Stamford’s single D-Day loss
Mickey Donahue had won 13 of his 23 professional fights, two of which were at Madison Square Garden, and the Stamford native was considered one of the most promising young welterwights (maximum weight 147 pounds) in the country when World War II interceded and he enlisted in the U.S. Army.
Donahue’s last fight was Sept. 16, 1940 at the old Columbus Hall on Guernsey Street where he had made his fistic debut on March 18, 1938. The 1940 bout would also turn out to be the last of his career which ended when he suffered a spinal injury June 6, 1944, that would confine him to a wheelchair for the rest of his life.
But at least Donahue would return home, as would at least five other Stamford GIs who fought at D-Day, 75 years ago today, as Stamford’s inestimable military historian Tony Pavia recounted in his book about Stamford servicemen and women, “An American Town Goes to War.”
U.S. Army Cpl. Harry LaChance Jr., 27, a member of the Army’s 82nd Airborne, did not make it home. He was killed after parachuting onto one of three beaches at Normandy, France, with about 15,000 other paratroopers during the biggest amphibious military landing in history. LaChance was in a C-47 transport plane with 17 other paratroopers and a crew of four who were en route to an area where LaChance and the other paratroopers were to bail out just south of Normandy when the plane was hit by anti-aircraft fire killing the radioman and injuring two of the paratroopers. Two crew members and LaChance and his paratrooper comrades bailed out before the transport crashed, killing a second crew member. LaChance was killed shortly thereafter, one of 16 servicemen from Connecticut to die on D-Day.
Another American paratrooper from Stamford, Eddie Page, told Pavia he met LaChance in England before D-Day and had spent a day talking with him. LaChance was born in Hartford in 1917, attended Stamford High School, worked for a delivery service and enlisted in the U.S. Army on May 8, 1942 when he was 25 after serving for a year and a half in the Canadian army.
Besides Donahue and Page, others who survived the D-Day landing by the Allies, and returned home to Stamford were U.S. Army Air Corps pilot Harry Vanech, U.S. Navy signalman Eugene Godlin, John Ginter of the U.S. Army, one of four brothers who served during World War II; Clement Turpin, who also served in the U.S. Army, and another sailor, Walter Wescott.
In all, about 200 Stamford men were killed during World War II at a time when the city had a population of about 50,000. Only one, LaChance, was killed on D-Day when slightly more than 4,000 American GIs died and about 2,000 were wounded during the Allied amphibious landing and air attack on Normandy which was commanded by Gen. Dwight Eisenhower.
After D-Day, Eddie Page, one of the six Stamford survivors, returned to England and found out LaChance had been killed at Normandy. In 1991, Page went back to Normandy with his brother-inlaw and visited the cemetery where LaChance and several thousand other Americans had been buried, looking for LaChance’s grave.
“All we could see were rows and rows of headstone,” Page told Pavia. “Something drew me over to one, and I looked at it. It said ‘Sgt. Harry LaChance, 82nd Airborne, Connecticut.’”
Page also recalled advice he received from LaChance, who had already jumped twice in German-occupied Italy.
“Don’t try to be a hero,’” Page quoted LaChance as having told him.