The Enduring Honor of Ronald Reagan’s Tribute to America’s D-Day Heroes

Excerpted from President Ronald Reagan’s 1984 speech on the 40th anniversary of D-Day, delivered at the site of crucial combat before some of the surviving veterans who fought in it.

We’re here to mark that day in history when the Allied armies joined in battle to reclaim this continent to liberty.

For four long years, much of Europe had been under a terrible shadow.

Free nations had fallen, Jews cried out in the camps, millions cried out for liberation.

Europe was enslaved, and the world prayed for its rescue.

Here in Normandy the rescue began. Here the Allies stood and fought against tyranny in a giant undertaking unparalleled in human history.

We stand on a lonely, windswept point on the northern shore of France.

The air is soft, but 40 years ago at this moment, the air was dense with smoke and the cries of men, and the air was filled with the crack of rifle fire and the roar of cannon.

At dawn, on the morning of the 6th of June, 1944, 225 Rangers jumped off the British landing craft and ran to the bottom of these cliffs.

Their mission was one of the most difficult and daring of the invasion: to climb these sheer and desolate cliffs and take out the enemy guns.

The Allies had been told that some of the mightiest of these guns were here and they would be trained on the beaches to stop the Allied advance.

The Rangers looked up and saw the enemy soldiers — the edge of the cliffs shooting down at them with machine guns and throwing grenades.

And the American Rangers began to climb.

They shot rope ladders over the face of these cliffs and began to pull themselves up.

When one Ranger fell, another would take his place. When one rope was cut, a Ranger would grab another and begin his climb again. They climbed, shot back, and held their footing.

Soon, one by one, the Rangers pulled themselves over the top, and in seizing the firm land at the top of these cliffs, they began to seize back the continent of Europe.

Two hundred and twenty-five came here. After two days of fighting, only 90 could still bear arms.

Behind me is a memorial that symbolizes the Ranger daggers that were thrust into the top of these cliffs.

And before me are the men who put them there.

These are the boys of Pointe du Hoc. [applause]

These are the men who took the cliffs. These are the champions who helped free a continent. These are the heroes who helped end a war…

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…

We in America have learned bitter lessons from two World Wars: It is better to be here ready to protect the peace, than to take blind shelter across the sea, rushing to respond only after freedom is lost.

We’ve learned that isolationism never was and never will be an acceptable response to tyrannical governments with an expansionist intent…

Here, in this place where the West held together, let us make a vow to our dead.

Let us show them by our actions that we understand what they died for…

Strengthened by their courage, heartened by their valor, and borne by their memory, let us continue to stand for the ideals for which they lived and died.

Thank you very much, and God bless you all.