Radio Memories: Listening To D-Day

Every Sunday we take a small break from current events of the day to listen to echoes of days gone by, hoping to discover something about our own times through the crackling static and fading voices of radio’s earliest days… the days when radio, not television, shaped our understanding of the world, through radio drama, the theater of the mind.

Yesterday of course marked the 65th anniversary of the D-Day landings in France, and I thought that this would make an ideal subject for this week’s Radio Memories post. The entire broadcast day from that fateful Tuesday in 1944 has survived; it makes for riveting listening today, letting us share the memory of a nation waking to the big news, holding its breath, checking their maps and saying a prayer for the success of the mission pursued by fathers, sons, brothers, family, friends and neighbors on the far-away beaches of Normandy.

Radio offered its listeners an intimacy that production circumstances deny television today. Most radio drama was broadcast live; actors would show up a few hours before air time to rehearse their performances in plays that had been written, often re-written, right up to the day of their broadcast. They could easily incorporate important stories of the day into their work, having characters comment on the news that the listeners themselves were following in-between their choice of radio theater, such as the war’s sudden beginning in the Pacific, the last days of war in Europe… and the beginning of the end: D-Day.

I've selected a trio of highlights to give a sense of how that day played out on radio. As you can imagine, regular programming was put largely on hold that day, as a flood of news bulletins tried to encapsulate history in the making.

We start with the noon broadcast of Kate Smith Speaks, a popular daily 15-minute chat show for women, hosted by the singer famous today for her stirring delivery of the unofficial US National Anthem, God Bless America. She puts her listeners thoughts into words as she offers a moving prayer for the troops overseas, "a prayer for victory".

Then comes a fifteen minute clip of CBS' six o'clock news broadcast, summing up the major news points of the invasion up to that time. (The time slot had yet to assume the daily compass point it was to offer for generations to come, displaced only recently by unsleeping cable networks and global online news resources.)

The final word goes to comedian Bob Hope. His Tuesday night variety show skirted the edges of prime time, broadcast as it was at a 10:00 pm time slot in those wartime days. It would have brought down the curtain on quite an emotional day for his listeners, and undoubtedly even more so for Hope.

Here was a man who devoted his legendary tireless energy towards criss-crossing the continent in order to entertain the troops. From May 1941 onward, he broadcast week after week from an airfield here, a training camp there; as we heard in an earlier Radio Memories post , he had even spent much of his 1943 "summer vacation" in-between radio seasons playing for the military stationed in the warzones of North Africa and Europe. And shortly after this Tuesday June 6th broadcast he was scheduled to begin his 1944 summer tour of the Pacific Theater. Had anyone met more American G.I.s, one-on-one, than Bob Hope? Shaken their hands, looked into their eyes, met their smiles with one of his own? Was there a single air base, naval base, or army camp that he didn't perform in during the war?

The disruptions of a news-heavy day of programming cut his usual Tuesday thirty minute show down to a mere six minutes, yet these six minutes broadcast on the sixth day of the sixth month of 1944 offer much heartening insight to the modern-day listener, plagued as we are with a world seemingly in decay, trying to imagine what it must have been like to experience a day when the world could be felt to be changing for the better.

In his three-minute introduction, Bob Hope reminds listeners of his day, and those finding his broadcast in our own time, what it was like to experience radio's coverage of the D-Day invasion:

Folks, this is Bob Hope speaking from a P-38 airfield out here near Van Nuys California. We looked forward to being with these men and doing our regular show here, but of course nobody feels like getting up and being funny on a night like this.
But we did want to go through with our plans and visit these fellas because these are the same kind of boys that are flying those 11,000 planes in our big effort.

What’s happened in these last few hours not one of us will ever forget. How could you forget. You sat up all night by the radio, and heard the bulletins and the flashes, the voices coming across from England, the commentators, the pilots returning from their greatest of all missions, newsboys yelling in the street… it seemed that one world was ending and a new world beginning. That history was closing one book and opening a new one.

And somehow we knew it had to be a better one. You sat there and dawn began to sneak in and you thought of the hundreds of thousands of kids you’d seen in camps the past two or three years; the kids who’d scream and whistle when they’d hear a gag in a song.

And now you could see them all again on 4,000 ships on the English Channel, tumbling out of thousands of planes over Normandy, and the occupied coast. In countless landing barges crashing the nazi gate and going out to do the job that’s the job of all of us.

The sun came up and you sat there looking at that huge black headline, that one great black word with the exclamation point: “Invasion”. The one word that the whole world has waited for.

That all of us had worked for.

We knew we’d wake up one morning and have to meet it face to face, the word in which America has invested everything these thirty long months, the efforts of millions of Americans building the planes and weapons, the men in the shipyards and the men who took the stuff across. Little kids buying war stamps and housewives straining bacon grease. Farmers working around the clock. Millions of young men sweating it out in camps and fighting the battles that paved the way for that headline this morning.

Now the investment is paid, for this generation and all generations to come.

And folks what a wonderful thing it is that no matter the price, the reward will be greater than the sacrifice. We hope that thought can go along with a prayer tonight, the prayer of a whole nation: God Bless those kids across the English Channel.

Previous Radio Memories posts:

Red Skelton: Vacations
Frontier Gentleman: Gambling Lady
Information Please: Guests Walter Duranty and John Gunther
The Aldrich Family: Cleaning The Furnace
Tom Mix, Terry and the Pirates VE Day broadcasts from May 8 1945
You Are There: The Capture Of John Wilkes Booth
Fort Laramie: War Correspondent
CBS Radio Workshop: Son Of Man
Great Gildersleeve: Easter Rabbits
Dimension X: Time And Time Again
An American In England: Women Of Britain
Cavalcade Of America: Bob Hope Reports
The March Of Time: Feb 10 1938 broadcast
Hear It Now: Coming Home From The Korean War
Escape: Vanishing Lady
Rogers Of The Gazette: Rewinding The Town Clock

UK: Not Even A Penny For British D-Day Veterans

From the "what-have-you-done-for-us-lately" school of gratitude, the UK government finds something better to do than honor its few remaining D-Day veterans' hopes to attend the upcoming 65th anniversary of the beginning of the Liberation of Europe:

Second World War veterans have criticised as "disgusting" the Government's refusal to help them travel to France to attend the 65th anniversary of the D-Day landings.

While America and Canada are paying for their veterans to travel to the event, British war heroes are having to stump up the cash themselves.

Thousands of them are hoping to travel to Normandy for the commemoration in June, which for many will be their last.

But the Ministry of Defence has told them that the next time public money will be used for a commemoration will be the 100th anniversary in 2044, when they will all be dead.

Bob Conway, 83, chairman of the Wiltshire branch of the Normandy Veterans' Association (NVA), said: "I think it's disgusting. Surely they can do something to help us old boys go over? We are pretty upset about it. We're all over 80 now and for many this will be the last time."

He and his comrades have taken to fund-raising in the cold in the middle of Trowbridge, where he lives.

He added: "It's a struggle to raise all the money we need but it's just a few thousand pounds. All our comrades from the US and Canada get their expenses paid for by their Governments but ours won't give us a penny."

D-Day.

As we remember those Allied forces who fought and died this day in 1944 for our nations and our forefathers, we would also like to take a moment to remember that we have men and women in our services fighting and dying for our nations and for us today.

For those who spent the day lying at the beach today we hope all had some thought of gratitude for those who laid down their lives for us on this day and those other day throughout our history as free nations protected by the lives of free men and women heeding the call of duty.

I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills, from whence cometh my help.
My help [cometh] from the LORD, which made heaven and earth.
He will not suffer thy foot to be moved: he that keepeth thee will not slumber.
Behold, he that keepeth Israel shall neither slumber nor sleep
The LORD [is] thy keeper: the LORD [is] thy shade upon thy right hand.
The sun shall not smite thee by day, nor the moon by night.
The LORD shall preserve thee from all evil: he shall preserve thy soul.
The LORD shall preserve thy going out and thy coming in from this time forth, and even for evermore.

Psalm 121: 1- 8.

Thanks to those who made the true sacrifice

Reader Zazie, from la belle France, writes to say: "the three of you on this site may think I am off topic, but today is June 6th ! SO ONCE AGAIN, THANK YOU !"

Thank you, Zazie, for reminding us that this is the sixty-third anniversary of the allied invasion of Normandy, for which we are grateful to the soldiers, sailors, and airmen of all the nations who risked their lives to free the world from the Nazi evil. Since this is a Canadian site, allow me to say, I know Zazie doesn't mean to thank us three, but rather these guys:









One historian writes:

[...] the Canadian soldiers scheduled to land at Juno Beach warily approached the coastline in their landing craft. Wet, cold, and seasick, they were also confident. On "Mike" sector, most of the 1st Hussars' tanks managed to get ashore in good order to provide covering fire as the Regina Rifles touched down just after 8:00 a.m. That was fortunate since the preliminary bombardment had failed to knock out many German defensive positions. The near invulnerable pill-boxes could be destroyed only by direct hits through their observation slits but, working in tandem, the tanks and infantry succeeded in fighting their way off the beach and into the nearby town of Courseulles-sur-Mer where they became engaged in house-to-house combat. They were moving inland by late afternoon. Other Reginas never reached the beaches – a reserve company suffered terrible losses when its landing craft struck mines hidden by high tide.

The company of Victoria's Canadian Scottish and most of The Royal Winnipeg Rifles at "Mike" made it ashore without much trouble, the beneficiaries of accurate naval gunfire which neutralized the German battery that dominated their area of the beach. The Winnipeg company at the western edge of Courseulles was not so lucky. There the bombardment had missed its targets, and the landing craft came under brisk gunfire while they were still far offshore. Although forced to "storm their positions cold [they] did so without hesitation," the unit's war diary noted. Many men died the instant they waded into the chest-high water. Nonetheless, the survivors advanced past the beach defences, cleared the minefields, and occupied the adjoining coastal villages. The victory did not come cheaply. In a few hours, the company lost almost three-quarters of its men.

But none of the "Little Black Devils", as the regiment was nicknamed, "had flinched from his task, no matter how tough it was [or] failed to display courage and energy and a degree of gallantry." They had not been alone. The Winnipegs' commanding officer later paid tribute to The 1st Hussars' "gallantry, skill and cool daring" in coming to the assistance of his battalion "time and again throughout D-Day, without thought of their own safety or state of fatigue. ..."

At "Nan" sector on Juno Beach, The North Shore Regiment and The Queen's Own Rifles also encountered enemy gun emplacements that had survived the preliminary bombardment. One concrete bunker and its defenders inflicted heavy casualties on the North Shores and destroyed several Sherman tanks of The Fort Garry Horse before being silenced. The North Shore's other companies made it ashore without incident, but needed six hours and armoured support to take the town of Tailleville.

Toronto's Queen's Own Rifles received the worst battering of any Canadian unit on D-Day. The initial bombardment on their sector of "Nan" had barely dented the enemy's fortifications. The DD tanks, supposed to "swim" in ahead of the infantry to diminish German resistance, had been forced by high waves to land after them, "within a few hundred yards of the muzzles of the beach defence guns," one tank commander recalled afterward. Only a few made it into action.

A half-hour late, the landing craft carrying the Queen's Own hit the beach more or less intact. Then the bloodbath began, the men making a mad dash from the shoreline to a seawall 183 metres away with no cover in between. A hidden German 88 opened up on the lead platoon of one company, decimating two-thirds of it before being silenced. Only a handful survived to get off the beach.

A second Queen's Own company landed directly in front of an untouched enemy strongpoint and very quickly lost half of its men, until three riflemen eliminated it with hand grenades and small arms fire. The price had been high, but the Queen's Own moved off the beach. The war diary of this, one of the oldest regiments in the Canadian Army, reflected the unit's unflagging spirit under onerous conditions.

The reserve units of the Canadian Scottish and the Chaudières arrived on the heels of the initial assault. The Scottish suffered the lightest casualties of any Canadian battalion on D-Day. But, coming in on the rising tide, many of Le Régiment de la Chaudière's landing craft struck concealed mines, and their occupants had no option but to throw off their equipment and swim to shore. Soon, both regiments were surging forward. By noon, the 9th Infantry Brigade was on its way to the beaches to exploit the 3rd Canadian Infantry Division's hard-won gains.

Although only one Canadian unit reached its D-Day objective, the first line of German defences had been completely smashed. By evening, Canadian troops had progressed further inland than any of their Allies. It was a remarkable achievement but, despite casualties being less than expected, it was an expensive one, too. "The German dead were littered over the dunes, by the gun positions," a Canadian journalist reported. "By them, lay Canadians in bloodstained battledress, in the sand and in the grass, on the wire and by the concrete forts. . . . They had lived a few minutes of the victory they had made. That was all." To ensure that D-Day would succeed, 340 Canadians had given their lives. Another 574 had been wounded and 47 taken prisoner. link to original source...

More D-Day links...

As a concluding thought, let me now change topics slightly. I find it interesting that a Frenchman, who has spent most of his adult life in American universities, has led the way in the post-war years in furthering our understanding of human sacrifice. Here, from an interview with Rene Girard, we can see the historical basis, in Judeo-Christian religion, for the understanding of self-sacrifice described above:

You have advocated what is seen as a “non-sacrificial” reading of the death of Christ that is significantly at odds with the usual understanding of that death as a “hilasterion” that satisfies the wrath and justice of God. Could you describe that view and how your study of the formation and maintenance of human cultures has led you to it?

RG: Oh, this is a question that will require a long answer! It is not quite true that I take what you have called a “non-sacrificial reading of the death of Christ.” We must establish first of all that there are two kinds of sacrifice.

Both forms are shown together (and I am not sure anywhere else) in the story of Solomon’s judgment in the third chapter of 1 Kings. Two prostitutes bring a baby. They are doubles engaging in a rivalry over what is apparently a surviving child. When Solomon offers to split the child, the one woman says “yes,” because she wishes to triumph over her rival. The other woman then says, “No, she may have the child,” because she seeks only its life. On the basis of this love, the king declares that “she is the mother.”

Note that it does not matter who is the biological mother. The one who was willing to sacrifice herself for the child’s life is in fact the mother. The first woman is willing to sacrifice a child to the needs of rivalry. Sacrifice is the solution to mimetic rivalry and the foundation of it. The second woman is willing to sacrifice everything she wants for the sake of the child’s life. This is sacrifice in the sense of the gospel. It is in this sense that Christ is a sacrifice since he gave himself “for the life of the world.”

What I have called “bad sacrifice” is the kind of sacrificial religion that prevailed before Christ. It originates because mimetic rivalry threatens the very survival of a community. But through a spontaneous process that also involves mimesis, the community unites against a victim in an act of spontaneous killing. This act unites rivals and restores peace and leaves a powerful impression that results in the establishment of sacrificial religion.

But in this kind of religion, the community is regarded as innocent and the victim is guilty. Even after the victim has been “deified,” he is still a criminal in the eyes of the community (note the criminal nature of the gods in pagan mythology).

But something happens that begins in the Old Testament. There are many stories that reverse this scapegoat process. In the story of Cain and Abel, the story of Joseph, the book of Job, and many of the psalms, the persecuting community is pictured as guilty and the victim is innocent. But Christ, the son of God, is the ultimate “scapegoat”—precisely because he is the son of God, and since he is innocent, he exposes all the myths of scapegoating and shows that the victims were innocent and the communities guilty.