On D-Day, hundreds of Midlanders took part in Ike's grand gamble to save Europe (2024)

Editor's note: This story first ran in The World-Herald in 2014, on the 70th anniversary of the D-Day invasion.

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In the anxious final days before his giant gamble at Normandy, Gen. Dwight Eisenhower took great comfort in spending time with his troops.

On the eve of D-Day, Eisenhower visited the fellows at the 101st Airborne Division. Their job would be to parachute behind enemy lines in the dark of night. In small groups, they would seize roads, bridges and waterways so German forces couldn’t reinforce the soldiers defending the beach.

It was among the riskiest missions of a supremely risky invasion for the Allies.

Typically, Eisenhower liked upbeat chatter with the troops, about their homes and hobbies. Happy, morale-boosting stuff.

In the memory of Technician 4th Grade Chuck Davis of the 101st, though, Ike was unusually solemn that evening.

“We were all lined up. Eisenhower came down,” Davis, then 95, told The World-Herald in a 2014 interview. “One thing he did say was, ‘Be careful.’ ”

Eisenhower stayed the whole evening with the troops, until the last aircraft took off after midnight.

At that point, his driver Kay Summersby would later report, he turned to her with tears in his eyes.

“Well,” he told her, “it’s on.”

Seventy-seven years later, D-Day — June 6, 1944 — stands among the most storied, and important, battles in U.S. history. The fate of many nations depended on the ability of six divisions of American, British and Canadian troops to grab a toehold across 50 miles of fiercely defended French coastline.

It is the largest amphibious invasion ever staged.

The day began in terror, confusion and, for hundreds of troops, death before they even fired a shot at the enemy. The finely tuned plans developed over months quickly fell into shreds because of the whims of weather, currents, enemy resistance, Allied errors, and, in many cases, plain bad luck.

Yet the Allies won the day, mostly because of the pluck and ingenuity of small, often ad hoc, groups of soldiers who improvised plans when their tanks, trucks, heavy weapons and much of their gear were waterlogged and ruined in the tides of Normandy.

They include men like Tom Scarpello, a Navy crewman on a Higgins boat that ferried soldiers to Omaha Beach in the first hour of the invasion. (Scarpello, of Council Bluffs, died at the age of 101 in 2020.)

And Ed Morrissette, 96, of Papillion, a 1st Infantry Division corporal who leaped out of one of those boats into shoulder-deep water during the second hour, then crawled across the sand among the dead and wounded.

By the end of the day, the Allies had landed some 156,000 troops ashore — almost as large a force as the U.S. had stationed in all of Iraq at the peak of the Iraq War. They had come aboard some 6,900 ships and landing craft. More than 11,500 planes crossed the English Channel.

More than 4,400 Allied soldiers died, according to the National D-Day Memorial Foundation, including 2,499 Americans. Almost 8,000 Allied soldiers were wounded.

It’s not clear how many of those who fought on D-Day hailed from Nebraska and Iowa. Certainly it was in the hundreds, and very likely in the thousands, based on the states’ populations at the time.

Nor is it known how many Iowans and Nebraskans were killed. Thirty-five men who joined the military in the two states died that day and are buried in Europe, according to the American Battle Monuments Commission.

But that number — 28 Iowans and seven Nebraskans — is only a starting figure. Others were shipped home to stateside cemeteries. And some bodies were never recovered.

“I had a lot of friends who didn’t make it back,” Morrissette told The World-Herald. “And I miss them.”

Nebraska has long kept a special connection with D-Day because of Omaha Beach, code name of one of the five Allied landing sites. (The others were Utah, Gold, Sword and Juno.) There’s no solid answer in the historical record of how Omaha Beach got its name, though in 2008, World-Herald reporter Henry J. Cordes uncovered some intriguing links to an Omaha carpenter who served under Gen. Omar Bradley, commander of the First Army during the run-up to D-Day

Pfc. Carl Praeuner of Battle Creek, Nebraska, nearly died on D-Day after being shot in the leg on a hill above Omaha Beach. He recuperated for months in England and earned a medical discharge from the Army in April 1945.

For decades, he donned a uniform and fired a rifle during Memorial Day services and at military funerals in his hometown.

“I was proud to serve my country, and yet today I get a thrill when the flag passed by,” Praeuner wrote in a 2004 account of his wartime adventures. “The sounding of taps still sends chills up and down my spine.”

He died in May 2014, just shy of the 70th anniversary of the invasion.

Known to planners as Operation Overlord, the Normandy landings not only involved painstaking planning— consider just the buildup of some 2.8 million troops in southwest England, opposite the Normandy shoreline — but also deception on a massive scale.

The Allies wanted to surprise the Germans, even though the invasion was the most widely anticipated event of the war. They mounted Operation Fortitude, an elaborate deception to convince the enemy that the thrust would come someplace other than Normandy.

Staging fake aircraft in Scotland and broadcasting phony radio traffic created the illusion of standing up a phony British army to invade Norway. Similarly, Eisenhower placed Gen. George Patton in charge of an illusory Army based in Dover, England, where the English Channel is at its narrowest point. Besides the radio ruse, the Allies planted wooden aircraft and landing craft in the area and allowed the London newspapers to report on Patton’s comings and goings.

The feint worked well. Even as Allied troops stormed ashore on D-Day, the German high command remained so convinced that Eisenhower planned to strike at Calais, France — just 22 miles across the channel from Dover — that it was slow to send reinforcements to Normandy, fearing a ruse.

It’s sometimes believed that Eisenhower delayed the invasion for a number of weeks because of bad weather. Actually, historians say, he was stalling to let the U.S. and British shipyards turn out more of the crucial landing craft.They could haul 2,100 tons of equipment, or 20 tanks and 400 soldiers. Eisenhower’s margin was so thin, he couldn’t bear the loss of a single one.

Even more crucial would be the landing craft that carried most of the U.S. ground forces onto the Normandy shores. They are best known as Higgins boats after Nebraska-born entrepreneur Andrew Jackson Higgins, who developed the craft. The flat-bottomed, open-topped craft carried 36 men and could pull right up onto the beach to let them out via a retractable ramp.

Years later, Eisenhower would describe Higgins as “the man who won the war for us.”

Weather would weigh heavily on Ike’s mind in the early days of June.Eisenhower had picked June 5-7 for the landing because it offered the right combination of tides and moonlight necessary for landing at dawn.

But early June coincided with what he described as the worst English Channel weather in 20 years. He sent the flotilla out on the evening of June 4 but called it back because of the dismal forecast.

He knew that rain, wind and clouds would affect the airborne jumps, the critical air and naval bombardments, and virtually every aspect of the invasion.

Eisenhower suffered through a restless night. The next morning, his staff meteorologist predicted a break in the weather June 6. Eisenhower gave the green light.

During the next few hours, about 20,000 U.S. and British airborne troops dropped behind the D-Day beaches, along with thousands of tons of gear. Their jobs included blocking roads and waterways and clearing paths to the beach to aid the infantry as it came ashore.

A company of 6th British Airborne landed first in gliders at 15 minutes past midnight. They landed near a pair of bridges over the Orne Riverat the east end of the easternmost beach, Sword, and quickly seized them from stunned German defenders. Mission accomplished in six minutes. But a British Army officer, Lt. Den Brotheridge, 29, was shot in the neck and became the first Allied death on D-Day.

More than 800 C-47 Skytrains hauled the 101st and 82nd Airborne soldiers on a looping pathto the west before swinging around to the east over the Cotentin Peninsula, behind Utah Beach.

They were to jump, on static lines, from about 400 feet.

But unexpectedly, the pilots encountered low clouds over land. Many of them scattered to avoid collisions and ordered the paratroopers out at altitudes too high or too low.

After crossing the coast, the aircraft formations encountered heavy anti-aircraft fire. Some soldiers suffered rifle wounds even before they jumped.

Chuck Davis recalled waiting in the back of the transport for the red light over the door that signaled when it was time to jump.

“Most of us were scared. We didn’t know what was coming,” he said.”Anybody that said they weren’t, they didn’t know what they were talking about.”

Soldiers landed in trees, in hedgerows, in fields, in rivers, in gardens. One planeload of 18 men jumped into the English Channel and drowned.

Some unlucky ones landed in the soon-to-be-famous village of Sainte-Mère-Église, where a house was on fire — likely after catching sparks from an incendiary round. Dozens of townspeople were fighting the flames as German soldiers looked on.

About 30 paratroopers landed in the village and immediately found themselves battling the Germans. Some were shot as they descended.

Air current sucked a few into the inferno of the house fire. Pvt. John Steele’s parachute caught on the town’s church steeple, and he convincingly played dead for two hours — an incident memorialized in the book and movie “The Longest Day.”

Despite the initial chaos, paratroopers would seize Sainte-Mère-Église before 5 a.m. — the first town to fall to the Allies.

Davis recalls landing on the edge of some hedgerows. He found some of his squadmates using a child’s cricket issued to every paratrooper: click once if you encounter someone and twice to acknowledge.

But like 80% of the airborne troops that night, Davis’ group was nowhere near where it was supposed to be. The men laid low until daylight, when they could get their bearings.

One of their soldiers, nicknamed “Frenchie” for his language skills, spoke with local farmers and learned that they were 17 miles away from their objective.

“We never did get there,” Davis said. “Everything was such a mess.”

Still, the chaos fed the confusion of the German defenders, who couldn’t make sense of the Allied plans.

It helped that the French Resistance, alerted by coded messages over the BBC’s French-language radio service, had cut communication lines the previous evening. German units in Normandy had great difficulty talking to one another.

Lulled by the bad weather forecasts, German military leaders were certain that no invasion would come that week. NaziGen. Erwin Rommel, who had been put in charge of northern European coastal defenses,traveled home to Ulm, in southern Germany, for his wife’s birthday. Several other key German leaders were traveling, too.

Allied air and naval forces had launched massive bombardments during the predawn hours on D-Day, hoping to take out the German coastal guns. But the clouds— especially at Omaha Beach — hampered their ability to aim effectively. Waves of bombers flew over the Normandy beaches and dropped their payloads harmlessly inland.

The naval guns hit their targets much more frequently, but they couldn’t knock out the hardened German fortifications of reinforced concrete.

The massive flotilla of Allied ships awed those who saw it.

”The sight going over was one of the thrills of my lifetime,” said Lee Seeman of Omaha, who flew a B-17 bomber over Normandy that morning.

It terrified those soon to be on the receiving end of its firepower.

German Maj. Werner Pluskat, who commanded 20 coastal guns around Omaha Beach, had been surveying the channel with binoculars since hearing the bombers fly over. For a long time, he saw nothing.

Then suddenly, out of the mist, the horizon filled with ships. He called his headquarters and said, “It’s the invasion. There must be 10,000 ships out there,” author Cornelius Ryan wrote in “The Longest Day.”

Pluskat knew instantly, he told Ryan, “that this was the end of Germany.”

But the picture looked quite a bit different aboard those ships. All were filled with impatient, wet, stinking, puking, terrified men.

“You could hear the bullets ricocheting off the deck of the ship,” Marion “Bob” Tabor of Omaha, who landed with a transportation unit on the afternoon of D-Day, told The World-Herald in 2014. “We tried not to make friends. If you had a close friend, and he got killed, it would hurt.”

Minesweepers tried to clear lanes toward shore for the landing craft. Upon landing, engineers and demolition teams were to blow up the starburst-shaped anti-tank obstacles called “hedgehogs” and clear the beach of mines.

But they had been given little time to do their jobs. And the channel winds and currents were such that most of the landing craft approached the shore some distance from where they intended.

On Utah Beach, this actually worked to the attackers’ advantage. The planned landing spot for the 4th Infantry Division units turned out to be opposite two big guns that undoubtedly would have pummeled the men storming the beach.

Instead, the troops landed about a mile to the southeast, opposite a less-defended beach exit. Brig. Gen. Theodore Roosevelt Jr., the deputy division commander, landed in the first boat.

Roosevelt was the son of the former president (and a political foe of the sitting president, his cousin Franklin), a World War I veteran and former assistant Navy secretary. He had to beg his commanders to let him go ashore with his troops; he walked with a cane and had a bad heart.

When he realized that his troops were massing in the wrong place, he rejected the idea of a risky move up to the right spot on the beach. According to legend, he declared, “We will start the war from here.”

The Americans methodically took out the German guns, many of which were manned by Eastern Europeans conscripted from lands the Germans had occupied. They eagerly surrendered.

But the new location had only one beach exit road, which led to massive traffic jams as the division tried to move inland. The 56-year-old Roosevelt sometimes personally intervened to get things moving.

Roosevelt would earn the Medal of Honor for leading troops under fire. A month after D-Day, he died of a heart attack.

Some of the credit for taking Utah also would go to the airborne troops who had sown confusion among the Germans and fought their way to the beach to link up with the 4th Infantry Division.

In total, the division suffered fewer than 200 killed and wounded in taking Utah Beach — though it would more than compensate in future bloody battles such as Hürtgen Forest and the Battle of the Bulge.

At H-Hour that morning, five Navy destroyers battled with shore batteries. One ship, the USS Corry, was hit by German artillery and sank in 30 feet of water. Twenty-four crew members died, including Seaman 1st Class Bernard Petersen, 24, of Omaha.

Farther east, the British and Canadian forces battled the enemy and nature.

At Gold Beach, engineers and demolition teams cleared obstacles for the British forces even as German snipers targeted them. Landing craft struggled in the heavy winds. But amazingly accurate fire from two cruisers took out three of four German guns just before the landing.

At the adjacent beach, Juno, the heavy seas delayed the Canadian forces from going ashore for an hour.They struggled under heavy fire because bombing hadn’t much damaged the coastal batteries. The delay also meant that demolition teams had to fight rising tides to destroy Rommel’s hedgehogs and clear paths for the infantry and tanks.

Fortified beachfront villas, and several nearby villages, had to be cleared house to house and gun emplacements destroyed one at a time. But the Canadians had gained a foothold and even moved inland by nightfall.

A bagpiper from the 1st Special Service Brigade played Highland reels from a landing craft as British assault teams scrambled ashore at Sword Beach. Twenty-one tanks landed in the first wave on the narrowing beach, which, as on all the beaches that morning, caused terrible congestion problems.

Also at Sword, the first French forces landed on Normandy shores. They seized a casino called Riva Bella that had been built into a fortress by the Germans.

Dead and wounded on the British and Canadian beaches totaled almost 3,000.

It is the grim fighting at Omaha Beach for which D-Day is most remembered, especially in the U.S.

War planners knew that Omaha Beach would be the toughest fight on the Normandy beachfront because of terrain ideally suited for defense. The crescent-shaped beach sloped gently upward, to cliffs that protected steep bluffs.

Attackers would be exposed for a long while to fire from three sides, then be forced to climb the steep cliffs to take out well-fortified gun emplacements. It seemed like an impossible task.

And, unknown to the Allies, it was guarded by the highly capable 352nd Infantry Division and not the low-quality regiment of conscripted Poles and Russians they were expecting.

Carl Praeuner, who landed in the first half-hour at Omaha Beach, remembered the huge 88-mm shells raining down on his landing craft when it was still well out to sea.

Weighed down with ammunition and gear, he was fortunate to be let off in ankle-deep water about 150 yards from the shore.

“I decided to zig and zag to make less of a target,” Praeuner wrote years later. “I did see the sand kick up just in front of my feet, but nothing hit me.”

Hundreds of first-wave soldiers weren’t as lucky. Many landing craft hit sandbars well offshore. German machine-gunners opened up on them as soon as the ramps on the vessels lowered. Many soldiers were slain before they left their boats.

Others scrambled over the sides only to find themselves in water neck-deep or higher. Those who didn’t quickly jettison their heavy packs drowned. Those who did shed their gear faced a slow slog to shore under withering fire — in some cases, without their weapons.

They hopped over corpses bobbing at the water’s edge, the tide red with blood. Soldiers huddled behind destroyed tanks and beach hedgehogs for some limited protection from the machine-gun fire, gathering strength for a hazardous dash across the beach.

Drained and terrified, Ed Morrissette and two other 1st ID soldiers hid behind a concrete pillar for about 20 minutes, smoking cigarettes wrapped in cellophane to keep them dry. Then they crawled up the beach under heavy fire to rejoin their unit.

The lucky ones reached the seawall. It offered shelter against direct fire — but also proved an attractive area for Germans to lob mortars.

Almost every unit in the early waves came ashore in the wrong place. Along the seawall, desperate men tried to find soldiers they knew. Some units lost all of their officers and sergeants. The men literally didn’t know what to do.

”We spent all morning pulling the bodies of the men who had been hit coming across the beach out of the water,” Praeuner said. “Many of these men were only wounded, but they drowned because of their wounds.”

The limited view from command ships offshore made Omaha Beach look like a resounding defeat — and sometimes it felt that way to the soldiers pinned down ashore. At 8:30 a.m., 90 minutes after H-hour, commanders suspended additional landings ashore because the beach was clogged with machines and men, both living and dead.

Over time, soldiers realized that staying on the beach meant dying there, even if the prospect of climbing the fortified hillside didn’t appeal much, either.

Small groups, often ad hoc, began the ascent. They used explosives to blow up concertina wire guarding the foot of the bluffs. Engineers crept over the wall to clear mines, followed by infantrymen to clear out pillboxes with grenades and flamethrowers. They proceeded slowly, with heavy losses.

But eventually, incredibly, they reached the top of the bluffs. By noon, about 600 soldiers had made it.

Praeuner vividly remembered reaching the ridge. He stepped on a mine. Luckily, his foot slipped off without detonating it.

But a mile inland, Praeuner stopped to set up his mortar at the edge of a ditch. Nearby, he saw someone squatting in the tall grass. Moments later, he saw a puff of smoke. A bullet ripped through his leg, from his knee to his crotch.

Praeuner’s buddies left him in a field, sure that medics would arrive shortly to take him to an aid station on the beach. No one came.

“I prayed most of the night while tracer bullets flew just over my head,” he would later write. ”I was so grateful that I had been raised in a Christian home.”

The next morning he was loaded onto a stretcher for a ride to the beach. He recuperated for months at a hospital in Southampton, England. The following spring he was medically discharged and returned to his life as a farmer in Battle Creek.

By the evening of D-Day, the Allies had somehow established a tenuous hold on Omaha Beach.

The famed combat reporter Ernie Pyle would describe the taking of Omaha Beach as a “pure miracle.”

“Our men were pinned down for awhile, but finally they stood up and went through,” Pyle wrote. “We did it with every advantage on the enemy’s side and every disadvantage on ours.”

Many of the men who landed on D-Day thought the war would end within weeks, that they would march on to Berlin in quick triumph. But the Germans had a lot of fight left in them. It took almost a year of brutal combat, and tens of thousands more Allied casualties, to bring down the Nazi regime.

Chuck Davis returned to his hometown of Adrian, Minnesota, and the floor-covering business he had worked in before the war. He would live in South Dakota and Utah before moving to Omaha in the early 1990s to be near his son. Davis died in 2016.

A few months after D-Day, Bob Tabor’s transportation unit moved to Antwerp, Belgium, a shipping hub for U.S. forces.

There he met a lovely young woman named Carmen. She followed him to America after the war and became his wife. For years he worked as a millwright and steelworker in Ohio. The couple moved to Omaha in 1984 to be nearer their three sons. He died in 2017.

The horror of war still sticks with Carmen Tabor. She described it as “four years of misery, four years of hunger, four years of fear.”

And she remembers the joy of liberation that Allied troops like Bob Tabor brought with him.

“I married him because he’s my hero,” she said. “I’m so proud of him. He brought us freedom.”