A day of narrow survival

In the skies above Normandy, in the waters off its shore, in the towns and villages of France, tens of thousands of people waited 60 years ago – waited and hoped.

Hoped to survive the war. Hoped to survive the next 24 hours. Hoped for deliverance from the Nazi occupation of most of Europe, and for freedom.

Sometime before midnight on June 6, 1944, that deliverance began. It was D-Day, the day the Western countries allied against Nazi Germany chose to gamble everything on an invasion of Europe.

Sgt. Erle Wheeler was in a C-47 with other members of E Company, 505th Parachute Infantry Regiment of the 82nd Airborne, flying through the cloudy night in a series of V’s.

“It was the best way to get into Normandy,” Wheeler, an 85-year-old resident of St. Maries, Idaho, said recently. “It sure beat the beaches.”

Micheline Creteur waited near the forbidden radio in her grandfather’s basement in the town of Roubaix, with two young men her grandfather, a leader in the French Resistance, was sheltering until they could flee south to free France. There was nothing for hours, then the final coded message that the invasion was to start.

She cheered because the war was almost over and they would be free from hunger and the oppression of the German occupiers.

“I can still see my grandpappa hugging me and saying, ‘No. It’s the beginning,’ ” said the former Resistance fighter, now Micheline Creteur Tarsia, a Spokane Valley grandmother.

Wheeler and Tarsia are among Inland Northwest residents who shared their recollections of D-Day recently with The Spokesman-Review as the 60th anniversary of the battle approached. The region once had scores of veterans who could give firsthand accounts, but in recent years, their numbers have dwindled.

‘Had to be done’

As dawn broke, Hugh Everhart looked down from his “ringside seat” as a tail-gunner in a B-26 headed back from bombing the German defenses along the Normandy beaches. The Allied armada was spread out below him, and the first troops were attempting to land.

“I didn’t know there were so many ships in the whole world,” said Everhart, now an 88-year-old retired postal worker in Spokane.

On one of those ships, Vince Schmid, also a Spokane resident, was loading into a landing craft that would take him and other members of the 5th Engineers Special Brigade to Omaha Beach. On the run in, about 9 a.m., his landing craft was so heavily damaged by artillery fire it had to return to the troop ship. Schmid thought that since his ship had already taken “quite a few casualties,” maybe he’d get to return to England.

“No such luck,” he said. The wounded were taken off and the remaining troops transferred to another boat, which landed under fire about 2 p.m. A military policeman, Schmid was supposed to be directing traffic as tanks and vehicles rolled off boats and onto the secured beach. But the beach wasn’t secured.

“All we could do was take care of ourselves, dig a hole and keep in it.” Schmid stayed in that hole on the beach all night. “I can still hear the moans of the injured guys all around.”

Farther out in the English Channel, Art Steiner, a member of the 899th Tank Destroyer Battalion, bobbed on a troop transport long enough to get everybody “good and seasick.” His unit had already fought in North Africa and participated in the invasion of Sicily. It was part of the eighth wave to hit Utah Beach later in the day.

Steiner didn’t know it, but Normandy would be his last campaign. In a few weeks, he’d suffer injuries that plague him to this day.

“I don’t feel bad about it,” said Steiner, 84, of Hayden, Idaho. “It was something that had to be done, and if I had it to do over again, I wouldn’t change anything – except for maybe getting blown up.”

Best-laid plans

That “something that had to be done” was the Allied invasion and liberation of Europe.

After months of planning and preparation, Allied forces commanded by Gen. Dwight Eisenhower threw nearly everything they had at the beaches of Normandy – 1,760 tons of bombs from the air, 700 warships, 2,700 support ships and 2,500 landing craft, according to statistics compiled from historical sources by the Associated Press. The Allies surprised the Germans and the residents of France, who assumed the invasion would come farther north, at Calais, where the distance between France and Great Britain was shortest.

By the end of the day, some 2,500 Allied troops would be dead and 10,000 wounded. But the allies gained a toehold on the European continent, then a foothold and then the base for an 11-month fight across France and Belgium and into Germany.

At some landing sites, the invasion went better than planned. Everhart recalls his B-26 being recalled from its second bombing mission of the day because the target had already been overtaken by Allied troops. The crew returned to its base in Colchester, England, was briefed on a new target, and took off for a third time.

For others, nothing seemed to go right. Wheeler’s platoon was so far from their target they didn’t know where they were.

When an American tank “popped up” over the hill on a nearby road, Wheeler was worried his men would be mistaken for Germans. He stood in the road, hoping the men in the tank would see his arm patch.

“Lucky you didn’t get shot,” the tank lieutenant told him. His platoon found the rest of their unit in three or four days, but they never did make it to their original target, Ste. Mere-Eglise.

For days the troops poured ashore on the beaches. Schmid, who remained on Omaha Beach for several months directing traffic, recalls that for weeks, tanks, trucks, jeeps and other vehicles rolled across the sand and into the interior of Normandy around the clock.

“A week or two later (after D-Day), I got some time to myself, and I remember going up a bluff and looking back over the beach,” Schmid said.

It wasn’t a landing site any more, but a huge harbor, with transport ships coming and going with the supplies needed for the war.

Lucky to be alive

On June 22, Steiner’s M10 tank destroyer and three others were sent to support an infantry unit attacking a German artillery post. Coming through hedgerows, the M10 was hit with mortar fire, and a shell came in through an open turret and exploded.

Steiner blacked out and only came to because his sleeping bag, which was stowed next to him, was on fire and burning his hair. Shrapnel had gone through his back and into his intestines, and his leg was nearly blown off. Paralyzed from the waist down, he pulled himself out of the tank after tossing his carbine out the turret.

Propped against the hedgerow with his rifle across his lap, Steiner was drifting in and out of consciousness when a German officer came around the tank with his Luger drawn.

“I pulled the trigger and hit him in the arm or the gun,” Steiner said. The gun flew out of the officer’s hand and he disappeared.

Eventually medics found Steiner and he was evacuated, first to a makeshift aid station in a wine cellar, then a field hospital, and eventually back to Utah Beach to be put on a boat for the trip back to England. He came home with a Bronze Star, a Purple Heart and a 60 percent disability rating, but he considers himself lucky. Out of 128 men in his company, 26 were killed and 76 wounded.

Wheeler was wounded by a mortar shell in France, evacuated to England to recuperate, then rejoined his unit in time to parachute into Holland. He made two other combat jumps in the war, fought in the Battle of the Bulge and left service with a Bronze Star and two Purple Hearts.

Liberating force

In the north, the French Resistance stepped up attacks on the Germans in Lille, the city closest to Roubaix. Paris was liberated in August, and Micheline Creteur remembers when the Americans arrived first in Lille, and then in her hometown in the early fall. A tall, young soldier pulled up to her grandfather’s house in a jeep and came in. Her grandfather grabbed him around the waist in joy and said, “My son, my son.” The soldier, who spoke no French, had no idea what was going on.

Her grandfather “always liked the Americans,” she said. “He always believed somebody was going to come.”

One of those Americans who came was Rosario “Bob” Tarsia, a young GI who landed two days after D-Day, fought in the Battle of the Bulge and, when the war was over, went to Marseilles on rest and recreation.

There he was walking along a beach when Micheline Creteur, who had been sent south to recuperate from the war, asked if he had the time. They talked, they met a few days later and began to date secretly. When she returned home, Tarsia went to visit. They fell in love, married in 1950 and lived for several decades in Europe until Bob retired from the U.S. government. They moved to Spokane to be near their daughter and grandchildren.

Bob died almost two years ago, but a picture of him in his 1944 Army uniform sits on a table in the Tarsia home in Spokane Valley. In front of the black and white picture is Bob’s Purple Heart and a gray rock from Omaha Beach. Tarsia knows that the French of her generation still appreciate the Americans who came to liberate them, but she believes that many in the younger generation have forgotten.

Schmid eventually was moved off the beach with his unit and stayed in Europe until 1945. His unit was headed back to the United States that August when they heard the atomic bomb was dropped on Japan and they wouldn’t be called on for another amphibious landing. By November he was discharged and shortly afterward he was in college on the GI Bill, earning an engineering degree.

Sixty years later, he still has bad dreams about D-Day “once in a while.”

Like other veterans of World War II, he’s heard his generation called “the greatest generation,” particularly in recent weeks as the nation dedicated the WWII memorial in Washington, D.C. He doesn’t know about that – to him, the most important part of one of the 20th century’s pivotal battles is reduced to the basics:

“That I survived,” Schmid said. “But I’m not one given to much exposition of stuff.”