"Every Man Was a Hero"

"From this day to the ending of the world

... we in it shall be remembered,—

... we band of brothers;

For he today that sheds his blood with me

Shall be my brother."

—King Henry V

The wind howled in the darkness as they went to the meeting. It was just before 4 a.m. on June 5,1944, and the rain slashed at them "in horizontal streaks," Dwight Eisenhower recalled later. The commanders of Operation Overlord were gathering around the fireplace in the library of Southwick House, outside Portsmouth, to hear a Scottish group captain named J.M. Stagg predict the next day's weather. On the basis of Stagg's calculations, Eisenhower would have to decide whether to give the attack order to the nearly 3 million troops assembled in southern Britain for the greatest seaborne invasion in history, the assault on Hitler's Atlantic Wall.

Just the previous day, Stagg had warned that a gale would strike on June 5, and Eisenhower had reluctantly ordered a 24-hour postponement of Dday. The first troopships, already at sea, had to be called back. But now that the storm was actually upon them, Stagg offered what he called "a gleam of hope for you, sir." The next day, June 6, there would be some clearing of the skies, a break of perhaps 36 hours, no more. The cloud ceiling over the Normandy beaches would be about 3,000 feet, the waves only about three feet high.

The risks were tremendous. Postponement would mean another month before the moon and tides would again be so favorable, yet a miscalculation now might end in enormous casualties, perhaps even a shattering defeat. "I ... sat silently reviewing these things, maybe, I'd say, 35 or 45 seconds ..." said Eisenhower, who had reviewed these same things many times before. "I just got up and said, 'O.K., we'll go.' "

It has been written that there is a tide in the affairs of men, which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune. Until Eisenhower made his decision, and until the highly uncertain outcome of D-day was assured, it was still theoretically possible that Hitler might yet win the war, or at least achieve a stalemate that would leave him the master of most of Europe.

The Allies had regained a great deal since the darkest days of 1941 and early 1942, when the Germans' panzer divisions swept to within 40 miles of Moscow and their Japanese allies struck at Pearl Harbor, the Philippines, Malaya. The hitherto invincible Japanese navy had been checked at the Battle of Midway in June 1942, the Soviets held fast at Stalingrad, and the Anglo-American invasion of North Africa that autumn inspired Churchill to say that although victory there might not be the beginning of the end, it was perhaps "the end of the beginning."

Now, two years later, the Soviets had smashed all the way to the Polish frontier; the Americans had pushed northward to the gates of Rome; fleets of Allied bombers were steadily pulverizing all the major cities of Germany. But Hitler's battle-hardened force of 7 million men still dominated an empire extending 1,300 miles from the Atlantic to the Dnieper, and his scientists were on the verge of unsheathing their promised victory weapons, the long-range V-1 buzz bomb and