The Daily Star: D-Day 1984

June 5, 2009 | Uncategorized

June 6, 1984

By TOM TOPOUSIS and JOHN FERRIS
Staff Writers

“You didn’t know what the hell was going to happen from one minute to the next.” — Russell Haynes, of East Guilford

It was 40 years ago today, in the darkness of early morning, when a young Ernest Goodman dodged machine gun fire and mortar shells as he and 154,000 Allied soldiers stormed onto the beaches of Normandy, France.

Goodman, now a political science professor at the State College at Oneonta, was a member of the British Second Army, when he landed at Gold Beach during the first hours of the D-Day invasion.

‘It was dark, and in some ways there was tremendous confusion,” Goodman said of the landing. “They were counter-attacking and we were shocked. I remember, as a 19-year-old, that bullets were hitting the beach and there was shrapnel hitting my helmet,” he said.

When the battle ended, there were more than 10,000 Allied casualties and anywhere from 4,000 to 9,000 German casualties, but the Allied armies had stepped on to French soil for the first time since 1940.

“There were an awful lot of’ dead,” Goodman said, recalling the beachfront. One of Goodman’s duties at the beach was to guard over the construction of a mobile harbor that was shipped in from England.

“I watched how they put it together,” he said. “A lot of people died building it.

“The amazing thing is that some of us lived,” Goodman said, recalling the battle and some of his fallen comrades. “I ask myself, here’s a guy who trained for years and he was killed and I wasn’t?”

Goodman, who is Jewish, fled from Germany through Holland when the outbreak of war in 1939 brought the beginning of the mass deportation of the Jews to camps in Eastern Europe. He made his way to England where he enlisted in the “liberation forces.”

But, he said, he does not think he felt any stronger about his mission than did any of the other troops that landed on June 6, 1944. “I found they all felt they had a job to do.

“We were craftsmen, we had the tools; we had the training, we had a job to do and we did it,” he said.

The allied soldiers struggled onto the beach under the deafening roar of German 88-milimeter guns nestled in concrete pillboxes at the hilltops ringing the beaches.

“The German equipment was awfully good; they could give you nightmares and still do from time to time,” Goodman said. He said the troops were constantly digging holes to protect themselves from German shells and mortars that rained down on them.

Although the British suffered loses at Gold Beach, Goodman said it was a far better situation than at Omaha Beach where the Americans landed. The U.S. troops at Omaha Beach met such fierce resistance that the water turned red from blood and commanders considered abandoning the beach.

Russell Haynes, of East Guilford, was a Navy salvage diver, encharged with clearing wrecked landing craft from Omaha Beach on the morning of June 6.

“It looked like a slaughterhouse out there,” Haynes said of Omaha Beach. He said many of the landing craft to first arrive got stuck on sunken piles left by the Germans.

“They got up on the piles and then them old ‘88s’ opened up,” Haynes said of the German gunfire. He said the “large shells ripped through the front of the landing craft “like tissue paper.”

Altogether 5,000 ships crossed the channel carrying soldiers, tanks, artillery, vehicles and supplies. It was up to Haynes and the other salvage divers to work at 80 to 100 feet underwater, clearing the wrecked landing craft and equipment so that others could reach the beach.

Haynes enlisted in the Navy in 1942 and volunteered for diving duty.

“It was total blackness,” Haynes said of the channel crossing. “There were no lights, you couldn’t even light a cigarette.”

“When we got across the channel there were destroyers, heavy cruisers and light cruisers and the old battlewagons plus wave after wave of airplanes blasting the, beach,” Haynes said.

Haynes spent hours at a time underwater clearing the way for landing craft while working to avoid German mines.

“A group of English divers went down nearby but they nevercame up,” Haynes recalled. The divers, he said, were sent down as a mine sweeper went by, triggering one of the explosives.

Trained in both the United States and England, Haynes said “nobody knew anything about the invasion.”

Only until June 5, when Haynes was traveling along the English shore and saw all the ships lined up with soldiers did he realize how soon the invasion was.
‘Some of those boys had been on board for two to three days,” he said.

“You didn’t know what the hell was going to happen from one minute to the next,” Haynes said of the D-Day invasion.

“We were all scared. But we had been under fire before, and we were ready.” — William Nichols, an Army private on D-Day

For Private William Nichols, the invasion of Normandy began in the darkness of June 9, as he and thousands of his comrades from the 9th Infantry Division waded toward Omaha Beach in the face of German fire. Their mission: to free the 29th Division, pinned down by the enemy for nearly 72 hours.

“Artillery shells were dropping in all around us,” said Nichols. “When we reached shore, we walked through hundreds of bodies - men that had yet to be picked up. I remember there was an entire squad just lying there, in a row, dead. We were all scared. But we had been under fire before, and we were ready.”

In all, Nichols fought in six campaigns, against some of the best Axis troops. “I came out of it good,” he said. “I was never so much as wounded.”

Nichols, who now lives in Walton, was a 24-year-old farmer when he was drafted in January 1941. He trained at Fort Bragg, N.C., until the early part of 1942, when he joined a fighting unit bound for North Africa and later Sicily.

Just before Christmas 1943, the 9th Division was transferred to Winchester, England, to prepare for D-Day. In late May, the troops moved on to Portsmouth on the southern end of the island nation. From there, they would debark for the Normandy coast.

In the days that followed the invasion, Nichols and his fellow 9th Division soldiers made great gains, 30 miles a day or more, as they marched across France. By mid-August, they were 18 miles from Paris.

The division skirted the French capital, then proceeded on toward Belgium. But on the night of Sept. 7, Germans captured scores of soldiers as they tried to cross the Meuse River, Nichols was among them, and was held captive for the next eight months.

At first, he was taken to a prison camp 30 miles from Munich. Later, though, he was sent to the country to work on a family farm. Forty years later, Nichols still receives Christmas cards from the family.

Looking back on the historic invasion of June 1944, Nichols said his only hope is that men “will never have to do it again.” And he is hesitant to take credit for his role in the battle for Europe.

“We just did what had to be done,” he said. “There were millions of us then. We were all just doing our duty.”

Goodman described the invasion as one of the high points of his life. “I look on the whole day with a great deal of nostalgia,” he said,
“There was that sense of resolve and the feeling that the free world was behind you, that’s what I feel so strongly about. There was a sense of purpose and unity.”