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Today – Thursday, June 6 – is the 80th anniversary of one of the most massive, audacious, and bloody but ultimately successful military invasions in history. D-Day threw the flower of American youth into the teeth of the mighty Nazi war machine. General Dwight D. Eisenhower sent the men off toward the French coast, many to certain death:
Eisenhower: "Soldiers, sailors, and airmen of the Allied Expeditionary Force: You are about to embark upon the Great Crusade toward which we have striven these many months. The eyes of the world are upon you, the hopes and prayers of liberty-loving people everywhere march with you. I have full confidence in your courage, devotion to duty, and skill in battle. We will accept nothing less than full victory. Good luck, and let us all beseech the blessing of Almighty God upon this great and noble undertaking."
Allied pool reporter George Hicks recorded the actual sound of the battle from the deck of the USS Ancon, a troop transport ship sailing off the coast in the English Chanel. Private Bill Parker – who was later promoted to sergeant – was one of the first soldiers to plant his boots on bloody Omaha Beach.
Parker: "And I went across the beach with the machine gun hitting the ground three foot in front of me, just knocking up sand, and I couldn't stop, couldn't get any faster. He never did raise it high enough to hit me. We had to go across that water. We couldn't go back, wasn't nothing behind us, so we had to go forward."
He was an engineer assigned to blow a hole in the barbed wire at the base of the cliffs. It was a miracle he survived.
Parker: "After we got the wire blowed, we looked back and there was nobody behind us. The landing craft we were on had, I think, 33 more soldiers plus the Navy, and it blew up and they were all killed right there."
Parke says one reason they did survive is that the captains on board some of the Navy ships, which were part of the greatest armada ever assembled, on that day disobeyed direct orders. They had been told not to get their ships too close to the shore, lest the Germans open up their big guns and sink them in the shallow waters just off the beach. Parker says they made a different call.
Parker: "Seeing we was hung up, he ordered the battleships in close to shore, lowered their big guns and they shot about 6, 7 feet, 8 over our heads, knocked them pillboxes out, and he turned us loose. I give the Navy credit for saving the invasion."
A generation forged in the fire
Ryan Fairfield interviewed Parker for The Warrior Next Door Podcast. He and co-host Tony Lopo had been collecting interviews for the Veterans History Project at the Library of Congress for years and says the term "Greatest Generation" fits the remarkable men and women who fought in World War II. AFN talked with Fairfield about that generation.
"That generation that grew up, they were forged in fire with the depression. They knew what it was like to chip in with their family and work, doing something at 7, 8, 9, 10 years of age, delivering papers and that sort of thing," Fairfield shared. "When the war broke out, that sort of mentality just kind of took over and, you know, you couldn't stop these guys from signing up for the military at that time."
Fairfield explains that Parker, like most World War II veterans, kept his story locked up in his body and mind for years – but in the end knew he needed to share it with the world.
"They wanted their story to be a learning situation for anybody who comes behind them," Fairfield continues, "and we've got a lot of younger kids … listening to the [podcast] who are learning from it. And that's really what we're hoping, is that we can get a younger generation to realize this isn't ancient history."
Parker died last year at the age of 98. But Fairfield and Lupo got to accompany him back to Normandy in 2022. Fairfield says that trip back to the scene was healing for Parker.
"During his visit he said that he saw in his mind's eye all those bodies on the beach all over again. A few days later he went to the American cemetery. There he was able to stand at an overlook, looking down on Omaha Beach, where young kids and families were playing on the busy beach, very near the spot where he landed," Fairfield recalls. "He said that the previous night was the first time since the war had ended that he slept without nightmares of the dead on the beach."
Eighty years ago, Bill Parker hit Omaha Beach amid a hail of machine gun fire, stared down death, survived and helped lead the march across Europe that would free the world from Hitler's evil ambitions – on June 6, 1944.
