Usually, there isn’t that much in common between waging war and telling a story.
But the Allied invasion of Nazi-occupied France in 1944 (which began on the day known as D-Day) sheds light on an important storytelling principle.
The Plan That Failed
In June 1944—nearly five years into World War II—the Allied Powers decided to invade the portion of the Nazi-occupied French coast code-named “Omaha Beach.”
Expecting serious resistance from the well-ensconced German troops, a flotilla of allied navy ships (and airplanes) bombarded the coastal Nazi positions before the invasion; they believed they had destroyed most of the German fortifications.
At that point, the battleships and cruisers had orders simply to guard the infantrymen against attack by German ships.
But the German strongholds had not been damaged. In fact, as the waves of infantrymen began to land, they were immediately pinned down under heavy German machine-gun fire—largely from concrete bunkers shielding German crews. The allied infantry had a handful of amphibious tanks, but not enough to disable the German bunkers. The invasion was completely stalled!
Disobeying Orders
One naval commander, though, Robert Beer, watched the infantrymen being shot at, killed, or rendered helpless. Then he disobeyed his initial orders to focus only on German ships. Instead, he radioed to the destroyers under his command,
“Get on [the machine gunners], men! Get on them! They are raising hell with the men on the beach, and we can’t have any more of that. We must stop it.”
So the destroyers began bombarding the area where they thought the Germans were firing from, even though the crews couldn’t see the German positions clearly. This made the destroyers unsure of their effectiveness but also vulnerable. They were so close to the land that their keels were in only a few inches of water—and their hulls were hit repeatedly by German rifle fire.
Non-Verbal Communication
At one point, the observant Commander Beer noticed that two of the Allied tanks were firing at a small area on a bluff. Testing a hunch, he ordered his sailors to fire their cannons at the area. After several rounds of powerful five-inch-fifty-one-caliber ammunition struck the bluff and damaged it, the tanks began to fire elsewhere—and the sailors aimed their high-power guns at the new target.
Later, Beer wrote:
“It was evident that the Army was using tank fire in [the] hope that the support vessels would see the target and take it under fire.”
In this way, the tanks and the ships created a new way to communicate—all without radio contact or words of any kind—and to work together to take out the German positions, one by one.
As a result, the pinned-down troops were able to advance. They succeeded in gaining a foothold in Nazi-occupied France, and, in time, marched on toward victory in Europe.
Had the ships stuck to their initial orders, the invasion would have been unsuccessful—and the war might well have ended differently!
What about Storytellers?
Just as the naval commander changed his behavior in response to the surprising conditions on Omaha Beach, storytellers also need to change their behavior in response to the unexpected.
After all, storytellers deal with the uncertain. No matter how often we’ve practiced telling a story, our listeners often respond in unexpected ways.
What Are Our “Orders”?
Like the sailors and tank drivers on Omaha Beach, we have our own “orders”: a goal (e.g., of connecting to people through the story) and our ideas of what we plan to do in order to achieve that goal.
Sooner or later, though, it happens to everyone: our best idea of how to achieve our goals of connecting, convincing, or educating through a story—the “orders” we gave ourselves, the thing we have prepared to do—does not work.
At that moment, just like Robert Beer on D-Day, we have two choices:
Keep doing the thing we thought would work, even if it is failing; or
Change our behavior in response to these unexpected developments.
A Key Aspect of Story Growing
To grow stories, you need to tell them to practice listeners—where you have little to lose when things don’t go well. But whenever you change your telling based on listener responses, you’re actually practicing adjusting your story to listener responses.
On the other hand, if you only practice telling a story without regard for listener responses, you systematically reduce your skills in adapting to unexpected responses.
What Can Storytellers Learn from D-Day?
We can learn the importance:
Of having a goal,
Of having a plan for carrying out your goal (your “orders”), but especially:
Of practicing how to change your plans, so that you become experienced in adapting to the unknown.
In short, practice in adapting to listener responses is a key part of the story-growing process!
*My main source of the D-Day story: