As if words could do any justice to these men. My main takeaway: it was impossible. It shouldn't have worked.
Welcome to politics by faith brought to you by the Patriot Gold Group. I just wanted to put here the segment we did on my radio show Breitbart News Daily on Sirius XM Patriot Simulcast on the First TV, 347 DirecTV, Pluto, Roku, Samsung, everywhere you stream anything, you can watch the First TV as well. But I wanted to give our D-Day tribute here, the best we could cobble together with words and hopefully there's something in here that's meaningful to you. Enjoy. Today is the
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80th anniversary of D-Day. This is our attempt at some sort of tribute as if any words could even get any close. Years ago I talked to an army ranger who climbed the cliffs of Pointe du Hoc. This is a cliff that is overlooking the beaches of Normandy and there were giant guns on top of this cliff and they had to be taken out first and foremost had to be the first thing they did otherwise they were just gonna lob down on the Americans landing on the beaches and the whole thing would be over they'd have no chance.
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So before anything else happened, before there was any landing, we needed to take out these pillboxes, these little concrete bunkers with a little hole in them, just big enough to shoot down on the beaches. So the plan was, we're gonna have these army rangers
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land early in the morning when it's still dark out and somehow climb these enormous cliffs with ropes and then engage in hand-to-hand combat. I can't, like, if someone told me the plan,
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I'd be like, what are you talking about?
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That's, no, that's impossible, that's not gonna work.
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But they, they're like, no, that's what we're gonna do.
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So, they tried it. And everything went wrong. There was a storm, the currents were really strong, and they landed three miles off course. Three miles, that's not close. If you're driving right now, put your odometer,
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reset it, and go three miles, that's how far off they were from where they needed to be. Okay, so you gotta hoof it over three miles to start off. But by the time they did that, the sun came up. So they lost the darkness, they lost the element of surprise.
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And because they were all wet, the ropes, they had these ropes on the ends of these rockets, they're shooting them up on top of the cliffs, like grappling hooks, right? But they were wet now, so they were heavy. So many of them didn't make it up the ropes didn't make it up
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so how are we gonna climb this thing now some of the ropes did so like okay great we'll climb these ropes but we're covered in mud we got barely move oh and there are now a bunch of Nazis on the top with machine guns shooting down on us but don't worry it's not that high of a cliff. It's only a hundred and ten feet. Which is a ten-story building.
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That was the mission. That was the reality.
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You kidding me? 225 men started. 77 were killed. It's amazing any of them survived that. That's impossible. That makes no sense but the mission was accomplished and D-Day could proceed.
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So I was talking to a veteran, one of the men, I talked to one of the guys who did And I asked him if he's ever been back. He said yes, I've been back. He said he went back with his wife. Whatever, 30 years later. He went back and he said he put his feet over the edge of the cliff.
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He walked to the edge of the cliff and he put his toes over the edge of the cliff and he looked down. And he said, there's no way we did that. There's no way we did that. And you would say the same thing. You can go now, you can go to Point du Hoc, I recommend you do.
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You go check it out and you can do the exact same thing that this man did. Put your toes over the edge and look over the edge and you'll say the exact same thing. There's no way they did that. How could anyone ever do that? How did that possibly work? And there's a monument there now. There's a monument and it's so simple and all it says inscribed in this stone it says to the heroic ranger commandos Who under the command of Colonel James rudder of the first American division?
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attacked and took possession of the point duhoc That's it
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And at first I saw that I was like that's it
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That what do you mean that's it? There's no story here. What do you mean that's it? And then I finally realized, no, no, no, there's so much beauty in that and just that. Every single World War II veteran I've ever talked to, every single one of them has said the exact same thing.
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I was just doing my job. That's it. We were called to do a job. I had to do my job. Okay, what was the job? Saving the world from the Nazis and the Japanese imperialists.
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Two of the most evil regimes in world history. Just doing my job, said the once 19-year-old ranger climbing the 110-foot-tall cliffs of Pointe du Hoc. Just doing my job with machine guns coming down on me. Just doing my job. What are you talking about? But I love this memorial because it doesn't give any of the details. The most famous memorial inscription ever was placed at the Battle of Thermopylae. It was where the 300 Spartans went and fought and knew they were going to
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die. And there was no illusion that they were ever gonna come home, like they knew they were gonna die. And they were fighting against the massive Persian army. And the whole point of this was to give enough confidence to the people of Greece that they could fight against the Persians too.
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Like, we're just gonna do the best we can here and hold off for as long as we can until the Persians kill all of us. And hopefully, war makes it back to everyone else and they get up and fight as bravely as we have. That was the whole point.
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And the memorial says, go tell the Spartans, stranger passing by, that here, obedient to their laws, we lie. That's it. That inscription, that memorial, says nothing about the battle. It says nothing about the Spartans, it doesn't mention the enemy, it doesn't mention the context, doesn't mention the outcome, it leaves
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out all the stakes of, you know, what was at stake in the whole thing, left out the name of the men, didn't mention anything about the command, didn't do anything, and that's the greatest battle inscription ever. And Stephen Pressfield said, the key to that line in that memorial is obedient to their laws.
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Obedient to their laws.
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It's go tell the Spartans, stranger passing by, that here obedient to their laws we lie. Obedient to their laws, meaning their code of honor, their code of honor, their valor, their integrity. The Spartan warrior was obedient to the standard, to our code of laws, to our expectations.
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And the details of the battle don't matter nearly as much as the obedience to their code of honor that they showed there on that spot. So the question, of course, is what is our code of honor today that we're called to be obedient to? the end too. Our veterans, our World War II veterans, they certainly knew the stakes.
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And that's why I love the simplicity of that memorial. To the heroic Ranger Commandos of the 1st American Division, attacked and took possession of the Point Duhoc. Like, like yeah, you know, well what happened here? Oh, the army rangers, they attacked and took possession. Okay, but it was impossible.
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It was impossible.
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I can't imagine these guys, because they trained for it.
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Like they knew the mission, it wasn't like they did it. You know, they came up with it the day before. They were training for it in England and preparing to climb the cliffs and everything. But the entire time they're training, they had to be like, there's no way this will work, right?
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Like we're all in agreement this isn't gonna, we'll do it, but there's no way it's gonna work. Maybe, I don't know. I can't, I can't fathom it. Stephen Ambrose wrote a book on D-Day. He said, but for all that American industrial brawn and organizational ability could do,
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for all that the British and Canadians and other allies could contribute, for all the plans and preparations, for all the brilliance of the deception scheme, which is one of my favorite stories of D-Day as well, is that Hitler thought that it was going to come from this other area in France, and the Americans did all this deception campaign to make Hitler think that that was a brilliant... for the brilliance of the deception scheme, for all the inspired leadership, in the end, success or failure in Operation Overlord came down to a relatively
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small number of junior officers, non-coms and privates or seamen in the American, British, and Canadian armies, navies, air force, and coast guards. If the paratroopers and glider-borne troops cowered behind hedgerows or hid out in barns rather than actively seek out the enemy. If the coxswains did not drive their landing craft ashore, but instead, out of fear of enemy fire, dropped the ramps in too deep of water, if the men at the beaches dug in behind the seawall, if the junior officers failed to lead their men up and over the seawall to move inland
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in the face of enemy fire, why then the most thoroughly planned offensive in military history, an offensive supported by incredible amounts of naval firepower, bombs and rockets would fail. Add to that the fact that none of this was done to conquer any territory, it wasn't done to preserve any territory of ours, but it was just done so that Hitler would not destroy freedom in the world. To make it even more incredible. Ambrose says it just shows what free men will do rather than be slaves.
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At least that's who we used to be. I hope we still have a bit of that today or enough of us still have some of that today. I saw a video that CBS News did, the CBS morning show, and it was fine. I'm not criticizing it at all. I'm not mocking it but the reporter
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did some training to parachute into normandy as part of the ceremonies are going on and it was cool right because i can do it on the old school parachutes that they used back then all that but he said he's a somewhat like you know this is this must have been what it
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was like for those boys to get on a plane and fly over the channel and land in France. And you're like, yeah, but not at all, actually. Because you land in France, right? So you get on the plane, you get on the old World War II
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plane, it's all super cool, right? You get on the World War II plane,
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and you jump out of the plane, and that's cool, and then you land, but you land in France and then you walk over to the closest cafe and get a croissant. The parachuting into France that was the easy part. That's just jumping out of a plane. Now what? Now you fight behind What's that plan?
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I gotta be the worst soldier ever.
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Slater, we need you to climb these cliffs.
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What's at the top of the cliffs?
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Bunch of guys with machine guns. Okay, not gonna do that. What else you got? Okay, you can jump out of this airplane. Oh, cool, where am I gonna land? In France, oh, beautiful.
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What's going on there right now? Well, the Nazis control it, and they're definitely gonna kill you. Wait, what, what am I? No, I'm not going to do that either. Like, give me, this is ridiculous.
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What are these plans? Alright, fine, we'll put you in a Higgins boat. Alright, great, what's the Higgins boat going to do? Well, the Higgins boat's going to roll up on shore and they're going to open up the door, and then as soon as they open up the door,
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you're just going to be riddled with machine gun fire. What are you talking about? These are terrible plans. We cannot imagine what it would have been like to be a part of D-Day? On one of those Higgins boats.
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This is again, this is from that Ambrose book on D-Day. When this guy, when Peters reached the beach, he said, I was loaded so heavy with water and sand, and I could just stagger about. He got behind a tank, was hit by an 88, shrapnel wounded the man beside him, hit Peters in the cheek.
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Like, but think about it, he's so wet, he can't even move. And there was a moment when he was behind this tank that he looked out and he saw a man carrying a flamethrower, hit with a bullet, somehow it lit the tank on fire, and he started running to the ocean, and all the men around him were burning to death. He said, here I was on Omaha Beach, instead of being a fierce, well-trained, fighting infantry warrior, I was an exhausted, almost helpless, unarmed survivor of a shipwreck.
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Man. 19, by the way. You're 19 years old. An exhausted, almost helpless, unarmed survivor of a shipwreck. That's who we were at that moment. When he got to waist-deep water, he got on his knees and crawled the rest of the way.
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Working his way forward to the seawall, he saw the body of his captain. At the seawall, quote, I saw dozens of soldiers mostly wounded, the wounds were ghastly to see. So he picked up the helmet off of a dead soldier, grabbed his gun, this dead soldier's gun, because he was unarmed, so he grabbed this other guy's gun,
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and ran forward.
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What?
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Ran forward? I gotta take my kids, so a while ago I introduced, or I told Jack there's this thing called laser tag. And we haven't had a chance to go, but we gotta go. And he's so excited to go play laser tag. And then once we do laser tag,
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I'm excited to go paintballing. It's been a long time since I've gone paintballing, and I love paintballing. The adrenaline you get from paintballing is pretty cool for a normal person, right? Like, you know, because you get hit, and it hurts.
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You know, like enough. Like it hurts enough that you don't want to get hit, you know? So I look forward to being old enough that we can go paintballing. Like, paintball and D-Day, you know what I mean?
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But like that's the closest I can come to is that time I went paintballing 20 years ago.
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What do you mean?
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You ran forward. He said, I was alone and completely on my own.
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How about this one?
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One of the captains who survived, he later said, I cannot fathom these people. He said, I've often felt very ashamed of the fact I was so completely inadequate as a leader on the beach on that frightful day. What do you mean?
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What is up with these people? Who are these people?
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You were ashamed that you couldn't have been a better leader? How is it possible that this guy thought he didn't do a good enough job storming the beaches under hellfire? He's ashamed
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One soldier said I was scared worried praying
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Once or twice I can't miss this quarter here once or twice I was able to control my fear enough to race across the stand To drag a helpless GI from drowning in the incoming tide That was the extent of my bravery that morning. That was the extent of my bravery. So in light of what these guys did, they say, it's just my job.
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I'm ashamed that I didn't do better. Oh, I wasn't brave. I ran out into the open and saved a couple guys from drowning and then continued to run forward towards the Nazis. I wasn't, you know. Amazing, 80 years ago, it just breaks me up that there's not many of these guys left.
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It's just, it's the worst thing. I'm going to be a mess when that happens. When there's the headline, final World War II veteran passes away, that's going to be a bad day. One soldier said afterwards all he could think of was this poem by Alfred Tennyson. It's called The Charge of the Light Brigade.
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And it was about a British cavalry charge against Russian troops. So the parallel here is this British cavalry were like the Americans and the Russian troops were like the Nazis, fully entrenched in their defensive positions. This is 1854. So the British cavalry, they go in and they charge against the Russians and they got destroyed, the British did. Which, and this is the most important thing to know I think about D-Day, other than these men.
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I think this is the most important big picture thing to know is it's an absolute miracle that we won. It 99.9, it was so much more likely that we would have gotten destroyed and it would have been one of the greatest military failures in history that it was so much more likely than what happened we have this thing in his in America I think it's because we
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won you know back-to-back World War champs that we're just like yeah yeah of course of course we're gonna win or America yeah of course it worked of course what else was it gonna do definitely not work was what else was going to happen. Like there's like no chance that this thing would work. You replay this thing a hundred more times it's not going to work. Just start with the point to hawk guys. That's why I always love that story so much. Start with the point to hawk guys. Like that shouldn't have worked at all and then it would have been over. The whole
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thing would have been over. There's no way. If you don't take point to hawk then forget it. Even if you do take point to hawk it's still a nearly impossible. I think that's the biggest thing for me. There's no way this thing should have worked and it didn't in the charge of the light brigade this French general is Megan 1854 this French general said of that charge he said it is magnificent like the courage and bravery of these these British cavalry units that went in he said it's magnificent but it's not war
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it's madness that's magnificent but that's madness. That's what D-Day, to me D-Day was madness. Which just happened to win. Anyway, the soldier thought of this poem by Alfred Tennyson. So Tennyson wrote this poem right after that charge of the Light Brigade in 1854. Here's what it is.
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Here's part of it. Forward, the Light Brigade. Was there a man dismayed? That's what I've been talking about here, like, no way is this going to work, guys, right? Was there a man dismayed?
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Yes. But theirs not to make reply, theirs not to reason why, theirs but to do and die. Into the valley of death rode the six hundred. Cannon to the right of them, cannon to the left of them, cannon in front of them, volleyed and thundered.
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Stormed at with shot and shell, boldly they rode and well. into the jaws of death, into the mouth of hell, rode the 600. And it goes on and then it says, then they rode back, but not, not the 600. And the poem ends with, when can their glory fade? Oh, the wild charge they made. All the world wondered.
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Honor the charge they made. Honor the Light Brigade, Noble 600. It's been 80 years. 80 years. When can their glory fade? Oh, the wild charge they made.
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Let us always honor our D-Day heroes, and not just in even-ending years. Let us always honor our D-Day heroes, and not just in even-ending years. Go tell fellow Americans, stranger passing by, that they're obedient to our laws they
