Thursday, June 08, 2023

As Usual, The New York Times Drama Queens Rail Against the (Far) Right Threats While Ignoring Those of the Left — Not Least the Government Itself


Below the title After Jan. 6 Sedition Convictions, Far-Right Threats Remain (in its international edition, Convictions haven't quelled far-right threats), the New York Times summarizes the article as follows:

The Justice Department has been successful in holding leaders of the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers to account, but threats from other groups and radicalized individuals are on the rise.
"To account." To account for what? The article references, as mentioned, the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers along with groups such as — groups that most of us have never heard of — such as the Goyim Defense League, the Atomwaffen Division, another (unnamed) neo-Nazi group, and the "so-called accelerationists, who seek to use the chaos of attacks to incite unrest and racial violence." Not a single word about Antifa or Black Lives Matter or their "mostly peaceful protests." Well, they are mentioned once or twice, and you will hardly be surprised in what a neutral way they are described…

The article by the usual band of Drama Queens speaks about the insurrection and the deadly attack on the Capitol (January 6, 2021) while forgetting that photos and video show no armed people among the protesters ("But they had a flagpole!!") and that, contrary to what has been reported (ad nauseam), no member of law enforcement was killed, or even died, on that day.  Related: The January 6 Protest Summarized in One Single Sentence

The guilty verdicts on Thursday against four leaders of the Proud Boys on charges of seditious conspiracy were arguably the most significant victory the Justice Department has won so far in its vast investigation of the attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

Prosecutors took a victory lap, with Attorney General Merrick B. Garland noting that along with the similar convictions of six members of another extremist group — the Oath Keepers militia — a major blow had been struck against two of the country’s most prominent far-right organizations.

 … even after the hard-won convictions of the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers on the most severe charges brought so far in the Justice Department’s inquiry into the Capitol attack, law enforcement agencies are still confronting threats from sometimes violent groups and individuals on the right.

The end of the sedition trials, while a landmark moment, does not mean that far-right radicals have given up their ambitions to foment unrest or attack their enemies. Recent reports have indicated that far from abating, right-wing threats and acts of violence are actually on the rise.

I thought that threats and acts of violence were on the rise among the left.

In March, the Federal Bureau of Investigation released statistics showing that hate crimes in 2021 — the last year for which data is available — had reached their highest point in decades, with reports of such crimes against Asians and members of the L.G.B.T.Q. community seeing the biggest increase. 

I do not remember many attacks against members of the LGBTQ community — usually written without periods, NYT — but as for crimes against Asians, do they usually come from whites or from (left-leaning) blacks?

That same month, the Anti-Defamation League reported that antisemitic incidents last year were also at a record high just as propaganda efforts by white supremacist groups had soared.
Don't anti-semitic incidents also seem to come more from the left (from white leftists as well as black leftists) harboring the Leftist Worldview: A world of Deserving Dreamers Vs. Despicable Deplorables?

These spikes in hate and threats have come at a moment when bellicose language and extreme ideas are increasingly common even among mainstream Republican officials. Experts on political violence say that the lines between right-wing extremists and ordinary right-wing public figures have become hopelessly blurred.

They point to how Mr. Trump, for instance, warns of “potential death and destruction” in response to criminal charges brought against him, or Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, Republican of Georgia, openly muses about a civil-war-like “national divorce.”

Yes, when leftists in power persecute their opponents so much, using lawfare against them (and against them alone), whether they are VIPs named Trump or are the mostly incognito members of some group or are simply parents of schoolchildren, are you supposed to expect them to react with feeble acceptance?  Related: The DOJ and the FBI "have no conscience or soul": “There is a fervor to attack the J6 protesters, ruin their lives, and bankrupt them”. Here we have again The Leftist Worldview in a Nutshell: A world of Deserving Dreamers Vs. Despicable Deplorables.

By any definition, the three sedition trials — all held in Federal District Court in Washington — were monumental endeavors.

Monumental endeavors in witch hunts and kangaroo show trials. Held in a city that is over 90% Democrat.
Now comes the only mention of Antifa and BLM:

Without leadership and with some local chapters in revolt, the Oath Keepers have not been able to mount the anti-government operations they undertook during their early years. Nor have they been able to conduct missions against leftist movements like antifa and Black Lives Matter, as they often did during the time Mr. Trump was in office.

The Proud Boys have been less affected by the government’s prosecutions. … Still, the Proud Boys have remained a persistent force in far-right politics, showing up — in often violent ways — to protest local issues like drag events, coronavirus restrictions and the teaching of antiracism in schools.

No context given about "the anti-government operations" and the "drag events, coronavirus restrictions and the teaching of antiracism in schools." Besides seeing racism everywhere, the New York Times does not realize that the curriculum is not teaching antiracism, it is teaching anti-Americanism and that, through historical lies. How about "in often violent ways"? what violence did the rightists use? The same as that used by parents, also known as "domestic terrorists"?!


Note how Antifa (why no upper-case A?) and Black Lives Matter are matter-of-factly mentioned simply as "leftist movements". "Leftist movements" beset by (military-type?) "missions" conducted against them. This segues into the next sentence, which should infuriate the average reader:

Hatchet Speed, a Proud Boy and military veteran charged in a different case, was quoted in a recent court filing saying that the Proud Boys of today were something like the Nazi brown shirts, fighting leftists in the streets.  

Note that the exact sentence that Hatchet Speed used is not quoted. I find it highly unlikely that he would use "leftists", suggesting that they were (unsuspecting?) run-of-the-mill victims. In the 1930s, the brownshirts (one word or two?) were fighting communists, at a time when all communist parties were totally bound to the Soviet Union.

So we can say that, rather than "far-right organizations" fighting "leftists", Hitler's fascists were fighting Stalin's communists, who were fighting back (indeed sometimes instigating the fighting), as good as they got.

In any case, the mainstream media is not only rewriting the present, it is also rewriting the 1930s (and God knows what other decade or century)…

Almost since the day the Capitol was attacked, Robert Pape, a scholar of political violence at the University of Chicago, has been studying a group that has traditionally been ignored by experts in his field: the more or less ordinary people who took part in the violence that day.

Again: How was the Capitol attacked by people with no weapons (or very few weapons that no participant knew about)? where was the violence with no deaths except among Trump supporters?

Mr. Trump and his allies have repeatedly sought political gain by stoking a sense of victimhood and grievance in their followers, and at times seeming to encourage violence.

Last summer, for example, after the F.B.I. searched Mar-a-Lago, Mr. Trump’s club and residence in Florida, for classified documents, pro-Trump figures described the search as an act of war not only against the former president but also against his ordinary supporters.

“Trump targeted by Biden administration, and they can do it to you, too,” read the headline of an opinion article by Ronna McDaniel, the chairwoman of the Republican National Committee, that was published on the Fox News website two days after the search took place.

Again, treat people like secondhand citizens, i.e., like garbage, and they get upset — justifiably upset. Once again, an expression of The Leftist Worldview in a Nutshell: A world of Deserving Dreamers Vs. Despicable Deplorables

There are false senses "of victimhood and grievance" and there are (entirely) justified senses "of victimhood and grievance." 

And is anything can be said about the Mainstream media, about the Democrat Party, and about the Left in general, it's that they have those groups entirely mixed up. 

100%.


Let us let Ann Coulter respond to one final part of 's article:

Oren Segal, the vice president of the Anti-Defamation League’s Center on Extremism …  said that while he recognized the threats presented by the Oath Keepers and Proud Boys, he was more concerned about individual extremists who were not part of any group but had been radicalized online by hateful ideology.

Such individuals, he noted, have been responsible for some of the most brutal and spectacular attacks in recent months. Among them were the teenage white supremacist who fatally shot 10 people in a Buffalo supermarket last May and the California man obsessed by conspiracy theories who assaulted Paul Pelosi, Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband, with a hammer during a break-in at their home in San Francisco in October.

Mr. Segal also mentioned the less violent, but no less threatening, confrontations that have taken place as extremists from smaller organizations like Patriot Front have protested Pride events across the country. 

Regarding Patriot Front, it is often considered an FBI psychop operation, with its faceless members, all of them, composed exclusively of FBI undercover agents (once called G-men). And why is it wrong — let alone violent — about protesting things like Gay Pride events? Oh, I forgot — The Leftist Worldview in a Nutshell: A world of Deserving Dreamers Vs. Despicable Deplorables

Having said that, and insofar as we can allow for the New York Times and CNN to be interchangeable MSM outlets, let us, again, let Ann Coulter handle this one:

Here's some "follow the facts" reporting CNN absolutely refuses to do. The network provides breathless bulletins whenever there's a mass shooting, but as soon as the suspect turns out NOT to be a straight white male, it's back to Ukraine.

Somewhere in the media right now (probably MSNBC), someone is talking about Dylann Roof, the monster who murdered nine people at a black church in South Carolina. That happened eight years and three presidents ago. But mass shootings this year keep mysteriously disappearing from the news.

January: two mass shootings of Asians in California just days apart, including the deadliest shooting in Los Angeles history. Eighteen killed in all. Gunmen in both cases Chinese immigrants, Huu Can Tran and Chunli Zhao.

The end!

February: Active shooter at Michigan State University kills three students, sends five to hospital. Gunman: Anthony Dwayne McRae, a 43-year-old black man.

The end!

March: mass shooting at a Christian school in Nashville, killing three 9-year-olds and three adults. Gunman: Audrey Elizabeth Hale, a transgender.

The end!

But she left a manifesto!

Media: Go away. We're not interested.

April: horrific shooting at a 16-year-old's birthday party in Dadeville, Alabama, leaving four dead -- three of them teenagers -- and wounding 32 others. Arrested: Johnny Letron Brown, Willie George Brown Jr., Wilson LaMar Hill, Travis McCullough and Tyreese McCullough.

The end!

Last day of April: slaughter of five family members, including a 9-year-old boy, all shot execution-style, in Texas. Arrested: an illegal from Mexico.

The end!

Would covering stories like these turn CNN into a "right-wing" network? Only if facts are "right-wing."


All the gunmen, all the perpetrators, symbolic of, again, The Leftist Worldview in a Nutshell: A world of Deserving Dreamers Vs. Despicable Deplorables

RelatedThe January 6 Protest Summarized in One Single Sentence
• David Horowitz: What the January 6th protest actually reveals is the criminal determination of the Democrats to establish a one-party state at whatever the cost
• The DOJ and the FBI "have no conscience or soul": “There is a fervor to attack the J6 protesters, ruin their lives, and bankrupt them”
The Central Absurd Inconsistency of the Ray Epps Conundrum Described in Two Sentences
• Kabuki Theater: the "top 12 strange, stand-out moments" of the January 6th Committee's interview with Ray Epps
• Déjà Vu All Over Again in the Banana Republic of Biden: No, the Democrats did not run better campaigns; they cheated, as usual
• Isn’t it strange that in Florida, with all those strict rules against cheating, the GOP red tsunami happened as predicted? The Democrats have again fixed, rigged, and stolen an election
• Let’s dispense with the myth that liberals are really against voter fraud; Voter fraud is actually an essential part of their election strategy
• If the Democrats learned anything from their 2016 debacle it’s that they didn’t cheat nearly enough
• Democrats don't support voter fraud; they just worry about disenfranchising the deceased
• Voter ID: Apparently not allowing minorities to cheat is a form of racial oppression
• Of the 47 countries in Europe today — the nations and the continent that the Democrats are always telling us to emulate — 46 of them currently require government-issued photo IDs to vote
Joe Biden, Why Are You Calling Denmark a White Supremacist Country? And You, Barack Obama: Why Are You Calling Africa a Racist Continent? 
• An almost totalitarian effort by the national political and social media to suppress and ridicule any doubt of the accuracy of the election result
• Our élites constantly lecture everyone about "disinformation," about "big lies", etc; They're the biggest liars of all, with zero accountability
• I believed a farrago of lies" Writes VIP Whose Leftist Half of the American Electorate was "Taken in By Full-Spectrum Propaganda" Regarding the Jan. 6 (Non-)Riots
Isn't America Being Governed by a Mafia Family Dynasty, setting things up so that there will always be Democrats in power?
• Inside of a month, Democrats have redefined riots and election challenges from the highest form of patriotism to an attack on democracy — And by “democracy”, they mean the Democrat Party
• Voter Fraud: A Note to Leftists Who Claim that "Not a shred of hard evidence has been produced"
Dennis Prager: The Numerous (and Sweeping) Anomalies Regarding the 2020 Election That Cannot Be Ignored
• One Thing that Putin Did Get Right: After January 6, "Over 400 Americans had criminal charges places against them, face prison sentences up to maybe even 25 years; they're being called domestic terrorists"

Wednesday, June 07, 2023

New York Times on Critics of The Little Mermaid: Show No Curiosity Whatsoever and Simply Label Them Racist


A New York Times story takes on the issues with the remake of a Disney classic by offering a portrait of the man who "has been president of Walt Disney Studios Motion Picture Production for 13 years."

Sean Bailey is in charge of live-action remakes of films like “The Little Mermaid.” It’s a job that puts him in the middle of a partisan divide.

A "partisan divide"? With words like that, you would expect a measure of neutrality and even-handedness. But works at the New York Times.

What follows is an interesting discussion of the Walt Disney Company's choices in the past 10 to 15 years, but as to the film's critics, needless to say, the Times does not think it necessary for its reporters to show any curiosity whatsoever, consider their viewpoints, and do their homework.

Call them racist, and there is no reason to develop further 

Four times, the article calls out "the racist responses to the film", mentions that the "casting of Halle Bailey as Ariel in “The Little Mermaid” was met with racist commentary online" (in a photo caption), refers to "online trolls flooding movie sites with racist one-star reviews" (those, though, come from abroad, the film having "done well in… North America"(!)) and, linking a Guardian article which offers a shield, denounces "a torrent of racist commentary".

One-star reviews are racist?  Those are the meat not of conservatives but of liberals, which rain down on Amazon every time a right-leaning book is published…

In case anyone is interested in the article, here are excerpts:

 Mr. Bailey sitting with his elbows on his legs and his hands clasped in front of him.

Disney likes the cash. The company also views Mr. Bailey’s remake operation as crucial to remaining relevant. Disney’s animated classics are treasured by fans, but most showcase ideas from another era, especially when it comes to gender roles: Be pretty, girls, and things might work out.

The reimaginings, as Mr. Bailey refers to his remakes, find ways to make Disney stories less retrograde. His heroines are empowered, and his casting emphasizes diversity. A live-action “Snow White,” set for release next year, stars the Latina actress Rachel Zegler as the princess known as “the fairest of them all.” Yara Shahidi played Tinker Bell in the recent “Peter Pan and Wendy,” making her the first Black woman to portray the character onscreen.

“We want to reflect the world as it exists,” Mr. Bailey said.

But that worldview — and business strategy — has increasingly put Disney and Mr. Bailey, a low-profile and self-effacing executive, in the middle of a very loud, very unpolite cultural fight. For every person who applauds Disney, there seems to be a counterpart who complains about being force-fed “wokeness.”

 … Consider his remake of “The Little Mermaid,” which arrived in theaters two weeks ago and cost an estimated $375 million to make and market. The new version scuttles problematic lyrics from the 1989 original. (“It’s she who holds her tongue who gets a man.”) In the biggest change, Halle Bailey, who is Black, plays Ariel, the mermaid. Disney has long depicted the character as white, including at its theme parks.

Halle Bailey speaking to reporters on the red carpet at the premiere of “The Little Mermaid.”

The casting of Halle Bailey as Ariel in “The Little Mermaid” was met with racist commentary online. Credit Philip Cheung for The New York Times
Support for Ms. Bailey, notably from people of color and film critics, has been offset by a torrent of racist commentary on social media and movie fan sites. Others

 … The upshot? Disney hoped “The Little Mermaid” would generate as much as $1 billion worldwide, with the furor evaporating once the film arrived in theaters. Feedback scores from test screenings were strong, as were early reviews. “Alan Menken just told me that he thinks this one is better than the animated film,” Robert A. Iger, Disney’s chief executive, said at the film’s premiere last month, referring to the Oscar-winning composer.

Instead, “The Little Mermaid” will top out closer to $600 million, box office analysts said on Sunday, largely because the film faltered overseas, where it was “review bombed,” with online trolls flooding movie sites with racist one-star reviews. The film has done well in North America, outperforming “Aladdin”

 … Mr. Bailey declined to comment on the racist responses to the film. 

 … “I think what he is doing is vastly important,” said Geena Davis, an actress and gender equity activist. “It’s not just about inspiring little girls. It’s about normalizing for men and boys, making it perfectly normal to see a girl doing interesting and important things and taking up space.”

One criticism of Mr. Bailey is that he has not created an original franchise. “We’re going to keep trying,” he said. Credit Philip Cheung for The New York Times

 … Like Mr. Iger, Mr. Bailey does not hide his political leanings. He is close to Senator Cory Booker, Democrat of New Jersey, a friendship that started in 2000, when Mr. Bailey held a fund-raiser for him in Hollywood. (Mr. Bailey has a lot of famous friends. He goes way back with Ben Affleck, helped Dwayne Johnson start a tequila brand and serves on the board of Robert Redford’s Sundance Institute.)

Tuesday, June 06, 2023

Operation Overlord or 'Operation Overboard'? Little-Known Facts About D-Day the 6th of June, 1944


Written 20 years ago, this links to my account of the D-Day landings, which has received praise again and again over the decades.

And for the anniversary of D-Day, here are some little-known facts taken from excerpts of Antony Beevor's D-Day The Battle for Normandy (a book* which the Daily Mail's Sam Leith calls "a triumph of research … on almost every page there's some little detail that sticks in the mind or tweaks the heart"):

Churchill once remarked that the Americans always came to the right decision, having tried everything else first.  But even if the joke contained an element of truth, it underplayed the fact that they learned  much more quickly than their self-appointed tutors in the British Army.  They were not afraid to listen to bright civilians from the business world now in uniform and above all they were not afraid to experiment. 

 … American officers regarded their British counterparts as 'too polite' and lacking a necessary ruthlessness, especially when it came to sacking incompetent commanders 

     Bearing the Cross of Lorraine

 … the lofty and awkward de Gaulle, often to the despair of his own supporters, seemed almost to take a perverse pleasure in biting the American and British hands which fed him.  De Gaulle had a totally Franco-centric view of everything

 … Only de Gaulle could have written a history of the French Army and manage to make no mention of Waterloo

 … to the amused resignation of British officers, one of the first ceremonies which Leclerc's Division [la 2ème DB] organized after its arrival in Yorkshire was an official mass in honour of Joan of Arc, whom the English had burned at the stake some five hundred years earlier

 … Dieppe had provided a cruel but vital lesson for the planning of D-Day: never attack a heavily defended port from the sea

      The Airborne Assault

 … Eve of battle rituals included shaving heads, to make it easier for medics to deal with head wounds, but a number of men decided to leave a strip of hair down the middle in Mohican style

 … The fighting became pitiless on both sides; in fact, that night probably saw the most vicious fighting of the whole war on the western front

 … General Maxwell Taylor, the commander of the 101st, had accumulated a group of thirty men [during the night], which included four colonels as well as other officers.  This prompted him to parody Churchill, with the comment,  'Never before in the annals of warfare have so few been commanded by so many'

 … The mission of the American heavy bombers attacking at dawn was twofold:  to destroy their targets, but also to make bomb craters on the beaches 'to provide shelter for ground forces who followed us in'

 … many [civilians] made omelettes or crêpes for the paratroopers or offered them swigs of Calvados

 … farmers' wives rushing out into the fields and grabbing as many parachutes as possible for their silk

 … One of the French farmers said to his companion, pointing to the blackened face of a paratrooper, 'You've now seen an American negro'

      The Armada Crosses

 … by far the largest fleet that had ever put to sea 

 … Almost everyone at every level was acutely conscious if taking place in a great historical event … 'The attempt to do what had been contemplated by all the great leaders of modern European History — a cross channel invasion — was about to commence'

 … In a bunker … an Obergefreiter … was shaken by the sight which dawn revealed.   'The invasion fleet was like a gigantic town on the sea,' he wrote afterwards.  And the naval bombardment was 'like an earthquake'. Another soldier manning a machine gun position … near the Colleville exit had also been shaken at dawn by the sight of the fleet 'stretching in front of our coast as far as the eye could see'

 … many compared the huge shells roaring over their heads to 'freight cars'

 … The men on the landing craft felt the shock waves of the heavy shells from the battleships and cruisers firing over their heads … The passage of the heavy shells created a vacuum in their wake.  'It was a strange sight,' wrote a staff sergeant in the Ist Division, 'to see the water rise up and follow the shells in and then drop back into the sea'

 … 'Make it look good, men', one [officer] shouted as their landing craft jammed on a sandbar just short of the beach.  'This is the first time American troops have been here in 25 years!'

 … Almost every soldier seemed to remember the sight of their first dead German

 … Company A of the 116th Infantry Regiment, a National Guard outfit, became a symbol of the sacrifice, albeit an unrepresentative one … Around 100 men out of 215 had been killed and many more wounded … A myth has arisen that most of the dead in Company A came from the town of Bedford, Virginia. In fact only six came from Bedford, and there were just twenty-four from the whole of Bedford County serving in the company on 6 June

 … The Canadians, in spite of their battledress uniform and regimental system inherited from the British Army, in many ways felt closer to the Americans than to their mother country. They cultivated a certain skepticism towards British Army conventions and referred to Operation Overlord as 'Operation Overboard', after being smothered in instructions from British staff officers

 … Many [Tommies] started to brew up on the beach, even though it was still under fire. … Both Canadians and Americans were bemused by the British Army's apparent inability to complete a task without a tea break.  They also noted a widespread reluctance to help other arms 

 … With only a few honourable exceptions, the British Army was woefully unprepared for infantry-tank operations

  … Both Rundstedt and Rommel regarded the [UK's] Second Army as the chief threat. This was partly because they considered the British more experienced soldiers (they later admitted to underestimating the Americans)

 … Other surprises came when talking to prisoners.  One German captive [at Utah Beach] spoke to an American soldier of German origin.
'There isn't much of New York any more, is there?'
'What do you mean?'
'Well', he said, 'you know it's been bombed by the Luftwaffe.'
Americans were to find that many German soldiers had swallowed the most outrageous lies of Nazi propaganda without question.

 … The only certain fact is that 3,000 French civilians died in the first twenty-four hours of the invasion, double the total number of American dead

 … Normandy, [the local population] had discovered, was to be the sacrificial lamb for the liberation of France

 … Omaha became an American legend, but a crueller truth lay ahead in the fighting to come.  The average losses per division on both sides in Normandy were to exceed those for Soviet and German divisions during an equivalent period on the eastern front.

* Strangely, I could not find Antony Beevor's D-Day The Battle for Normandy on Amazon's American website (just an excerpt), only on its UK website…


This year's commemoration of all who have had to stagger out of the blood foaming surf to die on a foreign shore is the first one after No Pasarán's 16-year initiative ended last year. 

On every June 6 since a couple of years after the blog was founded in 2004, the anniversary was commemorated — in addition to a link to my (oft-praised) "story of D-Day" — by one line from Paul Anka's thrilling score from the film The Longest Day, one of the best war movies (and simply one of the best movies) ever made. 

Last year, sixteen years, and 16 lines, after Many Men Came Here As Soldiers, the lyrics sung by Mitch Miller and the Gang reached its conclusion.

I kind of referred to the initiative, albeit very indirectly, back in a post in 2007, on the day the initiative started

One of the best movies ever filmed, and one of the best books ever written

Many men came here as soldiers
Many men will pass this way
Many men will count the hours
When they live The Longest Day
Many men are tired and weary
Many men are here to stay
Many men won't see the sun set
When it ends The Longest Day


For those who might be interested, below are the lyrics, the commemorations, and the hyperlinks from 2007 to 2022:

The first three commemorations were simply the title and a link to the story of D-Day; by 2010, I was adding photos, cartoons, and/or various links to the posts…

Many men came here as soldiers
Many men will pass this way
Many men will count the hours
As they live the longest day

Many men are tired and weary
Many men are here to stay
Many men won't see the sun set
When it ends the longest day

The longest day, the longest day
This will be the longest day
Filled with hopes and filled with fears
Filled with blood and sweat and tears

Many men, the mighty thousands (75th anniversary edition)
Many men to victory
Marching on, right into battle
In the longest day in history


Fox News
also has an anniversary article, and Erica Lamberg's account is well written, although it does get tedious to read in almost every one of its sentences — and invariably at the end — "according to", "says [source]", "notes the same source", etc…

The invasion was conducted in two main phases: an airborne assault and amphibious landings, says the Imperial War Museum in the U.K. 

Shortly after midnight on June 6, over 18,000 Allied paratroopers were dropped into the invasion area to provide tactical support for infantry divisions on the beaches, notes the same source. 

Also, Allied air forces flew over 14,000 sorties in support of the landings and, having secured air supremacy prior to the invasion, recounts the Imperial War Museum in the U.K.

(You don't need to write "in the U.K." the second time you mention the museum's name, especially when it has been quoted in the previous two sentences; likewise, after citing the Dwight D. Eisenhower Presidential Library the first time, you can subsequently refer to just the Eisenhower Library.)

By daybreak on June 6, 1944, thousands of paratroopers and glider troops were already on the ground behind enemy lines, securing bridges and exit roads, says History.com. 

The amphibious invasions began at 6:30 a.m., says [sic] multiple sources. 

The British and Canadians overcame some opposition to capture beaches codenamed Gold, Juno and Sword, as did the Americans at Utah Beach, according to History.com. 

The Germans were aware of the importance of the sector designated Omaha Beach, which the Allies would need to connect and secure the beachheads together, and made certain it was heavily defended, says the National D-Day Memorial Foundation. 

"Fortifications and elevated terrain meant the American landing on Omaha would be the bloodiest that day," says the same source. 

U.S. forces faced heavy resistance at Omaha Beach, where there were over 2,000 American casualties, says History.com.  

"However, by day’s end, approximately 156,000 Allied troops had successfully stormed Normandy’s beaches," says the same source. 

More than 4,000 Allied troops lost their lives in the D-Day invasion, with thousands more wounded or missing, according to some estimates, says History.com.


At American Thinker, the author of The D-Day Encyclopedia, Barrett Tillman (merci à Évelyne Joslain), adds that 

French citizens suffered severely from the Germans, from the Allies, and from internecine conflict. Allied bombers and artillery inflicted massive damage: surveying a ruined French city, an American soldier gained anonymous immortality when he said, “We sure liberated the hell out of this place.”

 … Logistics also bore heavily upon manpower, as less than 25 percent of the Allied troops in France belonged to combat units. For every infantryman, tanker, or artilleryman who crossed Omaha and Utah beaches, four or five other GIs backed him up: clerks, cooks, mechanics, truck drivers, doctors and nurses.

So when you think of the World War II vet, don’t allow your mental computer to default to the traditional image. He may have been your father, grandfather, or the neighbor you hardly knew. But give him tribute, gentle reader, whether he wielded a bazooka, a bomber, or a bulldozer.

When you think of the World War II vet, think of the uncle who collected scrap metal or the aunt who learned to use a rivet gun.

When you think of World War II, think of a nation unified in its purpose with steely resolve. It was the kind of singlemindedness that took us from 30,000 feet in the skies of Europe in 1944 to the lunar Sea of Tranquility only 25 years later.