As the pre-dawn mist cleared, an armada, thousands of ships strong, materialized off the Normandy coast 73 years ago Tuesday just past. Cloudy skies and a 50-degree chill greeted an Allied force about to swarm the historic area of France
Operation Overlord was underway.
Among U.S. soldiers was one from Iola, his 5-foot-4 frame sagging under the weight of a bag crammed with morphine, sulfa-based antibiotic and bandages. My dad, a medic, had trained for this day at Fitzsimons General Hospital in Denver.
Dad landed at Utah Beach on June 6, 1944, a short distance from the famed Omaha Beach, where more than 2,000 young U.S. soldiers were killed the first day while crossing a 100-yard stretch of low-tide sand, showered by a deadly barrage of German bullets. Those surging onto Utah had the protection of marshes, thus for the most part enemy fire was absent.
Canadian, British and Free French troops simultaneously landed on Juno, Gold and Sword beaches.
Dad took comfort in the U.S. losing only 12 soldiers during the Utah landing. Soon after, however, he and other medics were swamped by scores of wounded, coming in an unending stream.
Shortly before he died in 1997, Dad still was troubled, he told me one night as I sat at his bedside in Allen County Hospital; it was the haunting remembrance of a young soldier he had treated.
“He looked like he was 15 of 16,” Dad recalled; I noticed a string of tears welling from the corner of an eye. “That boy looked up at me and said, ‘Don’t let me die.’ I knew he wouldn’t make it back across the (English) Channel.” The young soldier’s internal injuries were massive; his blood pressure barely registered; his face a deathly pallor.
That was only one of the sad tales Dad could have told about the first 48 hours — during which he and others worked without break — as they tried to stabilize the wounded so they could be rushed to hospitals in England.
Another of Dad’s memories was the blood. His large medical station tent was on the backside of Utah Beach and within a few hours the sand was saturated with blood: “It squished up to our ankles,” he said.
Dad had had many experiences with death. He worked for Tom Waugh at his Iola funeral home from about the time he and Mom were married in 1939 until he was drafted a few months before I was born in 1943.
After the D-Day Invasion, Dad, an “old man” of 25, was involved in the Breakout, Liberation of Paris, Battle of the Bulge — with Patton’s army — and Battle of the Rhine.
He came home in late 1945 — discharged at Fort Leavenworth and detrained at Durand, east of Yates Center — and within days began a 32-year career at Monarch Cement in Humboldt, rising to production foreman several years before his retirement.
Like so many World War II veterans, he seldom talked about his experiences. He didn’t even seem concerned I lost most of his decorations playing with them as a child.
Although he told me about “the boy” on Utah Beach on his deathbed, I suspect it and similar experiences in the European Theater troubled him all of his life — but only his own mortality caused him to share the most vivid with me.
At Week’s End: Dad died remembering soldier’s plea
