“…let us continue to stand for the ideals for which they lived and died.”
At 0700 hours, June 6, 1944, three companies of the 2nd Ranger Battalion began their assault on Pointe du Hoc, a nearly sheer cliff 85-100 feet high. The attack was led by Lt. Col. James Earl Rudder who with his 225 men climbed rope ladders while under constant fire to reach the top of the cliffs. They were to take several German guns believed to have been there.
When they finally reached the top, they found that the guns had been moved and telephone poles put in their places to fool the Allies. Rudder sent a complement of men to find and destroy the guns, which they did after finally locating them in a nearby apple orchard. The Germans, initially surprised by the attack, mounted a counterattack on June 7. Rudder’s men, overwhelmed and outgunned, found themselves beseiged for two days and fought off three German counterattacks before they were finally relieved by the 5th Ranger Battalion.
Lt. Col. Rudder began the assault with 225 men. On June 8, fewer than 100 men were still capable of fighting. The three companies had taken casualties of 70 percent.
On the 40th Anniversary of D-Day, President Ronald Reagan spoke at the unveiling of a memorial to the brave men who took and held Point du Hoc. This is part of what he said:
Forty summers have passed since the battle that you fought here. You were young the day you took these cliffs; some of you were hardly more than boys, with the deepest joys of life before you. Yet, you risked everything here. Why? Why did you do it? What impelled you to put aside the instinct for self-preservation and risk your lives to take these cliffs? What inspired all the men of the armies that met here? We look at you, and somehow we know the answer. It was faith and belief; it was loyalty and love.
The men of Normandy had faith that what they were doing was right, faith that they fought for all humanity, faith that a just God would grant them mercy on this beachhead or on the next. It was the deep knowledge–and pray God we have not lost it–that there is a profound, moral difference between the use of force for liberation and the use of force for conquest. You were here to liberate, not to conquer, and so you and those others did not doubt your cause. And you were right not to doubt.
You all knew that some things are worth dying for. One’s country is worth dying for, and democracy is worth dying for, because it’s the most deeply honorable form of government ever devised by man. All of you loved liberty. All of you were willing to fight tyranny, and you knew the people of your countries were behind you.
The Americans who fought here that morning knew word of the invasion was spreading through the darkness back home. They thought–or felt in their hearts, though they couldn’t know in fact, that in Georgia they were filling the churches at 4 a.m., in Kansas they were kneeling on their porches and praying, and in Philadelphia they were ringing the Liberty Bell.
Something else helped the men of D-Day: their rock-hard belief that Providence would have a great hand in the events that would unfold here; that God was an ally in this great cause. And so, the night before the invasion, when Colonel Wolverton asked his parachute troops to kneel with him in prayer he told them: Do not bow your heads, but look up so you can see God and ask His blessing in what we’re about to do. Also that night, General Matthew Ridgway on his cot, listening in the darkness for the promise God made to Joshua: “I will not fail thee nor forsake thee.”
These are the things that impelled them; these are the things that shaped the unity of the Allies.
Images thanks to the Naval Historical Center.
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Category: No More Tyrants, The Good Old US of A
