From Memory Into History: A Guest Post by Garrett Graff
June 6th, 2024 marks the 80th anniversary of D-Day — the invasion of Normandy and the devastating battle that changed the course of World War II. Through meticulous research, historian Garrett M. Graff (The Only Plane in the Sky, Watergate) gathered testimonies from both sides of the war to create an oral history of D-Day. Read on to hear all about why Graff chose to write about this historic day and the process of his research.
Hardcover $32.50
When the Sea Came Alive: An Oral History of D-Day
When the Sea Came Alive: An Oral History of D-Day
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Hardcover $32.50
Everything you could ever want to know about D-Day in one book. Superstar historian Garrett M. Graff delivers a meticulously researched, yet deeply human narrative about the military campaign that changed the course of the world.
Everything you could ever want to know about D-Day in one book. Superstar historian Garrett M. Graff delivers a meticulously researched, yet deeply human narrative about the military campaign that changed the course of the world.
Writing at the turn of the millennium, historian Douglas Brinkley singled out D-Day as the most consequential and important of all the 36,525 days of the 20th Century. Indeed, as I quote Andy Rooney—the future famous CBS voice who was part of the D-Day invasion as a war correspondent for Stars and Stripes—saying in my new book, WHEN THE SEA CAME ALIVE: An Oral History of D-Day, “There have only been a handful of days since the beginning of time on which the direction the world was taking has been changed for the better in one 24-hour period by an act of man. June 6th, 1944, was one of them.”
WHEN THE SEA CAME ALIVE is an attempt to capture the full scope of that incredible day, highlighting not just the famous stories but the voices of participants you’ve never heard about who changed the course of human history that day.
Five years ago, I wrote a similar oral history of 9/11, THE ONLY PLANE IN THE SKY, which brought together 480 voices from across that day, coast to coast, morning to night. When it published in 2019, it arrived just as the events of September 11th, 2001, began to slip from memory into history—the first US servicemen and -women born after the attacks were just going through basic training and deploying to Iraq and Afghanistan to fight a war began before they were alive, and at the Fire Department of New York the first recruits born after the attacks were eligible to join the fire service still rebuilding from that devastating day.
Now, in June, we mark the 80th anniversary of D-Day, a monumental moment at the other end of the arc as we see the final passing of the Greatest Generation and the event slip fully from memory into history. Where once there were a million participants in Operation Overlord, there are only a few thousand left alive today. The memories we have of D-Day now are, effectively, all the memories we will ever have, and my goal with this book was to tell the most complete, comprehensive, and inclusive story of D-Day, told only in the voices of the participants themselves.
To me, there’s a unique power that comes with oral history—it puts you right back in the event knowing only what the participants know at the time. I’ve written plenty of narrative history too, but often in narrative history there’s a tendency to present events as more organized, linear, or predetermined than they were at the time. Sure, we recognize now that D-Day was a Herculean heroic triumph, but listen to the voices of the Allied troops crossing the Channel on an armada of ships on the night of June 5th and there’s little sense that what they’re doing is historic or heroic. They have no idea what lies ahead. They’re concerned about whether they’ll live to see the end of the day.
Altogether, I collected about 5,000 oral histories, memoirs, letters, news articles, and memories about D-Day and spent months whittling and carving their stories down; the finished book features nearly 700 voices from across the conflict—not just famous names, like Roosevelt and Eisenhower, but the front-line Allied soldiers and paratroopers, as well as American, British, and French civilians, and even German defenders. It’s a story about D-Day that I hope feels simultaneously familiar but fresh in a thousand little details and anecdotes.
