I was watching Braveheart on Saturday and it got me to thinking: what would you consider to be history’s greatest acts of bravery and cowardice? I am not a history buff so I would rather not attempt to answer, but I would enjoy reading the responses. You can define bravery and cowardice however you would like.
Climbing out of the LSTs in WW2 and running onto the beaches at Dunkirk. Machine guns and rifle fire were waiting. Yet they had to run into directly into it. It gives me chills.
I think you mean Normandy, Gonzomax. At Dunkirk the troops were wading out to boats to evacuate (thanks Grandad!).
I have always been impressed with the bravery shown at Masada; I cant imagine the anguish that killing your own family would bring, yet feeling that it was better than a life of slavery…
I also admire the courage of the defenders of the Alamo, they could have surrendered, but instead choose to fight and die for a cause that they believed in.
Bravest act of courage. History is full of soldiers that fought till the bitter end, in full knowledge that their cause, while just, was doomed. The last emperor of the Eastern Roman Empire is a great example.
For me, the band of the Titanic is near the top.
The sixteen bomber crews that flew the Doolittle raid off the Hornet.
A one-way flight, effectively defenseless save for the element of surprise, launched hundreds of miles before it’s intent due to being spotted by fishing trawlers, heading down out of gas in China with a dice-roll as to whether they would find a friendly strip in hostile Jap territory, followed by a make-it-up-as-you-go-along plan for what to do if/when you actually made it down safely, and how to get back home.
Plus they were launched off a ship that wasn’t nearly long enough for the B-25s.
Now that took some sack between the legs. And they all volunteered.
Second the D-Day landings. Also, I’ve always thought that the Charge of the Light Brigade was right up there. Brought on by basically by the stubborn stupidity of the top brass, the brigade charged into a narrow valley (“The Valley of Death”, according to Tennyson), surrounded by Russian artillery. 600 went in, just a few came out, and nobody faltered. I have read that the Russians were amazed by this action - thought that the whole brigade must have been blind drunk.
200 came out that day, and over half of the unit survived the war. Hardly just a few.
In fact the unit didn’t even have an above average mortality rate for the war. It’s amazing how effective military propaganda is, even after 150 years.
Interesting. I wonder how much of that effect is there for D-Day as well?
What’s his face jumped off of a cliff when Genghis Khan had him cornered in India.
Very little IMO. People don’t hold up the D-Day landings as an example of heroism because of the number of deaths, rather they hold it up because of the courage of charging bunkers with machine guns. The same acclaim is given to individuals who charged bunkers in other actions, so it’s not a numbers game.
In contrast cavalry charging and entrenched positions happened routinely in 19th century wars. That was a large part of the reason why cavalry existed: to rapidly cover the ground to an enemy position. However no other cavalry charge gets anything like the acclaim of the light brigade charge. That’s largely because of the perception of huge casualties rates. The casualty rate was high (half the unit wounded or killed) for a single action, but it wasn’t the near-total extermination that most people imagine. It was far less than the casualty rate of numerous actions in WWI for example.
The whole thing is a masterpiece of wartime propaganda. The charge was a gigantic clusterfuck and would have been a political disaster for the government. So they span it by concentrating on the brave and heroic sacrifice (including ordering the poet laureate to portray it that way). Nobody could criticise the manouevre itself because to do so would detract from the bravery of the dead, and that would be PR suicide. It was “don’t you support our boys” writ large. In all this the survivors were ignored and largely forgotten, leaving an impression in the public mind that that there were no survivors, and that perception is still with us 150 years later.
Not that they weren’t heroic, but it wasn’t the obvious suicide run that it is often portrayed as.
Ultimate bravery: Delta Force snipers Shughart and Gordon begging their superiors repeatedly to be allowed to rescue the crew of a crashed chopper during the battle of Mogadishu that is better known as Blackhawk Down. Both men were killed in the rescue efforts and both were awarded a well-deserved Congressional Medal of Honor.
Except that Tennyson wrote the poem at his own initiative (within minutes of reading about it in the Times), and included the line “Someone had blunder’d”*, which was explicit criticism of the manouevre itself. In fact, it was recognized at the time - and is remembered today - as a heroic fuck-up.
- He was asked to remove the line in later editions of the poem, and refused, claiming that the actual soldiers liked it too much.
The whole McCarthy period in the USA in the fifties always struck me as an era of both great paranoia AND great cowardice. People saw careers and lives of innocent people, friends, family and colleagues, being ruined all around them, yet almost no-one made the witch hunt for commies top, for fear of being branded a commie friend oneself.
Pickett’s Charge. Cross a full mile of open field with cannon and rifle fire coming at you. Wow…
That was his son’s account, but it seems to be fairly clear now that it was fictitious, particularly since he quotes and paraphrases articles written much later. It’s now widely accepted that the poem was requested by the government of the day.
That line appeared only in the original, single, newspaper printing. It was removed in later printings and didn’t re-appear in the poem in England until five years later, following a change of government.
Of course it is, just like the Jessica Lynch saga.
Once the public knows that there has been a military fuck up it is always portrayed as being heroic. Governments and generals don’t want incompetent, cowardly, indecisive fuck ups. That’s the whole point. It is remembered a an act of bravery because despite the fact that cavalry charges on entrenched positions were commonplace. So why was it remembered? Because of the spin that it was a suicide run with few survivors. That is not in fact true.
He indisputably did remove it in later English editions. You can read an original 1855 copy of the poem on page 157 here. It wasn’t reinstated until the 1861 edition.
Correcting a spelling error: Japanese is the prefered.
I worked with a grand old guy who was Japanese, raised in NY as a kid, returned to Japan and was a Japanese Imperial guard. He saw some of the Dolittle planes from the ground. He also walked from Burma to Thailand to surrender at the end of the war, and was the last Japanese soldier repatriated to Japan from Thailand as he was the unofficial translator.
Cowardice? I’ll vote for the crew of the Oceanos. In 1991, after it sprung a major leak and it was determined that the boat was gonna sink, the crew quietly abandoned ship, leaving ~500 passengers to fend for themselves. Fortunately all were rescued before the boat sank, but it wasn’t because of any gallant effort (or even performance of ordinary duty) on the part of the crew.
Noted.
‘Dude, please… Asian-American is preferred’.
From Walter, in The Big Lebowski
Alvin York