From Omaha Beach to the Colonnade
From Omaha Beach to the Colonnade
Mr. Thomas P. Rideout ‘63 describes his recent trip to the French World War II memorial and military history in universities.
(Mr. Tom Rideout at the Les Braves II Complex in the Omaha Beach Memorial in Normandy, France | SOURCE: Author)
Recently my wife and I visited Paris for a family celebration, which offered a wonderful opportunity to visit Normandy. Its appeal was that I had been alive but 3 years and a few weeks and my wife 2 years and 10 months when the allied D-Day invasion of June 6, 1944 was launched against Germany’s Atlantic Wall defenses. Neither of us has contemporary recall, with my earliest childhood memories being the sirens signaling both Victory in Europe Day (May 8, 1945) and Victory in the Pacific Day (August 15, 1945). When asked about the sirens, my parents provided a serious and detailed briefing. This helped spark my lifelong interest in history. It was not surprising I majored in European History at W&L and had teachers and likely interaction with administrators who participated in World War II. There is little personal doubt they made important contributions to shaping my future and those of other students.
We signed on for a 4-day professionally guided tour of the beaches, bluffs, cemeteries and the Normandy area’s fabulous museums. It was a brief but splendid education. We stayed in the medieval town of Bayeux, famous for its historic tapestry of William the Conqueror’s 1066 success at the Battle of Hastings; his seizure of the English crown; and emergence as King William I.
A key takeaway from our guide was how important America’s “Arsenal of Democracy” was to victory in Europe. We had an extensive session and view of the remains of a port American engineers built at Juno Beach to speed war materials and supplies to the new European front. Daily, I walk by a letter signed by General George C. Marshall to a family relative, who was designated to build and manage this operation from his Office at the War Department. In 1949 this office became the Department of Defense. Several months ago, President Trump accorded it secondary title usage for “Department of War” and its civilian day-to-day leader as “Secretary of War.”
The Academy’s Neglect of Military History
Given our deep immersion in war during the Normandy visit, I was not surprised upon returning to America to find the November 11, 2025 (USA Veterans Day) National Association of Scholars (NAS) newsletter. It featured the headline Disappearing Discipline: Why Are Our Colleges Deserting Military History? The essay’s author, Kali Jerrard, provided article links for several enlightening quotations from an accompanying collection of thematic articles on war, previously published by NAS in the Spring of 2008.
The first, written by Josiah Bunting III and entitled Why Military History? offers the following: “The decline of military history in universities reflects an indulged hatred of war and armies (now identified, as they should not be, with ‘conservatism’—another slipshod judgment), and of military people as not clever or, if clever, perverse in the vocation to which they devote their intellectual talents. It reflects the wide cultural chasm between academia and the American military, a chasm never deeper or wider than now, in the thirty-fifth year of the all-volunteer military.”
Collaborative Scoping & Scaling of Military History
The second is attributed to John A. Lynn II and is entitled Breaching the Walls of Academe: The Purposes, Problems, and Prospects of Military History. He makes the case for a long term preservation approach: “While a strategy for anchoring the field of military history concerns me most, in the long run what should concern us all is promoting and preserving historical studies in their full range. A limited selection of fashionable approaches to history studied in isolation is by its very nature a distortion. We gain by broad inclusion, not by narrow exclusion. Should the study of the conduct of war and military institutions be lost as a serious historical subdiscipline, it is not simply military historians who lose; it is all of us.”
Elsewhere, Lynn quotes Napoleon: “Read and reread the campaigns of Alexander, Hannibal, Caeser, Gustavus Aldophus, Turenne and Frederick; take them as your model; that is the only way of becoming a Great Captain, to obtain the secrets of the art of war.”
Suggestions for Resolving the Academic Conflict
A third linked perspective was offered by Peter Wood. It is entitled Arms and the Mind: The Military and Liberal Education in Conflict and Collaboration. He writes there: “The National Association of Scholars doesn’t have a foreign policy and we are not offering a prescription for the one right way for liberal arts education to take account of the military or for military education to take account of the liberal arts. Rather, we are arguing more basic points: that liberal education in America ought to be mindful of the military as an institution indispensable to our republic; that the phenomenon of war is rooted deep in the human condition and therefore demands our attention; and that, on the whole, we are better served by an officer corps that possess the horizons of liberal education than one that does not.”
Wood continues: “But there is more to our decision to devote this issue of Academic Questions (Spring 2008) to the fraught connections between the liberal arts and the military than just our sense that the topic is underserved. We also speak for several compelling ideas that seem in need of a fresh hearing. These are: (1) the duty of liberal arts professors to be good stewards of the cultural legacy of Western civilization; (2) the obligation of humanists to consider carefully how war is rooted in human nature; (3) the need for educated Americans to comprehend the complex role the military has played in our nation’s history on and off the battlefield; and (4) the perennial search to reconcile the necessary martial qualities of the soldier with the no less necessary qualities needed to participate in a civic order.” Wood provides in his article a varied and fascinating series of examples to illustrate each of these themes.
Emphasizing Military History’s Civilian Component
As a closing note, I offer Peter Wood again. He cites the heart of the issue when writing: “On the ambiguity of military service in the United States, no writer surpasses Melville, whose novel Israel Potter recounts the life of an actual American soldier captured by the British and sent to England. He survives bleakly, year after year, futilely seeking some way home. At last, as an old man, he returns—only to find himself entirely forgotten. The real Israel Potter penned his life story, a large part of which Melville simply appropriated into his novel. Remembering our wars and forgetting those who fought them is more evidence that we do not stand far from the universal human condition.
“But we do stand a little apart. We are overwhelmingly a civilian society and have made soldiering an increasingly rare profession. Most men and women in the United States will never serve in the armed forces, and only a small fraction will see combat. Yet our Constitution puts civilians firmly in control of the military. We rightly take this control seriously and engage in strenuous national debate over such matters as what weapons we should build, where and how our troops should be deployed, and what principles should guide our military conduct on and off the battlefield. It would seem indispensable that the civilians arguing these points have some grounding in the subject, and all the better if that grounding came in the context of history, philosophy, literature, political science, and other fields that help us frame the hard questions clearly.”
I close with the following: “If men could learn from history, what lessons it might teach us! But passion and party blind our eyes, and the light which experience gives is a lantern on the stern, which shines only on the waves behind us!” - Samuel Taylor Coleridge: Table Talk (1833) 18 December 1831
For readers interested in learning more about accessing the sources referenced in this essay, please feel free to email Mr. Tom Rideout at tprideout41@gmail.com
The opinions expressed in this magazine are the authors’ own and do not reflect the official policy or position of The Spectator, or any students or other contributors associated with the magazine. It is the intention of The Spectator to promote student thought and civil discourse, and it is our hope to maintain that civility in all discussions.