Looking back on anniversary of ‘Day of Days’
It used to be, as we headed into the week preceding the anniversary of D-Day, a reporter could pick up a phone and call a veteran of the “Day of Days” to excavate the memory vein, if they were up for it.
Now, 77 years later, they are nearly gone. D-Day was the day when 150,000 Allied soldiers from all the countries determined to end Nazi tyranny in Europe and did just that.
The letter Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower, future president and overall commander of Operation Overlord, wrote, rings down through history to this day, 77 years after the “Day of Days.” It went like this:
“Soldiers, Sailors and Airmen of the Allied Expeditionary Force!
“You are about to embark upon the Great Crusade, toward which we have striven these many months. The eyes of the world are upon you. The hope and prayers of liberty-loving people everywhere march with you. In company with our brave Allies and brothers-in-arms on other Fronts, you will bring about the destruction of the German war machine, the elimination of Nazi tyranny over the oppressed peoples of Europe, and security for ourselves in a free world.
“Your task will not be an easy one. Your enemy is well trained, well equipped and battle-hardened. He will fight savagely.
“But this is the year 1944! Much has happened since the Nazi triumphs of 1940-41. The tide has turned! The free men of the world are marching together to Victory!
“I have full confidence in your courage, devotion to duty and skill in battle. We will accept nothing less than full Victory!
“Good luck! And let us beseech the blessing of Almighty God upon this great and noble undertaking.”
The other day, I chanced on a blog post written by a writer I don’t know, but we are close in age. Jim Gath is 70 and this is what he wrote:
“Growing up, every kid I knew had a dad that was in the war. Every kid in the neighborhood. Every kid in school. Every friend. Every family. Every house we/they lived in was paid for, in part, by the GI Bill as thanks from a grateful nation for the sacrifices they made.
Every kid’s father was a hero. Because they all went overseas, to the Far East or to Europe or to the seven seas. They all went. And they all fought. Fought to eradicate the greatest scourge in history. A scourge that rounded up millions of people, put them into concentration camps and starved them until it was time for them to walk to their deaths in Auschwitz or Dachau or other places that had gas chambers, where they died horrible deaths by the hundreds at a time until their numbers reached into the millions.
“Our fathers and uncles fought that scourge in forests and in swamps and on beaches and on the high seas. Over three-hundred thousand of those would-be fathers and uncles left their mortal coils in the bloody dirt of those European battlefields. Monte Cassino. The Bulge. Africa. Normandy. Anzio. Berlin. El Alamein. And thousands of other battles.
“And on May 8, 1945, victory in Europe was achieved. Hitler was gone. The Nazis were gone. The death marches were gone. The Reich was gone. Over and done with. And, as kids, we looked up to our dads and our uncles and our friends’ dads and their uncles, and all the others who had gone, quite literally, to save the world. They saved the world from Nazism.
“Now, somehow, that scourge is trying to return. Return in our own nation. It is trying to return in the very nation that made the world safe from it. And I can’t quite believe it.” I can’t believe it either.
I do not know where Jim Gath is today, but his words speak to me. The Nazis were the ones who burned up and shot grandmothers and babies in Europe, because they were Jewish, or some other “other.” If they wear swastikas and “Camp Auschwitz” T-shirts today, they have no place in American decent society. Period.
My cousin Ed Miller went with the first tanks chugging onto Omaha Beach. My dad, Carl Anderson, arrived in England the next day as the V-1 buzz bombs built in a Nazi slave labor camp were falling on London, with the much deadlier V-2s to follow.
I remember Lew Shoemaker, Quartz Hill football coach, who waded ashore with the “Big Red One” soon to be wounded so badly he would be sent home to the United States to recuperate and meet his wife in an Army hospital. I think about California City’s Henry Ochsner with the 101st Airborne Division, and the 82nd Airborne Division’s John Humphrey, trapped behind enemy lines on D-Day and wounded on Christmas Eve, 1944.
I think about Adolph Martinez of Quartz Hill, still with us, captured at the Bulge and who escaped POW captivity. Twice! I think about our Navy vet, Art Ray, 96, whose cruiser, the USS Quincy, put shells on target on D-Day and fondly recalled, “The Quincy was a good ship.”
In March, at a paratrooper reunion, I met a live D-Day veteran, Sgt. Daniel McBride, 97, who was there when Eisenhower visited the 101st Airborne troopers about to board the planes the night of June 5, 1944.
“He asked if I was scared, and I said I wasn’t, because I wasn’t,” McBride recalled.
Sometimes a teenager carrying a hundred-plus pounds of lethal gear is just too scrappy and bold to be afraid. A Purple Heart and Bronze Star testified to lessons learned, and survival to long life. And our future is secured because of it.
The “Day of Days,” history’s biggest seaborne and airborne invasion armada is worth remembering, not just because of what they did, but because of what it meant for the rest of us who came after.