Episcopalians for Traditional Faith has a wonderful email today about the 1928 Episcopal Book of Common Prayer’s influence on President Franklin Roosevelt’s famous June 6, 1944 D-Day prayer, which he delivered on national radio today 69 years ago.
Roosevelt began:
Almighty God: Our sons, pride of our Nation, this day have set upon a mighty endeavor, a struggle to preserve our Republic, our religion, and our civilization, and to set free a suffering humanity.
And he prayed:
Some will never return. Embrace these, Father, and receive them, Thy heroic servants, into Thy kingdom. And for us at home — fathers, mothers, children, wives, sisters, and brothers of brave men overseas — whose thoughts and prayers are ever with them–help us, Almighty God, to rededicate ourselves in renewed faith in Thee in this hour of great sacrifice.
FDR concluded:
With Thy blessing, we shall prevail over the unholy forces of our enemy. Help us to conquer the apostles of greed and racial arrogancies. Lead us to the saving of our country, and with our sister Nations into a world unity that will spell a sure peace a peace invulnerable to the schemings of unworthy men. And a peace that will let all of men live in freedom, reaping the just rewards of their honest toil. Thy will be done, Almighty God. Amen.
Here’s the full prayer.
The Episcopal email notes that FDR the weekend before D-Day was in the Blue Ridge Mountains, where, according to William Manchester’s Churchill biography, FDR read his Book of Common Prayer “to find the proper words for a blessing to be read on the night of the invasion.”
Roosevelt was a lifelong, church-going Episcopalian and often drew solace from its faith and rituals. His final Easter on earth a few days before death he worshipped at the Episcopal service at the rehabilitation center he founded in Warm Springs, Georgia, frail, but singing the hymns, at times fumbling with the hymnal.
About 2500 Americans were killed on D-Day and many more wounded. A terrible toll, but only a tiny fraction of the approximately 50 million who perished in World War II. Over 425,000 Allied and German personnel were killed or wounded during the Battle of Normandy over the weeks following D-Day. Over 9000 Americans are buried in Normandy.
World War II is often recalled as the “good war,” but there was little good about it. It was the most morally necessary of all wars, given the alternative of Nazi and Japanese militarist domination, entailing not only the murder of all European Jewry but the eventual extermination of other targeted people groups, including the Slavs, amid the enslavement of many whom Nazis and Japanese militarists saw as sub-human. As Churchill recalled in his memoir, it was tragically also the most avoidable of wars. A modest exertion of force by the West against Nazi Germany earlier in the 1930’s likely could have deterred a larger conflict and possibly toppled Hitler. But the West preferred “peace.”
The U.S. Methodist Commission on World Peace quietly encouraged avoidance of military service and opposed World War II throughout. Officially the Methodist Church in the U.S. was pacifist until the 1944 General Conference narrowly endorsed participation in the war, in which 1 million U.S. Methodists served.
Among other horrors, 15,000 to 20,000 French civilians were killed in the Battle of Normandy, mostly by Allied bombers attempting to liberate France from German occupation. There were no carefully targeted cruise missiles or drones. There was mostly just carpet bombing, where friends almost died as often as foes.
Today many church thinkers and activists are pacifists or neo-pacifists whose strained interpretation of Just War teaching is too strict to allow force in almost any situation. Some now criticize the sometimes imprecision of U.S. drone strikes on terrorists, demanding an impossible human and technical perfection, and not considering the alternatives. Thank God that drones do offer a precision so much greater than the haphazard bombing of World War II.
Here’s an excerpt from the 1928 Book of Common Prayer that likely inspired FDR before D-Day:
ALMIGHTY God, our heavenly Father, in whose hands are the living and the dead; We give thee thanks for all those thy servants who have laid down their lives in the service of our country. Grant to them thy mercy and the light of thy presence, that the good work which thou hast begun in them may be perfected; through Jesus Christ thy Son our Lord. Amen.
– page 42, The 1928 Book of Common Prayer
Comment by David Virtue on June 6, 2013 at 2:03 pm
thanks for this Mark. I was planning a piece on this, but your piece is perfect and I will use it.
Warmly
david
On Thu, Jun 6, 2013 at 3:01 PM, Juicy Ecumenism – The Institute on Religi
Comment by Dean Allen on June 6, 2013 at 3:29 pm
I have been a soldier in combat. My job was to protect our nation and our way of life.
I do not tell clergymen how to save sinners. I do not tell politicians how to lie, cheat, and steal. I am somewhat offended when either group wants to usurp the right to tell a soldier how to win a war.
There is never anything “just” about war. Never has been, never will be. About the only thing American Generals Lee and Sherman agreed on was that war is hell – though Lee, a devout Christian expressed the sentiment less profanely than his Yankee counterpart.
There are plenty of times war is absolutely necessary unless you want your nation to die and your countrymen to live in slavery. When the time comes to acknowledge politicians have failed miserably to preserve the nation and we are in physical peril, it is time for them to stop making the decisions and turn affairs over to field commanders knowledgeable in methods to defeat the enemy. The mission of the United States Army is to break things and kill people. If that is not the mission, keep the Army home and send another group.
When it becomes necessary to fight – and, unfortunately, it often becomes absolutely necessary – the most humane course of action then becomes to use massive force to compel the unconditional surrender of the enemy as quickly as possible.
If what you are fighting for is not important enough to force an enemy to unconditionally surrender; then the use of force is murder. The killing is only justified if, after it ends, we can demonstrably show the world is both fundamentally different and better than before the fighting started.
Limiting German civilian casualties and stopping before victory to try to “work with” moderate Nazis would have been highly immoral. Fighting such a limited war would have been murder, plain and simple. Having the ability to target bombs more accurately allows us to drop a bridge, or kill a tank and its crew, with fewer weapons expended placing our forces at less risk. Had we not killed German and Jap civilians, we might not have won the war. If we won it with limited damage to enemy civilians, it would have lasted longer and gotten more allied soldiers killed.
President Harry Truman made a very moral decision to use the bomb and bring the war to a decisive close. He also had Gen. Curtis E. LeMay firebomb Jap cities, killing more civilians than the two nuclear weapons killed. Again these actions hastened the end of a terrible war and ushered in a peaceful world where the Nazis and the Emperor of Japan no longer slaughtered innocents and threatened our very existence. The war was indeed terrible. My Daddy and seven of my uncles fought in that war. One is still at the bottom of the Atlantic with his ship and another lost the fingers on his right hand throwing a grenade back at some Japs on Guadalcanal.
Regrettably, I see way too many clergymen and politicians interfering with wars today and splitting hairs over oxymorons like “just war.” We are not willing to name our enemy and promise the world we can exterminate that enemy and make the world a better place. Therfore politicians are murdering U.S. Soldiers because they buy into this just war garbage.
Comment by Jan Hermsted Mahood on June 6, 2013 at 4:28 pm
Thank you, Mark, for your mention of Episcopalians for Traditional Faith’s (ETF) D-Day E-blast. As President Roosevelt drew inspiration from the 1928 Book of Common Prayer, so do millions of Episcopalians, Anglicans, and others derive inspiration and comfort from its well-wrought, reverent words today. It’s the truly American prayer book, a direct descendant of Archbishop Thomas Cranmer’s original 1549 Book of Common Prayer, and the only liturgy in use in the Episcopal Church today that is completely based upon holy scripture.
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