Welcome to the Untold Story podcast. I'm Martha McCallum, and we're getting close to the 80th

anniversary of D-Day, and we'll be doing live coverage from there. And I can't think of a

better person to speak with as we get ready for that journey than Garrett Graff, who is the author

of many remarkable history books, and he's a Pulitzer Prize finalist. And his new book is called

When the Sea Came Alive, an oral history of D-Day. So,

Garrett, welcome. It's great to have you with us today. Thanks so much for having me. And thanks

for marking this important anniversary. It certainly is. And, you know, I never get tired of

revisiting this day.

And in the intro to your book, you write about the fact that, although there are many D-Day

for most of us and most of those in history, there's really only one, right?

Yeah.

I mean, D-Day is, as you know, a very straightforward and ubiquitous military term that

just means the start of any operation since for a large complex operations, the planning

starts long before a date or time or even location is necessarily selected.

But, you know, if you say D-Day to anyone on the street, there is only one D-Day that people

think of, and it is June 6, 1944.

You know, you talk about the, the, all the writing that has been done on this topic and, you know, wonderful films, the longest day and saving private Ryan and all of these great documents.

So as a historian who has tackled September 11th with the only plane in the sky and many other great historic moments.

What made you decide that this is the book you wanted to write now?

As you mentioned, I had done a previous oral history of 9-11.

It was called The Only Plain in the Sky that came out in 2019.

And 2019 was a unique moment for 9-11 memories because it was the 18 years thereafter the first American servicemen and women were being deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan who were born after 9-11 itself.

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