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In the Sun. When the American bugles blew for War II, Young Teddy was off again—with the same famed First Division he had been with in France in 1918. He made his mark as a gamecock, gallant soldier. He liked the front lines, and frontline soldiers liked him. When he passed by, the divisional band always struck up "Old Soldiers Never Die." He was in the first amphibious waves at Oran and at Gela. He was turned down two times for the invasion of France, but General Eisenhower couldn't refuse his third plea. So, though aching from arthritis, he hobbled ashore in Normandy with his troops, a .45 strapped to his shoulder, the first U.S. general to land in France on Dday. Thousands of G.I.s knew his cocky figure, and the wide-mouthed grin on his battered face. He had a gusty, spirited way about him, as inspirational from a jeep as his father had been on a horse.
Young Teddy liked battle poetry: entering Cherbourg the night it fell, he sang out Alan Seeger's line: "At midnight in some flaming town. . . ." Seeger was describing a soldier's rendezvous with death. That rendezvous came for Young Teddy, 56, last week in his proud new headquarters —a captured German truck that had been refitted with a bed, electric lights and a writing desk. Four days earlier, he had suffered a heart attack. He told his son, Quentin, "The old machine is pretty well worn down." But he kept to his robust routine, until his heart gave up.
This time the band played Chopin's Funeral March. Brigadier General Roosevelt was buried near Ste. Mère Eglise, in an American cemetery which has 2,000 new white crosses. Americans of all kinds were sure that if old T.R. were alive, he would have said to his son, "Bully!"