
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: SUNDAY, June 5, 1994                   TAG: 9406070007
SECTION: THE GREAT CRUSADE                    PAGE: D-DAY6   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: 
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Short

"YOU ARE ABOUT TO EMBARK UPON THE GREAT CRUSADE..."

As a decoy, Joe Bush didn't understand his role

JOE BUSH SR. of Vinton was asleep in England when the D-Day invasion began, exhausted from a night of endless, seemingly useless hiking that he didn't understand. All night long, he and about 900 other men hiked in the dark from one empty camp to another. "Sometimes, we would go right through the front gate and then right out the back."

They were decoys.

"To make it look like there were more troops than there actually were." To keep any German spies in England from noticing that most of the real troops had boarded ships headed for the coast of France.

Bush, now 69, didn't know any of that. None of the decoys did.

He didn't learn his purpose until later. When he bedded down at 6 a.m. at the dawn of D-Day, he didn't even know for sure it was D-Day. He suspected, but after hiking 25 miles over the previous 12 hours, he was more interested in getting some sleep.

"They woke us a few hours later and said it was on."

by CNB