Episode
Our Sacred Honor: The Maryland 400, the Fog That Saved a Revolution │ BardsFM
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- BardsFM
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- Sep 8, 2026
- Duration seconds
- 3765
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Summary
Episode 4218 │ September 7, 2026 Four hundred men chose suicide charges against the British line so their army could escape. Ninety to a hundred of them never made it back. WHAT THIS EPISODE COVERS Scott Kesterson and Rochelle Porto return after a scheduling break to cover the Battle of Brooklyn Heights and the Fall of New York in August 1776 — a devastating rout in which untrained, under-equipped Continental troops faced 20,000 British and Hessian regulars, and the Maryland 400 under Major Mordecai Gist knowingly launched repeated suicide charges to buy time for Washington's trapped army to escape, prompting Washington's own recorded words watching from a nearby redoubt: "Good God, what brave fellows I must this day lose." The episode traces the near-miraculous nighttime evacuation across the East River — oars wrapped in cloth, soldiers ordered to total silence forbidden even to cough, and a providential fog rolling in at dawn that concealed the final withdrawal minutes before British troops reached the empty shore, an event historians have compared to Dunkirk. Scott and Rochelle close on Yale-educated inventor David Bushnell's Turtle, the first submarine deployed in combat warfare, its failed attempt to plant a timed explosive on a British warship's hull, and Bushnell's subsequent invention of the naval mine — before Scott draws the episode's central thread through to the present: that America and Britain share a common root of tyranny, and that reclaiming national unity requires the same personal accountability the founding generation demonstrated when four hundred men chose to die so others could live. KEY QUESTIONS ADDRESSED What did the Maryland 400 actually do at the Battle of Brooklyn Heights — and why does Washington's own recorded reaction watching them charg…