Revisiting Normandy: D-Day At Eighty

6 June 2024 marked the 80th anniversary of the Allied D-Day landings at Normandy. In this article History PhD candidate Felicity Hodgson shares some of her work on American women war correspondents who covered this and other campaigns of the Second World War. Through an examination of their newspaper reportage, Felicity shows how their insightful journalism provides a complex picture of Americans at war.

On 6 June 1944 thousands of Allied troops and personnel successfully landed on a series of beaches, codenamed Omaha, Utah, Gold, Juno and Sword, in Normandy, northwest France. This maritime assault, known as D-Day, was pivotal in the long road that led to the eventual defeat of Nazi Germany and the end of the Second World War in Europe in May 1945.

Of the hundreds of American war correspondents representing newspapers, magazines and radio, from across the country, only a few dozen were permitted on the beaches at D-Day. Ernie Pyle, probably the most famous American war correspondent of the time and friend to GIs everywhere and always, was one of the select few. When he arrived on the beach he surveyed the scene and mourned the “horrible waste of war”, where dead bodies bobbed in the crashing waves against the shore and personal effects such as Bibles, photographs and notebooks littered the sand; all the while, those who had survived the battle, he wrote, possessed “a grim determination” to see the war through to its conclusion (Pyle 2023). Most war correspondents, however, arrived in the days and weeks after.

In order to gain access to the warzone, all war correspondents were required to be officially accredited by the US War Department and military forces. As part of this process, they were given military uniforms and were then permitted to be embedded with the soldiers. There were over two hundred and fifty accredited American women correspondents during the war. While discrimination was not an uncommon experience for the women, it was equally true that the difficulties of war brought male soldiers and female reporters together in a close comradery.

Among the many war correspondents who followed the war and the soldiers, were two indefatigable and empathetic women: Catherine Coyne (Boston Herald) and Virginia Irwin (St Louis Post-Dispatch). Both of these women, in their mid-thirties, were career journalists and, through their consistent professional efforts, were elevated as feature war correspondents for their respective newspapers and held in high regard by readers at the time. In revisiting the work of Coyne and Irwin, which have largely been excluded from the historical record, one finds beautifully poignant prose, which placed American soldiers at its centre. Their perceptive examination of the cost of war and the wartime lives of American soldiers shows Coyne’s and Irwin’s unwavering advocacy of human dignity.

In the days after D-Day, Coyne and Irwin were in England before transferring to France in late June. Before arriving in France, Catherine Coyne interviewed injured soldiers who had recently returned from the newly liberated areas of Normandy to receive medical treatment back in England. Coyne’s interviews from June 1944 offer particular insight into soldiers’ dispositions. She noticed that they were often, jocular, laughing and “raring to go again”. Most importantly, they were indifferent to their wounds and fighting feats, a sentiment that Coyne and Irwin would see repeatedly throughout their time in Europe.

Men wounded during the assault wept “bitter tears of frustration and anger” because they had been pulled from “the greatest battle in the history of warfare”, which was “the biggest thrill in their lives”. “It galls me”, one Massachusetts paratrooper said, “I trained and then I went and got hurt and had to let my buddies down. I’ve got to get back soon.” Similarly, another man “could not control the tears that filled his eyes”, as he recalled how he broke his leg when he landed on a tree in an orchard and, despite attempts by his friend to place the knee back in the joint, it could not be fixed. He cried: “I let that kid down, that’s what galls me. I’ve got to get back there with him and the rest of our outfit” (Coyne, Boston Herald, 28 June 1944, 10 June 1944).

Similarly, at a base hospital in England Coyne interviewed the wounded from the Normandy beachhead. “A mortar crippled me”, said 19-year-old Revere Ranger, Jimmie Sullivan, simply. “I don’t know how I got the rifle wound. I don’t remember getting it.” He got it, as Coyne found out later, while reaching with his own rifle to pull another man to safety. Sullivan had a half-memory and half-knowledge of the incident. He asked Coyne “wistfully”, “do you know what the hedges of Normandy are like?” He told her how he crawled through three miles of them and then dug his “buddy hole” with his bare hands. She told readers that Sullivan “had spent five days in France but his memory was only of five days of continuous horror, eased by recollections of almost miraculous gallantry”. He seemed to realise his predicament, telling Coyne, “what happened over there is sort of run in together”, except for his memory of the chaplain, Father James Lacey, who ran from man to man, up and down the beach; in Sullivan’s words, “death detoured around him. Just to see him gave you a wonderful feeling. What a man!” (Coyne, Boston Herald, 28 June 1944).

Virginia Irwin, too, met other men who awaited transfer back to Normandy in the days following D-Day. As she discovered, many men eagerly wished that they could return to their outfit, like Captain J Stewart Williams from Long Island, New York. The 26-year-old commanded a tank company and, Irwin told readers, “saw one of his platoons blown up by a mine”. He had already received the Croix de Guerre with Silver Star for his part in the Tunisian campaign. Now, he merely grinned and told Irwin: “I’ve got a chance … There’s a ship headed for the same beach this afternoon.”

Near midnight on 6 June, Irwin climbed off the side of a ship, fifteen minutes before it departed for France, after it had been promptly resupplied. Earlier in the evening, in the wardroom, she had coffee with 34-year-old Lieutenant commander Alvin H ‘Buck’ Tutt, of Arkansas, who had led the first ship of assault troops and equipment to land on the beach. Tutt, who spoke with a “slow Ozark drawl”, had not seen his son in 18 months. The pair then stood on the deck of the Landing Ship Tank (LST) watching all the equipment being loaded when Tutt admitted:

You know, I’d like to be home right now. I’d like to take that kid of mine fishing in Mountain Fork.

At the conclusion of her article Irwin reflected:

I went over the side of the LST and down the ladder thinking that an invasion can change a lot of things, but it can’t change what is in a man’s heart. The Skipper is by now on his way to deliver his second cargo for this 48-hour-old invasion, but he would rather be fishing in an Ozark stream. (Irwin, St Louis Post-Dispatch, 9 June 1944)

Catherine Coyne’s “favorite soldier” was Lieutenant Jack Shea, who she knew from Boston, as he was the former sports copy boy for the Boston Herald. As Shea bounced out of the jeep towards her, somewhere in late-summer France, Coyne struggled to comprehend his transformation from ‘kid’ to ‘hero’, calling him a “hero to heroic GIs”. Not only did he now refer to her as “Catherine” instead of the “diffident ‘Miss Coyne’ stuff”, she noted but, critically, the decorated Shea seemed “too absurdly young to be a hero”. However, fitting both the typically humble GI nature, and also the fact that war had turned Shea into a calculated soldier, he did not wear his Silver Star because, as he told Coyne, “decorations make good targets and I don’t aim to be one.” Yet, jarringly for Coyne, this was the same man who, before the war, had asked her advice about what flowers to buy for his girlfriend.

Now, because of injury, his temporary army job was to boost morale but he wanted to go back fighting. His squad, by contrast, sung his praises, which she, again, found “hard to take”. “Even when I remembered our Shea in France”, she told fellow Bostonians, “it was difficult to imagine that shy, polite kid smashing his way through one of the closed Nazi mine-strewn exits from the beach on D-Day”. Evidently, crawling was a common way for GIs to move around; Shea, too, had crawled through over a thousand metres of marsh to get aid for a company and brigadier-general, who he insisted that Coyne write about instead. He said jokingly, “I never walked lower in my life … It was awfully funny to see machine-gun slugs-one, two, three, four-hit the clay bank right in front of my face.”

In letters to other Herald staff, he would joke about the Ranger exercises. But these exercises, Coyne concluded, had turned him into a man. The pair sat on grass and talked for a couple of hours – about Boston, about the Herald (Shea wanted to know what was happening at the newspaper), and about what he wanted to do when he returned. It took Coyne “a lot of prying to discover he had been blown from a foxhole, where he had taken refuge with the general”. Only later did Shea talk of his former platoon, only two members of whom had survived; these losses, Coyne saw, had “hurt him” (Coyne, Boston Herald, 10 August 1944).

Lieutenant Shea and Coyne were reunited later in a hotel lobby in Paris. Shea, again, unsurprisingly, did not wear his ranking insignia, which caught the ire of the major nearby. Shea explained, “I’m an infantry officer … We don’t go in for metal bars on our jackets while were [sic] in the field. Jerry sees them too easily.” He had seen others killed by snipers because the light had reflected off their medals. “An awful lot got caught”, Shea told Coyne. “Jack has seen a lot of hell in this war”, she told readers, “but every time he sees me he tries to make me laugh”. For instance, he practically fell off the lounge, laughing at the memory of a prisoner who looked like the Herald’s boxing editor, which he admitted was exaggerated by his sodium-amatol confusion (a barbiturate that was used to treat ‘shell-shock’). After falling silent for a while, still sad over the loss of his buddies, he finally turned to Coyne and “solemnly” said, “I’m one of the luckiest guys on earth … Of our original regiment that came in on D-Day there are only two officers alive today and I’m the only one in France” (Coyne, Boston Herald, 10 September 1944).

By July 1944, in a Normandy field, both Coyne and Irwin were camping with the Women’s Army Corps (WAC). The WAC was the women’s division of the US Army, which permitted women to serve in the Army without participating in combat. The WACs made much effort to maintain a semblance of normality. Outside her tent, which was pitched under an apple tree, Virginia Irwin surveyed the improvised signs arounds the camp: “Camp De La Wac”, “Waldorf Astoria”, “Dew Drop Inn” and “Last Mile Barber Shop. GI cuts of all shapes. Soup bowl specials”. The entire scene was, in Irwin’s words, “filled with a feeling of unreality”, “a feeling that cannot be put into words” because the domesticity of the WACs contrasted with the battle scars in the surrounding landscape and the destruction of the homes of the local French population. Farmers ploughed fields and waved at the Americans, while others searched through the rubble of their homes. Irwin found this resilience powerful, writing, “it is as though both the land and people say in an unspoken eloquence: ‘This is our life. No war can rob us of what is ours’”.

Both Coyne and Irwin’s war writings show this keen perception of the complexities and contradictions of war. For instance, near their tents by a stream, Coyne watched a swan swim with “solitary dignity”. The pure ivory brilliance of the swan, was such a sight that Irwin, too, was captured by its presence, so out of place in the war. It was, after all, the last surviving swan and was “haughtily oblivious to the sound of the heavy guns in the distance” (Coyne, Boston Herald, 20 July 1944; Irwin, St Louis Post-Dispatch, 22 July 1944). It was these kinds of details and insights that gave illuminated nuance to the war for readers at home.

However, Coyne and Irwin, through their constant interactions with American soldiers, knew that the soldiers, too, were capable of great insight, even if the soldiers themselves did not recognise their skills. Both women gave space for the soldiers to speak, share their experiences and interpret the war for themselves.

At the beginning of July on the Normandy beachhead, Coyne studied the landscape. She found that the battlefield did not look like a battlefield. It reminded her of Sunday traffic at Cape Cod, except that “over those roads flowed an endless parade of grim men, supplies and equipment”. She studied the carnage around her. Across from a tank ditch there was a cemetery, “a raw looking field”, she wrote, “jagged with those white sticks that serve as temporary markers for the graves of American boys”. To Coyne, these deaths were an excessive sacrifice in order to secure an unknown beachhead or field thousands of miles away from home. She wrote: “Neither of those assets seemed to justify the deaths of those two boys from Lynn and Mattapan whose graves I saw on the hill”. Her lamentations, however, did not go unnoticed. With typical American GI simplicity, one “bearded, tired looking soldier” explained:

It’s this way … We’ve got to free the French and beat the hell out of Jerry so we can go home and live in peace. Maybe some of us can’t go home.

After a pause he finished:

Anyway there are some pretty nice folks in Oklahoma. I want to live in peace. (Coyne Boston Herald, 3 July 1944)

Coyne and Irwin remained embedded with the American soldiers throughout the war, with both women writing dozens of articles during this period. From the shores of Normandy to liberated Paris, through the cold and wet autumn-winter of 1944–1945 in the Low Countries, and across the Elbe, they followed the course of the war. Both women were danced off her feet during the first linkup between American and Soviet forces in April 1945. Virginia Irwin was dis-accredited as a journalist and forced to return to America after she, with another journalist and their jeep driver, snuck into Berlin without permission at the end of April to witness the final days of Nazi Germany. Catherine Coyne stayed in Europe a little longer. While both would eventually be reintegrated into civilian life, it could never quite replace the highly charged experiences of forming such deep and emotional bonds during their encounters with American soldiers abroad.

In an article published on 1 August 1944, Virginia Irwin wrote: “I saw sights that I shall remember when younger generations are reading of this bloody war in books of history” (Irwin, St Louis Post-Dispatch, 1 August 1944). As she foresaw, the passing of 80 years challenges us to reconsider how we remember the bloody war fought on the embattled shore and beyond. Coyne and Irwin’s dispatches are a living testament from the time. They offer a textual counterpoint to the famous statue at the US Memorial at Normandy, the “Spirit of American Youth Rising from the Waves”. The inscription on the stone arches at the Memorial proclaims that “This embattled shore, portal of freedom, is forever hallowed by the ideals, the valor and the sacrifices of our fellow countrymen”. The writings of Coyne and Irwin can also play a vital part in helping us to comprehend and “forever hallow” the humanity that shines through in the testimonies of these young and unassuming American soldiers.

Felicity Hodgson is a PhD candidate in History. Her thesis explores the undervalued and under-represented history of a group of women war correspondents during the Second World War. The aim of the thesis is to retrieve and revisit forgotten histories, while emphasising the literary value of these women’s journalism. She is also currently a Graduate Research Teaching Fellow in SHAPS and tutors USA and the World: Rise of a Superpower (HIST30065. Semester One) and Total War: World War II (HIST20060. Semester 2)

References

Catherine Coyne, ‘Wounded Cry Only at Missing “Show”’, Boston Herald, 10 June 1944.

Catherine Coyne, ‘Revere Ranger, 19, Raring to Go Again’, Boston Herald, 28 June 1944.

Catherine Coyne, ‘Norman Beachhead Greets Miss Coyne’, Boston Herald, 3 July 1944.

Catherine Coyne, ‘Mass. Girl Master Bath from Helmet’, Boston Herald, 20 July 1944.

Catherine Coyne, ‘Lt. Shea Won’t Admit Heroism’, Boston Herald, 10 August 1944.

Catherine Coyne, ‘Not All Yanks Find Paris Elysian Field’, Boston Herald, 10 September 1944.

Virginia Irwin, ‘Virginia Irwin at Invasion Port Sees First Wounded Coming Back, Others Waiting to Hit Beaches’, St Louis Post-Dispatch, 9 June 1944.

Virginia Irwin, ‘With the Wacs in Normandy’, St Louis Post-Dispatch, 22 July 1944.

Virginia Irwin, ‘Field Hospital Works Like Production Line’, St Louis Post-Dispatch, 1 August 1944.

Ernie Pyle, Brave Men. Penguin, 2023.

Coyne and Irwin’s articles can be read on the paywalled sites GenealogyBank and Newspapers.com respectively.

^{Feature image: Taxis to Hell – and Back – Into the Jaws of Death (detail), 6 June 1944. Photographer: Robert F Sargent, Chief Photographer’s Mate, United States Coast Guard, US Archives and Records Administration, NAID: 513173}