When The Sea Came Alive
My podcast with Garrett Graff on his amazing D-Day oral history.
I interviewed Garrett Graff this week about his phenomenal history of D-Day, When the Sea Came Alive: An Oral History of D-Day.
Normandy was an inflection point in history that is now sadly fading from our collective memory, and this book is riveting in its retelling of D-Day in voices both high — Ike, Churchill, Montgomery — and the voices of forgotten or anonymous soldiers.
It was a riveting conversation, and I highly recommend this important book.
YouTube:
My great aunt Muriel Aileen Kragh, an Army Nurse, was with the landing at Normandy. She helped set up field hospitals for the wounded men. She then followed the Army until they reached safety.
I second the remarks about the quality of Graff’s research. My British male family members all served in WWII. My great uncle was with the Special Operations Executive, and was parachuted into occupied France. He was right outside Paris and had to bike in every day pretending to be an Argentinian orange salesman in order to report on the Boche. In his spare time he trained the Maquis in terrorist tactics. His plane was blown up as he was leaving India en route to the Burma theatre. Nobody in my family tried to get a deferral for bone spurs.
I salute the troops from the Normandy beaches. The horror of that day is unimaginable, but they kept going. Thanks to them the tide turned on Hitler. I hope that fire burns in the hearts of the people of this country despite the attempts by some to stamp it out.