Cornelius Ryan on Courage

Cornelius Ryan

"I continue to be constantly amazed by the courage of men in battle," said Cornelius Ryan, "and by their humor in the midst of catastrophe. Ryan, the author of three volumes on World War II, dictated these words as he labored over volume that was perhaps the most famous of the three, A Bridge Too Far, as he himself faced a private battle with cancer at the age of 53.

“There is a desperateness, I suppose, in courage and in wartime humor. I have seldom encountered a soldier who thought he had been courageous and I would tend to discount a man who said he was. I rather think that courage is man’s unplanned positive reaction to what appears to him to be a last-ditch situation. I believe courage is at its peak when one has run out of hope. A soldier figures he has nothing to lose because subconsciously he has arrived at the conclusion that he has no future.”[1]

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[1] Cornelius Ryan and Kathryn Morgan Ryan, A Private Battle (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1979), 307.