A war speech I respect by a UK commander
- Thread starter Fencer128
- Start date
With all due respect, I prefer this:
"I am here because of the confidence of two men: The President of the United States and the theater commander. They have confidence in me because they don't believe a lot of goddamned lies that have been printed about me and also because they know I mean business when I fight. I don't fight for fun and I won't tolerate anyone on my staff who does.
You are here to fight. This is an active theater of war. Ahead of you lies battle. That means just one thing. You can't afford to be a goddamned fool, because, in battle, fools mean dead men. It is inevitable for men to be killed and wounded in battle. But there is no reason why such losses should be increased because of the incompetence and carelessness of some stupid son-of-a-bitch. I don't tolerate such men on my staff.
There are three reasons why we are fighting this war. The first is because we are determined to preserve our traditional liberties. Some crazy German bastards decided they were supermen and that it was their holy mission to rule the world. They've been pushing people around all over the world, looting, killing, and abusing millions of innocent men, women, and children. They were getting set to do the same thing to us. We had to fight to prevent being subjugated.
The second reason we are fighting is to defeat and wipe out the Nazis who started all this goddamned son-of-bitchery. They didn't think we could or would fight, and they weren't the only ones who thought that, either. There are certain people back home who had the same idea. Both were wrong.
The third reason we are fighting is because men like to fight. They always have and they always will. Some sophists and other crackpots deny that. They don't know what they're talking about. They are either goddamned fools or cowards, or both. Men like to fight, and if they don't they're not real men.
If you don't like to fight, I don't want you around. You'd better get out before I kick you out. But there is one thing to remember. In war, it takes more than the desire to fight to win. You've got to have more than guts to lick the enemy. You must also have brains. It takes brains and guts to win wars. A man with guts but no brains is only half a soldier. We licked the Germans in Africa and Sicily because we had brains as well as guts. We're going to lick them in Europe for the same reason.
That's all and good luck."
AND
"Be Seated.
Men, this stuff we hear about America wanting to stay out of the war, not wanting to fight, is a lot of bullsh!t. Americans love to fight - traditionally. All real Americans love the sting and clash of battle. When you were kids, you all admired the champion marble player; the fastest runner; the big league ball players; the toughest boxers. Americans love a winner and will not tolerate a loser. Americans despise cowards. Americans play to win - all the time. I wouldn't give a hoot in hell for a man who lost and laughed. That's why Americans have never lost, not ever will lose a war, for the very thought of losing is hateful to an American.
You are not all going to die. Only two percent of you here today would die in a major battle. Death must not be feared. Every man is frightened at first in battle. If he says he isn't, he's a goddamn liar. Some men are cowards, yes! But they fight just the same, or get the hell shamed out of them watching men who do fight who are just as scared. The real hero is the man who fights even though he is scared. Some get over their fright in a minute under fire, some take an hour. For some it takes days. But the real man never lets fear of death overpower his honor, his sense of duty to this country and his innate manhood.
All through your army career you men have bitched about "This chickensh!t drilling." That is all for a purpose. Drilling and discipline must be maintained in any army if for only one reason -- INSTANT OBEDIENCE TO ORDERS AND TO CREATE CONSTANT ALERTNESS. I don't give a damn for a man who is not always on his toes. You men are veterans or you wouldn't be here. You are ready. A man to continue breathing must be alert at all times. If not, sometime a German son-of-a-bitch will sneak up behind him and beat him to death with a sock full of sh!t.
There are 400 neatly marked graves somewhere in Sicily all because one man went to sleep on his job -- but they were German graves for we caught the bastard asleep before his officers did. An Army is a team. Lives, sleeps, eats, fights as a team. This individual heroic stuff is a lot of crap. The bilious bastards who wrote that kind of stuff for the Saturday Evening Post don't know any more about real fighting, under fire, than they do about fscking. We have the best food, the finest equipment, the best spirit and the best fighting men in the world. Why, by God, I actually pity these poor sons-of-bitches we are going up against. By God, I do!
My men don't surrender. I don't want to hear of any soldier under my command being captured unless he is hit. Even if you are hit, you can still fight. That's not just bullsh!t, either. The kind of man I want under me is like the lieutenant in Libya, who, with a Lugar against his chest, jerked off his helmet, swept the gun aside with one hand and busted hell out of the Boche with the helmet. Then he jumped on the gun and went out and killed another German: All this with a bullet through his lung. That's a man for you.
All real heroes are not story book combat fighters either. Every man in the army plays a vital part. Every little job is essential. Don't ever let down, thinking your role is unimportant. Every man has a job to do. Every man is a link in the great chain. What if every truck driver decided that he didn't like the whine of the shells overhead, turned yellow and jumped headlong into the ditch? He could say to himself, "They won't miss me -- just one in thousands." What if every man said that? Where in hell would we be now? No, thank God, Americans don't say that! Every man does his job; every man serves the whole. Every department, every unit, is important to the vast scheme of things. The Ordnance men are needed to supply the guns, the Quartermaster to bring up the food and clothes to us -- for where we're going there isn't a hell of a lot to steal. Every last man in the mess hall, even the one who heats the water to keep us from getting the GI sh!ts has a job to do. Even the chaplain is important, for if we get killed and if he is not there to bury us we'd all go to hell.
Each man must not only think of himself, but of his buddy fighting beside him. We don't want yellow cowards in this army. They should all be killed off like flies. If not they will go back home after the war and breed more cowards. The brave men will breed brave men. Kill off the goddamn cowards and we'll have a nation of brave men.
One of the bravest men I ever saw in the African campaign was the fellow I saw on top of a telegraph pole in the midst of furious fire while we were plowing toward Tunis. I stopped and asked what the hell he was doing up there at that time. He answered, "Fixing the wire, sir." "Isn't it a little unhealthy right now?," I asked. "Yes sir, but this goddamn wire's got to be fixed." There was a real soldier. There was a man who devoted all he had to his duty, no matter how great the odds, no matter how seemingly insignificant his duty might appear at the time.
You should have seen those trucks on the road to Gabes. The drivers were magnificent. All day and all night they rolled over those son-of-a-bitching roads, never stopping, never faltering from their course, with shells bursting around them all the time. We got through on good old American guts. Many of these men drove over forty consecutive hours. These weren't combat men. But they were soldiers with a job to do. They did it -- and in a whale of a way they did it. They were part of a team. Without them the fight would have been lost. All the links in the chain pulled together and that chain became unbreakable.
Don't forget, you don't know I'm here. No word of the fact is to be mentioned in any letters. The world is not supposed to know what the hell became of me. I'm not supposed to be commanding this Army. I'm not even supposed to be in England. Let the first bastards to find out be the goddamn Germans. Someday I want them to raise up on their hind legs and howl, "Jesus Christ, it's the goddamn Third Army and that son-of-a-bitch Patton again."
We want to get the hell over there. We want to get over there and clear the goddamn thing up. You can't win a war lying down. The quicker we clean up this goddamn mess, the quicker we can take a jaunt against the purple pissing Japs an clean their nest out too, before the Marines get all the goddamn credit.
Sure, we all want to be home. We want this thing over with. The quickest way to get it over is to get the bastards. The quicker they are whipped, the quicker we go home. The shortest way home is through Berlin. When a man is lying in a shell hole, if he just stays there all day, a Boche will get him eventually, and the hell with that idea. The hell with taking it. My men don't dig foxholes. I don't want them to. Foxholes only slow up an offensive. Keep moving. And don't give the enemy time to dig one. We'll win this war but we'll win it only by fighting and by showing the Germans we've got more guts than they have.
There is one great thing you men will all be able to say when you go home. You may thank God for it. Thank God, that at least, thirty years from now, when you are sitting around the fireside with your grandson on your knees, and he asks you what you did in the Great War, you won't have to cough and say, "I shoveled sh!t in Louisiana.""
-Patton
The quotes
"I'm not supposed to be commanding this Army. I'm not even supposed to be in England. Let the first bastards to find out be the goddamn Germans. Someday I want them to raise up on their hind legs and howl, 'Jesus Christ, it's the goddamn Third Army and that son-of-a-bitch Patton again.' "
"If not, sometime a German son-of-a-bitch will sneak up behind him and beat him to death with a sock full of sh!t."
Are just, IMO, classics. They get the point across to soldiers in a way they will remember forever. I have never seen the movie Patton (its on my to-do list), but just reading those make a man think about and visualize Patton saying those words.
Originally posted by: dahunan
Thank you for posting this... It only goes to show that we really do send our best men and women off to war to die for our freedomsThat man is possibly a more eloquent speaker than Tony Blair.
Thank you - I thought it was a well thought out speech too.
Andy
That may be the first post of yours that I can say we are in full agreement on. That was a very good speech and exactly what should be comunicated to all of the forces going into Iraq to liberate them from Saddam.
I remember seeing a blurb somewhere that one of the US officers was telling his troops to take the US flags off of their vehicles for that reason, they are going into Iraq as liberators, not an occupying force.
mastertech01
Moderator Emeritus Elite Member
- Nov 13, 1999
- 11,875
- 282
- 126
The only confusing thing with that action is that I figured those flags were there to prevent friendly fire incidents, and I hope that wasnt a mistake removing them for that very reason. In Desert Storm we had many FF incidents which precipitated the installing of flags, markers, on top of vehicles to keep friendly aircraft from accidently blowing away our coalition forces.
I think that markers remain - correct me if I'm wrong - its just "flags" that are being removed. Coalition forces still have visual ques as to who's who.
Andy
Andy
New technology aims to reduce friendly fire deaths
There are better ways than flags to identify vehicles now.
There are better ways than flags to identify vehicles now.
I like this one:
Marshall Mannerheims Order of The Day nr. 34
Soldiers of the glorious Finnish army!
Peace has been concluded between our country and the Soviet Union, an exacting peace which has ceded to Soviet Russia nearly every battlefield on which you have shed your blood on behalf of everything we hold dear and sacred.
You did not want war; you loved peace, work and progress; but you were forced into a struggle in which you have done great deeds, deeds that will shine for centuries in the pages of history. More than fifteen thousand of you who took the field will never again see your homes, and how many those are who have lost for ever their ability to work. But you have also dealt hard blows, and if two hundred thousand of our enemies now lie on the snowdrifts, gazing with broken eyes at our starry sky, the fault is not yours. You did not hate them or wish them evil; you merely followed the stern law of war: kill or be killed.
Soldiers: I have fought on many battlefields, but never have I seen your like as warriors. I am as proud of you as though you were my own children; l am as proud of the man from the Northern fells as of the son of Ostrobothnia's plains, of the Carelian forests, the hills of Savo, the fertile fields of Häme and Satakunta, the leafy copses of Uusimaa and Varsinais-Suomi. I am as proud of the sacrifice tendered by the child of a lowly cottage as of those of the wealthy.
I thank all of you, officers, non-commissioned officers and men, but I wish specially to stress the self-sacrificing valour of our officers of the reserve, their sense of duty and the cleverness with which they have fulfilled a task that was not originally theirs. Thus theirs has been the greatest sacrifice in this war in proportion to their numbers, but it was made joyfully and with an unflinching devotion to duty.
I thank the Staff Officers for their skill and untiring labours, and finally I thank my own closest assistants, my Chief Commanders, the Army Corps Commanders and the Divisional Commanders who have often transformed the impossible into the possible.
I thank the Finnish Army in all its branches, which in noble competition have done heroic deeds since the first day of the war. I thank the Army for the courage with which it has faced an overwhelming superior enemy equipped in part with hitherto unknown weapons, and for the stubbornness with which it held on to every inch of our soil. The destruction of over 1,500 Russian tanks and over 700 enemy aircraft speaks of deeds of heroism that were often carried out by single individuals.
With joy and pride my thoughts dwell on the Lottas of Finland - their spirit of self-sacrifice and untiring work in many fields, work which has liberated thousands of men for the fighting line. Their noble spirit has spurred on and supported the Army, whose undivided gratitude and respect they have achieved. Posts of honour have also been those of the thousands of workers who, often as volunteers and during air-raids, have worked beside their machine for the Army's needs, or laboured unflinchingly under fire, strengthening our positions. On behalf of the Fatherland, I thank them.
In spite of all bravery and spirit of sacrifice, the Government has been compelled to conclude peace on severe terms, which however are explicable. Our Army was small and its reserves and cadres inadequate. We were not prepared for war with a Great Power. While our brave soldiers were defending our frontiers we had by insuperable efforts to procure what we lacked. We had to construct lines of defence where there were none. We had to try to obtain help, which failed to come. We had to find arms and equipment at a time when all the nations were feverishly arming against the storm which sweeps over the world. Your heroic deeds have aroused the admiration of the world, but after three and a half months of war we are still almost alone. We have not obtained more foreign help than two reinforced battalions equipped with artillery and aircraft for our fronts, where our own men, fighting day and night without the possibility of being relieved, have had to meet the attacks of ever fresh enemy forces, straining their physical and moral powers beyond all limits.
When some day the history of this war is written, the world will learn of your efforts.
Without the ready help in arms and equipment which Sweden and the Western Powers have given us, our struggle up to this date would have been inconceivable against the countless guns, tanks and aircraft of the enemy.
Unfortunately, the valuable promise of assistance which the Western Powers have given us, could not be realised when our neighbours, concerned for their own security, refused the right of transit for troops.
After sixteen weeks of bloody battle with no rest by day or by night, our Army still stands unconquered before an enemy which in spite of terrible losses has grown in numbers; nor has our home front, where countless air-raids have spread death and terror among women and children, ever wavered. Burned cities and ruined villages far behind the front, as far even as our western border, are the visible proofs of the nation's sufferings during the past months. Our fate is hard, now that we are compelled to give up to an alien race, a race with a life philosophy and moral values different from ours, land which for centuries we have cultivated in sweat and labour. Yet, we must put our shoulders to the wheel, in order that we may prepare on the soil left to us a home for those rendered homeless and an improved livelihood for all, and as before we must be ready to defend our diminished Fatherland with the same resolution and the same fire with which we defended our undivided Fatherland.
We are proudly conscious of the historic duty which we shall continue to fulfil; the defence of that Western civilisation which has been our heritage for centuries, but we know also that we have paid to the very last penny any debt we may have owed the West.
Marshall Mannerheims Order of The Day nr. 34
Soldiers of the glorious Finnish army!
Peace has been concluded between our country and the Soviet Union, an exacting peace which has ceded to Soviet Russia nearly every battlefield on which you have shed your blood on behalf of everything we hold dear and sacred.
You did not want war; you loved peace, work and progress; but you were forced into a struggle in which you have done great deeds, deeds that will shine for centuries in the pages of history. More than fifteen thousand of you who took the field will never again see your homes, and how many those are who have lost for ever their ability to work. But you have also dealt hard blows, and if two hundred thousand of our enemies now lie on the snowdrifts, gazing with broken eyes at our starry sky, the fault is not yours. You did not hate them or wish them evil; you merely followed the stern law of war: kill or be killed.
Soldiers: I have fought on many battlefields, but never have I seen your like as warriors. I am as proud of you as though you were my own children; l am as proud of the man from the Northern fells as of the son of Ostrobothnia's plains, of the Carelian forests, the hills of Savo, the fertile fields of Häme and Satakunta, the leafy copses of Uusimaa and Varsinais-Suomi. I am as proud of the sacrifice tendered by the child of a lowly cottage as of those of the wealthy.
I thank all of you, officers, non-commissioned officers and men, but I wish specially to stress the self-sacrificing valour of our officers of the reserve, their sense of duty and the cleverness with which they have fulfilled a task that was not originally theirs. Thus theirs has been the greatest sacrifice in this war in proportion to their numbers, but it was made joyfully and with an unflinching devotion to duty.
I thank the Staff Officers for their skill and untiring labours, and finally I thank my own closest assistants, my Chief Commanders, the Army Corps Commanders and the Divisional Commanders who have often transformed the impossible into the possible.
I thank the Finnish Army in all its branches, which in noble competition have done heroic deeds since the first day of the war. I thank the Army for the courage with which it has faced an overwhelming superior enemy equipped in part with hitherto unknown weapons, and for the stubbornness with which it held on to every inch of our soil. The destruction of over 1,500 Russian tanks and over 700 enemy aircraft speaks of deeds of heroism that were often carried out by single individuals.
With joy and pride my thoughts dwell on the Lottas of Finland - their spirit of self-sacrifice and untiring work in many fields, work which has liberated thousands of men for the fighting line. Their noble spirit has spurred on and supported the Army, whose undivided gratitude and respect they have achieved. Posts of honour have also been those of the thousands of workers who, often as volunteers and during air-raids, have worked beside their machine for the Army's needs, or laboured unflinchingly under fire, strengthening our positions. On behalf of the Fatherland, I thank them.
In spite of all bravery and spirit of sacrifice, the Government has been compelled to conclude peace on severe terms, which however are explicable. Our Army was small and its reserves and cadres inadequate. We were not prepared for war with a Great Power. While our brave soldiers were defending our frontiers we had by insuperable efforts to procure what we lacked. We had to construct lines of defence where there were none. We had to try to obtain help, which failed to come. We had to find arms and equipment at a time when all the nations were feverishly arming against the storm which sweeps over the world. Your heroic deeds have aroused the admiration of the world, but after three and a half months of war we are still almost alone. We have not obtained more foreign help than two reinforced battalions equipped with artillery and aircraft for our fronts, where our own men, fighting day and night without the possibility of being relieved, have had to meet the attacks of ever fresh enemy forces, straining their physical and moral powers beyond all limits.
When some day the history of this war is written, the world will learn of your efforts.
Without the ready help in arms and equipment which Sweden and the Western Powers have given us, our struggle up to this date would have been inconceivable against the countless guns, tanks and aircraft of the enemy.
Unfortunately, the valuable promise of assistance which the Western Powers have given us, could not be realised when our neighbours, concerned for their own security, refused the right of transit for troops.
After sixteen weeks of bloody battle with no rest by day or by night, our Army still stands unconquered before an enemy which in spite of terrible losses has grown in numbers; nor has our home front, where countless air-raids have spread death and terror among women and children, ever wavered. Burned cities and ruined villages far behind the front, as far even as our western border, are the visible proofs of the nation's sufferings during the past months. Our fate is hard, now that we are compelled to give up to an alien race, a race with a life philosophy and moral values different from ours, land which for centuries we have cultivated in sweat and labour. Yet, we must put our shoulders to the wheel, in order that we may prepare on the soil left to us a home for those rendered homeless and an improved livelihood for all, and as before we must be ready to defend our diminished Fatherland with the same resolution and the same fire with which we defended our undivided Fatherland.
We are proudly conscious of the historic duty which we shall continue to fulfil; the defence of that Western civilisation which has been our heritage for centuries, but we know also that we have paid to the very last penny any debt we may have owed the West.
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