Ted Roosevelt visits General Eisenhower

History records that Brig. Gen. Ted Roosevelt was the only General Officer to land with the troops on D-Day, June 6, 1944. It was Roosevelt's fifth amphibious landing of the war. In the movie The Longest Day, General Roosevelt was portrayed by legendary actor Henry Fonda. In one scene in the movie, Roosevelt is seen conferring shipboard with his commanding officer, Maj. Gen. Raymond Barton. Gen. Roosevelt has requested permission to land with the troops and general Barton has refused his request. General Barton with a clear air of annoyance asks Roosevelt why it was necessary to put his request in writing. Barton then informs Roosevelt that he is reluctantly granting him permission to land with the troops. General Barton later wrote that he never expected to see Roosevelt alive again.

Although history has accepted this version of the events of how General Roosevelt received permission to land with the troops on D-Day, a former enlisted man, Harold Blackwell of Mesa, Arizona, who was attached to General Roosevelt in the weeks immediately following D-Day, reported Gen. Roosevelt's own version of how he gained permission to land with the troops. In Robert O. Babcock's book, War Stories, Utah Beach to Pleiku, Blackwell, who was called "Blackie" by Gen. Roosevelt, reported that Gen. Roosevelt one day asked him if he wanted to hear the story of how he got permission to land with the troops. Blackwell reported that Gen. Roosevelt told him that he was turned down by Maj. Gen. Barton, Fourth Infantry CG; Lieut. Gen. Collins, Seventh Corps CG; and General Omar Bradley, First Army CG. So Roosevelt said: "I want to see Ike ( General Dwight D. Eisenhower, Supreme Allied Commander of Operation Overlord) at his headquarters and was told by him that General Officers just didn't land with the first wave. "In disgust," he said, "I told Ike to let me use the phone, I'll call my cousin." Of course, Gen. Roosevelt was referring to his fifth cousin, President Franklin D Roosevelt. According to General Roosevelt, Ike smiled and said, "Okay, Teddy. You win." Brig. Gen. Theodore Roosevelt, Jr., did land with the first assault wave on Utah Beach on the morning of June 6, 1944. He was in the first boat to land and it was reported that he was the first American soldier to set foot on Utah Beach. For his extraordinary efforts that day in assuming leadership of the landing assault troops, General Roosevelt received the Medal of Honor.  

Early in World War I, Major Ted Roosevelt had been impatient to be assigned to a fighting unit.  He wrote to his wife and asked her to go to see a high ranking General at the Pentagon, a family friend, to see if he could pull some strings and help Roosevelt secure a combat assignment. When his wife protested that it wasn't seemly to pull strings in this manner, Roosevelt assured his wife that it was all right to pull strings in order to get into the fighting rather than trying to avoid the fighting. So while Ted Roosevelt was not above using his name and family connections to his advantage, he only did so to get himself into a fight. When General Barton came ashore at Utah Beach later in the day on June 6, 1944, he was surprised and delighted to be greeted by none other than Ted Roosevelt, smiling and full of useful information about the Fourth Division's situation.