alamo50
06-06-2009, 05:28 AM
Today marks the 65th anniversary of D-Day, when nearly 160,000 Allied troops landed on France's Normandy coast in the largest single-day amphibious invasion ever.
The assault on a 50-mile stretch of beach, including paratroopers, air attacks, naval bombardments and an early morning landing in rough water, set the stage for a breakthrough of Allied troops into France and Germany. Within five days, more than 320,000 troops would land there.
Estimates place the D-Day toll on Allied troops at more than 9,000 casualties, including 2,500 or more dead.
Now, the youngest D-Day veterans are 82, and more than 1,100 World War II veterans reportedly die each day. MediaNews asked some local
veterans of D-Day to share their stories of the invasion and the days that followed on the beach. All were in their early 20s or younger, and new to combat. Their memories — sad or proud, vague or vivid — cast a personal glow on a defining day in history.
'You can't describe it'
Filmmakers can't capture it, and words fall short, said Hank Tussy of the scene at Omaha Beach.
"We didn't start loading out until about 6 o'clock. It was dark, semidark, getting daylight. The bigger ships were behind us shelling over the top into the beach. That's where all the smoke came from, these shells exploding and rockets and stuff and I'm headed in and of course the Germans, by this time they were firing back.
"As we got closer into the beach, they started dropping shells on us, on the landing craft. A lot of them were hit. By this time we were close enough in, (the boats) started to hit mines in the water. We couldn't really see where we were going on account of the smoke. "
Petty Officer Tussy, 18, was manning a Higgins boat, motoring about 25 Army rangers to the beach, through treacherous, cluttered waters. The flat-bottom, 36-foot landing craft were built from plywood with metal plating. Among the obstacles: German mines, ties, and newly submerged American tanks.
"We were going in and the boat in front of us either hit a mine or a German 88 hit it, and all these Army troops and the operator of the boat, Navy guys, blew up in the air, body parts and stuff, and there's a "... like an electric hot flash goes through your body, and you get numb.
"And from then, you might call it that you're in a daze. And you do just what you were trained to do over and over, after that," said Tussy, 83, of Rio Vista. "I don't think I was scared. Or I was frightened out of my mind. You're in a shock."
Tussy, part of an amphibious small boat group that took soldiers into Omaha Beach and carted casualties from shore to hospital ships, made about four trips on D-Day, he said. He figures more than half of their 24-man group was killed in the operation.
"You can't describe it, and the reason is, you got the emotional feeling at the time, and you got the odor," he said. "The human body decays very, very fast. So you got that odor and all that tension and the smoke. The movies tried the best they can, but there's no way in the world they can, really."
It took years, Tussy said, to even discuss it with family. Now, with World War II veterans rapidly dying off, he said he feels compelled.
Tussy, who enlisted in the Navy in 1942, recalled the secret planning weeks in advance, the maps and pictures of Normandy landmarks.
"We were well versed on what we were going to encounter," he said. "It didn't do us any good. There was so much smoke and stuff we couldn't see where we were supposed to go. That's the reason there were a lot of screw-ups."
He spent 20 days on the beach at Normandy, he said, at one point getting trapped by Germans amid roadside hedgerows on an ill-advised foray to Paris.
Tussy, who returned to Normandy 25 years ago, suspects he's the last alive from his group. He worries that "the world is changing so fast, the next generation people like myself are going to be forgotten, and the history."
But don't call him a hero.
"I'm a survivor. I survived D-Day. I survived raising three teenagers during the '60s and '70s. Haight-Ashbury time. I survived cancer, two major operations. I've survived 64 years of marriage," said Tussy, who with his wife, Judy, runs a scholarship program for children in Baja, Mexico.
"No, I'm not a hero. The real heroes are the ones that didn't return. I'm just one of thousands of other guys."
'I was lucky all the way'
The old veteran sits at a table outside a San Leandro supermarket, handing out bright red memorial poppies, taking donations.
The sign above the store reads "Lucky," which seems only fitting. Joe Walsh never ventured to shore on D-Day, and he lived because of it.
"We tried to go in on the beach on the first day. The two tanks in front of us submerged completely. My tank commander, he said we weren't going in and that was it," said Walsh, who turns 87 next week.
Among the 29 tanks in B and C companies with Walsh's 741st Tank Battalion, just two made it to the beach on D-Day. The tank that Cpl. Walsh and four other soldiers manned was among three that held back. The canvass flotation system couldn't hold up in the rough water. Company C, with whom Walsh took his basic training at age 20, lost all 16 of its tanks.
"They went under, and none of the fellas that I took basic training with are alive," said Walsh, who was born in Oakland and now lives in San Leandro. "I didn't find out until after the war was over with. I was lucky all the way."
Walsh and his crew waited offshore on a landing ship, oblivious to the mayhem on the beach, he said. They landed directly on Omaha Beach the next day to find it "pretty well cleared up," he said.
Then, "we covered the (German) machine guns with our bulldozer blades, did that quite a few times. They were in the valley and we took the dirt and covered them up so they couldn't shoot at the infantry. Hee, hee. They surrendered, then the infantry took care of them," he said.
He chokes up and his eyes well at the thought of what happened later. His tank commander, Sgt. Elmer Middleton, who made the call to hold back on D-Day, took a shot across the temple from a German sniper.
"I said, 'That was a close shot.' I heard the sting, and he dropped on my soldiers,'" said Walsh, a gunner. "He saved us, and he got killed in action. It wasn't very easy. I don't know that he died right away, but I'd say he was dead when he hit me."
On Dec. 16, the first day of the Battle of the Bulge, the tank got knocked out of action. "We threw our guns overboard and there was a German standing on our guns," he said. They were taken prisoner, sent by train across Germany, held for five months in a stalag and forced to "do more marching for the Germans than I ever did for the Americans," said Walsh. In May, 1945, they woke up to find the Germans gone and waited for rescue.
Later in 1945, Walsh said he was training to go to Japan when V-J Day came and the war ended.
He said he hasn't kept any mementos from D-Day, and he wore out his uniform when he returned home to work for Western Electric, putting up microwave stations.
Walsh now relishes movies about D-Day, with the John Wayne classic, "The Longest Day," among his favorites. His wife died, but he has two living daughters and nine grandchildren. He tries not to get "too emotional" about it, he said, and tells his story to few people "except my daughters and their husbands."
He said he started attending reunions for the tank battalion about five years ago, but has never returned to Normandy. Like others, the hero tag comes hard for him.
"I'm proud of the American soldiers that died," he said. "The ones that were on the beach really suffered."
'Nothing, nothing worked out right'
Fright set in before Ed Primet ever reached the beach.
He had climbed down from a rope ladder into the landing craft, circled the larger ship in rough waters and inhaled the diesel fumes that sickened so many of the first waves of D-Day troops. Now, with a gauntlet of obstacles and mines between the boat and shore, Primet was ordered to wade in through the cold chop in chest-high water. He had enlisted in the Navy but found someone else to pass his swim test.
"I was pretty panicky then. If I carried a sidearm, I think I would have put it on the coxswain and said, 'You're going to get us in there.' Because he dumped us way out," said Primet, a quartermaster who had just turned 22. "I had a big pack. There'd be craters, so you'd just drop and have to bounce and hope it wasn't too big."
Now 87, the San Carlos resident said he followed the first waves of troops onto the beach. Assigned to the 7th Naval Beach Battalion, their job was to coordinate the orderly flow of equipment onto the beach. But little on D-Day went according to plan.
"Nothing, nothing worked out right. We landed on a different section of the beach than we were supposed to. The captains of the ships, they didn't want to stay there. They wanted to unload and get the hell back to England," said Primet, a retired high-school drafting and wood shop teacher. "That first night, I'm looking at some of the buildings that were just skeletons and I'm saying, what the hell am I doing here?"
Primet grew up in San Francisco, went to Mission High and calls himself "a gung-hoer at that time. Very patriotic." He reached shore near the village of Vierville, at the western edge of Omaha Beach. Allied troops had suffered some of their heaviest casualties there.
"At that age you can take an awful lot. But what was pretty spooky was the body bags," he said. "I mean, they had them stacked like cordwood. Like a tunnel, two sets, oh God, real high. Just gruesome."
Primet returned to Normandy 15 years ago, and he chokes up at the mention of it, though he can't say exactly why. He said he rarely talks about his D-Day experience. When he does, the missteps stand out.
"I've often thought the only reason we stayed there," he said, "was that the Germans made more mistakes than we did."
Primet stayed 19 days on the beach. Later he would go to Okinawa, Japan. He says he's proud, but he avoids any fanfare, steers clear of veterans groups, holiday parades, even Fourth of July fireworks — "Because we had fireworks going on, it seemed like, I don't know how many nights in a row."
And he dismisses the hero label.
"Nope," said Primet, whose wife died six years ago. "I did what I was told and not much more. And that's about all that can be expected, I think."
Hal Wall, Primet's closest friend and a history buff, persuaded him to return to Normandy, where, like so many others, Primet wandered silently to the water's edge and turned to stare at the bluffs.
"His battalion, they were supposed to be kind of the traffic cops, and the beach was chaos. They took a lot of casualties. He was lucky to make it," Wall said.
"My feeling is that he saw a lot of devastation there. I think he saw a lot that he wants to try to forget."
'Boy, this is for real, this stuff'
"We were sitting out there watching all the activity, saw all the shelling, bodies floating. They just couldn't get us in. There was no place to go. When you got in, all you saw was these shattered vehicles and bodies piled up against the walls."
That's about as far as John Ezersky, of Walnut Creek, cares to describe the scene when he arrived on Omaha Beach on June 7, 1944, with the 747th Tank Battalion.
He'd rather highlight the high jinks he and his fellow soldiers got into during the war, and marvel at his narrow escapes, the luck of it all.
A cocksure draftee from New York City who would later play professional basketball for the Boston Celtics, Ezersky was drafted into the Army at 20. At Normandy he volunteered to drive a gas truck, trailing tanks along the beach, then during the push inland with the July breakthrough at St.-Lô.
"Some people were scared, but I wasn't. Guys around me weren't scared. At that time I didn't know the difference, but it got a little hairy later on," he said. "When you see paratroopers hanging off trees, a colonel in a ditch dead, now you start wondering, boy, this is for real, this stuff."
A little fearless, a little stupid is how Ezersky, 87, recalls himself as a 22-year-old soldier.
Like the time he and Johnny Cannon decided to skip digging a foxhole and sleep under the truck instead.
"All of a sudden that night the shelling came in. Oh boy oh boy oh boy, he and I, no shoes, we were smart alecks, you know, civilian jerks. We ran across the opening, and what a stupid thing that was. They could have blown us apart," he said.
Or later in the war, when he felt "itchy that day, just funny," left the bivouac and returned to find a big shell where the truck had sat.
"Boy I tell you I got lucky a few times, very very lucky. God had to be with me, there's no doubt about it," he said.
Ezersky and his wife, Elaine, share a cozy home with pictures on the wall of his basketball playing days. The ones from the war he keeps in a trunk. He said he doesn't trust war movies to tell it straight, and rarely thought much of his combat duty while he drove a cab for nearly 50 years, first in New York and then in San Francisco.
"All that war experience didn't amount to anything until just recently, with 'Saving Private Ryan' and all that," he said. "All through my playing days and driving a cab, nobody ever talked about the war or anything, but just living your life. And all of a sudden the anniversaries started popping and everything became popular."
He meets monthly at a Concord restaurant with a large group of veterans, but said he doesn't speak much. The stories he tells friends are the funny ones, he said. He doesn't think they want to hear the grim stuff, though he claims not to recall much misery.
"It was just a game. It was, 'Hey, c'mon, let's go.' Whatever the government wanted us to do, hey, let's do it. Not that we had a choice," he said. "I guess that's why they took the young people. Everybody was gung-ho. It was a different world."
http://www.mercurynews.com/breakingnews/ci_12530242?nclick_check=1
The assault on a 50-mile stretch of beach, including paratroopers, air attacks, naval bombardments and an early morning landing in rough water, set the stage for a breakthrough of Allied troops into France and Germany. Within five days, more than 320,000 troops would land there.
Estimates place the D-Day toll on Allied troops at more than 9,000 casualties, including 2,500 or more dead.
Now, the youngest D-Day veterans are 82, and more than 1,100 World War II veterans reportedly die each day. MediaNews asked some local
veterans of D-Day to share their stories of the invasion and the days that followed on the beach. All were in their early 20s or younger, and new to combat. Their memories — sad or proud, vague or vivid — cast a personal glow on a defining day in history.
'You can't describe it'
Filmmakers can't capture it, and words fall short, said Hank Tussy of the scene at Omaha Beach.
"We didn't start loading out until about 6 o'clock. It was dark, semidark, getting daylight. The bigger ships were behind us shelling over the top into the beach. That's where all the smoke came from, these shells exploding and rockets and stuff and I'm headed in and of course the Germans, by this time they were firing back.
"As we got closer into the beach, they started dropping shells on us, on the landing craft. A lot of them were hit. By this time we were close enough in, (the boats) started to hit mines in the water. We couldn't really see where we were going on account of the smoke. "
Petty Officer Tussy, 18, was manning a Higgins boat, motoring about 25 Army rangers to the beach, through treacherous, cluttered waters. The flat-bottom, 36-foot landing craft were built from plywood with metal plating. Among the obstacles: German mines, ties, and newly submerged American tanks.
"We were going in and the boat in front of us either hit a mine or a German 88 hit it, and all these Army troops and the operator of the boat, Navy guys, blew up in the air, body parts and stuff, and there's a "... like an electric hot flash goes through your body, and you get numb.
"And from then, you might call it that you're in a daze. And you do just what you were trained to do over and over, after that," said Tussy, 83, of Rio Vista. "I don't think I was scared. Or I was frightened out of my mind. You're in a shock."
Tussy, part of an amphibious small boat group that took soldiers into Omaha Beach and carted casualties from shore to hospital ships, made about four trips on D-Day, he said. He figures more than half of their 24-man group was killed in the operation.
"You can't describe it, and the reason is, you got the emotional feeling at the time, and you got the odor," he said. "The human body decays very, very fast. So you got that odor and all that tension and the smoke. The movies tried the best they can, but there's no way in the world they can, really."
It took years, Tussy said, to even discuss it with family. Now, with World War II veterans rapidly dying off, he said he feels compelled.
Tussy, who enlisted in the Navy in 1942, recalled the secret planning weeks in advance, the maps and pictures of Normandy landmarks.
"We were well versed on what we were going to encounter," he said. "It didn't do us any good. There was so much smoke and stuff we couldn't see where we were supposed to go. That's the reason there were a lot of screw-ups."
He spent 20 days on the beach at Normandy, he said, at one point getting trapped by Germans amid roadside hedgerows on an ill-advised foray to Paris.
Tussy, who returned to Normandy 25 years ago, suspects he's the last alive from his group. He worries that "the world is changing so fast, the next generation people like myself are going to be forgotten, and the history."
But don't call him a hero.
"I'm a survivor. I survived D-Day. I survived raising three teenagers during the '60s and '70s. Haight-Ashbury time. I survived cancer, two major operations. I've survived 64 years of marriage," said Tussy, who with his wife, Judy, runs a scholarship program for children in Baja, Mexico.
"No, I'm not a hero. The real heroes are the ones that didn't return. I'm just one of thousands of other guys."
'I was lucky all the way'
The old veteran sits at a table outside a San Leandro supermarket, handing out bright red memorial poppies, taking donations.
The sign above the store reads "Lucky," which seems only fitting. Joe Walsh never ventured to shore on D-Day, and he lived because of it.
"We tried to go in on the beach on the first day. The two tanks in front of us submerged completely. My tank commander, he said we weren't going in and that was it," said Walsh, who turns 87 next week.
Among the 29 tanks in B and C companies with Walsh's 741st Tank Battalion, just two made it to the beach on D-Day. The tank that Cpl. Walsh and four other soldiers manned was among three that held back. The canvass flotation system couldn't hold up in the rough water. Company C, with whom Walsh took his basic training at age 20, lost all 16 of its tanks.
"They went under, and none of the fellas that I took basic training with are alive," said Walsh, who was born in Oakland and now lives in San Leandro. "I didn't find out until after the war was over with. I was lucky all the way."
Walsh and his crew waited offshore on a landing ship, oblivious to the mayhem on the beach, he said. They landed directly on Omaha Beach the next day to find it "pretty well cleared up," he said.
Then, "we covered the (German) machine guns with our bulldozer blades, did that quite a few times. They were in the valley and we took the dirt and covered them up so they couldn't shoot at the infantry. Hee, hee. They surrendered, then the infantry took care of them," he said.
He chokes up and his eyes well at the thought of what happened later. His tank commander, Sgt. Elmer Middleton, who made the call to hold back on D-Day, took a shot across the temple from a German sniper.
"I said, 'That was a close shot.' I heard the sting, and he dropped on my soldiers,'" said Walsh, a gunner. "He saved us, and he got killed in action. It wasn't very easy. I don't know that he died right away, but I'd say he was dead when he hit me."
On Dec. 16, the first day of the Battle of the Bulge, the tank got knocked out of action. "We threw our guns overboard and there was a German standing on our guns," he said. They were taken prisoner, sent by train across Germany, held for five months in a stalag and forced to "do more marching for the Germans than I ever did for the Americans," said Walsh. In May, 1945, they woke up to find the Germans gone and waited for rescue.
Later in 1945, Walsh said he was training to go to Japan when V-J Day came and the war ended.
He said he hasn't kept any mementos from D-Day, and he wore out his uniform when he returned home to work for Western Electric, putting up microwave stations.
Walsh now relishes movies about D-Day, with the John Wayne classic, "The Longest Day," among his favorites. His wife died, but he has two living daughters and nine grandchildren. He tries not to get "too emotional" about it, he said, and tells his story to few people "except my daughters and their husbands."
He said he started attending reunions for the tank battalion about five years ago, but has never returned to Normandy. Like others, the hero tag comes hard for him.
"I'm proud of the American soldiers that died," he said. "The ones that were on the beach really suffered."
'Nothing, nothing worked out right'
Fright set in before Ed Primet ever reached the beach.
He had climbed down from a rope ladder into the landing craft, circled the larger ship in rough waters and inhaled the diesel fumes that sickened so many of the first waves of D-Day troops. Now, with a gauntlet of obstacles and mines between the boat and shore, Primet was ordered to wade in through the cold chop in chest-high water. He had enlisted in the Navy but found someone else to pass his swim test.
"I was pretty panicky then. If I carried a sidearm, I think I would have put it on the coxswain and said, 'You're going to get us in there.' Because he dumped us way out," said Primet, a quartermaster who had just turned 22. "I had a big pack. There'd be craters, so you'd just drop and have to bounce and hope it wasn't too big."
Now 87, the San Carlos resident said he followed the first waves of troops onto the beach. Assigned to the 7th Naval Beach Battalion, their job was to coordinate the orderly flow of equipment onto the beach. But little on D-Day went according to plan.
"Nothing, nothing worked out right. We landed on a different section of the beach than we were supposed to. The captains of the ships, they didn't want to stay there. They wanted to unload and get the hell back to England," said Primet, a retired high-school drafting and wood shop teacher. "That first night, I'm looking at some of the buildings that were just skeletons and I'm saying, what the hell am I doing here?"
Primet grew up in San Francisco, went to Mission High and calls himself "a gung-hoer at that time. Very patriotic." He reached shore near the village of Vierville, at the western edge of Omaha Beach. Allied troops had suffered some of their heaviest casualties there.
"At that age you can take an awful lot. But what was pretty spooky was the body bags," he said. "I mean, they had them stacked like cordwood. Like a tunnel, two sets, oh God, real high. Just gruesome."
Primet returned to Normandy 15 years ago, and he chokes up at the mention of it, though he can't say exactly why. He said he rarely talks about his D-Day experience. When he does, the missteps stand out.
"I've often thought the only reason we stayed there," he said, "was that the Germans made more mistakes than we did."
Primet stayed 19 days on the beach. Later he would go to Okinawa, Japan. He says he's proud, but he avoids any fanfare, steers clear of veterans groups, holiday parades, even Fourth of July fireworks — "Because we had fireworks going on, it seemed like, I don't know how many nights in a row."
And he dismisses the hero label.
"Nope," said Primet, whose wife died six years ago. "I did what I was told and not much more. And that's about all that can be expected, I think."
Hal Wall, Primet's closest friend and a history buff, persuaded him to return to Normandy, where, like so many others, Primet wandered silently to the water's edge and turned to stare at the bluffs.
"His battalion, they were supposed to be kind of the traffic cops, and the beach was chaos. They took a lot of casualties. He was lucky to make it," Wall said.
"My feeling is that he saw a lot of devastation there. I think he saw a lot that he wants to try to forget."
'Boy, this is for real, this stuff'
"We were sitting out there watching all the activity, saw all the shelling, bodies floating. They just couldn't get us in. There was no place to go. When you got in, all you saw was these shattered vehicles and bodies piled up against the walls."
That's about as far as John Ezersky, of Walnut Creek, cares to describe the scene when he arrived on Omaha Beach on June 7, 1944, with the 747th Tank Battalion.
He'd rather highlight the high jinks he and his fellow soldiers got into during the war, and marvel at his narrow escapes, the luck of it all.
A cocksure draftee from New York City who would later play professional basketball for the Boston Celtics, Ezersky was drafted into the Army at 20. At Normandy he volunteered to drive a gas truck, trailing tanks along the beach, then during the push inland with the July breakthrough at St.-Lô.
"Some people were scared, but I wasn't. Guys around me weren't scared. At that time I didn't know the difference, but it got a little hairy later on," he said. "When you see paratroopers hanging off trees, a colonel in a ditch dead, now you start wondering, boy, this is for real, this stuff."
A little fearless, a little stupid is how Ezersky, 87, recalls himself as a 22-year-old soldier.
Like the time he and Johnny Cannon decided to skip digging a foxhole and sleep under the truck instead.
"All of a sudden that night the shelling came in. Oh boy oh boy oh boy, he and I, no shoes, we were smart alecks, you know, civilian jerks. We ran across the opening, and what a stupid thing that was. They could have blown us apart," he said.
Or later in the war, when he felt "itchy that day, just funny," left the bivouac and returned to find a big shell where the truck had sat.
"Boy I tell you I got lucky a few times, very very lucky. God had to be with me, there's no doubt about it," he said.
Ezersky and his wife, Elaine, share a cozy home with pictures on the wall of his basketball playing days. The ones from the war he keeps in a trunk. He said he doesn't trust war movies to tell it straight, and rarely thought much of his combat duty while he drove a cab for nearly 50 years, first in New York and then in San Francisco.
"All that war experience didn't amount to anything until just recently, with 'Saving Private Ryan' and all that," he said. "All through my playing days and driving a cab, nobody ever talked about the war or anything, but just living your life. And all of a sudden the anniversaries started popping and everything became popular."
He meets monthly at a Concord restaurant with a large group of veterans, but said he doesn't speak much. The stories he tells friends are the funny ones, he said. He doesn't think they want to hear the grim stuff, though he claims not to recall much misery.
"It was just a game. It was, 'Hey, c'mon, let's go.' Whatever the government wanted us to do, hey, let's do it. Not that we had a choice," he said. "I guess that's why they took the young people. Everybody was gung-ho. It was a different world."
http://www.mercurynews.com/breakingnews/ci_12530242?nclick_check=1