Like Footprints in the Sand: Searching for Eisenhower’s Climactic D-Day Words

Given the importance of General Dwight D. Eisenhower’s decision to launch the invasion of Normandy on 6 June 1944, both to the outcome of the war and to him personally, it is mysterious that neither he nor the commanders who witnessed his supreme moment could agree on what he said when he set the Allied force in motion. While the fog of war explains some of the discrepancies in the eyewitness accounts, Eisenhower’s modest character also plays a role in the mystery. Seventy years later, we still do not know what words unleashed the Allied assault on the Atlantic Wall.