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Around 4:00 a.m. June 5, 1944 General Dwight David Eisenhower gave the official order to launch D-Day the following day. It had been a tense several days for Ike because of the weather. While the most recent reports predicted a window of up to 48 hours of good weather, Ike’s chief meteorologist, Captain Stagg, couldn’t be sure. Despite some of his senior generals and admirals advocating postponing the invasion, Ike made the most difficult decision of his career. He gave this historic order with three simple words: “Ok, we’ll go.”

Or did he?

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Eisenhower’s chief of staff, Lt. General Bedell Smith, wrote in his memoir, Eisenhower’s Six Great Decisions (1956), that Ike, after thinking for nearly five minutes, said: “Well, we’ll go.” Ike’s chief of intelligence, Major General Kenneth Strong, claimed in his book, Intelligence at the Top (1969), that Ike said: “Ok, boys. We will go.” General Francis De Guingand, Field Marshal Montgomery’s chief of staff, wrote in his book, Operation Victory (1947), that Ike uttered the more naval phrase, “We will sail tomorrow.” Based on interviews with Admiral Ramsay, chief of naval forces for the invasion (who later died in an airplane crash), journalist Allan Michie wrote that Ike exclaimed, “Ok, let ‘er rip.”

In an interview with Walter Cronkite in 1963, Eisenhower said, “I thought it [the likely weather] was just the best of a bad bargain, so I said, ‘Ok, we’ll go.’” It would seem that Ike’s statement should have settled the matter for good. However, in 1964 Eisenhower wrote an article about D-Day for the Paris Match. In his notes for the article he stated that he said: “Yes, we will attack on the 6th.” In the first draft of the article he wrote that he said: “Yes, gentlemen, we will attack on the 6th.” In a later draft he wrote that he said: “Gentlemen, we will attack tomorrow.” In other notes on the draft he wrote that he said: “We will attack tomorrow.”

So what did Eisenhower actually say? Since there were neither recordings nor notes taken, we will never know. Historian David Howarth explained that: “Nobody was there as an observer. However high a rank a man achieves, his capacity for thought and feeling is only human, and one may imagine that the capacity of each of these men was [so] taxed to the limit by the decision they had to make that none of them had the leisure or inclination to detach his mind from the problem and observe exactly what happened and remember it for the sake of historians.” The bottom line is that it really doesn’t matter. In this case the key issue was that Ike decided to attack. The exact wording of his order doesn’t matter.

But at other times in history we see how the wording made a difference. Imagine if MacArthur had said, “I hope to return” or “I intend to return” instead of “I shall return.” What if John Paul Jones had said, “I have only fought a little so far” instead of saying, “I have not yet begun to fight.” And Kennedy’s inaugural speech would have become a historical footnote like so many other such speeches had he reversed the order and said: “Ask not what you could do for your country, ask what your country could do for you.”

In this week’s parsha we see what is arguably the most important commitment Bnei Yisrael made in history, and the order of the words is critical. The Torah relates (24:7) that when Bnei Yisrael declared “naaseh v’nishama” they committed themselves to observe the Torah prior to hearing all its commandments. Our absolute allegiance to the Torah as demonstrated by this declaration is considered by many to be “our finest moment.”

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Rabbi Dr. David Hertzberg is the principal of the Yeshivah of Flatbush Middle Division. He is also an adjunct assistant professor of History at Touro College. Comments can be emailed to him at [email protected].