The Daily Star: D-Day 2004

June 5, 2009 | Uncategorized

June 5, 2004

By Tom Grace

Cooperstown News Bureau

There were bodies stacked up like logs. You’d see it everywhere. A body would get rolled over by a tank and turn to mush. You had to keep going. I could, but not everyone could. — Paul Conley

SCHENEVUS — The second time Paul Conley of Schenevus landed on the coast of Normandy, for the 50th anniversary of D-Day in 1994, he knew where he was.

A half-century earlier, it was a different story.

Then, it was just a beach in hell, code-named Utah.

“We came over by destroyer and got on the landing barge,” said Conley, who was a second lieutenant in the 4th Division, U.S. Army.

“The Navy ran the barge, and the man in charge didn’t want to go in too close. I guess he’d been in before and shot at, but we had full field packs and didn’t want to drown,” said Conley, 87.

Before taking on Germans, the American soldiers showed their pistols to the naval comrade, and he agreed to navigate closer to shore, Conley said.

Conley gave the following account of what he saw during Operation Overlord, as allied soldiers crossed the English Channel and drove the Germans back from the coast of France.

“We got on the beach and there was a stack of helmets with bullet holes through the insignia. The Germans were trying to kill officers and they were pretty accurate. I threw my helmet off, put on a beach jacket.”

Guns were thundering, and the beach was covered with trash as Conley dug into a foxhole.

“When the sun came up, a shell hit the fellow next to me, and he just disappeared.”

Conley eventually found his heavy weapons platoon, and slowly the soldiers began to fight their way across the French countryside.

“It was difficult going, in hedgerow country,” he said. “The Germans would dig their tanks into the hedgerow and when they got you out in the open, they’d mow you down.

“What I’d do is send one man out, and they wouldn’t want to commit themselves for one man.”

When the scout saw a tank, the Americans would target it and try to take it out. This gamble usually paid off, although Conley was hit in the shoulder and spent days in an aid station, earning the first of two Purple Hearts.

After he returned to duty, he was transferred to the 2nd Armored Division and continued the confusing, bloody advance. He saw casualties all around, including those caused by friendly fire.

One day, a massive group of allied planes dropped bombs on the 2nd Division, killing among others, Gen. Lesley McNair.

“The next day they were dropping them on the Germans.”

The allied advance ground forward, but death was all around.

“There were bodies stacked up like logs. You’d see it everywhere. A body would get rolled over by a tank and turn to mush. You had to keep going. I could, but not everyone could.”

Conley’s tour ended suddenly one day when the pin on an American grenade came loose and he took a blast in the leg that put him in the hospital for a year. After he recovered, he moved from New Jersey to a hillside farm on Ridge Road outside Schenevus, became a rural mail carrier and even ran for president in 1988. He was a Republican challenger in a race won by George Herbert Walker Bush.

In 1994, Conley returned to Normandy, 50 years after the landing and push that eventually ended the war in Europe.

“I didn’t really see it the first time, and I give credit to the French for leaving it open and not turning it into Coney Island,” he said.

Just last week, he put on his uniform jacket while at the unveiling of the National World War II Memorial in Washington, D.C. He said he was still moved, but not shaken, by his wartime experiences of 60 years ago.

George Moubray, 80, of Oneonta, doesn’t want to hear the gory details of what happened from D-Day onward.

“When I saw some of that on TV the other day, I had to turn it off. Some things you don’t want to remember.”

As D-Day approached, Moubray was helping to build a landing field near Dover, England. “It was for planes that started out, but couldn’t make it over to France,” he said.

Early on D-Day, half his company was sent out in the first wave. Everywhere he looked in the sky he saw airplanes.

“The sky was jammed with them,” he said.

A few days later, Moubray, a sergeant with the 302nd Airdrome Squadron, was flown to the French coast and joined the advance.

“I was trained to make a map from photos, but I ended up being a linesman,” he said. As the battles raged on farms and in villages, he climbed telephone poles, trying to keep the lines of communication open.

“The Germans would detach the lines, but keep everything in place so you couldn’t see where the problems was. So, I had to climb up and see what was wrong,” he said.

He was attached to a hospital unit, he said, “And when they had the “M.A.S.H.” show on TV, the one thing they never talked about was the smell, which was terrible,” he noted.

Everywhere along the roads were piles of dead Americans, Moubray said. But this young man from Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, stayed alive, winning combat ribbons on his way to Germany. After the war ended, his technical training came in handy as he went to work for an engineering company, staying with them until he retired and moved to Oneonta in 1986.

Bastine “Bucky” Caracciolo, who grew up in Bainbridge, was working for the Bendix Corp. in Sidney before he was drafted. He wound up in the 115th Infantry, Company B, of the 29th Division.

“We went over in the second or third wave,” he recalled. “Omaha Beach.

“It was still pretty early when we landed, still daylight, because there weren’t as many bodies on the beach as you see on TV,” he said.

Caracciolo’s job was to carry mortar shells, but he never got to do it.

“We were still on the beach when there was a big blast, four shells fired,” he said. “The lieutenant yelled to hit the ground, but a little late. I was hit with shrapnel and could barely walk. A couple of guys from the 1st Division helped me and I got back to a boat. They put me on a hospital ship, and I was sent to Wales for sixth months.”

He returned to action as the allies pushed the Germans back at a tremendous cost.

“I can still close my eyes and see a fellow I thought was resting until I got close and saw the bullet hole in his head,” he recalled.

Before the war was over, he had more than his dose of gore, he said, and after it was over, he returned to work at Bendix in Sidney.

Ernest Goodman was in the 21st Army Group, 2nd British Army, and landed at Gold Beach. He made it off the beach and after going on a mission which he cannot discuss, battled across France.

“Most of us were 19, innocent, young and raw,” he said of the invasion forces during an interview with The Daily Star 10 years ago.

“Apprehension was fixed in your stomach and you were tired, always tired because you didn’t sleep much under the stars. It rained and the shells kept coming.”

Goodman was wounded and then hospitalized for seven months. But he stayed in the service until 1947, long enough to witness a massive victory parade not far away from war heroes Winston Churchill, British prime minister, and Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower, allied commander.

In 1953, Goodman moved to the United States and eventually settled in Oneonta, where he taught political science at the State University College at Oneonta for 28 years.

His war experiences are still with him, he said Thursday, as the world re-examines D-Day.

“Sometimes you want to forget it,” he said. “But you can’t forget it.”