Omaha Beach

On the 70th anniversary of D-Day, June 6, 1944, the CBS affiliate in Dallas took half a dozen veterans pf World War II to France.  Watching the ten o’clock news, I hear these old men recount their memories of landing on Omaha Beach. It brought make back my own memories of my husband John and his stories of World War II. . 

For him it was the most exciting time in his life.  John was drafted in January 1942, right after Pearl Harbor.  After basic training, he was sent to OCS, then to Harvard Business School to train as a supply officer.  In the hallway of our little house in Albuquerque hung a photo of his “class” at Harvard.  Three rows of young lieutenants in spiffy new uniforms.  Since John was short, he was in the center of the front row. 

His unit sailed to Europe on the Mauritania, a luxury liner which had been converted to a troop transport.  They landed in Liverpool on Christmas Eve 1943.  In the darkness the troops marched up from the pier, the only sound the pounding of two thousand pairs of boots echoing on cobblestones. 

In England his company set up a “depot” near Westbury, where they assembled supplies for the invasion of France.  John enjoyed his time in England.  He made friends (John always made friends wherever he was) with two English families who lived in side-by-side bungalows on the edge of the little town. 

The company joined the armada crossing the English Channel.  John said the most amazing sight he ever saw was “the sea covered with ships.  All around us as far as I could see were ships, over a thousand of them.”

John waded ashore on Omaha Beach on D-Day plus four, June 10, “carrying my rifle above my head.”  The beach had been secured.  Since John was in a supply company, always following the troops but never in combat, he never fired the gun during the many months that followed, all the way across Europe to meet the Russians at the Elbe. 

John’s company waited on Omaha Beach for several days before a ship brought their supplies. It dumped a shipload of cartons onto the beach, a mountain of food for men who were fighting the Germans. 

Major Peters gave John the job of organizing all this stuff   To help him John was assigned a group of POW’s.  All were Poles and Czechs who had been forced to join Hitler’s Army to avoid being sent to a concentration camp.  They were happy to surrender to the first Americans they met.  Since John could speak Polish, he had no trouble talking with these prisoners.  He had the men arrange the cartons in neat stacks. A wall of canned peaches six feet high, ten cartons wide, and a quarter of a mile long,  Next came to a similar wall of beans, another of corned beef hash, etc.

As the prisoners strained to lift the cartons into place, one of them said to John, “Why did the Germans think they could win?  The Germans could NEVER have won this war.  You have too much stuff.”