D-Day: The gauntlet through hell
On D-Day, June 6, 1944, Santa Cruzan John Drake Pusey (pronounced pew-zee) found himself hunkered down on a beach in the Normandy invasion of Europe, exhausted coming ashore, while exposed to German guns. The Invasion of Europe by allied forces, was an effort to open a second front against the Nazis, landing troops at five Normandy beaches code-named Utah and Omaha for Americans, plus Gold and Sword for Britain, and Juno for Canada. Yet failure of air and naval bombardment to cripple strong German defenses at Omaha Beach, brought this one landing close to defeat. Allied forces had to traverse a gauntlet of land mines, barbed wire, a seawall trench, and sniper fire from cliff-top pillboxes. How did a 39-year-old man with a distinguished arts career, get into this kind of pickle?
The jokester
Pusey was born 1905 in Council Bluffs, Iowa into an influential local family of pioneers, politicians and entrepreneurs. But at his father's death, his mother had to raise three children on a $65 a week school principal's salary. Pusey was a born leader, and class clown, “wise enough to play the fool,” and drew cartoons to amuse his friends. When Pusey graduated high school in 1923, he parlayed his humorous sketches into an arts major, graduating Yale School of Fine Art in 1926.
Hoping to broaden his artistic horizons, he went to Paris to study art, living the life of a starving Bohemian. He studied at the Louvre and Luxembourg museums, sold paintings to American tourists, and edited a magazine. He befriended art student Bill H. Irwin of Brookdale, California, and Chicago-native Margaret Jarvis studying art at the Sorbonne. Pusey married Margaret in 1926, who gave birth to son J.J. in 1927. Pusey had a successful one-man show at the Barbizon in the summer of 1928. A trip to Madrid was a revelation, where Pusey found a broader color pa late at the colorfully bedecked bullfights. But he was most inspired by the somber works of Francisco Goya, whose expressionist depictions of war, devastation and nightmares, seemed painted with raw emotion. Pusey found distorting perspectives added stress, and felt reality had to be subordinate to emotion.
The Puseys sold art in France, New York and Iowa, until the Great Depression cratered the market. Fortunately the New Deal created the Public Works of Art Project in Iowa City, where he joined 34 painters under the direction of Grant Wood. They were charged with creating murals for public buildings. Instead of doing monumental works of patriotic subjects, they celebrated the current struggles of farmers and laborers, dubbed “Regionalism” or “Depression Art.” While Wood had a more sentimental depiction of rural life, Pusey's jokester perspective seemed to comment on the ironies within the struggle. In one painting, he shows rich officials at a cornerstone laying ceremony being applauded in the background, while in the foreground, workers are struggling to put the cornerstone into place. In another painting, workers are juxtaposed with rows of cattle. Or he would depict industrial “progress” under skies darkened with plumes of smoke. When Wood recommended Eli Lilly hire Pusey for a large library commission, Pusey convinced Lilly to substitute average work
ing Americans for famous men.
California
In 1938, Pusey became a set-designer for Universal Studios in Hollywood, then was engaged at the 1939 San Francisco World's Fair on Treasure Island, where he created eight murals, and supervised a number of others. The fair was so popular, it was continued a second year in 1940. But Pusey moved to Santa Cruz to open a studio, linking up with his artistic college friend Bill Irwin.
France fell in June 1940, Paris being occupied by Nazis on June 14, with Hitler taking a tour on June 23, 1940. While admiring Paris, Hitler ordered the destruction of two World War I memorials, one to French war hero Gen. Charles Mangin, and one to British nurse Edith Cavell, executed for helping soldiers escape the Germans. Pusey and Irwin fretted about their friends in the Parisian art scene.
Pusey joined the National Guard, commissioned as a 2nd lieutenant in the 34th Infantry Division. Yet surprisingly, the army needed artists, so Pusey was promoted to captain, and transferred to the Corps of Engineers. Pusey and Irwin helped develop special camouflage patterns and scrimdrapes to hide factories and military bases, or disguise them from the air.
Pusey was then stationed in England, where he learned bomb and booby-trap defusing. He wrote his wife in Santa Cruz about D-Day. Pusey crossed the English channel on June 5, 1944 in a large ship-like landing craft known as an LST (“Landing Ship Tank,” nicknamed “Large Slow Target” by the soldiers). It was crowded with men and vehicles. At midnight the general quarters alarm sounded, locking men in their water-tight compartments below decks while the deck guns were fired. After about an hour, they were allowed on deck, and had a good breakfast. The sea was crowded with invasion vessels, yet eerily quiet as seacraft negotiated the lighted buoys left by minesweepers just ahead.
D-Day
Then “all hell seems to break loose on the shore about 15 miles away. The air bombardment had started, and the sky became an inferno of varicolored flashes from bombs, flak and burning aircraft. We hated to see our aircraft come tumbling down in flames. I saw six in 10 minutes. But they had a job to do and they did it.” Only nine of the 81 planes deployed that day found their designated drop-zone, but the accidently scattered landings in a 20-mile area confused the Germans, who killed mostly those who arrived accurately. These aerial D-Day fatalities included Jack Marlow of Aromas, Leo Packham of Santa Cruz and Carl Riggs of Watsonville.
“A navy control boat hailed us and ordered us not to land yet, so we turned and went out about 500 yards from shore where we circled, awaiting further orders. The destroyers came in close and really began to give the Jerry pill boxes hell from point blank range. They were firing directly over our heads, and I'm still deaf from it. … For four more hours we tossed around until we were so frozen, we were anxious to get to the beach in spite of the fire, which was stiff as ever.
“Then came 11 a.m. and we were ordered in. By this time we were good and mad and unafraid — only terribly excited, like at a football game. My brain was clear as crystal and I did automatically the things I had been trained to do. We grounded about 40 feet from shore, and as the ramp was being lowered, we received a direct hit in the rear of the boat, losing five men and many wounded. I was behind an armored car, so never caught anything. The water was only about 2 feet deep when we stepped off, but after several steps it was over our head, and we were all swimming like mad, with shell bursts all around us all the time.
“When I finally made the beach, I fell flat on my face from exhaustion, as I managed to retain all my arms and equipment, and the swim was consequently very hard. I ordered my little band up to a ditch that was already full of infantry that had been unable to attack as yet, and we piled in on top of them, which they did not mind as we gave them added protection.
“As I had a job to do, my sergeant and I started up the beach to the exit about 500 yards to our right. In rushes, falling on our faces every 10 yards or so when the mortars were chasing us, we eventually reached the slope of the cliff, through minefields and everything, unscathed. There I found the division engineer who I was ordered to contact, and began to get a picture of the situation as we dug in, and we dug faster than anybody ever did before, or ever will again! When I looked at the Jerry defenses several days later, I still don't know how we ever took it, but take it we did, and we are very confident and cocky now. I at least will never be afraid of anything any more.”
Pusey “deloused” the field of mines with detectors and defusing, and was often sent into bunkers to clear explosives. Pusey was sent to clear explosives at Adolph Hitler's “Felsennest” bunker. There he found oil paints and a painting kit too impractical for a real artist. These could only have been Hitler's paints. Pusey got permission to send that 10year supply of paints back to Santa Cruz, with the intention of painting a mural to celebrate Hitler's defeat.
After retirement from his post, Pusey was called back to active duty in 1948 by the Berlin Airlift, then served in the Korean War with his son J.J. The Puseys left Santa Cruz in 1950, and settled in Carlisle, Pennsylvania in 1957, where he became arts professor at Dickinson College. He got his chance to paint his World War II Victory mural at a Carlisle library, still there today. But in postwar McCarthyism, the New Deal was equated with Communism, and “Depression Art” was called Anti-American, so a number of New Deal murals were removed or destroyed.
Yet D-Day was still a defining moment. The allied forces used 5,333 ships to land 150,000 troops, with planes dropping 18,000 paratroopers, makes it the largest invasion force in world history. In the first 24-hours of D-Day, the allied casualties numbered 4,414, and German casualties between 4,000 and 9,000. And all to defeat the enslaving and murderous ethos of White Nationalism.