Editorial Staff

Jim Dunnigan (JD), Austin Bay (AB), Al Nofi (AN) and Dan Masterson (DM)

[Edwards Air Force Base @EdwardsAFB]

NEWS: Operational tester pilots #B21 Raider, marking fastest integration of joint DT/OT testing in major acquisition program. #AFMC #USAF

Efforts continue to deliver critical capabilities to the warfighter, faster- https://t.co/a8C2AGACXz

@HQ_AFMC @AFGlobalStrike @usairforce

[U.S. Naval Institute @NavalInstitute]

U.S. Disables 3 Tankers As Part of Iranian Blockade, 3 Mariners Killed in Tuesday Strike — USNI News
https://t.co/3809OoEreB

[Mykhailo Rohoza @MykhailoRohoza]

UKRAINE HAS LAUNCHED MASS PRODUCTION OF SUPERSONIC MISSILES! This is an entirely new level.

Ukraine has officially reached a fundamentally new technological milestone. Serial production of powerful domestically developed supersonic missiles has been launched. These weapons are capable of traveling at several times the speed of sound, making them extremely difficult for Russian air-defense systems to intercept.

Their warheads are designed for the precise destruction of heavily protected strategic targets, command centers, and deep rear-area military infrastructure at long range. Ukraine can now reportedly strike targets that were previously considered out of reach.

According to analysts, large-scale production of such missiles could significantly alter the balance of power on the battlefield and elevate Ukraine’s defense-industrial sector to a new level on the global stage.

[Israeli Air Force @IAFsite]

בפיקוד הצפון, חיל-האוויר בהכוונת הכוחות תקף כ-310 מטרות של ארגון הטרור חיזבאללה וחוסלו כ-80 מחבלים בדרום לבנון. זאת לצד, פעילות הכוחות הקרקעיים בקו ההגנה הקדמי להשמדת תשתיות טרור ולהסרת האיומים על אזרחי מדינת ישראל והכוחות הפועלים במרחב.

חיל-האוויר ממשיך לפעול בכל מקום שידרש

[U.S. Central Command @CENTCOM]

https://t.co/06XEfevOgs

[U.S. Indo-Pacific Command @INDOPACOM]

Eyes in the Sky. 🌊 🦅 🇺🇸

U.S. Sailors and Marines with the 11th Marine Expeditionary Unit conduct VBAT flight operations aboard USS Portland (LPD 27), enhancing intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance capabilities in support of maritime operations.

📸 Lance Cpl. Luke Rodriguez

#USNavy #USMarines #11thMEU #USSPortland #VBAT #IndoPacific

[Mossad Commentary @MOSSADil]

U.S. forces reportedly targeted an IRGC command-and-control center as major explosions were reported in Robat Karim, southwest of Tehran.

[Israeli Air Force @IAFsite]

בצור ובדרום לבנון:
במהלך היממה האחרונה, חיל-האוויר תקף תשתיות של ארגון הטרור חיזבאללה וחיסל מחבלים בצור ובמרחבים נוספים בדרום לבנון.

[U.S. Central Command @CENTCOM]

U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) forces began launching self-defense strikes against Iran at 5 p.m. ET today at the Commander in Chief’s direction, in response to yesterday’s downing of a U.S. Army Apache helicopter. The mission is a proportional response to unjustified Iranian aggression.

[Special Ops Magazine @specialopsmag]

Vehicle drop at night from a C-17.
Absolutely insane to watch.

[Hidden History @HiddenHistoryYT]

Before a single Allied soldier set foot on Normandy, before the battleships opened fire, before the paratroopers jumped, before any of it, a fleet of small ships sailed alone into the darkness toward the most heavily mined waters in the world.

Nobody talks about the minesweepers.

They should.

By June 1944, the Germans had laid over 6,000 mines across the approaches to the Normandy coast. Contact mines that detonated on impact. Magnetic mines triggered by a ship's hull. Pressure mines activated by the wake of a passing vessel. And some of the most sinister weapons ever devised: mines fitted with ship counters, designed to let several vessels pass safely overhead before exploding under the one that followed. You could sweep a channel, declare it clean, and still die.

The entire D-Day plan rested on one brutal fact: 6,939 ships could not reach the beaches without someone going first to clear the way.

That job fell to 350 minesweepers.

On the night of June 5, hours before the invasion fleet moved, the minesweepers sailed. No escort. No cover. Just small ships pushing into the dark, dragging wire sweeps through the water, cutting the cables of moored mines and listening for the sound of their own death.

They swept 10 separate channels, each 400 yards wide, all the way from England to the coast of France. They were operating within range of German shore batteries. In complete darkness. In rough seas with strong currents constantly pushing them off course, forcing sweeps to be repeated. Keeping formation in those conditions, in the dark, without lights, was nearly impossible.

The Germans never detected them.

Think about what that means. Hundreds of ships, running without lights, dragging equipment through the water, close enough to the French coast to be well within range of shore batteries, and the Germans had no idea they were there.

By 3:30 in the morning, all 10 channels were clear.

The price was paid. USS Osprey struck a mine on June 5 and went down in minutes, killing 6 men. They were the first casualties of the entire D-Day operation, killed before the invasion had officially begun, their names barely known to history. USS Corry struck a mine off Utah Beach and sank so fast her crew barely had time to abandon ship.

These men knew exactly what they were sailing into. Minesweepers do not have the armor of a destroyer or the firepower of a cruiser. They are small. They are slow. They go first because someone has to, and they go knowing that the mine that kills them is one they simply never found.

When the great armada finally moved, when 6,939 ships began crossing the Channel toward France, every single one of them sailed through corridors those men had cut in the dark.

Every landing craft that reached the beach. Every tank that came ashore. Every soldier who stepped onto Normandy and lived. They all passed through water that had been cleared, in silence, in darkness, hours before dawn, by men most people have never heard of.

The liberation of Europe sailed in their wake.

[Editorial Staff @Strategypage]

https://t.co/hkZx9Co9af

[Echoes of War @EchoesofWarYT]

On June 6, 1944, Martha Gellhorn was sitting in a London briefing room when the news broke: D-Day had begun.

She had already been denied press credentials. The U.S. military had banned all female journalists from the front. Her editor at Collier's had quietly handed her D-Day assignment to someone else.

That someone else was her husband, Ernest Hemingway.

She got in a cab and went to the docks at Southampton anyway.

She talked her way past a military policeman by claiming she wanted to interview nurses aboard a hospital ship. Then she found a bathroom, locked the door, and waited in silence until the HMHS Prague was too far out to sea to turn back.

The Prague was the first Allied hospital ship to reach Normandy. In the dark water off Omaha Beach, Higgins boats ferried shattered men out to the ship. Gellhorn moved among them, helping carry stretchers, holding hands, recording everything. On June 8, she went ashore herself, one of the only civilians to set foot on that beach during the landing operation.

When she got back to England, military police were waiting on the dock. They arrested her, revoked her accreditation, and sent her to a nurses training camp outside London as punishment.

She went AWOL within 48 hours.

She went on to cover the Battle of the Bulge. She was among the first journalists to enter Dachau after liberation. She reported conflicts on six continents over six decades, never once embedded, never once asking permission.

Hemingway flew to Normandy on a press plane. Full military clearance. Official credentials. He watched the landings from the air and filed his dispatch.

He won the Nobel Prize.

You know his name. You probably didn't know hers until just now.

[WarMonitor🇺🇦🇬🇧 @WarMonitor3]

WATCH: Russian airforce has increased its transport of North Korean soldiers and equipment to the frontlines in Ukraine over the past days and has launched a massive airlift of air defence systems into St Petersburg to deal with increasing Ukrainian drone strikes.

[Israeli Air Force @IAFsite]

חיל-האוויר השמיד את המשגרים מהם חיזבאללה שיגר רקטות לעבר יישובי הצפון הבוקר.

[U.S. Army Europe and Africa @USArmyEURAF]

Accuracy is built before the first round is fired. 🎯 Watch as 1st Armored Division zeros M1 Abrams sighting systems at Novo Selo Training Area, Bulgaria.

🎥: Spc. Thomas Madrzak

#ThisIsUSAREURAF #SwordOfFreedom @Victory_Corps @1stArmoredDiv

[NATO Maritime Command @NATO_MARCOM]

Congratulations & greetings to our Allies and friends in 🇸🇪. #Sweden celebrating their National Day. #WeAreNATO

[J&L Historical @Jason_R_Burt]

The flag flown on DDay by USS LST-393, 82 years ago today. 🇺🇸

She made 30 round trips to Omaha Beach, bringing varied equipment and supplies to France & returning with wounded soldiers as well as 1000s of German prisoners. ⚓️

[Voices of WW2 @VoicesofWW2]

They called them flying coffins. The men who volunteered to fly them knew exactly why.

The Allied gliders of D-Day were made of fabric stretched over a frame of wood and metal tubing. They had no engine. No armor. No weapons. No parachutes for the men inside. They were towed to France at 130 mph on the end of a 300-foot nylon rope attached to a C-47, and when the rope was cut, there was one chance to land.

One. No go-arounds. No second approach. Whatever was below you was where you were going.

What was below them was Normandy at night.

The Germans had spent weeks preparing. Under orders from Field Marshal Rommel, they had driven wooden stakes into every open field in the region, angled to impale gliders on landing. The French called them Rommelspargel. Rommel's asparagus. Thousands of poles, many with mines or artillery shells wired to the tips, packed into every field large enough to land on.

What the glider pilots had not been properly told was the scale of the Norman hedgerows. The bocage. These were not English garden hedges. They were ancient earthen walls, some dating back centuries, topped with dense root systems and trees, rising 50 feet in places, bordering fields barely 200 yards long. A Horsa glider coming in at 100 mph hitting a hedgerow did not survive it. Neither did most people inside.

Some fields were flooded. Some were mined. Many were both.

517 gliders went into Normandy. 97 percent were abandoned in the field by the end of the operation. Most were destroyed.

General Don Pratt, assistant commander of the 101st Airborne, was in the first glider wave. His pilot managed to find a field near Hiesville and brought the glider down. It slid across the wet grass without slowing and hit a hedgerow at speed. The co-pilot died instantly. The pilot, Lieutenant Colonel Mike Murphy, broke both legs. General Pratt suffered a broken neck. He became the first American general to die in the Battle of Normandy. His glider had landed in one piece.

Sergeant Eric Wilson's glider did not. It hit a building at high speed. Both of Wilson's legs were broken. He was trapped inside the wreckage, unable to move, in enemy-held Normandy, for two and a half days before anyone reached him.

Lieutenant Den Brotheridge had come in earlier than anyone, in the first glider to land in France, the silent coup de main assault on Pegasus Bridge just after midnight. His glider stopped 47 yards from its target. He led his men out at a run, reached the bridge, and was shot. He died within minutes, the first Allied soldier killed by enemy fire on D-Day.

The men who survived the landing did not get to stop. Glider pilots were not assigned to combat units. Once down, they were expected to fight as infantry, dig foxholes, guard prisoners, carry ammunition, do whatever was needed. Most of them had trained to fly, not to fight on the ground behind enemy lines in the dark.

They did it anyway.

Of the 517 gliders that went in, 222 were Horsa gliders. Most were destroyed either on landing or by German fire in the hours that followed. The Waco CG-4As fared slightly better but 97 percent of all gliders from the entire operation were eventually abandoned in Norman fields, broken and empty.

The men who flew them were not pilots in the traditional sense. They were soldiers who had been given just enough training to put an unarmed, engineless box of fabric and wood into a dark foreign field at 100 mph, full of men and equipment, with one attempt and no margin for error.

Many of them got it exactly right.

Many of them did not come home.

Today is June 6th.

Remember them too.

[Jack Carr @JackCarrUSA]

The people of Normandy showing up for our World War II veterans! What an honor it was to be there with them today! Thank you to the Best Defense Foundation for all you do for our Greatest Generation 🙏🇺🇸