That same Saturday, June 3, Eisenhower met with his meteorologists in the Library of Southwick House at Naval Headquarters in Portsmouth. The news was not good. A marked deterioration had taken place in the good conditions originally predicted for June 5. Now Captain J. M. Stagg, senior meteorologist for Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force, was saying that June 5 would be overcast and stormy, with high winds and visibility so low that the air force could not be used. And the weather pattern was so unpredictable that forecasting more than a day in advance was highly undependable. With great reluctance, Eisenhower decided to postpone the operation for twenty-four hours.
News of the postponement threw Churchill into “an agony of uncertainty.” If the bad conditions continued for another day, Overlord could not be launched for at least another two weeks. Unable to endure the tension, he decided to return to London. In Charlottesville, Roosevelt remained calm, though he, too, elected to return to his nation’s capital. In Eleanor’s judgment, her husband was better able to meet the tension than many of the others, “because he’d learned from polio that if there was nothing you could do about a situation, then you’d better try to put it out of your mind and go on with your work at hand.”
On Sunday night, June 4, Eisenhower met again with his meteorologists. This time Captain Stagg reported a slight improvement in the weather; the rain front was expected to clear in three hours, and the clearing would last until Tuesday morning; later that Tuesday, however, considerable cloudiness was expected to develop. Eisenhower recognized that these conditions were far from ideal but “the question,” he said, was “just how long you can hang this operation on the end of a limb and let it hang there.” At nine forty-five that night, Eisenhower announced his decision. “O.K., let’s go.” The invasion would be launched at dawn on the 6th of June. “I don’t like it, but there it is,” he said. “I don’t see how we can possibly do anything else.”
On the eve of D-day, a nervous Churchill went to his map room to follow the movement of the convoys as they headed toward the coast of France. “Do you realize,” he said to his wife, Clementine, who had joined him before she went to bed, “that by the time you wake up in the morning twenty thousand men may have been killed?”
That same night, Roosevelt went on the air to salute the fall of Rome. “The first of the Axis capitals is now in our hands,” Roosevelt said. “One up and two to go!” The Allied struggle to capture Rome had been long and costly, with heavy loss of life. In January, the Germans had pinned down more than 150,000 Allied soldiers to a bridgehead at Anzio on the Tyrrhenian Sea, preventing them from linking up with the main Allied force to the south. It took more than four months of fighting for the Allies finally to break out from Anzio on May 23 and link up with the Allied forces advancing on Rome. Things moved swiftly after that, leading to the capture of Rome in a matter of days. “How magnificently your troops have fought,” Churchill telegraphed.
Though Roosevelt knew that thousands of American soldiers were crossing the Channel as he delivered his address, he never tipped his hat, concentrating his remarks on Italy. Shortly after the speech, the president went to bed.
As the clock tolled midnight in Washington, the first waves of young Americans were plunging into the surf. Few had slept the night before, war correspondent Ernie Pyle reported, and many had thrown up their breakfasts, as the invasion turned “from a vague anticipatory dread into a horrible reality.” Some, loaded down with gas masks, grenades, TNT, satchel charges, and rifle ammunition, sixty-eight pounds in all, drowned when they first jumped into the water; others were hit by bullets and killed or wounded as they waded in to shore; still others were struck as they scrambled across the beach. Some of the beaches proved easier than others. Omaha was the worst. One infantry company at Omaha lost a quarter of its men in the first forty-five minutes. “I don’t know why I’m alive at all,” one survivor said. “It was really awful. For hours there on the beach the shells were so close they were throwing mud and rocks all over you. It was so bad that you didn’t care whether you got hit or not.”
But by 3 a.m., Washington time, when General Marshall called the White House to speak to the president, most of the troops were moving forward, making their way onto the beaches and up the hills. Eleanor was still awake when the call came. Franklin had told her the invasion news before she went to bed, and she became so wrought up she could not sleep. “To be nearly sixty and still rebel at uncertainty is ridiculous isn’t it,” she chided herself. The White House operator called Eleanor first, knowing she was still up, and asked her to awaken the president. Eleanor entered her husband’s room. “He sat up in bed and put on his sweater, and from then on he was on the telephone . . . .”
The official announcement of the invasion came at 3:32 a.m. along with a reading of Eisenhower’s order of the day: “Soldiers, sailors and airmen of the Allied Expeditionary Force! You are about to embark upon the great crusade, toward which we have striven these many months . . . . Much has happened since the Nazi triumph of 40-41 . . . . Our homefronts have given us an overwhelming superiority in weapons and munitions of war, and placed at our disposal great reserves of trained fighting men. The tide has turned! I have full confidence in your courage, devotion to duty and skill in battle. We will accept nothing less than full victory!”
At 4 a.m., Roosevelt told the White House operator to call every member of the White House staff and ask them all to report to duty at once. One by one the calls were made; only Harry Hopkins, still convalescing in the army hospital in White Sulphur Springs, was excluded from the list. More than anyone else on the staff, Hopkins had deserved to be there that day to share the news of the great invasion he had long supported. Alone in his hospital room, he told his biographer Robert Sherwood, he thought about all the production problems that had challenged the United States in 1939 and 1940, of how the various bottlenecks had been broken and the desperate shortages of strategic materials converted into surpluses. If ever there was a country unprepared for the war, it was the U.S. in 1940. And yet now, only four years later, the United States was clearly the most productive, most powerful country on the face of the earth.
As the news of the invasion reached the American people in the early hours of June 6, church bells tolled, school bells rang, factories sounded their whistles, fog horns blasted. “It is the most exciting moment in our lives,” Mayor LaGuardia told reporters. Sporting events were canceled. Retail stores closed. People streamed into the streets. “Outwardly they appeared to be celebrating a victory,” Homefront author Winston Estes observed, “but underneath all that raucous, uncontrolled excitement, lay a cold fear and a grim anxiety which gnawed at their insides.”
“The impulse to pray was overwhelming,” historian Stephen Ambrose wrote. People jammed the pews of churches and synagogues in cities and towns throughout the land to sit in silence and pray. “We have come to the hour for which we were born,” The New York Times editorialized the next day. “We go forth to meet the supreme test of our arms and our souls, the test of the maturity of our faith in ourselves and in mankind.”
Roosevelt met with his congressional leaders at 9:50 a.m. and his military leaders at 11:30. The official news was still fragmentary, but by midafternoon, as he lunched with Anna under the magnolia tree, it was clear that the landings had gone pretty well, better than anyone had hoped. Though casualties were high—some sixty-six hundred were recorded that first day alone—they were fewer than expected. The main event of the day was the president’s regular press conference at 4 p.m., which drew 180 men and women packed in a solid mass.
“The President was happy and confident,” I. F. Stone recorded. “Our faces must have shown what most of us felt as we came in. For he began, after an extraordinary pause of several minutes in which no questions were asked and we all stood silent, by saying that the correspondents had the same look on their faces that people all over the country must have and that he thought this a very happy conference.”
“I have
just sat in on a great moment in history,” a young reporter wrote his mother later that day. “The President sat back in his great green chair calm and smiling, dressed in a snow white shirt with the initials FDR on the left sleeve in blue and a dark blue dotted bow tie. In his hand he held the inevitable long cigarette holder and when he held the cigarette in his mouth it was cocked at the angle they say he always has it when he is pleased with the world.”
Still, Roosevelt warned the press against overconfidence. “You just don’t land on a beach and walk through—if you land successfully without breaking your leg—walk through to Berlin. And the quicker this country understands it the better.”
Later that evening, Roosevelt went on the air to deliver the simple prayer he had prepared in Charlottesville, “a far cry,” Rosenman noted, “from the kind of speech Hitler would have made if his troops were landing on the beaches of England.” The general tone of his voice reflected concentrated, quiet intensity, perfectly matching the mood of the country. He prayed first for “our sons, pride of our Nation . . . . Give strength to their arms, stoutness to their hearts, steadfastness in their faith.” He then prayed for the people at home, for strong hearts “to wait out the long travail, to bear sorrows that may come . . . . Give us Faith in Thee,” he concluded: “faith in our sons; faith in each other; faith in our united crusade.”
As Eleanor listened to her husband, she noted with pleasure that he looked very well and seemed himself again, full of plans for the future. At one moment, he talked of going to England as soon as Hitler was ready to surrender; the next moment, he spoke of Honolulu and the Aleutians. For her part, she had no sense of excitement whatsoever: “All emotion is drained away.”
The “hedgerow battles” that followed in the days after the landings were characterized by savage fighting, slow movement, and few geographic gains. Tangled hedges and bushes were ubiquitous in the bocage country surrounding Normandy; everywhere one looked, they boxed in fields and orchards of varying sizes and shapes. “Each hedgerow,” army historian Gordon Harrison notes, “was a potential earthwork into which the defenders cut often-elaborate foxholes, trenches, and individual firing pits. The dense bushes atop the hedgerows provided ample concealment for rifle and machine gun positions, which could subject the attacker to devastating hidden fire from three sides . . . . Each field thus became a separate battlefield.”
But if the infantry was temporarily splintered by the dense terrain, Allied air and naval power was practically unopposed. From the larger perspective, the overwhelming weight of Allied arms gradually wore down the defenders. “I cannot say enough for the Navy,” Corporal William Preston wrote his father, “for the way they brought us in, for the firepower they brought to bear on the beach. Whenever any of us fired a burst of tracer at a target, the destroyers, standing in so close they were almost ashore, fired a shot immediately after us, each time hitting what we were firing at on the nose.” And all this time, Preston marveled, while twenty thousand Allied planes formed a protective umbrella in the sky, “not a single German plane” could be seen. “Nobody doubted now,” Hap Arnold recorded, “the meaning of the damage reports, photographs, figures and percentages of the great air attack on the Luftwaffe in the five great days of February.”
Three weeks after D-day, one million men had been put ashore, along with an astonishing supply of 171,532 vehicles and 566,000 tons of supplies. “As far as you could see in every direction the ocean was infested with ships,” Ernie Pyle observed, but when you walked along the beach, a grimmer picture emerged. “The wreckage was vast and startling.” Men were floating in the water, lying on the beach; nearly nine thousand were dead. “There were trucks tipped half over and swamped . . . tanks that had only just made the beach before being knocked out . . . jeeps that had burned to a dull gray . . . boats stacked on top of each other. On the beach lay expended sufficient men and mechanism for a small war. They were gone forever now.
“And yet, we could afford it,” Pyle marveled. “We could afford it because we were on, we had our toehold, and behind us there were such enormous replacements for this wreckage on the beach that you could hardly conceive of the sum total. Men and equipment were flowing from England in such a gigantic stream that it made the waste on the beachhead seem like nothing at all, really nothing at all.”
Standing amid the wreckage, looking out to sea at the immense armada of ships still waiting to unload, Pyle noticed a group of German prisoners. “They stood staring almost as if in a trance. They didn’t say a word to each other. They didn’t need to. The expression on their faces was something forever unforgettable. In it was the final, horrified acceptance of their doom.”
• • •
Comforted by the news from France, Roosevelt journeyed to Hyde Park for seven days in the middle of June. “Much kidding about his destination,” Hassett recorded, “even mentioned possibility of taking me into Catskills for a drinking party.” A “Swiss family Robinson” caravan left the Bureau of Engraving terminal at 10 p.m. on a warm Thursday night: Franklin and Eleanor; Martha and Olav and their three children; Tommy, Tully, and White House operator Louise Hackmeister.
“I’ve unpacked a little and have some photos where I can enjoy them,” Eleanor wrote Joe Lash the next morning from her desk in Sara’s old bedroom, which she had finally taken over, “but really living here is hard for me—I’ve made Mama’s room pleasant and I can work in it and not feel her presence . . . but over here there is no getting away from the bigness of the house and the multitudes of people. Franklin has a diet. The Crown Princess another and running the house is no joke!” Never from choice would she live in this house, Eleanor had confessed several weeks earlier, for her heart was in the cottage, “but suddenly Franklin is more dependent.”
Following the simple routine he treasured so greatly at Hyde Park, the president worked in his library in the mornings, organized picnics along the river in the afternoons, took tea at Laura Delano’s, and went to bed early. By the time he returned to Washington, he looked, Hassett recorded, “in the pink of condition.”
The morning he returned, June 22, 1944, the president hosted a public ceremony in the Oval Office to celebrate his signing of the GI Bill of Rights. This extraordinary bill, which carried out in full the visionary recommendations Roosevelt had made the previous year, had passed the Senate by a vote of fifty to zero and the House by 387 to zero. Acknowledging the intense gratitude the country felt toward the men and women who had given up months and years of their lives in service to their country, the GI Bill was designed to provide the returning veteran with a chance to command the status, education, and training he could have enjoyed if he had not served in the military.
“There is one great fear in the heart of any serviceman,” Eleanor observed in her column, quoting a letter from a young soldier overseas, “and it is not that he will be killed or maimed but that when he is finally allowed to go home and piece together what he can of life, he will be made to feel he has been a sucker for the sacrifice he has made.”
The GI Bill responded to that fear by providing special opportunities for veterans: it backed them in their efforts to buy a home or get into business by guaranteeing loans up to $2,000; it authorized those who were unable to find a job to receive $20 a week for fifty-two weeks; it provided construction of additional hospital facilities, and, most far-reachingly, it provided $500 a year for college tuition plus a monthly payment of $75 for living expenses.
In 1940, when the average worker earned less than $1,000 a year and when tuition, room, and board ranged from $453 at state colleges to $979 at private universities, a college education was the preserve of the privileged few. By providing an allowance of what amounted to $1,400 a year, the GI Bill would carry more than two million veterans into colleges and graduate schools at a total cost of $14 billion. In the late forties, veterans would constitute almost 50 percent of the male students in all institutions of higher learning. To accommodate the new students, colleges and universities wo
uld vastly expand their physical plants. Scores of new urban campuses would be created. Moreover, under the same provision, another three million veterans would receive educational training below college, and two million would receive on-the-job training. Through this single piece of legislation, the educational horizons of an entire generation would be lifted.
Exceeding all expectations, the GIs would do exceptionally well at school. A Fortune survey of the class of ’49, 70 percent of whom were veterans, concluded it was “the best . . . the most mature . . . the most responsible, the most self disciplined group of college students in history.” Despite overcrowding in housing and the classroom, they were determined to make the most of this extraordinary opportunity. “We were men, not kids,” veteran Chesterfield Smith observed, “and we had the maturity to recognize we had to go get what we wanted and not wait for things to happen to us.”
“Almost everything important that happened to me later came from attending college,” veteran Larry Montrell would write. “I don’t know what I would have been if it hadn’t been for that.” Returning soldier Dan Condren agreed. “I doubt if I would have moved away from the Texas Panhandle. It set a whole new standard of improved education for a large number of people.”
A smiling Roosevelt used ten pens to sign the historic legislation, handing the first to Representative Edith Nourse Rogers of Massachusetts, a strong proponent of veterans’ rights and benefits. This bill, Roosevelt pledged, “gives emphatic notice to the men and women in our armed forces that the American people do not intend to let them down.”
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