D-DAY
REMEMBERED
MichaleConnelly.Jigsy.com
On June 6, 2014 it will be seventy years since my
father, 1Lt. Roy Connelly, landed on Utah Beach with
the other brave men of the 87th Chemical Mortar
Battalion. My
father died in 1987, but in 2005 as I was finishing
up my book about the unit, I had the honor of
attending the battalion’s final reunion, and meeting
with eleven of these remarkable men.
After their banquet, they all sat down with me at a
big table in the hotel lounge and I put a small tape
recorder in the center of the table and let them
talk about their experiences. Now I knew the story
of these men through my extensive research of not
only the day to day history of the battalion, but
each of the four companies.
I
also knew the history of the men at the table. I
knew which ones had won medals for heroism and which
ones had received one or more purple hearts for
wounds received in combat. I heard a lot of stories
that night and had collected many more through
telephone interviews, questionnaires filled out by
the unit veterans, and the diaries some of them sent
to me. Yet, none of these men would allow me to call
them heroes. They would refer to their buddies as
heroes, but not themselves, regardless of the facts
that I knew about them.
To
hear them talk, they were just average GIs who did
the job they were told to do. I knew better because
as I chronicle in my book “The
Mortarmen”
these men who fired the 4.2” mortars, the heaviest
in the U.S. military were in combat for 326 straight
days. They fought on the Cherbourg Peninsula, in the
Hurtgen Forest, and in the Battle of the Bulge. They
captured the key German City of Cologne, and they
liberated the Nazi death camp at Nordhausen.
They
fired their mortars in support of the 3rd, 4th, and
75th Infantry divisions, the 82nd and 101st Airborne
Divisions, the 2nd and 5th Armored Divisions, and
many other units. Almost every original member of
the 87th was killed, wounded, or captured at some
point. These men fought for their country and their
unit, but mostly they fought for each other. Their
loyalty to their fellow warriors was so strong that
many hid minor wounds or had more serious wounds
treated by the unit medics and refused to be shipped
back to a field hospital. Their fear was that they
might be reassigned to a unit other than the 87th.
Now,
seventy years later only a few of the men of this
distinguished unit are still alive and the same is
true of the thousands of other soldiers who landed
on the beaches of Normandy. These are the men of the
“Longest Day” and they must never be forgotten.
Michael Connelly