The Presidency by Hugh Sidey: Remembering the Sacrifices of D-Day

The Presidency

For Ronald Reagan and his generation, France was the killing ground, a distant land of ghastly heroics where thousands of American soldiers fell in two World Wars. These military crusades, and the anguish they caused back home, probably form the largest body of folklore in this century. Reagan was molded by that.

He was in first grade in World War I, and the stories of German atrocities not only made their way into his tiny world but left him frightened. “I can remember as a small child having nightmares that they [the Germans] would be marching down the street,” he said in a private talk last week as he prepared to leave for Europe. “I had no conception of how they would get there, but [I recall] waking up, thinking, ‘Where would I hide if this were true?’ ”

One day his mother took him down to the station in Galesburg, Ill., to see a trainload of doughboys. “All the windows in the cars were opened, and the soldiers were all waving out,” he said. “I remember my mother lifted me up and I had a penny. I handed it to a soldier for good luck. I’ve often wondered who he was and if he had good luck.”

The boys came home, and Reagan recalls hearing them tell of their exploits. Soon it became clear that “the war to end war” had merely set the stage for another. Germany was on the march again. The gigantic effort to stop Hitler reached its full fury on D-day on the beaches of Normandy. Reagan will be there this week to look and listen and try to understand what it must have been like to fight there, what it must have meant to a President to order young men into the jaws of hell.

Forty years ago, Reagan was far from Omaha Beach. “I was at my desk in the 1st Motion Picture Unit of the Army Air Force, Culver City,” he recalled. “That post was directly under Air Corps intelligence.” Reagan knew the invasion was imminent.

“We did not know the exact moment,” he said, “because there was a 36-hour break in the weather on the Channel. And when Eisenhower got word of that, he gambled and said go, because other than that, they didn’t know how long they might have to wait.”

Like most Americans, Reagan followed the progress of the invasion hour by hour with his heart in his throat. But not until days later, when the raw combat film was brought in to be edited down for the general staff, did Reagan feel the full impact of the event.

“You’d go into the projection room and watch that film that was going to be edited,” he said. “The troops were coming off the landing barges and heading for the beach and up the beach. And I would watch as closely as I could, knowing that this was real and they were under fire. It just used to tear you in two because you’d see the individuals that were hit godown.”

He had no family members who stormed the beaches.

But he had friends there. “A young man from my home town was a naval officer on a ship that was picking up the wounded from the landing barges that ferried them back to the boats offshore,” Reagan recalled. “He was on the bridge, and down below on the deck they were pulling men aboard. And he, through his glasses, was watching a German artillery pillbox up on the bluffs. He could even see the man with the range finder. One shot came over and landed just short of the ship. Then he watched the second shot and it was a little long. He knew the third shot was going to be it. He said he had an irresistible desire to put the glasses down and tell the men down on the deck, ‘Never mind.’ And while he was watching and feeling that and thinking that, the pillbox disappeared. Our cruisers got a direct hit, and the third shot never came.”

Reagan has never been to the Normandy landing sites, but his wife Nancy visited Omaha Beach two years ago and came back to tell him of the melancholy beauty she saw in the mist. “I’m looking forward to it,” Reagan said, “although I know I’ll probably have trouble getting through it. I found myself getting unable to speak at the ceremony for the Unknown Soldier. You see the veterans today, and I think of our young people. I once said to Bob Hope that he has all that film from all those trips that he made. I said, ‘Bob, did you ever think about putting all of that together just so that kids today could see kids then? No one ever thinks their parents were young.’ ” Reagan has read a few of the dozens of letters that have been sent to him about the commemoration of Dday. One from a young woman has stuck in his mind. “She told me so eloquently in the letter how [D-day] was the most significant moment in her father’s life. From a child up she remembered the stories that he would tell, including his own feelings about that day. He died a few years ago. She and her family just feel that they must go there now and see that place that meant so much to him.” All of America seems to share some of that compulsion now.

Reagan views the Normandy assault as a battle that had to be fought. But he knows too how hard giving the command to unleash such destructive might had to be. “This must be the most heartbreaking thing that anyone could ever have to do,” the President said. He looks forward to matching his mental pictures of the battle sites with the real thing.

“There are so many great and heroic stories [about the beaches],” Reagan said. “Omaha Beach, of course, is the one that seems to linger most in everybody’s mind. But then there are other spots, the one where the Rangers climbed those sheer bluffs under fire [Pointe-du-Hoc].”

The D-day tribute will be led by men now grown old, but in a very special way the ceremony will honor American youth. “I’ll always remember what George Marshall said,” Reagan related as he ended his D-day reminiscence. “Someone asked Marshall if we had any secret weapon. And he said, ‘Yes, the best damned kids in the world.’ “