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So they improvised, deciding to board the Higgins boats on the deck of the ship, and hoist them, full, into the sea. John scrambled into a boat with his men, and the crane lifted it, but the boat got caught on the TJ’s railing and almost tipped over and tumbled the men into the water. They held on for dear life. Just at that second a wave came and righted the ship, which untangled the boat, and they were lowered safe into the sea.
It took John’s five little boats four hours to cover the nine miles to the beach. “They were the worst hours of our lives. It was pitch black, cold, and the rain was coming down in sheets, drenching us. The boats were being tossed in the waves, making all of us violently sick. We’d all been given the big breakfast. Hardly anyone could hold it down. Packed in like that, with the boat’s high walls. A cry went up: ‘For Christ’s sake, do it in your helmet!’”
“Around 4 a.m. the dawn broke and a pale light spread across the sea, and now we could see that we were in the middle of an armada — every kind of boat, destroyers, probably the greatest array of sea power ever gathered.”
Now they heard the sound, the deep boom of the shells from the battleships farther out at sea, shelling the beach to clear a path. And above, barely visible through clouds, they saw the transport planes pushing through to drop paratroopers from the 82nd and 101st Airborne divisions. “Those were brave men.”
At 5 a.m. they were close enough to shore to recognize some landmarks — a spit of land, a slight rise of a bluff. In front of them they saw some faster, sleeker British boats trying desperately to stay afloat in the choppy water. As the Americans watched, three of the boats flipped over and sank, drowning all the men. A British navigator went by in a different kind of boat. “He was standing up, and he called out to my friend in a jaunty British accent, ‘I say, fellows, which way to Pointe du Hoc?’ That was one of the landmarks. It was expected to be the toughest beach of all. My friend yelled out that it was up to our right. ‘Very good!’ the man cried out, and then went on by with a little wave of his hand.” John later doubted the man had lived another hour.
Closer to shore, a furious din — “It was like a Fourth of July celebration multiplied by a thousand.” By 6 a.m. they were eight hundred yards from shore. All five boats of the squadron had stayed together, a triumph in those conditions. The light had brightened enough that John could see his wristwatch. “At 6:20, I waved them in with a hard chop of my arm: Go!”
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The troops at Omaha Beach took terrible fire. Half the soldiers from John’s five boats were killed or wounded. “It was a horrible sight. But I had to concentrate on doing my job.” To make room for the next wave of landings, John raised the ramp, backed out, turned around, and sped back to the TJ. “I remember waving hello to the soldiers in the incoming boats, as if we were all on launches for a pleasure cruise. I remember thinking how odd that such gestures of civility would persist amid such horror.”
Back at the TJ, he was told to take a second breakfast in the wardroom — white tablecloths, steward’s mates. It was surreal, “from Dog Red Beach to the Ritz.” As he ate he heard in the background the quiet boom of the liberation of Europe. Then back to a Higgins boat for another run at the beach. This time the ramp lowered, and he allowed himself to get off.
Dog Red Beach was secure, littered with wrecked landing craft of every kind. The bodies of the dead and wounded had been carried up onto a rise below a bluff. He felt thankful he had survived. “Then I took a few breaths and felt elated, proud to have played a part in maybe the biggest battle in history.”
John went on to landings in Marseilles, Iwo Jima, and Okinawa. After he came home he went to work at a relatively small Wall Street investment firm called Goldman Sachs, and in the next fifty years he went on to chair it, to work in Ronald Reagan’s State Department, and to head great organizations such as the International Rescue Committee. He is, in that beautiful old phrase, a public citizen.
But if you asked him today his greatest moment, he’d say that day on the beach, when he was alive and young and had done something dazzling. “At that moment, dead tired, soaked to the skin, I would not have wanted to be anywhere else in the world.”
When I asked John Whitehead why he had done what he’d done, he spoke of things you’ve heard before — patriotism, a young man’s excitement at wearing the uniform, an acceptance of the idea of sacrifice. And something else.
One day, as a teenager, just before or just after the war began, he saw something amazing. He was swimming off the Jersey Shore with his friends, and suddenly there, peering up from the waves, was the periscope of a submarine. A German submarine, surveying the American shore. The sight amazed and shook him. America was under threat. It needed his protection.
It was a straight line from that moment to Red Dog Beach.
***
Why do we tell these stories? Because tales of courage move us, inspire us. Because we long for greatness, and wish to know the specific facts and data of a heroic act so we can fix it more firmly in our minds. Because our country is more divided now than it was then, and it comforts us to think of a time when we were united, and did something great.
Excerpted from “Patriotic Grace: How We Lost it and How We Can Recover It.” Copyright (c) 2008 by Peggy Noonan. Reprinted with permission from HarperCollins. To read more, click here.
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