Abstract
Virtual dark tourism played a central role in American D-Day commemoration in the quarter-century following World War II. Dwight Eisenhower, writer Cornelius Ryan, and filmmaker Darryl Zanuck served as virtual tour guides of D-Day battle sites, familiarizing the public with the Normandy landscape and defining its role in the war. While these dark tours defined D-Day’s bloody history in heroic terms, Vietnam and the Cold War cast a gloomy shadow over the twenty-fifth anniversary. Eisenhower’s death prompted a struggle between Ryan and Zanuck over which would inherit the admired general’s mantle. Despite fears that popular conceptions of World War II as the “Good War” were being abandoned, the contested twenty-fifth anniversary was an anomaly, and earlier beliefs were revived with Reagan’s New Patriotism in the 1980s.
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Notes
- 1.
Drew Middleton, “Twenty Five Years Later in Normandy, D-Day Is a Time for Generals and Memory,” New York Times, June 7, 1969, 14.
- 2.
Ben Wright to Jack Thompson, 13 May 1968; Thompson to Wright 20 May 1968; Ryan to Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands 21 April 1969, Folder “D-Day Activities,” Supplementary Materials Box 7, Cornelius Ryan Collection, Mahn Center for Archives and Special Collections, Ohio University, Athens, Ohio (hereafter referred to as the Ryan Collection).
- 3.
Cornelius Ryan and Kathryn Morgan Ryan, A Private Battle (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1979), 164.
- 4.
Philip Beidler, The Good War’s Greatest Hits: World War II and American Remembering (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1998), 157.
- 5.
Douglas Brinkley, Cronkite (New York: Harper Perennial, 2013), 298–299.
- 6.
Douglas Brinkley, The Boys of Pointe du Hoc: Ronald Reagan, D-Day, and the US Army 2nd Ranger Battalion (New York: Harper Perennial, 2005), 100.
- 7.
John Bodnar, The “Good War” in American Memory (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010), 205.
- 8.
Thomas F. Brady, “D-Day Fetes Open on Normandy Soil,” New York Times, June 6, 1954, 1.
- 9.
Bodnar , 81–84.
- 10.
Michael Shapiro, “The Reporter Who Time Forgot: How Cornelius Ryan’s Longest Day Changed Journalism,” Columbia Journalism Review (May/June 2010): 51–52.
- 11.
Cornelius Ryan, The Longest Day: June 6, 1944 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1959), 236–239. Brinkley, 89–95.
- 12.
Shapiro, 52–52. See also Stephen E. Ambrose, “‘The Longest Day’ (1962): ‘Blockbuster’ History,” Historical Journal of Film, Radio & Television, 14:4 (October 1994): 421.
- 13.
President Dwight D. Eisenhower to Ryan, 21 January 1960, on display in the Cornelius Ryan Reading Room, Alden Library, Ohio University, Athens, Ohio.
- 14.
Ryan and Morgan Ryan, A Private Battle, 164.
- 15.
Peter Lev, “Filming the Longest Day: Conflicting Interests,” Literature/Film Quarterly 33 (2005): 264.
- 16.
Lawrence H. Suid, Guts and Glory: The Making of the American Military Image in Film (Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 2002), 184, 168.
- 17.
James Jones, “Phony War Films,” Saturday Evening Post, March 30, 1963, 64–67.
- 18.
Suid, Guts and Glory, 200. See also Stephen M. Silverman, The Fox That Got Away: the Last Days of the Zanuck Dynasty at Twentieth Century Fox (Secaucus, NJ: Lyle Stuart Inc., 1988), 16–18, and Leonard Mosley, Zanuck: The Rise and Fall of Hollywood’s Last Tycoon (Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1984), 200.
- 19.
Suid, Guts and Glory, 168.
- 20.
Ibid., 170.
- 21.
Ibid., 173, 178.
- 22.
Ibid.
- 23.
“D-Day Plus Twenty Years: Eisenhower Returns to Normandy,” CBS Reports, June 6, 1964 (New York: Ambrose Video Publishing, 1990), http://drc.ohiolink.edu/handle/2374.OX/61224 (accessed via OhioLINK Digital Media Center, September 9, 2012).
- 24.
Ibid.
- 25.
Bodnar , The “Good War,” 83.
- 26.
See Ben Wright to Jack Thompson, 13 May 1968; Thompson to Wright, 20 May 1968; Ryan to Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands, 21 April 1969; Wright to Ryan, 9 June 1969; Ryan to Mamie Eisenhower, 18 June 1969, Wright to Ryan, 13 January 1970, Folder “D-Day Activities,” Supplementary Materials Series Box 7, Ryan Collection.
- 27.
Cornelius Ryan, “My Longest Day,” Look, June 10, 1969, 69.
- 28.
Ryan, “My Longest Day,” 70.
- 29.
Ryan, A Private Battle, 164–65, 350. See also Time, December 9, 1974, 107.
- 30.
Ryan, “My Longest Day,” 70.
- 31.
Ryan to Timothy Elbourne, Special Assistant to the President, 22 April 1969, Folder “D-Day Activities,” Supplementary Materials Series Box 7, Ryan Collection.
- 32.
Stephen E. Ambrose, Nixon: Volume Two, The Triumph of a Politician, 1962–1972 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1989), 266–268. Richard M. Nixon, RN: The Memoirs of Richard Nixon (New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1978), 375–380.
- 33.
Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: Richard M. Nixon, 1969 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1971), 260.
- 34.
“D-Day Anniversary Noted,” New York Times, June 1, 1969, 34.
- 35.
Ibid.
- 36.
Middleton , “Twenty Five Years Later in Normandy.”
- 37.
Wright to Ryan, 9 June 1969, Supplementary Materials Series Box 7, Ryan Collection.
- 38.
Ryan to Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands, 21 April 1969, Folder “D-Day Activities,” Supplementary Materials Series Box 7, Ryan Collection.
- 39.
“Longest Day Advertisement,” New York Post, 6 June 1969, 61, Folder “Darryl F. Zanuck,” Supplementary Materials Series Box 6, Ryan Collection.
- 40.
“D-Day Revisited ,” directed by Darryl F. Zanuck . Disc 2, The Longest Day DVD (Aired in the United States on ABC 1 June 1969; Beverly Hills, California: Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment, 2006).
- 41.
Ibid.
- 42.
Ibid.
- 43.
Suid, Guts and Glory, 274.
- 44.
Kathryn Morgan Ryan to Merrill Panitt, 3 June 1969, Folder “Darryl F. Zanuck,” Supplementary Materials Series Box 6, Ryan Collection.
- 45.
Tele-Jour, Wednesday, 11 June 1969, Folder “Darryl F. Zanuck,” Supplementary Materials Series Box 6, Ryan Collection.
- 46.
1969 Appointment Book, Supplementary Materials Series Box 28, Ryan Collection. “Notes on Darryl F. Zanuck Contractual Disagreement,” n.d., Brussels Hilton Stationery, Folder 1, Supplementary Materials Series Box 13, Ryan Collection.
- 47.
Ryan to Attorney Paul Gitlin, 14 December 1968, Folder 1, Supplementary Materials Series Box 13, Ryan Collection. Darryl F. Zanuck to Ryan, 31 March 1969, Folder “Darryl F. Zanuck,” Supplementary Materials Series Box 6, Ryan Collection.
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Young, M. (2018). “Did Those Portly Men Over There Once Rush This Position?”: Virtual Dark Tourism and D-Day Commemorations. In: McDaniel, K.N. (eds) Virtual Dark Tourism. Palgrave Studies in Cultural Heritage and Conflict. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-74687-6_7
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