Stores shut down. Macy’s closed at noon. Still there was a large crowd around it, because the store set up a loudspeaker that carried radio programs. When one announcer read a dispatch that warned Americans against rejoicing, according to a reporter for the New York Times, “the faces of those who stood listening were grim and subdued.”

Lord & Taylor never opened at all. President Walter Hoving said he was sending his 3,000 employees home to pray. “The store is closed,” he announced. “The invasion has begun. Our only thought can be of the men who are fighting in it. We have closed our doors because we know our employees and customers who have loved ones in battle will want to give this day to hopes and prayers for their safety.”¹¹

Baseball games and racing programs were canceled. In his column “Sports of the Times,” Arthur Daley raised the question of whether all sports events should be canceled until the war was won and decided not. “Once the stunning impact of the invasion news has worn off,” he wrote, “there will not be the same irresistible urge to glue ear to radio for last-minute bulletins and human nature again will demand entertainment as a distraction from the war—movies, the theater and all other diversions, including sports.” Daley said no one resented the “youths playing games” while others died, because everyone knew that the baseball players were either 4-F or too old. The entire Yankee starting lineup of 1941, he reminded readers, was in uniform—military, not baseball. But bad as the replacements were, Daley wanted the season to “struggle along as best it can. After all, it still is part of our American way of life and that is one of the things we are fighting for.”¹²

Wall Street went about its business. The New York Stock Exchange called for two minutes of silent prayer at the opening, then went to work. The headline in the June 7 edition of the Wall Street Journal read: “INVASION’S IMPACT; MARKS BEGINNING OF END OF WAR ECONOMY; NEW PROBLEMS FOR INDUSTRY.” That might be characterized as putting first things first.

The market had suffered a case of “invasion jitters” for two months. According to Time magazine, “The New York Stock Exchange has quivered on every D-Day rumor. But on D-Day, taking its courage firmly in hand, the Exchange: 1) had its busiest day of the year, turning over 1,193,080 shares; 2) saw the Dow-Jones industrial average rise to 142.24, a new peak for 1944.” AT&T, Chrysler, Westinghouse, General Motors, Du Pont, and retail-store stocks all hit new highs for 1944.¹³

As always, Wall Street was concerned with the future. As the Journal put it, “Invasion has raised the curtain on reconversion.” As soon as it was clear that the invasion had succeeded, “a limited reconversion to civilian production will be possible. Contract cancellations will increase, freeing manpower, materials and facilities for a small-scale start on production of new consumer goods. Assuming all goes as planned, that time is thought to be two to four months off.”¹⁴

(In December 1944, the GIs paid for this unrealistic optimism. Orders for artillery shells were cut back during the summer; when the great German counteroffensive in Belgium began, American batteries were always short of and some ran out of ammunition.)

The New York Times financial section gave a patriotic cast to its report on Wall Street’s day: “The stock market gave a salute of confidence to the Allied invasion forces in a buying splurge. . . . The motor issues continued to attract the greatest speculative demand, while other industrials with high post-war ratings shared in the advance, which found support from all sections of the nation.”¹⁵

New Yorkers more concerned with the present than the future came in large numbers to the Civilian Defense Volunteer Office on Fifth Avenue, to sign up for bandage rolling, administering vision tests, checking prices for the Office of Price Administration, nurses’ aides, day-care, aides at Red Cross and other servicemen’s centers, the USO, and the dozens of other jobs volunteers were doing all across the city. Record numbers gave blood.¹⁶

The mayor, Fiorello La Guardia, talked to reporters at Gracie Mansion at 0340. He said: “We can only wait for bulletins and pray for success. It is the most exciting moment in our lives.”¹⁷

The editors of the New York Times tried to put some perspective on D-Day in their lead editorial for the June 7 edition. “We have come to the hour for which we were born,” they wrote. “We go forth to meet the supreme test of our arms and of our souls, the test of the maturity of our faith in ourselves and in mankind. . . .

“We pray for the boys we know and for millions of unknown boys who are equally a part of us. . . .

“We pray for our country. . . .

“The cause prays for itself, for it is the cause of the God who created man free and equal.”¹⁸

North of New York City, it was graduation day at West Point. Among the graduates was Cadet John Eisenhower; among the families gathered was Mrs. Dwight D. Eisenhower. On June 3, from Portsmouth, General Eisenhower had written to Mamie, “This note will probably reach you soon after you return to Washington [from West Point]. There’s nothing I would not have given to have been with you and John on June 6, but c’est la guerre!

“Anyway I’m so deep in work that I’ll actually be lucky to remember on the exact date—that it does mark his graduation.”¹⁹

Mamie found out about D-Day from a New York Post reporter, who woke her with a telephone call to her room at the Hotel Thayer at West Point.

“The invasion?” Mamie exclaimed. “What about the invasion?”

On June 9 General Eisenhower sent a telegram to Mamie. Never one to overstate things, he wrote: “DUE TO PREVIOUS PLANS IT WAS IMPOSSIBLE FOR ME TO BE WITH YOU AND JOHN MONDAY BUT I THOUGHT OF YOU AND HOPE YOU AND HE HAD A NICE TIME WITH THE FAMILY. I SEND YOU MUCH LOVE WITH THIS NOTE AS TIME HAS NOT PERMITTED LETTER WRITING RECENTLY AND PROBABLY WILL NOT FOR A WHILE BUT I KNOW YOU UNDERSTAND.”

(Monday was June 5. Evidently Eisenhower remembered that John had graduated on D-Day, which had been scheduled for June 5, and mixed the dates.²⁰)^III

IN NEW YORK and throughout the land, bells tolled. The greatest of these was the Liberty Bell. It had last been tolled on July 8, 1835, for the funeral of Chief Justice John Marshall. At 0700 on D-Day, Philadelphia mayor Bernard Samuel tapped the bell with a wooden mallet, sending its voice throughout the country over a radio network. Then he offered a prayer.

The impulse to pray was overwhelming. Many people got their first word of the invasion as they began their daily routines; after they recovered their breath, they said a silent prayer. Others heard the news broadcast on loudspeakers during their night shifts on assembly lines around the country. Men and women paused over their machines, prayed, and returned to work with renewed dedication.

Across the United States and Canada, from the Atlantic to the Pacific, from the Arctic to the Gulf Coast, the church bells rang. Not in triumph or celebration but as a solemn reminder of national unity and a call to formal prayer. Special services were held in every church and synagogue in the land. Pews were jammed with worshipers.

IN WASHINGTON, GENERAL PERSHING issued a statement. The commander of the World War I AEF said, “Twenty-six years ago American soldiers, in co-operation with their Allies, were locked in mortal combat with the German enemy. . . . Today, the sons of American soldiers of 1917–18 are engaged in a like war of liberation. It is their task to bring freedom to peoples who have been enslaved. I have every confidence that they, together with their gallant brothers-in-arms, will win through to victory.”²¹

At the Capitol building, the politicians were going about their business. On D-Day, the House voted 305 to 35 to proceed with the courts-martial of Maj. Gen. Walter Short and Rear Adm. Husband Kimmel in order to fix responsibility for the Pearl Harbor disaster. “It’s all politics,” one congressman confessed. The Democrats (who opposed but felt they could not vote against the resolution, which they had been delaying for two years) charged that the Republicans were seeking to make a campaign issue in an effort to embarrass President Roosevelt. The Republicans (who sponsored the resolution and were unanimous for it) charged that the Democrats were trying to delay any possible disclosures until after the presidential election.²² Both charges were true.

In midafternoon, Roosevelt held a press conference. Over 180 reporters filled the executive office almost to capacity. According to the New York Times reporter, “They found Mr. Roosevelt looking tired around the eyes but smiling. He sat at his desk in shirtsleeves, wearing a dark bow tie. He smoked a cigarette stuck into a yellow amber holder.”

“How do you feel about the progress of the invasion?” a reporter asked.

“It’s up to schedule,” the president replied, then smiled.

He went on to say he had reports from General Eisenhower that indicated only two destroyers and one LST had been sunk and that losses among the fliers were less than 1 percent.

Other points: General Eisenhower alone decided the actual date and place. Stalin had known of the plan since the Teheran meeting and was pleased with it. A second front a year ago would have been impossible due to lack of men and equipment. The war was not over by any means; this operation is not even over, and this is no time for overconfidence.²³

After the conference, Roosevelt conferred with Admiral Ernest J. King and General Marshall. At their rarefied level, and so far removed from the battle, they couldn’t tell the president much more than what was coming over the radio.

Marshall was stopped as he left the Oval Office by a reporter who asked if he had spent the night at his desk.

No, Marshall replied. Then he smiled a little bit and said simply, “I had done my work before.”²⁴

IN BEDFORD, VIRGINIA, the local newspaper, the Bulletin, printed a prayer written by Mrs. H. M. Lane of nearby Altavista: “Dear Father and Great Maker of all things: Beauty that dies the soonest, lives the longest. Who can fail to see the beauty and sacrifice our brave lads are making? Because they cannot keep themselves for a day, we’ll keep them forever in memory and give them immortality.”

A reporter for the Bulletin wrote, “News of the invasion brought a feeling of uneasiness to hundreds of Bedford county homes for many of them have sons, husbands and brothers in the army in England. Old Company A [of the 116th Regiment] has been in training there for nearly two years and probably was among the first landing forces, and hundreds of other Bedford county men will ultimately be thrown into the fight, and among them some casualties can be expected.” He noted that every church in town was filled to capacity for special services.

A month later, on July 6, the Bulletin reported that “Old Company A” had received “high praise” for its role in D-Day, and went on, “So far there have been no reports of fatalities, but as yet the government has given out no complete list of casualties. There has been considerable uneasiness about the fate of the men, as it seemed too much to hope that all of them could have come safely through the landing ordeal and subsequent fighting.”

In the July 20 issue, the Bulletin reported that the 116th had been awarded a presidential citation, and it recorded the awful news that on July 19 fourteen families in Bedford were informed that their sons had been killed on June 6. There would be more to come. The editor wrote, “They died as all free men should die—gallantly and unafraid. They knew what was before them. But there was no shirking or hesitation, no holding back, no attempt to escape the issue.”²⁵

(At the Normandy American Cemetery and memorial, overlooking Omaha Beach, there are eleven sons of Bedford buried along with 9,386 other American war dead from the Normandy campaign. The cemetery is beautifully and perfectly maintained by the American Battle Monuments Commission. No American can visit the site without feeling a surge of pride, nor can any American suppress a flow of tears. In the circular chapel, there are inscribed these words: “Think not only upon their passing. Remember the glory of their spirit.”)

THE HISTORIC ST. LOUIS CATHEDRAL in New Orleans, from the first early Mass until Benediction Tuesday night, was full. A mother of a paratrooper, “my only child,” prayed by the side of a policeman with “two boys over there.” A pretty young bride knelt before a statue of Our Lady of Prompt Succor while in a nearby pew a sailor, home on leave, prayed.

Canal Street store owners had planned for D-Day for three months; when it came, they turned their employees to selling war bonds rather than goods. The idea was picked up in a number of other cities. On Canal Street, patriotic music and appeals to buy bonds filled the air. Bonds went at a record pace. One woman counted out $18.75 in dimes for a bond. She explained, “I’ve been saving this money to buy a bond on the day of invasion. I hope it will be a day I can remember happily. My husband is with the airborne troops and he’s been in England for a long time waiting for this.”²⁶

Record crowds at the Red Cross blood donor center on Carondelet, record numbers of volunteers at the various civilian agencies, but in a city that will seize on any excuse for a parade, there was no parade. The Times Picayune explained, “New Orleans was hoarding its parades for V-Day.”

Andrew Higgins reminded his employees that there was a long way to go, and not just in Europe: “There should not be letup on our part until our boats have carried our troops onto the shores of Japan.”²⁷

IN OTTAWA, PRIME MINISTER MACKENZIE KING reported to the House of Commons that the landings were making good progress. He warned that there was still much to do. Opposition leader Gordon Graydon said there were no divisions of opinion on this day. From the ranks of the French-speaking members, Maurice Lalonde rose to acclaim, in French, “the historic fact that from the belfry of time has rung out the hour of the deliverance of France.”

On D-Day, Canada, like the United States, was united as never before. French-Canadians and English-speaking Canadians had equal stakes in the invasion and were single-minded about the goal. M. Lalonde asked special permission of the House: could “The Marseillaise” be sung? For the first time in Canadian parliamentary history, all the members joined in singing “The Marseillaise,” followed by “God Save the King.”²⁸

IN COLUMBUS, OHIO, Mayor James Rhodes ordered the air-raid sirens and factory whistles sounded as a call to prayer at 7:30 P.M. The entire city came to a complete stop for five minutes—cars, buses, trucks, and pedestrians halted and people prayed.²⁹ In Columbus, as elsewhere, the Red Cross got a record blood donation, factory production was up, absenteeism down, churches were full. The Red Cross put out a call: “Every woman in Franklin County is asked to go immediately to the surgical dressing unit in her community,” and was overwhelmed with volunteers. The Truck-Tractor & Equipment Company took out a full-page advertisement in the Columbus Star with the banner headline reading “Next Stop: Berlin,” and with a brief text: “Today is a fitting day to ask ourselves, am I doing enough? If I met a man who was there, could I look him squarely in the face and say, I did my share?”³⁰

IN MILWAUKEE, THE Red Cross blood donor center was overwhelmed by people wanting to give blood. In Reno, Nevada, the gambling dens closed and only sixteen couples filed for divorce, less than 10 percent of the usual weekday number. Elsewhere, an uglier side of American life was at work; in Cincinnati, 450 workers at the Wright Aeronautical Corporation went on strike, which tied up the plant. Their grievance was that seven Negro workers had been transferred into a shop theretofore manned entirely by white personnel. William Green, president of the American Federation of Labor, called on American workers to consider themselves part of the invasion force and to stay at their jobs “under any and all circumstances.”³¹

In Birmingham, Alabama, the News reported that 1,500 miners at Republic Steel had gone out on a wildcat strike. The editors at the News were outraged. So were union officials. “Damn the strikers,” the president of the state American Federation of Labor said. “To think that this great day should find AFL people away from their jobs is inconceivable.”

In Marietta, Georgia, police sirens and church bells began sounding at 3:00 A.M. “Many citizens were hysterical,” the Atlanta Constitution reported, “as wave after wave of sirens blasted their ears. Police cars, their sirens wide open, sped through the residential districts.”

Columnist Ralph Jones quoted his wife, whose remarks, he felt, were typical. Their son was in England, possibly already in Normandy. “Even if it meant I had to die,” Mrs. Jones said, “I should like to be a part of that invasion. It is the biggest and greatest and most spectacular thing in all history.”

After a pause, she went on, “I just can’t worry all the time about young Ralph. If I did I’d go crazy. He’s in no greater danger than hundreds of thousands of sons of other mothers.”³²

IN MISSOULA, MONTANA, “There was discussion everywhere, but the tremendous import of the news threw a hush over the spirit of the city, which was definitely noticeable.”³³

At the veterans hospital in Helena, one soldier on crutches exclaimed, “This is it, brother. We’ve got ’em on the run now.” Another called out from his bed, “Boy, do I wish I could be there!”

There was a silence in the ward. “Yeah,” the boy on crutches finally said, without enthusiasm. Then he thoughtfully added: “I’ll bet that beach is like hell on the Fourth of July.”³⁴

At Lawson General Hospital, near Atlanta, wounded German POWs took the news with derisive laughter and a “just you wait” attitude. One of them told a reporter, “The high command will simply let the Allies penetrate a few miles and then pinch them off with the thousands of SS elite guards who are stationed near Paris.”³⁵

In Dallas, Texas, patriotism ran high. At 0235 a hospital intern and a city ambulance driver helped Mrs. Lester Renfrow give birth to a daughter. She heard sirens going and asked what was the cause. Told that the invasion had begun, she named her little girl Invasia Mae Renfrow.³⁶ In Norfolk, Virginia, Mrs. Randolph Edwards named her June 6 daughter Dee Day Edwards.³⁷

ON JUNE 4, Mollie Panter-Downes reported in her “Letter from London” for the New Yorker, “Everyone is existing merely from one ordinary day to the next, waiting for the great, extraordinary one.”

Panter-Downes noted an unexplainable rise in the rental of punts on the Thames and a record crowd at a cricket match at Lord’s. Then she turned to a phenomenon of the war in Britain that was always an irritant and sometimes costly, the prohibition on any weather news either in the newspapers or over radio. In May, frosts wiped out the famous Vale of Evesham berry and plum crops. “The fruit growers regret that the official secrecy on weather conditions was not relaxed for once to give them a warning which might have helped save some of the fruit.”

The loss was a serious one for the British diet, made worse by a drought that had damaged the hay crop, meaning less milk. The weather was the natural topic of conversation in a rural pub Panter-Downes dropped in on, the one she expected to hear, but instead “the one topic, as much there as in London clubs and bars, is the invasion.”³⁸

On June 6, Panter-Downes sensed something that other commentators missed: “For the English,” she wrote, “D-Day might well have stood for Dunkirk Day.

“The tremendous news that British soldiers were back on French soil suddenly revealed exactly how much it had rankled when they were seen off it four years ago.”

There was no celebrating, however; far from it. “The principal impression one got on the streets was that nobody was talking. . . . Everybody seemed to be existing wholly in a preoccupied silence of his own. . . . Everywhere, individual silences.”

Business was extremely bad. Taxi drivers said it was their worst day in months. Theaters and movie houses were half empty, all but unheard-of in 1944. The pubs didn’t fill, either. Londoners stayed home. “Everybody seemed to feel that this was one night you wanted your own thoughts in your own chair.”

In the countryside, “Everything is different now . . . every truck on the road, every piece of gear on the railways, every jeep and half-track which is heading toward the front has become a thing of passionate concern.

“Farmers who wanted gray skies for their hay’s sake now want blue ones for the sake of their sons, fighting in the skies and on the earth across the Channel.” Women who gathered at train crossings where troops headed for the battle went by “didn’t know whether to wave or cheer or cry. Sometimes they do all three.”³⁹

KING GEORGE VI made a D-Day broadcast to the nation. “Four years ago,” he began, “our Nation and Empire stood alone against an overwhelming enemy, with our backs to the wall. . . . Now once more a supreme test has to be faced. This time the challenge is not to fight to survive but to fight to win the final victory for the good cause.”

The king knew that nearly all his subjects were listening and realized that the mothers and wives among them deserved special concern. “The Queen joins with me in sending you this message,” he said. “She well understands the anxieties and care of our womenfolk at this time and she knows that many of them will find, as she does herself, fresh strength and comfort in such waiting upon God.”

The king called on his subjects to pray: “At this historic moment surely not one of us is too busy, too young, or too old to play a part in a nation-wide, perchance a world-wide, vigil of prayer as the great crusade sets forth.”⁴⁰

THE HOUSE OF Commons went about its business. The first question came from Mr. Hogg, Oxford. He asked the secretary of state for war “whether he could give an assurance that all ranks of the Army had been informed that unless A.F.B. 2626 was completed they would not have a vote at the next General Election whether or not they were on the old register; and on what scale A.F.B. 2626 had been issued to units.”

The secretary of state for war, Mr. John Grigg, replied at ten-minutes length that it was being done.

Another member wanted to know if the prime minister would consider the complete restoration of the abbey of Monte Cassino as a memorial to the heroes who had captured it, to be done at the expense of Germany as a part of reparations. Labor leader Clement Attlee, member of the coalition War Cabinet, replied that is was “premature to consider such proposals.”

The secretary of state for the colonies, Col. Oliver Stanley, rose to remind the House that in many of the colonies “there are large numbers of people who are condemned to live at an abysmal level of existence. The standard of living of the peoples in the Colonial areas should be built up.” Mr. Attlee, in replying to another question, switched the area for postwar concern from the colonies to the home front. He urged “the composition and terms of reference of the proposed Royal Commission on the subject of equal pay between men and women.”

John Grigg made an unhappy announcement about men who had been overseas for five years or more: “I much regret that owing to the shortage of men it may be necessary, at any rate for the time being, to send such men overseas again after a period of three months in this country instead of six months as hitherto.”

A member pressed the secretary of the treasury to see to it that members of the Association of Office Cleaners were referred to as such instead of as charwomen or charladies, which was resented by the 2,400 members of the association. The secretary replied that the word “cleaners” would henceforth be used.

As the mundane gave way to the silly in Commons, the tension built. Rumors buzzed around about when the great man would appear on this, his greatest day.

Churchill sent word to expect him at noon.

When Churchill entered Commons, every seat was taken, every member was leaning forward expectantly. They were not so much expecting (or even wanting) to be swept away by Churchillian eloquence as they were eager for whatever news the prime minister could tell them.

The master toyed with his audience. Churchill began with Rome. He was obviously enjoying his old role of war reporter (“still this country’s best reporter,” Raymond Daniell wrote in the New York Times). Churchill went into fifteen minutes of detail about how Rome was taken, then an analysis of the meaning of the event. It was all welcome news, the kind that prime ministers love to be in a position to tell the members, but the members squirmed on their benches. They wanted to hear about how it was going on the other side of the Channel.

Finally Churchill got to it. “I have also to announce to the House that during the night and early hours of the morning the first of a series of landings in force upon the European continent has taken place. So far, the commanders . . . report that everything is proceeding according to plan. And what a plan!

“Landings on the beaches are proceeding at various points at the present time,” he said. “The fire of shore batteries has been largely quelled. Obstacles which were encountered in the sea have not proved as difficult as was apprehended.”

He left to great cheers. He returned four hours later to add more detail. “There is very much less loss than we expected. The many dangers and difficulties which at this time yesterday appeared extremely formidable are behind us.

“A very great risk had to be taken in respect to the weather, but General Eisenhower’s courage is equal to all necessary decisions that have to be taken in these extremely difficult and uncontrollable matters.”

He referred to Maj. John Howard’s operation at Pegasus Bridge and claimed that British troops had “fought their way into the town of Caen, nine miles inland.”

Churchill was fond of saying that the first casualty of war is truth. His rosy report fell, at times, into that category. But he was telling the truth when he described the airborne landings as having taken place “on a scale far larger than anything that has been seen so far in the world.”⁴¹

FOR EDWARD R. MURROW in London, it was a day of frustration. CBS put him in charge of coordinating the work of its many correspondents and reading the various announcements coming from SHAEF and others. He would much rather have been in France. Adding to his woes, radio correspondents had precious little to pass on to the States. Mobile transmitters were not set up on the beach or even on ships. Reporters who went into the beach in landing craft, including Bill Downs, Larry LeSueur, and Charles Collingwood, could not broadcast.

Finally, in the small hours of June 7 (2300, June 6 in New York), Murrow got what he wanted. It was a recording that had been made at daybreak just off the French coast, sent back to London by small boat. “I think you’ll like this,” Murrow told New York as he put it on. It was George Hicks of ABC, reporting from the Ancon. He described the array of ships, while in the background could be heard the exchanges between the German batteries and the Allied warships. That broadcast, cutting through the static and punctuated by the sounds of battle, became the most widely listened-to account of the D-Day landings.⁴²

IN PARIS, THE military governor, General Stulpnagel, issued a proclamation that was broadcast by French Radio: “German troops have been given orders to shoot any person who is seen to be cooperating with the Allied invasion forces, or who gives shelter to Allied soldiers, sailors, or airmen. Such Frenchmen will be treated as bandits.”

Prime Minister Pierre Laval of the Vichy government broadcast a national appeal to his countrymen to ignore Eisenhower’s call over BBC for resistance: “With sadness I read today of the orders given to Frenchmen by an American general. . . . The French government stands by the armistice of 1940 and appeals to Frenchmen to honor their country’s signature. If you took part in the present fighting, France would be plunged into civil war.”

Marshal Pétain called on Frenchmen to stand with the Germans: “The Anglo-Saxons have set foot on our soil. France is becoming a battlefield. Frenchmen, do not attempt to commit any action which might bring terrible reprisals. Obey the orders of the government.”⁴³

Parisians listened and kept their own counsel. The country as a whole was quiet. Resisters went into action, of course, but most French people were not in the Resistance. In Normandy, and everywhere between Normandy and the German border, people were apprehensive about their village or farm or city becoming a battlefield. They could hardly be sure who was going to win; the Germans were there, among them, occupying their country, while the Allies were only a hope. They did the sensible thing, kept quiet and kept their thoughts to themselves.

In the smaller cities in the south of France, people were more open with their feelings. Anthony Brooks of SOE walked into Toulouse at dawn. He knew from the BBC broadcasts the hour had come and he was putting his operation into action. But only he and other Resisters knew that this was D-Day.

“So I walked into Toulouse through the market garden area and there were all these little one-story houses and these enormous great stretches with lettuces and onions and they were thinning them out, like a painting.

“Suddenly as I was walking past a house, just after sunrise, shutters were flung open and a little girl, I suppose eight years old, stark naked, shouted in the local jargon, ‘They’ve landed!’ and the liberation of Europe had begun.”

Brooks went to a meeting in Toulouse, where “we lifted our glass for a very early morning drink, white wine, because we never really believed that we would see it. I mean liberation. I couldn’t believe when I was parachuted into France in 1942 that I’d ever see D-Day.”⁴⁴

One famous American expatriate who was a French resident wrote down her feelings and her perception of the effect on the Germans. In 1940, Gertrude Stein had fled Paris when the Germans entered. “They all said, ‘Leave,’ ” Stein wrote in 1945, “and I said to Alice Toklas, ‘Well, I don’t know—it would be awfully uncomfortable and I am fussy about my food.’ ”

But they went. Stein and Alice Toklas lived in the village of Belley at the corner made by Italy and Switzerland. Stein’s attitude was, “Alice Toklas could listen to the wireless, but as for me I was going to cut box hedges and forget the war.”

Of course she could not. On June 5, 1944, she wrote, “Tonight Rome is taken it is a pleasure and such a pleasure . . . and it has taken everybody’s mind a little off their feelings about the [Allied] bombardments in France about the civilians killed. . . . But tonight Rome is taken and everybody has forgotten the bombardments, and for the French to forgive and forget and forget and forgive is very easy just as easy as that. Rome is taken and it is not the end but the beginning of the end.”

Stein went walking on the morning of June 6 to celebrate. She passed “some German soldiers [and] they said most pitifully how do you do, I naturally said nothing, later on I was sitting with the wife of the mayor in front of her house a German soldier passed along the road and he politely bowed to us and said how do you do, they have never done this before.

“Well to-day is the landing and we heard Eisenhower tell us he was here they were here and just yesterday a man sold us ten packages of Camel cigarettes, glory be, and we are singing glory hallelujah, and feeling very nicely, and everybody has been telephoning to us congratulatory messages upon my birthday which it isn’t but we know what they mean. And I said in return I hoped their hair was curling nicely, and we all hope it is, and to-day is the day.”^{45 IV}

IN ROME, A celebration was already under way when the news came. The celebration just got bigger. Daniel Lang in his “Letter from Rome” reported to the New Yorker that the Italians were ecstatic. “They love a winner just a little more than the rest of the world does,” and they were “out by the thousands, jamming the square on which Mussolini used to stage his pep rallies. They cheered and applauded as though they were watching the best opera of their lives. They shouted whatever scraps of English they knew. One wild old man yelled ‘Weekend! Weekend!’ over and over again. Many had huge bouquets of flowers, from which they kept plucking small bunches to toss at soldiers in jeeps and lorries, or at tank drivers. Dozens of people were waving British, French and American flags. Where they had been hidden, only the Italians knew.”⁴⁶

IN AMSTERDAM, ANNE FRANK heard the news over the wireless in her attic hideaway. “ ‘This is D-Day,’ came the announcement over the English news,” she wrote in her diary. Then, in English, she wrote, “This is the day.” She went on, “The invasion has begun! The English gave the news. . . . We discussed it over breakfast at nine o’clock: Is this just a trial landing like Dieppe two years ago?” But through the day, confirmations that this was really it kept coming on the wireless.

“Great commotion in the ‘Secret Annexe’!” Frank wrote. “It still seems too wonderful too much like a fairy tale. Could we be granted victory this year, 1944? We don’t know yet, but hope is revived within us; it gives us fresh courage and makes us strong again. . . . Now more than ever we must clench our teeth and not cry out. France, Russia, Italy, and Germany, too, can all cry out and give vent to their misery, but we haven’t the right to do that yet!

“The best part of the invasion is that I have the feeling that friends are approaching. We have been oppressed by those terrible Germans for so long, they have had their knives so at our throats, that the thought of friends and delivery fills us with confidence!

“Now it doesn’t concern the Jews any more; no, it concerns Holland and all occupied Europe. Perhaps, Margot says, I may yet be able to go back to school in September or October.”⁴⁷

IN MOSCOW, THE CROWDS were joyous. People literally danced in the streets, Time reported, and its correspondent claimed that “This was the happiest capital.” In the lobby of the Metropole Hotel, an ecstatic Muscovite threw her arms around the correspondent and exclaimed, “We love you, Americans. We love you, we love you. You are our real friends.”⁴⁸

Restaurants were packed in Moscow on the evening of June 6, packed with people celebrating—Russians dancing with British and American diplomats and reporters. Alexander Werth was at one such gathering when “a party of Jap diplomats and journalists came in and behaved and danced provocatively and ostentatiously and were nearly beaten-up by some Americans.”

Pravda gave the invasion news four columns with a large photograph of Eisenhower, but no comment was made on the significance—the editors had to wait for Stalin to give his line. Not for a week did the dictator speak about the realization of that second front for which he had for so long been pleading. When he did, he was generous and forthright: “This is unquestionably a brilliant success for our Allies. One must admit that the history of wars does not know of an undertaking comparable to it for breadth of conception, grandeur of scale, and mastery of execution.” He pointed out that “Invincible Napoleon” had not managed to cross the Channel, nor “Hitler the Hysteric.”

“Only the British and Americans troops succeeded in forcing the Channel. History will record this action as an achievement of the highest order.” After that statement, Pravda was enthusiastic for the achievement.⁴⁹

IN BERLIN, PEOPLE went quietly about their duties. Few talked of the invasion, although the radio was full of announcements. The Nazi propaganda line was “Thank God, the intense strain of the nerve war is over.” But the Times correspondent in Stockholm reported that “the scale of General Eisenhower’s first blow made a deep impression on the general public in Berlin, especially as the German spokesmen emphasize its magnitude and disconcertingly add that it is not yet certain whether this is the main invasion force.”

Mainly, though, the Nazi broadcasters went to work to convince people that it was necessary for them to fight against the British and Americans in France in order to save Germany from the horror of a Red Army occupation. In a totalitarian state it was impossible to tell how many, if any other than Hitler and his henchmen, believed such logic.⁵⁰

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I. Britain and America utilized their womanpower to the fullest in World War II. In Japan, women were urged by the government to stick to their traditional role and have more babies. In Germany, Hitler’s romantic notions led him to give cash awards to German women who had more babies, and in Germany womanpower was not utilized until the very last months of the war.

II. Time magazine reported on June 12 that “so far as the U.S. Army can determine, the first use of D for Day, H for Hour was in Field Order No. 8, of the First Army, A.E.F., issued on Sept. 20, 1918, which read, ‘The First Army will attack at H-Hour on D-Day with the object of forcing the evacuation of the St. Mihiel salient.’ ”

III. A week later, 2nd Lt. John Eisenhower joined Supreme Commander Dwight Eisenhower in London (Marshall arranged it). He stayed three weeks before going to Infantry School at Fort Benning. John’s West Point obsessions came to play immediately on his arrival in London; walking with his father at SHAEF HQ, he asked in great earnestness, “If we should meet an officer who ranks above me but below you, how do we handle this? Should I salute first and when they return my salute, do you return theirs?” The supreme commander snorted, then said: “John, there isn’t an officer in this theater who doesn’t rank above you and below me” (John Eisenhower, Strictly Personal [Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1974], p. 63).

IV. Stein published her memoir of the war in the fall of 1945. She was liberated in the fall of 1944 by two soldiers from the 45th Infantry Division. “Were we excited,” she wrote. “How we talked that night, they just brought all America to us every bit of it, they came from Colorado, lovely Colorado, I do not know Colorado but that is the way I felt about it lovely Colorado. . . . They have asked me to go with them to Voiron to broadcast with them to America and I am going and the war is over and this certainly this is the last war to remember.”