It’s the 80th anniversary of D-Day. My father remembers it happening.

He woke up June 6th 1944 to hear on the radio that “the Allies had crossed the English Channel and invaded France.”

He was a senior at Columbia High School in Maplewood, New Jersey. 

What a moment! How incredible to have been alive at that defining time. I asked him how he reacted. What did he do right after hearing the news?

“Not much,” he said. “We went to school.”

What happened at a school?

“We went to class. I had geometry and English,” he said. 

I love the juxtaposition of the historical and mundane. Life goes on even during the Worst of Times.

We are so accustomed to immediate information today it’s hard to imagine such a monumental event occurring without social media, Internet or even TV. 

“I don’t think we knew what a big deal it was,” he said. “It wasn’t clear until later what the outcome was.”

It did, however, become clearer. Dad said the kids who graduated a year before him in 1943, got hit hard. Two friends were killed in the Battle of the Bulge. 

Dad said the TV coverage today brought back memories, many of which have been left out of the popular wartime narratives.

In particular, I was struck by the activity on the home front. 

The fear Germans would attack New Jersey by air or sea was real.

He said that people painted the tops of their car headlights black to avoid illuminating the roads near the coast where U-boats patrolled.

There were air sirens and when the alarm sounded people sprang into action. Dad’s uncle was in charge of dimming the iconic gas street lights.

Dad said one time the sirens went off during a school dance. Lots of the young men left, but he couldn’t immediately get home.

He was stuck in the dark with a large group of girls. 

“It was kinda fun,” he said.

Dad enlisted in the Navy after graduation and was assigned to study how to become a radio operator. The war ended just as he was finishing training. 

My father started high school in 1941. In December of that year he was called into the school auditorium to listen to a live broadcast of President Roosevelt’s Day of Infamy speech following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. 

He was about to graduate when D-Day occurred.