D-Day 65 years later: “The fire was just murderous”

When John L. Burke and his fellow Army Rangers came ashore at Omaha Beach shortly after daybreak 65 years ago today, they didn't know they would be making history.

They just knew they were getting shot at.

"The fire was just murderous," Burke said. "It was a real shooting gallery."

The beach was a killing field. The surf ran red. Of the 150,000 Allied troops involved in the D-Day operation, more than 10,000 were killed or wounded.

It proved to be a turning point, but no one on the ground could tell at the moment. Things didn't go according to plans, but then almost nothing did that morning on the French coast. The weather was bad, and the seas were rough. That first afternoon, Burke pulled out his canteen for a drink and discovered no water, just a jagged shrapnel hole.

Burke wound up using ropes to scale the cliffs of Pointe du Hoc, where the Germans had set up a strategic battery. He doesn't remember eating anything for three days, though he knows he must have. He recalls not so much the sights as the sounds -- the deafening roar of combat, the desperate cries of "Medic!"

It was the third day ashore before Burke truly believed they weren't going to be driven back into the sea. It was much later, after he returned home, when he discovered what he had been a part of was, in his words, "a big deal."

"We just did our jobs, that's all," said Burke, 86, whose brother, Thomas, was killed in the Ardennes at the Battle of the Bulge. "A guy told me once, 'When you're fighting, the war is only within 100 or 200 yards of you.'"

In retrospect, Burke, who retired from the A.H. Robins Co. and lives at The Hermitage at Cedarfield in western Henrico County, said he believes the invasion ultimately worked for two reasons: the Navy's big guns softening German strongholds and the ability of the Allied forces to improvise.

"Everything that could go wrong did go wrong," said Burke, a corporal at the time who went on to become a staff sergeant. "But it was the ingenuity of the officers, the noncoms, the lowest privates that hit the beach. Their ingenuity to do what they thought was right to meet their objective. Everything was going wrong, but we turned it into a success."

And there is this:

Sitting in a theater, during the horrific D-Day scenes re-created in the film "Saving Private Ryan," Burke shut his eyes.

. . .

Burke will be among a group of almost five dozen Richmond-area World War II veterans -- some of them D-Day participants -- meeting at the Virginia War Memorial this morning to travel aboard a chartered bus to the National D-Day Memorial in Bedford County where special anniversary events are planned.

Other bus passengers will include fellow D-Day survivors Guy DeGenaro, a glider pilot, and C. Denis Gilchrist and Aubrey L. Gilman Jr., who were shipmates aboard a Navy minesweeper just off the Normandy shore.

Gilchrist's and Gilman's work began in the predawn darkness, clearing a path for other ships. They were well aware of the commotion around them, but they were focused on "making sure we were on our proper track and proper speed," said Gilchrist, 89, now secretary of the Navy League, Richmond Council.

Gilman, 86, a gunner's mate at the time, will never forget the scene.

"I looked up and I never saw so many planes and gliders," said Gilman, who lives in Chesterfield County. "You couldn't see the sky."

One of those gliders was piloted by DeGenaro. Carrying a Jeep, a trailer and a crew of six, DeGenaro's glider was towed a few hundred feet above the Normandy coast in the early evening of D-Day, attracting enemy fire.

Cut loose from the tow-plane, DeGenaro set the glider down in a field, 5 or 6 miles behind the German defenses along the coast, coming to rest in a hedgerow. The glider was damaged by anti-glider stakes the Germans set up in the field, but the crew and supplies were safe.

"People ask what it was like landing a glider in combat," said DeGenaro, 87, who had careers in the Air Force and later as a professor of management at Virginia Commonwealth University's School of Business. "It wasn't a question of fear. It was a question of concentration. Getting that glider on the ground is all you could focus on."

The crew took refuge in a nearby farmhouse, but DeGenaro spent the night alone in a ditch on sentry duty. Firefights were all around, but he never saw a German.

"That was one of the longest nights I've ever experienced," he said in an interview at his home in Richmond's West End.

By the third day, DeGenaro's crew had made its way back to the beach, escorting enemy prisoners, and then returned to England. He flew additional glider missions over Holland and across the Rhine River.

He is struck by how witnessing the most horrendous events -- an exploding ship, a plane in a death spiral before crashing and burning -- seemed to make such a little impression on him and others in combat.

"Numb may be a good word," he said. "You just accept anything that's going on, because that's the way things are."

. . .

The evening before D-Day, pilot David C. Landin and a buddy were hitchhiking from the air base in southern England to Cambridge to take in a movie. A limousine pulled up beside them. It was their commanding officer.

"'You guys get in; I'm going to take you back so you can go to bed,'" Landin recalled. Right then, they knew the big mission they'd heard about was about to happen.

Landin's job was to escort bombers and protect them from enemy aircraft. When he flew his single-seat P51 over the Normandy coast the next morning at daybreak, he looked down and saw nothing. He was above the thick cloud cover.

But the sky was clear of enemy planes. On a later mission that day, he took out a locomotive and some German armored vehicles.

"I think to myself, we were damn lucky," said Landin, 89, who is retired from the insurance business and lives at Westminster Canterbury Richmond, a continuing-care retirement community.

"I don't want this to sound wrong, but it worries me that we've kind of forgotten what we fought that war for," he said. "I think we accomplished a lot for civilization."

Contact Bill Lohmann at (804) 649-6639 or .