June 6, 1944

The commander of a U.S. base in England said to his airmen: "May I have your attention, please? This is what we have been waiting for. This is invasion morning." His young men went out to their planes, and up into the Channel dawn.

A London cabbie cocked his white head and his Homburg toward the sky. The dawn hid a mighty lot of bombers, and their extra thunder told him: "Something is up!"

One of Britain's "old contemptibles," from the France of Ypres and the Somme, heard that the armies and the fleets were crossing the Channel again, and said: "It must be something to see!" A G.I. from Cincinnati, left behind by history in Piccadilly Circus, heard the news and said: "When do the bars open? I want a drink."

In Vincennes, Ind., Mrs. Lyndon Eberly and her daughter, Helen, heard on the radio that Sergeant Richard Eberly, 21, had been one of the first to be landed by air in France. The Eberlys prayed. At 3:30 a.m. in Marietta, Ga., the bell of the Methodist Church began to peal; by 4, every church was lighted, and in every church the people prayed.

In Brooklyn, bearded patriarchs of the Brooklyn Hebrew Home marched the street in prayer shawls and skull caps, sounding the shofars. At St. Patrick's Cathedral in Manhattan, and at many & many another church, the indifferent city warmed, and people came to pray, to weep, to share that world morning. In their various ways pagans and pastors acknowledged their presence "in the hour of death, and in the day of judgment."

In Berlin, in Moscow, in London, in freed Rome, military men calculated the great fact of one continental war on three fronts; the fact which had ever spelled defeat to German strategists. They measured the pent-up might of the Russian hosts. They tried to analyze the first tremors in the uncertain Balkans, in what was left of German Italy, on those coasts of France and the Lowlands which were yet to be invaded, but certainly were affected by stresses placed on German arms and transport in the west.

But on June 6, 1944, for the young men in battle, for the patriots, the craven, the ordinary millions of Occupied Europe, for people everywhere, the military news was personal. Aloud or in their hearts, plain men were not ashamed to say with General Eisenhower in his Order of the Day to his men: "Good luck, and may the blessing of God go with you."

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