History Book: The 80th anniversary of D-Day

NICK EICHER, HOST: Today is Monday June 3rd. Good morning! This is The World and Everything in It from listener-supported WORLD Radio. I’m Nick Eicher.

MARY REICHARD, HOST: And I’m Mary Reichard. Up next, the WORLD History Book. Eighty years ago this week, D-Day as it unfolded. Here’s WORLD Associate Correspondent Caleb Welde.

CALEB WELDE: Monday, June 5th, 1944. 6:07PM, Eastern Standard Time. A family sits down for dinner in Pennsylvania, while a bank teller in Oregon still has at least an hour on the clock.

The same moment is just after midnight across the Atlantic. German sentries in the French village of Carentan spot planes coming in low over the English Channel.

Paratroopers in nine hundred C-47s double check their gear above the Channel, trusting reinforcements will come at dawn.

AUDIO: [NBC BREAKING NEWS BULLETIN]

At 12:37 AM Eastern Standard Time, NBC interrupts a Hollywood dance band to report a German radio station is saying the Allies are invading. The newscasters are more convinced by 3  AM.

NBC: This is Robert St. John in the NBC News Room in New York. Ladies and gentlemen, we may be approaching a fateful hour. All night long bulletins have been pouring in from Berlin, claiming that D Day is here, claiming that the invasion of Western Europe has begun.

3 AM on the East Coast is 9 AM in France and in Austria where Hitler is just waking up. His subordinates were afraid to disturb him. He is unaware that seventy thousand troops have already waded ashore in France.

NBC: Let me read you several of the latest bulletins...

More than two thousand ships dot the English channel– not counting the three thousand landing craft unloading wave after wave of men onto beaches codenamed Omaha, Utah, Juno, Gold, and Sword.

NBC: …from the sea and from the air are stretching over the entire area between Cherbourg and Le Havre. A distance of about 60 miles.

Omaha Beach is proving the most deadly. American Rangers radio demolition teams saying the tide is coming in quickly and beach barriers are still hindering progress.

CBS Go ahead, London. This is supreme headquarters, Allied Expeditionary Force. Under the command of General Eisenhower, Allied naval forces, supported by strong Air Forces, began landing allied armies this morning on the northern coast of France.

Moments later, an American General orders another naval artillery barrage of Omaha Beach knowing it may kill Americans already on shore. It’s now 3:30 in the morning on the East Coast.

NBC: Men and women of the United States, this is a momentous hour in world history. This is the invasion of Hitler's Europe.

A minute later,

NBC: 10 seconds. Standby..

Another official broadcast, this time from Eisenhower himself.

NBC: Soldiers, sailors and airmen of the Allied Expeditionary Force, you are about to embark on the Great Crusade toward which we have striven these many months. The eyes of the world are upon you.

Eisenhower recorded the broadcast several days earlier. Commanders were to read it to their soldiers en-route to the fight. Now the world listens…

NBC: The hopes and prayers of liberty loving people everywhere march with you. And let us all beseech the blessing of Almighty God upon this great and noble undertaking.

7:30 AM on the East Coast. NBC invites church leaders to pray for the men landing on French beaches, pastors like Norman Vincent Peale of Marble Collegiate Church in New York City.

NBC: Almighty God, God of our Fathers, we, thy people, bow humbly before thee on this fateful day of human history. As thou has guided us and blessed us in the past, so give us now we beseech thee thy blessing. In thy might and power, let us prevail.

The same hour, German soldiers surrender their positions on Omaha Beach and Americans from Utah Beach link up with the paratroopers who jumped at midnight. NBC catches up around 8:15.

NBC: American, Canadian and British troops have seized beachheads. It’s now known that American troops have knocked out enemy pillboxes and other fortifications along the Atlantic wall.

News is spreading across the world.

In Switzerland…

NBC: No one said good morning today, everywhere it was only, did you hear, they have landed, they have landed. 

A reporter on the streets of London says one girl summed up the attitude well.

NBC: She said simply, Thank God. 

It’s just after 10 AM In the United States, NBC reports,

NBC: In many a quiet hamlet the church bells pealed to announce the news, and also to summon America to her knees in prayer. There was an impulse I think we all had in common, and even men and women who might have forgotten how to pray, knelt once more with their eyes toward God.

President Roosevelt briefs the press just after 4 PM in Washington. The sun has just dipped below the horizon in Normandy.

More than two thousand Americans are dead. A hundred-fifty-thousand Allied troops are on the ground.

At 10PM, President Roosevelt addresses the nation from the White House.

FDR: In this poignant hour, I ask you to join with me in prayer. Almighty God, our sons, pride of our nation, this day have set upon a mighty endeavor, a struggle to preserve our republic, our religion, and our civilization, and to set free a suffering humanity…

He prays for more than five minutes. When he finishes he adds no further comment.

FDR: Thy will be done, Almighty God. Amen.

The war continues for another four-hundred-fifty-two days before the prayers for an end to the war are answered.

On this 80th anniversary of D-Day we end with one last prayer, broadcast at 11pm from NBC studios. A prayer for lasting peace.

NBC: We thy needy children, this day cry out to thee, in the midst of anguish, suffering, and conflict. Thou art our refuge and our hope. Forgive, oh God, the sins of us all. Purge us, as men and nation, of self interest. Then thou will be able to grant unto us patience and wisdom and hope. Then through the gospel of thy redeeming love, we may transform our lives, and the lives of men and of nations, until justice and righteousness, and peace shall be established in all the earth. In the name of Christ we pray, Amen.

That’s this week’s WORLD History book. I’m Caleb Welde.

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