{"id":25,"date":"2025-11-05T01:03:33","date_gmt":"2025-11-05T06:03:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sites.temple.edu\/eglasshistory\/?p=25"},"modified":"2025-11-05T01:03:33","modified_gmt":"2025-11-05T06:03:33","slug":"when-the-sea-came-alive-book-review","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sites.temple.edu\/eglasshistory\/2025\/11\/05\/when-the-sea-came-alive-book-review\/","title":{"rendered":"When the Sea Came Alive: Book Review"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Can a book be truly considered an oral history if its author wasn\u2019t the one to do the actual interviews, especially given that most of its interviewees have already passed on? If not, can oral history methodologies still be applicable? These are the questions I had when I sat down to read through Garrett M. Graff\u2019s When the Sea Came Alive: An oral history of D-Day.<\/em> Published in 2024, this book is an exhaustive history of the June 6, 1944 D-Day landings during the Second World War, as well as the wider historical context for such a pivotal event. It tells its story through a series of quotes from people who were there, and in so doing attempts to dispel the pervasive myths and legends that have grown up around D-Day over the past 80 years.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In his foreword, Graff states that his aim for this project was to \u201cbroaden the understanding of D-Day itself, and to acknowledge the full scope of the event\u2019s complexities and nuances, as well as its high points.\u201d1<\/a><\/sup> Though hardly iconoclastic – in the end, his interpretation of D-Day is the same rosy story of liberation and fighting against tyranny that occupies the public imagination – he still takes aim at four pervasive myths about the Longest Day: that the invasion was a near-failure; that the concrete Atlantic Wall was a nigh-insurmountable obstacle; that the infamous Omaha Beach was a disastrous bloodbath; and that the British and Canadian beaches (Gold, Juno, and Sword) were easy \u201ccakewalks.\u201d Additionally, he seeks to uncover stories from otherwise ignored groups, such as the 2,000 Black soldiers who participated in Operation Overlord or the female naval personnel who were also there for the liberation. This is much closer to Donald A. Ritchie\u2019s broader theoretical approach: a history at least in part told from below, through the voices of people who were actually there on that day.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In this, Graff has both successes and failures. The sheer scope of the project – 700 individual voices, on all sides of the conflict – does mean that there is a lot of history to choose from, and the majority of the interviewees and subjects were regular soldiers and staff who were swept up in the whirlwind of events that was Operation Overlord. In contrast to the military historian whom Ritchie cites as \u201conly [interviewing] generals,\u201d2<\/a><\/sup> this oral history focuses on the individual experience and eschews \u201cgreat man history.\u201d But conversely this enormous wealth of sources somewhat dilutes the individuality and thus the impact of these stories, and the dispersal of the sources across the chapters as pithy little \u201csoundbites\u201d worsens this issue. Though effective in telling a coherent narrative of D-Day (and thus in his goal of acknowledging the operation\u2019s full scope), this structure tends to cause individual names outside of the famous ones to sink into a wider milieu of \u201cregular soldiers.\u201d Individual tales of heroism do stand out, but they are often few and far between.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Graff is a journalist instead of a historian, so methodologically this project takes a departure from \u201cacademic\u201d oral histories; it would not meet the requirements of oral history as defined by Sommer and Quinlan, especially in the case of sources and interview practices. Of the stages that define their \u201cOral History Life Cycle,\u201d the \u201cinterview\u201d and \u201cpreservation\u201d stages are largely absent.3<\/a><\/sup> Graff himself admits as much – his is a compilation of many different types of media, including newspapers, books, archival documents, and more, in addition to traditional oral history interviews; essentially a compilation of human snippets from Operation Overlord. Therefore, When the Sea Came Alive<\/em> is more than just an oral history – in general it is a research history, done through multiple methods even if oral history is the chosen method of presentation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Graff also focuses heavily on the sensory aspect of the history, picking snippets that outline the physical experience of those who were there. Smells, tastes, sensations, noises – they feature heavily throughout the text, and they do give a more evocative, personal feel to a lot of the stories. While it is methodologically a classical \u201cfife and drum\u201d history, this sensory aspect does restore the personal feel of the narrative and make a strong case for the use of oral history even in a project that can\u2019t fully aspire to the label.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Portelli or Lynn would likely find this book lacking, especially when it comes to the importance of the oral historian\u2019s direct relationship with the oral author. Graff\u2019s role in When the Sea Came Alive<\/em> is less oral historian than oral curator – he conducted no formal interviews, and instead based most of his work on archival research or the interviews done by others like Stephen Ambrose or Ronald C. Drez at the Eisenhower Center. Portelli in particular would probably be contemptuous towards his approach to transcription – Graff \u201clightly edited quotes for clarity striving to balance the speaker\u2019s original words with the precision of recorded history,\u201d4<\/a><\/sup> and in so doing removed a lot of the \u201chuman element\u201d from the interviews in service of a coherent, \u201caccurate\u201d story.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Additionally, Graff commits the sin of accuracy; as he puts it, \u201cThose memories captured in these pages\u2026 were surely fallible, as we all are. Traumatic memories even more so. I have tried to rely on the most trusted sources possible and cross-checked what details are available to ensure that the memories herein are as accurate as they can be.\u201d5<\/a><\/sup> This is where Graff fails to meet the spirit of the method more than the letter; to oral history theorists, the inaccuracy and fallibility of the oral author\u2019s testimony is a feature rather than a bug, as it can offer important emotional and cultural context; oral history is often as much a study of memory and its imperfections as it is a study of cold, hard when-where facts.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As I was reading, it occurred to me that though When the Sea Came Alive<\/em> was an exhaustive and clearly very ambitious project, it is hardly without precedent. In structure and in intent, it holds a great deal of similarity to another, more famous military-oral history: Christian G. Appy\u2019s Patriots: the Vietnam War Remembered from All Sides.<\/em> Like When the Sea Came Alive,<\/em> Patriots<\/em> is a book structured around a large number of individual stories, all focused on the context of a war. Like Graff, Appy set out to tell a more complete story, one that added in traditionally ignored perspectives like women, Black soldiers, and the Vietnamese themselves. It also keeps the interviews generally in one piece, allowing them to stand out more rather than be lost in a sea of other oral authors. And most importantly, Appy was the one to conduct the interviews himself – a luxury that Graff, writing in 2024 after the bulk of D-Day veterans had long since passed on, did not have. Patriots<\/em> is what When the Sea Came Alive<\/em> ought to have been, but as stated, Appy had resources and interviewees that Graff had no access to. Though both are well researched, Patriots <\/em>is a much better example of how to do military oral history.<\/p>\n\n\n\n


So in the end – is When the Sea Came Alive: An Oral History of D-Day<\/em> truly an oral history? Methodologically, perhaps not – it fails to meet many of the standards set out for it by oral historians and theorists, and the fact that Graff was not the one to conduct these histories means that it misses out on one of the dynamics – the interviewer-interviewee relationship – that makes it so compelling and unique among other ways of doing history. Yet it also holds many of the strengths of oral history, from the authenticity of the human voice to its ability to tell a compelling, emotionally-charged narrative to a degree that most \u201ctraditional\u201d histories cannot reach. It is committed to oral history\u2019s \u201chistory from below\u201d approach, and even if its pool of oral authors can be too broad, Graff\u2019s commitment to seeking out viewpoints and stories that have too often been ignored by history is reason enough to endorse it as a fascinating and important book for any historian of the Second World War.<\/p>\n\n\n

  1. Garrett M. Graff. When the Sea Came Alive: An Oral History of D-Day<\/em> (Avid Reader Press, New York, 2024), xv. \u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/li>
  2. Donald A. Ritchie. Doing Oral History<\/em> (Oxford University Press, 2014), 25. \u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/li>
  3. Sommer, Barbara W., and Mary Kay Quinlan. The Oral History Manual<\/em> (Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Incorporated, 2018), 17-18. \u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/li>
  4. Graff, When the Sea Came Alive,<\/em> xviii. \u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/li>
  5. Ibid. \u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/li><\/ol>\n\n\n

    <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    Can a book be truly considered an oral history if its author wasn\u2019t the one to do the actual interviews, especially given that most of its interviewees have already passed on? If not, can oral history methodologies still be applicable? These are the questions I had when I sat down to read through Garrett M. … <\/p>\n

    Continue reading “When the Sea Came Alive: Book Review”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":37290,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":"[{\"id\":\"16dbec02-0a30-4a47-8226-10bcb1bb8046\",\"content\":\"Garrett M. Graff. When the Sea Came Alive: An Oral History of D-Day<\\\/em> (Avid Reader Press, New York, 2024), xv. \"},{\"id\":\"b4ac9bad-8205-433e-9d70-9b7b5c04bc4c\",\"content\":\"Donald A. Ritchie. Doing Oral History<\\\/em> (Oxford University Press, 2014), 25.\"},{\"id\":\"348c5b1a-be74-48cb-b8bb-775f244961ff\",\"content\":\"Sommer, Barbara W., and Mary Kay Quinlan. The Oral History Manual<\\\/em> (Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Incorporated, 2018), 17-18.\"},{\"id\":\"1363fc77-f4ab-4f17-ac2b-af07138f55cc\",\"content\":\"Graff, When the Sea Came Alive,<\\\/em> xviii.\"},{\"id\":\"9aaf5672-b13a-4d2b-b389-d348c4fad365\",\"content\":\"Ibid.\"}]"},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-25","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.temple.edu\/eglasshistory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.temple.edu\/eglasshistory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.temple.edu\/eglasshistory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.temple.edu\/eglasshistory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/37290"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.temple.edu\/eglasshistory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=25"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/sites.temple.edu\/eglasshistory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":26,"href":"https:\/\/sites.temple.edu\/eglasshistory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25\/revisions\/26"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.temple.edu\/eglasshistory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=25"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.temple.edu\/eglasshistory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=25"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.temple.edu\/eglasshistory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=25"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}