Sixty-five years ago today, 160,000 allied troops landed on the beaches of Normandy to reclaim Europe from the horrors of fascism. 35,000 of these troops landed on Omaha Beach, and almost 5000 of them died there that day. The American forces on Omaha Beach were from the 1st and 29th Divisions. The 1st Division had seen more combat than any other in the American army--- it has been said that war is months of boredom punctuated by seconds of terror, but for the soldiers of the Big Red One the seconds were months of terror-they spent a total of 442 days in intense direct combat, more than any other Division in WWII- invading north Africa to battle with the forces of Rommel, invading Sicily, taking part in the invasion of Normandy, the subsequent break-out, and the Battle of the Bulge, fighting there way through Germany and into Czechoslovakia in a race to liberate the death camps.
On Omaha Beach on June 6, 1944 the 1st Division suffered 30% casualties in the first hour as they were pinned down on the beach by murderous fire from the sheer cliffs in front of them. At one point, Col. George Taylor, commander of the 16th Infantry Regt., famously told his men trapped on the beach, "Two kinds of people are staying on this beach! The dead and those who are going to die! Now, let's get the hell out of here!".
(part put below the fold by me. I also embedded the Emmylou Harris video-JD)
H Company of the 2nd Battalion, 18th Infantry Regiment was led on D-Day onto Omaha Beach by Robert Murphy of Manchester, who for many years served as a Democratic state representative while serving as clerk of the Hillsborough Superior Court (which he ran with as much grace and authority as he showed on D-Day). One of the soldiers under him that day was my father, Joe Twomey, the son of Irish speaking immigrants who themselves had been born to survivors of the Famine. He received a Bronze Star for something he did on Omaha Beach-- growing up I never knew exactly what because, while he would occasionally talk about such things as being the only survivor of his platoon in a disastrous battle with Rommel at the Kasserine Pass in Tunisia, and how he went AWOL from a hospital in Paris in order to avoid being shipped home and then hitchhiked back to the front to re-join his unit in time for the Battle of the Bulge, he would never ever say a single word about what happened on Omaha Beach. After he died, one of his cousins told me that Joe had been the fourth volunteer to attack a machine gun position that had pinned down and was slaughtering the men of his company. The first three volunteers had been cut into pieces. For the rest of his life he suffered from severe PTSD, spending almost two decades as a homeless vet self-medicating with whiskey until the VA began to offer medical treatment for PTSD in the latter years of Vietnam. He was a very quiet man and his only friends were other disabled vets.
And so on June 6th, lets take a minute to think of what Bob Murphy, Joe Twomey and their brothers gave on the beaches of Normandy, what Arthur Buckley sacrificed on the frozen wastes of Korea, what many of our dear friends lost in the jungles of Vietnam, and what some continue to give each day in Iraq and Afganistan.
Emmy Lou Harris wrote a song about her father's service in World War II---
