On D-Day, June 6, 1944, 160,000 troops participated in the invasion of Normandy. Today just a few thousand of these veterans are still alive, with the youngest in their late nineties. As their voices, and those of the million combatants and leaders who swept into motion across Europe 80 years ago, fall silent and pass from living history, Garrett Graff has captured and compiled them in a new book: When the Sea Came Alive: An Oral History of D-Day.
Drawing on his project of sifting through and synthesizing 5,000 oral histories, today Garrett takes us back to what was arguably the most consequential day in modern history and helps unpack the truly epic sweep of the operation, which was hard to fathom even then, and has become even more difficult to grasp with the passage of time. We talk about how unbelievably involved the planning process for D-Day was, stories you may never have heard before, a couple of the myths around D-Day, and the sacrificial heroism born of this event that continues to live on.
Resources Related to the Podcast
- AoM Podcast Episode #1: We Who Are Alive and Remain
- AoM Article: The 70th Anniversary of D-Day — Remembrances from the Brave Men Who Were There
- AoM Podcast #514: Remembering D-Day 75 Years Later
- The Bedford Boys: One American Town’s Ultimate D-Day Sacrifice by Alex Kershaw
- AoM Article: How Eisenhwoer Made the D-Day Decision
- The Only Plane in the Sky: An Oral History of 9/11 by Garrett M. Graff
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Read the Transcript
Brett McKay: Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition of The Art of Manliness podcast. On D-Day, June 6th, 1944, 160,000 troops participated in the invasion of Normandy. Today, just a few thousand of these veterans are still alive with the youngest in their late 90s. As their voices and those of the million combatants and leaders who swept into motion across Europe 80 years ago, fall silent and pass from living history, Garrett Graff has captured and compiled them in a new book, When the Sea Came Alive: An Oral history of D-Day. Drawing on his project of sifting through and synthesizing 5,000 oral histories, today, Garrett takes us back to what was arguably the most consequential day in modern history. It helps unpack the truly epic sweep of the operation, which was hard to fathom even then and has become even more difficult to grasp with the passage of time. We talk about how unbelievably involved the planning process for D-Day was, stories you may never have heard before, a couple that meets around D-Day and the sacrificial heroism born in this event that continues to live on. After the show’s over, check out our show notes at aom.is/Normandy.
Garrett Graff, welcome to the show.
Garrett Graff: Thanks so much for having me.
Brett McKay: So it is the 80th anniversary of D-Day, the invasion of Normandy, where the Allied forces crossed the English Channel and started at a western front in World War II in Europe. And you got a new book out about that day, it’s called When the Sea Came Alive: An Oral History of D-Day. And this book is amazing. What I love about it is you create this narrative of what happened that day, not only that day, but leading up to D-Day. And all you use is quotes, that’s it. Just quotes from people who had firsthand experience with the invasion. What was the impetus behind creating this oral history of D-Day?
Garrett Graff: Yeah, so in 2019, I wrote a oral history of 9/11. It was called The Only Plane in the Sky. And 9/11 is I think arguably or not arguably, the most famous and consequential day of the 21st century. And in 2019, it was this very specific moment, which was, it was 18 years after 9/11, and you began to see that day shift from memory into history. The first American servicemen and women were coming out of basic training and deploying to Iraq and Afghanistan who were born after 9/11. You know, the first firefighters were coming into FDNY who were born after 9/11. And now as we approach the 80th anniversary of D-Day, it’s sort of the other bookend of that shift that this was a huge, titanic monumental day, arguably the most famous and consequential day of the 20th century.
And there were a million combatants that day in motion across Europe. And 80 years on, that number has dwindled to perhaps a few thousand. And we are seeing this day shift entirely from memory into history. And so what I wanted to do with this book was to take this moment when we have effectively every first person story that we will ever have of D-Day, of what that day was like, of what the people who participated in that day experienced and lived. And to try to tell really the most comprehensive version of that day that I could in the first person. And there’s a unique power, I think, that comes with oral history where, I think, and I’ve written plenty of narrative history as well, but I think often in narrative history and when you’re writing about an event like 9/11 or like D-Day, you write about it historically in a more organized and logical and neater way than anyone that day actually lived or experienced.
And oral history helps, I think, put you back in that moment knowing only what the participants knew at that time. And so you have these letters and these quotes and these reflections from people aboard the ships crossing the channel on the night of June 5th. They don’t know that they’re about to have this incredible, heroic, courageous day ahead of them. They, in fact, feel quite the opposite, which is they don’t feel particularly heroic or courageous about that which they are about to embark upon because for them it’s unknown and it’s terrifying.
Brett McKay: What was the process of putting this book together? Because it is 500 pages long, and as I said, there’s very little… You provide every now and then, some like historical context, give people some understanding what’s going on, what they’re about to read. How did you piece together all this material? Like where did you go for the material and then what was the process of creating the story?
Garrett Graff: Yeah. So it’s a mix of archival oral histories. There are some incredible projects and archives that have pulled together first person memories and oral histories of veterans at the National World War II Museum in New Orleans, at the Imperial War Museum in London, the American Veterans Project at the Library of Congress, as well as lots and lots of memoirs and letters from the battlefield, newspaper interviews, magazine pieces, official reports, etcetera, etcetera. And I think I ended up amassing about 5000 oral histories in pulling this together. The first draft of this book, believe it or not, was about 1.2 million words. That’s 3000 or 4000 pages. And then it was just a lot of whittling and carving and shaping to get it down to the story that’s included here, which ultimately features about 700 voices. I think the final number is 692 different participants.
Some names you know, FDR and Churchill and Eisenhower and Bernard Montgomery, and a lot of names that you don’t, American families back home, British civilians, French civilians, allied troops, sailors, soldiers, Marines, Coast Guard, and a lot from a lot of the rest of the countries that were part of that war effort. D-Day is as international a day of combat as we have probably ever experienced in history. And it was that Naval force off the shores of Normandy had more than a dozen nationalities represented including more than 600 Dutch sailors.
Brett McKay: So let’s get into D-Day. First all, why is D-Day called D-Day? I’m sure some people don’t even know that.
Garrett Graff: Yeah. What’s funny about it is D-Day is just a generic military term for the start of any operation. It’s a planning term in that when you’re doing a large complex operation, the planning for it starts long before a specific day or month or even location has been chosen. And so D-Day is a way to denote the start of an operation. And D-Day plus one is the day after the invasion, and D-Day minus one is the day before the invasion, so on and so forth to give the planners the chance to build these incredibly complex logistical timelines. But at a very technical level, there have been dozens or scores of D-Days. The first one was recorded in World War I, there’s actually a book that comes out in 1944 called D-Day written by the author John Gunther that’s about the invasion of Italy. And yet, here we are 80 years later, if you walk up to anyone on the street and say, D-Day, there is only one D-Day that we remember in history. And that’s June 6th, 1944.
Brett McKay: Yeah, because this is the most epic, most sweeping of all D-Days.
Garrett Graff: Not only that, I mean, it’s arguably the most sweeping and epic human endeavor that we’ve ever seen before and might ever see again. The scale of that invasion and the planning that went into it is just monumental in the sort of most monumental sense of that word.
Brett McKay: Yeah. How many people were involved? I mean, that was… And one of the biggest takeaways I got from this book, it was a reminder of how big D-Day was. Because then when you think about D-Day, you go, you just think about the invasion itself, and you only see maybe the soldiers running up and Saving Private Ryan, or maybe you see the Band of Brothers doing their thing. But it was huge, like, to give us an idea, like how many people were involved, how many ships, planes, etcetera?
Garrett Graff: It was the largest sea armada ever assembled in human history. Depending exactly on how you count it, it was around 5000 ships involved on D-Day itself, more than a million combatants on the move on the Allied side. On D-Day, about 160,000 troops in the first invasion wave coming ashore. 13,000 paratroopers carried aboard more than 2000 planes. And then the scale and scope of everything that was included in that, the Jeeps and tanks and gallons of drinking water and numbers of meals ready to eat, and the number of tanks and pints of blood and the whole sweep of that day is really incredible to calculate, especially when you think about basically getting every single one of those items to the place that it is supposed to be down to the minute that it is supposed to arrive, which was how closely calculated D-Day was, both in terms of loading people aboard ships, but then also the sense of what was arriving at the beach on D-Day itself.
Brett McKay: Were there any quotes that you came across that really stood out to you that captured just how big D-Day was?
Garrett Graff: Well, I think one of the things that, and you sort of mentioned this a little bit already, that there’s really no way to grasp how big D-Day actually was because this personal experience of D-Day was often so small. In the foreword to the book, there are sort of two quotes that stand out for me. Andy Rooney, who went on of course to be the famous CBS news correspondent. He says, “No one can tell the whole story of D-Day because no one knows it.” Each of the 60,000 men who waited ashore that day, he’s referring to the US beaches, know a little part of the story too well.
And Ernest Hemingway, who was aboard one of the landing craft that day, although he didn’t actually go ashore himself, he writes, you could write for a week and not give everyone credit for what that person did on a front of 1,135 yards. So I think that the dichotomy of that day is how much of that day was really lived at this incredible individual micro level even as the macro experience of that day was the most monumental in human history.
Brett McKay: Yeah, I’ve had several World War II historians on the podcast before and I remember, I think I asked this question to Alex Kershaw a while back ago in one interview, it was about D-Day, I believe, and I asked him like, “How do you keep finding these stories?” You know, because he will find these stories of just a single soldier, and it’s just this amazing epic story of this one guy. And he just said, “You don’t realize how big that thing was. We’ll never run out of stories to find.”
Garrett Graff: Yeah. Absolutely. And Alex Kershaw really, one of the things that he helped excavate and tell in a new thread that I follow in this book too, is the incredible story of Company A and Company B of the 116th Infantry Regiment, the 29th division at Omaha Beach, who were the first wave at one end of that beach. And they were mostly from this single town in Bedford, Virginia and they were devastated and wiped out in the way that has, I think, come to symbolize Omaha Beach and the killing field of Omaha Beach for so many Americans. Think about those first seven minutes of Saving Private Ryan and company A of the 116th storms ashore, the first wave at Omaha Beach. They leave the ship that morning with 230 members of their company, and just 18 will make it to the end of June 6th unscathed.
And for my purposes, that was actually a very hard portion of the book to tell, because there just weren’t enough people who survived the first wave ashore at Omaha Beach in order to tell about it later. And I struggled to pull together those couple of chapters at the start of the Omaha Beach section. But when I talk about doing oral history, my goal in reading and assessing and looking at the first person stories of an event like 9/11 or an event like D-Day, is you try to focus on what I call the ordinary and the extraordinary. And what I mean by that is you wanna sort of figure out what the ordinary experiences are. What is sort of the baseline experience that most people have on 9/11 or D-Day, so that you can include those and capture what the basic experience of that day was like.
On 9/11 it’s, what’s the ordinary experience of someone evacuating down the stairwells of the Twin Towers after the attack? What’s the ordinary experience of a firefighter responding to 9/11? And then you want the extraordinary, you want those incredible outlier stories that push people to the limit of human experience and capability. And what just stands out so much about writing about D-Day is how extraordinary the ordinary actually was. As you sort of imply in your question, you end up just reading one version after another, after another. These people that you have never heard of who of that day do things that would in any other circumstance stand as one of the most heroic things a human being could ever do. And yet that day is not even the most interesting story on that stretch of 1,135 yards of beach.
Brett McKay: So you break the book up into several sections. First section is about the preparation for D-Day, and this began an entire year before it actually happened, in 1943. And I really enjoyed this section because as I was reading that I was incredibly impressed with how thorough everyone was who was preparing this thing, how well thought out it was, the logistics of figuring out how to move so many people, how to make sure you have enough ships, how to coordinate everything. I was thinking, I don’t know if we could ever do something like that again. ‘Cause everything, you know, you even go to a fast food restaurant and things that just don’t work, but they’re somehow able to plan this great undertaking. Who were the main planners that you highlight in this section?
Garrett Graff: Yeah. This actually to me, was one of the more surprising efforts of writing and researching this book, was I started this book expecting, I’ll have a couple of chapters about the lead up and the planning, and then get right into D-Day itself. Yet so much of the story of D-Day actually turns out to be the work that went into preparing for D-Day. And in many ways, as terrible and high the cost was in human lives on D-Day itself, it was far lower than planners had anticipated or feared in part due to how good and thorough and specific and advanced the planning was in those months and years ahead of time.
And so about the first third of the book really ends up being both the planning and the training for D-Day itself. And there’s this wonderful figure, Lieutenant General Frederick Morgan, British General, who ends up the head of the operation to plan for D-Day. It’s this organization that ends up being called CASAC, the Chief of Staff to the Supreme Allied Commander, an organization that actually exists for almost a year before they get around to naming a Supreme allied commander himself, which of course is Dwight Eisenhower. And that they, Morgan is out there for months planning with this incredibly small staff that with time then grows into this giant machine building in invasion force and invasion plan more complex and larger than anything humans have ever attempted before.
Brett McKay: Is there a part of the planning phase that is sort of archetypical of just how complex preparing for the operation was?
Garrett Graff: Well, what I think is sort of funny about it is you realize how much of the planning ends up taking place in these video game terms you would call side quests. The sheer scale of projects that make up the individual components of D-Day. One of the challenges that the Allied planners are wrestling with is how to bring ashore after the invasion, all of the supplies and follow-on reinforcements that they’re going to need to bring. One of the most basic parts of an invasion is you need to have ports and harbors to bring the follow-on supplies by, but where the Allies choose to invade doesn’t have any natural harbors and ports, and so they end up building these things called mulberries, which are basically portable concrete harbors that they’re going to float across the channel with tug boats and toe, and then sink off the Normandy Coast to basically bring their own harbor with them.
And again, this is just the equivalent of one of the many side quests that people are working on leading up to D-Day, and those mulberries end up being two million tons of steel and concrete, more than 200 caissons constructed by tens of thousands of workers across the British Isles, some of them as big as five-story buildings, and then they also bring 70 old Navy ships that they are going to sink off the coast of these harbors to build artificial breakwaters. And this one operation alone is so big that it requires every tug boat in the British Isles as well as a whole bunch brought over from the United States itself, just for this one tiny piece of this giant operation.
Brett McKay: Yeah. Brigadier Walter, he said this about the mulberries. “It was probably the greatest wartime engineering feat of all time.” Of all time.
Garrett Graff: Of all time. Yes.
Brett McKay: And then Winston Churchill talked about, he says the whole project, talking about the mulberries, was majestic. Churchill calls D-Day, the whole preparation, majestic. He likes to use that word a lot.
Garrett Graff: He does, and he really gets… You could sort of see, he’s a Navy guy himself, he’s led Britain through this incredibly dark period that I try to tell in the first chapter of the book, as World War II opens and begins and the British and Allied forces are thrown out of Europe at Dunkirk. You see how excited he gets by the planning of Operation Overlord, a codename he actually selects and improves himself.
Brett McKay: Yeah, that was interesting. You talk about, there’s a quote from someone saying how he took a very personal interest in codenames.
Garrett Graff: Yes, he evidently loves codenames and ends up talking about them at great length and choosing them and changing them to sort of reflect his own beliefs in these operations, but one of my favorite scenes or anecdotes in the book is right up at the end of the run-up to the invasion as they’re getting ready, he asks, Winston Churchill asks for permission to accompany the landing aboard one of the British Navy vessels, and Eisenhower basically says, “Winston, I don’t think that’s a very good idea.” And then Churchill is like, “Well, if I just enlist as a Navy Aide aboard one of the ships, you can’t do anything about it.” And so he makes this plan to accompany the landing as just sort of run-of-the-mill Navy Aide aboard one of the British warships, and Eisenhower is pulling his hair out over this because he doesn’t wanna risk the Prime Minister in first wave of the D-Day landing.
And then the King of England actually gets wind of this, recognizes that it’s a problem and comes up with the only solution that he can think of to get Winston to back down, which is, he’s like, “Well, if Winston Churchill’s going, I’ll go too.” And tries to insist, not entirely seriously it seems, that he will accompany the landing invasion force as well, at which point Churchill is like, “Well, we can’t risk the King. So I won’t go, so the King won’t go.” And Eisenhower sort of ends up getting a good laugh over the whole thing and how astutely the King maneuvered Winston Churchill out of the invasion force.
Brett McKay: We’re gonna take a quick break for a word from our sponsors. And now back to the show. And what’s crazy too about the planning part and getting ready for D-Day, they kept this thing secret. The Germans had an idea that something was happening, but they didn’t know exactly what was gonna happen or when it was gonna happen. I was impressed by that. And the other thing I learned too from your book, and I didn’t realize this, is how much training went on for D-Day, ’cause you don’t really see… When you watch the movies about World War II, you’ll see the crew, a company at their boot camp in the United States, but you don’t see them training for the operations that they took part in. What was the training like in preparation for D-Day?
Garrett Graff: Yeah. This again, was part of what was so fascinating to me was understanding that actually more Allied troops were killed in the training for D-Day than on D-Day itself, that the Allies spent really the better part of a year ahead of D-Day running mock invasions of the British countryside, that they actually evacuate an entire seaside British county of civilians in order to set up a training facility that looks like the beaches the troops will storm in Normandy.
Brett McKay: Yeah. That was really interesting ’cause you get first-hand accounts of the residents there, and they just basically get this announcement saying, Hey, you gotta leave. You gotta sell your stuff and get out of here, and it’s not even for an invasion, it’s just so we can train.
Garrett Graff: Just to practice for the invasion and that for months, the US and British and Allied troops load up in landing craft and go out into the English Channel, and then turn around and storm back ashore in the British countryside as they train for this, and that there’s one particular exercise in the spring of ’44, that’s called Exercise Tiger, that was supposed to be the last large scale rehearsal for the troops heading to Utah Beach. And it is all of the force that is heading to Utah Beach, a raid-out on ships in the English Channel. And the night before the dawn invasion preparation, some German torpedo boats get through the security screen and sink a couple of landing craft and end up killing in that one night, upwards of 700 Allied servicemen, mostly Americans. And we actually don’t know the final number. It could be much higher than that even. And the Pentagon covers that up for decades. It’s not until really the 1980s that they admit that this incident happened at all, let alone that those units headed to Utah Beach suffered orders of multiple more casualties in Exercise Tiger than they did actually storming ashore at Utah Beach on June 6th, 1944.
Brett McKay: You have some quotes from some soldiers who were part of that, and how they had to keep it quiet. A story that stood out for me was from Corporal Eugene Carney. He says, “We were told to keep our mouths shut and taken to a camp where we were quarantined. When we went through the mess line, we weren’t even allowed to talk to the cooks. If, for example, we wanted two potatoes, we were told to hold up two fingers, if three, three fingers. We could have all we wanted, but could say nothing.” And then another sad one, this is from Private Veldon Downing, he said, “They told us to keep our mouths shut, and we did. After the war, the parents of one of the kids I served with who’d been lost, drove all the way out here from New York just to ask me what happened. I told them I couldn’t talk about it.”
Garrett Graff: Yeah, and it was this incredible secret for years and years and years. Secret in that moment, both because of the concerns about what it would do to undermine public confidence in the invasion, but also what it would do to the morale of the servicemen heading to the invasion itself in a couple of weeks. And one of the things that is really incredible to realize coming out of Exercise Tiger is the thing that had dogged Eisenhower and Morgan and all of the planners through that entire spring had been there just weren’t enough landing craft, they’re just weren’t enough landing ships, and they’d end up delaying the whole operation from May until June in order to get literally one more month’s worth of landing craft production in the United States over to Europe. And then in Exercise Tiger, they lose a couple more landing craft, and that is the last reserve that the entire Allied military has of landing craft, and they are down to the point where had they lost one or two more landing craft, it’s possible that they would have ended up having to scale back the D-Day invasion.
Brett McKay:And not only were soldiers getting very specific training, you talk about how the bombers were also getting trained. There was a ton of reconnaissance done in preparation for D-Day, and they had film, and so these bomber crews, they were watching this film over and over again of what their flight into Normandy would look like and they knew exactly where the pillboxes were, where they needed to drop their bombs, so they knew exactly where they needed to go, and something else that impressed me was the level of reconnaissance that happened during this planning process.
Garrett Graff: Yeah, down to the point where they had such thorough reconnaissance that if you were the coxswain of a landing craft, you got a photo of what your tiny stretch of beach should look like 1000 yards off the beach when you are coming into shore. It was incredibly detailed and advanced reconnaissance given the comparatively primitive photographic capabilities and technologies of that era.
Brett McKay: So, okay. At this point, we’re a couple of months away, we’re in the spring of ’44, they still hadn’t decided the exact day. They knew it was gonna be late May, June, based on where the moon was gonna be, tides, things like that, but they couldn’t pinpoint the exact date because they needed to look at the weather, and we’ll talk about the weather here in a bit. So you had, I think it was like two million people in England training, just getting ready for this invasion, not knowing when it was gonna happen. So morale becomes an issue, this always becomes an issue in the military when you have a bunch of guys not doing anything, kind of milling about. And so you talk about what Montgomery did, what Eisenhower did to boost morale, but you also recount this really harrowing story, it just made me, like I felt sad after I read it, of this chaplain who basically went to go give a pump-up speech to the guys, and it was basically the biggest downer.
He was just like, “Yeah, it’s gonna be tough. A lot of people are gonna die.” And then everyone was just feeling down and despondent, so this other guy had to come in and give a better speech. And the correspondent from Reuters talked about it, because he saw this chaplain give this really Debbie Downer speech. He says, “I went to the mess for lunch feeling very uncomfortable. As I was walking back to the tent, I was a few paces away when I heard a rifle crack. I saw the canvas move, went in and there was the padre,” talking about the chaplain, “he’d shot himself.”
Garrett Graff: Yeah, it was one of the British units, one of the commando units who sort of got this terrible, as you said, Debbie Downer speech from this padre and Lord Lovat, who’s the very colorful commander of the British commandos, ends up basically like pushing the guy off stage and jumping up to re-charge up his men, worried that they’re gonna have this crisis of confidence in themselves in those final hours. And he ends up basically saying to the padre, “Hey, you’re off the invasion, you can’t come with us anymore.” And the chaplain goes back to his tent and kills himself. And he’s so despondent about the damage that he’s caused to… The potential damage that he’s caused to the invasion, and they end up listing him formally as a battle casualty even though he dies in camp before they leave.
Brett McKay: Okay. So you have a section about the weather forecast, that played a big role. Originally, I think D-Day was supposed to be the 5th of June?
Garrett Graff: Exactly. Yeah.
Brett McKay: Yeah, and the weather was bad. And then Eisenhower, you just talked about the tension and the stress that Eisenhower had to go through to make this decision, ’cause it was on him. He was the only one who can make this decision, and you can tell that the burden was just so intense on him. But then he makes the go, and when he made that decision, everyone, he says everyone kind of lighted up. He says this, Dwight Eisenhower, “There was a definite brightening of faces as without further word, each went off to his respective post of duty to flash out to his command the messages that would set the whole host in motion,” and then Churchill said, “The die was irrevocably cast. Invasion would be launched June 6th.” So it started early in the morning, like right after midnight, with the paratroopers going in behind enemy lines. What was their mission, those initial paratroopers?
Garrett Graff: Yeah. The weather forecast turns this whole thing and almost upends the entire invasion. There are only three days in the start of June when the tides, the moon, all of the weather conditions that they need, overlap. And if they don’t go then, they will need to delay at least two weeks, if not a month. And the challenge is when you have an operation as big as D-Day, everyone is on board the ships and entire convoys have already put to sea even before they’re sure when exactly the D-Day invasion will be launched. And so Eisenhower is sitting there on June 3rd, June 4th, looking at these weather reports, knowing that D-Day is already in motion, there are a million people loading aboard the ships even that weekend, and if they can’t go on June 6th, they are actually gonna need to offload all of those million people and put them back into camps across England. And the security risk of that, these million people all now know their mission, they know where the invasion is gonna take place, and so for Eisenhower, it’s this incredibly high stakes, almost existential question about the Allied cause and whether the invasion can take place as he’s weighing the weather reports.
And then the weather just clears just a tiny, tiny bit enough to let them launch the invasion. And it begins, as you said that night with the paratroopers, the American paratroopers who were dropped behind the far western flank of Utah Beach, 82nd Airborne, 101st Airborne. 13,000 of those paratroopers dropping in to cure the Western flank and the approaches behind Utah Beach to make sure that the troops can actually get off Utah Beach once they get there. And then the British 6th Airborne is dropped along the eastern flank behind what we now call Sword Beach to secure the beach exits there and to seize the river crossings that would stop the German reinforcements from racing up behind the British and Canadian beaches.
And again, these are extraordinary stories that on any other day would be some of the wildest versions of military heroism recorded. In the 6th Airborne, they dropped three gliders of troops into this tiny field next to this one key bridge that’s later, now sort of known to history as Pegasus Bridge, they drop into this tiny field. I’ve stood there and you look at where these three gliders have all crashed just a couple of yards apart, and it’s impossible to imagine doing this in the dark, landing as close to the bridge as they did. And they storm out and seize Pegasus Bridge before the Germans have a chance to counter-attack or destroy the bridge, and then basically sort of set up to wait there till midday or early afternoon on the 6th when reinforcements will finally reach them from Sword Beach.
Brett McKay: So you have a section about the Naval part of this. They codenamed that Neptune, and this is the Naval component of D-Day. And again, epic. Majestic. And you have some great quotes from the Germans who were on the shores of Normandy and looking out into the ocean and just seeing just that giant armada. You have this one quote from a guy named Carl Wegner. This really stood out to me. He said, “Violently, my arm was shaken by Willie. I sat straight up and looked at him. His face was pale. I asked him what was wrong. He just pointed toward the sea. I looked out and saw ships as far as one could see. I’m not ashamed to say that I was never so scared of my life, but the sight was so impressive that no one could help but stare in amazement.” Yeah, it was just… I couldn’t imagine, again, we look in the past, we know what happened, but can you imagine if you’re some young 19-year-old German kid and you look out into the sea and it’s just thousands and thousands of these black dots that you know they’re gonna start pounding you with artillery.
Garrett Graff: Yeah, and it’s also… I think from the German perspective, you get a sense of the confusion and chaos that reigns that day, again, I think is normally lost in the way that we tell a narrative history, but that comes through so clearly in an oral history where even something as simple as like we know, and we talk about this history as these five features; Utah, Omaha, Gold, Juno, and Sword. I talk about the British airborne dropping in to secure the eastern flank and the 82nd and 101st Airborne dropping in to secure the western flank. The Germans are waking up that morning. They don’t understand any of this. They don’t understand that there are five beaches. They don’t understand that it’s British troops on one side and American paratroopers on the other. They’re trying to figure out even whether this is the real invasion, because the allies have done this incredible job, basically misdirecting that the “real invasion” is going to come in mid-July in Calais, which is the place where the Germans most expected the invasion. And it’s the shortest part across the English Channel, it seems like it would be the easiest place to launch an invasion. And instead, they launch this invasion across the English Channel, where it’s 100 miles wide. And it is just this utter and complete shock to the Germans who spend the entire day trying to understand what they’re actually working on.
Brett McKay: The most harrowing part of D-Day, and the one that’s been captured in film by Saving Private Ryan was soldiers leaving landing craft in the ocean and charging the beaches of Normandy. Were there any first-hand accounts that sit out to you, that really captured the carnage and chaos of that amphibious invasion?
Garrett Graff: Yeah, we talked a little bit about the unit known as the Bedford Boys, that 116th infantry, Company A, Company B, storming ashore at Omaha Beach. But I think one of the things that I really tried to reframe a little bit in this telling of the book is I think we have this mythology in D-Day that Omaha Beach was this incredible killing ground, and everything else was a cake walk, especially the British and Canadian beaches. And that is technically true in a limited sense, if you are talking about people who die on the sand itself, but it’s not really reflective of the totality of the experience of D-Day, which is when you add in the casualties of the paratroopers and the fighting of the paratroopers behind Utah Beach, that sector is secured at great cost. When you talk about the British and Canadian beaches, there are individual units where they are absolutely devastated in their early waves of the invasion. 110 of the Queen’s Own Rifles fall as they march up the beaches in the British sector. And then the British and Canadian units get off the beach relatively quickly and then are engaged in very heavy fighting in an urban environment inland on D-Day itself. And that for the British and Canadian forces, in some ways, the afternoon of D-Day is where they see their most violent combat. Even as the Americans, once they get through their beach defenses at Utah and Omaha, their fighting is mostly done.
Brett McKay: There’s a really sad story at Juno. So this is the Canadian part of the invasion, and it’s the story of Corporal Fred Barnard. Could you read that one? I thought it was really poignant.
Garrett Graff: Yeah. “This is Corporal Fred Barnard, Company B, Queen’s Own Rifles, 8th Infantry Brigade, 3rd Canadian Division. My brother, Don, was on the boat with me. You could claim your brother to your regiment, get them to transfer him to your regiment, and I claimed him in 1944. And as we were going down the ramp, I yelled to my brother, “Don, give him hell.” And the next thing I know, I’m in the water maybe 4 feet deep. When I went up the beach, I passed one of the guys in my platoon, just a kid, about 19. He had been ripped right down, crying for his mother. The next thing I know, there was Don, lying on his back, a bullet right there in the heart. There was just a black hole in his uniform, right in the middle of his chest, no blood. It was as if he was asleep.”
I’m not surprised, I guess, that that quote stood out to you, but that really stuck with me when I was reading that. I’m grateful there was a Canadian journalist named Ted Barris, who went out and did the one definitive book on Juno and gathered up a lot of those memories and interviewed a lot of those veterans when they were still around and had very nicely shared his research and interview transcripts with me for this book. And I thought about that moment so much, like, “What must it have been like to go through the rest of your life, knowing that you had done this thing that you thought was great, you had gotten your brother to serve in the same unit as you did and gotten him into the same landing craft that you did on D-Day, and then for him to die?” And I don’t know what Fred Barnard ever felt about that, but you could just imagine the guilt or the second guessing or the responsibility that you would feel for a moment like that.
Brett McKay: Yeah. And it also just shows how random stuff was. There’s so many accounts where a guy would say, “I just ducked, and the bullet was by, then hit the guy behind me,” these guys that you could tell they just… They felt so helpless in a lot of cases. Of course, there were moments of gallantry and bravery, the Dick Winters types who went up and charged and did all that amazing stuff, but I just couldn’t imagine what it would have been like. One minute, you’re talking to your buddy, and the next minute, his head is blown off and you have to keep going.
Garrett Graff: You see in so many of the stories that day, the randomness of luck and chance. And as you said, that some of D-Day was skill, and some of it was courage and bravery and heroism, and a lot of it was just random fate and dumb luck and chance of who was on what patch of sand or in which hedgerow at which moment when a shell landed or a bullet went by. And there were so many people that day who, again, went through these extraordinary moments that were entirely ordinary for everyone around them.
Brett McKay: One of the goals you had with this book was to, I think, address this myth that is, I think, built up around D-Day, that it was this really tenuous thing that was always teetering on the edge of failure. But in the narrative that you were able to pull out of these accounts, you see that, yes, there were a lot of casualties. A lot of men lost their lives that day. But overall, it was a really a smashing success. It was probably one of the biggest military successes in world history.
Garrett Graff: Absolutely. And I think that is… To me, one of the things that really stands out is we have this sense that this was this incredible gamble. And at one level, it is, but the truth of the matter is every Allied amphibious invasion in World War II succeeds. And the reason for that is precisely because of what a gamble an amphibious invasion actually is.
And so for Operation Overlord, the Americans have invested so much. They have developed so many new technologies. They have developed so many new capabilities. They have trained so hard for so long. They’ve brought such scale and scope and size to this invasion that the Germans just don’t really have much of a chance on D-Day. Anywhere the Allies choose to land on D-Day, they are going to punch through. The question is, can they stay ashore once they’re there? And can they get to… Can they get enough follow-on supplies and reinforcements ashore faster than the Germans can get reinforcements up from inland in France and in Germany? And the tenuousness of the invasion actually is not D-Day itself, it’s the days after June 7th, June 10th, June 14th. And that when we talk about D-Day, D-Day is really just the start. It takes the Allies 77 days to complete the Normandy campaign and break out of the beach heads that they have built up and begin the march for Paris and Germany, and that D-Day feels, in so many ways, like the triumph. It is the day we storm ashore and pierce Fortress Europe. But for all of the troops who made it ashore that day and lived, some of their most poignant reflections are waking up the morning of June 7th and starting to fight all over again.
Brett McKay: Yeah. And I think one of the reasons why D-Day… Yes, it was a pivotal moment in… You say pivotal moment in human history. But it was a moment where there was so much carnage, but also you see bravery, you see courage, you see compassion of these soldiers trying to help each other out. And I’d like to end with this quote from Andy Rooney, if you don’t mind. It’s in the foreword. Can you read that?
Garrett Graff: “Andy Ronnie: If you think the world is selfish and rotten, go to the cemetery at Colville-sur-Mer overlooking Omaha Beach and see what one group of men did for another on D-Day, June 6th, 1944.”
Brett McKay: Well, Garrett, this has been a great conversation. Where can people go to learn more about the book?
Garrett Graff: So you can get the book anywhere that you like purchasing books. The book is called When the Sea Came Alive. If you are a podcast listener, I would encourage you to pick up the audio book, which is a incredible marvel and masterpiece itself. It’s been read by dozens of actors, so every voice is different in the audio book, and you get the full sense of the accents of the British and Canadian and French and Germans who fought that day.
Brett McKay: Well, Garrett Graff, thanks for your time. It’s been a pleasure.
Garrett Graff: Thanks so much for having me.
Brett McKay: My guest today was Garrett Graff. He’s the author of the book When the Sea Came Alive: An Oral History of D-Day. It’s available on amazon.com and book stores everywhere. You can find more information about his work at his website, garrettgraff.com. Also check out our show notes at aom.is/normandy, where you can find links to resources, we delve deeper into this topic.
Well, that wraps up another edition of the AoM podcast. Make sure to check out our website at artofmanliness.com, where you can find our podcast archives. And while you’re there, sign up for our newsletter. You get a daily option and a weekly option. They’re both free. It’s the best way to stay on top of what’s going on at AoM. And if you haven’t done so already, I’d appreciate if you could take one minute to give us a review on Apple Podcast or Spotify. It helps out a lot. And if you’ve done that already, thank you. Please consider sharing the show with a friend or family member who you think would get something out of it. As always, thank you for the continued support. Until next time, it’s Brett McKay, reminding you to not only listen to the AoM podcast, but put what you’ve heard into action.
