Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, June 5, 1994 TAG: 9406070001
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: BEN BEAGLE STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
We never thought of losing the war - although our parents were not worry-free on that score - and we knew this invasion meant the end for the Third Reich and all its weird leaders. Actually, it would be over in Europe in less than a year. And we would find the Germans had been far, far worse than weird.
Some time later, Ed Murrow would put our feelings into more sophisticated words. The invasion, he said, was "the most important day of the war and, very possibly, of our generation."
Maybe, I think sometimes, maybe our cockiness had something to with the presence of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. He was the only president we in the Class of '44 had known and he seemed durable and, well, cocky. He would be dead in less than a year.
We had waited for the invasion through foolish fear that the huge powder plant on the New River near Radford would be bombed; that "they" would blow up the old, two-laned bridge that took U.S. 11 across the New River - old, yes, but lovely in its antiquity and the main access to the powder plant itself. There were sentry booths and men with shotguns guarding the old structure.
We waited for the invasion through sugar rationing, meat rationing, shoe rationing and gas rationing - although the latter was no problem for our family because we were fresh from the Great Depression and didn't have a car.
We knew, from newsreels watched in the Radford Theater, that blood had been lost on Guadalcanal, in the Kasserine Pass; in Italy; in far too many other places.
We knew. And my pompadour haircut stood on end, despite its high Vitalis content, when the high school choir sang "Say a Prayer for the Boys Over There." If you were 17 in June of 1944 and male, you wanted to "get in it" and see if you could bear combat and come home a hero.
But at that age, you had to have parental consent, which my mother would never have given, even with a bayonet at her throat. I would get "in" after "it" was all over and never know how I would have acted in combat. I still think about that.
I am not demeaning any of the costly campaigns of World War II - including the horrors of the South Pacific; of Iwo Jima and Tarawa and the messy, drawn-out terror of Okinawa, fought in the summer of 1945 - a year after D-Day and mere days after victory in Europe.
It is just that the invasion of Hitler's Fortress Europa - and we were a generation that loved to sing about heiling right in the fuhrer's face - impressed us as the beginning of the end of that crazy paper-hanging sonofabitch.
The image of that huge fleet in uncertain water off the coast of Normandy became the catalyst for our remembrance of those days when things turned around.
The invasion of Europe apparently does the same thing for people who illustrate history books about the war. Many of them choose pictures of American troops landing at Normandy. I don't know why this should be. It just is. And, yet, the flag raising on Mount Suribachi during the taking of Iwo Jima inspired a statue in Arlington.
There is no statue in Arlington for the young men of the First and 29th Infantry Divisions who died in the surf on Omaha Beach and the others who landed at Normandy.
The assault on Hitler's 1,000-year Reich, which lasted far less than a quarter of a century, stirred our blood. This, despite the fact that the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor was everybody's personal "day of infamy."
I don't know. I wish I could say that I remember what it was like in Radford when we heard the news. I suspect the reaction was rather solemn, but I don't remember. I found later that they rang the Liberty Bell in Philadelphia. It bongs leadenly on this highly scratched old LP I have.
Of all the battles of World War II, D-Day has captured us - to the perhaps unfortunate extent of getting John Wayne into it after the fact, not to mention Red Buttons hanging from the church tower on his parachute lines. My generation knows that neither John nor Red was ever a paratrooper.
A personal aside here: My brother-in-law, the late Charlie Richardson of Staunton, was a buck sergeant in L Company, 116th Infantry Regiment, 29th Infantry Division.
The 116th inherited the battle streamers of the old Stonewall Brigade - a Civil War outfit on which many Virginians had conferred a sort of unofficial, sentimental sainthood.
My uncle, the late Hugh P. Beagle Sr. of Staunton, was top kick in L Company when the 29th, originally a National Guard outfit, was called to federal service in February of 1941. For different reasons, neither landed on Omaha Beach, but they represent my link to the 29th Infantry Division - the Blue and the Gray.
At the time, the division - its insignia a round patch with a wavy line between blue and gray segments - was composed of guardsmen from Virginia, Maryland and Pennsylvania.
I was 13 when L Company got on the train at the old C&O station in Staunton, bound for Fort George G. Meade, Md., on its way to a war that would find the company more than three years later. And I cried.
When the allies invaded Europe, I was less than one year short of being an 18-year-old infantryman who could wade into that fatal surf on the coast of Normandy. Or, worse, be a replacement later on for some GI who didn't make it. I would have come a stranger among men who had been through hell together. A stranger and a liability because of inexperience.
Your average Radford teen-ager didn't know where Normandy - not to mention Omaha Beach - was on the French coast. But we understood that we were at last getting close to old Adolf and his people. God. Few of us even knew where the French coast was.
But we were the youngsters who sang this inane song that had to do with heiling right in the fuhrer's face and we were damned serious about it.
And one of my worries is that the generations who came after will have no great interest in the bloody surf at Omaha Beach 50 years ago.
I can say 29th or Big Red One to my children - the First Division, which had already seen combat, went in with the 29th on Omaha - and get a relatively blank stare.
I rail about this sometimes. I say I know how the 20th Maine had a large part in the eventual defeat of the Confederacy at Gettysburg in another summer some eight decades before D-Day. So how come these children don't know what the Big Red One and the 29th did to assure their futures?
I rail, despite my own ignorance on June 6, 1944 - an ignorance diluted somewhat by later reading and conversations with people who were there.
Perhaps a disinterest in war is a good thing - but I wish my children to know more about the Big Red One and the Blue and Gray and what those people did for them a half century ago on a nightmare beach in France.
And what they did for me - those surviving dogfaces who are now no longer young and those who didn't make it but will never grow old.
by CNB