It was a few minutes before 10 p.m. Eastern time on Tuesday, June 6, 1944, when President Franklin D. Roosevelt began his radio broadcast to an anxious nation. Earlier that day, he had held a press conference for 180 reporters about the D-Day invasion, its scale and seriousness. Special editions of newspapers across the country—big cities and small towns too—led with the same story and headlines: The war in Europe had begun.
Our soldiers, airmen and seamen, Americans learned that day, were embarked on an invasion of massive proportions to liberate the European Continent from Hitler's war machine. They crawled out of the sea and dropped from the sky—160,000 Allied troops in all landed along a heavily fortified, 50-mile stretch of French coastline, supported by more than 5,000 ships and 13,000 aircraft. The stakes could not have been higher: The fate of the free world hung in the balance.
By that evening, a solemnity fell over the country. If you remember September 11, 2001—the day of and the day after—what was most distinctive about it was the silence. The stillness. It was as if the world had suddenly stopped. Churches filled up. Synagogues filled up. Mosques filled up. Families huddled together.
Imagine 9/11 on a much larger scale and you can begin to comprehend what America was like on June 6 and the days after. It was something my parents, whose lives were shaped by World War II, never forgot. Or their friends. Because the war wasn't an abstraction to them. Their husbands, fathers, brothers and sons—and so many family friends—were doing the fighting. And wives, mothers, daughters and sisters too were in harm's way while serving as nurses on the war front.
The night of June 6, Roosevelt was finally ready to address the nation. The true mass medium of the day wasn't TV. It was radio. And Roosevelt, like Winston Churchill, was a master of the medium. What would he tell Americans that night? What would he say to the families whose sons had volunteered for the war? What would he say to a nation on edge?
Roosevelt understood the gravity of it all. He understood that it would take more than just a mobilization of our industrial power to beat back the forces of Hitler. In this address to the nation, he hoped to harness our spiritual power too.
Which is why his 535-word, six-minute radio address took the form of a prayer. Roosevelt wrote it with assistance from his daughter, Anna, and her husband and distributed it to newspapers across the country so Americans could pray along with him.
At 9:57 that night, Roosevelt's prayer began:
Almighty God: Our sons, pride of our Nation, this day have set upon a mighty endeavor, a struggle to preserve our Republic, our religion, and our civilization, and to set free a suffering humanity. Lead them straight and true; give strength to their arms, stoutness to their hearts, steadfastness in their faith. They will need Thy blessings.... Success may not come with rushing speed, but we shall return again and again; and we know that by Thy grace, and by the righteousness of our cause, our sons will triumph.
Roosevelt then shifted his prayer to the suffering, loss and grief that were likely to come.
Men's souls will be shaken with the violences of war. Some will never return. Embrace these, Father, and receive them, Thy heroic servants, into Thy kingdom.
Roosevelt then turned to Americans at home, pleading with them to continue with their prayers and to make any and all sacrifices to support America's fight to liberate Europe.
"Many people have urged that I call the Nation into a single day of special prayer. But because the road is long and the desire is great, I ask that our people devote themselves in a continuance of prayer.... O Lord, give us Faith. Give us Faith in Thee; Faith in our sons; Faith in each other; Faith in our united crusade. Let not the keenness of our spirit ever be dulled.
This is how Roosevelt ended things. It may be the most powerful and purposeful part of any public address by an American wartime president.
With Thy blessing, we shall prevail over the unholy forces of our enemy. Help us to conquer the apostles of greed and racial arrogancies. Lead us to the saving of our country, and with our sister Nations into a world unity that will spell a sure peace, a peace invulnerable to the schemings of unworthy men. And a peace that will let all of men live in freedom, reaping the just rewards of their honest toil. Thy will be done, Almighty God. Amen."
Over 100 million people worldwide heard Roosevelt's plea over the airwaves, including many living in Nazi-occupied Europe. One was a teenage Jewish girl sequestered in a secret annex (a small attic) in Amsterdam. When she heard the American president's voice invoking "almighty God," it gave her hope.
Her name was Anne Frank. "The best part of this news is that I have the feeling friends are approaching," she wrote in her diary. "We have been oppressed by those terrible Germans for so long that the thought of delivery fills us with confidence.
"I may yet be able to go back to school in September or October," she ended the day's entry. She never returned to school. She died at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in February or March 1945.
More than 4.400 Americans never returned home from that opening day of fighting. By the time the battle for Normandy had been won, 29,000 men, mostly young, never returned home
One soldier who never came back was John Lapadula, a 17-year-old from West New York, New Jersey. He volunteered for the Army the moment he was old enough to do so. He was my mother's only brother and her father's only son. The uncle I never knew. He was one of 416,000 Americans who died defending the world from tyranny by war's end.
America's industrial strength and our energy resources no doubt played a part in the Allied victory. So did the courage and selflessness of our troops, Black and white and from every ethnic background, along with the sacrifices of millions on the home front, including an army of women known as Rosie the Riveters.
But the spiritual power—the prayer power—of our people was a resource too. And it was unleashed by Roosevelt that night in 1944 in what would become America's largest mass prayer in our history—and world history too.
Prayer helped us endure the war and prevail, providing peace in the midst of chaos and hope in the midst of hopelessness.
Uncommon Knowledge
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