D-Day behind the scenes
By
JAY CONLEY
The Roanoke Times
May
20, 2001
As they struggle
with the grim memories of D-Day, they haul out the
old photographs: a black soldier in his Army field
jacket, a white nurse in a khaki suit, a black
sailor in Navy dress blues. Then the tales begin to
unfold.
But because of
their race or sex, those stories -- unlike those of
other American servicemen in World War II -- aren't
told often.
Fifty-seven years
ago, they played important behind-the-scenes roles
in the June 6, 1944, invasion of Europe. But for
decades, they shelved those memories.
Edward Farley, 76,
of Petersburg, landed on Omaha Beach on June 7 as
part of a 200-man, all-black amphibious truck
company that supplied ammunition, food and fuel to
advancing forces. He will be one of the few black
soldiers to attend the dedication ceremony June 6
at the National D-Day Memorial in Bedford. Farley
is scheduled to be one of the speakers.
As a flight nurse,
Huddleston resident Evelyn Kowalchuk, now 81, flew
over the English Channel repeatedly in the days
after the invasion. She and others evacuated
wounded soldiers to England. Kowalchuk will be one
of the few flight nurses present at the dedication.
She's also scheduled to speak.
Henderson Randolph,
76, from Pulaski, won't be at the ceremony. He's
concerned that it will be too hot that day and that
it may affect his heart condition.
As a Navy sailor
aboard a destroyer in the English Channel in the
early morning hours of D-Day, Randolph's ship
bombarded German defenses along the French coast in
advance of the invasion. He was one of eight black
sailors on a ship with 250 whites.
Combat in World War
II forced black and white soldiers to fight side by
side. That de facto desegregation, launched in the
heat of horror-filled battles, would presage the
civil rights struggles that were to come at home in
future years.
Edward Farley
Edward Farley was a
19-year-old staff sergeant with the 463rd
Amphibious Truck Company. The company trained
separately from white troops in Pennsylvania,
Louisiana and South Carolina before being stationed
in segregated camps in England. Occasionally, black
troops and white troops brawled, Farley
recalled.
That changed after
D-Day.
"When we landed in
France, we all had a job to do and we did it,"
Farley said.
Omaha Beach was
still under enemy fire when Farley's platoon of
amphibious cargo boats landed June 7 near St.
Laurent-sur-Mer. Bodies of soldiers lay floating in
the water; German machine gun fire cut down others
on the beach.
Farley's voice
choked as he recalled that day.
"It's very
emotional for me," he said. "We had to just go by
them. We had our own job to do."
The invasion forces
secured the beach June 8, and Farley organized his
50-man platoon. In the days to come, troops
collected and buried those hundreds of floating
bodies in huge sand pits dug by Army bulldozers. It
wasn't until the Germans retreated that those
servicemen received proper burials.
Two men from
Farley's platoon died while unloading cargo from
the supply ships. One man disappeared. His body
later washed up on shore after a storm. Another
soldier who couldn't swim drowned after his
amphibious "duck" vehicle began to sink.
The soldiers "died
for a noble cause and for the freedom to always
be," Farley wrote in a poem years later. Yet the
blacks who survived, the poem continues, "could not
go home and, in certain places, buy a cup of
tea."
Although Farley
spent most of his wartime in French seaports
unloading ships, he understood firsthand the
dangers of war.
In December 1944,
he volunteered to deliver machine guns to the front
lines in Belgium. He unknowingly drove into the
bloodiest battle of the European theater, the
Battle of the Bulge.
"I didn't know I
was going to the Bulge," Farley recalled. "That was
the closest I ever got" to combat, Farley said,
"and I knew I didn't want to be there."
The
casualty-reduced American forces looked to black
support soldiers to volunteer for combat. That
effectively integrated the Army and blazed the
path, years later, for desegregation struggles in
many other areas of American life.
Three soldiers from
Farley's company volunteered for the front lines.
"I never saw them again," he said
somberly.
When the war ended
in Europe, Farley celebrated in Paris for four days
with other men from his company. He said there was
no color barrier among the French
people.
"They were so
grateful," Farley said. "They would have given us
anything."
After his discharge
in 1945, Farley returned to Petersburg. He became a
high school teacher and tried to put the war behind
him. He wouldn't speak of it. It would be nearly 50
years before Farley would make contact with members
from his company.
Farley has a cap
embroidered with the words "Omaha Beach: June 7,
1944" on it. He hesitates to wear it in public
places now because veterans and relatives of
veterans approach him to discuss the
war.
"It's too hard,"
Farley said.
But the D-Day
Memorial's construction in Bedford, and the
sobering idea that 1,000 World War II veterans are
dying daily from old age, has prompted him to open
up about black soldiers' contributions.
Henderson
Randolph
Drafted as a
19-year old Navy steward's mate on the destroyer
USS Finch, Henderson Randolph's job was to clean a
white officer's cabin.
"That was all we
could do at the time," Randolph said of black
sailors.
During combat,
however, he saw plenty of action. He fed ammo to
gunners on one of the ship's 14-inch guns. From
2:30 a.m. to 6 p.m. on D-Day, the Finch fired
continually on the German defenses at
Normandy.
"There were 50
battleships firing at the same time," Randolph
recalled. "The noise . . . would bust your ear
drums." Periodically, sailors would come up from
below deck to get some air. But nobody stayed
topside for long.
"As far as you
could see, there was smoke, and the sea was red
with blood," Randolph recalls.
Randolph's ship
escaped enemy fire, but ships around him didn't.
One of them was a cargo ship whose contents spilled
out into the ocean.
"Oranges and orange
crates were everywhere," Randolph said.
The Finch patrolled
the area for another month, protecting convoys of
ships and looking for mines.
"We shot at
everything that floated," Randolph said.
From Normandy, the
Finch went to Italy and North Africa, then returned
to Norfolk, where it was refitted as a mine
sweeper. Then it sailed to the Pacific and Tokyo
Bay.
Along the way,
Randolph earned three battle stars.
He speaks proudly
of his Navy service and says he enjoyed sailing all
over the world. Being one of the few black sailors
on the ship wasn't a concern for him.
"I never had any
problem with the other sailors," Randolph
said.
He returned to
Pulaski following his discharge in 1945, but in
1947 moved to New York City to work as a clerk in
the main branch of the New York City Post
Office.
Randolph returned
to Pulaski frequently over the years, and moved
back there in 1983 following his
retirement.
Evelyn Kowalchuk
Evelyn Kowalchuk
was a second lieutenant in the Army Air Corps. As
one of 25 flight nurses in the 818th Medical Air
Evac Transport Squadron, she took off June 7 for
France in a C-47.
The huge transport
planes landed on makeshift runways carved out of
Normandy's grainy beaches. The propellers kept
turning; they blew sand everywhere. It covered the
faces and uniforms of wounded soldiers and stuck to
the doctors' eyelashes and eyebrows as they treated
them.
A single nurse was
assigned to each plane, which ferried supplies for
troops over the English Channel and returned with
wounded men. On each plane, there was room for 42
soldiers. Some had minor injuries. But many others
had recently amputated limbs, or were barely
alive.
"It was chaotic,
but not to the point where you couldn't make sense
of it," Kowalchuk said.
The wounded were
loaded on the planes as quickly as the cargo was
unloaded.
The planes had to
fly low on their return trip to England. Because
the cabins weren't pressurized, high altitudes
could be fatal to soldiers with chest
wounds.
Kowalchuk made as
many as three trips a day after the D-Day
invasion.
Moans of dying men
filled the airplane on those trips back. Some shook
with fear; others were shocked so senseless that
they didn't know where they were. For some, it was
their first flight ever. All of them were
scared.
"All we had to give
them was morphine," she said.
Once on the ground
in England, the men were transferred to hospitals.
Kowalchuk never learned what happened to them. She
never saw any of them again.
She doesn't like to
talk about that. The horrible wounds, spilled blood
and the soldiers' terrified faces took a toll on
the doctors and nurses, she said. "No matter how
much training you had, you weren't prepared to see
somebody shot."
Over the years,
she's come to realize that talking about it is
necessary to let people know what happened. "My son
is so proud of me because now I'm opening up,"
Kowalchuk said.
As the invasion
moved inland, Kowalchuk and the other nurses were
moved to air bases closer to the
fighting.
"We slept in
chateaux. We slept in foxholes. We dug our own
trenches," Kowalchuk said. "We got so close . . .
better than sisters."
After she returned
from the war, Kowalchuk took a job as a school
nurse in New Jersey. She got married, raised two
children and tried to forget about the war.
But she couldn't
forget about her fellow nurses. She began tracking
them down in 1973.
Then in 1974,
Kowalchuk hosted the first reunion of flight nurses
from her squadron. Although their ranks are
dwindling, they've been getting together every two
years since.
When Kowalchuk
hosts the next flight nurses' reunion in Bedford in
July, it may be the final one, she said. There are
11 nurses left, but only six are well enough to
make it.
She expects the
talk there will be of grandchildren, hobbies,
health, and their daily lives. Like past reunions,
it will focus on the present and not the
past.
On a weekly basis,
Kowalchuk helps a student learn to read at
Huddleston Elementary, sews children's sweaters
that are sent through a relief organization to
Third World countries, and volunteers at Carilion
Bedford Memorial Hospital. She's a regular
volunteer at the National D-Day Memorial
Foundation.
"We talk about what
we did yesterday and what we did last week but not
about the war. We talk about how much alike we are
and how much we've changed," Kowalchuk
said.
Why not
D-Day?
"It was a mean
war," she says simply.
Jay Conley can
be reached at 981-3114 or
jayc@roanoke.com
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