As if we haven’t had enough Odyssey controversies over the past week, the latest cultural faux pas comes courtesy of &#8220;The Odyssey&#8221; actress Zendaya, who <a href="https://hyperallergic.com/zendayas-earrings-are-part-of-a-much-bigger-problem/">wore</a> a 3000-year-old pair of earrings to a photocall in London earlier this month.
And as usual, the Left is losing it.
A reporter for Buzzfeed <a href="https://www.buzzfeed.com/chelseastewart/zendaya-ancient-earrings-the-odyssey">called</a> her fashion statement “American audacity at its best,” while writers at Hyperallergic <a href="https://hyperallergic.com/zendayas-earrings-are-part-of-a-much-bigger-problem/">observed</a> that the earrings reveal a “controversy within a longer pattern of Western indifference to the ethics of trading.” Commenters on X were quick to <a href="https://x.com/themeulemeester/status/2076953937714827327">point out</a> that Zendaya’s earrings come from “a white jeweler based in london who loots countries in africa and the middle east of ancient artifacts,” which, as <a href="https://x.com/themeulemeester">@themeulemeester</a> sneers, is “typical of the british but extremely low for two black ppl to support.”
While it is tempting to roll our eyes at our leftist friends and their ongoing obsession with colonialism, they may have a point.
I don’t agree with the Left’s characterization of Zendaya as some sort of unethical desecrator of ancient culture, nor do I buy the framing of her fashion choices as a manifestation of Western imperialism. I do, however, believe that there is a broader conversation to be had about our society’s fundamental inability to respect traditional institutions and the valuable artifacts that define our cultural heritage.
According to <a href="https://barron-london.com/collection?ref=hyperallergic.com">Barron London</a>, Zendaya’s earrings are “a pair of Ziwiye gold medallion plaques, circa 1st millennium BC Iran.” Hyperallergic <a href="https://hyperallergic.com/zendayas-earrings-are-part-of-a-much-bigger-problem/">reports</a> that the earrings were looted from an archaeological site home to “gold, silver, and ivory objects reputedly discovered by local villagers in northwestern Iran.” These circumstances have led many commentators to conclude that the earrings would have likely made their way to a museum had a proper excavation taken place — at the very least, they might have been treated with more care before being immediately fashioned into an accessory for consumption by Hollywood celebrities.
In other words, our culture has a fundamental lack of respect for the traditions of antiquity — and this attitude extends well beyond archaeological artifacts. The same impulse to refashion the past according to contemporary tastes has also shaped one of this year&#8217;s biggest cultural phenomena — Christopher Nolan&#8217;s &#8220;The Odyssey&#8221; — and explains the broader debate surrounding the film.
It’s true that many reviewers on the Right came away from the film with glowing reviews. Daily Wire’s own Ben Shapiro <a href="https://variety.com/2026/film/news/ben-shapiro-the-odyssey-masterpiece-christopher-nolan-1236816164/">called</a> the film a “masterpiece,” and Dave Rubin <a href="https://x.com/RubinReport/status/2078647793950830745">echoed</a> these same words on X. But Christopher Rufo’s <a href="https://x.com/christopherrufo/status/2079220744962347132">mixed</a> review calls attention to a greater issue within the world of the film that reveals our culture’s general defiance of tradition: Rufo acknowledges that the film was “engaging” but laments the departure from the source material. And therein lies the heart of the controversy about Nolan’s most recent hit: as a culture, we approach the past as editors rather than as heirs, compulsively updating ancient traditions to adhere to our contemporary values. In this case, we refashioned Homer to reflect our own moral and psychological assumptions rather than asking what Homer intended to teach us about his own world.
There is, of course, nothing wrong with artistic adaptation on its own. Every generation has staged Shakespeare and painted biblical scenes in styles that resonate with the changing times. But there’s a difference between reimagining an ancient story and reshaping its moral universe — and Christopher Nolan’s &#8220;The Odyssey&#8221; veers toward the latter.
Anyone who has read &#8220;The Odyssey&#8221; knows that much of Greek culture is bound up with pride and glory; the Greeks repeatedly explored the idea of hubris — pride taken to a dangerous extreme — in their many mythological creations. The myth of Icarus, for instance, depicts a young man who dares to fly too close to the sun and falls tragically back to earth, drowning in the sea; in the Arachne story, Arachne believes that she can beat Athena in a weaving contest and is consequently transformed into a spider. It is reasonable to conclude, therefore, that a Greek hero from Homer’s time would have wrestled with the distinction between pride and hubris, and the great translations of Homer&#8217;s &#8220;Odyssey&#8221; into English — from Chapman’s 17th-century translation to Fagles’ more contemporary interpretation from the 1990s — echo this heroic sensibility.
The Odysseus we see in Nolan’s adaptation, however, lacks the heroism that defines Homer’s great warrior. In the poem, Odysseus repeatedly revels in his victory at Troy — perhaps even to a fault. In the film, on the other hand, Odysseus regrets his actions at war and suffers from a PTSD-like trauma that seems more appropriate for a Vietnam War vet than a Hellenic hero. At one point in the film, Odysseus is even referred to as a “veteran,” a term that better suits the ethos of a contemporary audience rather than the world of Homeric Greece. Throughout the film, Zendaya’s Athena haunts him in the form of a young girl his men behead during the sack of Troy, and by the time he reaches home, Odysseus breaks down in tears before his wife Penelope. Filled with sorrow and regret, he suggests that the Trojan War was ultimately fought for nothing.
The overall result is a softer, more traumatized Odysseus — but certainly not a characterization that stays true to the legacy of the Ancient Greek world.
Nolan’s film is a fantastic standalone piece of cinema, but one can’t help but feel disappointed at his sharp departure from the source material. Instead of portraying Odysseus as the glory-seeking hero we’ve known for centuries, Nolan updates his character to become more palatable to a modern audience, tailoring his film for contemporary consumption — but only at the cost of doing a great disservice to the heritage of Ancient Greece.
Taken in tandem with the broader debate about &#8220;The Odyssey,&#8221; the Zendaya controversy becomes especially revealing of our constant urge to repurpose the past according to the priorities of the present. Perhaps that&#8217;s why so many people instinctively felt uncomfortable seeing a 3,000-year-old artifact dangling from a celebrity’s ears — some things are simply too valuable to become vehicles for exploring our own modern sensibilities. Because at the end of the day, inheritance requires both stewardship and cultural understanding.
The Greeks understood that they were custodians of a civilization larger than themselves. We would do well to recover that same reverence.
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Liza Libes is a writer and the founder of Pens and Poison. She holds degrees in English from Columbia University and writes about literature and culture at pensandpoison.org. Follow her on X @pensandpoison.

“The Odyssey” – Photocall

Sometimes We Just Can’t Have Nice Things — Including Zendaya’s Earrings

Ancient Artifacts

Antiquities

DW Opinion

History

The Odyssey

Zendaya

What happens when an organization founded to preserve history decides it can no longer preserve the very definitions upon which it was founded?
Recently, at its Continental Congress, the Daughters of the American Revolution rejected a proposed bylaw amendment that would have defined &#8220;woman&#8221; for purposes of membership. <a href="https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2026/jun/27/daughters-american-revolution-defeats-proposal-block-transgender/" target="_blank" rel="noopener" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2026/jun/27/daughters-american-revolution-defeats-proposal-block-transgender/&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1784134832324000&amp;usg=AOvVaw38iW2zXCsc3k1_fWIVsA6z">The resolution read</a>: “Resolved, That in Article III, Section 1 of the Bylaws, the term ‘woman’ shall be understood to clearly mean a woman who was born female, and therefore, individuals who were born male shall not be eligible for membership.” By rejecting this bylaw amendment, the organization chose not to adopt language that supporters believed would preserve DAR as a female-only organization.
In the days that followed the vote, many chapters expressed disappointment with both the outcome and the organization&#8217;s response. The official DAR message failed to address their central concern over whether the organization intends to remain a space for women only.
If you’re not in DAR, it’s easy at first glance to give this a “so what?”
DAR exists to preserve history, and, ironically, an organization dedicated to preserving truth about the past is now struggling to acknowledge objective reality in the present. But bigger than that, it represents one more step in a broader cultural movement where we are asking — rather, guilting — women to surrender spaces created specifically for them.
Created to preserve American history and uphold constitutional ideals, DAR was founded by women in 1890. The organization exists and is deeply rooted in service because descendants accepted a responsibility to preserve these ideals, not merely sit in the privilege of being born of them. That calling comes with the responsibility to acknowledge hard truths.
My own journey into DAR wasn’t easy. It took years of genealogical research alongside my grandmother, gathering documentation and verifying lineage. I originally intended to join under the lineage of Oliver Wolcott on my maternal grandfather’s side, linking me to the signing of the Declaration of Independence. This was complicated by a courthouse fire where all records were destroyed, so I opted to take the path of joining under my maternal grandmother, a path where the documents were easier to find. This linked me to some horse thieves instead, but, hey, they were patriots nonetheless. Every document I located felt like another thread reconnecting my family to the American story. There were so many hoops I had to jump through, and the deeper I dug, the more I appreciated that patriotism is not merely inherited; it is cultivated through understanding the sacrifices that came before us, and that patriotism and our history must be preserved — the good and the bad.
DAR asks its members to honor historical truth. Every application depends upon documents that cannot be altered to fit our preferences. Birth records matter. Marriage records matter. Death records matter. Genealogy is built on objective facts. Historical preservation depends upon objective facts. If those two things are true, why is it not expected that women’s organizations should likewise depend upon objective definitions? If an organization explicitly dedicated to historical accuracy cannot maintain a clear distinction between a man and a woman, both equally important to our society in their own right, that organization risks undermining its own credibility.
DAR was created by women. Women built it. Women have sustained it for generations. Women deserve organizations created specifically for women, and DAR itself is part of women&#8217;s history. At a time when women had few opportunities to lead national civic organizations, these women built one of their own. Preserving that legacy is itself an act of historical preservation.
Increasingly, women are told that maintaining female-only spaces is exclusionary rather than legitimate. The burden has shifted from explaining why men should enter women&#8217;s organizations to explaining why women should have organizations of their own. For women, it is a burdensome responsibility to explain routinely why we matter and why we uniquely bring value. Supporting women&#8217;s spaces is not hostility or hate toward anyone else.
DAR is not without real historical failures. Black women were wrongly excluded despite qualifying ancestry — an incorrect decision that took us far too long as an organization to rectify. And now, we face another one of those moments where we are failing women, women whose ancestors were the reason our nation exists today.
The question before today&#8217;s DAR is whether an organization founded by and for women should remain one. In the pursuit of making every institution open to everyone, we risk forgetting that some institutions exist precisely because they were created to serve a particular purpose.
One of my favorite stories from DAR came during my first visit to its museum in Washington, D.C. Displayed prominently is one of President James Monroe&#8217;s 1817 armchairs. After the chair was sold from the White House grounds in the 19th century, it eventually found its way into DAR&#8217;s collection. Years later, when the White House sought to reacquire pieces of its original furnishings, DAR refused to part with it. The women who said that chair belonged with DAR felt their responsibility was not to surrender history for cash, but to safeguard it for future generations — an edict they would never abandon. I cannot help but wonder what those women would think of today&#8217;s debate over preserving the organization&#8217;s own identity.
Women who believe this decision departs from the organization&#8217;s founding purpose must stand up and speak out about it. Courage requires speaking up when it is uncomfortable. I do not relish this controversy. I do not like the copious amount of hate I receive because I believe in the importance of protecting women and our spaces, but the courage to do what is right and just means speaking unpopular truths.
The women who founded DAR understood that preserving history required courage. Sometimes that courage meant preserving stories that were uncomfortable. Today, it means preserving truths that are unpopular. Institutions are not preserved through silence but through conviction.
When an organization founded to preserve history decides it can no longer preserve the very definitions upon which it was founded, we already know what happens. Institutions slowly lose sight of the very purpose they were created to preserve. If we cannot, and will not, preserve the truths closest to us, we should not be surprised when future generations stop trusting us to preserve the truths of those who came before us.
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Taylor Hathorn is a visiting fellow at Independent Women. She has over 10 years of experience in cybersecurity, policy, public relations, and nonprofit management.
This article is part of <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/introducing-upstream-a-lifestyle-and-culture-section-of-the-daily-wire" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Upstream,</a> The Daily Wire’s new home for culture and lifestyle. Real human insight and human stories — from our featured writers to you.

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A Historic Women’s Organization Couldn’t Define ‘Woman’

Gender

Transgender

Upstream

Women

The latest episode of &#8220;<a href="https://www.dailywire.com/show/real-history-with-matt-walsh">Real History with Matt Walsh</a>&#8221; may be the most important of the series as it exposes the clear connections between communist Russia and modern-day America.
Walsh’s recent release of “<a href="https://www.dailywire.com/episode/real-history-ep-6-communism?elementPosition=0&amp;row=0&amp;rowType=Vertical+Show+Episodes+Carousel">The Real History of Communism: The Russian Revolution</a>” dives into how Left-wing radicals took control of the Russian Empire, killing millions and causing endless suffering for seven decades. Walsh then depicts the similarities of Left-wing radicals taking over Russia over a century ago with what we are seeing in our own country today. 
<a href="https://www.dailywire.com/episode/real-history-ep-6-communism">WATCH: The Real History of Communism: The Russian Revolution</a>
“The Real History of Communism: The Russian Revolution” is broken into six chapters, telling the story of the uprising of the communist party. Walsh then examines the eight rules of a communist takeover and how they still apply today.
The episode looks specifically at Vladimir Lenin and the Bolsheviks targeting the family, the church, and the media in 1917 Russia. In the episode, Walsh describes how the “playbook” the Bolsheviks used in their revolution is the same that the Left is using to push radical, resentment-fueled movements on institutions in America in 2026.
The sixth episode is more connected to what is happening today than any of the previous five episodes as it dives into the parallels of communist Russia and current events and headlines in the United States. Viewers don&#8217;t have to be “history buffs” to get invested throughout the episode as Walsh shows the patterns of the communist revolution and leftist tactics.
Walsh aims to tell the main story of communism that was not taught in history classes — the rise of the system and it&#8217;s ability to take over an entire empire. Walsh wants to inform viewers of the true history of communism so Americans realize that history is on pace to repeat itself.
This episode of Real History is only available to Daily Wire members. Right now, Daily Wire is <a href="https://get.dailywire.com/">offering</a> 3 months for $17.76, so it&#8217;s a great opportunity to watch the <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/show/real-history-with-matt-walsh">episodes of Real History</a> you may have missed and be ready have access to everything that&#8217;s still to come. (Hint: The next episode is about Richard Nixon&#8230;)

Real History of Communism: The Russian Revolution

Matt Walsh’s Newest ‘Real History’ Is The Most Essential Yet

Communism

Leftists

Matt Walsh

Revolution

Russia

The state of Texas recently implemented a new education curriculum that includes passages from the Old and New Testaments. Committed secularists, liberal and progressive religious leaders, and even many evangelicals quickly pounced on the inclusion of Hebrew and Christian texts in the state’s educational program.
CNN breathlessly <a href="https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/texas-is-poised-to-require-millions-of-students-to-study-bible-stories/ar-AA26zDMV?ocid=BingNewsVerp">warned</a> that “Texas is on the verge of requiring its more than 5 million public school students to study Bible stories, as the state emerges as a leader in a national conservative effort to infuse Christian teachings into American classrooms.” But Texas is not proposing theocracy, or implementing some sort of evangelical proselytization program. It is doing what Americans have done since 1776: ensuring that students have the best and most comprehensive education in order to make them citizens of a republic dedicated to the proposition &#8220;that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights.&#8221;
The American republic just had its 250th birthday, and ever since the 13 colonies cast their lot among the independent and sovereign nations of the world, education has formed a vital part of the United States’ republican identity. Certainly, the new American union saw state churches and the oppressive religious structures of the Old World as a cumbersome inheritance they could, and did, cast off. But that was not something the colonists agreed on at the outset of the American Revolution in 1775, nor was it the reason for their Declaration of Independence in 1776.
The late Joyce Appleby, one of the 20th century’s great historians of the era of American independence, noted that even though the elites who began the war for independence believed the revolution was for a regime dedicated to natural rights, most of those same elites “saw few radical implications in this affirmation of natural rights.” John Adams, George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, and most of the revolutionaries who eventually identified with the Federalist Party “expected continued federance; they supported the authority of patriarchal families, established churches, and legitimate governments.” The Federalists who wrote the United States’ constitution were not secularists, and they were comfortable with the Bible as a essential part of the schooling that made good republican citizens.
Of course, Thomas Jefferson and his Jeffersonian Republicans did work to remove religion from the oversight of government, but not even Jeffersonians believed that the Bible could safely be removed from the sources of knowledge that made educated citizens. And therein lies the basic confusion about what Texas is doing: Secularists, and evangelical Christians, believe learning the Bible is an intrinsically religious act. Reading the Bible is certainly a religious act for Christians and Jews, but the Bible is also a major source of the moral framework of Western Civilization that gives modern Americans the freedoms we enjoy. The reason it is good for Texas’ public school children to know the Bible is the same reason it’s good they know <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/the-ancient-lesson-christopher-nolan-may-have-completely-stripped-out-of-the-odyssey">Homer</a>; it’s an important part of the Western canon and a vital piece of the catechesis that creates cultural literacy necessary for liberal democracy. 
The Bible is full of the folk tales found in classical Jewish literature; the Old Testament tells of Moses and Pharaoh, David and Goliath, King Solomon’s wisdom, Joshua and the walls of Jericho, Gideon’s small band of warriors, and so much more. Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey tell stories of Achilles, Agamemnon, Hector, Paris, Helen, Odysseus, Penelope, and other figures of Greek mythology. The United States too has its folklore: Pecos Bill, Mike Fink, Daniel Boone, David Crockett, John Henry, and Paul Bunyan are the American versions of those Biblical and Greek figures, and they are all — Hebrew, Greek, and American — important for young Americans to know and learn about. The American republic can only have a healthy society if its citizens are educated enough to know not only that Paul Bunyan, Hercules, and Goliath are all big strong men, but that they are each an example of a very different type of big strong man.
Understanding the moral dimensions of the Bible is vital for the formation of a moral republic. But if secularists, and also some evangelicals, have their way, American students in the 21st century will not have the opportunity to learn the great moral stories their parents and grandparents did. Both groups are arguing that the any reading of the Bible must be a religious act and therefore cannot be done by public schools. This proposition is a twin form of religious and secular fundamentalism that says a pupil cannot study the Bible as literature. The Bible is one of the greatest, if not the greatest, sources of moral literature the West has. It would be a grave mistake to rob American students of its moral and literary influence. Texas has decided to give that gift to its public school students. Other states should do the same.
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Miles Smith IV is an associate professor of history at Hillsdale College.
This article is part of <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/introducing-upstream-a-lifestyle-and-culture-section-of-the-daily-wire" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Upstream,</a> The Daily Wire’s new home for culture and lifestyle. Real human insight and human stories — from our featured writers to you.

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The Battle Over America’s Moral Foundation Is Back

Bible

Education

Public Schools

Religion

This article is part of <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/topic/upstream" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Upstream</a>, The Daily Wire’s new home for culture and lifestyle. Real human insight and human stories — from our featured writers to you.
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You’ve seen George Washington bravely crossing the Delaware, posing for a portrait as he stretches out his arm to welcome the future, and staring solemnly on the $1 bill. But one common — and contested — motif finds him doing something totally different: kneeling on the ground in prayer.
Arnold Friberg painted one such <a href="https://www.museumofthebible.org/prayer-valley-forge-fiftieth" target="_blank" rel="noopener">image</a>, “The Prayer at Valley Forge,” for America’s bicentennial celebration in 1976. Now at America’s 250th, it’s making critics furious.
“A scene inspired by the winter at Valley Forge has become more prominent in the Trump era, along with claims that the United States was founded as a Christian nation,” <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/14/arts/design/george-washington-praying-trump-right-wing.html?searchResultPosition=1" target="_blank" rel="noopener">warned</a> the New York Times last month.
Thanks to President Donald Trump, a culture writer for the paper suggests, “the image of Washington at prayer, some scholars say, has gone from being a patriotic commonplace to a politically charged statement.”
“Conservative Christians love this painting of George Washington,” NPR <a href="https://www.npr.org/2026/05/27/nx-s1-5747094/church-and-state-george-washington" target="_blank" rel="noopener">sneered</a> less than two weeks later. “The event it depicts may not have happened.”
There is no shortage of iconic paintings that depict historical moments merely imagined by the artist, though the idea that Washington might visibly pray for his army at a low point in the revolution is not so ridiculous.
Historian Thomas A. Tweed is <a href="https://yalebooks.yale.edu/2025/07/01/did-washington-kneel-in-prayer-at-valley-forge/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">doubtful</a>, though he concedes that this particular mythos does match the man Washington was.
“Parson Weems, Washington’s early biographer, concocted that story — as well as the yarn about George and the cherry tree — to establish the moral character and personal piety of the first president and, thereby, advance a particular view of national belonging and church-state relations,” Tweed wrote. “There is some truth in the claim, and in the images. Washington did pray, though perhaps not the way Weems described, and he did attend church services, though not on Communion Sunday. Washington was not a conventional Christian, but he also wasn’t a church-hating atheist.”
Notably, NPR’s report repeated the first half of that quote, but not the second.
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet">
“It is the duty of all nations to acknowledge the Providence of Almighty God, to obey His will, to be grateful for His benefits, and humbly to implore His protection and favor.” —George Washington, 1789 <a href="https://t.co/i4i9HLJvfk" target="_blank" rel="noopener">pic.twitter.com/i4i9HLJvfk</a>
— U.S. Department of Labor (@USDOL) <a href="https://x.com/USDOL/status/2005005413805162993?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw" target="_blank" rel="noopener">December 27, 2025</a></blockquote>
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Casting doubt on the validity of the image of Washington in prayer has become something of an elite pastime. In this context, a new play at the Museum of the Bible becomes even more powerful.
Running through Friday, the one-man play “A General’s Prayer” finds George Washington alone at camp in Valley Forge, poring over a package of letters and keepsakes from his wife, Martha, and debating how to implore Congress for more funds for his sick and half-clothed troops. Played by James Denton of “Desperate Housewives” fame, Washington is verbally processing his legacy in this war, his responsibility to his troops, and his relationship to the divine — all while speaking directly to the audience, whom he calls “my anonymous confessors.”
The 70-minute play is punctuated by Washington’s self-deprecating humor; “I do wonder if history might mostly paint me as a man who stands upright in boats,” he muses. This Washington is not the legend of history books. He’s vulnerable, approachable, a man who stands amid a snowy encampment mourning his comrades and recalling his near-death experience in battle as he asks, “For what had I been saved?”
The name of the play may set off Christian nationalism alarm bells for those who always hope to hear them, but the play’s primary focus is not so much the general’s faith as it is his struggle to wrangle his passions, guide his troops, and be seen as a man who, though he didn’t feel so himself, was stoic in the face of tragedy.
<div id="attachment_1117863" style="width: 310px" class="wp-caption alignnone"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-1117863" class="size-medium wp-image-1117863" src="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2026/06/James-Denton_A-Generals-Prayer-1-300x200.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="200" srcset="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2026/06/James-Denton_A-Generals-Prayer-1-300x200.jpg 300w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2026/06/James-Denton_A-Generals-Prayer-1-864x576.jpg 864w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2026/06/James-Denton_A-Generals-Prayer-1-768x512.jpg 768w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2026/06/James-Denton_A-Generals-Prayer-1-1536x1024.jpg 1536w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2026/06/James-Denton_A-Generals-Prayer-1-2048x1365.jpg 2048w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2026/06/James-Denton_A-Generals-Prayer-1-1800x1200.jpg 1800w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2026/06/James-Denton_A-Generals-Prayer-1-1200x800.jpg 1200w" sizes=" (max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px" />Museum of the Bible</div>
Near the end of the play, Washington pauses stage right for a silent prayer, posing as he appears in the much-maligned paintings. When he returns, he says a prayer for the nation and appeals to the audience to remember and protect our founding ideals.
In a discussion at the end of opening night, playwright Dean Batali told the audience that the owners of Friberg’s painting, First Freedom Art Company, commissioned him to create a play about it.
“I just didn&#8217;t want to do, necessarily, a flag-waving, simple play,” he said. “And I certainly didn&#8217;t want to do a whole play about a guy just praying. So I tried to make it about the struggle that maybe is relatable to all of us, and what it takes to bring us to our knees.”
His goal, he added, was “also to talk about the country in a way that wasn&#8217;t just making us proud of ourselves just for the sake of being proud,” but suggesting that “maybe we have something to live up to.”
This used to be the kind of thing we could all support. The image of George Washington kneeling in prayer at Valley Forge may not be literally accurate, but the legend is true in spirit, an interpretation legacy media outlets would also like to debunk if they could. The idea that our Founding Fathers looked to a higher power for guidance, and that we would serve our country well by doing the same today, may not seem like a radical one. But to today&#8217;s critics, “A General’s Prayer” may be more transgressive than anything running on Broadway.

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Why Critics Can’t Stand The Idea Of George Washington Praying

America 250

George Washington

Theater

This article is part of <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/introducing-upstream-a-lifestyle-and-culture-section-of-the-daily-wire" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Upstream,</a> The Daily Wire’s new home for culture and lifestyle. Real human insight and human stories — from our featured writers to you.
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Today is the birthday of one of my favorite British writers, Dorothy L. Sayers. The Oxford educated author, translator, and literary critic insisted on the L., as she was nothing if not a stickler for detail.
You may be generally aware of Sayers’ existence — more likely so if you have a library card, a Britbox subscription, or enjoy the sort of detective fiction that Rian Johnson has been ripping off for his &#8220;Knives Out&#8221; movies. These stories tend to have a much smaller number of deaths (and less grotesque ones) than the American “true crime” genre. The investigators, such as Sayers’ iconic creation Lord Peter Wimsey, are marked more for their wit, banter, and understanding of human nature than their devotion to forensics.
If you are a Christian, you may know Sayers as someone who, while not a member of the infamous men-only Inklings, was a close friend of some of its members, including C.S. Lewis and Charles Williams. But that friendship did not include her Oxford graduating classmate J.R.R. Tolkien, who <a href="https://dc.swosu.edu/mythlore/vol21/iss2/53/">confessed</a> that he “loathed” her books, finding her depictions of sexuality hedonistic. In &#8220;Strong Poison,&#8221; when she introduces her own stand-in romantic interest of Harriet Vane, Wimsey is weighing the pros and cons of pursuing the woman: “She has a sense of humor &#8230; and brains &#8230; life wouldn&#8217;t be dull. One would wake up, and there would be a whole day full of jolly things to do. And then we would come home and go to bed &#8230; and that would be jolly too.” That was a bit too much for Tolkien in 1930, but then no one (at least no one normal) reads Tolkien for his takes on sex.
If you’re a true nerd, you may even know Sayers as a founding member of the renowned Detection Club, whose first members included Agatha Christie and whose first president was G.K. Chesterton. She famously authored the oath to be sworn over a skull by its invite-only members: “Do you promise that your detectives shall well and truly detect the crimes presented to them using those wits which it may please you to bestow upon them and not placing reliance on nor making use of Divine Revelation, Feminine Intuition, Mumbo Jumbo, Jiggery-Pokery, Coincidence or Act of God?” She would go on to curate great collections of detective fiction published by some of the top writers in the field.
What you may not know is that Sayers&#8217; life outside of the world of British mystery writing was often stacked with personal drama. Prior to the publication of her first novel, she gave birth to a son out of wedlock, having discovered belatedly the father in question was married. She gave the baby up for fostering and never acknowledged him as her own. The daughter of a vicar, she behaved like nothing of the sort, despite her Christian faith. She loved to smoke and drink and ride her motorcycle, and as an advertising writer in the 1930s, she created the famed <a href="https://www.guinness-storehouse.com/en/discover/guinness-galleries/gilroy-advertising">Guinness toucan</a>, the ads for which you’ll still find hanging around your Irish local pub.
What certainly deserves to be known and appreciated more about her is that Sayers’ unique life and experience gave her an understanding of human nature that proved prescient for our day and age, and particularly for the fractious relationship between modern men and women. You can find this throughout her work, but its best distillation is a speech given nearly a century ago to a women’s society in 1938, which you can find published in full in the collection “Are Women Human?”
She opens her remarks by saying that she is unsure about the very word &#8220;feminism,&#8221; and that “under present conditions, an aggressive feminism might do more harm than good.” As she explained in the context of her university experience:
<blockquote>
Take, for example, the very usual reproach that women nowadays always want to “copy what men do.” In that reproach there is a great deal of truth and a great deal of sheer, unmitigated and indeed quite wicked nonsense … That battle was won, and rightly won, for women. But there is a sillier side to the university education of women. I have noticed lately, and with regret, a tendency on the part of the women’s colleges to “copy the men” on the side of their failings and absurdities, and this is not so good &#8230; The women students, too, have a foolish trick of imitating and outdoing the absurdities of male undergraduates. To climb in drunk after hours and get gated is silly and harmless if done out of pure high spirits; if it is done “because the men do it,” it is worse than silly, because it is not spontaneous and not even amusing.
</blockquote>
You can read the entire speech <a href="https://matiane.wordpress.com/2024/06/26/dorothy-l-sayers-are-women-human/">here</a>. The conclusion of Sayers&#8217; argument has always struck me as stunning for how much it reflects the tensions between the sexes that endures today:
<blockquote>
Indeed, it is my experience that both men and women are fundamentally human, and that there is very little mystery about either sex, except the exasperating mysteriousness of human beings in general. And though for certain purposes it may still be necessary, as it undoubtedly was in the immediate past, for women to band themselves together, as women, to secure recognition of their requirements as a sex, I am sure that the time has now come to insist more strongly on each woman’s — and indeed each man’s — requirements as an individual person.
It used to be said that women had no esprit de corps; we have proved that we have — do not let us run into the opposite error of insisting that there is an aggressively feminist “point of view” about everything. To oppose one class perpetually to another — young against old, manual labour against brain-worker, rich against poor, woman against man — is to split the foundations of the State; and if the cleavage runs too deep, there remains no remedy but force and dictatorship.
If you wish to preserve a free democracy, you must base it — not on classes and categories, for this will land you in the totalitarian State, where no one may act or think except as the member of a category. You must base it upon the individual Tom, Dick, and Harry, on the individual Jack and Jill — in fact, upon you and me.
</blockquote>
This is the warning we in the West should heed today. The anti-relational musings of the chattering class, the grinding down or caricaturization of masculinity, the runaway scared memes of whether a man or a bear in the woods is more dangerous to a woman — all represent in their deepest level a collectivist vision of sex.
This inhuman vision, advocated for by voices on the Right and Left today, is not just a danger to our pursuit of happiness. They are a danger to individual freedom itself. This is not idle talk. Recognize it for what it is: the seeds of Western suicide. Dorothy L. Sayers did. So should you.

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She Loved God, Booze, And Cigarettes — And She Thought Feminists Got Everything Wrong

Mystery

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America Just Lost One Of Its Greatest Defenders

American Revolution

Founding Fathers

Obituaries

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I was visiting Canada’s East Coast last week and happened to tour the Fortress of Louisbourg, the largest reconstructed historic fort in North America. At one point, a reenactor explained that the French were so keen on keeping their colony dependent that nearly everything there had to be shipped in from France: basic supplies, stone, stonemasons, and even firewood. (For added comic effect, we were literally standing next to a forest.) It was a small but salient detail, underscoring the perennial absurdity of government planning from past to present and the colonial condescension that would eventually help fuel the American Revolution.
That same tension runs through “Revolutionary America,” Hillsdale College’s first feature-length documentary. Directed by Ian Anthony Reid and narrated by Tom Selleck, the film traces the struggle for independence from the French and Indian War through the Revolution and into the constitutional settlement that followed. Its central question is not merely how the Americans won independence, but why ordinary men risked their lives, fortunes, families, reputations, and futures for what must have seemed, at the time, like political fantasy.
The film begins with the French and Indian War, framing the event as the turning point that reshaped both North America and the relationship between Britain and its colonies. By the war’s end, Britain’s American territories were roughly the size of the Roman Empire at its peak. It was at this moment, the documentary suggests, that the British Empire truly became the Empire.
Yet imperial grandeur came with imperial expenses, and the Crown soon began imposing draconian taxes on the colonies to compensate for its spending — a veritable inspiration for New York’s <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/mamdani-wants-to-decide-who-deserves-to-keep-their-property">current mayor</a>. The issue, as the film wisely emphasizes, was not simply money. Taxes are not merely about money; they reveal a theory of government: who has authority, who owes obedience, and who gets to decide the terms of civic life.
This is where “Revolutionary America” is strongest. It shows how the Tea Act and Coercive Acts (among others) were part of a broader imperial posture. As Daily Wire host Michael Knowles observes in the film, Britain treated the colonies like children and resented their success while lavishly profiting from them — like child stars whose parents appoint themselves managers and siphon off the proceeds.
The colonists’ grievance was therefore not reducible to a tepid tax revolt. They were objecting to a form of rule that denied them the rights and responsibilities they believed were endowed by a higher power. The English monarch believed the inverse: that this same higher power had ordained him with the authority to dictate those rights. Hillsdale understands the Revolution as a moral argument foremost, rooted in the conservative preservation of inherited liberties rather than the radical, abstract restructuring of society that later doomed the French model.
Among Hillsdale’s triumphs is the selected cast. Tom Selleck’s earnest narration carries a warm and disarming authority that effortlessly conveys his passion for the period and his esteem for its heroes. The commentators are effective as well, especially Hillsdale professor Wilfred McClay, whose amicable and endearing speaking style is as effective as any advertisement for the college.
The documentary also cleverly layers commentary with letters, speeches, maps, landscapes, paintings, sketches, and architectural footage. The camera deftly moves through them, isolating details and drawing the viewer into the scene with the careful theatricality of one of those immersive Van Gogh exhibitions. The result is visually richer than one might expect from an educational documentary working within what was likely a modest budget.
Ryan Moore’s musical score also gives the film great momentum, from pulsating snare drums placing you squarely amid the chaos of a raging battlefield, to lush, pastoral string arrangements carrying you through the sweeping landscape of the era.
The film’s strongest section comes at Valley Forge, the defining crucible of the American Revolution. Reid combines snowy landscapes, period sketches, animated letters, and intimate narration to evoke the misery of the winter of 1777 to 1778. Letters from soldiers, including Timothy Pickering writing to his wife about the lack of shoes and clothing amid the freezing privation, convey both the hardship and endurance required to wage war against the superpower of their time.
Here, too, the film foregrounds the Christian dimension of the Revolution. The Americans’ determination was driven by the conviction that their rights were not indulgences from the Crown, but truths ordained by a higher power. “We are on a mission from God,” as the Blues Brothers would later proclaim. George Washington and his compatriots believed their rights came from God as firmly as the English monarch believed his right to rule did. Only one vision of authority could prevail.
That is the deeper argument of “Revolutionary America.” Rights do not come from government and therefore cannot rightly be taken away by government. Watching the documentary, I was reminded of what Abraham Lincoln meant at Gettysburg when he described the United States as a government “of the people, by the people, for the people”: The American Revolution was not about changing management but asserting that legitimate government derives from the consent of the governed.
The final stretch moves toward the Constitution and the crucial work of preserving what the Revolution began. Asked whether the convention had produced a monarchy or a republic, Benjamin Franklin famously quipped: “A republic, if you can keep it.” And that is the documentary’s lingering lesson. The Constitution is, in a sense, only a piece of paper. It cannot preserve itself. “We the people” must keep the republic.
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Harry Khachatrian (<a href="https://x.com/harry1t6">@Harry1T6</a>) is a film critic for the Washington Examiner. He is a software engineer, holds a master’s degree from the University of Toronto, and writes about wine at<a href="https://www.betweenbottles.com/"> BetweenBottles.com</a>.

The Death of General Warren at the Battle of Bunker Hill, June 17, 1775 by John Trumbull

This Movie Tells The Story Today’s Schools Won’t

Documentaries

Movies

This article is part of <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/topic/upstream" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Upstream</a>, The Daily Wire’s new home for culture and lifestyle. Real human insight and human stories — from our featured writers to you.
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Just in time for Father’s Day comes the ultimate film for the men in your life: It’s a war movie about the weather. Better, it’s a movie about <a href="https://www.thefp.com/p/the-ancient-male-art-of-monitoring">monitoring the situation</a> and then making a decision about what the situation will become. It’s an unexpectedly thrilling depiction of what it means to make hard choices, trust your instincts, and be decisive when a single call might turn the tide of a war. 
“Pressure,” which is out in theaters now, tells the story of one pivotal decision near the end of World War II: how the Allies chose the exact time to storm the beaches at Normandy on D-Day. Its hero is meteorologist Captain James Stagg (Andrew Scott), who leaves his pregnant wife at home to report to General Dwight D. Eisenhower (Brendan Fraser) and lead a team of weather watchers. The Allies need one key forecast.
Stagg’s American counterpart Irving P. Krick may have helped the filming of “Gone With The Wind” by predicting good weather, but there’s much more at stake now than Hollywood cash and Clark Gable’s hair. It’s 1944, the war has been raging for almost five years, and the Germans have held France for four. The details for this invasion must be precise. Waves that are too high mean boats will capsize. Clouds that are too thick mean pilots won’t know where to fly. Conditions must be good, or at least good enough. Otherwise, thousands of lives will be lost. 
“Pressure” is based on a play, which makes sense when you consider that it’s mostly just people talking in various rooms. But despite a bit of a slow start, it rarely feels boring. From the tense, demanding score to Scott’s minute facial changes, the film finds ways to command your attention. And it knows it might sound a bit dull. 
“Did you know that weathermen are traditionally a little boring?” Eisenhower’s aide, Kay Summersby, quips to Stagg. 
“How dare you say that?” he jokes. “Weathermen, maybe. But how can the weather be boring? It feeds us. The weather can destroy us. Controls our daily life. I don’t think that’s boring.” 
We know the stakes, but what drives the film is not the abstract fear of failure in battle but the internal moral struggles of its protagonists. Racked with guilt over a training exercise gone fatally wrong, Eisenhower wrestles with how to make a decision that could lead to the end of the war — or if, as one British Army officer puts it, they might as well start goose-stepping now. 
“If any blame or fault is attached to the attempt, it is mine, and mine alone,” Eisenhower concludes hours before the attack. 
Stagg proves his character by maintaining his forecast of poor weather even when everyone, including his colleagues, wants to believe in a cloudless sky. But he’s still hesitant to attach any certainty to his forecasts, arguing that with the weather, nothing is certain. It was President Harry Truman who begged for “a one-handed economist” so he could stop hearing “on the one hand” and “on the other hand.” 
Here, what Eisenhower needs is a one-handed weatherman. 
Fraser is an imposing presence as the general, and his secretary (played sympathetically by Kerry Condon) acts as a voice of reason and an emotional center for the two men, telling Eisenhower to leave his guilt in the past and advising Stagg to let the general’s outbursts wash over him. 
Stagg is confident in his understanding of the weather, but not in his ability to make a decision that he himself has to own. After spending two meetings with high-level officials telling them that the weather on the day of the invasion is likely no good, he gets another chance to give Eisenhower a new forecast that could make the invasion possible after all. To make his case, he points to his charts.
“I don’t want to look at your damn charts,” Eisenhower says. “It’s a bunch of gobbledygook!”
Finally, Stagg quits hiding behind his forecasts and makes a decision. “My official position is this: Go. You should go.” 
When the D-Day invasion begins, “Pressure” reminds you that we’re talking about real events by interspersing actual footage from the war. Of course, the invasion, which happened on June 6, 1944, was a success. Years later, President Eisenhower would <a href="https://www.usatoday.com/story/weather/2014/06/03/d-day-weather-forecast/9914207/">observe</a> that the attack succeeded “because we had better meteorologists than the Germans.” The film is a celebration of that excellence — and of the courage it takes to make a monumental decision when the stakes couldn’t be higher.

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How A Weatherman Helped The Allies Win On D-Day

World War II

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There are many famous memorials within walking distance of each other in our nation&#8217;s capital, but perhaps none so imposing as the World War I Memorial just steps from the White House. Its 60-foot bronze sculpture known as &#8220;A Soldier&#8217;s Journey,&#8221; installed in 2024, honors the 116,000 men and women who died in the war and uses 38 figures in its depiction of the hero&#8217;s journey, beginning and ending with the relationship between a soldier and his daughter. For Memorial Day, The Daily Wire spoke with Sabin Howard, the master sculptor behind the art. We talked about the beauty of the Western artistic canon, the value in memorial artwork, and why our history is something to remember, not reject.
The Daily Wire: Tell us about getting veterans to pose for you as models. What was that process like?
Sabin Howard: There&#8217;s something that distinguishes this memorial from the rest of the memorials that are out there, and I really wanted to show our humanity. My whole process of making art is so reliant on looking at real people. I spent an average of 650 hours per figure. That whole time you&#8217;re looking at the person, and you&#8217;re diagramming what you see in real life and translating it into art. And I&#8217;m using a system of translation that is objective truths and sacred truths.
When you look at art and when you depict a human being, that human being needs to be — I&#8217;m searching for the word — created. It&#8217;s almost like as an artist you&#8217;re creating the vision of that human being in the sculptural form. And we&#8217;re made in God&#8217;s image, so you have to use a voice that comes from the canons of Western civilization, of proportion and anatomy and design, that were used for almost 2,000 years — and then thrown out.
&nbsp;
<div id="attachment_1101293" style="width: 310px" class="wp-caption alignnone"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-1101293" class="size-medium wp-image-1101293" src="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2026/05/IMG_7317-300x225.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="225" srcset="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2026/05/IMG_7317-300x225.jpg 300w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2026/05/IMG_7317-768x576.jpg 768w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2026/05/IMG_7317-1536x1152.jpg 1536w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2026/05/IMG_7317-2048x1536.jpg 2048w" sizes=" (max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px" />Courtesy of Sabin Howard</div>
There&#8217;s no way I could have made that monument if I didn&#8217;t have a really, really good knowledge of what had preceded me in the figurative art world for the last 2,000 years. Every single figure comes from a source of an artist that has preceded me, and then I use that as a launching point to then evolve it into something that would be modern and contemporary. 
What can I learn from looking at the Baroque period with Bernini? It&#8217;s highly dramatic and like an opera. And what about the structure of Michelangelo? And what about the emotionalism of Rodin? Because I looked at that, I was able then to compose things that are very unique because I would have a starting point. I didn&#8217;t go and try to reinvent the wheel. I looked at what had happened in Western civilization, and I took that and I evolved it into a contemporary mindset. And that was by making the figures more kinetic, more action-packed, breaking past the boundary of the frame. And that goes to the art form of today, which is movies. So that sculpture is an evolution of Western civilization. I made a bronze &#8220;movie&#8221; that the visitor comes and looks at.
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<div id="attachment_1101217" style="width: 310px" class="wp-caption alignnone"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-1101217" class="size-medium wp-image-1101217" src="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2026/05/IMG_9613-300x225.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="225" srcset="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2026/05/IMG_9613-300x225.jpg 300w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2026/05/IMG_9613-768x576.jpg 768w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2026/05/IMG_9613-1536x1152.jpg 1536w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2026/05/IMG_9613-2048x1536.jpg 2048w" sizes=" (max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px" />Courtesy of Sabin Howard</div>
The Daily Wire: You&#8217;ve created something visually complex and compelling. Why was it important to create a sculpture in this style rather than, say, some abstract shapes? 
Howard: A large segment of our society is not into art, right? They&#8217;re not art aficionados. So you need to make something that will capture their attention in a chemical, visceral way. And so by going to the idea of a bronze movie, you&#8217;re doing something that&#8217;s very dynamic, kinetic, and emotional. It has a life when people look at it. I saw busload after busload of eighth graders and high school kids, and they&#8217;re really captured by it because they&#8217;re excited by it, by how it looks. The visuals are exciting to them.
We got a problem, though, because figurative art today is not exciting. If you do something that&#8217;s esoteric and static and quiet, it&#8217;s not going to emotionalize the viewer. You got to capture the viewer&#8217;s attention. And so I was thinking, how do I design this so I can capture the viewer&#8217;s attention and get them engaged? That was it.
People want to see what we look like. They want to know, what did it look like to be in World War I? That&#8217;s what I did.
The Daily Wire: Like you were saying, there&#8217;s a little bit of a contemporary element. Viewers can picture themselves in that scenario. It doesn&#8217;t feel as far removed.
Howard: Yes. That&#8217;s exactly it. It&#8217;s perfect words that you use, &#8220;It doesn&#8217;t feel that far removed.&#8221; You can relate to it, and you can see yourself in the sculpture because it&#8217;s not like gods. It&#8217;s very much real people because we sculpted real people.
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<div id="attachment_1101295" style="width: 310px" class="wp-caption alignnone"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-1101295" class="size-medium wp-image-1101295" src="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2026/05/GettyImages-1312837205-300x200.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="200" srcset="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2026/05/GettyImages-1312837205-300x200.jpg 300w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2026/05/GettyImages-1312837205-864x576.jpg 864w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2026/05/GettyImages-1312837205-768x512.jpg 768w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2026/05/GettyImages-1312837205.jpg 1024w" sizes=" (max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px" />Photo by Shannon Finney/Getty Images</div>
The Daily Wire: Why is it important to have things like the World War I Memorial, this sculpture, pieces of art that are specifically about our veterans or people who have died in combat? What is the value of honoring them in that way, through art?
Howard: Two things. Each of us is not an isolated incidence in time. Our DNA strings way back into history. And then if you have children, it goes forward. So we are stewards of our history, and we, in the present moment, must think about how are we going to play that into the future.
I&#8217;m very averse to tearing down the past and saying, &#8220;Oh, it&#8217;s old, it&#8217;s archaeological, it&#8217;s history.&#8221; No, it&#8217;s our story. Stories unify cultures and countries. And that&#8217;s why the Left is so interested in destroying history and destroying values and Western civilization: because then it&#8217;s like we&#8217;re starting fresh from zero and you have to reinvent everything rather than build off of our heritage of what we&#8217;ve been given.
History explains to us our virtues and our ideals because we&#8217;ve seen men and women who have done things of great courage and stepped into places where we don&#8217;t know what will happen. Stepping into the void, I call it. Those soldiers and all history, everything that we honor — these are men and women that have stepped in the void. It&#8217;s limbic space, and it&#8217;s a space where our faith grows.
This is actually what all memorials are about. It shows the virtue and ideals of our predecessors. How can we learn from history so we don&#8217;t repeat the same mistakes? And we move forward with greater consciousness.

First Illumination of “A Soldier’s Journey” At The National World War I Memorial

The Hidden Message Inside America’s New WWI Memorial

World War I

Editor’s note: This is the last of a four-part weekend series on the hunt for the Bismarck, coming up on its 85th anniversary this month.
When the last of Ark Royal’s Swordfish plopped onto the tossing flight deck, their rain-soaked crews believed they’d scored no hits. At least none they could see. Yet something strange was happening. Bismarck had suddenly begun steering away from France. But why?
Watching the air attack from a healthy distance, Sheffield’s lookouts reported what may have been the most consequential torpedo hit of the war. One said: “There was a big column of water, briefly dull red, at [Bismarck’s] base near the stern.” For the Germans, the torpedo had struck in the worst possible place.
Though well-protected, trials revealed Bismarck had an Achilles heel: she could not steer using propellers alone. Without her rudder, she was uncontrollable. And now the rudder was jammed, frozen in place by the stern torpedo blast while the battleship was maneuvering to evade the incoming attack. Locked into a 12-degree turn to port, Bismarck began veering away from France in a helpless circle while damage-control crews repeatedly dove into flooded compartments trying to free the frozen rudder as if their lives depended on it — which they did.
Sub-Lieutenant Ludovic Kennedy, serving aboard destroyer HMS Tartar, remembered: “We didn’t know what happened…all we knew was [Bismarck] was steering in our direction. And there was a feeling of tremendous exultation…she’d been delivered into our hands.”
After hours of futile effort, it became grimly clear to Bismarck’s crew that her rudder could not be freed. Unable to steer, the situation was hopeless. Just 350 miles from Brest, a single torpedo from a slow biplane nicknamed the “stringbag” had delivered Hitler’s mightiest warship to the Royal Navy. And they were out for blood.
Throughout the night of May 26-27, Tovey’s converging forces closed in on their helplessly circling prey, who would be in range by sunrise. The German crew knew exactly what awaited them at dawn. The Royal Navy would surround their crippled ship like a firing squad and blast her to pieces. Tension aboard Bismarck was palpable. Many of the crew simply wanted it over with. They knew their time was up when Lindemann told the men to help themselves to anything in the galley.
Lütjens admitted as much when he radioed the fleet: SHIP UNMANUEVERABLE. WILL FIGHT TO THE LAST SHELL. LONG LIVE THE FÜHRER.
During the night, messages arrived from Berlin promising help, but the men knew otherwise. Another announced gunnery officer, Adalbert Schneider, was awarded the Knight’s Cross for sinking Hood. Then came Hitler’s own message, effectively delivering their eulogy:
ADOLF HITLER TO CREW OF BISMARCK: ALL GERMANY IS WITH YOU. WHAT CAN BE DONE WILL BE DONE. YOUR PERFORMANCE OF DUTY WILL STRENGTHEN OUR PEOPLE IN THE STRUGGLE FOR ITS DESTINY.
Addressing the crew, Lütjens echoed the Führer. “The German people are with you. We will fight until our gun barrels glow red-hot and the last shell has left the barrel. For us seamen, it is a question of victory or death!”
It was received in silence. If the admiral hoped to inspire the men, it had the opposite effect by confirming it really was over. Bismarck’s 2,282 men could do nothing now but await execution. One sailor muttered, “Let us think one more time about our home, our wives, our children,” before breaking down in tears.
Across Britain, over 1,400 other messages were arriving. In Ringwood, the parents of one sailor aboard Hood received the devastating telegram: REGRET TO REPORT THAT YOUR SON THOMAS JOSEPH BERNARD SAMMARS, BOY FIRST CLASS P/JX 182136 IS MISSING PRESUMED KILLED ON WAR SERVICE. Joseph Sammars was just 16 years old.
At 8:43 a.m. on May 27, 1941, the British sighted the huge German battleship over the horizon. Tovey intended to close the range, bring his broadsides to bear, and systematically annihilate the crippled enemy. Remembering Hood, he ordered Renown to remain clear. Prince of Wales had already been dispatched home for repairs, her crew still unaware how decisive their earlier hits had been.
Leading the attack was King George V, supported by the 45,000-ton battleship Rodney. Though older and slower, Rodney mounted nine monstrous 16-inch guns, making her the most heavily armed ship present. Before battle, Rodney’s padre delivered a brief prayer that captured the mood of thousands of sailors on both sides: “Oh God, remember that we will be very busy today. And though we may forget you, please don’t forget us.”
At 8:47 Bismarck came within range. Rodney swung her turrets toward the enemy and vanished in what one of her sailors described as “a sea of flame and pall of black smoke” as she unleashed two of her three forward 16-inch batteries. King George V followed with her own 14-inch salvos. Unable to steer, Bismarck was an easy target; the British quickly got the range. Soon a storm of shells tore through her superstructure, including one that obliterated the bridge, likely killing both Lütjens and Lindemann.
Bismarck returned fire, but her crews could not aim effectively due to the ship’s erratic movements, and hits disabled her optics, forcing her to fire blind. (Only one near miss against Rodney caused any damage at all.) By 9:30 a.m., all four main turrets had been knocked out, and hundreds of men were dead, among them Germany’s newest Ritterkreuzer Schneider. Machinist Mate Karl-August Schuldt, emerging from the inferno below decks, later recalled the horror awaiting him topside: “The turrets were ripped open like a tulip. I could see inside. Everything was on fire. There were explosions. Twenty, thirty, fifty, a hundred dead, some of them without legs, without arms, without heads.” To Zimmerman, who’d already seen two men ripped in half by a shell right in front of him, the dead strewn across the deck resembled “butchered meat” more than people.
With the German guns silenced, Rodney closed to point-blank range and hammered the helpless battleship again and again while King George V stayed farther off to rain plunging fire onto her decks. Norfolk and Dorsetshire closed in, adding their eight-inch guns to the destruction. By battle’s end, the British ships would fire more than 1,800 shells, scoring roughly 400 hits. Yet Bismarck remained afloat, absorbing repeated blows like an exhausted boxer who, though out on his feet, refuses to go down.
At 10:10 a.m., Tovey ordered a cease-fire. Bismarck lay dead in the water, witnesses describing her as “on fire from stem to stern.” British sailors watched German crewmen leaping overboard like ants fleeing a collapsing hill. It took three torpedoes from Dorsetshire to finally finish the shattered battleship, though German survivors claimed scuttling charges and opened sea valves had already doomed her. In the end, both sides claimed credit for sinking the Bismarck.
At 10:35 a.m., less than two hours after the fight began, Germany’s greatest battleship rolled over and slipped beneath the waves, joining Hood and so many other wrecks at the pitch-black bottom of the Atlantic. Roughly 800 men escaped the sinking ship.
Although satisfied they’d avenged Hood and restored national honor, victory brought little joy to the British. A feeling of pity replaced hatred. Lieutenant Commander William Crawford aboard Rodney later reflected: “A gallant ship had gone, and a lot of gallant people had gone, although they were our enemies.” The shivering and oil-soaked Germans clinging to wreckage in the frigid water were no longer mortal foes but fellow seamen in desperate need of rescue. Dorsetshire and the destroyer Maori cautiously entered the debris field and began hauling survivors aboard. Saved Germans would later express gratitude towards the British for their decent, even kind, treatment.
But then came the final tragedy. After rescuing 110 men, the British received reports of a nearby U-boat. They had no choice but to flee, leaving hundreds to die a lonely, torturous death in the middle of the open ocean. One captive died of his wounds, while German vessels later recovered five more survivors. Of a total complement of 2,365 (including Lütjens’ staff), 2,251 Germans perished. Jack Austin, a Royal Marine aboard Rodney, contemplated the madness: “We lost a lot of good sailors on the Hood. But there were a lot of good sailors lost in the Bismarck or in the water afterwards. What a waste.”
A waste, perhaps, but also a necessity. Had Bismarck been able to return to sea, especially if joined by Scharnhorst and Gneisenau already refitting at Brest, she could have ravaged Britain’s lifeline across the Atlantic. Bismarck had to be destroyed.
Yet the manner of her destruction carried even greater significance. Slow carrier aircraft had crippled Europe’s most formidable battleship and rendered her helpless before the guns arrived. The five-day running engagement over 1,700 miles of ocean marked the swan song of the big-gunned battlewagon. Just six months later, Japanese carrier aircraft would devastate the American Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor. Three days after that, Prince of Wales and Repulse would be sunk off Malaya by land-based Japanese bombers, taking Captain Leach to his watery grave. Even Tirpitz, Bismarck’s sister ship, would eventually succumb to air power. As would the eventual largest battleships of them all, the 72,000-ton IJN Yamato and Musashi.
Thus did the destruction of Bismarck help close the curtain on one of the most iconic chapters in naval warfare. When one German survivor was hauled aboard Dorsetshire, he reportedly warned his captors with eerie foresight: “Today us. Tomorrow you.” Dorsetshire herself would indeed be sunk by Japanese carrier aircraft barely a year later. The age of naval air power had arrived. And though Bismarck’s brief reign of terror was over, a wider war at sea was just beginning.
***
Brad Schaeffer is a commodities fund manager, author, and columnist whose articles have appeared on the pages of The Wall Street Journal, NY Post, NY Daily News, The Daily Wire, National Review, The Hill, The Federalist, Zerohedge, and other outlets. He is the author of three <a href="https://www.amazon.com/stores/author/B07MQJBJSD?ccs_id=55112527-86f6-4c89-b82e-a96d6869abed">books</a>. You can also follow him on <a href="https://bradschaeffer.substack.com/">Substack</a> and <a href="https://x.com/BSchaefferNJ">X</a>. His latest book, A War For Half The World: Why the Real Battle for the Future was Fought in the Pacific, will be released in February 2027.

The German battleship “Bismarck”.

The Rise and Fall Of The German Battleship Bismarck, Part IV

Editor’s note: This is the third in a four-part weekend series on the hunt for the Bismarck, coming up on its 85th anniversary this month.
On the bridge of King George V, still steaming westward toward the battle area, Adm. Tovey received a staggering message from the captain of Prince of Wales, John Leach. It simply read: HOOD SUNK.
Word of the disaster ricocheted through the fleet. One sailor described the mood aboard his vessel as “a strange mixture of incredulity, anger, and loss.” Royal Navy pilot Alan Swinton’s reaction was blunter: “Well bugger me!” But as the magnitude of what had happened settled in, numbness turned to rage, then iron resolve. The Admiralty now had one mission: avenge Hood. Sink Bismarck.
One British warship was still engaging the lethal German battleship and cruiser. But Prince of Wales was in no condition to continue the fight. During the action her aft Y turret jammed, and she was down to only three operational 14-inch guns, while Hood’s destruction freed both Bismarck and Prinz Eugen to concentrate fire on the lone British battleship. It did not take long for the German gunners to find the range. In the next 10 minutes, the Prince of Wales was struck four times by Bismarck and another three by Prinz Eugen. Outnumbered, with 13 crewmen dead and turrets malfunctioning, Captain Leach broke off the action at 6:10 a.m. Lindemann wanted to pursue and destroy the fleeing battleship, but Lütjens ordered the squadron southward instead.
Now came the damage assessment. Bismarck had blasted her way free, but the victory carried a heavy cost. Prince of Wales, though untested and under intense fire, had scored three hits, including two below the waterline, one at the bow and one amidships. Two thousand tons of seawater flooded Bismarck’s forward compartments, leaving her down three degrees by the bow and listing nine degrees to port before counterflooding corrected the imbalance. Worse still, damage to fuel tanks cut off access to 1,000 tons of precious oil. Lütchens no doubt wished he’d topped off when he had the chance.
Trailing oil and unable to sustain maximum speed, Bismarck needed repairs. Lütchens faced two choices: return north toward Norway and Germany, the closer route, or make for the French coast through the sanctuary of wide-open seas. Lindemann, after initially arguing to repair the ship at sea and continue the mission, favored returning home. Lütchens instead informed Berlin he intended to head for occupied France.
Since Prinz Eugen remained unscathed, Lütjens would detach her for commerce raiding. But the German ships were still shadowed by Suffolk, Norfolk, and the battered Prince of Wales. Then, at 6:00 p.m. on May 24, Lütchens executed a clever maneuver. Bismarck suddenly turned southwest while Prinz Eugen accelerated directly south. The British followed the battleship as she eventually resumed course while the cruiser slipped unseen into the open Atlantic.
Now Bismarck was alone, and her crew understood what Hood’s obliteration meant. Every available Royal Navy warship in the Atlantic would be mobilized with one purpose: hunt down their fugitive battleship and kill her…and them. For Britain, this was no longer merely a military necessity. It had become a matter of national honor.
The Admiralty ordered every ship within reach to converge on Bismarck. While the cruisers and Prince of Wales continued shadowing her, Tovey steamed at 27 knots aboard King George V, accompanied by the carrier Victorious, battlecruiser Repulse, four cruisers, and several destroyers. Also racing toward the scene was the battleship Rodney and three destroyers, diverted while en route to Boston for a refit. From the south came Gibraltar-based Force H built around the carrier Ark Royal, battlecruiser Renown, and cruiser Sheffield. Two cruisers were pulled from convoy duty off West Africa, and one more, Dorsetshire, detached on her own volition. The hunt was on.
In the spring of 1941 carrier warfare had yet to fully emerge, and most admirals still had little faith in aircrafts’ ability to sink a capital ship at sea. But by the evening of May 24, the British were desperate to stop Bismarck before she reached France, and they resolved to use every arrow in their quiver. One of those arrows was the Fairey Swordfish.
First flown in 1934, the ungainly biplane looked more suited to the trenches of the First World War than modern naval combat. Built of metal framing, canvas, and wire, with a top speed barely above 130 miles per hour, the Swordfish hauled a 1,700-pound torpedo under the belly. With Tovey’s heavy vessels still too far away, these open-cockpit aircraft would launch from Victorious into foul weather to attack the most formidable battleship at sea. It seemed suicidal. One pilot remembered climbing into his cockpit and thinking, “God, I’d get out of this if I could!” But they went.
With the northern sun still lingering above the horizon, the plucky Swordfish lifted off from Victorious’ pitching, rain-swept flight deck and headed into worsening weather. At first, the inexperienced crews emerged from the clouds too early, only to discover an American Coast Guard cutter searching for survivors from a merchant ship sunk earlier by U-boats. Bismarck remained farther away. Surprise was lost, but the Swordfish crews pressed on through heavy anti-aircraft fire. Ironically, the lumbering biplanes’ ostensible weaknesses became strengths. The Swordfish flew so slowly that Bismarck’s advanced fire-control systems struggled to track them properly, especially while the aircraft were buffeted sideways by violent winds. And any shells that did hit passed straight through the canvas skin without detonating.
Skimming the churning sea, the Swordfish released their torpedoes, banked slowly, and crawled away through streams of cold rain and hot tracers. One torpedo struck home. The damage was minor — the warhead detonated against the thickest belt armor — but one sailor was killed, Bismarck’s first fatality. More ominously, the attack demonstrated that aircraft could threaten even the mightiest warship afloat. By 2:00 a.m. on Sunday, May 25, all the biplanes, many riddled with holes, had landed safely aboard Victorious.
May 25 was Admiral Lütchens’s 52nd birthday, but no one aboard Bismarck was celebrating. Fuel had become critical. To conserve oil, he slowed the ship to 22 knots and steered directly for Brest. If Bismarck could get within a few hundred miles of occupied France, Luftwaffe aircraft could shield her final approach. But first he had to shake the British trackers.
Taking advantage of enemy zig-zagging to avoid U-boats, Lütjens executed a brilliant maneuver. At 2:00 a.m., with perfect timing, he ordered Bismarck hard to starboard, swinging the battleship in a broad loop while the British cruisers, having temporarily lost radar contact during a “zag,” continued onward into the darkness. Bismarck then circled back, crossed her own wake behind them, and resumed her easterly heading. At 5:00 a.m. Suffolk reluctantly signaled: HAVE LOST CONTACT WITH ENEMY. The German battleship had vanished into the Atlantic. When word reached Prince of Wales, one crewman recalled, “We all felt utterly depressed.” Bismarck appeared home free.
And then Lütjens made an inexplicable mistake. Unaware how completely he’d escaped, the admiral carelessly broke radio silence to send routine reports to naval headquarters in France. British direction-finding stations intercepted the transmissions and obtained a bearing on the battleship’s location. Lütchens had inadvertently revealed himself.
But the German admiral was not the only one to blunder. Having obtained a rough bearing, Tovey miscalculated Bismarck’s heading and assumed she was steering north. He turned his pursuing force away from the enemy. Only on the evening of May 25 did Tovey realize the mistake. By then, Bismarck had widened the gap still further.
RAF Coastal Command had also joined the search, dispatching reconnaissance aircraft across enormous stretches of ocean in what amounted to scouring for a needle in an Atlantic haystack. Then, at 3:30 a.m. on Monday, 26 May, an American-built Catalina flying boat lifted off to continue the hunt. Although the United States remained officially neutral, the aircraft was co-piloted by an American, L.B. Smith. At 10:30 a.m., to his astonishment, Smith spotted the German battleship below him.
Bismarck had been lost, found, lost again, and found again. But time was rapidly running out. If not stopped soon, the battleship would reach the protective umbrella of German air cover. She still remained roughly 150 miles ahead of her pursuing battleships — well beyond gun range, but not beyond aircraft range.
And so the British turned once more to the Swordfish. This strike would launch from Ark Royal, as Victorious had broken off low on fuel. The raid nearly ended in catastrophe when the attackers mistakenly identified Sheffield as Bismarck and dropped torpedoes against their own cruiser. Fortunately, they missed. As evening approached on May 26, Bismarck drew ever closer to safety.
Then, at 7:00 p.m., with only hours remaining before the German battleship escaped, the intrepid Swordfish again rolled down Ark Royal’s flight deck into foul weather. This time they found their target. Once more the little biplanes crept toward the giant battleship through intense anti-aircraft fire. Towering geysers erupted around them as Bismarck fired her main guns into the sea in an attempt to destroy the fragile aircraft with shell splashes alone. The Swordfish pressed through the chaos and released their torpedoes before turning away into the darkness.
From the aircrews’ perspective, the attack appeared to be another failure. The torpedoes seemed to miss. And with France now dangerously close, time had effectively run out.
Only a miracle could stop Bismarck now.
And that is exactly what happened.
***
Brad Schaeffer is a commodities fund manager, author, and columnist whose articles have appeared on the pages of The Wall Street Journal, NY Post, NY Daily News, The Daily Wire, National Review, The Hill, The Federalist, Zerohedge, and other outlets. He is the author of three <a href="https://www.amazon.com/stores/author/B07MQJBJSD?ccs_id=55112527-86f6-4c89-b82e-a96d6869abed">books</a>. You can also follow him on <a href="https://bradschaeffer.substack.com/">Substack</a> and <a href="https://x.com/BSchaefferNJ">X</a>. His latest book, A War For Half The World: Why the Real Battle for the Future was Fought in the Pacific, will be released in February 2027.

World War Two: War at Sea 1940

The Rise And Fall Of The German Battleship Bismarck, Part III

Bismarck

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