65th Anniversary of D-Day. What are your stories?

[charlie and algernon]

Were you there? Were you in another theater? Did you have family there? Let's hear the stories of our heroic veterans.

[KharmaTrain]

1. My Father Passed Through Normandie

I'd be interested to see if there are any DU'ers who can remember 65 years ago, yet were a participant.

My father served in the Army Medical Corp...he passed through Omaha Beach a couple weeks after the invasion. He treated many of the wounded both in England and then once he got to France. He then followed the British Army (Montgommery), breaking out of St. Lo and then across Northern France, Southern Belgium and into Germany.

[no_hypocrisy]

2. My mother's uncle was a filmmaker and was in the water, taking footage of the D-Day invasion.

A very comprehensive and valuable record.

He never made copies and unfortunately the reels were stolen 30 years ago when someone broke into his car trunk.

[Hepburn]

3. My mother was in college and I was -4 years old. n/t

[rurallib]

4. Late FIL was in the invasion - would never talk about the war

Once in a while he would utter a sentence but would stop. Except for his R&R in Iceland. He loved that. Playing baseball at midnight.
On the 50th anniversary his cousin asked if he would join her on trip back. He erupted and it was the only time I ever heard him say fuck as in "Why in the fuck would I ever want to go back there?"

[OmmmSweetOmmm]

5. My Dad worked at the Brooklyn Naval Yard as a welder.

[lpbk2713]

10. My father worked at the Fore River shipyard, just outside of Boston.

I'm sure both of them built ships that participated in the D-Day invasion.

[whistler162]

16. My Grandfather worked at the Brookyln Naval Yard also

as a cabinet maker.

[NoPasaran]

6. My mother told of waking with a start in the night

And later learning that a cousin of hers had been killed on Omaha Beach.

My father wasn't a participant in D-Day, but he landed at Omaha later with his antiaircraft battalion (90mm guns). He fought in France, was wounded near Metz, but was back for the crossing of the Rhine. For a short time after the defeat of the nazis he was military governor of a German village.

[lonestarnot]

7. An uncle who went a more than a little well, became a hermit, never

talked to anyone, life of seclusion, went to his garden with a handgun in its shoulder holster, bent over, gun fell out, shot him between the eyes. Poor guy. War is hell.

[lamp_shade]

8. My father... D-Day +1 (Utah Beach). Master Sargeant served as a guard at

a German POW camp. One of the prisoners gave him a wooden match box on which he'd carved the image of Dagwood and Blondie. We still have it. He died in 1973 at age 58 from alcoholism.

[GreatCaesarsGhost]

9. i knew a woman who was a little girl living there on D-Day

she said the nazis took over her house and they had to live in the cellar. she said the noise of the shelling was incredible.

[Are_grits_groceries]

11. My Daddy landed +4 with Old Hickory.

He was in the artillery. He never would talk much about the war. He fought on through the Battle of the Bulge and VE Day. He was in for several years.

[Tierra_y_Libertad]

12. 2 of my uncles were in the Canadian Army landed at Juno Beach.

Both survived the landing and the war.

[Frank Cannon]

13. My grandfather landed at Omaha Beach with the 58th AFAB

He was a forward observer who managed to survive all the way through the end of the war. He was captured by the Germans twice, but managed to escape and eventually find his way back to his unit just in time to fight in the Bulge.

He never, ever spoke of his experiences in the war. We found out everything from our grandmother and from his papers from the Army after he passed away.

[conscious evolution]

14. My uncles were there

One was a Navy Beachmaster on Omaha beach.He hit the beach before the first wave to set up radios for the landing craft to follow in.He was only one of three men out of fourty to survive the day.
My other uncle skippered a higgins LST in the second wave at Omaha Beach.It was destroyed by fire and he spent the rest of the day hunkered down behind beach obstacles shitting his pants(Can you blame him?)
Another uncle was a paratrooper in the 82nd Airborne.He never has told anyone in our family what he went through.
My father was a .50 cal gunner was in the PTO at the time.He doesn't speak of his experiences either.

[hedgehog]

15. This is a story from the Pacific War.

My uncle was a Navy corpsman assigned to be a medic to a landing craft full of Marines. God help me, I can't say for sure whether it was Guam or Tarawa. I'll have to ask my dad. The boat hit the beach, the front was dropped and they were facing a mortar launcher. The landing craft was towed out to see later and sunk with what remained.

Masses were said in Youngstown, Cleveland and at Notre Dame for the soul of my uncle.

Later on, the family found out what had really happened. My uncle had been terribly wounded, but he was the only corpsman left in that part of the beach. He was dragged into cover, and the wounded were brought to him. Later, his unconscious body was transported to a hospital. There was no ID left, so no one knew who he was for about six months until he woke up enough to tell them.

Imagine, learning that your son and bother is dead, only to learn six months later that he is alive.

There is a story that people were setting off firecrackers one day shortly after he came home, and his brothers had to drag him into a cold shower to calm him down. He never went back to Notre Dame. He settled down and raised a family, but I don't think he had more than a few days where he was entirely sober the rest of his life. He was still visiting the VA occasionally to have shrapnel removed as it worked up to the skin until the day he died. He made it his business to visit others in VA hospitals.


A while back, when all the 50 year anniversaries were coming up, NBC commemorated the events by showing footage of each operation as it happened. The anniversary of my uncle's landing came up, and there was footage of young men sitting in a landing craft. I saw him sitting there, the last few minutes before his life changed forever.

[uppityperson]

20. I am glad that you got to see him in the footage, your story gives me goosebumps

[Cirque du So-What]

17. My uncle tried his damndest to get in on the action during WW II

but he was a veteran of WW I and was pushing 50 by the time Pearl Harbor was attacked. He tried lying about his age, but he lived in a small town and the head of the local draft board knew better.

Denied the opportunity to head into battle, he resigned from his job as a superintendent of highway construction and went to work in a synthetic rubber factory - one that had been retooled for producing materiels for wartime use. He worked in that factory for three years - hot, backbreaking labor - but it gave him satisfaction, knowing that the goods he was producing were helping in the war effort.

On V-J day, a great jubilation broke out at the factory. One of my uncle's co-workers - a huge fellow with gargantuan strength - hoisted a mold weighing nearly 300 pounds and heaved it through a nearby window. My uncle said, 'on the day that the Japanese surrendered, so did I,' and he immediately quit. He was able to return to the highway department, where he enjoyed working outdoors until he retired.

[Individualist]

18. One of my uncles was one of the paratroopers who went in on D-Day.

[uppityperson]

19. BIL's family live in the area.

Grandfather was in the resistance. Neighbors took refuge in their house since it was large and furthest from the beach, they still have shrapnel in their shutters though. The ones away from the ocean. A couple yrs ago they noticed an odd shaped thing in their neighbor's pile of scrap metal. Called the authorities to come take away the unexploded bomb.

It has been wild there the last couple days, roads blocked, paratroopers dropping out of the skies, planes flying overhead very very low, but also very exciting.

We had this email last night "To mark the 65th anniversary of the D-Day Landings there will 25 simultaneous firework displays along a 50-mile stretch of coastline, from Ste-Marie-du-Mont to Merville-Franceville." with this comment from family there "boy am I glad that those aren't real bombings"

Thank you vets who participated in the Liberation of Europe!