June 6 1944
- Thread starter BobD
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Right on Bob.
I would like to honor my father in law who passed away this last January at the age of 94. He served during WWII and was flown in on DDay in one of those infamous gliders that crashed in the middle of enemy lines. He was able to avoid capture and continued to fight. He also fought at Anzio (another one of the bloodiest fights in Europe), helped take Rome and was awarded the Bronze Star for bravery taking over command of his unit when they lost their commanding officer fighting in Germany. Like most of his generation who fought, he never talked about it. It wasn’t until he passed that we learned a number of these facts that he hadn’t even shared with his family. After the war he continued to serve his fellow man as an Indianapolis fireman for 30+ years.
Hats off to Bob Biggs and all the soldiers who risked their lives for us. God bless them all.
I would like to honor my father in law who passed away this last January at the age of 94. He served during WWII and was flown in on DDay in one of those infamous gliders that crashed in the middle of enemy lines. He was able to avoid capture and continued to fight. He also fought at Anzio (another one of the bloodiest fights in Europe), helped take Rome and was awarded the Bronze Star for bravery taking over command of his unit when they lost their commanding officer fighting in Germany. Like most of his generation who fought, he never talked about it. It wasn’t until he passed that we learned a number of these facts that he hadn’t even shared with his family. After the war he continued to serve his fellow man as an Indianapolis fireman for 30+ years.
Hats off to Bob Biggs and all the soldiers who risked their lives for us. God bless them all.
T Town Tommy
Alabama Bag Man
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My grandfather was in the Pacific theatre during the war. God bless all those that served and fought in such a brutal time in our history. We can never repay them for their sacrifices. And to those who gave all... may the memory of your lives and duty to our great country live on forever.
GreenSox04
LET THE BIG DOG EAT!
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No words can really do it, even thank you seems cheap.
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You're so right. I have always been interested in WWII and have read a lot and watched a lot on it. Always had great respect and have been in awe of these men. After I was able to see the photo albums of pics my father in law took while he was fighting and read about his citations and exploits it took it to an entirely new level.
A Pac
Me in ND Stadium
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How anyone ever got off that beach alive is beyond me. Just one of those men has more balls than everyone on this board combined.
I teach history and my favorite day of the year is when we go over D-Day. I love showing the students pictures and info on the day that changed the world. Then of course we watch the first 30 minutes of Saving Private Ryan. Greatest. War. Movie. Ever.
I teach history and my favorite day of the year is when we go over D-Day. I love showing the students pictures and info on the day that changed the world. Then of course we watch the first 30 minutes of Saving Private Ryan. Greatest. War. Movie. Ever.
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GreenSox04
LET THE BIG DOG EAT!
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Not to derail any sort of tribute but me and my buddy's at school got into a discussion about this the other night about greatest war movies ever, I had saving private ryan and still do for the record, but we sat down and watched lone survivor and it is Nothing to scoff at.
irishog77
NOT SINBAD's NEPHEW
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Last week PBS had a show called "D-Day 360" (I believe that was the name) and it was great. I didn't know that Rommel was in charge of fortifying the beaches from invasion. And what a job he did.
I know the History Channel is running a D-Day special over the next several days that I'm recording and looking forward to watching.
That day, and that war overall, truly did require heroic effort from so many people. Sadly, it's almost disturbing to think about needing that type of effort and service from so many in this day and age.
I know the History Channel is running a D-Day special over the next several days that I'm recording and looking forward to watching.
That day, and that war overall, truly did require heroic effort from so many people. Sadly, it's almost disturbing to think about needing that type of effort and service from so many in this day and age.
Polish Leppy 22
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My grandfather was in the Battle of the Bulge. God bless him and all the others in the greatest generation.
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NORMANDY BEACHHEAD, June 12, 1944 – Due to a last-minute alteration in the arrangements, I didn't arrive on the beachhead until the morning after D-day, after our first wave of assault troops had hit the shore.
By the time we got here the beaches had been taken and the fighting had moved a couple of miles inland. All that remained on the beach was some sniping and artillery fire, and the occasional startling blast of a mine geysering brown sand into the air. That plus a gigantic and pitiful litter of wreckage along miles of shoreline.
Submerged tanks and overturned boats and burned trucks and shell-shattered jeeps and sad little personal belongings were strewn all over these bitter sands. That plus the bodies of soldiers lying in rows covered with blankets, the toes of their shoes sticking up in a line as though on drill. And other bodies, uncollected, still sprawling grotesquely in the sand or half hidden by the high grass beyond the beach.
That plus an intense, grim determination of work-weary men to get this chaotic beach organized and get all the vital supplies and the reinforcements moving more rapidly over it from the stacked-up ships standing in droves out to sea.
***
Now that it is over it seems to me a pure miracle that we ever took the beach at all. For some of our units it was easy, but in this special sector where I am now our troops faced such odds that our getting ashore was like my whipping Joe Louis down to a pulp.
In this column I want to tell you what the opening of the second front in this one sector entailed, so that you can know and appreciate and forever be humbly grateful to those both dead and alive who did it for you.
ERNIE PYLE: The horrible waste of war
D-DAY: Veteran's stranded boat withstood German shelling
Ashore, facing us, were more enemy troops than we had in our assault waves. The advantages were all theirs, the disadvantages all ours. The Germans were dug into positions that they had been working on for months, although these were not yet all complete. A one-hundred-foot bluff a couple of hundred yards back from the beach had great concrete gun emplacements built right into the hilltop. These opened to the sides instead of to the front, thus making it very hard for naval fire from the sea to reach them. They could shoot parallel with the beach and cover every foot of it for miles with artillery fire.
Then they had hidden machine-gun nests on the forward slopes, with crossfire taking in every inch of the beach. These nests were connected by networks of trenches, so that the German gunners could move about without exposing themselves.
Throughout the length of the beach, running zigzag a couple of hundred yards back from the shoreline, was an immense V-shaped ditch fifteen feet deep. Nothing could cross it, not even men on foot, until fills had been made. And in other places at the far end of the beach, where the ground is flatter, they had great concrete walls. These were blasted by our naval gunfire or by explosives set by hand after we got ashore.
Our only exits from the beach were several swales or valleys, each about one hundred yards wide. The Germans made the most of these funnel-like traps, sowing them with buried mines. They contained, also, barbed-wire entanglements with mines attached, hidden ditches, and machine guns firing from the slopes.
This is what was on the shore. But our men had to go through a maze nearly as deadly as this before they even got ashore. Underwater obstacles were terrific. The Germans had whole fields of evil devices under the water to catch our boats. Even now, several days after the landing, we have cleared only channels through them and cannot yet approach the whole length of the beach with our ships. Even now some ship or boat hits one of these mines every day and is knocked out of commission.
The Germans had masses of those great six-pronged spiders, made of railroad iron and standing shoulder-high, just beneath the surface of the water for our landing craft to run into. They also had huge logs buried in the sand, pointing upward and outward, their tops just below the water. Attached to these logs were mines.
In addition to these obstacles they had floating mines offshore, land mines buried in the sand of the beach, and more mines in checkerboard rows in the tall grass beyond the sand. And the enemy had four men on shore for every three men we had approaching the shore.
And yet we got on.
***
Beach landings are planned to a schedule that is set far ahead of time. They all have to be timed, in order for everything to mesh and for the following waves of troops to be standing off the beach and ready to land at the right moment.
As the landings are planned, some elements of the assault force are to break through quickly, push on inland, and attack the most obvious enemy strong points. It is usually the plan for units to be inland, attacking gun positions from behind, within a matter of minutes after the first men hit the beach.
GARY VARVEL: 70th Anniversary of D-Day
TODAY'S AMERICANS: Too many clueless about D-Day details
I have always been amazed at the speed called for in these plans. You'll have schedules calling for engineers to land at H-hour plus two minutes, and service troops at H-hour plus thirty minutes, and even for press censors to land at H-hour plus seventy-five minutes. But in the attack on this special portion of the beach where I am – the worst we had, incidentally – the schedule didn't hold.
Our men simply could not get past the beach. They were pinned down right on the water's edge by an inhuman wall of fire from the bluff. Our first waves were on that beach for hours, instead of a few minutes, before they could begin working inland.
You can still see the foxholes they dug at the very edge of the water, in the sand and the small, jumbled rocks that form parts of the beach.
Medical corpsmen attended the wounded as best they could. Men were killed as they stepped out of landing craft. An officer whom I knew got a bullet through the head just as the door of his landing craft was let down. Some men were drowned.
The first crack in the beach defenses was finally accomplished by terrific and wonderful naval gunfire, which knocked out the big emplacements. They tell epic stories of destroyers that ran right up into shallow water and had it out point-blank with the big guns in those concrete emplacements ashore.
When the heavy fire stopped, our men were organized by their officers and pushed on inland, circling machine-gun nests and taking them from the rear.
As one officer said, the only way to take a beach is to face it and keep going. It is costly at first, but it's the only way. If the men are pinned down on the beach, dug in and out of action, they might as well not be there at all. They hold up the waves behind them, and nothing is being gained.
Our men were pinned down for a while, but finally they stood up and went through, and so we took that beach and accomplished our landing. We did it with every advantage on the enemy's side and every disadvantage on ours. In the light of a couple of days of retrospection, we sit and talk and call it a miracle that our men ever got on at all or were able to stay on.
Before long it will be permitted to name the units that did it. Then you will know to whom this glory should go. They suffered casualties. And yet if you take the entire beachhead assault, including other units that had a much easier time, our total casualties in driving this wedge into the continent of Europe were remarkably low – only a fraction, in fact, of what our commanders had been prepared to accept.
And these units that were so battered and went through such hell are still, right at this moment, pushing on inland without rest, their spirits high, their egotism in victory almost reaching the smart-alecky stage.
Their tails are up. "We've done it again," they say. They figure that the rest of the army isn't needed at all. Which proves that, while their judgment in this regard is bad, they certainly have the spirit that wins battles and eventually wars.
Ernie Pyle, a native of Dana, Ind., was the nation's premier war correspondent during World War II. Permission to re-publish this column was given by the Scripps Howard Foundation.
By the time we got here the beaches had been taken and the fighting had moved a couple of miles inland. All that remained on the beach was some sniping and artillery fire, and the occasional startling blast of a mine geysering brown sand into the air. That plus a gigantic and pitiful litter of wreckage along miles of shoreline.
Submerged tanks and overturned boats and burned trucks and shell-shattered jeeps and sad little personal belongings were strewn all over these bitter sands. That plus the bodies of soldiers lying in rows covered with blankets, the toes of their shoes sticking up in a line as though on drill. And other bodies, uncollected, still sprawling grotesquely in the sand or half hidden by the high grass beyond the beach.
That plus an intense, grim determination of work-weary men to get this chaotic beach organized and get all the vital supplies and the reinforcements moving more rapidly over it from the stacked-up ships standing in droves out to sea.
***
Now that it is over it seems to me a pure miracle that we ever took the beach at all. For some of our units it was easy, but in this special sector where I am now our troops faced such odds that our getting ashore was like my whipping Joe Louis down to a pulp.
In this column I want to tell you what the opening of the second front in this one sector entailed, so that you can know and appreciate and forever be humbly grateful to those both dead and alive who did it for you.
ERNIE PYLE: The horrible waste of war
D-DAY: Veteran's stranded boat withstood German shelling
Ashore, facing us, were more enemy troops than we had in our assault waves. The advantages were all theirs, the disadvantages all ours. The Germans were dug into positions that they had been working on for months, although these were not yet all complete. A one-hundred-foot bluff a couple of hundred yards back from the beach had great concrete gun emplacements built right into the hilltop. These opened to the sides instead of to the front, thus making it very hard for naval fire from the sea to reach them. They could shoot parallel with the beach and cover every foot of it for miles with artillery fire.
Then they had hidden machine-gun nests on the forward slopes, with crossfire taking in every inch of the beach. These nests were connected by networks of trenches, so that the German gunners could move about without exposing themselves.
Throughout the length of the beach, running zigzag a couple of hundred yards back from the shoreline, was an immense V-shaped ditch fifteen feet deep. Nothing could cross it, not even men on foot, until fills had been made. And in other places at the far end of the beach, where the ground is flatter, they had great concrete walls. These were blasted by our naval gunfire or by explosives set by hand after we got ashore.
Our only exits from the beach were several swales or valleys, each about one hundred yards wide. The Germans made the most of these funnel-like traps, sowing them with buried mines. They contained, also, barbed-wire entanglements with mines attached, hidden ditches, and machine guns firing from the slopes.
This is what was on the shore. But our men had to go through a maze nearly as deadly as this before they even got ashore. Underwater obstacles were terrific. The Germans had whole fields of evil devices under the water to catch our boats. Even now, several days after the landing, we have cleared only channels through them and cannot yet approach the whole length of the beach with our ships. Even now some ship or boat hits one of these mines every day and is knocked out of commission.
The Germans had masses of those great six-pronged spiders, made of railroad iron and standing shoulder-high, just beneath the surface of the water for our landing craft to run into. They also had huge logs buried in the sand, pointing upward and outward, their tops just below the water. Attached to these logs were mines.
In addition to these obstacles they had floating mines offshore, land mines buried in the sand of the beach, and more mines in checkerboard rows in the tall grass beyond the sand. And the enemy had four men on shore for every three men we had approaching the shore.
And yet we got on.
***
Beach landings are planned to a schedule that is set far ahead of time. They all have to be timed, in order for everything to mesh and for the following waves of troops to be standing off the beach and ready to land at the right moment.
As the landings are planned, some elements of the assault force are to break through quickly, push on inland, and attack the most obvious enemy strong points. It is usually the plan for units to be inland, attacking gun positions from behind, within a matter of minutes after the first men hit the beach.
GARY VARVEL: 70th Anniversary of D-Day
TODAY'S AMERICANS: Too many clueless about D-Day details
I have always been amazed at the speed called for in these plans. You'll have schedules calling for engineers to land at H-hour plus two minutes, and service troops at H-hour plus thirty minutes, and even for press censors to land at H-hour plus seventy-five minutes. But in the attack on this special portion of the beach where I am – the worst we had, incidentally – the schedule didn't hold.
Our men simply could not get past the beach. They were pinned down right on the water's edge by an inhuman wall of fire from the bluff. Our first waves were on that beach for hours, instead of a few minutes, before they could begin working inland.
You can still see the foxholes they dug at the very edge of the water, in the sand and the small, jumbled rocks that form parts of the beach.
Medical corpsmen attended the wounded as best they could. Men were killed as they stepped out of landing craft. An officer whom I knew got a bullet through the head just as the door of his landing craft was let down. Some men were drowned.
The first crack in the beach defenses was finally accomplished by terrific and wonderful naval gunfire, which knocked out the big emplacements. They tell epic stories of destroyers that ran right up into shallow water and had it out point-blank with the big guns in those concrete emplacements ashore.
When the heavy fire stopped, our men were organized by their officers and pushed on inland, circling machine-gun nests and taking them from the rear.
As one officer said, the only way to take a beach is to face it and keep going. It is costly at first, but it's the only way. If the men are pinned down on the beach, dug in and out of action, they might as well not be there at all. They hold up the waves behind them, and nothing is being gained.
Our men were pinned down for a while, but finally they stood up and went through, and so we took that beach and accomplished our landing. We did it with every advantage on the enemy's side and every disadvantage on ours. In the light of a couple of days of retrospection, we sit and talk and call it a miracle that our men ever got on at all or were able to stay on.
Before long it will be permitted to name the units that did it. Then you will know to whom this glory should go. They suffered casualties. And yet if you take the entire beachhead assault, including other units that had a much easier time, our total casualties in driving this wedge into the continent of Europe were remarkably low – only a fraction, in fact, of what our commanders had been prepared to accept.
And these units that were so battered and went through such hell are still, right at this moment, pushing on inland without rest, their spirits high, their egotism in victory almost reaching the smart-alecky stage.
Their tails are up. "We've done it again," they say. They figure that the rest of the army isn't needed at all. Which proves that, while their judgment in this regard is bad, they certainly have the spirit that wins battles and eventually wars.
Ernie Pyle, a native of Dana, Ind., was the nation's premier war correspondent during World War II. Permission to re-publish this column was given by the Scripps Howard Foundation.
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First hand account from a Notre Dame hero.
Alexander was among the 73,000 U.S. troops (out of an estimated 156,000 total Allied troops taking part that day) who were involved in the massive invasion during World War II that helped turn the tide of the fighting in Europe. No one has an accurate count of how many D-Day veterans are still alive today. But, according to several veterans groups, estimates range from 5,000 to 10,000.
When they returned home, many D-Day vets tried to put the horror of what they had experienced in Normandy, France, behind them, said Joe Davis, public affairs director for the Veterans of Foreign Wars.
"You don't want to relive the worst day of your life," he explained. "It's a stressor. It takes them back to their youth, when they were fighting for their lives — and it reminds them of all those who didn't make it back home."
EYEWITNESS: Ernie Pyle: Courage, sacrifice and a pure miracle on D-Day
KEY REPORT: D-Day: The most important weather forecast in history
As America observes the 70th anniversary of the largest seaborne invasion in history, Davis said it's a good time to reflect on how those men and women changed our world, both on the battlefield and on the homefront.
"They became the teachers, the doctors, the politicians and the scientists primarily responsible for helping make America the world's leader," Davis said. "We can never do enough to thank them and their families."
Joe's_Picture (2)
Joseph Alexander was a 21-year-old Navy ensign commanding Landing Craft Tank 856, when he headed toward Omaha Beach in Normandy during the D-Day landings on June 6, 1944. Few of his crew members made it back to England unscathed.(Photo: Provided by family)
Alexander was fresh out of Midshipman School at the University of Notre Dame — part of a group referred to as the "90-Day Wonders," because they crammed four years of training into three months — when he shipped out to England in early 1944 and was given command of Landing Craft Tank 856. About three times the size of the ubiquitous, boxy landing crafts that delivered troops to the beach, his LCT was capable of carrying up to three medium-sized tanks and dozens of men.
Because of its load, Alexander's LCT could only make five knots and had to leave Portland, England, a full day before its designated landing time.
"Crossing the channel was awesome," Alexander wrote in an account in 2000 of his D-Day experience, "ships in front and back over the horizon as far as the eye could see. At night, we could only see a faint blue light of the ship ahead to follow and guide us."
Setting up at the line of departure about 2,000 yards from the shore, Alexander said smoke from shells fired from the battleship USS Arkansas filled the air, making it hard to see. But he could tell several of the other LCTs did not appear to be lining up for the delivery mission.
"I used my megaphone to ask another skipper what was going on," Alexander recalled. "His answer: 'They're all scared to go in.' "
Surprised and disgusted, Alexander didn't even respond. He directed his helmsman to steer toward the beach and called for engines at full speed. It was an order that sealed his fate, along with that of his crew, cargo and passengers — delivering them into a living hell from which only a few would return unscathed.
The lieutenant colonel in charge of the soldiers the LCT was carrying toward shore rushed up the conning tower where Alexander was standing.
"You can't go in there," he told Alexander. "Look at our boys."
The young ensign ordered the lieutenant colonel off the tower and pushed on toward the beach.
Moments later, the hulking LCT came under fire from German machine guns and cannons. In the confusion, the crewman manning the anchor dropped it into the surf too soon, leaving the boat stalled in the line of fire. Alexander decided to drop off the tank, then retreat.
But the cannon shells began to find their mark. The first hit the port gun, wounding the gunner and loaders. Another shell hit the wheelhouse, injuring five more on the boat. Another hit the port side.
"I got the craft turned around and headed out to sea but couldn't make any headway," Alexander recalled. "Another shell hit us on the starboard side. More wounded."
The LCT continued to take enemy fire. Two fires were burning and the engine rooms were flooded, blood was everywhere, at least two on board had been killed. Alexander cut the cable attaching the anchor to the LCT and the now-powerless boat drifted back toward the beach.
Alexander grabbed a rope, hoping to catch a tow out of harm's way.
"Not a single craft was heading toward the beach," he said. "It was helter-skelter and mass confusion. Not one was willing or made an effort to help."
LCT 856
The heavily damaged Landing Craft Tank 856, commanded by Indianapolis native Navy Ensign Joseph Alexander on D-Day, June 6, 1944, sits grounded near the Fox Red position at the eastern end of Omaha Beach. Alexander said he couldn’t walk several feet in any direction without running into casualties.(Photo: Provided by Navsource.org)
The LCT finally ran aground in about three feet of water under the cliffs at the east end of the beach, where it was out of the line of fire. Alexander jumped off and ran to where an LCVP (Landing Craft, Vehicle, Personnel, also known as a Higgins Boat) was approaching, hoping to get help for his crew and the wounded aboard his boat. As he got to within a few hundred feet of the other boat, it struck a mine.
"All aboard went flying through the air like rag dolls," he recalled.
Alexander returned to his LCT and tried to assist the wounded. As another LCVP approached, he jumped back into the water and splashed toward it.
"He didn't want to pick up my men," Alexander said. "I begged and begged, and he finally agreed."
By the time the exhausted Alexander got back to his boat, the LCVP had picked up what remained of his stranded crew and passengers. Alexander was left alone to fend for himself.
Seeing the beach area beneath the cliffs jammed with wounded soldiers, Alexander waded to shore and warned that the tide was rising. He pointed to the high water mark on the rocks and explained that their refuge, while out of the line of enemy fire, would soon be flooded. Alexander convinced a medic that they needed to get the wounded back to his LCT, where they spent the night packed "shoulder-to-shoulder and head-to-feet."
Nightfall and the unrelenting push forward by Allied troops had finally brought relief from the threat of enemy fire.
"We didn't have much more than Band-Aids to doctor with and many spent the night with open wounds," he recalled. "Some whimpered, some cried, one asked for his mother. Most were silent and somber."
The next morning, Alexander waded back to the beach in search of a radio operator to report his position, and to call for help for the wounded on his boat.
"I walked through 50 yards of dead soldiers. I couldn't walk a straight line for four feet without having to step over or around a body," he said.
"I was stunned. I never looked at their faces, because I didn't want to see someone I knew. It was a sight I'll never forget."
The fighting had moved on, but chaos still ruled the beach. Alexander was unable to make contact with his unit and stayed on the beach for five more days, sleeping in a foxhole, before he was able to catch a boat back to England.
Somehow, he escaped without injury.
"I was," he said, "definitely lucky."
Alexander never saw his LCT or crew again.
His role in the D-Day invasion was Alexander's only combat duty and, when he left the Navy in 1947, Alexander returned home to Indianapolis where he married and started a family.
Alexander went into the hardware business, eventually owning a group of Ace Hardware stores in Indianapolis, but he was not active in veteran's groups. However, he said the memories of what he saw and experienced on Omaha Beach never really haunted him.
"I put it all behind me when I came back," he said. "I really didn't give it much thought. I was too busy working seven days a week."
But Alexander, who retired from his hardware business in 1988 and now splits his time between Florida and Indiana, admits he never really forgot. And on Sept. 10, 2012, he took part in the inaugural Indy Honor Flight, joining a group of veterans treated to a free trip to the National WWII Memorial in Washington, D.C.
The trip brought back a flood of memories — good and bad.
"All those years and I still feel bad about those injured and killed on my boat," he said. "At the same time, I don't know what else I could have done. I was so dedicated to carrying out my orders."
Alexander was among the 73,000 U.S. troops (out of an estimated 156,000 total Allied troops taking part that day) who were involved in the massive invasion during World War II that helped turn the tide of the fighting in Europe. No one has an accurate count of how many D-Day veterans are still alive today. But, according to several veterans groups, estimates range from 5,000 to 10,000.
When they returned home, many D-Day vets tried to put the horror of what they had experienced in Normandy, France, behind them, said Joe Davis, public affairs director for the Veterans of Foreign Wars.
"You don't want to relive the worst day of your life," he explained. "It's a stressor. It takes them back to their youth, when they were fighting for their lives — and it reminds them of all those who didn't make it back home."
EYEWITNESS: Ernie Pyle: Courage, sacrifice and a pure miracle on D-Day
KEY REPORT: D-Day: The most important weather forecast in history
As America observes the 70th anniversary of the largest seaborne invasion in history, Davis said it's a good time to reflect on how those men and women changed our world, both on the battlefield and on the homefront.
"They became the teachers, the doctors, the politicians and the scientists primarily responsible for helping make America the world's leader," Davis said. "We can never do enough to thank them and their families."
Joe's_Picture (2)
Joseph Alexander was a 21-year-old Navy ensign commanding Landing Craft Tank 856, when he headed toward Omaha Beach in Normandy during the D-Day landings on June 6, 1944. Few of his crew members made it back to England unscathed.(Photo: Provided by family)
Alexander was fresh out of Midshipman School at the University of Notre Dame — part of a group referred to as the "90-Day Wonders," because they crammed four years of training into three months — when he shipped out to England in early 1944 and was given command of Landing Craft Tank 856. About three times the size of the ubiquitous, boxy landing crafts that delivered troops to the beach, his LCT was capable of carrying up to three medium-sized tanks and dozens of men.
Because of its load, Alexander's LCT could only make five knots and had to leave Portland, England, a full day before its designated landing time.
"Crossing the channel was awesome," Alexander wrote in an account in 2000 of his D-Day experience, "ships in front and back over the horizon as far as the eye could see. At night, we could only see a faint blue light of the ship ahead to follow and guide us."
Setting up at the line of departure about 2,000 yards from the shore, Alexander said smoke from shells fired from the battleship USS Arkansas filled the air, making it hard to see. But he could tell several of the other LCTs did not appear to be lining up for the delivery mission.
"I used my megaphone to ask another skipper what was going on," Alexander recalled. "His answer: 'They're all scared to go in.' "
Surprised and disgusted, Alexander didn't even respond. He directed his helmsman to steer toward the beach and called for engines at full speed. It was an order that sealed his fate, along with that of his crew, cargo and passengers — delivering them into a living hell from which only a few would return unscathed.
The lieutenant colonel in charge of the soldiers the LCT was carrying toward shore rushed up the conning tower where Alexander was standing.
"You can't go in there," he told Alexander. "Look at our boys."
The young ensign ordered the lieutenant colonel off the tower and pushed on toward the beach.
Moments later, the hulking LCT came under fire from German machine guns and cannons. In the confusion, the crewman manning the anchor dropped it into the surf too soon, leaving the boat stalled in the line of fire. Alexander decided to drop off the tank, then retreat.
But the cannon shells began to find their mark. The first hit the port gun, wounding the gunner and loaders. Another shell hit the wheelhouse, injuring five more on the boat. Another hit the port side.
"I got the craft turned around and headed out to sea but couldn't make any headway," Alexander recalled. "Another shell hit us on the starboard side. More wounded."
The LCT continued to take enemy fire. Two fires were burning and the engine rooms were flooded, blood was everywhere, at least two on board had been killed. Alexander cut the cable attaching the anchor to the LCT and the now-powerless boat drifted back toward the beach.
Alexander grabbed a rope, hoping to catch a tow out of harm's way.
"Not a single craft was heading toward the beach," he said. "It was helter-skelter and mass confusion. Not one was willing or made an effort to help."
LCT 856
The heavily damaged Landing Craft Tank 856, commanded by Indianapolis native Navy Ensign Joseph Alexander on D-Day, June 6, 1944, sits grounded near the Fox Red position at the eastern end of Omaha Beach. Alexander said he couldn’t walk several feet in any direction without running into casualties.(Photo: Provided by Navsource.org)
The LCT finally ran aground in about three feet of water under the cliffs at the east end of the beach, where it was out of the line of fire. Alexander jumped off and ran to where an LCVP (Landing Craft, Vehicle, Personnel, also known as a Higgins Boat) was approaching, hoping to get help for his crew and the wounded aboard his boat. As he got to within a few hundred feet of the other boat, it struck a mine.
"All aboard went flying through the air like rag dolls," he recalled.
Alexander returned to his LCT and tried to assist the wounded. As another LCVP approached, he jumped back into the water and splashed toward it.
"He didn't want to pick up my men," Alexander said. "I begged and begged, and he finally agreed."
By the time the exhausted Alexander got back to his boat, the LCVP had picked up what remained of his stranded crew and passengers. Alexander was left alone to fend for himself.
Seeing the beach area beneath the cliffs jammed with wounded soldiers, Alexander waded to shore and warned that the tide was rising. He pointed to the high water mark on the rocks and explained that their refuge, while out of the line of enemy fire, would soon be flooded. Alexander convinced a medic that they needed to get the wounded back to his LCT, where they spent the night packed "shoulder-to-shoulder and head-to-feet."
Nightfall and the unrelenting push forward by Allied troops had finally brought relief from the threat of enemy fire.
"We didn't have much more than Band-Aids to doctor with and many spent the night with open wounds," he recalled. "Some whimpered, some cried, one asked for his mother. Most were silent and somber."
The next morning, Alexander waded back to the beach in search of a radio operator to report his position, and to call for help for the wounded on his boat.
"I walked through 50 yards of dead soldiers. I couldn't walk a straight line for four feet without having to step over or around a body," he said.
"I was stunned. I never looked at their faces, because I didn't want to see someone I knew. It was a sight I'll never forget."
The fighting had moved on, but chaos still ruled the beach. Alexander was unable to make contact with his unit and stayed on the beach for five more days, sleeping in a foxhole, before he was able to catch a boat back to England.
Somehow, he escaped without injury.
"I was," he said, "definitely lucky."
Alexander never saw his LCT or crew again.
His role in the D-Day invasion was Alexander's only combat duty and, when he left the Navy in 1947, Alexander returned home to Indianapolis where he married and started a family.
Alexander went into the hardware business, eventually owning a group of Ace Hardware stores in Indianapolis, but he was not active in veteran's groups. However, he said the memories of what he saw and experienced on Omaha Beach never really haunted him.
"I put it all behind me when I came back," he said. "I really didn't give it much thought. I was too busy working seven days a week."
But Alexander, who retired from his hardware business in 1988 and now splits his time between Florida and Indiana, admits he never really forgot. And on Sept. 10, 2012, he took part in the inaugural Indy Honor Flight, joining a group of veterans treated to a free trip to the National WWII Memorial in Washington, D.C.
The trip brought back a flood of memories — good and bad.
"All those years and I still feel bad about those injured and killed on my boat," he said. "At the same time, I don't know what else I could have done. I was so dedicated to carrying out my orders."
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Awesome story about a British Vet sneaking out of his nursing home to go to Normandy.
British D-Day Vet Sneaks Out of Nursing Home to Attend Normandy Remembrance - ABC News
British D-Day Vet Sneaks Out of Nursing Home to Attend Normandy Remembrance - ABC News
Catholics_Rule
Active member
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Thank God for these incredible men.
ResLife Hero
Well-known member
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Visitors To Hell: How Two Minor Leaguers Earned Their Medals Of Honor
A really good article about 2 minor league baseball players who earned their Medals of Honor serving bravely on opposite sides of the globe.
This part really struck me:
A really good article about 2 minor league baseball players who earned their Medals of Honor serving bravely on opposite sides of the globe.
This part really struck me:
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Bogtrotter07
Guest
My father fought in the Pacific. He had four family and friends that made the D-Day landing. Three survived that day, one made it back.
My father was part of a medical unit in the Pacific that landed behind enemy lines. They did research on jungle diseases and were often bombed or overrun by Japanese commandos. Dad said he had one hand on his microscope and one hand on his 1911A. He slept with it, along with his Enfield. Hid from the Japanese in New Guinea, because the were starving and wanted to eat him. Saw some of the greatest naval battles, flew over Coral Sea. But toward the end of the war my dad worked in an operating theater. The senior non-coms opened and closed for the surgeons. Dad said during the Battle of the Philippines a stretch went by where they operated on over 15,000 before the got four hours of sleep, back to back.
Dreamt the rest of his life of all the blood. He said orderlies would bring a new casualty in as soon as they finished on one. Several orderlies would walk the line with squeegees and another would hose that down the drain. He said sometimes it was so bad no one could stand around the operating table without falling. And he said it took months to get that smell out of his nose.
Unlike a lot of stories that were circulated (apparently) they operated on anyone brought to them, US, civilians, Japanese POW's; it didn't matter.
Dad was part of two units that won Presidential citations, the research, which Roosevelt said saved more allied lives than any other unit, and the surgical unit at the end that saw a remarkable number of patients and had the highest survival rate of any field surgical hospital at that time.
A bonus was that early in the war his unit was transported in and out of island locations by PT boats almost exclusively. And they spent a lot of time with those guys. (Dad said PT boats were the toughest ride in WWII and he experienced a lot of them.) But those guys lived like kings. Cold beer, steak, lobster, baked potatoes, corn on the cob. He could never figure how all their food was as fresh as any he had back home.
My father was part of a medical unit in the Pacific that landed behind enemy lines. They did research on jungle diseases and were often bombed or overrun by Japanese commandos. Dad said he had one hand on his microscope and one hand on his 1911A. He slept with it, along with his Enfield. Hid from the Japanese in New Guinea, because the were starving and wanted to eat him. Saw some of the greatest naval battles, flew over Coral Sea. But toward the end of the war my dad worked in an operating theater. The senior non-coms opened and closed for the surgeons. Dad said during the Battle of the Philippines a stretch went by where they operated on over 15,000 before the got four hours of sleep, back to back.
Dreamt the rest of his life of all the blood. He said orderlies would bring a new casualty in as soon as they finished on one. Several orderlies would walk the line with squeegees and another would hose that down the drain. He said sometimes it was so bad no one could stand around the operating table without falling. And he said it took months to get that smell out of his nose.
Unlike a lot of stories that were circulated (apparently) they operated on anyone brought to them, US, civilians, Japanese POW's; it didn't matter.
Dad was part of two units that won Presidential citations, the research, which Roosevelt said saved more allied lives than any other unit, and the surgical unit at the end that saw a remarkable number of patients and had the highest survival rate of any field surgical hospital at that time.
A bonus was that early in the war his unit was transported in and out of island locations by PT boats almost exclusively. And they spent a lot of time with those guys. (Dad said PT boats were the toughest ride in WWII and he experienced a lot of them.) But those guys lived like kings. Cold beer, steak, lobster, baked potatoes, corn on the cob. He could never figure how all their food was as fresh as any he had back home.
T Town Tommy
Alabama Bag Man
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Bogs...
your dad truly is a hero. Thanks for sharing.
your dad truly is a hero. Thanks for sharing.
ACamp1900
Counting my ‘bet against ND’ winnings
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My grandfather was a bombardier on a B-25 ... Hard to believe we live in a world where very few of this generation are still alive... Heck I'm fairly young and when I was a kid there were plenty on WWI vets left, now they're all gone...
I hope June 6th never becomes just another day.
I hope June 6th never becomes just another day.
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Impressive to say the least. "The Greatest Generation" will never be equaled again.
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Bogtrotter07
Guest
I saw several of the "specials", and saw things and stats I could not believe.
Did you know two giant pipes were placed under the English Channel and several million gallons of fuel were pumped a month from England to France and then put in tankers that supplied the Allied forces? I always wondered how they got the fuel to the Red Ball Express, without modern tanker ships. A historian called this temporary supply chain the greatest in modern history, and unlikely to ever be repeated again.
Did you know approximately 78 million people were killed in the six years of WWII, and that 67% were civilian?
The USSR suffered the greatest with over 25 million war dead, and the US ended with 405,000 soldiers killed, and 68 civilian deaths?
That D-Day cost 10,500 lives of 156,000 participants, but the last two major invasions of the war, Iwo Jima and Okinawa cost over 100,000 American dead, and at Iwo Jima, American casualties topped the Japanese for the first time in the war, making March-April 1945 the most deadly period of the war for the US?
Did you know two giant pipes were placed under the English Channel and several million gallons of fuel were pumped a month from England to France and then put in tankers that supplied the Allied forces? I always wondered how they got the fuel to the Red Ball Express, without modern tanker ships. A historian called this temporary supply chain the greatest in modern history, and unlikely to ever be repeated again.
Did you know approximately 78 million people were killed in the six years of WWII, and that 67% were civilian?
The USSR suffered the greatest with over 25 million war dead, and the US ended with 405,000 soldiers killed, and 68 civilian deaths?
That D-Day cost 10,500 lives of 156,000 participants, but the last two major invasions of the war, Iwo Jima and Okinawa cost over 100,000 American dead, and at Iwo Jima, American casualties topped the Japanese for the first time in the war, making March-April 1945 the most deadly period of the war for the US?
Bishop2b5
SEC Exchange Student
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I knew a guy from church when I was growing up that had fought in Europe during WWII. I always wanted to ask him about what he'd done and tell him thanks, but felt uncomfortable doing so. A few years ago I realized he wouldn't be around much longer so I finally spoke to him about all of it.
When I asked if he'd landed on the beaches on D-Day, he said, "Well, not exactly. I parachuted in the night before." He'd been part of the assault against the artillery on the cliffs above the beach. He told me about how scared he'd been as a 20-year-old seeing his first combat, what it had been like climbing those cliffs with grenades being dropped on them, and watching friends get killed. I told him how much I admired him and appreciated what he'd done, and he cried. A priceless moment. Heck of a generation of great men.
When I asked if he'd landed on the beaches on D-Day, he said, "Well, not exactly. I parachuted in the night before." He'd been part of the assault against the artillery on the cliffs above the beach. He told me about how scared he'd been as a 20-year-old seeing his first combat, what it had been like climbing those cliffs with grenades being dropped on them, and watching friends get killed. I told him how much I admired him and appreciated what he'd done, and he cried. A priceless moment. Heck of a generation of great men.