deltagreenofficial:

peashooter85:

Patton’s Speech to the Third Army, June 5th, 1944

Gentlemen, be seated,

Men, all this stuff you hear about America not wanting to fight, wanting to stay out of the war, is a lot of bullshit. Americans love to fight. All real Americans love the sting and clash of battle. When you were kids, you all admired the champion marble shooter, the fastest runner, the big-league ball players and the toughest boxers. Americans love a winner and will not tolerate a loser. Americans play to win all the time. That’s why Americans have never lost and will never lose a war. The very thought of losing is hateful to Americans. Battle is the most significant competition in which a man can indulge. It brings out all that is best and it removes all that is base.

You are not all going to die. Only two percent of you right here today would be killed in a major battle. Every man is scared in his first action. If he says he’s not, he’s a goddamn liar. But the real hero is the man who fights even though he’s scared. Some men will get over their fright in a minute under fire, some take an hour, and for some it takes days. But the real man never lets his fear of death overpower his honor, his sense of duty to his country, and his innate manhood.

All through your army career you men have bitched about what you call ‘this chicken-shit drilling.’ That is all for a purpose—to ensure instant obedience to orders and to create constant alertness. This must be bred into every soldier. I don’t give a fuck for a man who is not always on his toes. But the drilling has made veterans of all you men. You are ready! A man has to be alert all the time if he expects to keep on breathing. If not, some German son-of-a-bitch will sneak up behind him and beat him to death with a sock full of shit. There are four hundred neatly marked graves in Sicily, all because one man went to sleep on the job—but they are German graves, because we caught the bastard asleep before his officer did.

An army is a team. It lives, eats, sleeps, and fights as a team. This individual hero stuff is bullshit. The bilious bastards who write that stuff for the Saturday Evening Post don’t know any more about real battle than they do about fucking. And we have the best team—we have the finest food and equipment, the best spirit and the best men in the world. Why, by God, I actually pity these poor bastards we’re going up against.

All the real heroes are not storybook combat fighters. Every single man in the army plays a vital role. So don’t ever let up. Don’t ever think that your job is unimportant. What if every truck driver decided that he didn’t like the whine of the shells and turned yellow and jumped headlong into a ditch? That cowardly bastard could say to himself, ‘Hell, they won’t miss me, just one man in thousands.’ What if every man said that? Where in the hell would we be then? No, thank God, Americans don’t say that. Every man does his job. Every man is important. The ordnance men are needed to supply the guns, the quartermaster is needed to bring up the food and clothes for us because where we are going there isn’t a hell of a lot to steal. Every last damn man in the mess hall, even the one who boils the water to keep us from getting the GI shits, has a job to do.

Each man must think not only of himself, but think of his buddy fighting alongside him. We don’t want yellow cowards in the army. They should be killed off like flies. If not, they will go back home after the war, goddamn cowards, and breed more cowards. The brave men will breed more brave men. Kill off the goddamn cowards and we’ll have a nation of brave men.

One of the bravest men I saw in the African campaign was on a telegraph pole in the midst of furious fire while we were moving toward Tunis. I stopped and asked him what the hell he was doing up there. He answered, ‘Fixing the wire, sir.’ ‘Isn’t it a little unhealthy up there right now?’ I asked. ‘Yes sir, but this goddamn wire has got to be fixed.’ I asked, ‘Don’t those planes strafing the road bother you?’ And he answered, 'No sir, but you sure as hell do.’ Now, there was a real soldier. A real man. A man who devoted all he had to his duty, no matter how great the odds, no matter how seemingly insignificant his duty appeared at the time.

And you should have seen the trucks on the road to Gabès. Those drivers were magnificent. All day and all night they crawled along those son-of-a-bitch roads, never stopping, never deviating from their course with shells bursting all around them. Many of the men drove over 40 consecutive hours. We got through on good old American guts. These were not combat men. But they were soldiers with a job to do. They were part of a team. Without them the fight would have been lost.

Sure, we all want to go home. We want to get this war over with. But you can’t win a war lying down. The quickest way to get it over with is to get the bastards who started it. We want to get the hell over there and clean the goddamn thing up, and then get at those purple-pissing Japs. The quicker they are whipped, the quicker we go home. The shortest way home is through Berlin and Tokyo. So keep moving. And when we get to Berlin, I am personally going to shoot that paper-hanging son-of-a-bitch Hitler.

When a man is lying in a shell hole, if he just stays there all day, a Boche will get him eventually. The hell with that. My men don’t dig foxholes. Foxholes only slow up an offensive. Keep moving. We’ll win this war, but we’ll win it only by fighting and showing the Germans that we’ve got more guts than they have or ever will have. We’re not just going to shoot the bastards, we’re going to rip out their living goddamned guts and use them to grease the treads of our tanks. We’re going to murder those lousy Hun cocksuckers by the bushel-fucking-basket.

Some of you men are wondering whether or not you’ll chicken out under fire. Don’t worry about it. I can assure you that you’ll all do your duty. War is a bloody business, a killing business. The Nazis are the enemy. Wade into them, spill their blood or they will spill yours. Shoot them in the guts. Rip open their belly. When shells are hitting all around you and you wipe the dirt from your face and you realize that it’s not dirt, it’s the blood and gut of what was once your best friend, you’ll know what to do.

I don’t want any messages saying 'I’m holding my position.’ We’re not holding a goddamned thing. We’re advancing constantly and we’re not interested in holding anything except the enemy’s balls. We’re going to hold him by his balls and we’re going to kick him in the ass; twist his balls and kick the living shit out of him all the time. Our plan of operation is to advance and keep on advancing. We’re going to go through the enemy like shit through a tinhorn.

There will be some complaints that we’re pushing our people too hard. I don’t give a damn about such complaints. I believe that an ounce of sweat will save a gallon of blood. The harder we push, the more Germans we kill. The more Germans we kill, the fewer of our men will be killed. Pushing harder means fewer casualties. I want you all to remember that. My men don’t surrender. I don’t want to hear of any soldier under my command being captured unless he is hit. Even if you are hit, you can still fight. That’s not just bullshit either. I want men like the lieutenant in Libya who, with a Luger against his chest, swept aside the gun with his hand, jerked his helmet off with the other and busted the hell out of the Boche with the helmet. Then he picked up the gun and he killed another German. All this time the man had a bullet through his lung. That’s a man for you!

Don’t forget, you don’t know I’m here at all. No word of that fact is to be mentioned in any letters. The world is not supposed to know what the hell they did with me. I’m not supposed to be commanding this army. I’m not even supposed to be in England. Let the first bastards to find out be the goddamned Germans. Some day, I want them to rise up on their piss-soaked hind legs and howl 'Ach! It’s the goddamned Third Army and that son-of-a-bitch Patton again!’

Then there’s one thing you men will be able to say when this war is over and you get back home. Thirty years from now when you’re sitting by your fireside with your grandson on your knee and he asks, 'What did you do in the great World War Two?’ You won’t have to cough and say, 'Well, your granddaddy shoveled shit in Louisiana.’ No sir, you can look him straight in the eye and say 'Son, your granddaddy rode with the great Third Army and a son-of-a-goddamned-bitch named George Patton!’

All right, you sons of bitches. You know how I feel. I’ll be proud to lead you wonderful guys in battle anytime, anywhere. That’s all.

“All the real heroes are not storybook combat fighters. Every single man in the army plays a vital role. So don’t ever let up. Don’t ever think that your job is unimportant. What if every truck driver decided that he didn’t like the whine of the shells and turned yellow and jumped headlong into a ditch? That cowardly bastard could say to himself, 'Hell, they won’t miss me, just one man in thousands.’ What if every man said that? Where in the hell would we be then? No, thank God, Americans don’t say that. Every man does his job. Every man is important. The ordnance men are needed to supply the guns, the quartermaster is needed to bring up the food and clothes for us because where we are going there isn’t a hell of a lot to steal. Every last damn man in the mess hall, even the one who boils the water to keep us from getting the GI shits, has a job to do.”

quoms:

songsaboutswords:

god andrew jackson is staying on the back of the twenty

this is brilliant. as you hold one of these crisp new bills in your hand, on one side you’ll see the vibrant revolutionary undercurrent of american history, and on the other side you can see the genocidal white supremacist reactionary element

and as you turn it over and over, admiring the tenth of a millimeter of cotton-linen paper separating harriet tubman from andrew jackson, you come to understand the way in which america reconciles these seemingly dialectically opposed forces: it turns them both into money

So I hear you guys like musical theater about American political history. Here’s an emo-rock opera about Old Hickory, the…

oldshowbiz:

midcentury motels. it’s amazing the little pockets of america where signs like this still survive. very few of the motel restaurants or coffee shops still function, but in little desert towns like Lone Pine and Bishop and the dodgy outskirts of Lancaster, California you can still find successions of sketchy motor inns all in a row with rusty signs that look a lot like these.

murder-core-power-funeral:

I know I have said this before but you could base all the bosses in a video game off of caricatures of Theodore Roosevelt.

Theodore of the Twisting Violence

Theodore the Elephant Warrior

Theodore the Train Grappler

The Theodores Three

Theodore of Barbar

Theodore the Centaur with guns.

And the Super Columbia Dreadnought Roosevelt

MERICA
Blairally
Eugene, OR

mapsontheweb:

US counties map made from 3047 carved wooden blocks.

More creative maps >>

ryanpanos:

Gun-Concealing Furniture Design | Via

People cannot agree on gun control laws in America, but one point is not in doubt: Gun sales are on the rise. Following mass shootings, of which we have plenty, firearm manufacturers and retailers confirm that sales increase.

Which begs the question: Is there an attendant increase in the sales of firearm-storing furniture? 

Absent the politics, the furniture itself is fascinating as it poses a unique storage design challenge: End users want the furniture to visually conceal their goods, yet they want lightning-quick access to it. This often means that end users are seeking to integrate gun storage into some very central pieces of furniture—like dining tables.

ultrafacts:

Fact Sources: [1] [2]

Follow Ultrafacts for more facts

lizamon:

peaceful-wanderer:

nevver:

It’s Science! The Perfect Road Trip

brittneybrightside

y’all think this is cute and fun looking but as a bamf that drove 3,000+ miles across the country I can tell you that its not. When you get on I90 and your  GPS tells you to go straight for the next 450miles and you realize you could watch the entire Braveheart movie twice before you see anything other than cow pastures or corn fields you beg for death. I saw so much weird ass shit from towns with horses that wander like stray dogs and places where people say weird shit like “Sure dont!”. America is fucking bizzaro and a trip like this is only for the most Mad Max-iest of mother fuckers. 

In 1930, the local Hondo Lions Club erected the now somewhat famous sign reading “This is God’s Country, Don’t Drive Through It Like Hell” at the city limits with the intention of slowing down those speeding while traveling through town. Later, in the 1940s the sign was changed to “This is God’s Country, Please Don’t Drive Through It Like Hell” to satisfy those in the town who were displeased with the tone of the old sign.

On the fifth day of travel across the Atlantic Ocean, we saw the gigantic buildings of New York. America was before us. But when we had been in New York for a week and had begun, as we thought, to understand America, we were suddenly and unexpectedly told that New York isn’t America at all.

Then we went to Washington, being firmly convinced that the capital of the United States would, undoubtedly, be America. We spent a day there and by evening we had fallen in love with that purely American city. However, that very evening we were told that on no account could Washington be considered America. we were told that it is the city of government clerks, while America is something completely different.

Bewildered, we went to Hartford, a city in the state of Connecticut, where the great American writer Mark Twain spent his mature years. Much to our horror, the locals announced in unison that Hartford isn’t exactly the real America either. They couldn’t say for certain where the actual America is located. Some said that the real America is the southern states, while others maintained that it is the western ones. A few didn’t say anything at all–they just pointed their fingers vaguely into space.

Ilya Ilf and Yevgeniy Petrov, Soviet satire writers, 1936 (via qichi)

@pureamericanism

(via heavilyarmedvirtue)

mapfail:

The world according to Home Depot.

agrifuture:

why does this actual, real life photo look like a nightmarish norman rockwell painting

Canonically, the United States of America once built a silver ship and sailed it to the moon and back.

Canonically, the United States of America once tore the earth asunder and united the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans.

Civic Mythology #1

Canonically, the United States of America once possessed a unique artifact known as the Demon Core, but it was consumed in the process of summoning a miniature star.

Just had a dream where I met Uncle Sam, on the book tour for his autobiography.

It was called “Give Me A Gun, I’ll Solve It”, which was a) apparently a quote from a particularly memorable episode in his life and b) a little too on-the-nose, don’t you think?

lambdaphagy:

The Revolution was not a single struggle, but a series of four separate Wars of Independence, waged in very different ways by the major cultures of British America.  The first American Revolution (1775-76) was a massive popular insurrection in New England.  An army of British regulars was defeated by a Yankee militia which was much like the Puritan train bands from which they were descended.  These citizen soldiers were urged into battle by New England’s ‘black regiment’ of Calvinist clergy.  The purpose of New England’s War for Independence, as stated both by ministers and by laymen such as John and Samuel Adams, was not to secure the rights of man in any universal sense.  Most New Englanders showed little interest in John Locke or Cato’s letters.  They sought mainly to defend their accustomed ways against what the town of Malden called ‘the contagion of venality and dissipation’ which was spreading from London to America.

Many years later, historian George Bancroft asked a New England townsman why he and his friends took up arms in the Revolution.  Had he been inspired by the ideas of John Locke?  The old soldier confessed that he had never heard of Locke.  Had he been moved by Thomas Paine’s Common Sense?  The honest Yankee admitted that he had never read Tom Paine.  Had the Declaration of Independence made a difference?  The veteran thought not.  When asked to explain why he fought in his own words, he answered simply that New Englanders had always managed their own affairs, and Britain tried to stop them, and so the war began.

In 1775, these Yankee soldiers were angry and determined men, in no mood for halfway measures.  Their revolution was not merely a mind game.  Most able-bodied males served in the war, and the fighting was cruel and bitter.  So powerful was the resistance of this people-in-arms that after 1776 a British army was never again able to remain in force on the New England mainland.

The second American War for Independence (1776-81) was a more protracted conflict in the middle states and the coastal south.  This was a gentlemen’s war.  On one side was a professional army of regulars and mercenaries commanded by English gentry.  On the other side was an increasingly professional American army led by a member of the Virginia gentry.  The principles of this second American Revolution were given their Aristotelian statement in the Declaration of Independence by another Virginia gentleman, Thomas Jefferson, who believed that he was fighting for the ancient liberties of his ‘Saxon ancestors.’

The third American Revolution reached its climax in the years from 1779 to 1781.  This was a rising of British borderers in the southern backcountry against American loyalists and British regulars who invaded the region.  The result was a savage struggle which resembled many earlier conflicts in North Britain, with much family feuding and terrible atrocities committed on both sides.  Prisoners were slaughtered, homes were burned, women were raped and even small children were put to the sword.

The fourth American Revolution continued in the years from 1781 to 1783.  This was a non-violent economic and diplomatic struggle, in which the elites of the Delaware Valley played a leading part.  The economic war was organized by Robert Morris of Philadelphia.  The genius of American diplomacy was Benjamin Franklin.  The Delaware culture contributed comparatively little to the fighting, but much to other forms of struggle.

The loyalists who opposed the revolution tended to be groups who were not part of the four leading cultures.  They included the new imperial elites who had begun to multiply rapidly in many colonial capitals, and also various ethnic groups who lived on the margins of the major cultures:  notably the polyglot population of lower New York, the Highland Scots of Carolina and African slaves who inclined against their Whiggish masters.

– David Hackett Fischer, Albion’s Seed.