Tom Brokaw Read online

  There on the beaches of Normandy, I began to reflect on the wonders of these ordinary people whose lives are laced with the markings of greatness. At every stage of their lives they were part of historic challenges and achievements of a magnitude the world had never before witnessed.

  Although they were transformed by their experiences and quietly proud of what they had done, their stories did not come easily. They didn’t volunteer them. I had to keep asking questions or learn to stay back a step or two as they walked the beaches themselves, quietly exchanging memories. NBC News had brought to Normandy several of those ordinary Americans, including Gino Merli, of Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, who landed on D-Day and later won the Congressional Medal of Honor for holding off an attacking wave of German soldiers. This quiet man had stayed at his machine gun, blazing away at the Germans, covering the withdrawal of his fellow Americans, until his position was overrun. He faked his own death twice as the Germans swept past, and then he went back to his machine gun to cut them down from behind. His cunning and courage saved his fellow soldiers, and in a night of battle he killed more than fifty attacking Germans.

  We also brought Harry Garton of Bucks County, Pennsylvania, who lost both legs to a land mine later in the war. Merli and Garton had both been in the Army’s “Big Red One,” the 1st Division. This trip to Normandy was their first time meeting each other and their first journey back to those beaches since they’d landed under greatly different circumstances forty years earlier. Quite coincidentally, they realized they’d been in the same landing craft, so they had matching memories of the chaos and death all around them. Garton said, “I remember all the bodies and all the screaming.” Were they scared?, I asked them. Both men had the same answer: they felt alternating fear, rage, calm, and, most of all, an overpowering determination to survive.

  As they made their way along Omaha Beach in 1984, they stopped and pointed to a low-lying bluff leading to higher ground. Merli said, “Remember that?” They both stared at a steep, sandy slope, an ordinary beach approach to my eye. “Remember what?” I asked. “Oh,” Merli said, “that hillside was loaded with mines, and a unit of sappers had gone first, to find where the mines were. A number of those guys were lying on the hillside, their legs shattered by the explosions. They’d shot themselves up with morphine and they were telling where it was now safe to step. They were about twenty-five yards apart, our guys, calmly telling us how to get up the hill. They were human markers.” Garton said, “When I got to the top of that hill, I thought I’d live at least until the next day.”

  Sam Gibbons and Snow Ball at Grandparents Gibbonses’ house, Haven Beach, Florida, 1926

  Sam Gibbons, 1927

  They described the scene as calmly as if they were remembering an egg-toss at a Sunday social back home. It was an instructive moment for me, one of many, and so characteristic. The war stories come reluctantly, and they almost never reflect directly on the bravery of the storyteller. Almost always he or she is singling out someone else for praise.

  On that trip to Normandy, I ducked into a small café for lunch on a rainy Sunday. A tall, familiar-looking American approached with a big grin and introduced himself: “Tom, Congressman Sam Gibbons of Florida.”

  I knew of Gibbons, a veteran Democrat from central Florida, a member of the Ways and Means Committee, but I didn’t know much about him.

  “Congressman,” I said, “what are you doing here?” “Oh, I was here forty years ago,” he said with a laugh, “but it was a little different then.” With that he clicked a small brass-and-steel cricket he was holding and laughed again.

  I knew of the cricket. The paratroopers of the 101st and 82nd Airborne divisions were given the crickets to click if they were separated from their units. As it turned out, most of them were. When I asked Gibbons what had happened to him that day, he sat down and, staring at a far wall, told a harrowing tale that went on for half an hour. In the café, all of us listening were hypnotized by this gangly, jug-eared man in his sixties and the story he was sharing.

  Gibbons, a captain in the 101st, was all alone when he landed in a French farm field in the predawn darkness. Using his cricket, he clicked until he got an answer, and then formed a squad of American paratroopers out of other units. They had no idea where they were, and for a time Gibbons thought the invasion had failed because there was no sign of American troops besides his small patched-up patrol.

  Gibbons and the other paratroopers with him moved along the country roads between the hedgerows, getting ambushed and fighting back, moving on again, trying to figure out just where they were. Gibbons even tried to converse with the terrified French villagers, using his high school Spanish. It didn’t help. It was eighteen hours before they hooked up with other units.

  His original objective, holding the bridges over the Douve River at a village called St. Côme-du-Mont, turned out to have been a far tougher assignment than the D-Day planners had realized. It took a whole division, fire support from U.S. cruisers offshore, and tanks to take control of the river crossings. By the third day, Gibbons was exhausted, he said, and he was one of only six hundred or so of the two thousand men in his battalion still on his feet. The others were all dead or wounded.

  As he sat there on that rainy afternoon, describing these scenes from passing images of his memory, Gibbons’s tough-guy demeanor began to change. He softened and then began to weep. His wife touched his arm and said he didn’t have to go on. But he did, and those of us in his tiny audience were enthralled.

  Later, Gibbons told me that he fought his way all across Europe and into Germany without a scratch. His brother, also in the Army, was badly wounded, and when the war was over they both enrolled at the University of Florida law school. They didn’t talk much about the war until one Saturday in the fall term when they decided to try to count up the young Floridians they had known who hadn’t made it back. Gibbons says, “When we got to a hundred we stopped counting and said, ‘To hell with this.’ ”

  Gibbons went on to his career in politics, first in the Florida legislature and then seventeen terms in the U.S. House of Representatives, where he became a champion of free trade as a means of keeping international tensions under control, a lesson he learned from the politics of World War II. He was also a solid member of the ruling Democratic majorities. He initially supported the Vietnam War but says now, “The sorriest vote I ever cast was for the Tonkin Gulf resolution,” the congressional mandate engineered by President Johnson so he could step up the American efforts in Vietnam.

  Gibbons’s personal war experience rarely came up publicly again, but it did one day in the fall of 1995, after the Republican Revolution of the year before, when a well-organized class of GOP Baby Boomers took control of the House, determined to deconstruct many of the policies put in place by Democrats during their long congressional rule.

  Martha and Sam Gibbons, 1962

  Sam Gibbons, U.S. Army

  Gibbons, now in the minority on the Ways and Means Committee, was furious. The new Republican leadership had cut off debate on Medicare reforms without a hearing. Gibbons stormed from the room, shouting, “You’re a bunch of dictators, that’s all you are. . . . I had to fight you guys fifty years ago.” Gibbons then grabbed the tie of the startled Republican chairman, demanding, “Tell them what you did in there, tell them what you did.”

  Watching this scene play out on CNN, many of my colleagues were puzzled by the eruption in the normally calm demeanor of Congressman Gibbons. I smiled to myself, thinking of that day in Normandy in 1944 when Gibbons, who was then just twenty-four, learned something about fighting for what you believe in.

  When I returned to Normandy for the fiftieth anniversary of D-Day, my wife, Meredith, joined me. By 1994, I felt a kind of missionary zeal for the men and women of World War II, spreading the word of their remarkable lives. I was inspired by them but also by the work of my friend Stephen Ambrose, the plain-talking historian who had written an account of the invasion called D-Day June 6, 1944: The
Climactic Battle of World War II.

  From him I learned that the men told the stories best themselves. So I told Meredith, “Whenever one of these guys comes over to say hello, just ask, ‘Where were you that day?’ You’ll hear some unbelievable stories.” And so we did, wherever we went. What we did not know at the time was that an old family friend back in our hometown of Yankton, South Dakota, had played a critical role in D-Day planning.

  In fact, we were only vaguely aware that Hod Nielsen had anything to do with World War II. To us, he was the keeper of the flame of high school athletics as a sportswriter and radio sports-caster. In his columns and on the air, he chronicled the individual and team achievements of our local high school, writing generously of the smallest victories, celebrating the stars but always finding some admirable trait to highlight in his descriptions of those of us who were known mostly for just showing up.

  What I did not know—nor did any of my high school contemporaries—was that Hod Nielsen, who spent so many of the postwar years making sure our little triumphs received notice, had been a daring photo reconnaissance pilot during World War II. He was in the unit that flew lightly armored P-38s over Normandy just before the invasion, photographing the beaches and fields for the military planners. As soon as they returned from that mission, they were hustled back to Washington to report directly to the legendary commander of the Army Air Corps, General Henry “Hap” Arnold. It’s also likely they were spirited out of England quickly to diminish the chances that the identity of their reconnaissance targets would somehow leak.

  President Bill Clinton’s presentation to Sam Gibbons,

  recalling Gibbons’s participation in D-Day—

  White House Family Dining Room, May 14, 1994

  Hod Nielsen, England, 1942

  Hod Nielsen, England, 1943, returning from a mission

  Hod Nielsen, 1995

  Hod was one of many in our midst who kept his war years to himself, preferring to concentrate on the generations that followed. He is so characteristic of that time and place in American life. One of four sons of hardworking Scandinavian immigrants, whom he remembers for their loving and frugal ways, Hod doesn’t recall a missed meal or a complaint about hard times during the height of the Great Depression.

  All four boys in his family were in the service. One brother was killed in action when his bomber was shot down over Europe. The war had been a family trial but also an adventure. Hod had a lot of fun as a freewheeling young officer during pilot training. He managed to avoid getting shot down during numerous reconnaissance missions. He saw a lot of the United States and the world, but when the war was over Hod wanted to return to the familiar life he had known in South Dakota. He says now, “I thought then, If this is the fast track, I don’t want any part of it.”

  Instead, he returned to a career in broadcasting and sportswriting. He’s been at it for more than half a century, and he can still get excited about the local high school team’s coming football season. He can tell you the whereabouts and the personal and professional fortunes of the athletes long gone from that small city along the Missouri River.

  To get a favorable mention in a Hod Nielsen column requires more than a winning touchdown or all-state recognition. He is as likely to write about an athlete’s musical ability or scholastic standing or family. As a result, it’s always been a little special to read your name beneath his byline. Now that my contemporaries and those who followed us onto the playing fields of Yankton know more about his early life, I am confident they’ll feel even greater pride in recognition from this modest and decent man.

  During NBC’s coverage of the fiftieth anniversary of D-Day, I was asked by Tim Russert on Meet the Press my thoughts on what we were witnessing. As I looked over the assembled crowd of veterans, which included everyone from Cabinet officers and captains of industry to retired schoolteachers and machinists, I said, “I think this is the greatest generation any society has ever produced.” I know that this was a bold statement and a sweeping judgment, but since then I have restated it on many occasions. While I am periodically challenged on this premise, I believe I have the facts on my side.

  This book, I hope, will in some small way pay tribute to those men and women who have given us the lives we have today. It is not the defining history of their generation. Instead, I think of this as like a family portrait. Some of the names and faces you’ll recognize immediately. Others are more like your neighbors, the older couple who always fly the flag on the Fourth of July and Veterans Day and spend their vacation with friends they’ve had for fifty years at a reunion of his military outfit. They seem to have everything they need, but they still count their pennies as if the bottom may drop out tomorrow. Most of all, they love each other, love life and love their country, and they are not ashamed to say just that.

  The sad reality is that they are dying at an ever faster pace. They’re in the mortality years now, in their seventies and eighties, and the Department of Veterans’ Affairs estimates that about thirty-two thousand World War II vets die every month. Not all of them were on the front lines, of course, or even in a critical rear-echelon position, but they were fused by a common mission and a common ethos.

  I am in awe of them, and I feel privileged to have been a witness to their lives and their sacrifices. There were so many other people whose stories could have been in this book, who embodied the standards of greatness in the everyday that the people in this book represent, and that give this generation its special quality and distinction. As I came to know many of them, and their stories, I became more convinced of my judgment on that day marking the fiftieth anniversary of D-Day. This is the greatest generation any society has produced.

  THE TIME OF THEIR LIVES

  “This generation of Americans has a rendezvous with destiny.”

  —FRANKLIN DELANO ROOSEVELT

  The year of my birth, 1940, was the fulcrum of America in the twentieth century, when the nation was balanced precariously between the darkness of the Great Depression on one side and the storms of war in Europe and the Pacific on the other. It was a critical time in the shaping of this nation and the world, equal to the revolution of 1776 and the perils of the Civil War. Once again the American people understood the magnitude of the challenge, the importance of an unparalleled national commitment, and, most of all, the certainty that only one resolution was acceptable. The nation turned to its young to carry the heaviest burden, to fight in enemy territory and to keep the home front secure and productive. These young men and women were eager for the assignment. They understood what was required of them, and they willingly volunteered for their duty.

  Many of them had been born just twenty years earlier than I, in a time of national promise, optimism, and prosperity, when all things seemed possible as the United States was swiftly taking its place as the most powerful nation in the world. World War I was over, America’s industrial might was coming of age with the rise of the auto industry and the nascent communications industry, Wall Street was booming, and the popular culture was rich with the likes of Babe Ruth, Eugene O’Neill, D. W. Griffith, and a new author on the scene, F. Scott Fitzgerald. What those unsuspecting infants could not have realized, of course, was that these were temporary conditions, a false spring to a life that would be buffeted by winds of change dangerous and unpredictable, so fierce that they threatened not just America but the very future of the planet.

  Nonetheless, 1920 was an auspicious year for a young person to enter the world as an American citizen. The U.S. population had topped 106 million people, and the landscape was changing rapidly from agrarian to urban, even though one in three Americans still lived on a farm. Women were gaining the right to vote with the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment, and KDKA in Pittsburgh was broadcasting the first radio signals across the middle of America. Prohibition was beginning, but so was the roaring lifestyle that came with the flouting of Prohibition and the culture that produced it. In far-off Russia the Bolshevik revolution was a blood
y affair, but its American admirers were unable to stir comparable passions here.

  Five years later this American child born in 1920 still seemed to be poised for a life of ever greater prosperity, opportunity, and excitement. President Calvin “Silent Cal” Coolidge was a benign presence in the White House, content to let the bankers, industrialists, and speculators run the country as they saw fit.

  As the twenties roared along, the Four Horsemen of Notre Dame were giving Saturdays new meaning with their college football heroics. Jack Dempsey and Gene Tunney were raising the spectacle of heavyweight boxing matches to new heights of frenzy. Baseball was a daytime game and a true national pastime, from the fabled Yankee Stadium to the sandlots in rural America.

  The New Yorker was launched, and the place of magazines occupied a higher order. Flappers were dancing the Charleston; Fitzgerald was publishing The Great Gatsby; the Scopes trial was under way in Tennessee, with Clarence Darrow and William Jennings Bryan in a passionate and theatrical debate on evolution versus the Scriptures. A. Philip Randolph organized the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, the beginning of a long struggle to force America to face its shameful policies and practices on race.

  By the time this young American who had such a promising start reached the age of ten, his earlier prospects were shattered; the fault lines were active everywhere: the stock market was struggling to recover from the crash of 1929, but the damage was too great. U.S. income was falling fast. Thirteen hundred banks closed. Businesses were failing everywhere, sending four and a half million people onto the streets with no safety net. The average American farm family had an annual cash income of four hundred dollars.