THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, June 4, 1994 TAG: 9406040195
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY TONY GERMANOTTA, STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: 940604 LENGTH: OMAHA BEACH, NORMANDY
Tears were in his eyes. He could bear only glimpses of the flat where he landed on that terrible morning 50 years ago. So he stared instead into the scrub-covered bluffs where the Germans had been waiting and efficiently slaughtering his fellow GIs.
{REST} ``This is the area I landed in,'' Williamson said, ``That whole beach was just strewed with dead.''
The words caught in his throat, and he turned away again.
``I can't look at it,'' he croaked, ``there's a lot of memories here.''
Then Williamson snapped back to 1994 and he seemed to notice for the first time the cottages that line the area of the Vierville draw, where about 1,000 men in his 29th Division died.
It's like Virginia Beach now, he said with distaste for the desecration by development. ``You've got your summer homes on Omaha Beach.''
Williamson, of Norfolk, was a forward observer for an artillery company when he hit the beach with the second wave on June 6, 1944. None of the radios on the beach worked, so Williamson became an infantryman, grabbing a weapon and heading off the beach, somehow climbing up the bluffs and attacking the Germans from behind.
Even he wondered now how he had done it. ``Fifty years ago,'' he finally explained, ``we were young, and first-class troops, too.''
William E. Halstead, another Norfolk artilleryman who at last returned to Omaha Beach, climbed along the modern stone seawall, put in after the war. He dropped to one knee and scraped shaky handfuls of sand into a plastic bag, to take back for the veterans unable to make the pilgrimage.
``This is sacred soil here,'' he announced softly. Then he pocketed a few of the smooth stones that once served as the seawall. They, too, would be reminders.
As he dug in the sand, he flashed back to D-Day afternoon, when he landed - without a weapon - and scrambled past the obstructions and dead bodies to the safety of the little embankment.
He then dug frantically, using his hands to scratch out a foxhole. He remembered a shell hitting close by, sending a football-sized rock into his back.
``I felt my arms, and they were all right,'' he said. He was afraid to check any lower on his body, worried that it was all blown away. Finally, he gathered the courage and found himself bruised but otherwise intact.
Nearby, French teenagers wearing authentic 29th Division WWII uniforms performed a stylized re-enactment of the landing. But the 500 or so 29th Division veterans and families paid little attention.
Most of the veterans were like Williamson and Halstead, absorbed in their memories, alone in a crowd of the living, fixed on the legions of the dead.
For Halstead, it was the first time on the beach since 1944. Williamson had returned only once, and that was 30 years ago when the pillboxes and beach obstacles still bristled ominously.
Monte Huffman of the 116th Infantry Regiment's E Company returned after five decades to try to make sense of the slaughter and retrace his steps.
Now 81, the Huntington, W.Va., man has a simple explanation of why D-Day succeeded despite the extraordinary casualty toll.
``They just couldn't kill us all,'' he said. Huffman was 31 when he hit Omaha Beach in the deadly first wave. He was a 2nd lieutenant, a section leader then.
``When we came in, I had 30 men and an attached sergeant for the engineers,'' he recalled. ``In about 30 minutes I had 11 men left.''
He had bazooka men with no bazookas, flame-throwing teams with no gear, and everywhere there were German shells and bullets flying.
When the artillery shells passed nearby, Huffman remembered, still almost unable to believe it himself, the ``airwash would knock you off your feet.''
Had the Germans counterattacked in those first few minutes, he said, ``They could've knocked us off the beach with pillows.''
But the Germans hesitated and men like Huffman began to fight back and eventually recapture Europe. ``It was a matter of self-survival,'' he said.
Huffman had wanted to return for the 40th anniversary, but didn't have the money. ``I'm sorry I didn't,'' he said, ``I'm almost 82. I can't get about like I should to see all these things.''
David Silva returned to Normandy after 50 years to revisit the place that changed his life more than any other.
As he struggled to stay alive on D-Day, Silva made a promise many servicemen have uttered. Silva kept his word.
``If the Lord is good to me,'' Silva told his buddies, ``I am going to be a priest.''
Silva survived and entered the seminary. ``I made a deal,'' said Silva, who lives in Parma Heights, Ohio.
For Hal Baumgarten, the visit to Omaha Beach was a trip into the horrors of a day he can never shake.
Baumgarten, a northern lad, had trained with A Company of Bedford, Va., for most of the war.
Just before D-Day, he was transferred to B Company and had to land on the beach moments after most of his friends had been slaughtered.
``It was a sad sight,'' Baumgarten recalled.
All around him were the bodies of men he had grown to love as brothers.
His best friend, Robert Garbett Jr. of Newport News, was among them.
As Baumgarten stormed ashore, a machine-gunner killed the men on either side of him. Baumgarten felt one round hit his M-1 rifle and a mortar shell exploded in the sand in front of him, blowing off the face of Bedford Hoback, one of his friends from A Company, and nearly ripping off Baumgarten's jaw.
``I couldn't talk or eat after that,'' he recalled. It was only 7 a.m. and there would be much more killing and dying before the sun set on that Longest Day.
Baumgarten, an expert rifleman, spotted the machine-gunner who was killing so many on the beach. He fired his rifle and the German fell back, his head blown away.
But the bullet that had hit his rifle caused it to jam. Baumgarten dropped behind a beach obstacle and tried to use his feet to clear the weapon. The M-1 cracked in half, instead, and Baumgarten tossed it into the sand in disgust.
``A Company A man crawled up to me and with his last breath, handed me back that rifle,'' Baumgarten recalled. It was in two pieces then and the man said nothing, but Baumgarten got the message.
``It was so one-sided then,'' he recalled, ``that he wanted somebody to keep on fighting.''
Baumgarten, 19, fought on. He was wounded five times in the first two days and was evacuated for medical care at 3 p.m. June 7 - D-Day plus one.
Plastic surgery restored his face and he used the GI bill to get a medical education and is a doctor in Jacksonville, Fla., now.
Rocco Russo of Virginia Beach was on a mission of his own Friday.
He felt an obligation to the men of Company F, the 116th Regiment's group based in South Boston, Va. The company had adopted him in England when he joined as a draftee just before D-Day.
And so, he and his wife, Midge, visited every Company F grave in the sprawling American cemetery that overlooks Omaha Beach.
There was Sgt. John E. Cooney of Rhode Island, the first dead man Russo saw on D-Day, and Michael Paradise of Massachusetts, a very close friend who survived the beach only to die in the fighting outside St. Lo more than a month later when an artillery shell exploded above him in a tree.
At each marble marker, Midge Russo planted a single red rose and her husband said a silent prayer. Then they took a photograph for the families left behind.
Rocco Russo refused to be rushed by impatient tour guides, eager to get the veterans on buses for a formal ceremony a few miles down the road.
``This is more important to me,'' he said. Let the bus leave him behind, he said. ``I walked all over Normandy before,'' he said. ``I can walk it all over again.''
{KEYWORDS} D-DAY NORMANDY ANNIVERSARY
by CNB