George Hicks was the reporter who came under fire from German planes while he was on the USS Ancon, as part of the armada that stormed the beaches of Normandy on June 6, 1944. The recording is 13 minutes of what Hicks observed as the invasion progressed. He is heard speaking calmly amid the chaos of war, his words competing for purchase over the roars of planes and guns and soldiers.

Hicks was working for the radio division of the Blue Network (a precursor of ABC) at the time and was the London bureau chief during World War II. The device on which Hicks made the recording, the Recordgraph, is obsolete. Historians later judged Hicks's dispatch as one of the most compelling pieces of audio to come out of the war. The recording was played on many occasions, at the time and since, but only copies of the broadcast have been available until now.

Bruce Campbell, who found the original in the basement of a summer home he bought on Long Island, donated the recording, along with a handful of others, to the National D-Day Foundation. The collection included other reports by Hicks, before and after D-Day. (He traveled with the U.S. Army into France and narrowly escaped death several times.) Also in the collection were recordings made by other well-known journalists from World War II, including the famous Edward R. Murrow.

Listen to Hicks's recording here.