News

D-Day: A last hurrah for heroes

Local veterans of fighting will never forget

By Alan Burke
Staff writer
Published: June 6, 2009

There are books and movies, monuments and medals, as well as students who examine D-Day in detail. Yet only a dwindling few really know what it was like.

Today's observance of the 65th anniversary of the invasion of Europe, the beginning of the end of Adolf Hitler's hellish regime, has been ramped up to deal with the fact that few veterans of the fight will be around to mark the 70th anniversary in 2014.

President Barack Obama, French President Nicolas Sarkozy and British Prime Minister Gordon Brown are scheduled to be in Normandy today honoring the sacrifice of those who fought.

That includes Leonard Marshall, a Portuguese kid from Peabody. On June 6, the teenage soldier with the 82nd Airborne glided onto French soil outside of St. Mere Eglise.

"We landed in a field," he recalls. "The Germans had a lot of spikes and stuff standing up." These were meant to rip through the gliders, which they did at the end of the run.

"The front of the glider would open up and we would come out," Marshall says. It was toughest on the lieutenant flying the glider, he noted. "He got ripped up. ... He would open up (the glider) and then he couldn't get out."

Asked if he was scared, dropping noiselessly into the darkness of occupied France, he laughs and says, "Of course I was scared. Wouldn't you be scared?"

At 84, his memory isn't what it once was, but he remembers this: "D-Day was tough. A lot of boys got shot."

Back home, Marshall married Francelina, had two children and worked in the leather mills, then as a Peabody firefighter.

Other North Shore boys weren't so lucky; a few never came home after D-Day. Marblehead Veterans' Agent Dave Rodgers (a Vietnam veteran) ticks off three names of Marbleheaders: "Azer O. Goodwin. Ralph 'Freckles' Messervy was killed on Omaha Beach. Willard Fader. ... Fader is buried in France. Messervy is in Waterside Cemetery. Goodwin still has some family here in Marblehead."

It's difficult to hear the names and not understand the implications, all the heartache suffered by families back home, all those precious years lost, from then to now, the good and bad, marriage, children, careers.

Dr. William Haley of Marblehead landed a few days after June 6. He was among those fighting through Normandy's hedgerow country in the hours after D-Day.

Hedgerows are enormous natural forts, earth, trees and brush, that surround Norman fields. "A truck couldn't get through it," he remembers.

Haley watched American ingenuity tackle the problem. Rail tracks were fashioned to tanks, like cutting tools. GIs discovered they could make their tanks jump and slice through the growth by braking at high speed and starting again.

The discovery proved successful enough that the supreme commander, Gen. Dwight Eisenhower, came to see how it was done. "He watched these guys do it," Haley says. "And I was there. I saw it." The general soon ordered all American units to adopt the technique.

For his part, Haley never had a doubt about why he was fighting. He'd studied at Tufts Medical School with several German-Jewish professors, refugees from Hitler. Later he saw a liberated death camp.

"There they are lying five deep. Body after body. Men, women and children. ... One does not forget it."

Haley won the Silver Star.

When Phil Verrette, 87, landed on Omaha Beach with the 30th Infantry Division, it was D-Day plus two. Bodies were everywhere. "It wasn't peaceful. Everybody was firing guns." The hedgerows introduced him to combat. "We took two a day."

Verrette would fight all the way to the Rhineland, winning the Silver and Bronze stars. For all the grand speeches, he wonders if people appreciate what was done.

His unit sustained roughly 2,200 casualties, he recalls. Verrette was wounded "on the Siegfried line" and sent to the hospital. The Battle of the Bulge brought him back. "They needed infantrymen."

He remembers much of it as if it happened yesterday. "You don't forget," Verrette says. "Anybody that tells you they forgot — they're crazy."

The voices and memories of those with firsthand knowledge of all this belong to old men and old women. One by one, day by day, they fade away like the mist on Norman beaches, until all that is left is history.

Yet, as Phil Verrette might say, it's history we forget at our peril.

"Old men forget; yet all shall be forgot,

But he'll remember, with advantages,

What feats he did that day."

— William Shakespeare, "Henry V"