The ‘reporter’ who invented D-Day
“Operation Overlord … began at precisely fifteen minutes after midnight…. At that moment a few specially chosen men of the American 101st and 82nd airborne divisions stepped out of their planes into the moonlit night over Normandy.”
Thus, Cornelius Ryan begins to weave thousands of strands of stray stories into a tight narrative describing the first 24-hours of the Allies’ D-Day invasion of northern France in June 1944.
Ryan, a Dubliner who became a London newspaperman and eventually a naturalized American citizen, called his book The Longest Day. Another book about another battle of World War II, Operation Market-Garden, he called A Bridge Too Far.
By his book titles Ryan helped give form and substance to two titanic and bloody struggles in the freeing of Europe from the iron-grip of Nazi rule.
“A bridge too far” especially has entered the kingdom of phrases. It’s been employed to describe everything from why the National League should not adopt the DH rule to explain the unlikely appearance of a COVID-19 vaccine in time for school in the fall.
Not that “the longest day” is a slouch In the short-hand phrase department. The three words have come to encapsulate history’s most consequential battle — a battle that will be remembered just days from now, on June 6.
D-Day – the longest day – will be 76 years in the rearview mirror on Saturday. The fact that it’s receding rapidly into the past makes Ryan’s book all that more important.
Nothing is remembered that is not written down is not completely true – fossils and modern DNA analysis are two of the means whereby the past becomes distinguishable.
However, the statement is true enough to make Ryan’s D-Day narrative invaluable. There have been other books about the battle that began Hitler’s ultimate unraveling, but Ryan’s was the first and probably the best.
As Rick Atkinson, a pretty good narrative historian In his own right, has observed, “Ryan was a master of suspense, even when writing about events once known to every seventh grader. All those pointilist brushstrokes of detail empower the reader’s imagination…. Events speak for themselves and behavior reveals character.”
The Longest Day is crowded with voices – American, British, French, German, generals and privates, soldiers, sailors, airmen, civilians, the perplexed and the purposeful.
The German enemy is as conspicuous as the British Tommy and the American GI in Ryan’s books. Indeed, the very first character the reader encounters in The Longest Day is the German field marshal Erwin Rommel.
“In the ground-floor room he used as an office, Rommel was alone,” Ryan tells us by way of introduction. “He sat behind a massive Renaissance desk, working by the light of a single desk lamp. The room was large and high-ceilinged…. There were a few chairs casually placed on the highly polished parquet floor and thick draperies at the windows, but little else.”
Here is the first glimpse of the D-Day beaches by an Allied combatant, 26-year-old British Navy Reserve lieutenant George Honour, in charge of a mini-sub off the coast just as dawn broke on that fateful morning.
“Cushioning one eye against the rubber-cupped eyepiece, [Honour] slowly pivoted the periscope around … The blurred image … became the sleepy resort of Ouistreham…. Honour could see smoke rising from chimneys….”
Just a few hours separated that instance from the moment U.S. airborne private Robert Murphy fell from the sky into a garden belonging to French civilian Madame Angele Levrault. “They stood looking at one another for a long moment,” Ryan writes. “…. Then, as the old lady watched in terror, unable to move, the strange apparition put a finger to his lips in a gesture of silence and swiftly disappeared.”
Published in 1959, The Longest Day was an instant success. It was soon made into a blockbuster movie.
“I am not actually writing about war,” Ryan would say. “… I am writing about the human spirit in the midst of war — incredible courage, loyalty, hope, despair, and, all too often, ineptitude and bad management.”
His friend columnist Herb Caen called Ryan “the man who invented D-Day.” Atkinson would not go that, though conceding that Ryan “revived public interest in one of the most extraordinary events of the 20th century.”
Ryan wanted to be buried at the U.S. military cemetery inland of the Normandy beaches. Rules prevented that. Instead, following his death in November 1974, he was laid to rest in his adopted Connecticut.
The tombstone marking Ryan’s grave is inscribed with a deceptively simple one-word description: “Reporter.” Cornelius Ryan was that, and more.
Richard Robbins lives in Uniontown. He can be reached at dick.l.robbins@gmail.com.