“It extends in a thin little line, just like a high-water mark, for miles along the beach...Here in a jumbled row for mile on mile are soldiers’ packs. Here are socks and shoe polish, sewing kits, diaries, Bibles and hand grenades. Here are the latest letters from home. . . . Here are toothbrushes and razors, and snapshots of families back home staring up at you from the sand. Here are pocketbooks, metal mirrors, extra trousers and bloody, abandoned shoes...I picked up a pocket Bible with a soldier’s name in it, and put it in my jacket. I carried it half a mile or so and then put it back down on the beach. I don’t know why I picked it up, or why I put it back down.
*
"As I plowed out over the wet sand of the beach. I walked around what seemed to be a couple of pieces of driftwood sticking out of the sand. But they weren’t driftwood. They were a soldier’s two feet. He was completely covered by the shifting sands except for his feet. The toes of his G.I. shoes pointed toward the land he had come so far to see, and which he saw so briefly."
~ Ernie Pyle, A dispatch from Normandy, June 17, 1944.
75 Years Ago Today, Courage and Horror Washed Over Normandy's Beaches
At 8 am on Monday, July 17, 1944, Elizabeth Teass turned on the Western Union teletype machine in her tiny office at the back of Green’s Drug Store in Bedford, Virginia. Bedford was a small town of 3200 people; Company A of the 116th Infantry, 29th Division included 32 soldiers who called Bedford home. Residents of the town had been on tenterhooks since the D-Day invasion on June 6th, since it was known that Company A had been one of the first forces to land on Omaha Beach. A few people had received news of loved ones’ deaths in letters sent home but as of mid-July, no one had received any official word from the Army about the soldiers of Company A.
That changed on July 17th. When Teass turned on the teletype it clattered to life with the message, ‘Good morning. Go ahead. Roanoke. We have casualties.’ Then, ‘The Secretary of War desires me to express his deep regret that your son ….’
Teass does not remember the order of the names of the men who were killed, nor does she remember the exact number of telegrams that were received that day. (A present day newspaper report says nine.) In all, 19 soldiers from Bedford were killed on June 6th; an additional 3 died in the following days, making the town famous as the one that suffered the largest loss of life, per capita, of any American community during the invasion.
As the telegrams poured in, Teass’s anxiety mounted. She wanted to get the messages to families and loved ones before they heard the news ‘through the grapevine,’ which in a small town like Bedford was likely to happen. She went into the drugstore and in addition to the owner, Mr. Green, found the local undertaker and doctor; she pressed all three of them into service. Elizabeth made a list of everyone she knew who had a truck or car and might be willing to drive out into the country (remember at the time, gas was strictly rationed). In the end, Roy Israel ended up being the hero of the day. A former cowboy from Texas, Israel had a Cadillac and used it as a one-car taxi business. He took the telegrams from Elizabeth and delivered them throughout the county, often sitting with the family until they had begun to be able to absorb the bad news.
Read more here.
It was the invasion to save civilization, and LIFE’s Robert Capa was there, the only still photographer to wade with the 34,250 troops onto Omaha Beach during the D-Day landing. His photographs—infused with jarring movement from the center of that brutal assault—gave the public an American soldier’s view of the dangers of war. The soldier in this case was Private First Class Huston Riley, who after the Nazis shelled his landing craft jumped into water so deep that he had to walk along the bottom until he could hold his breath no more. When he activated his Navy M-26 belt life preservers and floated to the surface, Riley became a target for the guns and artillery shells mowing down his comrades. Struck several times, the 22-year-old soldier took about half an hour to reach the Normandy shore.
TIME
To record the moment, Capa stood deep into the frigid water himself, turning his back to the exploding German artillery. Of the three rolls he shot over the course of an hour, while those around him died, only 11 photos survive. The rest were lost in a processing error.
Woodson was wounded, hit by burning shrapnel that raked his landing craft and ripped open his buttocks and thigh. The soldier next to him was killed. A medic slapped dressings on Woodson’s wounds, and they, along with three other medics in their crew, crept up the beach while crouched behind a tank. They were the first African-Americans to set their boots on Omaha Beach.
For the next 30 hours, Woodson would survive German snipers and his own searing pain to save scores of lives. Decades later, Woodson would learn that he had been nominated for the Medal of Honor.
TIME
He did not receive it.
Waverly Woodson died in 2005 but his widow, Joann Woodson, who turned 90 on May 26, has made it her mission to see that her husband’s heroism is acknowledged. “I will fight for him as long as I live,” Woodson said from her home in Clarksburg, outside Washington, D.C.
ON OMAHA BEACH, France (AP) — All at once, Charles Shay tried to stanch the bleeding from a ripped-open stomach, dull the pain with morphine and soothe the mind of a dying fellow American army medic. It was a tall order for a 19-year-old who had just set foot on the European mainland for the first time.
But nothing could have prepared him for what happened on June 6, 1944, on five cold, forbidding beaches in northern France. It was D-Day, one of the most significant 24-hour periods of the 20th century, the horrifying tipping point in World War II that defined the future of Europe.
That morning, Shay could not yet fathom what the event would ultimately mean. He was more concerned with the bleeding soldiers, body parts and corpses strewn around him, and the machine-gun fire and shells that filled the air.
“You have to realize my vision of the beach was very small. I could only experience what I could see,” he told The Associated Press, speaking from the now-glimmering Omaha Beach, where he landed 75 years ago.
AP
He was 14 years old.