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FDR’s moving fireside D-Day prayer to be added to World War II Memorial

Franklin Roosevelt’s wartime radio address comforted a fearful nation.

By
October 15, 2020 at 6:11 p.m. EDT
President Franklin D. Roosevelt receives visitors in his White House office on June 6, 1944, the long-awaited D-Day, the start of the Western European invasion. (AP Photo) (AP)

The voice of the president was soothing as it came through radios across America that evening, with the same slow cadences, precise enunciation and warmth people had heard from Franklin D. Roosevelt for years.

But this was June 6, 1944 — D-Day, in World War II. Allied troops had begun the high-risk landings on the beaches of Normandy. And Roosevelt wished to tell the citizens how dangerous an enterprise it was, and how the soldiers and sailors needed their support and God’s.