This reading group guide for When the Sea Came Alive includes an introduction, discussion questions, ideas for enhancing your book club, and a Q&A with author Garrett M. Graff. The suggested questions are intended to help your reading group find new and interesting angles and topics for your discussion. We hope that these ideas will enrich your conversation and increase your enjoyment of the book.

Introduction

June 6, 1944—known to us all as D-Day—is one of history’s greatest and most unbelievable military triumphs. The surprise sunrise landing of more than 150,000 Allied troops on the beaches of occupied northern France is one of the most consequential days of the twentieth century. Now, Pulitzer Prize finalist Garrett M. Graff, historian and author of The Only Plane in the Sky and Watergate, brings together a one-of-a-kind, bestselling oral history that explores this seminal event in vivid, heart-pounding detail. A visceral, page-turning drama told through the eyes of those who experienced it—from soldiers, nurses, pilots, children, neighbors, sailors, politicians, volunteers, photographers, reporters, and so many more, When the Sea Came Alive “is the sort of book that is smart, inspiring, and powerful—and adds so much to our knowledge of what that day was like and its historic importance forever” (Chris Bohjalian)—an unforgettable, fitting tribute to the men and women of the Greatest Generation.

Topics & Questions for Discussion

1. Before reading When the Sea Came Alive, what came to mind when you thought of D-Day? Has that meaning changed after reading this book?

2. What other depictions or representations of D-Day have you seen, read, or heard? How did they frame your understanding of the day’s events?

3. How does reading oral history differ from reading traditional narrative history? Do you have a format that you prefer, or think is more effective for storytelling?

4. Were there any chapters or moments in When the Sea Came Alive that were particularly difficult to read? Inspiring? Impactful?

5. What surprised you most about the stories, action, or people featured in the book?

6. D-Day is typically categorized as a war narrative, but in When the Sea Came Alive, it’s presented as a human drama, one that affects and involves a much larger, global community. Would you still call D-Day “a war story” after reading this book?

7. “D-Day” has become a shorthand when counting down to any major event. What are other “D-Days” in our modern history, and how do they compare?

8. Stories of World War II, in general, have endured and resonated in contemporary reading—novels, history, and more. What do you think it is about this particular moment in time that still feels so important and relevant?

If this is a period of time you enjoy reading about, what are some of your other favorite books?

9. When the Sea Came Alive features stories from people fighting by land, sea, and air. Did one stand out as particularly harrowing, affecting, or interesting to you?

10. While much of When the Sea Came Alive focuses on the everyday soldiers and people affected by the action at Normandy, there are some names that many readers will recognize: Winston Churchill, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Charles de Gaulle, Martha Gellhorn, Bob Hope, among others. Which were most interesting to you?

11. When the Sea Came Alive broadens the traditional scope of the landing’s narrative to include women, journalists, civilians, Black soldiers, and more. What other seminal global or American moments could be re-explored through the voices of other communities?

12. As we move forward and D-Day becomes more distant history, do you think it will hold the same weight and that its legacy will hold? How can we ensure that stories of the day survive?

Enhance Your Book Club

1. There are many visual records of D-Day available to us—movies, documentaries, newsreels, archival clips, and after-the-fact interviews. After reading When the Sea Came Alive, watch any of them as a group or individual members to add a layer of understanding to the action and impact of the day.

2. Have each member of your book club select a person from When the Sea Came Alive that captured their attention at various points in the narrative. Try to research more about that person and what happened to them after June 6, 1944, and present your findings at your next meeting.

3. Create an oral history project of your own! Collect audio recordings of members of your book club sharing their experiences of various historic or seminal moments, and then expand the interviews to friends, family, and community members.

A Conversation with Garrett M. Graff

Q: Your first work of oral history, The Only Plane in the Sky, focused on September 11, 2001, a uniquely monumental event in modern American history. When the Sea Came Alive echoes that model but brings us into a more global moment—the Allied landings at Normandy, which turned the tide of the Second World War and all but secured a victory against fascism.

Why did you choose D-Day, and what made you choose oral history as the format to explore it in?

A: In thinking about what oral history to tackle after 9/11, D-Day seemed a logical choice. September 11, 2001, is the most famous and consequential date of the twenty-first century, and June 6, 1944, is the most famous and consequential date of the twentieth century—days upon which the whole world and the whole century turned. There are only certain kinds of events that work for a book-length oral history—it needs to be an event of gigantic proportions, where you have a cast of thousands to draw upon. Moreover, you need incredible archives and primary sources, so it needs to be something where lots of others before you have been interested in recording memories and experiences. D-Day certainly fit that bill, even though it took decades for many of the participants to be ready to record their memories.

Also, like 9/11, while everyone knows the main story and outcome, we’ve lost sight in history of what that day was like to experience at the human level, and, to me, that’s the real power of oral history—it puts you back in the moment knowing only what the participants knew at the time. We view D-Day as this heroic world-changing triumph, one of the greatest days in all of history, and yet to the participants in that day, to hear them tell of June 5 or June 6, they were nervous, scared, and worried about what was to come. As Pvt. John Barnes says in the book, “We were handed a printed sheet of paper with Eisenhower’s address to the troops: ‘You are about to embark upon the Great Crusade. Toward which we have striven these many months. The eyes of the world are upon you. . . .’ We didn’t feel like Crusaders.” They didn’t know they were about to be doing something great—they wondered whether it would succeed at all and whether they’d live to see the end of the day to come.

Q: What is your earliest memory of hearing about or understanding what D-Day was?

A: I was in my early teens during the fiftieth anniversary events of the 1990s and devoured the major works of that time—from Stephen Ambrose’s narrative D-Day, the research files for which I used for this oral history, to Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan. I think anyone who watches those first minutes of Saving Private Ryan will never forget it and never think of D-Day the same again.

Q: This is cheating, perhaps, because it’s also a question for our reading group guide, but: what do you think it is about World War II that feels so important and so resonant for contemporary readers?

A: I’m in my forties now, and for my parents’ generation—the Baby Boomers—World War II was often the defining event of their parents’ lives. And yet, for most World War II veterans, they didn’t talk much about the war, and I think there’s still a great longing among many Baby Boomers to know what their dads went through in the war (it was, for most, their dads, after all). It was this huge shadow across decades in their lives. I don’t spend much time in the book following soldiers’ lives back to the US after the war, but these millions of veterans had these horrific, violent experiences, participated in these giant heroic events, built these deep friendships—usually all in a few years in their teens or early twenties—and then came back to the US and lived the rest of their lives in near silence about their wars.

The other thing that stands out in modern feelings of World War II is that it was the “Good War,” the war America understood, that was morally unambiguously good, and that was won with decisive, overwhelming, unconditional victory. We haven’t had a war or conflict like that since—Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, and a whole host of smaller military expeditions, like the Iranian hostage rescue, Panama, or Somalia, have had much more mixed historical legacies and feel harder to celebrate as a country.

Q: How did you select the stories to feature in When the Sea Came Alive? Where are they all from? Were there elements of the story you were most excited to explore or specific voices you wanted to introduce (or re-introduce) to a new generation of readers?

A: As the source notes show, I drew from all over—there’s a huge repository of D-Day memories and World War II oral histories at the National World War II Museum in New Orleans, and thanks to their amazing archivist, I was able to get access to hundreds of those. From there, I spent a year digging up every source I could find—from old newspapers and magazines on eBay, to old memoirs and war reports in used bookstores, to pamphlets and oral histories in local historical societies in the US and the UK. At the Portsmouth D-Day museum and Imperial War Museum in the UK, I spent a couple days flipping through boxes and boxes of old letters and postcards—it feels so different to handle pieces of history like that.

In some of the cases, particularly in the files at the Imperial War Museum, where I found these postcards, people had written in the 1970s about their D-Day memories for a contest for the then-3oth anniversary, I had this overwhelming sense that I might be the last person to ever read some of these postcards, letters, and memories. I’ve always been profoundly moved by the quote attributed to Ernest Hemingway, himself of course a D-Day participant: “Every man has two deaths, when he is buried in the ground and the last time someone says his name. In some ways men can be immortal.” That idea of the two deaths has roots in a lot of spiritual traditions too, and I really felt that going through some of the personal letters, telegrams, and postcards. Telling their stories, using their words, was literally helping keep their memories alive.

Q: Both When the Sea Came Alive and The Only Plane in the Sky—and, in some ways, your book Watergate, which was a work of narrative history, not oral history—focus on events that have also been depicted on-screen. Do you watch visual representations of the events before or during your process, or do you avoid them in case they might color your view or skew your focus?

A: I certainly have gobbled up documentaries on all three subjects—and how could you write a book about D-Day without watching Saving Private Ryan, Band of Brothers, or The Longest Day? All of them actually hold up pretty well; what’s remarkable about The Longest Day, actually, is how many of the “best” stories from D-Day Cornelius Ryan had managed to find and gather by his 1959 book. And, wow, that cast! We’ve probably never had a movie since that featured so many big-name stars! But when I’m writing more narrative history, I am more careful about consuming fictional “histories”—there’s a well-liked novel by a great author, Thomas Mallon, about Watergate, for instance, that I’ve never read, just because I wanted to be sure that it didn’t accidentally plant the seed of a false anecdote or scene in my brain.

Q: Both of your oral histories also have very evocative titles. Why do you choose that route, instead of just something like “D-Day: An Oral History”?

A: To me, you want a quote like those—“We’re the only plane in the sky” or “The sea had come alive”—to ground that this isn’t your “normal” history of an event, that it’s a more human and more observational approach to the stories we’re used to. Everyone who picks up a book on D-Day or 9/11 knows how the story ends, of course. The drama comes in the lives lived amid the event we know so well.

Q: D-Day took place at Normandy, but many people might misinterpret or don’t quite know the scale of the area. A lot of ground was covered in the landing, and When the Sea Came Alive moves between a number of different locations. How did you seek to balance these shifts, and how does setting work in the context of oral history?

A: That was a tremendous challenge here—D-Day is one of the best covered events of all time. Almost every single chapter of this book has been the subject of multiple full, book-length projects. And as you say, it covered a tremendous amount of physical territory—something I understood for the first time when I visited Normandy. We stayed in the middle, in Bayeux, and the first day, to get to the far western edge of D-Day, where the American paratroopers fought, we drove almost an hour—and then another day, to get to the eastern flank, where the British paratroopers fought, we drove almost an hour in the other direction.

One thing I felt very strongly about was trying to balance all the units and perspectives and not just tell the “greatest hits of D-Day.” So many Americans, particularly, think of D-Day as “just” the horror of Omaha Beach. And for so many decades, D-Day has been told as this story primarily about white men. But there were so many people and places of that day, including stories like Waverly Woodson, Jr. Beyond that, for instance, I really wanted to make sure I did justice to the story of the Canadians at Juno Beach—the Canadian story has long been overlooked in history, sandwiched between the “big” stories of the American and British beaches, but in some ways, the Canadian operation was particularly emotionally fraught that day because of the disaster at Dieppe. It was a chance for Canada to avenge its earlier defeat.

Q: Much of the action of When the Sea Came Alive takes place on June 6, but earlier chapters explore the lead-up to planning and executing the landing, and there are some segments at the end of the book that discuss the aftermath and impact. Were there more parts of the story, outside of the set time frame, that you wish you could have featured?

A: My 9/11 oral history has only a single chapter that takes place before 9/11 and it covers only the events of September 10th. I had originally figured that this would be the same—surely the book would begin maybe noon on June 5 and then move forward. But as I got into the research, I realized that so much of the success and the drama of D-Day took place long beforehand. In fact, as I cover in the book, the units headed to Utah Beach suffered their biggest casualties weeks before the event, at Exercise Tiger, and actually—to me—the most dramatic chapter in the entire book, the tensest, most nail-biting moments come in the chapter about the weather forecast for June 6th and Ike’s decision to launch.

Q: This may be an odd question, but: we often refer to people, even in works of narrative history, as “characters,” but that doesn’t seem appropriate or true when discussing oral history because these people are very real, and the experience of reading their exact words and perspectives feels so intimate. How do you refer to them, or like to think of them, when you’re speaking about When the Sea Came Alive, or The Only Plane in the Sky?

A: I actually do refer to them as “characters” or “voices.” One of the things that’s true in both books is that there are very few “characters” or “voices” that you follow through the entire book. Many people appear only in a single section and sometimes even for just a single line. There are just shy of 700 voices in the book—I think the final number was something like 692—and there can’t be more than a few dozen that appear throughout the book.

Q: All your books, both oral histories and traditional narratives, seek to somehow explain or provide context for the world we’re currently living in? How does D-Day relate to this present moment?

A: I wish the fight of D-Day actually felt less relevant to me than it does. We’re in this really hard moment as a country, debating what America is and what it isn’t. There’s a simpler answer to that question than many would like to admit: What we’ll fight for is what we are. What that Greatest Generation fought for on D-Day was the noblest of fights—an entire invasion, the first-ever successful cross-Channel invasion from Britain in history, launched not to subjugate or seize but to liberate a continent darkened by authoritarianism. As the invasion’s supreme allied commander, Gen. Dwight Eisenhower, told CBS’s Walter Cronkite, when they returned to Normandy in 1964 for the twentieth anniversary, “These men came here—British, and our other allies, Americans—to storm these beaches for one purpose only, not to gain anything for ourselves, not to fulfill any ambitions that America had for conquest, but just to preserve freedom.” To me, the question I wrestle with almost every day in modern American life, is whether we are as willing as a nation to carry forward the torch of World War II and defend freedom today as that generation was then?

Q: While the remaining members of “the Greatest Generation” are dwindling as time passes, there are many family members and friends who carry the stories of their loved ones. Have you heard from any of them? What is it like getting those messages?

A: Yes, I’ve been amazed at how many stories I’ve heard, at book talks or in emails, from family members. While I mentioned earlier that many of that generation never talked about their experiences, the opposite is also true—I was particularly struck by one woman, whose dad fought in D-Day, who came up to me at one of my first book events to tell me about her dad’s best friend who died in D-Day. This was a soldier, mind you, she’d never met, who died years and years before she was born, but whose name and background and short life she was still able to talk about eight decades later because his life had meant so much to her dad.

Q: What do you hope that readers of When the Sea Came Alive take away from the experience?

A: To me, telling this story is about remembering the high cost of freedom and what it takes to preserve and protect democracy. We so often hear the platitudes of bumper-sticker patriotism—“Freedom isn’t free!”—and D-Day is, first and foremost, the story of what that really means in human lives. Each day, we should wrestle with the question of what we will do with the legacy that Greatest Generation defended and bequeathed us. The story of American freedom has always been of an imperfect nation seeking generation after generation to be better—to be more equal, more inclusive, and more free. It is a story of hard-fought rights and bloodily defended liberties that each generation of Americans has handed down to the next, a vision for a future where each successive generation will improve upon the past. D-Day is the most audacious thing humans have ever done—nothing has ever unfolded on a grander, larger scale—and it is the story of the sacrifice and Herculean effort it took for us to live our lives in freedom today.

Q: Another RGG/Q&A crossover question, for your take: As we move forward and D-Day becomes more distant history, do you think it will hold the same weight and that its legacy will hold? How can we ensure that stories of the day survive?

A: My 9/11 book came out in 2019 for the 18th anniversary of 9/11, which felt like when that day started to shift from memory to history. There were now a generation of students who had grown up in a world fundamentally shaped by 9/11, but didn’t remember the day at all. I wanted my book to help them understand the legacy of that day.

This book, coming out for the 80th anniversary in 2024, captures the other end of that cycle. We’re losing the last of that Greatest Generation.

In 2021, Harry Parham, the last Black combat veteran of D-Day died at 99. In July 2023, Leon Gautier, the last surviving French commando at D-Day, died. In December 2023, it was Maureen Sweeney, the Irish weather observer whose reports of storms over the Atlantic changed the course of D-Day. In April 2024, it was Bill Gladden, who had been part of the British 6th Airborne Division’s glider landing on D-Day and had hoped, at age 100, to survive to return to Normandy for that June’s 80th anniversary. The UK now estimates that there are just 5 or 6 living D-Day veterans left; the US has perhaps just a few hundred. We have, right now, basically every first-hand memory of D-Day we will ever have.

Someday in the next couple of years, as that last living veteran passes, D-Day will slip entirely from memory into history. My hope is that this book will help future generations understand that day.

Q: Last question: some eagle-eyed readers might have noticed that certain names pop up across or between your books. Is this on purpose, or a fun coincidence? Can you tell us more about the “Garrett Graff Literary-Historical Universe” and what interests or excites you about these subtle overlaps?

A: Ha! Yes, this is something I actually think about a lot—and it’s part of how I think about would make a good topic for me to write about. Much as there’s a Marvel Cinematic Universe or DC Universe, where all those comic heroes and villains live and interact, I think of my collected books in the same way—they’re this living cinematic universe of our time, where all the books and stories reflect and interact with one another and the “characters” cross from one book to another. I’m just writing my tenth book now, and if you line them all up, you’d end up with one of those crazy spider-webs on a bulletin board with all the connections.

Dwight Eisenhower has been a major “character” in two of my other books as well, Raven Rock—about the Cold War nuclear war plans—and Watergate, where he chooses a young Richard Nixon as his vice president. My next book, also an oral history about World War II, Destroyer of Worlds, which follows the Manhattan Project and the making and use of the first atomic bombs, not only features some of the voices from this D-Day book (obviously!) but also features a whole bunch of people who—amazingly—were previously in my book on UFOs, a book that also featured a lot of the same Cold War anxieties and events that I wrote about in Raven Rock.

To me, a really fun part of the history is finding how all these eras and threads influence and change one another. Who would have imagined that a young officer at D-Day, Elliot Richardson, would then someday be the central figure in the Saturday Night Massacre of Watergate? Or that the 509th Bomb Composite Group, the Air Force unit that dropped the atomic bombs, would then return to the States and be assigned to the base at Roswell, New Mexico, where, in 1947, its commander, Col. William Blanchard, who had been the backup B-29 pilot for the Hiroshima bombing, would be the person to put out a statement saying that the Air Force had recovered a crashed “flying saucer” that beget the whole Roswell UFO conspiracy?