“By Grabthar’s hammer, by the suns of Worvan, you shall be avenged!”
“Never give in, never surrender!”
- Alan Rickman both though some Churchill guy may have co-opted the later.
Not quite a command, but Elizabeth I’s speech to the troops at Tilbury awaiting the Spanish Armada is pretty powerful rhetoric:
Speech to the Troops at Tilbury - Wikipedia
Are we allowing fiction? Shakespeare’s Henry V has some stirring examples - "Once more unto the breach’ and the speech before Agincourt. They were clearly in Churchill’s mind for some of his best-known wartime speeches.
It gets even better when the Germans were confused as to what he meant and asked for clarification;
Not a command exactly but “Russian warship, go fuck yourself” is pretty inspiring.
“Never give up. Never surrender!” was Tim Allen’s line, not Rickman’s. Although Alan did speak it once.
“Come on you sons of bitches do you want to live forever”
My Google-fu is failing me, but I I once read of a US army group that was surrounded by Germans during WWII. When the Germans sent someone under a white flag to discuss terms of surrender the America commander said something to the effect of “I’m sorry, we cannot accept your surrender because we don’t have enough men to take you all prisoner.”
That’s a scene from A Bridge Too Far, and not an American, but a Brit. Whether it happened during the real life battle, I don’t know.
Scene:
That may explain why I couldn’t find it. Oddly enough, though, I’ve never seen the movie; maybe I just read a description of that scene somewhere.
Huh, according to the Wikipedia page on the incident, a closer translation is “Russian warship, go sit on a dick”.
We want to be sure that we’re using the proper terminology when addressing Russian warships, after all.
The character in the movie is fictional but based on Major Digby Tatham-Warter. The character dies in the movie but Digby survived. He was truly a unique character:
He carried an umbrella because he couldn’t remember passwords.
He led a bayonet charge wearing a bowler hat.
Disabled a German armored car by sticking his umbrella through the vision slit and poking the driver in the eye.
He rescued a chaplain who was pinned down by enemy fire by bringing him to safety under his unbrella.
Before being captured at Arnhem he radioed “Out of ammo, God save the King.”
He escaped captivity and spent a long period of time behind enemy lines before getting back to the British.
“Haut les têtes! la mitraille c’est pas de la merde!” (heads high, it’s canister shot , not shit") Colonel Lepic charging with the horse grenadiers at Eylau 1807
and the following is more epic!
“When they attack us they will see our faces and not our backs.” Volodymyr Zelenskyy
Broadcast on the day of the invasion I thought, you deserve to win, just for that.
“Occasionally, one must conjure up enough courage, close one’s eyes and jump off the platform of the Kiyomizu.”
-Hideki Tojo on the eve on the war.
Said temple.
Those brave words always inspire me to stop and f*cking think before doing something reckless and foolhardy.
“I don’t want a ride, I want ammunition” Volodymyr Zelenskyy
Perry was quoting Lawrence (as you pointed out, yourself).
In 1912, the German Kaiser visited Switzerland and asked a Swiss minister what the 250,000 strong Swiss army would do if Germany attacked with 500,000 troops. Reply: “Shoot twice and go home.”
Hmm, I can’t figure out why I made that nitpick. You are correct.
I feel like you have confused each other. Perry quoted Lawrence with the somewhat misleading and not altogether inspiring “Don’t give up the ship.” But after the battle, in reporting on the victory, Perry wrote “We have met the enemy and they are ours.”
He has definitely risen to the occasion, maybe we should all elect comedians as our leaders, though some may argue we already do that.