You were seasick, half drunk on cheap booze that was passed around, and expecting to die. You were on a ship bound for the Normandy coast, about to board a landing craft in rough seas.The date was June 6, 1944. And there was no going back.The biggest military naval flotilla that has ever taken place. Hundreds of ships as far as the eye could see.Aircraft covering the skies, shooting down any enemy in sight. The few Luftwaffe aircraft that did show up were outnumbered and dispatched. Submarines too, protecting the channel.And Jerry wasn't expecting it. The Allied deception plan worked perfectly.You were a young lad, probably in your early 20s. Full of bravado. Eager to show the Nazis what you and your pals were made of. You probably didn't even know what life was about, as you put it all out on the line.But courage was not always easy to come by, said one US veteran of that day on Omaha beach. When the door of the LCVP came down, nobody moved, he said."Move!" said the US sergeant's voice, as bullets whizzed past and raked the water.One LCVP got hit dead rights by an artillery shell, he said, blowing up and killing everyone. Still, nobody moved. Nobody dared move. It was certain death."I said move!" said the sergeant, now angrier.Finally, he said it again, "Move, I said!"Nobody dared take a step.Then the pull-bake of a .30 mm machine gun was heard, and the sergeant's voice, now at a level that everybody could hear him."Look lads, if you don't move, I will personally make you move." Suddenly, they jumped off ... many of them, into water up to their necks. Everything, including their weapons getting drenched. "Up high! Up high you bastards!" he yelled."Keep those rifles up high," he said. "We can replace you, but we can't replace the rifles," he spat. Probably a joke, but who knows, eh..Omaha was the bloodiest. A estimated 2,501 Americans were killed, as German defenders fought back from stone bunkers on bluffs overlooking the flat shore.Those bunkers are still there by the way. I toured them a couple times, in 2011 and 2017. I also poured Canadian holy water over my Dad's cousin's gravestone in Beny-sur-Mer Canadian cemetery.Mike Makichuk, a Corporal in the Royal Winnipeg Rifles, didn't make it off the beach. He either stepped on a mine or was shot. To this day, we are not sure. He was in the first wave at Juno Beach, and caught the brunt of it. In a single day, 574 men of the 3rd Canadian Division were wounded and 340 were killed on Juno.Leading company D that day for the RWR, was James Doohan, who would later gain fame as Scotty, on the television show, Star Trek."The sea was rough," Doohan recalled of his landing on Juno Beach that day. "We were more afraid of drowning than [we were of] the Germans."Doohan managed to take out two German snipers when he successfully led his men across the beach without setting off any of the planted mines, The Daily Mail reported. "I don't know if they were killed or wounded but it shut them up," Doohan told the New York Times. He would survive the landing, but later shot six times by friendly fire, after a guard mistook him for a German in the darkness.But even if you did survive Normandy — a hellish experience for many — you were up against a powerful enemy. The infamous 12th SS Panzer Division Hitlerjugend were ruthless and well-seasoned..The unit that infamously murdered as many as 156 Canadian soldiers taken prisoner that week, in the so-called Normandy Massacres. As one Normandy/France veteran told me, a fellow who worked with me at the General Motors Transmission plant in Windsor, "After we heard about that, all bets were off," he said.After that, he said, things changed. And not in a good way, for the German troops. He suddenly went very quiet after that, and never talked about it again. I never pressed him on it.I kinda figured it out by myself. He wasn't proud of what he'd done, but he did what he had to do, just the same. I assumed "they" didn't take many prisoners after that.The Battle of Normandy would last for 11 long weeks. Fighting through the hedgerows and the dust and heat of the French summer, more than 5,000 Canadian soldiers would die. Another 13,000 Canadians would be wounded before the campaign officially came to a close in late August, 1944.Decades later army Gen. Dwight. D. Eisenhower, who gave the historic go-ahead for D-Day in the war room at Southwick House — a Victorian mansion near Portsmouth — revisited Normandy in a 1964 CBS special report: "D-Day Plus 20 Years, Gen. Eisenhower Returns to Normandy."In the CBS special, Eisenhower related some of the stories of the D-Day landings that may have escaped the historians.One involved stopping Prime Minister Winston Churchill from going to Normandy, to personally watch the action."I told him he couldn't do it," Eisenhower said of Churchill's plan to be aboard a British ship to get up close to the landings, but then Churchill began to lawyer him.He asked whether Eisenhower could still stop him if he signed up as a member of the crew. Eisenhower said he couldn't, but "luckily, the king [King George VI] learned of his intentions."The king said that if Churchill was going, he was going too, and Churchill backed off. Churchill "was not going to risk him [the king] because he was worth too much to the allied cause," Eisenhower said.Eisenhower, the Supreme Commander Allied Expeditionary Force, was out on the wharves and airfields to meet with the soldiers, airmen and sailors — the men he was sending into battle — in the early morning hours of June 6.The 101st Airborne troops could sense the stress he was under, and several piped up along the lines of "Quit worrying, general. We'll take care of this thing for you," Eisenhower recalled.CBS correspondent Walter Cronkite pressed Eisenhower on a report that he had tears in his eyes when he left the paratroopers. "Well, I don't know about that," Eisenhower said, but "it could've been possible.""The hours before a major battle is joined "are the most terrible time for a senior commander," he said. "You know the losses are going to be bad," and "Goodness knows, those fellas meant a lot to me."
You were seasick, half drunk on cheap booze that was passed around, and expecting to die. You were on a ship bound for the Normandy coast, about to board a landing craft in rough seas.The date was June 6, 1944. And there was no going back.The biggest military naval flotilla that has ever taken place. Hundreds of ships as far as the eye could see.Aircraft covering the skies, shooting down any enemy in sight. The few Luftwaffe aircraft that did show up were outnumbered and dispatched. Submarines too, protecting the channel.And Jerry wasn't expecting it. The Allied deception plan worked perfectly.You were a young lad, probably in your early 20s. Full of bravado. Eager to show the Nazis what you and your pals were made of. You probably didn't even know what life was about, as you put it all out on the line.But courage was not always easy to come by, said one US veteran of that day on Omaha beach. When the door of the LCVP came down, nobody moved, he said."Move!" said the US sergeant's voice, as bullets whizzed past and raked the water.One LCVP got hit dead rights by an artillery shell, he said, blowing up and killing everyone. Still, nobody moved. Nobody dared move. It was certain death."I said move!" said the sergeant, now angrier.Finally, he said it again, "Move, I said!"Nobody dared take a step.Then the pull-bake of a .30 mm machine gun was heard, and the sergeant's voice, now at a level that everybody could hear him."Look lads, if you don't move, I will personally make you move." Suddenly, they jumped off ... many of them, into water up to their necks. Everything, including their weapons getting drenched. "Up high! Up high you bastards!" he yelled."Keep those rifles up high," he said. "We can replace you, but we can't replace the rifles," he spat. Probably a joke, but who knows, eh..Omaha was the bloodiest. A estimated 2,501 Americans were killed, as German defenders fought back from stone bunkers on bluffs overlooking the flat shore.Those bunkers are still there by the way. I toured them a couple times, in 2011 and 2017. I also poured Canadian holy water over my Dad's cousin's gravestone in Beny-sur-Mer Canadian cemetery.Mike Makichuk, a Corporal in the Royal Winnipeg Rifles, didn't make it off the beach. He either stepped on a mine or was shot. To this day, we are not sure. He was in the first wave at Juno Beach, and caught the brunt of it. In a single day, 574 men of the 3rd Canadian Division were wounded and 340 were killed on Juno.Leading company D that day for the RWR, was James Doohan, who would later gain fame as Scotty, on the television show, Star Trek."The sea was rough," Doohan recalled of his landing on Juno Beach that day. "We were more afraid of drowning than [we were of] the Germans."Doohan managed to take out two German snipers when he successfully led his men across the beach without setting off any of the planted mines, The Daily Mail reported. "I don't know if they were killed or wounded but it shut them up," Doohan told the New York Times. He would survive the landing, but later shot six times by friendly fire, after a guard mistook him for a German in the darkness.But even if you did survive Normandy — a hellish experience for many — you were up against a powerful enemy. The infamous 12th SS Panzer Division Hitlerjugend were ruthless and well-seasoned..The unit that infamously murdered as many as 156 Canadian soldiers taken prisoner that week, in the so-called Normandy Massacres. As one Normandy/France veteran told me, a fellow who worked with me at the General Motors Transmission plant in Windsor, "After we heard about that, all bets were off," he said.After that, he said, things changed. And not in a good way, for the German troops. He suddenly went very quiet after that, and never talked about it again. I never pressed him on it.I kinda figured it out by myself. He wasn't proud of what he'd done, but he did what he had to do, just the same. I assumed "they" didn't take many prisoners after that.The Battle of Normandy would last for 11 long weeks. Fighting through the hedgerows and the dust and heat of the French summer, more than 5,000 Canadian soldiers would die. Another 13,000 Canadians would be wounded before the campaign officially came to a close in late August, 1944.Decades later army Gen. Dwight. D. Eisenhower, who gave the historic go-ahead for D-Day in the war room at Southwick House — a Victorian mansion near Portsmouth — revisited Normandy in a 1964 CBS special report: "D-Day Plus 20 Years, Gen. Eisenhower Returns to Normandy."In the CBS special, Eisenhower related some of the stories of the D-Day landings that may have escaped the historians.One involved stopping Prime Minister Winston Churchill from going to Normandy, to personally watch the action."I told him he couldn't do it," Eisenhower said of Churchill's plan to be aboard a British ship to get up close to the landings, but then Churchill began to lawyer him.He asked whether Eisenhower could still stop him if he signed up as a member of the crew. Eisenhower said he couldn't, but "luckily, the king [King George VI] learned of his intentions."The king said that if Churchill was going, he was going too, and Churchill backed off. Churchill "was not going to risk him [the king] because he was worth too much to the allied cause," Eisenhower said.Eisenhower, the Supreme Commander Allied Expeditionary Force, was out on the wharves and airfields to meet with the soldiers, airmen and sailors — the men he was sending into battle — in the early morning hours of June 6.The 101st Airborne troops could sense the stress he was under, and several piped up along the lines of "Quit worrying, general. We'll take care of this thing for you," Eisenhower recalled.CBS correspondent Walter Cronkite pressed Eisenhower on a report that he had tears in his eyes when he left the paratroopers. "Well, I don't know about that," Eisenhower said, but "it could've been possible.""The hours before a major battle is joined "are the most terrible time for a senior commander," he said. "You know the losses are going to be bad," and "Goodness knows, those fellas meant a lot to me."
