Selfless sacrifice on Normandy beaches inspired eruption of hope across Europe
Surviving D-Day: A Veteran's Story
98-year-old World War II veteran Jack Gutman recounts his experience serving as a medic on Omaha Beach at just 18 years old on D-Day, tending to countless wounded and dead soldiers. Listen to 'The Untold Story' interview on FoxNewsPodcasts.com.
The heroes of D-Day won a spiritual victory when they selflessly crawled from the ocean and fell from the sky into Normandy, France, on June 6, 1944 — 80 years ago this week.
Their triumph spread almost instantly across the occupied nations of Europe on D-Day, even as military success was still far from certain.
Evidence of the spiritual impact of the D-Day landings spilled out of the pages of "The Diary of Anne Frank."
The German-born Jewish teen spent two years recording her thoughts while hiding during the Holocaust in a cramped "secret annex" in Amsterdam, Netherlands.
Her spirit, long constricted by the world around her, erupted on D-Day with a feeling that she rarely knew in her short, tragic life: hope.
Second Lieutenant Walter Sidlowski of 348th Engineer C Battalion, 5th Engineer Special Brigade, on Omaha Beach, Normandy. (Walter Rosenblum/U.S. Army Signal Corps/Galerie Bilderwelt/Getty Images)
"The best part about the invasion is that I have the feeling that friends are on the way," the 14-year-old wrote on June 6.
"The thought of friends and salvation mean everything to us!"
Frank spent most of her life in fear of Adolf Hitler’s murderous National Socialist German Workers Party.
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Her diary is filled with mature philosophical musings about daily life and the state of humanity.
Her exuberant instant reaction to the D-Day landings of World War II is the most overt outburst of hope recorded in her diary.
"Hope comes before salvation," Jesse Bradley, author and pastor of Grace Community Church in Auburn, Washington, told Fox News Digital.
Anne Frank. "The thought of friends and salvation mean everything to us!" the 14-year-old wrote in her diary on June 6, 1944. (Wikimedia)
"Ultimately, hope is a confident and joyful trust in someone or something. Hope is confidence in God."
Frank instinctively put her trust in the American, British and Canadian heroes at the sharp end of the audacious D-Day invasion.
"The best part about the invasion is that I have the feeling that friends are on the way."
The many thousands of young men who risked sudden, violent death landing in Normandy that day were more than just soldiers to those hope-deprived people such as Frank living in fear in Europe.
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They were agents of spiritual salvation.
"Hope is not dainty. Hope is not wimpy," said Bradley.
"Hope is courageous. Hope is rugged. The hope that Jesus brought through His death and resurrection is the hope that these men brought to Europe on D-Day."
A copy of "The Diary of Anne Frank" can be seen in an exhibition in Frankfurt, Germany. (Andreas Arnold/picture alliance via Getty Images)
That sense of hope spread quickly among the 280 million Europeans who woke up on June 6 enslaved, imprisoned or living under foreign occupation.
The BBC aired radio reports of the D-Day invasion to the occupied countries across Europe.
The news of the Normandy landings, Frank wrote on June 6, created a "huge commotion" in the "Secret Annex" that she and her parents shared with five other people at the time.
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The scene was dramatized in the 1959 Oscar-winning Hollywood movie, "The Diary of Anne Frank."
It portrays the residents of the annex singing and dancing in celebration as the news reports shoot out of a concealed radio.
U.S. Rangers from E Company, 5th Ranger Battalion bound for Normandy. June 4, 1944. Clockwise, from far left: First Sergeant Sandy Martin, who was killed during the landing, Technician Fifth Grade Joseph Markovich, Corporal John Loshiavo and Private First Class Frank E. Lockwood. (Galerie Bilderwelt/Getty Images)
Amid the commotion, the prayerful voice of President Franklin D. Roosevelt is heard invoking "Almighty God" over the airwaves.
They were the first two words of President Roosevelt’s D-Day prayer, one of the most remarkable addresses in American history.
"Hope is not dainty … Hope is courageous. Hope is rugged."
His prayer continued: "Our sons, pride of our nation, this day have set upon a mighty endeavor … to set free a suffering humanity."
Roosevelt's D-Day prayer appeared on the front page of almost every newspaper in the United States. It aired repeatedly on American radio and was shared in schools, churches and synagogues from coast to coast.
A sign outside Trinity Church, New York City, inviting worshipers to "Come in and pray for Allied victory" in the invasion of Normandy on D-Day, on June 6, 1944 — 80 years ago this week. (FPG/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)
An estimated 100 million people in occupied Europe also heard Roosevelt's D-Day prayer.
"Let our hearts be stout ... to bear sorrows that may come," Roosevelt said in the prayer.
Frank offers evidence that she not only heard the prayer, but heeded its message of maintaining hope amid terrible days ahead.
"We’ll need to be brave and endure the many fears and hardships and the suffering yet to come," Frank wrote, using similar language to Roosevelt's in her diary.
Frank’s hope for "salvation" on Earth was not realized for herself and the others with her, tragically.
Her family was found and captured by the Germans two months after D-Day. She was killed in 1945 in a Nazi concentration camp.
Pictures from the Anne Frank exhibit of June 2003 are shown at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. (TIM SLOAN/AFP via Getty Images)
But hope did not die with her.
Nor did hope die with the thousands of men killed in Normandy on D-Day, says Bradley.
The hope of life after death mobilized GIs to selflessly lay down their lives for their fellow humans on D-Day.
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It's a hope deeply ingrained in the American spirit.
"As He died to make men holy/let us die to make men free/While God is marching on," Julia Ward Howe wrote in "The Battle Hymn of the Republic."
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The Civil War anthem describes soldiers marching to their deaths in the hame of Christ to liberate the enslaved.
The same spirit of battlefield salvation was echoed three decades later in "America the Beautiful" by Katharine Lee Bates.
American medics render first aid to troops wounded in the initial landings on Utah Beach at les Dunes de Madalaine, France, June 6, 1944. (PhotoQuest/Getty Images)
"O beautiful for heroes proved/In liberating strife/Who more than self their country loved/And mercy more than life!"
Roosevelt pleaded for mercy for the fallen in his D-Day prayer.
"Our sons, pride of our nation, this day have set upon a mighty endeavor … to set free a suffering humanity."
"Some will never return," he said of America's GIs. "Embrace these, Father, and receive them, Thy heroic servants, into Thy kingdom."
"When you're faithful to God, it fills you with desire to bring hope to your fellow man," said Bradley of Washington.
Soldiers struggle to gain a foothold on Omaha Beach in Normandy, France, on D-Day, plus a detail of Anne Frank's diary on display in a Berlin museum. (Underwood Archives/Getty Images and Andreas Rentz/Getty Images)
He believes the heroes of Normandy, agents of hope, arrived in heaven on D-Day, and heard the following words.
"Well done, my good and faithful servant.’"
Kerry J. Byrne is a lifestyle reporter with Fox News Digital.
