When America went to bed at 11pm on the night of June 5, she had no idea that 140 thousand Allied troops, half British and half Americans, were on landing craft in the middle of the English Channel, ready to storm the beaches of Normandy and begin the slow move inland to the Rhine. Of the 5 beaches, Omaha Beach was the most difficult and those landing craft were nearly all Americans, proud and brave. My father was one of them.
It's impossible to say whether the craft where the famous picture of the ramp dropping and troops swarming onshore. There were hundreds doing the same thing at the same time. During those initial moments, many died by drowning because the water was too deep and because of a navigational error, the LST's and LCVP's landed on the wrong part of the beach. The rest fought just to make it too the beach where there was no cover. By the end of the day, nearly 2,500 lay dead in the surf, some being swept back out to sea with the high tide.
The beach was crowded and troops pinned down by fire from above as the second wave landed and caused even more chaos. Meanwhile, Naval bombardments from the channel had little effect. The bunkers on the cliffs were so well built, that the shells from the battle group's 15 inch guns would ricochet off them. Medics were overburdened by the dead and dying, let alone the injured. They were a prime target of German snipers. The fact that the invasion succeeded was almost a miracle. Eisenhower had written two speeches..one for victory and one for defeat.
My father was one of the lucky ones. He survived when so many fell. He refused to talk about the experience, only once in a great while did he gave a passing mention, but always about what somebody else did. That was apparently a common trait of those who walked into hell and emerged on the other side. They weren't unscathed. There was no PTSD..you would just continue to fight until you couldn't fight any more. His fighting temporarily ended shortly after the invasion, not by enemy action but by trenchfoot, caused by wearing waterlogged combat boots for a long period of time. He was evacuated to England, almost lost both feet, was declared ready for combat, and sent back to duty. As he was a tank commander, he was returned to duty just in time for the "Bulge", where he stepped out of his tank to take a leak and watched in horror as a German round hit the tank dead center.
The break-out from Normandy was slow. At midnight of D-Day, Allied troops held a beachhead that was only 5 miles wide and a mile and a half deep. 34,000 troops had landed, 3 of whom earned the Medal of Honor including Theodore Roosevelt Jr., who could have stayed off shore, but insisted on leading his men in the assault. His first 2 requests were denied and the third approved. He died running up and down the beach leading men to safety with few casualties.
By the end of July, 1 million 300 thousand men had secured the beachhead and moved inland at a cost of 120,000 casualties. The American Cemetary holds the sacred remains of over 9,300 war dead, most from the Normandy invasion and the war inland. The Wall of the Missing contains 1557 names. There are 307 Unknowns as well as 4 women, several fathers and sons, 33 brothers.
Whether Eisenhower was a great general is open to debate. There were many failures in both the mission and the intelligence. It was the gallantry of those first 34,000 men and the largest naval bombardment in history to secure the beach so more could follow. It was the French Resistance that knew how to blow things up and create mischief. It was the 82nd and 101st Airborne that, though scattered because of high winds, were able to regroup and attack German ground forces from behind.
I have two regrets. One was not being able to get my father to go with me to Omaha Beach. I didn't want to go alone, and ultimately I didn't go at all even though it was an 8 hour train ride. He carried the emotional scars and even in delirium in the final hours of his life, I swear he was reliving the horrors of that June morning over 40 years earlier. He still had combat dreams for all of his life.
The other regret was not getting 3 people I knew had been in Normandy to do an interview for the 40th anniversary. One was my father whom I knew better than to ask, Mike Syrylo who was a medic, and the other was a Medal of Honor recipient who was, as I remember, the administrator of the VA hospital. I wanted to do an hour on WARM to tell their story but I also wanted to let their memories rest in peace, so I never got it off the drawing board. Today I wish I had pursued it further.
We will never again, God willing, have to sacrifice so many lives for a small piece of beach anywhere in the world. So many gave so much for the greater good of mankind. Some might say the hand of God won the day, but if it was God, He would have given the Allies blue skies and calm seas. And the beach wouldn't have been red from the blood of thousands. They gave us the American Dream. They gave us that brighter tomorrow. Please don't let us squander it.
