THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, June 6, 1994 TAG: 9406060057
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY TONY GERMANOTTA, STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: 940606 LENGTH: VIERVILLE-SUR-MER, NORMANDY
This town, where so many Virginians gave their lives 50 years ago today, hosted a simple ceremony Sunday for D-Day vets and their families.
{REST} Hundreds of men who survived history's biggest amphibious assault returned to be honored by the citizens they liberated and to be saluted by generals from the United States, Great Britain and France.
The ceremony was short, but heartfelt. When soldiers speak to their own, many things need not be said.
Two days earlier, the men of the 29th Division had found it difficult to look out on the broad sand flat that had once been littered with GIs' bodies.
Sunday evening, the sand of Omaha Beach was swallowed by high tide, much as it had been at the end of that Longest Day, June 6, 1944. But there were no bodies stacked against the seawall, or weakened, wounded men being washed out to die at sea.
On the horizon Sunday bobbed a commemorative D-Day flotilla of about a dozen Navy ships, including the Norfolk-based aircraft carrier George Washington. Fifty years ago there were thousands of ships, seemingly stacked all the way across the channel to England.
President Clinton was to spend Sunday night on the carrier and conduct a sunrise memorial service there this morning before heading to the American cemetery overlooking the beaches for formal ceremonies.
An assistant secretary of defense represented the administration on shore Sunday but delivered no speech.
It was an evening for those in uniform to pay homage to their brave predecessors.
Army Chief of Staff Gen. Gordon Sullivan saluted the returning heroes of the 29th Division.
Their actions, their bravery, he said, had changed the world.
``God bless you all,'' Sullivan said.
He told the veterans that there were 80 current members of the 29th Division in attendance who would draw inspiration from what they are learning about D-Day.
``God bless what you represent. Today is a soldier's day.''
After the speeches, the veterans marched off to ``The Beer Barrel Polka,'' their division's unlikely theme song.
It was a tune loved by the division's World War II commander, Gen. Charles H. Gerhardt. He had it played in marches, he had it played at gatherings, and he even had it played at division funerals.
``That was my father's favorite song,'' said Charles Gerhardt Jr., who came to France for D-Day's 50th anniversary. ``He caught a lot of heat for it.''
Once, the division, made up of National Guard units based in Virginia and Maryland, even sang the song for Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower as they paraded for him in England.
As the veterans gathered, they shouted another of Gen. Gerhardt's inventions, the division motto, ``29, let's go!''
Earlier in the day, the veterans returned to several small towns where friends were killed during the battle for the Normandy hedgerows. In Le Carrefour, little more than a crossroads between fertile Norman fields, they dedicated a monument to the 31 men who were killed and 72 wounded on June 9 and 10, 1944.
Then, battle-weary American soldiers were slaughtered as they slept in an open field. A German division had stumbled onto their position and poured machine-gun and artillery fire on the Americans.
After the ceremony, some of the men who fought there wandered into that field for the first time in 50 years. One veteran found a .30-caliber armor-piercing rifle round in one of the hedgerows. It most likely had been dropped by a panicked GI five decades ago.
A young man trying to retrace his father's steps was approached by a French couple. They drove him and his mother to the spot where his father had been wounded and taken prisoner. Then the couple invited the two Americans to their home.
As they have since the men arrived in Normandy, the French were showing their appreciation.
``They treated me like family,'' said Mary Kalmeta Rusnak of Chicago. Her husband, Tony, had survived the stalags - the German prisoner camps - and returned to the United States, where he died of cancer in 1983. Now their son, Ron, was on a pilgrimage to learn more about his father's war experiences, using his diary and the memories of his fellow soldiers.
The French couple, Francoise and Bernard Loscul, were also on a mission. They held an aging letter from a GI who during the war had been hidden in Francoise's family farmhouse for several weeks. The GI had written a few times, then stopped. The Losculs wondered whether anyone in the 29th Division knew a soldier from Christianburg, Va., named Norman Knowles.
Francoise Loscul carried an album filled with pictures of this GI, and showed it to the Virginians she met at the ceremony.
Also showing some old documents was a 70-year-old woman who spoke no English but came from Paris to Normandy on Sunday to meet the D-Day vets.
As a teenager, Denise Marie Guersing had been a member of the French Resistance, running information from Paris to the patriots fighting the Germans.
When William N. ``Buck'' Williamson of Norfolk gave her a distinctive blue-and-gray 29th Division patch, she pulled out her most treasured possessions. They were three yellowed cards: World War II identity papers issued by the Germans, papers from the collaborating French government and her Resistance ID. The last would have meant certain execution had it been discovered during the occupation.
She had never been arrested, she said through an interpreter.
Her parents were with the Red Cross and she borrowed their insignia to cross the German lines. Once, when her bicycle broke down, she summoned the courage to get a German soldier to help her fix it.
``In my bra,'' she said, laughing at her gall, ``was the secret information.''
Later, after the liberation, she discovered a German man who seemed to be lost. She invited him to her home, where she fed him and then turned him over to the French police. She won a medal - proudly displayed on her blouse Sunday afternoon - for apprehending a German spy.
As the Americans tried to leave Carrefour for the tour buses that would take them to yet another ceremony, a French family came running out of their home, carrying bottles of homemade apple cider and begging people to join them in a toast to their liberators.
As they shouted ``Long live America,'' the Americans replied ``Vive la France.''
{KEYWORDS} D-DAY NORMANDY WORLD WAR II
by CNB