WILLOW CREEK — News of the Allied invasion of Normandy reached Willow Creek by radio broadcast on Tuesday at 9:30 AM Eastern War Time, and within an hour, a crowd of more than fifty residents had gathered on the porch of the General Store, where Seamus O’Donnell had placed his radio on a wooden crate and turned the volume as high as it would go.
The announcement came via a special bulletin from CBS Radio, relayed through the Bangor station. The broadcast, disrupted by static and fading, carried the voice of war correspondent George Hicks reporting from a landing craft off the coast of France. The crowd listened in near-silence, straining to hear the words between bursts of interference.
“The production of a special bulletin was unnecessary,” Arthur Whitcomb writes in the Gazette’s front-page story. “The radio at the General Store served the purpose. It drew the town together, as the town has always drawn together in moments of great importance.”
Among those gathered was Eleanor Thorne, whose husband Walter — at 45, past draft age — was not among the invading forces. But her younger brother, Corporal Thomas Cheney, was believed to be in the invasion. Eleanor stood at the edge of the porch, holding her two-year-old son Jedidiah, and did not speak for the duration of the broadcast.
“The news is good,” Seamus O’Donnell told the crowd after the broadcast ended. “The Allies are ashore. The invasion is under way. But there will be casualties, and some of them will be boys from Maine. We will know more in the days ahead.”
The Gazette published a special bulletin the following morning, printed on a single sheet of paper and distributed free of charge to every household. The bulletin, which went to press at 6:00 AM, carried the banner headline: “ALLIES LAND IN FRANCE.”
“We are a small town,” Whitcomb writes. “We have sent our sons across the ocean. They are fighting on the beaches of a country most of them had never heard of until a year ago. We pray for them, and we wait for news — good or bad — and we do not turn away from either.”
A prayer service was held at the Congregational Church on Tuesday evening, drawing more than 200 people — the largest weekday service in the church’s history. The Reverend Samuel Phelps led the congregation in the reading of Psalm 91: “He shall cover thee with his feathers, and under his wings shalt thou trust.”