May 2006 Cover Story:
Tribute to Veterans
D-Day: We Were There

Presented by America’s Flyways and the Commemorative Air Force

Preface
The following are excerpts of D-Day experiences from three oral histories in the archives of the American Airpower Heritage Museum, Midland, Texas. These are the personal stories of three men: a radio operator on a B-24, a parachute-infantryman and a B-17 crewmember and how each contributed to the Allied invasion of France on June 6, 1944.

William A. Turner, Sr., served as a radio operator with the 487th Bomb Group, flying B-24s.

At approximately 1 a.m. on June 6, 1944, we were awakened by the orderly and told that briefing would be in one hour. We dressed hurriedly
as usual.

Arriving at base headquarters for general briefing, the curtain was let back and a big map pulled down. There it was! “Gentlemen, this is it, D-Day.” After the general briefing I was called aside by our base communications officer, Maj. Vernon Demsey. Dempsey said, “Sgt. Turner you have an extreme responsibility on you this morning. The other operators throughout the entire mission will be instructed not to use a radio for any reason, and I’m also instructing you not to break radio silence due to the fact that this entire effort is an element of surprise and must be kept from the Germans at all costs. So if you break your radio silence, they can take bearings on you and determine at what point you are leaving the British coast, what direction you are headed in and approximately what time you will arrive and what point you will be headed towards. And you will be going in some two hours, I believe, before the actual first landing craft hit the coast of France.” This was behind Normandy and the Omaha Beach area that we were to bomb.

But as fate would have it, I did receive a call, and it was from Ike’s headquarters — high command. They immediately gave the proper authenticator code for the day and asked me to hold my key down for 30 seconds so that they might take a fix. Well, of course this scared me to death because I would have to disobey previous orders in order to obey these, and I knew in my mind the authenticator codes were given to all our Allied crafts and others that were involved in the invasion some hours before we set out. Therefore, it could be Germans calling instead of Allied high command. So, we had two command officers, I believe a brigadier general and, perhaps, a colonel was the other officer. They were sitting on my radio table. So I checked with the command officers.

I said, “What should I do? I am going to have to jeopardize the mission and perhaps the whole invasion if I break radio silence.” They shrugged their shoulders.

“Well, we have our orders and you have yours. It is your decision. You make it.”

I didn’t know what in the world I was going to do. So I went back and sat down at my radio table, and I pondered for a moment and broke my key open finally and asked for two more authenticator codes that we had available. They were answered promptly and correctly. So, I thought, “Well, I must do my duty.” I held my key down for 30 seconds in terror, and I closed the transmission and sat back and watched the endless stream of ships and crafts of all kind in the channel for a brief period. The more I thought about it, the more horrified I became that I might have done the wrong thing, that we had tipped off the Germans and these men would be just shredded as the Germans rushed everything they had right to the beachheads. I had no way of finding out until we returned to home base, and we did return without any serious incident.

Waiting at hardstand was Dempsey, and he sternly admonished, “Sgt. Turner, come with me at once.”

I said, “Yes sir, let me get my radio log please.” We stormed into his office at headquarters and he said, “You know you are subject to general court-martial, perhaps death for treason, for what you have done this morning?”

I said “Sir, I have my log here, and I would like for you to take look at it.” He did, and I could see a little puzzled frown on his face. I said, “Sir, could you hear Allied high command call me?”

He said, “No, not from my distance. I only heard you disobeying my orders by breaking radio silence.” So finally he became somewhat convinced that I might have done the right thing, and he called high command.

They said, "Yes, we called him because it was very pertinent to coordinating all efforts to find out exactly what position that the 8th Air Force was in at that time.” I fell down — not literally — but, a mass of tremendous relief that I had not done the wrong thing. I might say that, perhaps, this was my greatest accomplishment, and I did it alone. I did not give a war away.

John Taylor joined the parachute infantry and was assigned to the 508th Parachute Infantry Regiment, B-company, 1st Battalion.

The following remarks are not those of military strategists or professional soldier. Rather, but of a civilian who all of a sudden found himself in the service. I joined the parachute infantry in late 1943.

We went up to an airport in England someplace around the first of June (1944). We were put in a barbed wire enclosure and locked up like prisoners. At that time, they started to brief us on what we were going to be doing in the invasion. They didn’t tell us where we were going, but rather that it was a peninsula someplace jutting out into the Atlantic Ocean.

On the night of June 5, it was rather an exciting night. We received mimeographed letters from Eisenhower, Churchill and Roosevelt, and we actually felt like we were trying to improve the world, I guess.

We boarded the plane. As I recall, it was 11:02 at night, and we soon took off. It was interesting. I was right close to the door and while flying over the English Channel, you could look out and see this vast flotilla of ships. Some of our fellows, after 15 minutes in the air, they were sound asleep. I don’t know how they do it.

Our first sign of any activity: we swung south of England and came up through the isles of Jersey and Guernsey, from which you could see tracer bullets being fired or anti-aircraft.

Very soon we hit the coast of Normandy. I remember the surf. At that time the red light came on in the plane. That was an indication to stand up and hook up, because you’re gonna go. We came in low. I remember looking out the plane and seeing the tops of trees. The trees in Normandy were not very large, and I thought, “We don’t need a parachute for this, all we need is a step ladder.” Usually when you’re going to jump, you can tell because the plane would slow down, and they would raise the tail, so to give you clearance when you jumped out of the plane. This pilot did not slow down, and as I recall, we weren’t over two or three hundred feet in the air.

We jumped. No problem. I remember coming down. I had a recollection of all these people on the ground — looked like a circle — and I think they were all firing up at me. I doubled up, held my jackknife position. I was lucky; I hit right at the middle of a big open field, luckier than lots of fellows who landed in trees or water or on top of buildings.

After landing, I lay there. I thought, “This is a bad dream; this is not real.” Now all of a sudden I heard Germans talking. It was still a bad dream, but it was real. You do funny things, and I thought, “I’ve got to get out of this parachute.” These were the old-fashioned chutes with snap harnesses, not the quick-release type. I took out my knife, and I said, “Now let’s not cut an artery here.” And then I thought, “Well, maybe I’ll get in trouble if I cut this parachute up.” Very economy minded. An unusual sight were the parachutes. They were everywhere. They were in trees. They were on the ground. They were on buildings. They were in the water. It wasn’t too long after that that the Germans made good use of them. They used them for camouflage, and they made just like a poncho out of them. The French took that up, too, so everybody was wearing parachutes. I’d cut up a piece and stick it in my pocket. That was my bedroll.

Anyway, I cut myself out and looked up to see this person approaching me. You trained so much with the people in your squad and your platoon that you recognized people in the dark, and this was my best friend. So we got together; we got the machine gun and we started moving out.

In a short time, we started moving, as it turned out, towards Ste. Mere Eglise. Our original objective was a little town called Chef du Pont, in which there was a causeway going across, I think, the Dove River. We were to seize a road junction there. Luckily, we were dropped into the wrong place, because at that road junction, there was a battalion of German infantry. Sometimes it pays to make a mistake.

Anyway, we moved through Ste. Mere Eglise, down to Chef du Pont. It was more like a farm, and there were quite a few of us by this time. Must have been 75. There were Germans in the farmhouse. Luckily, I was not designated to go in after them, but we had some fellows who did go in there. I saw my first wounded man there.

Well, we crossed the causeway. The Germans had opened up the floodgates beside the river and covered the lowland with several feet of water. We fanned out on the other side of the causeway and hadn’t any more than started to set up and the Germans were waiting for us. (There’s) Nothing more awesome or fearful than hearing a bunch of tanks when you don’t have anything to fight tanks. Everybody decided to run. The only way was through the flooded lowlands. We got a real good baptism of fire there. You try to stay low, but when the water’s three feet deep, you can’t duck too far. You’d be up more than once during this period, almost like being under a cutting machine because the cattails and the grass were being cut off right above your head. During this time, the group split, and Taylor ended up in a group of three.

We finally got to the river, and, of course, sitting on the bridge was a German tank. I started to swim, and I could see this tank swinging the gun around down in our general direction. You kind of stick out like a sore thumb when you’re trying to swim a river with 30 pounds of equipment. So I thought, “Well, I’ll outsmart them. I’ll duck under the water and swim underwater.” Well, unfortunately, I tried to come up and couldn’t. I was waterlogged, had all this equipment (hand grenades, gammon grenades, K-rations and first aid kits) in my heavy pockets. I just went down. I said, “This is it. I’m never going to get off here.” For some reason I started crawling on the bottom, and all of a sudden, I could feel the bank of the river going up. I was able to crawl out. After all three crossed the river, they began to run.

Well, we got to the edge of the woods, and met some Americans. They had a gung-ho lieutenant saying, “Okay, men. We’ve got to stand right here. This is it. Nobody retreat any farther.” I was standing there, and all I had was a pair of wire cutters. I said, “How do you want me to fight with this?”

We decided we’d had enough for that day, so we went up the hill. There were some people from the 101st Airborne up there, and we found out they had an aid station. We were able to rearm ourselves with a rifle and some ammunition.

Then we proceeded to walk for a short distance. It was getting dark, and we found this field and decided it was a good place to dig in. Just at dark, the gliders came in. It was a terrible sight because these gliders came in, and the minute they came over the Germans were firing at them. They’re just a duck soup target. The Germans had been very clever. In the big fields they put up posts with barbed wire.

Anyway, on this place where we were supposed to land, the causeway we were supposed to have taken plus the Chef du Pont, was the objective of one platoon in our company, and to take this same land it took two regiments, tanks and artillery. So, today, I’m very thankful I didn’t land on the other side. We came back that way, later on. I believe it was a couple of days later. The ditches were just lined with bodies.

Wilbur Richardson was assigned to the 331st Bomb Group at Bury, St. Edmunds, England, as an air crew member.

June 6, 1944. Whenever I remember D-Day, I can feel again the aching sense of suffering and heroics that occurred 18,000 feet below me that early morning 43 years ago, today being November 2, 1987.

When we reached the briefing room (the morning of June 6, 1944), we were all talking and wondering what was going on. As the briefing meeting started, the curtain was pulled aside, and again the target was the coastline. Well, we knew something was going to happen shortly, and no sooner did they draw the curtain than the briefing officer said that yes, this was the day. The invasion was going to begin, and we had to be over the target and gone by 6:30 a.m. That meant the last of the airplanes had to be over the target, so some of us would be over earlier than that, of course.

Because this was the invasion day, nothing was going to keep crews down. We were told in briefing that the airplanes over the target area would be all Allies, and they didn’t expect any German aircraft at all. Flak would be very light, and it turned out to be that way. So, no one was going to stay down if they could help it. So, again, the target was the shoreline, and we were going to be in the air a long time. We left, as we did the night before, real early. We were off the ground by, I think, around 3 a.m. So we flew for about an hour and a half or two hours in darkness, and as I did the night before, I sat in the tail. I volunteered to do this. The tail-gunner didn’t want to do it, and I sat in the tail with a lamp flashing the letter A, indicating this was the 94th bomb group. Planes were forming up on a leader, and as we were the second flight of the first element, the airplanes were forming up on our group.

Well, the target’s conditions were as we were told. The Germans were not around. We made the target all right on the first mission. We were going to go on two. We could see below some action, pretty well the first mission. There were a few breaks in the clouds. We saw lots of ships.

Well, we got off for the second mission of the day, and again, it was the invasion coast. Of course, it would be a little further in because of the action on the beach below. The second mission, the weather had broken up a bit more. The clouds had more breaks in them, and we got a real good look at the action on the beach below. Hundreds and hundreds of boats were still coming across the channel, and more were lined up along the beach. I saw the Battleship Texas firing its big rifles across the water to the target areas just beyond the invasion forces, and I watched those 2,000-pound shells as they left the muzzles of those rifles and went into their targets and exploded. That was quite an awe-inspiring sight, along with all the boats that we could see.