by Alan Gratz
“Huh?” said Sid.
“The lily.”
“Oh,” Sid said. He relaxed now that he had something to talk about. “Yeah, that girl and her mom, they told me I saved their lives. But I didn’t.”
“They told me we all did,” said Dee.
They didn’t speak again for a few long seconds, Sid looking at the flower in his hands and Dee looking at the red tube that snaked down to the needle in his arm.
“I—I saw you getting stretchered off that truck,” Sid said at last. “How bad is it?”
“I think my career as a Major League pitcher might be over,” said Dee.
Sid snickered. “Listen, kid, I saw you pitch for the barracks team back at training camp. You were never going pro.”
Dee smiled, then nodded toward his wound. “Seriously, I can barely feel it.” Which was true—but most likely because of the morphine. “I’ll be back out there fighting Nazis in no time.”
Sid turned the lily in his hands again. Dee could tell there was something more Sid wanted to say, but he still didn’t know how to say it. He sighed and sat down on the edge of Dee’s cot, not quite looking at him but not looking away either.
“I couldn’t do it,” Sid said. “I couldn’t shoot them. Those German soldiers you left me with. I wanted to. I had them all lined up and ready, and I couldn’t do it.”
Dee blinked. “But I heard gunshots,” he said. “On the way out of town.”
“New GIs came up from the beach. There were still a couple of German snipers that hung back to give us trouble, and the new boys took care of them. But I guess you know all about the snipers. One of them must have caught you before the others took care of him.”
Sid paused. He pulled his helmet off his head and ran his fingers through his dark curly hair.
“I had my gun on those Krauts, the ones I was guarding, and I kept thinking about how they had killed so many of our boys. How they had put all those people in that church and set it on fire. I kept thinking about what the Nazis were doing to Jews all over Europe, and how I still hadn’t got to pay a single one of them back.” Sid took a breath. “And I wanted to kill them, Dee. But I kept thinking about what you said. About being as bad as them if I killed them like that, in cold blood. And I kept thinking how you were a better man than all of us, even if you were a Kraut. Sorry—a German. And that there had to be some reason you were on our side, and not theirs …”
Dee told Sid his story then. His whole story. How he was Dietrich, not Douglas. Why he and his family had left Germany, and why Dee had wanted to come back, as a US soldier. How if Dee had stayed in Germany, he would have been taught to hate Sid. And how coming to America had meant they became friends instead.
“So, I’m supposed to call you Dee-trick now?” Sid said, butchering the pronunciation.
“Just Dee. I was Dee before, and I’m still Dee now.”
“And you’re not even an American citizen?” Sid asked. He leaned close, conspiratorially. “Does Uncle Sam know?”
Dee laughed. “Yeah. They still let you fight. All you gotta do is hate the Nazis, which is something we both have in common. And I’m going to become one too. An American citizen, that is, not a Nazi! Just as soon as I get home. I’ve decided. Those Nazis back there, they were never my countrymen. You are.”
Sid put his hand out, and Dee took it.
A doctor finally came to examine Dee. He read the chart the first medic had left and peeled back the bandage on Dee’s shoulder.
“When can I get back in the fight, Doc?” Dee asked.
The doctor made a notation on Dee’s chart and hung it back on his cot. “You’re done, son,” he said.
Panic welled up inside Dee. “‘Done’? What do you mean ‘done’?”
“I mean you get a Purple Heart and a story to tell the grandkids about how you survived Omaha Beach. Your war is over, kid.”
“No—no!” Dee said, but the doctor was already off to see his next patient.
Dee clutched at Sid’s arm. “You gotta get him back here. Tell him I’m okay to fight.”
Dee winced from the pain in his shoulder, and he fell back on his cot.
“Don’t sweat it, Dee,” Sid said. “You heard the man. You got a golden ticket back to England for R & R and then back to the States. Which is a lot more than a lot of guys today get to say.”
“I know. But you don’t understand,” Dee said. The weight of everyone he’d seen die today pressed down on him. Their sergeant. Bill and his tank crew. The Lucky Soldier. All the thousands of other men who’d never made it off Omaha Beach. “It’s our fault things got this bad,” Dee said. “My family’s and mine. And I’ve got to fix it.”
“Dee, you did your part. More than your part. It’s time to go home.”
Dee fought back his tears. He didn’t want it to end this way. There was more he had to do. More he could do to make things right. He’d only spent a single day—D-Day—in the war. He didn’t want to go home yet.
“But who’s going to liberate Europe?” Dee said. “Who’s going to stop the Nazis?”
“Are you nuts?” Sid said with a laugh. “Dee, look around you. You see all these soldiers? You hear all these different languages? All these people from different countries? That’s what they’re all here for.”
Dee dried his eyes and looked around. Sid was right. Dee had never seen so many people come together for a single cause like this. Yes, he’d seen them before: on the ships at sea and on the Higgins boats, on the beaches and in the towns of Normandy, on the streets of Bayeux. But he’d been so wrapped up in his own reason for being here, his own reason for fighting the Nazis, that he hadn’t thought too long about anyone else.
Now Dee really saw them. The medics and the sailors and the pilots and all the soldiers. The paratroopers and Resistance fighters and spies. He thought of all the people back home working in factories, making sacrifices. The entire free world, united for the common good. It was just like Samira and her mother had said—no one of the soldiers had saved them. They all had. And now they were going to save the rest of the world.
They were stronger together.
They were allies.
“Don’t worry, pal,” said Sid. “We got this.”
The Allied invasion of Normandy on June 6, 1944—commonly referred to as D-Day—was, and still is, the largest seaborne invasion in history. Planning for the complicated, international mission began a year ahead of time, led principally by President Franklin D. Roosevelt of the United States and Prime Minister Winston Churchill of the United Kingdom, and their highest-ranking generals.
Shortly after midnight on June 6, nearly 25,000 American, British, and Canadian paratroopers were dropped from planes over Normandy. Their efforts corresponded with countless smaller acts of sabotage and assault carried out by the thousands of French Resistance fighters scattered throughout northern France.
The paratroopers were followed, at dawn, by more than 5,000 Allied ships and landing crafts carrying almost 160,000 soldiers from at least eight different countries. The Allies landed on a fifty-mile stretch of Normandy beach divided by the invasion planners into five zones, each with its own code name: Gold, Juno, and Sword to the east, which were the responsibility of British and Canadian troops, and Omaha and Utah to the west, which were the responsibility of the United States.
Accurate figures are hard to come by, but by the end of the day on June 6, 1944, an estimated 4,500 Allied soldiers would be dead, and more than 10,000 would be wounded—a majority of them American. In the first twenty-four hours of the invasion, more than 3,000 French civilians died in the fighting and bombing, and German losses for the day ranged anywhere between 4,000–9,000 dead.
What is more certain is that, though costly, D-Day was a tremendous victory for the Allies. Once the beaches were secure, the armies of the United States and the United Kingdom poured through into France, pushing the Nazi army back toward Germany. By the end of that August, Paris had been liberated, and the Allies—l
ed by the United States and the United Kingdom in the west, and the Soviet Union in the east—stood on Germany’s doorstep. By May of the following year—less than a year after their triumph at D-Day—the Allies had accepted Nazi Germany’s unconditional surrender.
June 6, 1944—D-Day—was the beginning of the end of the Second World War.
A NOTE ON OPERATION NAMES
The entire plan for D-Day was code-named Operation Overlord, but there were dozens—if not hundreds—of smaller operations and missions, each with their own separate code names that fell under the larger Overlord umbrella. The names were often nonsensical, to hide what they were really about, though some seem rather fitting. Operation Bodyguard and Operation Fortitude were code names for the misinformation campaign designed to trick the Germans into thinking the Allies were landing at a different time in a different place. The French Resistance operations to sabotage railways and roads and telephone lines included code names like Blue, Green, Purple, and Tortoise. The joint British and Canadian paratrooper landings just after midnight were code-named Operation Tonga. The name given to the beach invasion itself was Operation Neptune.
In the spirit of the code names the Allies gave to their operations, I’ve made up a few code names for some of my characters. Dee, Sid, Bill, Henry, and even Dorothy and Monique are all technically parts of the beach invasion, and therefore could all be considered to be carrying out facets of Operation Neptune. To make each of their stories more clearly separate, I invented the names Operation Amiens (Bill and Achilles), Operation Integration (Henry), and Operation Bathing Suit (Monique and Dorothy).
OPERATION NEPTUNE
Thanks in part to poor navigation, rough seas, and stronger-than-expected German defenses, the American landing on Omaha Beach was a disaster. Soldiers were delivered almost anywhere but where they were supposed to land, and most of the tank support that made the other beaches easier by comparison didn’t arrive until much later in the day. Allied bombers, afraid of hitting their own men or being shot by German anti-aircraft guns, dropped their bombs well before their intended targets, and the battleships at sea, also afraid of return fire, didn’t come in close enough to shore initially to do any real damage to the fortified German positions on the cliffs.
The invading soldiers were expected to be up and off the beach within three hours of landing—by nine thirty in the morning. In reality, most of the surviving American soldiers didn’t make it off the beach until well after two o’clock in the afternoon. Even then, only a few of the planned routes up and off the beach were open by the end of the day. Things went so badly that the American commanders considered giving up on Omaha entirely and withdrawing any surviving soldiers. Of the more than 4,000 Allied soldiers who died on D-Day, almost half of that number were Americans who died on Omaha. By comparison, fewer than 200 American soldiers died on Utah Beach.
Many immigrants and foreign nationals served in the United States military during the Second World War, as Dee does here. More than 300,000 immigrants served in the US armed forces during the war, a third of them non-citizens.
Canada was slow to send its soldiers into a war so far from home, so many Canadians who wanted to fight joined the US military to see action right away. They were joined by tens of thousands of volunteers from Mexico, Germany, Italy, and dozens more countries—all of them with the common goal of defeating the Axis powers (Germany, Italy, and Japan). Many, like Dee, who were political dissidents from German-controlled countries, changed their names to avoid being executed or sent to concentration camps should they have been captured by the Nazis. And like Dee, almost all of them chose to become naturalized US citizens after the war. Immigrants and foreign nationals have fought for the United States in every major conflict since the American Revolution. Today there are more than half a million foreign-born veterans living in the United States, and close to 10,000 non-citizens enlist in the US military each year.
Like Sid, many Jewish soldiers who served in the United States military during the Second World War experienced anti-Semitism from their fellow soldiers and faced institutionalized prejudice when they returned home. During the war, prominent Americans like Henry Ford and Charles Lindbergh gave speeches and wrote articles blaming Jewish Americans for the US involvement in the war, and afterward, many restaurants, hotels, and shops continued to refuse to serve Jewish Americans. It wasn’t until the Civil Rights Act of 1964 that the United States officially outlawed discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, or national origin.
OPERATION TORTOISE
The French Resistance’s major contributions to the success of D-Day were intelligence and sabotage. French Resistance intelligence reports provided far more accurate troop strengths than aerial reconnaissance could, and rail lines were sabotaged to create enormous train wrecks and snarl long-distance travel for the Germans. The Resistance was also skilled at cutting phone and telegraph lines to prevent German communications. In addition to being disruptive, their sabotage efforts had other benefits for the Allies: Destroying rail lines forced the Germans to move their tanks by roadway, burning precious gasoline. And cutting phone lines made the Germans resort to communicating by radio, which the Allies could listen in on. The French Resistance was so effective at slowing transportation within their borders that one German army division took just one week to move all the way from Russia to the border of France—a distance of two thousand miles—but three weeks to go from the border of France to the city of Caen: a distance of less than 500 miles.
Like Samira and her mother, many Algerians fought on the side of France in both the Resistance and the army. In return for their contributions, French Algerians were promised independence. What they got instead, once the war was over, was the offer of French citizenship, not independence, angering many Algerians. A celebration in Algeria to mark the end of the war turned into a protest against French rule, and eighty-four European settlers were killed. The French army responded by killing thousands of Algerians. Known as the Sétif Massacre, the bloodshed on both sides sowed the seeds for the Algerian War of Independence that began nine years later. Algerians finally won their independence from France in 1962, but only after a long, bloody, bitter war.
OPERATION TONGA
Paratroopers at D-Day were often dropped miles from their targets. Many paratroopers drowned in the fields the Germans had flooded. Others were shot before they hit the ground. Sometimes paratroopers even came down on top of German defenses—literally. More than one paratrooper reported landing on the roof of a German barrack. Throughout the night, paratroopers from different companies came together and managed to achieve their many different goals, despite being undermanned and sometimes poorly armed.
The battle of Varaville Château was a real battle, although I fictionalized it here. A severely outmanned Canadian team forced the surrender of a much larger German garrison—much to the surprise and dismay of the Nazis once they saw how few there were of the enemy. The actual battle lasted until around ten thirty in the morning; I’ve compressed time a little here to have it end a bit sooner.
If Day was a real event too, held in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada, on February 19, 1942. The exhibition raised more than three million dollars for the Canadian war effort and was featured in the pages of Life magazine, Newsweek, and the New York Times. Since then, If Day has been the subject of a number of documentaries and television shows.
In Canada, Indigenous peoples, also known as First Nations, were long seen as second-class citizens by Canadian law. The 1951 Indian Act rescinded some of the more egregious restrictions on them, but still legalized many forms of discrimination. It wasn’t until a 1985 law change that many Canadian First Nations regained tribal status that had been taken away from them over decades of discrimination. Though much amended and better for First Nations than it was originally, the Indian Act remains controversial.
OPERATION AMIENS
Thanks to innovations that allowed them to float, Sherman tanks played an important
role in most of the Allied beach invasions. The one place they were not as effective was on Omaha Beach. Twenty-seven of the initial twenty-nine tanks meant to land on Omaha sank on their way in to shore.
British soldiers did drive American-made Sherman tanks—President Franklin Delano Roosevelt famously called the United States the “Arsenal of Democracy” due to America’s leading role in producing arms for all its allies. I have no evidence that a British tank crew ever landed on Omaha Beach, but in an effort to show the contributions of all the major Allied players and connect them to my story, I’ve taken some historical license to have Bill and his Achilles crewmates end up on Omaha and play a small role in Dee’s story.
If Bill had made it as far as Bayeux, he would not have found the Bayeux Tapestry there. During the Second World War, the tapestry resided in the Louvre, a famous museum in Paris, France. Eager to loot expensive works of art from museums and private collections all over Europe, Nazi leaders ordered local SS officers to steal the Bayeux Tapestry and other priceless pieces from the Louvre before abandoning Paris to the Allies in August 1944. The Nazis were foiled by the French Resistance, who intercepted and decoded the order and took control of the Louvre in time to defend it from Nazi soldiers when they came to take the art. Today the tapestry has returned home to Bayeux, where it is on display in a museum dedicated to the Bayeux Tapestry—and the Invasion of Normandy.
OPERATION INTEGRATION
The character of Henry Allen is based largely on Waverly “Woody” Woodson, a black army medic from Philadelphia who, like Henry, graduated from Officer Training School only to find that the United States Army was not interested in having black men become officers. Despite never expecting to see actual combat, Woodson and the rest of the 320th Barrage Balloon Battalion were delivered into the middle of a battle on Omaha Beach. Woodson worked tirelessly during D-Day, tending to wounded soldiers, black and white alike.
The 320th as a whole won a commendation from General Eisenhower for their extraordinary service on Omaha Beach. Woodson was one of four medics from the 320th who individually received a Bronze Star. Many years later, it was revealed that Woodson had been nominated for a Medal of Honor but was passed over for the award. A 1997 army inquiry found that institutional racism had kept many deserving black veterans of the Second World War from receiving the highest military honors. That same year, President Bill Clinton retroactively awarded Medals of Honor to seven African American soldiers who deserved the award for their actions during the war, but only one of them was still alive to accept his award in person. Waverly Woodson was, again, not among the seven men honored.