Wednesday, June 8, 2004

A son remembers his father on D-Day

I remember my father’s reply to my dilemma: “Your mother and I are going to Rhode Island early tomorrow morning. Do the best you can son.” My best friends and I had thrown our scuba equipment in the back of my ‘62 Chevy Impala to drive to Lake George to “search for cannon balls.” On the way home, the water pump had blown on the Taconic Parkway about three hours from home. We had just enough money for gas among the three of us, and it was getting late. There would be no father rescue.

The rough ship’s log reads: “Unable to beach Fox Green due to heavy shelling.” The date on the log is 6 June 1944, and the time 0900 local. My father was a barely 18-year-old gunner’s mate on LCT (Landing Craft Tank) 19 Flotilla 5.

The first wave on Omaha Beach was being slaughtered, and the decision had been made to send Flotilla 5, the “veterans” of the North Africa campaign.

As LCT 19 approached the beach, a LCI (Landing Craft Infantry) carrying 240 combat infantry troops and a crew of about 20 preceded it in the rough water. As the LCI touched ground and stopped, it was immediately rocked by German 88mm shells in the bow and stern, and simultaneously raked by multiple well-concealed machine guns.

The men in the boat instinctively huddled for protection, but were afforded no usable defilade by the thin skin. Body parts and ripped flesh actually flew through the air, and the blood ran from the gunwales.

Every single man on that boat was killed as far as my father knew, and he never really discussed it until we stood near the same spot 50 years after it happened.

My best friend and I were watching “Combat” with Vic Morrow. The plot was a somewhat predictable replacement private (not a regular on the show) failing to uphold his duties which would lead to his inevitably being shown the way by the sergeant.

I recall saying something about the man’s lack of courage, a remark overheard by my Dad in another room. His eyes angry, but his demeanor calm (never a good sign), he informed me that every ___damn one of those infantrymen were heroes; every one. When he left, my buddy and I looked at each other as if to say, “What got into him?”

The dead men were all over the beach and in the surf. The screws on the LCT were getting fouled on the dead men’s clothing. Dad’s LCT carried six half-track trucks with anti-aircraft balloons and the trucks were manned by black men.

As the half-tracks left the boat, they were individually hit by artillery shells so that the skipper had to actually turn the boat to get the last half-tracks off. All were destroyed and some of the men killed.

The young gunner’s mate returned fire at the cliffs, but had no real target at which he could shoot.

“Did you kill any Germans, Dad?”

“I killed a lot of bushes,” was his reply.

He could see the Rangers scaling Pointe du Hoc, could tell there were figures hurling things down at them, but hadn’t the effective range to help them.

He made two more trips that day, saw the brave men making their way up the hills, and witnessed the summary execution of a German soldier found with “Dum Dum” bullets in his pockets. It was quite a day for an 18-year-old boy.

I found the cardboard box in Dad’s workroom, stuffed up on the top shelf and suffused with cobwebs. It contained some old pictures of a very handsome young Dad in uniform, a jagged piece of shell, some old money, and a bunch of purple bullets.

The piece of shell had been removed from my father’s groin, and may have been the same instrument that blew off Seaman Hardbarger’s leg. It was from an American 40mm antiaircraft gun and had landed on the deck of the LCT during an air raid in Portland harbor on June 4, 1944.

Dad had been patched up at an army clinic and sent back to the LCT. They were expecting a lot more the next day.

Dad told me about the wooden bullets, how they would pierce the body, cause infection, but be invisible to X-ray, and how they’d been taken off a now-deceased German soldier.

Some 30 years later I read in Steven Ambrose’s book about the practice rounds issued to the Atlantic wall garrison soldiers for an exercise. They were purple marking rounds, and didn’t even pierce the clothing. Dad had witnessed the execution of an innocent man who never even knew his crime.

Christmas day 1944, the German army mounted its last offensive in the west, what became known as the Battle of the Bulge.

Less well-known was the sinking of the SS Leopoldville in the English Channel by a German submarine. The Belgian crew abandoned the ship, and over 700 American GIs drowned.

Dad’s LCT spent that night and all the next day retrieving their young bodies from the frigid water. Talking about it 50 years later, he choked up a little, something I never saw him do before, nor subsequently. Those drowned soldiers never got to fight, and they were just kids, like Dad.

Like most of his generation, Dad came home from the war and put behind him the bad memories. He married very well, a woman of vast intellect and compassion, who was to become my and my eight siblings’ mother.

A very tough man of enormous physical strength and a rare gift for mangling the English language, Dad was a wonderful dancer with my mother, a driven worker who gave up fishing for 25 years to work constantly, a great patriot, and revered father.

He never took one cent from the government. All nine of his children went to college. He could build anything. He revered the woman he married until her untimely death from cancer 20 years ago, and he never remarried.

He seldom spoke of the war during our childhood, but it obviously affected him. A blown water pump on an American highway probably seemed less critical to someone who’d seen such horror at 18. We lost him last November after complications from open-heart surgery.

Going through his things after the funeral, I came across a letter dated April 9, 1946, and this is what it said:

“My dear (sic) Mr. Parker:

“I have addressed this letter to reach you after all the formalities of your separation from active service are completed. I have done so because without formality but as clearly as I know how to say it, I want the Navy’s pride in you, which it is my privilege to express, to reach into your civil life and to remain with you always.

“You have served in the greatest Navy in the world.

“It crushed two enemy fleets at once, receiving their surrenders only four months apart.

“It brought our land-based airpower within bombing range of the enemy, and set our ground armies on the beachheads of final victory.

“It performed the multitude of tasks necessary to support these military operations.

“No other Navy at any time has done so much. For your part in these achievements you deserve to be proud as long as you live. The Nation which you served at a time of crisis will remember you with gratitude.

“The best wishes of the Navy go with you into civilian life. Good luck!

“Sincerely yours, James Forrestal.”

My father’s story probably reads like that of most in his generation. They were as flawed as all of humanity, with their cultural prejudices, their later ignorance and overconfidence in Vietnam, their inability to understand the generation that followed.

But they were wonderful and strong and brave in a way they chose to be. They defended the Constitution and humanity, and sacrificed to build a better world for us all.

It has become cliché to call them the greatest generation. I think they see themselves as the generation that did their duty. Robert E. Lee said of duty: “... You can never do more, you should never wish to do less.”

He missed the WWII memorial dedication, but his son watched, and watched proudly.

Timothy J. Parker

Peachtree City, Ga.

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