Excerpt
Roosevelt retired at midnight, aware the landings were underway. Eleanor was too keyed up to sleep, so the White House switchboard put General Marshall's call from England, when it came in at 3 a.m., through to her and she awakened the President. He put on his old gray sweater, propped himself up in bed, and remained steadily on the telephone for nearly six hours. Marshall reported that while there had been heavier resistance than anticipated at Omaha Beach, most of the men on all five beaches (Omaha and Utah for the Americans, Gold and Sword for the British, Juno for the Canadians) were moving steadily ashore and inland. Roosevelt ordered the switchboard at 4 a.m. to call the entire White House staff in to work at once. Throughout the United States, all church bells and school bells peeled and factory whistles blew all morning. Huge crowds, tense and excited, gathered in all public places. The churches were full all day and in succeeding days throughout the country. Special services were run almost continuously in places of worship of all denominations throughout the United States in favor of the cross-Channel operation.
On D-Day morning, Roosevelt met congressional leaders at 9:50 and military leaders at 11:30. Winston Churchill telephoned, very cheerfully, shortly after noon. The news from the beachhead, though fragmentary, was encouraging by the time Roosevelt had lunch with his daughter under the magnolia tree, planted on the White House lawn when Andrew Jackson was President. By the time he met the press at 4 p.m., his office jammed with more reporters than it had ever contained before, indications were that the Allies had taken over 6,000 casualties, with many "little paroxysms of red foam" where soldiers were killed in the water. But that was less than had been foreseen. The President was jovial and happy, told the reporters that they knew just about as much as he did, and revealed that the date had been chosen at Teheran. When asked about the importance of individual landing dates, he asked the questioning reporter if he had ever crossed the English Channel and said, as if giving holiday travel advice: "Roughness in the English Channel has always been considered by travelers one of the greatest trials of life."