Honoring the men who went ashore
The Column: 06.12.23
I was an infant when Allied forces crossed the Channel and landed at Normandy in 1944 and none of my uncles were there, the only D-Day vet I knew was my high school biology teacher Lyle Bradley who dove into a foxhole under enemy fire and two men fell on top of him, both dead, who shielded him from a nearby mortar explosion, but he never told me about it until he was an old man and so my first knowledge of it came from A.J. Liebling’s accounts in The New Yorker, which I read as a college kid and reread last week on the anniversary. Reading them the first time made me want to be a writer and the rereading was no less stunning.
Joe Liebling was a war correspondent aboard a 155-foot landing craft that hit Omaha Beach at dawn and dropped off infantry and advance teams of engineers assigned to clear away mines and obstacles and he stood topside and reported what he saw and heard. He went to a chapel service, a chaplain quoting St. Paul, “If God be for us, who can be against us?” Printed copies of General Eisenhower’s message to the troops were passed out and men autographed them for each other as souvenirs. Liebling had boarded the boat days before and gotten to know the sailors who refer to the amphibious force as “the ambiguous farce” and the troops of the First Division who’ll go ashore — “The First Division is always beefing about something, which adds to its effectiveness as a fighting unit,” he writes. A trooper boards, saying, “Did you ever see a goddamn gangplank set in the right place?”
Liebling wrote that on the crossing, everyone was “in the same mood: everybody hopes he won’t get seasick. On the whole, this is a favorable morale factor. A soldier cannot fret about possible attacks by the Luftwaffe or E-boats while he is preoccupied by himself and the vague fear of secret weapons on the far shore is balanced by the fervent desire to get the far shore under his feet.”
So when the boat slips past the big ships and drops the two landing ramps and the battle is joined, you sort of know the guys who dash forward into five feet of water and struggle toward the beach and the cliff beyond, the German pillboxes firing tracer bullets, the thunder of Allied artillery. He hears a BBC announcer announce that the landing was carried out “with surprising ease.” “I called briefly upon God,” Liebling wrote. “D-Day hadn’t seemed like that to us. There is nothing like a broadcasting studio in London to give a chap perspective.”
The first man ashore is a young coastguardsman from a small town in Mississippi who’ll carry a guideline ashore so the disembarking soldiers will have something to hang onto if they step into a hole. The guy is wearing a swimsuit. He went to Tulane and he wants to become a newspaperman. He says he’s a “pretty good” swimmer. So when you read later that he was hit by a German shell as he stepped off the ramp and was blown apart, you grieve for him.
It was stunning, to be so gripped by writing that had gripped me as a college kid, that I read over and over again. I got to The New Yorker five years after Liebling died in 1964 and I had lunch once with his colleague Joseph Mitchell who remembered Joe sitting in an office down the hall tapping away on a typewriter and stopping to laugh at what he’d written. “He was the only New Yorker writer who enjoyed reading his own stuff,” Mitchell said. “Most of us thought writers were supposed to agonize but Joe loved a good turn of phrase.”
I read the piece in the magazine’s archive, columns of type between ads for cigarettes and Rodgers’ and Hammerstein’s “Oklahoma” and the Crosley automobile and men’s double-breasted suits, and it struck me how far we’ve come from Liebling’s respect for soldiering and his fondness for the democratic spirit of the military, men from Kansas and Bensonhurst and South Dakota coming together, beefing about the chow, the highfalutin manners of the officer corps, putting their lives on the line in defense of Europe.
What came between the beach at Normandy and today was a series of disasters, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, and when my cousin Ron got to Vietnam, he wrote to his brother, “Do whatever you need to do to not wind up here.” Mr. Bradley came ashore that June day in 1944 and was reluctant to talk about it. Other men died all around him and it wasn’t his place to play the hero. But Joe Liebling honored the men in uniform and if you want to do likewise, go read him.
Oh, Mr. Keillor,
You've made me remember. Every Veteran’s Day, Mary Lois Brunker, who celebrated her 90th birthday in 2013, arranged a tribute to the veterans who worshiped at the little fundamentalist Church of Christ where I grew up. It usually consisted of special music, a reading, and the presentation of a small token of appreciation to each of the men who ever belonged to the United States’ armed forces. Veteran’s Day mattered to Mary Lois. Veterans matter to her. At nineteen, she watched so many young men her age, including a brother and husband, leave their lives behind to serve their country. Many of them never came back. Those who did survive that war are gone now. At Salem, we lost two of their number that year, so that day’s service was especially poignant.
Mary Lois came to me before worship and asked if I would stand in for my father. All she wanted was for me to come forward when she called Daddy’s name and accept the token on his behalf. When she said, “George Marsh,” I stepped into the aisle and walked up to the front where 9 year-old Will Johnson handed me a white carnation with red, white, and blue ribbons tied around the stem. Just to stand in front of the congregation where my father should have been was humbling enough, but while I stood there and she called the names of the others, I began to think just what it would have meant to have stood in for my father.
The inscription on the Marine Corps monument in Washington D.C. is truth. "Uncommon valor was a common virtue." Every fighter on that island, including the Japanese, was a grand man. First in the navy, then attached to a marine unit, Daddy spent six weeks on the island of Iwo Jima during what is remembered by history as some of the fiercest, bloodiest fighting of the war. His job was to bind wounds. All he had was a little morphine and a few bandages. He didn’t even have water to wash his hands, only sand. In six weeks, he did not have a shower or change clothes. He learned to sleep through mortars falling. He was sustained by the twenty-third psalm. Daddy was wounded in battle and treated his own wound, never even reporting it. He carried the scar. If you were to ask him about it, he would tell you it was just a flesh wound.
When they were burying the Japanese, many of the bodies were already in foxholes that they had dug themselves. The men were warned that some of the bodies were booby trapped. The marines took turns testing for traps. He said he had to take a volcanic rock the size of a basketball and throw it onto a body and hope that it didn't explode.
He left a Higgins boat on February 19, 1945 nineteen years old, standing 5'11" and weighing 165 pounds. Six weeks later, he was still 5'11" but he weighed 130 pounds. He was essentially deaf in one ear from a mortar shell that fell too close.
Three months after the battle, he was awarded a bronze star. He had gone out under fire and risked his own life to save the life of a wounded man.
For most of my life, he wouldn't even talk about his experiences. He just carried them around in his head. Near the end of his life, he told me that even though he saw hundreds and hundreds of men die, saw limbs and heads blown off, and holes in every part of a human body, none of it was as hard as watching my mother die.
I stood in front of a congregation in HIS place
Thank you for shaking lose that memory.
Love,
Dawn
My mothers first husband, Russ McConnell, was torpedoed on the St. Lawrence River near Quebec City during what few people know as The Battle of the St. Lawrence, WWll. Russ asked his very best friend, Ron Perowne, to take care of his wife should anything ever happen to him. Every sailor aboard that boat died. Ron Perowne kept his word and married Russ’s widow. He is my Dad. That’s Friendship.