Yakima Herald Republic
Sunday, June 5, 1994
Section: News; Page: 1A

Fifty years ago the largest seaborne assault force in history embarked on a risky World War II mission that will forever be known as the D-Day Invasion. The goal: Liberate Europe from the grip of Adolf Hitler and his Nazi forces.

Some 176,000 troops, mostly American Canadian and British, left the relative safety of the more than 2,500 ships amassed off the coast of Normandy on the morning of June 6, 1944, and headed ashore - straight into a hail of enemy bullets and artillery fire. Another 22,000 paratroopers were dropped inland the night before.

Thousands would never see home again.

The invasion and ensuing victory were considered the turning pint of World War II in Europe. Germany surrendered 11 months later. Not until that front was secured could the Allies turn their full weight to the war against Japan and the rest of the global hostilities.

Five Yakima Valley residents who participated in D-Day were young, homesick and scared. They saw many friends die. They would never forget the battle.

By WYLIE WONG
of the Herald-Republic

As the DC-3 soared hundreds of feet above the northern French coast, two dozen paratroopers tensed. Despite not sleeping much the night before, they were wide awake now.

For two years, Pvt. Glenn Moe of the U.S. Army 1st Airborne trained for this moment.

It came at 1 a.m. On June 6, 1944. D-Day. Time to drive the Nazis out.

He said a silent prayer and jumped.

It was windy and cold. Everything was quiet and dark except for flashes of German gunfire below.

Some paratroopers to Moe's left and right ere hit as they drifted toward the ground. They yelped in pain.

As Moe continued to fall, he had a frightening thought: A land mine to destroy German tanks was strapped to his leg. If a bullet hit the mine, it would explode.

"I thought I was going to get clobbered," said Moe, now a 78-year-old Toppenish resident.

Less than a minute after his leap, the 28-year-old Montana native landed softly in a 4-foot-deep swamp.

A strong breeze kicked up and carried him - and the parachute - across the swamp on his back.

"It took me like a motorboat," Moe said. "Each time I reached to collapse the 'chute, I pulled my head underwater and I'd let her go again."

Finally, Moe felt some bushes behind him. He grabbed them, and, using only his arms, uprighted himself in the water.

"It felt like half a lifetime," he said. "But it was only 10 seconds."

Immediately, Moe whipped out a knife from his boots and hacked off the parachute - and to ease his mind, the land mine, too.

Still wearing a helmet and a 60-pound backpack, he checked one of his side pockets: His cigarettes and matches had gotten wet. He pulled out the two pieces of his rifle, snapped them together and poured out the water. Falling in a swamp was not part of the invasion plans, Moe thought.

The night before in England, Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower, the Supreme Allied Commander, had given the paratroopers a pep talk. Eisenhower said they were going to land in flat open fields.

"Of course, by the time we got there, they turned into swamps," Moe said.

About 18,000 paratroopers from the 82nd and 101st Airborne had dropped from the sky. Unfortunately, many of the planes were under German fire and scattered the men around the countryside instead of dropping them where they could quickly reform into larger groups.

Moe didn't know where he was at the time, but he had landed about a mile inland from Utah Beach, near Sainte-Mere-Eglise. Moe's unit members were supposed to regroup and station themselves near a causeway. That way, they could catch German troops as they retreated from the beachhead.

He heard three guys splashing in the water. He pulled out a "cricket," a hand-held device that when pressed made a clicking noise. It was used so U.S. Soldiers could recognize each other in the dark.

The soldier closest to him wasn't responding, though. The man was splashing around, gurgling and breathing heavily.

"I got nervous, so I pulled my rifle around and said, 'If you're a GI, you better say something or else I'm cutting loose."

"Don't you shoot," the man said.

"You better pay attention to the clicker or somebody's going to shoot you," Moe replied.

The man, who was about 20 years old, tried to explain: His wife had just given him a new watch for Christmas and he lost it when he fell in the swamp.

The four paratroopers then huddled together and climbed out of the swamp, leaving the watch behind.

Their goal was to find the causeway.

"We were supposed to look for certain landmarks, a group of trees (to find the causeway,)' Moe said. "But we were not sure where we were and where the rest of the guys were."

Still dripping wet, the four trudged through the French countryside, reuniting with three other paratroopers.

Just before dawn, while walking down a paved road, they heard Germans marching toward them, so the paratroopers hid in nearby bushes.

"Some of the Germans were snatching horses, jeeps and bicycles (from the French)," Moe said. "They sounded like a herd of tin cans coming down the road."

The paratroopers gripped their rifles tightly as the Germans moved closer. Suddenly, half the Germans disappeared from view. They fell into a huge bomb crater in the middle of the road.

In the confusion, the paratroopers fired.

"We killed them off," Moe said. "They were kind of at a disadvantage after half of them went head over heels into the crater and the others on the road wondering what happened to them."

AT DAWN, THE FIRST waves of the main invasion forces hit the beaches of Normandy. More than 176,000 Allied soldiers assaulted the 50-mile stretch of coastline. The British 2nd Army invaded the eastern beaches, code-named Gold, Juno and Sword. The U.S. 1St Army attacked the western beaches, code-named Utah and Omaha.

Wapato resident Clyde Stimpson sat by himself in the dark as he and dozens of men waited for the landing craft to reach Omaha Beach. They were silent and somber.

"Everyone knew they might get killed," said Stimpson, who was drafted while attending Idaho State University. "I was just trying to put what was coming out of my mind."

His unit, the 197th Anti-Aircraft Battalion, was assigned to accompany the Army's 1st Infantry Division, headed by Gen. Omar Bradley. The battalion was in charge of destroying low flying German aircraft as the 1st Infantry invaded.

Sgt. Stimpson, then 22, was in charge of two-way radio communications.

The landing craft's ramp lowered 200 feet from the beach. The first jeep rumbled own the ramp and sank in 10 feet of water. The battalion's commanding officer and his driver abandoned the jeep and swam to shore.

The second jeep and its crew also plunked into water too deep.

Stimpson's half-track - with a 37 mm gun and two other crew members - was next. "We went down the ramp, and this being a larger vehicle, the water came to our necks," he said.

The engine coughed, but struggled on.

Stimpson looked around. It was a blustery, overcast morning. Nearby, a battleship thumped the beach and hillside with artillery fire, knocking ut German pillboxes filled with machine guns.

"There were so many crafts, you could hardly see the water," he said.

The driver of the landing craft saw the trouble the vehicles were in, so he raised the ramp and came another 100 feet closer into shallower water.

German artillery fired and destroyed the craft. The remaining 30 crew members, half-tracks and jeeps perished along with it.

To Stimpson's right, a half-track with a five-man crew also was hit.

"One guy's head came right off," he said.

When his half-track reached the beach, Stimpson and his other crew members jumped off and ducked behind it.

As the Germans sprayed a steady barrage of bullets, Stimpson and his crew members dug away at the rocks and pebbles, making a six-inch depression on the ground.

They laid there and waited. Mortars rocked the earth, 20 feet away from them.

The soldiers tried to storm the beach but were stymied.

Standing in their way were land mines, barbed wire and steel barriers designed to tip tanks over. The U.S. Solders also confronted the German 352nd Infantry Division, considered the best unit he Allied troops faced at any beach.

"The Germans had so much control of that beach, it was difficult to get anybody in," Stimpson said. "The beach was clogged with Allied troops. Nothing could move.

"You could almost take a couple of strides and touch a body," he said. He stayed where he was.

"There was nothing we could do," he said. "We were supposed to hit enemy aircraft, but none came all day."

More than 2,000 men died on Omaha Beach during the first day. The situation was so bad that Gen. Omar Bradley had considered withdrawing the troops before receiving reports in the afternoon of a breakthrough.

GLEED RESIDENT PETE BACHMEIER was nearly killed by a German 88mm artillery shell during the invasion.

At 7 a.m., Cpl. Bachmeier's landing craft swept toward Omaha Beach as part of the second wave of the invasion. As the barge inched closer, German artillery struck its left side, causing a fiery explosion.

Bachmeier, an Army radio technician, climbed up the stairs to the deck and raced toward the boat's right side, where men were jumping overboard.

"Guys down below were going crazy and wanted to get off that sucker," he recalled.

Before taking the leap, he pressed the button that inflated his life jacket. It was already inflated.

The life preserver tightened around his waist and "nearly tore me in half," he said.

A man next to him was on fire, but Bachmeier ignored him.

"We had no time to help each other. We had to save our own lives."

Bachmeier jumped overboard.

As he splashed into the water, he dropped his .3-caliber rifle and his radio - the size of a 12-inch television.

Then he screamed out: "I can't swim!"

The man in the water next to him replied: "Just lay on your back and paddle like a dog."

He let go of a 60-pound pack filled with food and toothbrushes and backstroked to shore for half an hour. German bullets zinged and whizzed by as he crawled along the sandy beach, finally resting behind a 4-foot retaining wall.

He made it, but some of his boat mates didn't.

His job was to set up radios on the beach so U.S. Warships could communicate with troops on shore. But without a radio or a gun, he hid behind the wall for most of the morning. He stood shoulder to shoulder with other U.S. Troops.

"I kept wondering if we were all coming out alive," said Bachmeier, who was then 23 and a North Dakota farmer before the war.

When the boat he was on coasted to shore, he saw a fellow radioman wrapped around the boat's propeller, his body badly scorched. He watched in horror as other boats hit mines and exploded.

He also saw Allied infantry head toward the Germans, who were entrenched in fortifications on the hillside.

One time, a U.S. Tank pulled up next to Bachmeier.

"I hollered, 'Get the hell out of here.' I was afraid the Germans would hit them and kill us all."

At 7 a.m., MOE AND 40 OTHER paratroopers found the landmarks they sought: Some 50-foot-tall trees were in the distance and they walked toward them.

When they reached the trees, they found the causeway they were looking for.

They dug foxholes and waited. During the rest of the day, eight groups of German soldiers were ambushed.

"When they got within 100 yards, we opened fire," Moe said.

In the massive armada offshore, Yakima resident Martin Waarvick's job in the Navy on D-Day was to crew a landing craft to ferry tanks and soldiers ashore to Omaha Beach.

At 1:30 p.m., as his landing craft reached shore, Waarvick revved up a small engine and pulled a lever to lower the ramp. One infantryman after another streamed out.

"I told them, 'Good luck and go get 'em,'" he said.

But the last two men were too afraid to go out. They stayed on the ramp as the landing craft started moving away from shore.

"The skipper hollered, 'Waarvick, shove those two off,' I pushed them and said, 'Sorry you guys got to get off.'"

That night, the landing craft anchored off shore.

"I was able to sleep, but I was thinking about those poor guys sleeping in the foxholes all night," said Waarvick, then a 20-year-old who was a welder in Everett before joining the Navy.

By dusk, the U.S. Troops finally broke through and secured the Omaha beachead.

Bachmeier emerged from the retaining wall and helped carry the dead off the beach.

"You looked at the faces," he said. "I took a revolver from one guy 'cause I didn't have a gun."

During the evening, Bachmeier guided landing crafts onto shore, using Morse code with flashlights to help them elude mines. He later slept in the foxholes up on the hill, where Germans had once been holed up.

Down the beach, Stimpson and his two crew members hopped onto their halftrack and followed the 1st Infantry about a mile inland.

They camped out there that night, dug foxholes to sleep in and ate K rations.

No German aircraft had flown over Omaha Beach during the day. But during the evening, he heard a German plane flying overhead.

"Our engines sound faster," he said.

Again, Stimpson ducked for cover. But the German plane dropped pamphlets, not bombs.

The leaflets said: "Hitler will push the Allies back into the ocean. You will either b dead or back in the Channel."

"It was a psychological move. It did scare you," Stimpson said.

The next morning, Stimpson walked past captured German soldiers who were locked up in a barbed-wire stockade near the beach.

The Germans stared at the thousands of U.S. Ships in the English Channel, shook their heads and said, "Hitler told us you people had no ships."

SIX DAYS AFTER D-DAY, MOE still didn't know who was winning. Most of the time he waited around for orders, usually ending up at a road junction to help fight retreating Germans.

The French countryside was filled with hedgerows, which made for excellent cover. And both sides hid behind them.

"You see a puff of smoke and start shooting at the hedge there," Moe said. "You don't know what you're hitting."

Moe said there was mass confusion. It had taken two or three days before all the paratroopers were reunited with their original units.

They slept whenever they could.

"We were so damn tired, we just fell on a ditch and slept."

He had also smoked all his cigarettes.

On the sixth day, his unit was ordered to take over Carentan, a small town southeast of Sainte-Mere-Eglise.

At dusk, Moe's unit camped out on a causeway outside Carentan. His commanding officers decided reinforcements were needed before attacking.

Suddenly, a drab, gray German plane appeared overhead and the troops tried to scatter. Frantically, Moe dug a foxhole on the paved road's dirt shoulder.

The plane strafed the middle of the roadway.

"A lot of guys jumped into the water," Moe said. "Bullets hit the ground and bounced back up."

With his heart racing, he jammed into the small foxhole, face first.

"My left arm was above ground. Some kind of shrapnel hit my arm. I thought it was gravel. It stuck like a piece of rock hit you."

Seconds later, the plane zoomed past, Moe lifted his head and saw the plane turn around for another run. Luckily, Allied troops shot it down first.

Moe jumped out of the foxhole and looked around: About 40 men were killed or injured.

Nearby, his 19-year-old friend, Harry, was hit and bleeding. A bullet had torn through his thigh.

"I never thought much about religion until now," Harry said.

Moe lifted Harry off the ground and put his arm around his waist. They limped 150 yards to the first-aid station.

After helping a third injured soldier walk to the aid station, the medic saw blood trickling down Moe's arm.

The medic told him: "You've got enough of a wound to get out of here."

D-Day for Moe was over. And he felt lucky to be alive.

"You looked out for your skin," he said. "You didn't volunteer for excess heroism."

FOR YAKIMA RESIDENT TED ADLER, his D-Day was just beginning.

He and 87 others in his unit - the Army's 2465th Quartermaster attached to headquarters - arrived six days after the main invasion forces to help bury the dead.

Half a mile away from Omaha Beach, the Navy barge door cracked open and a groggy Adler emerged, wading in chest-high water to reach the shore.

"I'm short and fat and had a hell of a time," Adler said. "I was so damn seasick. I did a lot of vomiting."

On the day of the invasion, Pvt. Adler was moving from southern England, toward the English Channel. Crowds gathered along the roadsides, waving Adler and the U.S. Troops goodbye.

The then 21-year-old had originally signed up as an Air Force air gunner but didn't qualify because he had air and seasickness. So he became an Army truck driver and mechanic.

Adler, an upholsterer before being drafted, was homesick during World War II.

"Every hour was like a day and every day was like a month," he said.

He prayed often for the war to end, so he could go home to his wife, whom he married just days before he was drafted.

"I thought about her every minute," he said. "My sergeant used to say I prayed with my Rosary so much that I had to dip it into a canteen to cool it off."

When he reached the beachead, Adler was amazed by what he saw.

He saw what remained of the pillboxes, the barbed wire, the obstacles sticking up from the ground.

"These poor son of guns that went in. I feel sorry for them," he said. "Nobody can believe what a sacrifice it was."

Allied troops picked through the bodies, sorting them out according to nationality.

The dead U.S. soldiers were wrapped in canvas bags, with their dog tags hung on the outside. He stacked his truck with 20 bodies each time, carrying them from the beach area to the cemetery in Sainte-Mere-Eglise.

"It was just a mess," he said. "No one in the world realized how many died. There were 22,000 Allied soldiers killed in the first three days."

REFLECTING ON D-DAY 50 YEARS LATER, the five Yakima Valley residents said They were proud to have served in the invasion.

"It was the start of the retaking of Europe," Waarvick said. "It was the most critical battle of the war."

Stimpson had similar sentiments.

"I'm glad we did it and got (Hitler) stopped," he said. "We had a fanatic who tried to take down everybody."

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