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See the battle through the eyes of those who fought there.
'The Great Crusade'
The Roanoke Times
June 5, 1994
D-Day was just another of the more than 60 missions bomber pilot Al Buckley flew
BY D-DAY, Al Buckley had been piloting missions in his B-26 Martin Marauder bomber over the Europe for more than a year.
Buckley, a retired president of Roanoke Gas Co., entered the Army Air Corps at age 21. He trained in Texas, Oklahoma and Illinois before returning to his native Louisiana, where he was assigned to B-26s.
Buckley arrived in England in May 1943. His group was put to work bombing targets in France, Holland and Belgium. The B-26, which had a short range, would sometimes bomb Nazi airbases to help clear the way for the bigger B-17 and B-24 bombers on missions into Germany.
Although he was supposed to fly 25 missions and go home, the Air Corps kept raising the number. By D-Day, Buckley had flown 60 missions.
Buckley flew over the invasion fleet but isn't sure he flew on D-Day. He has copies of his unit's old records that show he flew to France on June 7, the invasion's second day.
"It was unbelievable, the number of ships of varying sizes I saw out there on the water," Buckley said. He recalls seeing what looked like "some big barns" floating on the channel. These probably were the concrete artificial harbors that were being towed to the coast to aid in landing the invasion armies.
On the bombing mission to Normandy, the B-26s flew lower than usual. A bomber in front of his plane dropped a bomb and it exploded. "I could see pieces of box cars flying around in the air."
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."
'It was mass confusion,' and signalman John Will Creasy had to make sense of from ship to shore
JOHN WILL CREASY of Roanoke spent the month leading up to D-Day in an English port aboard the USS Ancon, watching and "quaking" as the German Luftwaffe bombed the port nightly.
On D-Day, the Ancon was anchored roughly 12 miles off Omaha Beach. Creasy, a 21-year-old Army sergeant in charge of a message center for the 5230 Signal Radio Intelligence Company, was one of those responsible for receiving, unscrambling and relaying messages from troops to the ship's command center. Others in the company were to intercept and break the codes of German communications on shore.
Creasy watched as the assault troops moved by the ship in their landing craft and hours later as the craft brought the wounded back. The sky overhead was polka-dotted with Allied airplanes headed for France.
"It was mass confusion," Creasy said. Troops on the beach were yelling for more fire power and artillery support because they were pinned down.
The situation was complicated because the landing troops lost many of their radios in the water. "I and my cohorts had to work with minimal information," Creasy said.
Duty was mind bending for pair from Vinton and Salem aboard LST
"YOU LOOKED LIKE you could walk from one ship to the other," Jim Gladden of Salem says of the armada of nearly 5,000 ships that took Allied troops from Britain to the French coast on D-Day.
Gladden was aboard a Landing Ship Tank (LST), a 330-foot long craft with two large doors in its bow for discharging cargo onto a beach or into the sea. Gladden's D-Day job was damage control, and he was stationed in the ship's steering engine room. Clifton Scott of Vinton was on a gun crew on the same LST.
On deck, Scott thought "the world's coming to an end." The Germans fired machine guns and artillery at the ship but made no hits.
After the LST delivered tanks and armored cars to Juno Beach at 8 a.m., Gladden's job was to move through the tank deck and fold down hundreds of beds that were attached to the hull. A surgical unit was aboard to care for the wounded who would soon fill the beds.
The injured included British, Canadian and German soldiers. Gladden remembers the shocked reaction of one German when he was told the pharmacist's mate who was tending him was Jewish.
Gladden feared he'd lose his mind from the things he saw.
"I really did some serious praying about this," Gladden said.
Later, when Sgt. Slaughter looked, he realized the holes in his coat were made by machine gun bullets
FROM THE DECK of the British troop ship Empire Javelin, the coastline of Normandy "looked like a brilliant sunrise" early on D-Day morning, Bob Slaughter of Roanoke County recalls.
Slaughter was a 19-year-old sergeant in D Company of the 29th Infantry Division's 116th Regimental Combat Team. He was a member of a 30-man boat team that landed on the Easy Green sector of Omaha Beach 40 minutes behind the first assault wave.
On the ride in, even the roar of the landing craft's diesel engine failed to muffle the heavy Navy guns bombarding the beach. The soldiers could see the 2,000-pound artillery rounds fired by the battleship Texas tumbling to their targets on land.
As the steel ramp to his landing craft was lowered, Slaughter jumped into chest-deep water that was turning red from the blood of those who had landed before. The rattle of machine guns and explosions from naval artillery surrounded him. "There were dead men in the water and live men acting dead.
"Screams for help came from men hit and drowning under ponderous loads."
Forced from the water by machine gun fire and exploding mortar shells, Slaughter crouched to make his 6-foot-5 body less of a target and ran for a seawall 100 yards away.
At the wall he removed his heavy assault jacket and spread out his raincoat to make a place to clean his sand-clogged rifle. He found bullet holes in the jacket and the coat.
Slaughter and the men with him stayed at the wall long enough to compose themselves and then made their way to the base of the bluff overlooking the beach, out of the way of small arms fire. Col. Charlie Caham, commander of the 116th, found the men there. Canham, wounded in his right arm, held a Colt .45 in his left hand and shouted orders to get the men off the beach.
"Later that afternoon, we still hadn't gotten farther than the top of the hill."
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Copyright 2002