When The Sea Came Alive: An Oral History Of D-day

This reading group guide for When the Sea Came Alive includes an introduction, discussion questions, ideas for enhancing your book club, and a Q&A with author Garrett M. Graff. The suggested questions are intended to help your reading group find new and interesting angles and topics for your discussion. We hope that these ideas will enrich your conversation and increase your enjoyment of the book.

Introduction

June 6, 1944—known to us all as D-Day—is one of history’s greatest and most unbelievable military triumphs. The surprise sunrise landing of more than 150,000 Allied troops on the beaches of occupied northern France is one of the most consequential days of the twentieth century. Now, Pulitzer Prize finalist Garrett M. Graff, historian and author of The Only Plane in the Sky and Watergate, brings together a one-of-a-kind, bestselling oral history that explores this seminal event in vivid, heart-pounding detail. A visceral, page-turning drama told through the eyes of those who experienced it—from soldiers, nurses, pilots, children, neighbors, sailors, politicians, volunteers, photographers, reporters, and so many more, When the Sea Came Alive “is the sort of book that is smart, inspiring, and powerful—and adds so much to our knowledge of what that day was like and its historic importance forever” (Chris Bohjalian)—an unforgettable, fitting tribute to the men and women of the Greatest Generation.

Topics & Questions for Discussion

1. Before reading When the Sea Came Alive, what came to mind when you thought of D-Day? Has that meaning changed after reading this book?

2. What other depictions or representations of D-Day have you seen, read, or heard? How did they frame your understanding of the day’s events?

3. How does reading oral history differ from reading traditional narrative history? Do you have a format that you prefer, or think is more effective for storytelling?

4. Were there any chapters or moments in When the Sea Came Alive that were particularly difficult to read? Inspiring? Impactful?

5. What surprised you most about the stories, action, or people featured in the book?

6. D-Day is typically categorized as a war narrative, but in When the Sea Came Alive, it’s presented as a human drama, one that affects and involves a much larger, global community. Would you still call D-Day “a war story” after reading this book?

7. “D-Day” has become a shorthand when counting down to any major event. What are other “D-Days” in our modern history, and how do they compare?

8. Stories of World War II, in general, have endured and resonated in contemporary reading—novels, history, and more. What do you think it is about this particular moment in time that still feels so important and relevant?

If this is a period of time you enjoy reading about, what are some of your other favorite books?

9. When the Sea Came Alive features stories from people fighting by land, sea, and air. Did one stand out as particularly harrowing, affecting, or interesting to you?

10. While much of When the Sea Came Alive focuses on the everyday soldiers and people affected by the action at Normandy, there are some names that many readers will recognize: Winston Churchill, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Charles de Gaulle, Martha Gellhorn, Bob Hope, among others. Which were most interesting to you?

11. When the Sea Came Alive broadens the traditional scope of the landing’s narrative to include women, journalists, civilians, Black soldiers, and more. What other seminal global or American moments could be re-explored through the voices of other communities?

12. As we move forward and D-Day becomes more distant history, do you think it will hold the same weight and that its legacy will hold? How can we ensure that stories of the day survive?

Enhance Your Book Club

1. There are many visual records of D-Day available to us—movies, documentaries, newsreels, archival clips, and after-the-fact interviews. After reading When the Sea Came Alive, watch any of them as a group or individual members to add a layer of understanding to the action and impact of the day.

2. Have each member of your book club select a person from When the Sea Came Alive that captured their attention at various points in the narrative. Try to research more about that person and what happened to them after June 6, 1944, and present your findings at your next meeting.

3. Create an oral history project of your own! Collect audio recordings of members of your book club sharing their experiences of various historic or seminal moments, and then expand the interviews to friends, family, and community members.

A Conversation with Garrett M. Graff

Q: Your first work of oral history, The Only Plane in the Sky, focused on September 11, 2001, a uniquely monumental event in modern American history. When the Sea Came Alive echoes that model but brings us into a more global moment—the Allied landings at Normandy, which turned the tide of the Second World War and all but secured a victory against fascism.

Why did you choose D-Day, and what made you choose oral history as the format to explore it in?

A: In thinking about what oral history to tackle after 9/11, D-Day seemed a logical choice. September 11, 2001, is the most famous and consequential date of the twenty-first century, and June 6, 1944, is the most famous and consequential date of the twentieth century—days upon which the whole world and the whole century turned. There are only certain kinds of events that work for a book-length oral history—it needs to be an event of gigantic proportions, where you have a cast of thousands to draw upon. Moreover, you need incredible archives and primary sources, so it needs to be something where lots of others before you have been interested in recording memories and experiences. D-Day certainly fit that bill, even though it took decades for many of the participants to be ready to record their memories.

Also, like 9/11, while everyone knows the main story and outcome, we’ve lost sight in history of what that day was like to experience at the human level, and, to me, that’s the real power of oral history—it puts you back in the moment knowing only what the participants knew at the time. We view D-Day as this heroic world-changing triumph, one of the greatest days in all of history, and yet to the participants in that day, to hear them tell of June 5 or June 6, they were nervous, scared, and worried about what was to come. As Pvt. John Barnes says in the book, “We were handed a printed sheet of paper with Eisenhower’s address to the troops: ‘You are about to embark upon the Great Crusade. Toward which we have striven these many months. The eyes of the world are upon you. . . .’ We didn’t feel like Crusaders.” They didn’t know they were about to be doing something great—they wondered whether it would succeed at all and whether they’d live to see the end of the day to come.

Q: What is your earliest memory of hearing about or understanding what D-Day was?

A: I was in my early teens during the fiftieth anniversary events of the 1990s and devoured the major works of that time—from Stephen Ambrose’s narrative D-Day, the research files for which I used for this oral history, to Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan. I think anyone who watches those first minutes of Saving Private Ryan will never forget it and never think of D-Day the same again.

Q: This is cheating, perhaps, because it’s also a question for our reading group guide, but: what do you think it is about World War II that feels so important and so resonant for contemporary readers?

A: I’m in my forties now, and for my parents’ generation—the Baby Boomers—World War II was often the defining event of their parents’ lives. And yet, for most World War II veterans, they didn’t talk much about the war, and I think there’s still a great longing among many Baby Boomers to know what their dads went through in the war (it was, for most, their dads, after all). It was this huge shadow across decades in their lives. I don’t spend much time in the book following soldiers’ lives back to the US after the war, but these millions of veterans had these horrific, violent experiences, participated in these giant heroic events, built these deep friendships—usually all in a few years in their teens or early twenties—and then came back to the US and lived the rest of their lives in near silence about their wars.

The other thing that stands out in modern feelings of World War II is that it was the “Good War,” the war America understood, that was morally unambiguously good, and that was won with decisive, overwhelming, unconditional victory. We haven’t had a war or conflict like that since—Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, and a whole host of smaller military expeditions, like the Iranian hostage rescue, Panama, or Somalia, have had much more mixed historical legacies and feel harder to celebrate as a country.

Q: How did you select the stories to feature in When the Sea Came Alive? Where are they all from? Were there elements of the story you were most excited to explore or specific voices you wanted to introduce (or re-introduce) to a new generation of readers?

A: As the source notes show, I drew from all over—there’s a huge repository of D-Day memories and World War II oral histories at the National World War II Museum in New Orleans, and thanks to their amazing archivist, I was able to get access to hundreds of those. From there, I spent a year digging up every source I could find—from old newspapers and magazines on eBay, to old memoirs and war reports in used bookstores, to pamphlets and oral histories in local historical societies in the US and the UK. At the Portsmouth D-Day museum and Imperial War Museum in the UK, I spent a couple days flipping through boxes and boxes of old letters and postcards—it feels so different to handle pieces of history like that.

In some of the cases, particularly in the files at the Imperial War Museum, where I found these postcards, people had written in the 1970s about their D-Day memories for a contest for the then-3oth anniversary, I had this overwhelming sense that I might be the last person to ever read some of these postcards, letters, and memories. I’ve always been profoundly moved by the quote attributed to Ernest Hemingway, himself of course a D-Day participant: “Every man has two deaths, when he is buried in the ground and the last time someone says his name. In some ways men can be immortal.” That idea of the two deaths has roots in a lot of spiritual traditions too, and I really felt that going through some of the personal letters, telegrams, and postcards. Telling their stories, using their words, was literally helping keep their memories alive.

Q: Both When the Sea Came Alive and The Only Plane in the Sky—and, in some ways, your book Watergate, which was a work of narrative history, not oral history—focus on events that have also been depicted on-screen. Do you watch visual representations of the events before or during your process, or do you avoid them in case they might color your view or skew your focus?