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on this day

During stressful times, it helps to look back at other times of national trial.

And May 23, 1944, eighty years ago today, was such a time.

The D-Day invasion, which would put 160,000 Allied troops in Nazi-occupied France, was then two weeks away.

1.6 million US troops were in England making final preparations after months of rehearsal and stockpiling materials.

Operation Tiger, a D-Day rehearsal involving 30,000 men, took place on the beach Slapton Sands, in Devon, England, in late April 1944.

Gen. Eisenhower has been given command of both RAF and US heavy bombers to streamline command of the air operation for the coming invasion.

These bombers were then engaged in ‘neutralizing’ the German Luftwaffe and destroying rail lines and hubs to isolate Normandy from other Nazi installations.

Left: US code-breakers at work. Right: a computer decoding machine.

Code-breakers in England and the US have deciphered Nazi messages, enabling them to pinpoint the location of nearly all of the German fighting units in the Normandy region.

Two Japanese kamikazes strike the USS Bunker Hill near Kyusu, the southernmost island of Japan, May 11, 1944.

US forces are battling in Italy and a major offensive is underway in the Pacific island of New Guinea.

Left: US troops assault Wakde Island, New Guinea, May 1944. Right: the assault on Saipan, July 1944.

US forces will enter Rome in ten days.

And the Allies will launch a large, four-week amphibious assault against Saipan on June 15.

Democratic and Republican primaries for the fall presidential election are underway.

FDR faced no Democratic challenger.

The Republicans select Thomas Dewey, a well-known New York prosecutor, age 42, as their nominee.

In September 1944, FDR denied Republican claims that he had sent a US destroyer to an Aleutian island to retrieve Fala after leaving him behind on a 1943 trip. FDR’s humorous speech dealt a blow to Dewey’s campaign.

Dewey is a moderate who supports much of FDR’s New Deal legislation, and, out of concern for national morale, offers little criticism of FDR’s conduct of the war.

But Dewey alleges that some members of the Roosevelt Administration are under Communist influence, and he also suggested that FDR, then age 62, is too old and tired to continue to serve as president.

The economy is booming thanks to heavy wartime production, but there is a resurgence in the production of consumer goods, too.

And it is a time of social upheaval: male heads-of-households are away at war; women and Black people are employed; and the movement of Black families north, into urban areas, is underway.

The Ferdinand Magellan Presidential Railcar. FDR boarded his armored train car for trips to Hyde Park at a special siding in the basement of the Bureau of Printing and Engraving Building located two blocks from the White House. [Alexf photos]

On May 23, 1944, FDR was in his fourteenth year as president.

It had been a time of relentless trials and tribulations, with more on the way.

How did he cope with the pressure?

There’s a clue in his 1942 letter to Winston Churchill:

"Once a month I go to [my home in Hyde Park, New York] for four days, crawl into a hole and pull the hole in after me.

“I am called on the telephone only if something of really great importance occurs.

“I wish you would try it.”

FDR, October 1944. He would pass away in six months.

On May 23, 1944, that’s what FDR had done: a few days earlier, he’d ‘crawled into his hole’ in Hyde Park for a week’s rest.

The work and worries, and the work schedule which kept him up until 11:00 each night, would resume in two days’ time.

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I’ll see you tomorrow.

— Brenda