…Back home in the United States, the sheer magnitude of [Operation Overlord] was just beginning to be understood. Charles E. Wilson, the president of General Electric, would remember how the word “invasion” had “hung in the air, almost touchable, just out of reach,” for weeks, if not for months. On the morning of the sixth, Wilson had driven to Union Station in Washington, D.C., to pick up a friend. The number of commuters at the train station at that hour was enormous, but a hush fell over the concourse as one person whispered to another and then to another, “The invasion’s begun… they’re landing in Normandy.” Wilson recalled:
While I stood watching, it began. First it was a woman who, right there in the station, dropped to her knees and folder her hands; near her a man knelt down. Then another, and another until all around me people knelt down before the hard wooden benches of Union Station.
What were we praying for that morning of the Invasion? For Jim or for Franz or for Giovanni – or just for peace? Perhaps for no reason at all, except that in the hush we felt the need to pray.”
After a few minutes, life returned to the station as everyone got up from the floor, each in his or her own time, and continued on with their personal business. “But for those of us who witnessed the hush,” Wilson later reflected, “Union Station will always have a special meaning: we were there on the day the railroad station in Washington, D.C., became a house of worship.”
One Nation Under God: The History of Prayer in America by James P. Moore, Jr. Doubleday, 2005. p.315
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