We are the children of heroes.
The Daily Wire’s new podcast, America’s Forgotten Heroes, tells the stories of seven men whose courage, determination, and skill are so remarkable that it is nearly impossible to credit them as true. But the stories are true. These men were real.
These things actually happened.
Writer and series host Bill Whittle peels away the history, the colorless and drab recitation of dates and events, to reveal the actual human beings beneath the legend. Many of these men were national celebrities in their day, although a few of them never got the recognition that they deserved, in their own time. The one thing that all seven have in common is the tragic fact that almost no one today can even recognize their names, let alone tell you anything about the actions that made those names worth remembering.
LISTEN:
The first episode of America’s Forgotten Heroes takes listeners back to July 3, 1863, the day before Independence Day, with America mired in the midst of a Civil War. Union forces are in a defensive line along a small rise called Cemetery Ridge, in a peaceful Pennslyvania crossroad village called Gettysburg. The line is manned by the 20th Maine Infantry regiment and commanded by a Professor of Rhetoric named Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, whose decisions, made on Little Round Top, will likely save the Union’s position, the battle, and possibly the war.
The second episode takes listeners to the morning of December 8th, 1941, when a stunned America, reeling from the attack on Pearl Harbor, demands a strong and swift response. There’s just one man for the job, according to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt: celebrity aviator and 5’4” human dynamo, James Doolittle. After a great many modifications and a great deal of training, Doolittle did what everyone had assumed was impossible: he put huge Army bombers onto an aircraft carrier and sailed them across the Pacific in the worst weather anyone had ever seen.
Doolittle’s crew would shock the world — and the Japanese Navy.
The third episode, released Saturday, transports listeners to the Revolutionary War, where an experienced seaman named John Paul Jones — an alias designed to fool British authorities — goes toe-to-toe with the Royal Navy using little but a ragtag armada of third rate ships and often mutinous crews, raiding Great Britain’s coastal ports and taking the war in the Colonies to King George III’s doorstep.
Listen all this week, as Bill Whittle unpacks these seven incredible but forgotten stories for the Daily Wire and celebrates those heroes — in every American generation — who ensure the dream of freedom, written into the Declaration of Independence, remains alive for new American generations.
America’s Forgotten Heroes is available on Apple Podcasts or wherever you download your podcasts. You can also listen to streaming podscast audio through the Apple podcast player embedded both above and below.