Ted’s friend and superior, General Raymond Barton, had been loath to let him join the battle—particularly since Ted’s son Quentin (named after Ted’s deceased brother) was also involved. (“I never expected to see him alive again,” Barton later said of Ted.) But Ted insisted. “Ingrained within him was a sense that he needed to be part of this great historic enterprise,” historian Tim Brady wrote in His Father’s Son. “He was a Roosevelt, after all, his famous father’s eldest son.”
It wasn’t easy growing up the son of the legendary Rough Rider and U.S. President whose face ended up on Mount Rushmore. “I will always be known as the son of Theodore Roosevelt and never as … only myself,” he once said. Still, Ted became a World War I hero, winning battle after battle with the 26th Infantry. After that war, he followed his father into politics but was quickly overshadowed by his cousin Franklin. Despite his age, when World War II broke out, Ted reenlisted.
Now he was about to face the greatest challenge of his military career. On the morning of D-Day, Ted’s division landed on the heavily defended Utah Beach. As German artillery fire and land mines exploded all around him, Ted realized that he and his team were far south of where they should have been. Since other divisions were following their lead, this was “a potentially disastrous circumstance,” Brady wrote. “An error … could skew the architecture of the whole attack.”
Nevertheless, Ted and other officers decided to move forward. “Gentlemen,” he announced to his troops, “we’ll start the war from right here.”
The oldest Allied soldier and only general to come ashore in the first wave of the invasion, Ted spent the day hobbling about the beach with his .45-caliber pistol and cane, directing traffic “as if he was looking over some real estate,” one sergeant said. Though he jokingly called himself “grandpa” in a letter to his wife, Ted led and encouraged his troops in the most dangerous circumstances imaginable. “It’s a great day for hunting,” he shouted to passing soldiers. “Glad you made it.”
Ted made it, too—unlike the nearly 425,000 men from both sides who were killed, wounded, or went missing during the invasion. But he paid a price. On July 12, he was organizing battalions from his headquarters in a Normandy chateau when Quentin paid a visit (Ted had only recently learned that he’d survived). “Ted confided to his son that he had suffered a series of chest pains that came and went,” Brady wrote, “a fact that he had hidden from others.”
Nearly an hour after Quentin left, Ted suffered a fatal heart attack.
At 11:30 that night, Ted died in the chateau with General Barton at his side. “I sat helpless and saw the most gallant soldier and finest gentlemen I have ever known expire,” Barton later wrote to Ted’s wife, Eleanor. “The show goes on. He would have it so and we shall make it so.”
On Bastille Day, Ted was buried in Normandy’s Sainte-Mère-Église cemetery. Barton, Quentin, and General George Patton attended, along with hundreds of GIs and members of the French resistance. It was “a warrior’s funeral in every sense of the word,” Quentin wrote Eleanor. “Above all, remember that he was happy, especially that last evening—with family and friends around him … he was happy and had everything.” (Ted’s brother Quentin, who had perished in World War I, was later moved from his original burial site in Chamery, France, and buried beside him.)
Nearly a month later, France was liberated. The Germans surrendered the following spring, with the Normandy invasion proving the beginning of the end of the war in Europe—thanks in part to an unlikely hero who called himself “grandpa.”
ROBERT CAPA © INTERNATIONAL CENTER OF PHOTOGRAPHY/MAGNUM
During the Battle for North Africa, Roosevelt, left, with generals Terry Allen and George Patton, made plans for the Tunisian Campaign. There their forces battle the Germans at El Guettar for two weeks in early 1943.
ROBERT CAPA © INTERNATIONAL CENTER OF PHOTOGRAPHY/MAGNUM
Near Mount Pantano, Italy, Roosevelt, left, chatted with one of his men in December 1943.
ROGER VIOLLET/GETTY
Utah Beach served as one of the five landing sites for D-Day. General Dwight D. Eisenhower called the invasion known as Operation Overlord “the Great Crusade” that would “bring about the destruction of the German war machine, the elimination of Nazi tyranny over the oppressed peoples of Europe, and security for ourselves in a free world.” Reinforcements arrived soon after the invasion, above, and the Allied forces started the nearly yearlong march toward Berlin and victory.
RALPH MORSE/LIFE/THE PICTURE COLLECTION
In July 1944, Simone Renaud, wife of the mayor of Sainte-Mère-Église, a town near Utah Beach, placed flowers on the fresh grave of Theodore Roosevelt Jr.
Just One More
BETTMAN/GETTY
Chips served with the K-9 Corps and was the most decorated dog of World War II. He was awarded a Silver Star for jumping into an enemy pillbox and subduing Italian soldiers. He also earned a Purple Heart for his wounds. On his way home to the Wren family in Pleasantville, New York, in December 1945, he received an appreciative pat from a railway employee. However, after debate over the appropriateness of awarding animals military honors, the Army reclassified them as “equipment” and Chips lost his medals.
Heroes of World War II
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