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A review by whatellaread
When the Sea Came Alive: An Oral History of D-Day by Garrett M. Graff
challenging
dark
emotional
informative
inspiring
tense
4.5
"I was just a young kid, like the rest of them, trying to free the world from the Nazis. We did that, but we still haven't learned a damn thing." - Pvt. Frank Palys
Writing really compelling oral history requires the ability to convey the breath of history through the depth of specificity, threading a needle in way that captures a massive moment in history through raw individual perspective. I don't think anyone is doing this as capably as Garrett Graff (whose first oral history "Only Plane in the Sky" about 9/11 is if anything even more compelling). In "When the Sea Came Alive", Graff weaves together narratives from people at every level of the armed forces with civilians caught up in the invasion of Normandy to create an utterly vivid and spellbinding minute by minute breakdown of both the day itself and the preparations leading up to it. We hear from French citizens, weather observers in Ireland, Polish forced laborers, and journalists, infantry and generals on both sides, Prime Ministers, planners, and manufacturers, sometimes in long quotes and sometimes in rapid fire, single sentences that convey the intensity and pressure of the day. The tension that Graff manages to build between all these varied accounts is vivid and compelling. At times, I found myself tearing up both from the intensity of what these people experienced and from the sheer horror of reading this in 2025, where people in power in this country quote Hitler and give Nazi salutes and spread a hollow, white supremacist and ideologically weak nationalist vision.
As the people at the highest levels of power quote Hitler and give Nazi salutes, its hard not to ask what was it all for. Or, in the words of a solider in the final pages of the powerful book: "when you look how peaceful it looks now, all those crosses, you cannot help but think, what a terrible, terrible waste."
Note: I listened to the audio for this, which I strongly recommend, but I did find that even Graff's careful curation cannot cut through the chaos of the morning of June 6th and it was easy to get lost at times in ways that might have been helped by also having the book in hand.
Writing really compelling oral history requires the ability to convey the breath of history through the depth of specificity, threading a needle in way that captures a massive moment in history through raw individual perspective. I don't think anyone is doing this as capably as Garrett Graff (whose first oral history "Only Plane in the Sky" about 9/11 is if anything even more compelling). In "When the Sea Came Alive", Graff weaves together narratives from people at every level of the armed forces with civilians caught up in the invasion of Normandy to create an utterly vivid and spellbinding minute by minute breakdown of both the day itself and the preparations leading up to it. We hear from French citizens, weather observers in Ireland, Polish forced laborers, and journalists, infantry and generals on both sides, Prime Ministers, planners, and manufacturers, sometimes in long quotes and sometimes in rapid fire, single sentences that convey the intensity and pressure of the day. The tension that Graff manages to build between all these varied accounts is vivid and compelling. At times, I found myself tearing up both from the intensity of what these people experienced and from the sheer horror of reading this in 2025, where people in power in this country quote Hitler and give Nazi salutes and spread a hollow, white supremacist and ideologically weak nationalist vision.
As the people at the highest levels of power quote Hitler and give Nazi salutes, its hard not to ask what was it all for. Or, in the words of a solider in the final pages of the powerful book: "when you look how peaceful it looks now, all those crosses, you cannot help but think, what a terrible, terrible waste."
Note: I listened to the audio for this, which I strongly recommend, but I did find that even Graff's careful curation cannot cut through the chaos of the morning of June 6th and it was easy to get lost at times in ways that might have been helped by also having the book in hand.