Why add another book to those bulging shelves?

Because the six-month lead-up to D-Day illuminates Eisenhower’s singular diplomatic skills, Paradis writes in The Light of Battle, and his “underappreciated role in America’s rise as a superpower.”

Paradis—a human rights lawyer, historian, and fellow at the Center on National Security at Fordham Law School—does this by focusing on the six months leading up to the invasion, starting with President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s decision to select Eisenhower over General George C. Marshall as supreme allied commander.

Paradis draws on deep archival research and newly found letters to build a compelling portrait of Eisenhower’s character and capabilities. The future U.S. president’s “most fateful choices” were diplomatic, Paradis writes, as he tactfully navigated the political and logistical difficulties of planning such a high-risk, high-reward operation. He managed to double the size of the planned invasion and persuade Winston Churchill and the British, among other international leaders, to go along with the plan.

In vivid, humanizing detail, Paradis brings out the roiling drama centered around Eisenhower, who often had to project optimism even when he knew the venture was on the verge of collapse.

“By avoiding the grandiosity associated with great power,” Paradis writes, and beaming American openness and opportunity, “Eisenhower made it easy to believe that there was nothing to fear. He wore his ambition lightly … [in]service to a cause greater than himself.”

A 1927 Fordham graduate, Father Ternan had served as a Franciscan priest for seven years, and as a U.S. Army chaplain for two, when he landed at Normandy on D-Day in 1944, attached to the 315th Infantry Regiment. Thirteen days later, during the Battle of Cherbourg, he responded to a wounded sergeant’s request that he pray for him, and while he was kneeling over the man, a German sniper shot him in the back.

Father Ternan died instantly. The sergeant survived.

Exactly 75 years later, on Wednesday, June 19, Father Ternan’s life and his sacrifice were commemorated in midtown Manhattan at the Church of St. Francis of Assisi, the mother church of Holy Name Province, where he once celebrated Mass and heard confessions.

“As a parish, as an order, as a province, as a city, we’re so proud of our brother and the sacrifice that he gave,” said Kevin Mullen, O.F.M., provincial minister of the Holy Name Province, during a Memorial Mass. “We are a community of memory. It is very important to remember—to remember those who went before us [and]sacrificed for us.”

Father Ternan’s story is detailed in a 2017 article by Brian Jordan, O.F.M., for Friar News, a publication of the province.

A first lieutenant at the time of his death, Father Ternan was posthumously awarded the Silver Star for gallantry in action, and was the first American member of the Franciscans’ Order of Friars Minor to be killed in the line of duty during World War II.

The German soldier who shot him would later show deep regret at having killed a chaplain; he insisted that Father Ternan’s raincoat had hidden the chaplain’s insignia and Red Cross armband, Father Jordan wrote.

A Jovial, Unassuming Student

A native of Brooklyn’s Cypress Hills neighborhood, Leonard Joseph Ternan graduated from Brooklyn Prep. At Fordham, “Butch” Ternan attended church avidly and played baseball and football, according to the 1927 Maroon yearbook, in which he is described as “quiet and unassuming.”

“[He] never sought the applause of the multitude,” and possessed “a certain modestly which greatly enhances his jovial disposition,” a classmate wrote about him in the yearbook.

He joined the Franciscans at age 31, taking Dominic as his religious name.

In addition to his duties at Manhattan’s Church of St. Francis of Assisi, he served as a substitute chaplain at area hospitals. Before being deployed to Great Britain for the D-Day invasion, he “provided religious instructions for more than 150 U.S. soldiers to be received into the Roman Catholic Church” over the course of 25 months, “in addition to celebrating the sacraments and offering wise counsel,” Father Jordan wrote.

Paying Tribute

After the war, when government funding helped Fordham establish eight temporary structures to accommodate the postwar boom in enrollment, one of them was named for the humble chaplain. Ternan Hall was a classroom building located on the current site of the McGinley Center.

The June 19 service included a U.S. Army Color Guard from West Point as well as clergy from the Jesuit schools Father Ternan attended. Alumni chaplain Daniel J. Gatti, S.J., FCRH ’65, GSE ’66, represented Fordham; music was led by William Mulligan, cantor at the church and assistant director of liturgical music for Campus Ministry at Fordham’s Lincoln Center campus.

Toward the end of the service, Father Mullen made one last invocation of Father Ternan’s service to the people of New York: “Let us go forward and try to pass on the goodness of this day to the people we meet on the streets of our city.”

It was an important reminder during dark, perilous times. Hartmann participated in the D-Day landing at Normandy and several other brutal battles with the Army’s Fourth Infantry Division. His Fordham heritage, he wrote, had become “an infallible yardstick in peace and a mighty bulwark in war.”

Hartmann’s son, Alfred Hartmann Jr., M.D., FCRH ’63, discovered the letter among his father’s things after his death in 2000 at age 89. “It says a lot about his relationship with Fordham, and Fordham’s relationship with the world,” he said.

Hartmann may never have had the chance to send his letter, but FORDHAM magazine is proud to share his enduring message of faith and gratitude with our readers.

The full text and an image of the letter appear below.

Men of Fordham on the Campus,

Your “Catholic Prayer Book for the Army and Navy,” via a circuitous mail route, reached me here. I want to thank you for a most thoughtful and useful remembrance. It gives a man a lift to realize that he is not forgotten, and the prayer book, by virtue of its pocketing ease, is a real adjunct to the service man.

When still on the beaches I used to ponder over such seemingly unnecessary incongruities as “good is derived from evil.” It is unfortunate that it takes a world holocaust to revive the merits of such institutions as Peace, the Home, Loyalty, Friendship and the like. It is too bad that man’s more shallow criteria of success are adequately exposed only by a global upheaval.

That “man does not live by bread alone,” furthermore, is proven conclusively only by the advent of chaos and sudden death. It takes more than finite equipment to weather the exigencies of total war. Without the sanctuary of our Faith, the multiple heartaches of the present added to the unknown and ominous forebodings of the future could drive men to the point of despair.

Fordham has always taught, teaches, and will continue to teach the true worth of human institutions, and the Faith without which mankind gropes in exterior darkness. What is more, Fordham propounds these principles even in the absence of … catastrophe. She affords to her matriculants the ability to evaluate the world about us, and to derive benefit from good times and evil times alike.

I am proud of my Fordham heritage. It is a heritage that becomes an infallible yardstick in peace and a mighty bulwark in war. It is the intangible something-extra which always pays dividends in the heart. You too will come to the realization of this appreciation, as even now “with prayerful remembrance from the Fordham Men on the campus” indicates.

Sincerely,

Alfred A. Hartmann ’32