D-Day, Ike Hour

Television serves best when it serves history, and last Friday night it made history as well. On the eve of the 20th anniversary of the invasion of Normandy, CBS Reports presented a program about Dday. It started by showing Omaha Beach as it looks today --bathers, volleyballs, open sky, and little boys playing in the rotted shells of LSTs. Then Dwight D. Eisenhower walked up from the water's edge and began to talk about it.

He talked for 90 minutes, with Walter Cronkite getting a word in occasionally. He talked from a Jeep while he drove it; he talked from the deck of a British frigate; he talked from the window of a German observation bunker; he described the greatest show in military history from plan to execution. Often almost professionally vague as President, Eisenhower as Commanding General was a man of self-assurance and enthusiasm, reeled off statistics with computer ease, and often, as he gestured toward empty stretches of beach or water, film clips would appear, showing the precise scene 20 years earlier, jammed with the action of war.

Best Bargain. The most fascinating effect of these scenes was a matter of chronology, as the program reached back across the nearer distance of Ike's genial presidency to show a man slightly but substantially different, reliving his somewhat presidential generalcy in command of the corporate war. Against the background of the vast invasion, with organization reaching to the horizons, his special colloquial touch stood out retrospectively as the small force that brought the great ones to human terms and made the whole huge enterprise go so well.

Sitting in his still-preserved invasion room at Southwick House near Portsmouth, he said that the D-day he had picked was June 5, but "it wasn't in the cards. You couldn't go. The weather was terrible. This house was shaking."

Eisenhower recalled the "little grin" on the meteorologist's face when he came in announcing a break for June 6. "It was the best of a bad bargain," Ike told Cronkite. "He predicted this good weather would last between 24 and 36 hours, but I said, 'O.K., we'll go,' and this room was emptied in two seconds."

Waiting Time. With Operation Overlord in motion, there was nothing much for Ike to do but wait nervously for H-hour. Had he indeed written a message to be broadcast in case of failure? Cronkite wondered. "Well, Walter, I must tell you something. I did," said Ike. The message had read: "The landing has been a failure and it's no one's fault but mine." Grinning at Cronkite, Ike shrugged. "If it did fail," he said, "I was going into oblivion anyway, so I might as well take full responsibility."

He went around to see several units of the 101st Airborne Division, and the paratroopers told him not to worry: they would button things up on arrival in France. As they took off, "I watched them out of sight," Ike told Cronkite, who asked if it were true that tears had been observed in his eyes. "It could have been possible," said Ike. "Goodness knows those fellows meant a lot to me."

On Sea & Land. But the greatness of the program was not so much in its superb vignettes as in the experience of watching Eisenhower move through them, whether he was standing on the cliffs of Pointe du Hoc remembering the Rangers ("regular monkeys") who scaled them, contemplating Omaha Beach in a light rain with water glistening on his hat and droplets forming on his nose, or looking out over the water and recalling that the landing craft had trouble "over here, where the currents were so bad."

In the village of Ste.-Mere-Eglise, he sat on a bench with the wife of the wartime mayor. She pointed to the steeple of the church and told him about a paratrooper from Wilmington, N.C., whose chute had caught on it, and how he had hung there for hours, pretending to be dead. Eventually the Germans cut him down and took him prisoner.

In the end, President Eisenhower sat in an American military cemetery at St.-Laurent-sur-Mer and, with thousands of white crosses forming a background for his words, talked about his own son, who had graduated from West Point on June 6, 1944, who had not died in the war, and who had given him grandchildren to brighten his life. There was no sentimentality in what he said, merely strong feeling for the dead who had gone to France, as he put it, to gain nothing for themselves.

Never before in history has such an immediate and permanent record been made of a general returning to the field of a great battle and describing it in his own words, while film archives supplied scenes of the actual warfare. It was something to see.

It is too bad that CBS is so young. If it had existed 149 years ago, it might have invited Wellington to do a show on Waterloo.

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