When the Sea Came Alive

January 1, 2024

Director of the cyber initiative at the Aspen Institute, best-selling Graff (The Only Plane in the Sky; Pulitzer Prize finalist for Watergate) offers a panoramic history of D-Day, from the planning of the massive maneuver to the morning when over 150,000 Allied troops stormed the beaches at Normandy. Prepub Alert.

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May 15, 2024
A sprawling history of D-Day from the point of view of participants on both sides. "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." So recalled Andy Rooney, then a war correspondent. Timed for the 80th anniversary of the Normandy landings, Graff's book is an anthology of sorts: Most of the stories gathered in this oral history come from printed sources and weren't gathered firsthand. Still, it's a worthy endeavor, bringing together 700 people who took part in the invasion in one way or another. Rooney was there; so was a German officer on Juno Beach who recalled, "This battle was the beginning of the end of the war." Graff emphasizes the precariousness of the Allied position on a couple of scores: The sea was rough, drowning as many soldiers as were gunned down on the beaches, and the Germans could have defeated the attackers if they had organized an effective counteroffensive strategy. That's not the way it worked out, of course--although, as Graff comments, "German resistance would continue along the beaches for multiple days, until the final strongpoints were defeated and the final batteries inland were captured." Another point of emphasis is the appalling rate of casualties suffered by the Allies: One British soldier recalls that when his unit reached Germany a few months after landing in Normandy, "there were only three of us remaining from the original complement of men who landed on D-Day. All the others had either been killed or wounded." A timely reminder of the cost of war, as well as the bravery of those who stormed the beaches all those decades ago.

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June 1, 2024
D-Day, the June 6, 1944, military strike to reclaim Western Europe from Nazi Germany's control, has been recounted in print and on screen practically from the day itself. Graff (UFO, 2023) sorted through mammoth worldwide archives for this comprehensive oral history of that fateful day. Starting with a compilation of quotations from politicians, military leaders, soldiers, sailors, and airmen, Graff documents political and military preparations. As the day approaches and convoys of American draftees who have barely left their homes marshal weaponry in England and prepare themselves for maiming and death on French beaches, the sheer scope of the effort becomes almost overwhelming. Even this friendly "invasion" of the bucolic English countryside by thousands of American recruits stressed local inhabitants physically and emotionally. Juxtaposing grand strategic thinking from Eisenhower, Montgomery, and other leaders against the quotidian concerns of GIs gives insight into war's panoramic complexity. Graff interweaves detailed logistical intricacies with fighting men's reactions that suddenly inject raw emotion into otherwise soulless statistical inventories. Military history buffs as well as aficionados of popular history will avidly consume this.

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Starred review from June 17, 2024
Pulitzer finalist Graff (Watergate) draws from more than 700 eyewitness accounts for this gripping and propulsive history of the D-Day invasion. The contributors range from teenage privates to heads of state and military commanders, from frogmen and signalmen to parachuting generals, all of whom were engaged in a “feat of unprecedented human audacity, a mission more... complex than anything ever seen.” The interlaced first-person accounts—sometimes just a sentence or two—are connected by helpful narrative tissue and often reach back into the months and years before the invasion to provide context for the day’s events, like the development of the Mulberry Plan—the building of secret portable harbors the Allies would float to Normandy—and Exercise Tiger, a landing rehearsal on a British beach that was attacked by a German flotilla, resulting in hundreds of casualties. Harrowing recollections from survivors of the first wave of landings (“If you moved, you were dead”; “Wherever possible I crawled around bodies”) paired with descriptions of elite operations with narrow yet crucial goals—like the team of Rangers who practiced six months to scale a single cliff—add up to a panoramic view of an astonishingly intricate plan coming to fruition, undertaken by men and women with a clear sense of its momentousness. Readers will be spellbound.