Holy Sh!t! I’m sorry, but I don’t see a lot of dudes with Nazi SS ink at the ballpark or hockey rink. Haven’t bumped into any guys at the gun range that want to r@pe a burglar, but “not in a gay way”. Pretty sure I’ve never heard any Vets down at the VFW Hall wishing fellow Vets would’ve died in combat after watching him get shot. Stick your Everyman bullsh!t straight up your @ss.
On the morning of June 4, 1942, Ensign George Gay climbed into his TBD Devastator torpedo bomber and flew toward the largest concentration of Japanese naval power ever assembled.
He knew exactly what he was flying into.
Torpedo Squadron 8 had 15 planes and 30 men. Their aircraft were slow, outdated, and completely unescorted. No fighter cover. Command had promised them protection. It never showed. The flight leader, Lieutenant Commander John Waldron, had written a farewell letter to his wife before takeoff. He knew.
Waldron found the Japanese fleet first. Before the attack, he got on the radio one last time: "My greatest hope is that we encounter a favorable tactical situation, but if we don't, and the worst comes to worst, I want each one of us to do his utmost to destroy our enemies. If there is only one plane left to make a final run in, I want that man to go in and get a hit."
Then they dove.
The Japanese Combat Air Patrol fell on them like wolves. Dozens of Zeros. The Devastators had no altitude, no speed, and no cover. They had to fly low and straight to line up torpedo shots, which meant they couldn't evade. They could only absorb fire and keep flying.
One by one, the planes went down.
Gay watched them fall around him. Friends. Bunkmates. Men he had trained with, eaten with, played cards with. Going into the water one after another. No parachutes. No survivors.
His gunner, Robert Huntington, was hit. Dying in the backseat as Gay flew forward.
Gay himself took a 20mm cannon round. His left hand was hit. The plane was on fire.
He kept flying.
He lined up on the Japanese carrier Soryu and dropped his torpedo at point-blank range, closer than doctrine called for, because he had no other choice. He watched it run toward the ship.
Soryu turned. The torpedo missed.
Then his plane was hit again and went in.
As the nose of the Devastator knifed into the Pacific, Gay forced the canopy open against the rushing water pressure and pulled himself free. He surfaced surrounded by burning fuel and wreckage, wounded, alone, in the middle of the Japanese fleet.
He had one Mae West life vest. One seat cushion. That was it.
The Japanese destroyers were close enough that he could see sailors moving on their decks. He knew if they spotted him, they would not rescue him. So he did the only thing he could do.
He held the seat cushion over his head and floated.
Every time a Japanese aircraft flew low over the water, he pushed himself under and pressed the cushion above him to break his silhouette. For hours he did this. Treading water. Hiding. Bleeding. Watching his friends' planes burn on the surface around him.
He was the last man. Every single other pilot and gunner in Torpedo Squadron 8 from the Hornet was dead. All 29 of them.
And then, from high altitude, the American dive bombers arrived.
SBD Dauntlesses. They had found the fleet almost by accident, following the wake of a Japanese destroyer. And when they arrived, the sky above the carriers was empty.
Here is the part that will haunt you.
VT-8's attack had looked like a catastrophic failure. But it wasn't. By flying low, slow, and straight into the teeth of the Japanese fleet, they had pulled every single Zero in the Combat Air Patrol down to sea level to kill them. For those few critical minutes, the carriers below had nothing above them. No protection. No altitude cover.
The dive bombers came straight down out of the sun.
Akagi: hit. Fires reached the torpedo magazine. Gone.
Kaga: hit. Fuel ignited. Gone.
Soryu, the same carrier Gay had attacked alone minutes before: hit. Gone.
Three of Japan's six fleet carriers, the core of the force that had attacked Pearl Harbor, were mortally wounded in under five minutes.
George Gay watched all of it.
From fifty yards away, treading water with a shot-up life vest and a seat cushion over his head, he watched three Japanese aircraft carriers burn to the waterline. He watched the explosions. He watched the smoke columns rise so high they could be seen for miles. He watched the fleet that had seemed invincible that morning begin to die.
He floated there for thirty hours total. When darkness finally fell, he inflated the life raft. It was full of bullet holes but held enough CO2 to keep him on the surface through the night.
A Navy PBY Catalina patrol plane found him the next morning and pulled him out.
He later met with Admiral Chester Nimitz personally and confirmed what he had seen: three carriers destroyed. His eyewitness account was among the first human confirmation that the battle had turned.
He was 26 years old.
He was awarded the Navy Cross. He recovered from his wounds. He went back to flying, eventually spending 30 years as a commercial pilot for Trans World Airlines, carrying passengers on routes across America. He never made a big show of what he had done. He gave interviews when asked. He wrote a book. He went to reunions.
He died in 1994 in Marietta, Georgia.
His name was Ensign George Henry Gay Jr. He is, to this day, the only known combatant in history to survive a major naval battle by floating in the middle of it while it happened around him.
He flew in with 29 men. He came home alone. And the battle those men died in changed the course of the entire war.
Today is the 84th anniversary of the Battle of Midway.
Remember his name.
Last night, I read the entirety of C.S. Lewis' The Screwtape Letters. It's a novel told in the form of letters written by a demon to another demon instructing him on ways to manipulate his "patient" to do evil.
This one quote sounded familiar.
You cannot claim that you’re aborting your Down syndrome child because you don’t want him to “suffer.” First of all, killing a child so they don’t suffer is psychopath serial killer logic. You’re on the same moral plane as Andrea Yates. Second, children with Down syndrome are famously some of the happiest people you’ll ever meet in your life. They are not in fact living in a state of perpetual torment. So what’s really happening is that you’re killing your child so that YOU won’t suffer the inconvenience of caring for him. This is about freeing yourself of your own perceived suffering. If you’re going to be a child killing sociopath, at least be honest about it.
Can’t wait for Matt Damon to play Graham Platner in a future coming-of-age Netflix film about a spoiled rich kid who acts out as a teenager and is shipped off to an $80K a year boarding school only to get expelled after one semester for sexually assaulting a student then he joins the Marines as a fuck you to his parents and while enlisted he frequently posts on Reddit about how soldiers should bang hookers in Thailand then gets wasted in Croatia and gets a Nazi tattoo before deciding to move back to DC and bartend at Tune Inn where he meets a Blackwater executive who hires him to “work security” in Afghanistan which he does for a year before moving home to Maine to sell oysters to his mom and run for the U.S. Senate.
Give it the Oscar already.
@SaulStaniforth@schneiderhome In London, blacks are 4.2x as likely to be stopped & searched but 7.2x as likely to be a knife crime offender and 10x as likely to be a knife murder offender. They are UNDER SEARCHED. 👇
So here's what often happens in these situations.
Government handlers rush to get ahold of the parents.
The parents are vulnerable, they're mourning, and the handler will pressure them to make a statement calling for unity. In some cases, the government representatives will even suggest or write verbiage for the parent.
So the parent, sad and unused to this unique form of guilting, makes the requested statement.
At that point, the government uses the statement to head off any criticism of their policies that led to the controversial death. It's a standard play.
So, did you or any representative of the UK government ask or request Henry's family in any way to issue a statement so that you could make this argument?
🚨 OMG. SEC. SCOTT BESSENT JUST WENT THERE 🔥
SEN WYDEN (D): We don't want ramblings about the most corrupt regime in history, we want facts
BESSENT: "And we'd like to hear what Adam Wyden and Jeffrey EPSTEIN talked about. Your son's largest investment position was Rick's Cabaret. So, did your son and Jeffrey Epstein talk about pole dancing as he begged him for money using your limited credibility?"
ASSASSIN.
The UK won two world wars and Japan lost one horrifically. Yet it’s Japan that is still a culturally homogeneous, high-trust, low-crime country.
Mass immigration does more damage to your nation than being hit with a nuclear bomb.
The percentage of Republicans who believe that gay and lesbian relationships are morally acceptable has plummeted from over 50% in 2022 to 35% just four years later. GOP support is now at its lowest level since 2011.
I think we all know why this is happening.
The “I personally disagree, but adults can do what they want” mindset we all adopted over the last 10 years ended up blowing up in our faces. There is no such thing as a stable equilibrium that emerges if we just chant the Progressive incantations that “love is love” alongside our fellow libtards.
We thought that after Obergefell that this messy “social issue” would be put behind us. It was too much of a distraction. Don’t you know that we need to be talking about debt and taxes?
But the exact opposite ended up happening. Accepting gay marriage didn’t temper the Left’s appetite for eternal revolution, it emboldened these people. They immediately started trying to normalize transgenderism and turn “Pride Month” into the new Progressive Ramadan from which there was no opting out.
The Biden administration marked essentially the culmination of this cultural revolution. At that point, it became obvious to the Right that the “culture wars” weren’t a distraction. They were THE issue that would only continue to ratchet up and agitate for yet more power and wealth to be redistributed to the Left’s various client groups in the name of diversity, equity, inclusion, tolerance, and progress.
Throwback: this was the moment any person capable of thinking for themselves realized the Fauci Covid cult was a scam that would gleefully sacrifice all of us at the altar of Saint George Floyd.
CBS has fired “60 Minutes” correspondent Scott Pelley, and rightly so. He betrayed journalistic principles in platforming debunked science, in being closed-minded and dogmatic, and in behaving like a pompous ass. Good riddance.