrete box for four months and today the thing you were waiting for arrived, and it was five thousand ships.

You know how this ends now.

You knew before today but today made it real in a way that can't be unfelt.

You write nothing down that night. You have no letter to write. There is no one left at home who doesn't already understand what is coming.

The hedgerow war starts tomorrow. Weeks of it. Then months. Then the roads east, and everything that waits at the end of those roads.

But tonight you sit against a French farmhouse wall in the dark and you are 20 years old and very far from Bavaria and you think about your mother's kitchen and the smell of it in winter and you understand, for the first time with your whole body and not just your mind, that you are never going home.

82 years ago today, the men defending that beach were also somebody's sons. Some were true believers. Some were conscripts with no choice. One in six wasn't even German, just a man captured on the Eastern Front and handed a uniform.

History gave them the wrong side of history.

That is also worth remembering.

What do you know about the German perspective on D-Day that most people have never heard?

#DDay

[Lisa Jane Spencer @LisaJaneSpencer]

This transition hasn’t been easy, but it’s been worth it 🖤💛❤️

[Skippy @skippy_63]

@uncle_fury They no doubt tell everyone they’re a strike group.

[Skippy @skippy_63]

@LordHardThrashe You missed it, never mind.

[Skippy @skippy_63]

@augusteprompt They have a point about the Nolan movie though.

[Skippy @skippy_63]

@spectator @MrVirtueSignal Outstanding. Like abused children we still keep thinking we need him.
Nobody else is thinking it other than people who are devoid of original thought and forget history.

He’s the reason the country has been destroyed.

[Skippy @skippy_63]

@matthewsyed Of course you did, he opened his mouth & you climaxed.

It’s people like you & commentary like this that has contributed to the utter destruction of the UK.

[Skippy @skippy_63]

@SophyRidgeSky @SteveBakerFRSA This tweet shows how easy it was for him to seize & maintain control. You, as a journalist, fawning over him just for saying something that isn’t original & obvious to most.

This is why countries end up fucked & people die.

[Skippy @skippy_63]

@doctoriaindarcy How many have you done?

[Skippy @skippy_63]

@dom_lucre Could he not just have come out three days previously.

I feel that would’ve saved everyone some time.

[Skippy @skippy_63]

@NAtanason @ausvstheagenda Has it been extended?

[Skippy @skippy_63]

@ChrisEd43356677 @ausvstheagenda Try reading the original reply without moving your lips. Maybe then you’ll get it.

[Skippy @skippy_63]

@MailSport It’s Doctors, there’s no need to add in NHS, if anything it’s not a positive the NHS were involved, he’s lucky to have survived.