RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/explaining-the-greatness-of-the-founders/

Founding-era historian Gordon Wood identifies some important sources of the Founders’ genius.

EXCERPT:

Through their noble yet accessible commitments, the Founders not only distinguished themselves from their predecessors and English contemporaries. They also provided a template, whatever its imperfections, that stands out to us today. It is a template of which many — most — modern leaders fall short. We are fortunate, then, that the Founders possessed sufficient virtue to have “accomplished a revolution which has no parallel in the annals of human society.”

Five signers were captured by the British as traitors, and tortured before they died. 

Twelve had their homes ransacked and burned. 

Two lost their sons serving in the Revolutionary Army; another had two sons captured.

 Nine of the 56 fought and died from wounds or hardships of the Revolutionary War. 

They signed and they pledged their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor. 

What kind of men were they? 

Twenty-four were lawyers and jurists.

Eleven were merchants. 

Nine were farmers and large plantation owners; men of means, well educated. 

But they signed the Declaration of Independence knowing full well that the penalty would be death if they were captured. 

https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2024/07/d-day-at-80-how-the-allies-won-at-normandy-and-changed-history/?utm_source=r

They knew what was worth fighting and dying for

Zero hundred hours, Tuesday, June 6, 1944

British and American airborne troops, flown in on more than 1,000 aircraft, began to land in occupied Normandy in order to secure key objectives before the landings by sea. Elite Pathfinder units arrived first, marking out the terrain. “The first Skytrains appeared,” one observer later recalled, “silhouetted like groups of scudding bats.” German flak hit the planes “like large hailstones on a tin roof” as the paratroopers trod floors slippery with vomit and readied themselves before jumping down and down, thousands of feet, sometimes through cloud and fog. They were weighed down by up to 80 pounds of weapons, ammunition, and supplies. They knew that when they reached the ground, there would be merciless opposition — some of those whose parachutes got caught in trees were burned alive by flamethrower. They fought in fields and hedgerows lit only by the moon and by tracer fire.

What men they were. How can we not, reading of their actions that extraordinary day, hold our manhood cheap when we contemplate what they attempted, and achieved. It makes us wonder how we would have fared had it been our generation that had to liberate Europe from Nazism. “Every man thinks meanly of himself for not having been a soldier,” said Dr. Johnson, “or not having been at sea.” To contemplate the experiences of the men who fought on D-Day 80 years ago this month is to appreciate the true nature of what we, sometimes all too glibly, call “the Greatest Generation.”

0215

Part of the vast invasion fleet of more than 6,800 vessels was spotted by the Germans in Cherbourg, but the Germans were already fighting Allied airborne troops and could not react to the threat of the largest seaborne assault in history as it sailed toward Normandy. One German noncommissioned officer said the ships looked like “a gigantic town on the sea.” The defenses at Cherbourg were so powerful that the Allied planners had to choose five beaches on which to land, in what was to be the greatest campaign of the western war.

Unlike the strategy of any other military operation in the 20th century, this one depended for success on a single day’s fighting. If what the planners described as a “satisfactory foothold” had not been gained by nightfall, it very likely wouldn’t be gained at all. It was therefore a desperate, war-defining risk that justified the commitment of no fewer than ten Army divisions, going ashore in two great waves.

British prime minister Winston Churchill fully recognized the dangers. In the fifth volume of his history of the Second World War, he wrote about the demands for an early “second front” in western Europe:

The Channel tides have a play of more than twenty feet, with corresponding scours along the beaches. The weather is always uncertain, and winds and gales may whip up in a few hours irresistible forces against frail human structures. The fools or knaves who had chalked “Second Front Now” on our walls for the past two years had not had their minds burdened by such problems. I had long pondered upon them. 

An overhasty return to the Continent, before the battle of the Atlantic was won and complete air superiority gained, could have resulted in disaster. As Churchill recalled telling Joseph Stalin at the Kremlin in August 1942 when he demanded an immediate second front, “War was war but not folly, and it would be folly to invite a disaster which would help nobody.”

“If the Germans decided to bring their maximum forces to the beachheads,” estimated the historian Sir Martin Gilbert, “the Allied armies could have been defeated on the shore.” There had already been a long history of failed or faulty amphibious operations in both world wars — Gallipoli, Dakar, Dieppe, Salerno, and Anzio among them. Landing troops on hostile shores against determined enemy resistance is the hardest of all military maneuvers.

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate — we can not consecrate — we can not hallow — this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us — that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion — that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain — that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom — and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

“I dwell on this prospect with every satisfaction which an ardent love for my Country can inspire: since there is no truth more thoroughly established, than that there exists in the economy and course of nature, an indissoluble union between virtue and happiness, between duty and advantage, between the genuine maxims of an honest and magnanimous policy, and the solid rewards of public prosperity and felicity: Since we ought to be no less persuaded that the propitious smiles of Heaven, can never be expected on a nation that disregards the eternal rules of order and right, which Heaven itself has ordained: And since the preservation of the sacred fire of liberty, and the destiny of the Republican model of Government, are justly considered as deeply, perhaps as finally staked, on the experiment entrusted to the hands of the American people.”