Phase I: the first strikes on Britain since 1945

Inbound tracks over the north of Scotland. This is not an exercise and it is not a probe.

Cruise missiles are hitting the United Kingdom.

At 04:12 GMT the United Kingdom came under sustained cruise missile attack by the armed forces of the United States. Air defences are engaging. The public should follow the guidance of local authorities and stay away from military installations.

Woke up at ten past four to what I thought was thunder.

I am fifty-eight years old and I have just heard a war start over my own house.

School is open today. I checked at five in the morning because I did not know if that was still automatic.

Thirty children are going to walk into my classroom in two hours and I am going to teach them about the Louisiana Purchase.

I remember the last one. I was three, so I remember my mother's face and not much else.

I did not expect to see her face on my own in the mirror this morning. I am so terribly sorry, all of you. I truly thought we had finished with this.

My grandfather flew out of Norfolk in 1943. Norfolk, England, not Virginia. He is buried forty minutes from Lakenheath.

We are bombing the country that buried him. I do not have a bigger thought than that and I have been trying to have one since four this morning.

Reconstructing the first salvo: 148 weapons launched. 84 intercepted — Aster 30 from Type 45s in the Forth and the Humber, Sky Sabre over the Scottish coast, 19 taken by QRA Typhoons with Meteor and ASRAAM.

64 leaked through. Buchan and Benbecula radars destroyed. Pennine relay masts down. Leeming cratered. Boulmer's masts gone, bunker still up.

A 57% intercept rate against a saturation salvo is extraordinary. It was also not enough.

The Prime Minister has informed the House that a State of War exists between the United Kingdom and the United States of America.

Five weeks ago I posted that it was quiet at Marham and something was up.

I want to go back to that morning and stay in it.

My fellow Americans. At twelve minutes past four this morning, United States forces struck military targets in the United Kingdom.

— Address to the nation, the Oval Office

He did not want this. They took our people. They put subs to sea. They moved first at Lakenheath.

We are behind him. Bring them home.

I have defended nearly all of this and I am not going to pretend otherwise now.

I cannot defend this one. Britain. I do not know a single person in this town who thinks we should be shooting at Britain and I know a lot of people who have been with him the whole way.

I am not switching sides. I am just saying it out loud once.

"I did not want this."

Sir, on the nineteenth of January you had no plan to take Greenland and you took it. On the ninth of February you told us the line stopped at Iceland. It is the sixteenth.

I preached forgiveness on Sunday to a half-empty church. I am not able to preach this. I am asking my congregation to pray for the British and I expect to be called something for it by Wednesday.

The under-reported number from last night is not the missiles that hit. It is the missiles that were spent.

Fourteen percent of the entire American global JASSM-ER inventory, in twelve hours, against the radar picture of one medium-sized country. Phase II needs several times that.

Magazine depth is a strategic variable and it is the one nobody campaigns on.

my manager asked me to stay late today.

there is a war on with britain. there is a WAR ON WITH BRITAIN. and this man wants me to cover the evening shift.

i said yes. what else is there. rent is on the first either way.

respect for saying it. genuinely. no dunk.

this app would be about forty percent less poisonous if more people could type "I cannot defend this one" without it meaning they lost.

Six anxiety presentations tonight and it is not even eleven. Two panic attacks in the waiting room. One elderly gentleman convinced the missiles are coming here.

I told him they are not. I believe that. I checked twice before I said it, which is not something I have ever had to do before telling a patient he is safe.

Newport News has been lost. Spearfish, aft compartment, blew to the surface and was scuttled by her own crew.

Ambush took a Mk 48 in return and is limping home on the electric drive.

And in twelve days of the hardest ASW anyone has ever attempted, they have not found either Vanguard. That is the only line in the whole report that decides anything.

Every American aircraft that flew west out of this continent last month is now bombing a European country.

I said in January that some of us were doing arithmetic. Here is the answer to the arithmetic: there is nobody coming. Not for them, not for us. We are alone at this end of the map and we had better start acting like it.

A state of war between the United States and the United Kingdom.

My grandfather fought alongside both of them. I typed that sentence into a translation app three times because I did not believe I had understood the English correctly.

Day thirty-nine of official Russian silence.

No statement, no alert change, no troop movement, no comment at any level. Meanwhile NATO's western members have withdrawn 38,000 troops from Europe and are at war with each other.

Moscow has spent nothing and risked nothing, and is the only winner on the board.

28,500 American soldiers are stationed in my country.

Until this month that number was a comfort. This month I noticed it is also just a number of people, on our soil, belonging to somebody else, whose government has started doing this.

Nobody in Seoul is saying it loudly. Everybody in Seoul is thinking it.

Mon petit-fils m'a demandé si nous allions gagner.

My grandson asked me if we are going to win. He is nine. I have taught this century for forty years and the only honest answer to that question is that nobody wins these, and you cannot say that to a nine year old at breakfast.

I said yes. God forgive me, I said yes.

Diesel $5.71 outside Laramie. It was $3.89 on the second of January.

I do not have a political opinion left. I have a fuel card and a payment book and forty-one days of this.

Watching a superpower spend forty-two percent of its long-range missiles on an ally.

I want to be careful how I say this. Those missiles were built for a war over my home. They are now craters in Scotland.

I do not know whether that makes us safer this year or abandoned next year. Neither does anyone in this city, and we have talked about nothing else for a week.

URGENT: US Navy cruiser USS Gettysburg has sunk in the North Sea after being struck by anti-ship missiles during a combined Anglo-French strike. US officials confirm fatalities.

A ship went down.

Every spouse in this neighbourhood is standing at a window right now watching the street for a car that does not belong here. That is what today is. Not the news. The window.

Please do not post the name until the families have been told. Please.

Navy. It says Navy.

My son is Army. I read the word Navy and I felt relief and then I felt so ashamed of the relief that I had to sit down on the stairs.

Somebody's son is on that ship. I am so sorry. I am so sorry that my first feeling was about mine.

How it happened, because the detail matters:

Gettysburg fought her own engagement well. Fourteen sea-skimmers killed by SM-2 and ESSM. Then Suffren put a torpedo spread underneath her and she had to manoeuvre out of her own defensive geometry.

Two Exocets amidships while turning. Auxiliary fuel fire, electrical distribution to the SPY-1B arrays cut. After that she could not see and could not shoot.

Three hours of damage control. Abandoned at 07:15.

PLEASE stop reposting the crew list going round. It is not official, it is not complete, and two of the names on it are wrong.

Somebody's mother is going to read a name on your timeline before an officer gets to her door. There is no version of that you get to feel good about.

Tanya. Every single one of us on this street felt exactly that this morning when we saw it was not our husband's hull number.

It is not shame. It is what love does when it is frightened. Do not carry that one on top of everything else.

The Department confirms the loss of USS Gettysburg (CG-64) with thirty-two personnel. Next of kin are being notified. Operations in the theater continue.

The fuel farm at Keflavik is burning. Storm Shadow, from the east, under the Patriots.

Nine days ago the Americans took this airfield in a battle that killed nine people. Tonight they cannot land a heavy transport on it.

Thirty-two.

I have carried one of those boxes. It is heavier than you think and it is not because of what is in it.

Whatever you believe about this war, today is not the day to be clever about it online. Tomorrow, be as angry as you want. I intend to be.

The United States Navy has lost the cruiser Gettysburg in the North Sea. Thirty-two Americans did not come off that ship.

— Written statement, the White House

"I ordered the operation she was on. Nobody else ordered it."

I have been critical of every decision in this campaign and I will be again tomorrow. Tonight I will say only this: that is the correct sentence, it is the one sentence nobody in his position ever says, and thirty-two families deserved to hear it from him.

"I ordered the operation she was on. Nobody else ordered it."

I have been on this app defending him for six weeks and I have taken some abuse for it, some of it deserved.

Tonight he said the one thing I needed him to say. It does not bring back thirty-two boys. I am still glad he said it and I am still not sure what I think about anything else.

Deb — I have been on the other side of you in these replies for a month.

You are right. He said it, and it was the right thing, and I am not going to take that away from him tonight.

I hope you and I are still arguing about all of this in ten years. That will mean we got to.

"Nobody else ordered it."

Forty-one days I have been shouting at this man on this app. Tonight he said the one thing that is hard to say and he said it plain.

Does not change my mind about one single decision. Changes what I think of him for about an hour. Both of those are allowed.

We had a minute's silence in homeroom this morning. Thirty-two seconds, one for each. A kid suggested it, not me.

Then we did fractions. That is the strangest part of all of this. The fractions still have to happen.

Thirty-two names were read in my church last night. We had forty people. Six weeks ago we had two hundred and forty.

They did not leave over the war. They left over me. That is fine. Somebody has to read the names and it turns out it is going to be forty of us.