Eighty years ago Thursday morning, Americans woke up to the news that Allied forces had crossed the English Channel and were fighting on the beaches of Normandy — the day we now remember simply as D-Day.
The first indications came shortly after midnight Eastern time, from a suspicious source: German radio. American news organizations were rightly skeptical until 3:32 a.m. — 9:32 a.m. at the landing sites — when radio stations interrupted their programming to bring a message from Col. Richard Dupuy, a former New York Herald reporter, who solemnly read the brief text of “Communiqué Number One”: “Under the command of General Eisenhower, Allied naval forces, supported by strong air forces, began landing Allied armies this morning on the northern coast of France.”
By then, the fighting was three hours old, and many of the Virginians who were in those first waves were already dead or dying — but the liberation of Europe had begun.
It wasn’t until more than a month later, on July 17, 1944, when the teletype machine at Green’s Drug Store in Bedford start spitting out one death notice after another, that the people of Bedford would learn just how many of their sons at died on D-Day — 20 in all, said to be the largest per-capita loss of any community in the country. (Nineteen of those were from A Company, plus one from Company F.)
Eight decades later, the role Virginians played on D-Day is memorialized in books, in news reports, in the enduring granite of the National D-Day Memorial in Bedford.
See our D-Day special report
Units from Emporia to Winchester were among the first ones to land in Normandy. Read the “after action” reports from those Virginia units where D-Day survivors described what they did that day.
- Hear Gov. Glenn Youngkin read an excerpt from the headquarters company.
- Hear Bedford County students read an excpert from A Company from Bedford.
- Hear Sen. Mark Warner read an excerpt from B Company from Lynchburg.
- Hear Sen. Tim Kaine read an excerpt from D company from Roanoke.
There is another Virginia connection to D-Day — and the larger history of World War II and the years that followed — that isn’t so well-known: Dwight Eisenhower’s mother was from Augusta County.
Ida Stover Eisenhower was a pacifist who was disappointed by her third son’s decision to pursue a military career, but no understanding of Eisenhower would be complete without knowing his mother’s story. It’s also a story that tells us some things about our own past that often get overlooked.
The Stovers were of German heritage, part of the wave of German immigration that peopled much of the Shenandoah Valley in the 1700s. Ida came into the world in 1862, at the same time that Union and Confederate armies were marching up and down the Shenandoah Valley as part of Stonewall Jackson’s Valley Campaign. She was christened at the Salem Lutheran Church in Mount Sidney. Her father was a pacifist who had paid $1,000 — the equivalent of $31,000 today — for a substitute to take his place in the Confederate army. He was drafted anyway, and fled north. Confederates raided the Stover farm, looking for military-aged males. Support for the Confederacy was never unanimous in the western part of the state.
When Ida was 4 or 5, her mother died worn out by the stress of war, some accounts say. Ida’s father distributed the 11 children among relatives, and then died himself a few years later. Ida wound up with her grandparents, her late mother’s parents. By all accounts, it was not a good fit. Eisenhower biographer Jean Edward Smith describes Ida as having “boundless confidence.” Her grandparents are described by others as “strict,” “somber and parsimonious,” “cheerless.” Ida was told not to expect an education — she was, after all, a farm girl in the 19th century.
Ida had other ideas. At some point in her late teens — accounts differ as to the exact age — she moved out (some say she ran away). She went to Staunton (which doesn’t sound too much like running away), where she rented a room, supporting herself by baking cakes and pies for sale and working as a “mother’s helper” while she also went to high school. Ida graduated at age 19, and then went back to Mount Sidney to teach for two years at the one-room schoolhouse her family hadn’t let her attend.
Ida sounds pretty determined.
At 21, she was able to claim a $1,000 inheritance for her late father. Some of her brothers had already moved to Kansas, where another sect of the Stover clan had previously settled, so she decided to join them. That ended her time in Virginia, but not her impact on history.
In Kansas, this young woman whose family had tried to deny her education in Virginia enrolled in college, a rarity for a woman in those days. Her plan was to study music. She also met a fellow student named David Eisenhower. Smith’s biography, “Eisenhower In War and Peace,” says: “Ida and David made an attractive couple, but in many ways they could not have been more different. She was optimistic, perky, and, in the words of one biographer, ‘as bright as Kansas sunshine.’ He was solemn, introverted and stubborn — as humorless and self-absorbed as Ida was vivacious and outgoing.”
They married two years later and Ida spent the last of her inheritance “on a new ebony piano … a possession she treasured for the rest of her life.”
David went into business but “lost interest and walked away from it in October 1888,” Smith writes. David “drifted off” to Texas, “leaving Ida, who was six months pregnant, and their two year-old son, Arthur.” It was something of a family scandal that was covered up for years. After Ida gave birth to her second son, Edgar, she joined her husband in Denison, Texas, living in “a shack” beside the railroad tracks. David, who had once gone to college to study engineering, instead spent his days “scrubbing the grime” from locomotives for the railroad. “Aside from Ida’s piano [which had been left [behind in Kansas], they had no assets other than their clothes and a few household possessions, and absolutely no prospect of doing better,” Smith writes.It was there in Denison that a third son was born — the future general and president.
Unlike her husband, Ida had ambition. The Eisenhower Library and Museum says that for a time she studied law, something even more unheard of for a woman in those days. She also urged her husband to find a better-paying job, which he eventually did — a refrigeration mechanic, back in Kansas.
Smith paints an unflattering picture of David in his biography, and a very flattering one of Ida. David showed no interest in any of his children, or much of anything else, for that matter, except maybe reading the Bible. “David lived in his own world,” Smith writes. “Ida took up the slack. … She was there for them when David was not, a constant presence who organized their lives, soothed their hurts and praised their accomplishments.”
Ida also impressed upon her children a need for education, according to the Eisenhower Library. The nightly Bible readings — one of the few things David Eisenhower enjoyed — turned into competitions to see who could read the longest before making a mistake. Ida taught all her children to play the piano. She also taught them all to cook and perform other household chores. All this was considered “women’s work,” but Ida gave birth to no girls, only seven sons (six survived infancy), and the Eisenhower Library says that given her personality, she would probably have taught her sons these tasks even if there had been daughters. While the future general and president didn’t take well to the piano lessons, he “excelled at cooking.”
After her husband’s disastrous experience running a business, Ida also took over the family finances. When a family member agreed to sell them a house, “the title was put in Ida’s name — evidently a precaution against a recurrence of David’s wanderlust,” Smith writes. That was also out of character for a woman in the 1890s.
Throughout all this, “she always had a song in her heart,” one of her sons (Milton) later said. “Of all the boys, it was commonly agreed that Ike was the one who resembled his mother most.”
Despite her pacifism, Ida did not try to dissuade him of his decision to attend West Point. She stood on the front porch as he left and said: “It is your choice.” Then she went to her room to cry.
The great valley of Virginia has produced lots of people who went on to greatness elsewhere. Stephen Austin was born in Wythe County and moved away when he was 5. Sam Houston was born in Rockbridge County and moved away when he was 13. Both went on to help found Texas; both are also remembered today in Virginia with historical markers and parks or waysides. Woodrow Wilson lived just two years in Staunton before moving away; today there’s a museum and library dedicated to his presidency. Ida Stover lived in Virginia longer than all of them put together, and as Ida Stover Eisenhower helped mold a general who helped win a war and a president who helped keep the peace — yet no marker remembers her.
In this week’s West of the Capital:
I write a free weekly political newsletter, West of the Capital, that goes out every Friday afternoon at 3 p.m. You can sign up here:
Here’s what I’ll have in this week’s edition:
- The latest early voting numbers across the state.
- An update on the latest developments in the June 18 primaries.
- A curious piece of legislation in North Carolina that Virginia may (or may not) want to replicate.
- More information on who’s speaking atthe cannabis conferencethat Cardinal News is hosting Oct. 15 at Roanoke College. The conference is expected to attract participants from across Virginia, but space is limited. More information about the program, sponsorships and early bird registrations areavailable now.To take advantage of a $25 discount off the $150 ticket, use the promo code “early bird” before Aug. 1.
