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Show ee i i oS ~~ - Sunda Sjandard-Exarruner D-Day. “I've - headed for Sainte ae never seen § | Charles © . From 1B Somerville “Heasked metoget his billfold out of his packet and open it up for him. I did and he said, “There is what I want.” It was a picture ofhis girlfmend. He said says ‘Isn't. she beautiful? “He didn’t last | He didn’t very long. Two or n northern France =| D- Day. scludine 5.85 including 5,853 tonsabetween =midnighth davbreak and day and : “I can close my eyes and still see that ne” Hinrkte “The e th 2Piggpce. pelleaccrtees ” Pa day ~ — . — “There were so many ships” — nearly 6.000 warships, support ships and vs pices older seen was ever er thtie a ased byits selstowing£ plane in from teepee landed r the town,” hesai t 82nd AiAirborne eure t >» oO > Landi ered ee . y Natisuniy'sdeuthytaeieesee conics : "Tet = oi a and wes an Faster = t" d eee Hunt, sai Landing at full speed, Murphy eee said. ak Ra glider came apart but nobody . mae oe ee the - could go down there and walk across the with ada nema But we ended up pee ook. e - a: | bre: or 1 ~, was almostthat crowded uptherein the rh "Tiersine “ Font, slmost in 7 oe SKY,,..he said. Sweeping the channei To makesure 140,000 troops machines unloadingonto the beache could move inland, Allied planners came up with a daring scheme. During upto protect the flanks of the invasion beaches, scores of minesweepers were clearing 10 corridors from the middie of the English Channel to the beaches as the forerunner to the massiveflotilla that The paratroopers D-Dav’s pre-dawn hours, they would drop 20;000 airbornetroops behind the beaches to secure several roads, bridges, causeways and crossroads. The U.S. 82nd and 101st and the British 6th airborne divisions took off thout 11 p.m. on June 5 and reached their drop zones in two hours. Morgan Countynative Allison Giles, nowretired after 31 years with the Standard-Examiner, was with the 101st and Charles Somerville of Ogden jumpedwith the 82nd. While the British had little trouble finding their targets, the Americans were scattered over a 15-by-25-mile area due to poor visibility, wind from the dying storm, Germanantiaircraft fire and just plainerror. “Every time I think of it, it makes eeld-chills go down myspine. But it was so.snafued, it worked,” said Giles, now of Clearfield. “The Germans had no idea where to concentrate their forces” against the scattered pockets of U.S. paratroopers. “It was one hell of an ordeal,” Giles said. “It was wild. You just gathered yourselves together and kept moving and stayed low and shotfast.” ~. The approximately 7,000 paratroopers from Giles’ 101st Airborne Division carried a tiny toy with them when they were-dropped behind Normandy’s : WeAChes, their mission to prevent German reinforcements from reaching the Allied beachhead. They were given metal “crickets” — “aboutthe size of your thumb,” said Fred Hancock, commanderof a paratroop companywith the 101st who nowlives in Long Beach, Calif. One click fromthe “cricket” was Sai ais eactaiestameeee Cone op had surrounded theirfields with piles of While> the airborne troops were setting just went ahead and did it,” said Rice, a chemist living in Salt Lake City. mined. We were there for weeks. I felt fortunate after we got through that,” Ostlersaid. The wooden minesweepers would drag an electric cable behind to set off magnetic mines and had an air hammer hanging off the bowto detonate pressure or acoustic mines. And contact mines? They would try to shoot them. “The Germans in the blockhouses on Utah Beach must have seen us out there and said, ‘Holy mackerel! Where did all those Indians come from?’ We werein so close, sometimes within 200 yards, . you could see the cannons following us, but they didn’t shoot because they didn’t want to give away their positions,” said Rice. Before the Allies secured Normandy and the port city of Cherbourg, 14 of the 21 minesweepers in Rice’s squadron would be damaged or sunk by mines, but not YMS 351. “On my ship,” Rice said, “our loses were zero. Raining bombs Waves of bombers were sent in to support troops in the water and on the ground. Before dawn, the 8th Air Force dropped almost 6,000 tons of bombs on coastal defenses and 1,700 tons more in the first 30 minutes ofthe assault. Ogden’s Bill Kyle was an operations officer for the 8th Air Force 446th Bomb “We were out of contact forfive days. It was kind ofan unknown. We were sweating there for a while because we didn’t know if the beach landing was successful.” sion on D-Day, in the second wave of bombers. “Wewere in the bomberstream to hit a coastal gun emplacement. But the cloud undercast was so thick — weonly had one pass —— we held our bombs be- cause we couldn’t see the target,” Lind- Good luck on Utah Beach As so often happens, luck plays a role in many military battles, and good fortune definitely was on the side of the American 4th Infantry Division storming Utah Beach. The channel current pushed most of the “Force U” landing craft about 2,000 yards off target and unloaded the majority ofthe division in a lightly defended sector. As a result, 23,000 Americanseasily gained a foothold with the reported loss of only 197 men killed and 60 missing. Tooele native Lester Newman had joined the 82nd Airborne Division, but they didn’t have enough planes and gliders to carry all the paratroopers to Normandy. So Newmanarrived at Utah Beach with the 319th Field Artillery, after the 4th Division had already taken the beachhead. “The oniy GermansI saw the day we came ashore were already dead,” said quist said. “You didn’t turn around; Newman,a retired Utah Powerlineman. there were no 360-degree turns because it was too crowded.” So Lindquist’s B-24 returned to England full of bombs “and they didn’t give mecredit for D«Day. “They were working1the airfields day and night during June,” he said. “The 8th Air Force kept everything in the air “They werestill just lying on the ground.” As the Allies advanced against stubborn Germanforces ordered not to retreat, Newmansaid, “there was a lot of shooting and lot of counterattacks for the first week or so. Then the Germans gave a big push.” In the obstacle course of Normandy’s they had.” John supposed to be answered bytwo, Lindquist Hancock said. “I picked up five or six men that night using the cricket.” “If you spotted someone in the dark, you couldn’t tell who they were. They were just moving shadows,” said World - War II veteran Frank Hare of Layton. “If you clicked and he didn’t click back, 8th Air Force In-the hours before daylight. Giles and six.afthe other 15 men who jumped from the same plane formed a squad . and would spend a week trying to find working the airfields day success. “We really didn’t know what had happened, but every day we saw solid masses of bombers andfighters, so we figured we were OK,” Giles said. Somerville came down “with a big bunch of guys, about 125, andfairly t0s@%0 our target. “But we were out of contact for five days.Jt was kind of an unknown. We wert sweating there for a while because we didn’t knowif the beach landing was suceessful.” * Unlike the 101st, the paratroopers in the-82nd Division didn’t use the crickets to identify friendly forces. “We had a series of passwords instead,” Somerville Group.It was the first bombardmen’ group to cross the‘Normandybeachhead said. that morning, and Kyle was deputy reinforcements to the beach. We did thaf, but at quite a cost,” Somerville said. He parachuted in with a companyof 135 men. After 38 days of fighting in Normandy, “weleft with 35 men.” Ofthe other 100, nearly 40 were killed, and the other 60 were wounded, captured or listed as missing in action. Corinne’s Melvin Murphywas piloting a glider being hauled behind a C-47 cargo planejust at daybreak on CHUCK WING/Standard-Examiner formation commander and in one of the lead planes. “We were glad to see it happen and it was quite an honor for the 446th to be the lead bomber group,” said Kyle, who was Hill Air Force Base commander from 1969 to 1972, then retired from the military to work for United Savings Bank. Kyle remembers the weather was terrible that day for bomberpilots trying to locate cloud-covered targets on the French coast about 15,000 feet below. “Nowand then you'd see a little hole in the clouds,”he said, “and that was it most of the time. “We were busy as a group, trying to make it as difficult for the Germans as we could. We were fortunate. Our group flew four missions that day with no casualties.” John Lindquist was a B-24 bombardier-navigator whoarrived in England one month before “Overlord” and would be scheduled for his first combat mis- Lindcuist’s squadron wouldfly three or more missions over northern France during the next two weeks, supporting the Allied ground troopsas they slugged their way inland. On onebizarre mission, his B-24 was sent to drop 88 fragmentation bombs on a Germanstrongpoint. But all did not go as planned. Fins of 21 bombs mounted high inside the B-24 caught on the bomb-baydoorframe. “I get back there and there are 21 bombs hanging up and they've armed themselves,” said Lindquist. As bombardier, Lindquist had the job of hanging down into the bomb bay and disarming the bombs so the B-24 could land. “It wasn't a good job,” he said. “Bloody Omaha” The D-Day beaches were in a relativelyflat area between the French port cities of La Havreto the east and Cherbourg on the west. The Alliessplit Normandyinto five mainsectors, with Americans assigned to the two western most — Utah and Omaha beaches — andBritish and Canadiantroops taking the threeto the east — Gold, Juno and Sword Despite the intensive bombing and Robert pre-invasion naval shelling, many Germanfortified positions werestill intact whenthe Allied soldiers waded ashoreat 6:30 a.m. on Utah and Omaha beaches and about anhour later at Gold, Juno and Sword. The U.S. 1st and 29th infantry divisions ran into a meat grinder on what they would call “Bloody Omaha.” Ogden’s Alfred Hart, with the 397th Antiaircrafi Battalion, was in the second wave hitting Omaha Beach just 30 minutesafter the invasion began Hart remembers the German gunners were blasting awayat the Allied ships and, just after he jumped fromhis landing craft, “it was blown up as they were turning around, If we hadn't have jumped off then, that would have been Hinckley Jr. 458th Bomb Group Bth Air Force . “There were so many ships it was just like you could go downthere and walk across the English i, Channel. Andit was Carrying part of a 40-mm machine gun and a 70-pound pack, Hart struggled through the surf and crawled up on the beach near a soldier who had called to almost that crowded up there in the sky.” - rdinate u bombing a au: ‘Ss missions with the D-Day invasion wApril 17, 1944: The movement of diplomats 3 > the tigi and their couners into and out of nf the United Kinstonis indefinitely euxpcaded w May 1944: Field Marshal Ervin Romme responsible for the coastal defenses in France, asks the German High Command for a nal 24 Orne haced and Vire rivers, a heavy mortar b or Deas be held his reserve. His requests are ignored w May 1944: Allied bombing raids during May destroy more than 900 of the Third ‘ locomotives and 16,000railroa: close or destroy 50 of the 82 junctions in northern France ar of the river bridges between Paris and Normand: w May 8, 1944: Eisenhowersets D-Day for June 5. The process of moving hundreds of thousands of men from their compounds totheir appointed ships and landing craft finally begins w May 15, 1944: Eisenhower meets withhis SHAEF staff, Churchill and King George VI to explain the final “Overlord” plan. There are no objections. mJune 1, 1944: The BBC broadcasts 28 messages to the French Resistanceafter the 9 p.m. news. The coded messages alert the resistance that the invasion is impending mJune 2, 1944: Eisenhower moves to his invasion headquarters at Portsmouth. wJune 3, 1944: Despite three days of stormy weather, Rommel tells the High Command it is essential that it send air reconnaissanceflights over the port cities in southern England to determine when the invasion fleet begins to move. German meteorologists predict the storm will continue for another week. wdJune 4, 1944, 4:15 a.m.: Eisenhower postpones the invasion for one day, to June 6. Ships already sailing from the northern portcities are recalled. mJune 4, 1944, 9:30 p.m.: Told that the storm will clear over Normandy for 36-48 hours during the night of June 5-6, Eisenhower orders the invasion for June 6 at dawn: “I am quite positive we mustgive the order. I don’t like it but thereit is. I don’t see howwe can possibly do anything else.” June 5, 1944: Because of the storm, Field Marshal Karl von Rundstedt, commander in chief of German forces in the West, tells the High Command, “It is unlikely that the invasionis imminent.” wJune 5, 1944, 4 a.m.: With the weather report still favorable for June 6-7, Eisenhower gives the word: “OK, let’s go.” mJune 5, 1944, 9 p.m.: The BBC sends out the warning to the French Resistancethat the Allied invasion is imminent. The coded messageis the second line of French poet Paul Verlaine’s ‘Odeto Autumn,’ which reads, “... wound my heart with a monotonous languor.” German Sth Army headquarters signals all German units in the West France. The airborne troops will secure the east and “They were and learned that the invasion was a an@ keep the Germans from getting theater of war so he can best planes crammed with 17,000 paratroopers head for while-they worked their way toward the beaches. It wasn't until the seventh day that they linked up with Armytroops corfimunications, cut telephone lines, =— of the Allied air forces in the European the air, thousands of bombers, gliders and cargo other. paratroopers and avoid capture The 82nd was to capture the kev town of Sainte-Mere-Eglise, sitting on five roads behind Utah Beach, and secure three highway bridges anda railroad bridge over the Merderet River. Their biggest job was to keep the German91st Jirborne Division from attacking Utah beaeh “Dur job wasto obstruct operations a that the invasion is about to start, but von Rundstedt dismisses thealert as a false alarm. June 5, 1944, 9 p.m.: An armada of minesweepers begins clearing mines from 10 channel corridors between England and France. In youshot him.” The mission ces a mame m ' : a at Carentan, and two Panzer divisions to hedgerow, and then all the roads were CHUCK WING/Standard-Examiner 15 with brambles and bushes. That meant virtually anyfield could become a defensive fortress, said Ostler. “At night, you could hear the William Rice was on YMS 351, one May anti-aircraft batteries to be placed |bn mortar 2a) > ire Germans talking from behind the next of the minesweepers. “It's a scary thing to be doing but we undertake Operations aimed at the : ; heart rocks and earth to serve as a patchwork c of almost impenetrable fences covered foll nved 2 May 1944 w April 14, 1944: Eisenhower assumes a Seg are snip like cyou landing “craft — Support “it ae just English Channel on the ships. And,it breaks. Page : mtutcnees t rach in ge in Semel 4the era'sflap hon k tinued from Germanyandthe destruction She diene Gor eautensens tae Toeesnineoeer arn ia thor infantry as the soldiers doggedly pushed ; Con three minutes and he wasoe dead.” Utahn Harry Ostler of the 724th Field However, Germanantiaircraft fire had upt 7 ee A Maer teiy CHUCK WING’ Standard-Examiner west flanks of the invasion beaches. mw June 6, 1944, midnight-6 a.m.: Allied planes drop 5,853 tons of bombs on coastal batteries between Cherbourg and Le Havre. At daybreak, the U.S. 8th Air Force bombers drop another !,763 tons of bombsalong coastal fortifications. wJune 6, 1944, 1 a.m.: The troops from the 82nd Airborne Division (the “Screaming Eagles”), the 101st Airborne (the “All-Amenca”division) and from the Bntish 6th Airborne Division, parachute behind the landing zones to capture needed bridges and crossroads and cut German telephone lines. A number of American troopsare dropped well off-course, but rather than spell disaster it serves to confuse the Germans about the Allied intentions. w June 6, 1944, 5:10 a.m.: The cruiser HMS Orion begins the naval bombardment on Gold Beach, the middle of five invasion beaches. Twenty minutes later, the battleship USS Texas opens fire on a German artillery battery just to the west of Omaha Beach, one of two western beaches that U.S. troops will attack. a June 6, 1944, 6 a.m.: Five hours after the U.S. and British airborne landings, von Rundstedt decides the invasion is not a deception and asked the High Command to releasethree elite Panzer and night during June. The 8th Air Force kept everything in the air they had.” hedgerows, Newrnansaid, “I was scared all the time, especially at night because they're always shooting at you.” However, Ostler figured he was going to be OK. One evening he was walking * along with an infantry sergeant when a random German shell hit on the other side of the sergeant, killing him instantly. “But,” Ostler said, “I didn’t get a scratch.” Seven other Germanshells hit right next to him and all seven were duds, Ostler said. He cameto believe it was not his time to die. divisions held in reserve, which are only several hours away from the beaches. The Ist SS Panzer, 17th SS Panzer Grenadiers and 12th SS Panzer Lehr divisions can not be released without Hitler's permission, however, and Hitler had taken a sleeping pill the night before and does not wake until 10 a.m. Finally, at 4 p.m., Hitler agrees to von Pushing inland The German forces in northern France were tenacious foes, but the Allies controlled theair fromthe start, had more than I million men in Normandy by early July, and bythe end of Julythe Germans were ontheverge of coliaose, pounded into submission bythe overwhelming U.S. supply train. The Allies had 10 airplanes for every one German aircraft in France or Belgium andthey also landed more than 8,000 tanks in Normandy, to the fewer than 1,500 tanks in 10 panzer divisions. More than anything, the Germanslost the battle of pre duction. During A uxtust , led by Gen. George S. Patton's 3rd Army, the Allies stormed out of Normandy and raced through northern France, almost reaching Belgium byAug. Rundstedt's request, but now the divisions can not move up until the morning of June 7, a critical delay. mw June 6, 1944, 6:30 a.m.: Troops of the U.S. 4th Infantry Division arethefirst Allies to land on Normandy, on Utah Beach. Heavycurrent sweeps most of the landing craft about 2,000 yards south of the planned landing zoneand into a weak point © aad ne 5.1984 78 in the German lines. In all, about 23,000 men landed at Utah, with the loss of only 197 Americans killed and 60 missing mw June 6, 1944, 6:30 a.m.: The U.S. Ist and 29th divisions battle ashore on Omaha Beach, faced by the fresh German 352nd Infantry Division on 100-foot cliffs commanding the beaches, They are pinned down for most of the morning and, but for interise naval bombardment, are nearly pushed back into the channel. By nightfall, 55,000 men have landed on Omaha beach, but 4,649 arekilled or wounded. mw June 6, 1944, 7:25-7:35 a.m.:. The 3rd 3] “Once you were out of Normandy, it Canadian Division lands at Juno Beach, andthe was all flat land,” said Salt Lake's Harry Miller of the 79th Division's 314th Infantry Regiment. “What a job Patton's British SOth and 3rd divisions, respectively, take Gold and Sword beaches. They donot face the tanks did. They just chewed them up Omaha, but their landings are not be as easy as Utah. The British suffer 3,500 casualties and the Canadians 1,000 killed, wounded or missing w By nightfall on D-Day, the Allies had not achievedall of their first-day objectives, but they had placed nearly 140,000 men on Normandy's beaches alive. It was all over once we got into the open country. We just slaughtered them,” While Patton's 3rd Army was outracing everyoneelse, Miller said he took advantage of the confusion to head for Paris. “There was no resistance at all,” Miller said. He arrived in Paris Aug. 49 — the day before the Americans and Free French reached the outskirts of the Opposition that the Americans are facing on and the German defenders would be hard pressed to slow their advances into France. By June 16 557,000 Allied troops were ashi » along with 183,000 tons of supplies anc 18] 000 vehicles The war would be over in /ess than a year French capital Along with two sergeants, Miller said Sources: “D Dav" by Warren Tute, Time-Life Books “History ef the Second World War itlas of World War Two" by Charles Messenger, The him. “I worked my way over to him and he was thefirst American into Paris. And he celebrated. “I stood there on the curb and watched it,” he said, “then I got drunk he had been hit bad,” Hart said for two days.” \fuseum Enevclopedia Americana, Fort Douglas s Army |