5 Essential D-Day Stories

The story of D-Day is as much about years of diplomatic skirmishing among Churchill, Roosevelt and Joseph Stalin as it is about the landings themselves on the beaches where President Obama and other world leaders will gather this week. And in that convoluted tale lies a lesson in leadership, for FDR’s patient maneuvering in 1941, ’42 and ’43 was that of a President at once constrained and determined as he sought the right answer in the calamitous times. What seems straightforward in retrospect was, in real time, highly improvisational—­and at moments, dare we say it, Franklin Roosevelt led from behind.

Across the land, generally, the mood was solemn. There was no sudden fear, as on that September morning in 1939 when the Germans marched into Poland; no sudden hate, as on Pearl Harbor day. This time, moved by a common impulse, the casual churchgoers as well as the devout went to pray.

The U.S. people had wondered for weeks how they would behave on D-day.

When it came, they went about their regular business. Race tracks called off their programs for the day; many stores closed at noon. The citizens stuck to their radios, read newspaper extras as they rolled off the presses, sat and thought, stood and drank, knelt and prayed.

To the top commanders, everything is always part of a plan, but to the ordinary soldiers in the landing craft, the invasion seemed more like a series of fragments that added up to chaos. The storm that was supposed to have died down still churned up waves four and five feet high, and the landing craft wallowed through them. White-capped waves slurped over the sides. Seasickness became epidemic. Drenched, shivering, scared and loaded down with almost 70 Ibs. of wet battle gear, they had to keep bailing. … If there were mistakes and failures on the Allied side, they were insignificant compared with the blunders by the Germans. Not only did Rommel spend D-day speeding through the countryside, not only had the Luftwaffe withdrawn all the planes that were needed in Normandy, but the armored regiments that should have been thrown into the defense of Omaha Beach could not move without direct orders from Hitler, and Hitler’s aides refused to wake him before 9:30 a.m.

It is, in a sense, a testament to the incalculable hardship and violence of the Longest Day that the only surviving photographic record of the Omaha Beach landing from the beach itself are nine hard-won, fragile, immensely powerful negatives.

The following day, June 7, newspapers were full of mind-boggling factoids and statistics about how D-Day had succeeded. One number that didn’t appear was 36,525. Readers might guess that the number represents the tally of soldiers who landed at Omaha Beach or the number of ships and aircraft used in the cross-Channel operation or the number of German defenders or the number of casualties or any number of other things associated with Operation Overlord. But 36,525 is simply the number of days in a century, and of all the days in the 20th century, none were more consequential than June 6, 1944.