The Emotional Language of D-Day
On June 6th, 1944 (also known as D-Day), General Dwight D. Eisenhower gave a short, inspirational speech to soldiers before the Battle of Normandy. A full transcript and audio of the speech can be found here. In June of 1944, approximately 156,000 American, British, and Canadian forces landed on the coast of France’s Normandy region in one of the largest amphibious military assaults in history.
We used our Quantified Communications communications analytics platform to analyze this short speech that inspired so many troops in a time of war. Of the over 100 metrics we track, the characteristic that stands out, far more than any other, is emotion.
Eisenhower’s emotional language score was a 16.46%, meaning he used 3.6 times the average amount of emotional language according to our communications analytics database. Even though the speech is short (only 243 words), phrases such as “The hopes and prayers of liberty loving people everywhere march with you” serve to deeply and emotionally connect him with his audience at a profound time in their lives.