Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, June 5, 1994 TAG: 9406070017
SECTION: THE GREAT CRUSADE PAGE: D-DAY-5 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: BEN BEAGLE STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
It's a natural assumption in this time of Fax, E-Mail and information highways and "Scud studs" who stand on rooftops in faraway cities and perform for live television while missiles presumably are falling, or about to do so.
In fact, newspapers and radio brought the news of D-Day swiftly and competently. The Columbia Broadcasting System and the old Blue Network picked up broadcasts on the continent and fed them to the American people.
The Roanoke Times announced the landings that Tuesday morning in bludgeoning, big letters that newspaper people once irreverently called "Second-Coming type."
The headline was big and black and it roared over the top of the newspaper's flag.
The coverage was possible because the newspaper was a member of the Associated Press.
The media didn't bring immediate news of who was dead or what units were involved, but it did a creditable job given the means it had at hand.
Ironically, it was the Nazis who first broadcast the invasion news, although there was confusion as to where the allies had landed.
The Associated Press, sometimes criticized among non-wire newspapermen for being dull and conservative, did a superb, craftsman-like job of reporting what was going on.
And all of it was in ink - from the copy punched loudly on the ribbons of chattering, bell-ringing teletype machines to the hand-set black headlines. There were no computer screens and no printers that made a sound like zippers. And each story and headline had to be set in hot lead.
The wire service was all over the story. It reported, for example, that the German announcement that the invasion had begun might have been phony - that it might have been done to get underground resistance leaders out into the open so they could be killed easily. But the Virginians of the 116th Infantry Regiment - the old Stonewall Brigade -were already on Omaha Beach, and in danger of being pushed off it into the sea, by 6:30 a.m.
Gen. Dwight David Eisenhower, in an unremarkable, soft Kansas accent, announced in a broadcast to the people of Europe that the invasion had begun.
Today, the words sound like a 19th Century general exhorting his troops, which is understandable and a little quaint 50 years later:
"People of Western Europe: A landing was made this morning on the coast of France by troops of the allied expeditionary force. This landing is part of a concerted plan plan for the liberation of Europe made in cooperation with our great Russian allies.
"I call upon all who love freedom to stand with us now. Together. we shall achieve victory."
In the United States, President Roosevelt prayed on the radio far more eloquently.
And Ed Murrow, in his post-war Columbia recording, "I Can Hear It Now," brought us a broadcaster somewhat resembling a "Scud stud," except that George Hicks of ABC radio was on the deck of a ship in the invasion armada and not in the rear.
In a voice distorted by the technology of the time - sounding somewhat like the famous broadcast of the Hindenburg disaster, but not as excited or emotional - Hicks described flak "coming up in the sky. We're going to have a night tonight."
There was no television aboard Hicks' ship that night, but there were tremendous explosions and gunfire in the background.
"Something's burning," Hicks said. "It's falling down through the sky. They got one."
You look back 50 years and you wonder how Ike might have handled the "Scud studs" or how he would have come off at daily briefings of war correspondents. Ike won the Crusade in Europe and became president of the United States, but, before the microphones, a Norman Schwarzkopf he wasn't.
You have to wonder what it might have done to American resolve if television cameras had been there on Omaha Beach or in the Normandy hedgerows; or in St. Lo or in the Vierville Draw - as they were in Vietnam so many years after the assault on the Normandy beaches.
Ernest Hemingway was in there somewhere as a war correspondent for the now-dead Colliers magazine, but there were no Dan Rathers or Tom Brokaws, rushed to the scene from their anchor sets in New York and wearing safari jackets.
You have to wonder how Ike might have handled Dan and Tom.
by CNB