The Daily Star: D-Day 1994

June 6, 2009 | Uncategorized

By SANDRA FENTIMAN
Community Editor

Marino Scorzafava picked up another bundle of dynamite and tied it to the steel and concrete barrier blocking Omaha Beach.

German guns and mortars raked the sand. Offshore, the big guns of the U.S. Navy pounded the German positions on the cliffs.

Thousands of troops were already wading through the surf and thousands more were in landing craft heading toward the shore.

If they were going to get off the beach, they would need a way through. At 6:30 a.m. on June 6, 1944, Scorzafava and his fellow frogmen slogged from barrier to barrier, blowing 50-yard gaps in the line and opening the door to France.

Amphibious tanks sank in the surf and rubber boats full of TNT exploded. Only Scorzafava and one other frogman from his crew survived. At times, they found themselves fighting like combat soldiers instead of the Naval frogmen they were trained to be.

“We picked up rifles off dead soldiers and were hiding behind dead soldiers. And the wounded were screaming and hollering for medics and corpsmen.”

For more than four decades he kept his thoughts about those days to himself. Only his sister, Faustina Russo, knew that he was in a secret demolition unit. And only after she died and the family was sorting through some papers did his wife, Jean, and son, Charles, find out about his role.

Only then did they understand how he lost part of his hearing and why he sometimes had nightmares.

Even now, he has trouble coping with what happened.

“I could talk to you for a whole week, and I could never tell you the whole, true story. It was a terrible, terrible, terrible situation: we were crucified.”

Scorzafava was later awarded the Victory Medal, the French Croix de Guerre, two stars from the European Theater, a Bronze Star, two Purple Hearts and a Presidential Unit Citation from Harry S. Truman. After the war, he returned to Oneonta and worked for the D&H Railroad. He was married in 1949 and later served as an alderman.

On D-Day, Scorzafava landed with the first wave of troops under heavy German artillery, machine- gun and sniper fire. The Naval Combat Demolition Unit worked alongside Army demolition crews to blow up the obstacles which were exposed then, at low tide, but would be covered as the tide came in.

Landing craft and tanks sent to support the 16 demolition units were hit and set on fire. Nearly half the amphibious tanks approaching land foundered and

sank in the heaving swells.

The 13-man unit had a rubber supply boat full of dynamite, TNT and plastic explosives. The men carried one- and two-pound charges in packs tied around their chests. As they worked their way down the beach, they would tie the charges to the barriers.

“We had to tie each charge individually; we’d tie a whole 50-yard gap and blow it with primer cord that attached one explosive to the other,” he said.

Grabbing more charges where they could, his group moved across the beach, clearing safe channels for the landing craft to touch down.

After exhausting the explosives in their chest packs, Scorzafava and his crew members were to restock from the supply in the rubber boat nearby.

“But that got hit and killed the guy that was holding it, to start with. That was gone. And then all havoc broke loose and they were dying like flies,” he said slowly.

“The group this side of us got killed, and two groups over, they got killed — everybody,” he said recently, pointing to a map he drew at his Oneonta home. “A big

88 shell hit the small boat, landing craft, and blew them out; we couldn’t find them.”

The path to the beach turned fatal for some men coming out of the landing craft.

“Every one of these things was mined, with several different kinds of mines. If you touched one of those, it blew you to bits,” he said.

“The obstacles were roughly 4½, 5 feet high. And the soldiers were hiding behind them for protection, because they were getting shot up by snipers. So I went out to one guy and I told him, ‘You get out of the way — we’ve got to blow these.’

“And I got him and pulled him away, and right away he was back in there because he was partly drowning and he was probably frightened like the rest of us, and he froze,” he said, his voice soft with compassion. “And I pulled him off and then I couldn’t do any more. So we killed some of our own, blew some of our own up, we had to.”

He threw his arm out as if gesturing out toward sea.

“Because you’ve got thousands upon thousands of soldiers behind you coming in that day,” he said. “And this was the immediate hour. That’s the thing that bothered me the most, we blew our own boys up. Guys our own age at the time, we were only early 20s, 19, 18.”

Help finally arrived on D-Day, with reinforcements from Utah Beach.

“They didn’t have quite the opposition; they had opposition, but no comparison,” he said.

“We were supposed to be on that beach, us, maybe a couple hours. I was on there three weeks, cleaning up the devastation, the mess and the dead.”