![]() ![]() ![]() “The older you get, when you start facing death yourself, you start talking about it,” Orlando says. Many just wanted to move on, as quickly as possible.įor example, Peter Orlando’s daughter Susan Pierce had grown up hearing her father talk about how great the Navy was, but she didn’t know that story about her father watching his rescue tug pull in drowned men until 15 years ago, when the two of them were in hospital waiting room while her mother was having surgery. When the Americans who made the surrender possible returned home, they tended not to get into the nitty-gritty with their civilian counterparts. By the time the 100th anniversary of D-Day comes around, there will be no veterans left,” says Rob Citino, Senior Historian at The National WWII Museum.Īnd they were the lucky ones, considering Americans bore the brunt of the casualties from the operation.īut while the historic importance of D-Day was immediately clear, the feeling of not wanting to discuss that day remained the norm for decades. “This is the last big anniversary in which there will be any sizable presence of veterans at all. Department of Veterans Affairs statistics, 496,777 of the 16 million Americans who served in World War II were alive in 2018. These eight veterans are part of a shrinking group. Get your history fix in one place: sign up for the weekly TIME History newsletter Choosing to Remember He turned 19 two days later, and shortly after, a blast from a Tiger tank exploded and knocked him out, and he woke up from a coma three weeks later in a hospital in England. “I’m kind of a small guy so I floated pretty good, so I held my rifle in the air and managed to get my feet on the sand.” After landing on Omaha Beach on June 7, the 18-year-old Private First Class sustained shrapnel wounds to both arms. “The water was supposed to be only a few feet deep, so a lot of guys jumped off the ramp of the Higgins boat and never came up because they had a lot of equipment on their backs and they just sank and drowned,” he says. Norman Riggsby recalls the many men who weren’t so lucky, who died before they made it to land. Arriving on the beach, though, he knew he could in fact be hurt, and was constantly afraid of running into mines and snipers as he sat high up in a Jeep during the “fireworks display” of machine gunfire. They aren’t going to hurt you,'” he recalls from his Lansdowne, Va., home. I guess I looked a little uptight, so my sergeant came by and said, ‘Harner, relax. “My first job was to guard those prisoners. Serving with a battalion attached to a British unit, Harner was on the deck of the landing ship tank when he saw a small craft down below, full of German prisoners. Harlan Lincoln Harner, a 19-year-old Army radioman, encountered a different boatload of troops early in the morning on June 7, just hours after his unit arrived at Gold Beach on the night of D-Day. “The smells were almost as bad as the sounds.”ĭominic Geraci, then a 20-year-old Private First Class Army medic, still can’t talk about what he saw on Omaha Beach the day after D-Day on June 7, as he helped clear the wounded. Everything was burning - vehicles, rubber, ammunition, belts, packs, uniforms, human flesh, “all giving off awful smells,” he says. Amid the smoke, with the steep hills in flames, they made their way to Pointe du Hoc, where they successfully dismantled a battery of German artillery. One bullet that day hit the man behind him, Raaen’s messenger, while he was running across the beach. John Raaen, then a 22-year-old Army captain, likens “the frightening pop” of the countless bullets flying over his head that morning to the sound he hears these days during space shuttle launches near his home in Winter Park, Fla. The next thing he remembers is waking up, lying on his back on the beach, seeing a big cloud and hearing “a constant huge roar.” He was put on a ship headed back to England for treatment, and returned to Normandy about a week after D-Day. “Just before our boat touched down, we sunk,” he says. He wondered whether his boat had been hit. He remembers sitting on the side of a Higgins boat, holding a flame thrower - designed to kill Germans hiding in bunkers by shooting flames through the gun slits - when, suddenly, he heard a muffled boom. Russell Pickett, then a 19-year-old Private First Class in the Army remembers thinking he couldn’t wait to get on the beach and get the mission over with. ![]()
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