#dday75

FDR’s four sons and Churchill’s son, Randolph, all served overseas in the military during World War II. On June 16, 1944, Randolph Churchill narrowly survived when a transport plane carrying him and others to Yugoslavia crashed on landing.

Franklin Roosevelt to Winston Churchill, July 27, 1944

Winston Churchill to Franklin Roosevelt, July 28, 1944

Roosevelt learned of the incident through a newspaper account while traveling in Hawaii and sent the Prime Minister a note of relief. In his response, Churchill observed that 10 of the 19 men aboard the aircraft had perished.

Franklin Roosevelt’s distant cousin, Theodore Roosevelt, Jr.—son of President Theodore Roosevelt—served as a brigadier general during the war. On June 6, 1944, he came ashore at Utah Beach with the first wave of men from the U.S. 4th Infantry Division. At age 56, he was the oldest man to land in Normandy that day. Roosevelt earned the Medal of Honor for his valor on June 6. The medal citation reads, in part, “His valor, courage, and presence in the very front of the attack and his complete unconcern at being under heavy fire inspired the troops to heights of enthusiasm and self-sacrifice.” Five weeks later, Roosevelt died of a heart attack while serving in France. He is buried at the American cemetery in Normandy.

Today, we visited the grounds where my grandfather left a part of himself behind—and left carrying a part of it with him forever.

A part of him died in the Ardennes during that Belgian winter, but he buried it so deeply that even he didn’t quite know it and neither did we—not until years and years later, when small vessels in his brain became blocked and his mind began to play tricks on him, when his nightmares no longer stopped when he opened his eyes.

I walked through the forest, verdant and lush in the damp Belgian March, and thought of Papa. I am much older now walking among these birch trees than he was then; my grandfather was hardly older than the students I am chaperoning. He was twenty and cold and in a foxhole thousands and thousands of miles from home. A “big boy doing a man’s work,” as Frost writes.

I remember the way he used to bring me into his bed whenever I had nightmares and calm my fussing by telling me to put my ear on his chest and to listen: “Listen to my heart.” Thinking of him there, shivering in his Army-issued blanket, I wonder what I might have said to him during those sleepless nights withstanding the freezing cold and the Nazi offensive. Would he even believe me in that moment if I told him what a loving family he would have? That he would be remembered with intense love three-quarters of a century later? That the battlefield where he watched his friends kill and be killed would become a monument to peace?

He went home after the Battle of the Bulge when a mortar jumped out of its spiked position and drove forcefully through his knee. The picture below shows him in France before the mess in the Ardennes—posing like the twenty-year-old he was before going into that forest. I took the other this afternoon, when the sun emerged briefly as I walked through a small glade near where my grandfather may have dug in seventy-five years ago.

President Roosevelt greets Free French General Charles de Gaulle at the White House, July 6, 1944. FDR’s daughter, Anna, stands behind him.

See this photo and more in “D-Day: FDR and Churchill's ‘Mighty Endeavor’” open now!

This Day in History: D-Day, a massive June storm, and the battle for Cherbourg

On this day in 1944, the city of Cherbourg, France, falls to Allied forces. It had been mere weeks since the D-Day landings—but Allied leaders were bound and determined to seize Cherbourg. They really needed that port!

They especially needed it after the events of June 19.

A huge storm struck Normandy that day. The damage was massive, and it threatened to cripple the Allied effort. General Omar Bradley would later describe himself as “appalled” by the destruction. Allied ships had been mangled and thrown onto the beaches. Supplies and ammunition had been lost. The artificial harbors that had been created after the D-Day landings were now damaged or ripped up.

“In four days,” Bradley concluded, “this Channel storm had threatened [Operation] OVERLORD with greater danger than had all the enemy’s guns in 14 days ashore.”

The situation was bad, but it could have been worse. Did you know that the D-Day landings were nearly scrubbed on June 6 due to concerns about the weather? The tides would not have been favorable again until June 19—the very day that the massive storm hit.

What if Allied forces had been attempting their landings in such weather?