Fred
A story of an improbable coincidence that gave me the story of my father experience during D-Day, a subject he never discussed when he was alive.
It seemed an impossible coincidence. Ghostly even.
It was Sunday, June 5, 1994. I was sick and had been banished to the attic room in our house in Akron, Ohio; quarantined, as it were. The world was approaching the 50th anniversary of D-Day, the invasion of Normandy, and the TV was filled with stories and remembrances, old grainy footage and images.
I was overtaken with a fever-induced fantasy of seeing my father amongst the black and white photos and film of the beaches, of soldiers fighting their way into French towns, faces of pain and fear and hardship.
There were so many questions I wanted to ask him, so many things I wanted to know. My father, Frederick C. Gevalt, Jr., had died seven years previously.
That Sunday morning, I awoke and went downstairs to read the paper, the Akron Beacon Journal, the paper where I worked. My wife and children had gone to church. I sat down and began reading the special section on D-Day put together by my colleagues. I turned the page. And there he was. In a photo taking up nearly half the page, standing in the water, staring straight at the camera, the man on the far right, arm in a sling. I recognized him immediately and was overcome by his absence, by the fact he’d never told me anything about that day, by the realization I would never know what that day was like for him.
(There was no identification in the photo which came from the National Archives; the Associated press had chosen 50 photos from thousands in the archives and distributed them to its newspaper members.)
What we knew: He was a doctor in the U.S. Navy. His unit had participated in every invasion in Africa, Italy and Europe. He was part of the second wave of the invasion at Normandy. He was wounded early on but did not evacuate; he was 29 years old. And this curiosity: a year before he died he went to Normandy with my mom and visited the vast graveyard. He told my mom to stay in the car and, alone, he visited a grave marker deep in the sea of white crosses. Through binoculars, my Mom saw that he was sobbing. When she asked, he would not tell her a thing about it.
In 1994, one of my Dad’s closest friends, Dr. Joseph Foley, then a neurologist in Cleveland, was still alive but was ill. I called him and over the next few days interviewed him for 20 minutes at a time and each conversation I asked him to tell stories around one of the senses: What did he see? What did it smell like? What were the sounds? The most vivid memories were the sound — the wind and seas coming in, the explosions of the German artillery, the strafing airplanes, the screaming of the men with “shell shock.”
My story appeared the following Sunday in the Beacon Journal; it was also carried by the Knight-Ridder News Service and appeared in papers all over the country. A story of coincidence, a story of a story found. But there was more.
The following Monday a man called from Chicago, Charlie Potter.
“Does my name mean anything to you,” he said after a courteous apology for calling me.
“Of course,” I said. “You were an usher in my parents’ wedding; you were in the Navy together.”
“You don’t know how much that heartens me. I just wish you’d called me before you wrote your article. I saw your dad get wounded.”
Potter filled in many gaps.
Here’s what I now know: Fourteen minutes after the first wave, my dad set out for Utah Beach in a crowded, small landing vessel, a LCVP. General Eisenhower sent in the docs so early to boost morale on the theory that if everyone saw that the docs were being sent in, they’d think the invasion couldn’t be that bad; they wouldn’t risk killing all the doctors would they?
It was windy. The waves were high and tossed the vessel around like a toy boat. As they made their way towards shore, a teenaged soldier from rural Indiana in the bow lost it and started screaming. My father went forward and settled him down and stayed with him. When they landed, when the front of the LCVP flopped down, he and the kid jumped out together in the water. The kid was killed instantly by a bullet to the head; my father dragged his body to the beach and yanked one of his dog tags. (Later, after my Dad returned stateside, he took a train to Indiana and gave the tag to the boy’s parents and told them he’d died bravely.)
In the first hours of battle, the Americans knocked out the German guns. At least almost all of them. As a new wave landed, an 88 mm shell whistled overhead and hit one of the vessels. Bodies were everywhere. My father, close to a protective cliff, leapt up, yelling “medics!”
Potter, who was commanding officer of that stretch of beach, told my father to stay put, to let the medics handle it. My father refused and ran to the water. Another 88 came in, landing near my father, hurtling a piece of shrapnel into his shoulder and knocking him out face down in the water. A medic pulled him out.
Foley, who was assigned the adjacent section of beach, was ordered down to fix my father’s shoulder and get him off the beach to a hospital ship.
My father refused to be evacuated.
“Your dad could be kind of stubborn,” Foley told me.
“Yes, I know,” I said.
Foley couldn’t remove the shrapnel so he cleaned and dressed the wound as best he could. My father stayed on and dealt with the wounded. And the dead.
“Things were chaotic,” Foley said. “There was yelling, rifle fire, machine-gun fire. And they kept bringing us casualties. … We were doing pretty well until the fourth or fifth day; the weather got frightful. No craft was coming in or going out. The casualties were piling up.
“Your father and I were about the same emotionally. We were scared going in, but we were responsible as officers for the younger people with us. We tried not to show our fear. We tried to maintain the spirits of the people who were with us. … And we were busier than hell.”
Two weeks later, they were gone, he said, all the docs and their teams on a ship back to the States where they’d have a little R&R and then head to California to be trained for the invasion of Japan. By the time they got home, orders had changed, the invasion was off, so they did a lot of R&R. One night in a café, after a “cheery night” of drinking, my father bumped into an admiral, literally. The admiral took one look at my father’s shoulder and ordered him, under threat of court martial, to get to the nearest naval hospital to have it taken care of. The orders were written on a cocktail napkin. So my father went to Chelsea Naval Hospital. And after surgery, he met and took a shine to a Red Cross volunteer named Sally Young. She became his wife and my mother.
Each time I spoke with Foley I had the same question: “Why did you guys never talk about it?”
“Talking about yourselves was, well, like bragging,” he said, one time. “Besides, anyone who wasn’t there wouldn’t really understand what we went through.”
In the final interview, Foley said the only way to answer was to “quote a little Billy Shakespeare” and proceeded to recite, in its entirety, the famous soliloquy from Henry V, that includes these lines:
“He that outlives this day and comes safe home
Will stand a tip-toe when this day is named …
From this day to the ending of the world,
But we in it shall be remembered –
We few, we happy few, we band of brothers.”
There was reaction, of course. The original story ran in my Sunday newspaper, The Akron Beacon Journal, and was also carried by the Knight-Ridder newswire and the Associated Press. It was published all over the country.
The next day I got the phone call from Charlie Potter.
A few years later I received the second photo from a history buff in France who read my story and said he was doing a story on my Dad’s unit which was involved in every European invasion of the war — Africa, Sicily, Italy and Normandy.
Foley had another story: Two weeks after D-Day, Foley, my father and the other doctors in the unit were sent stateside. Their top secret orders were that they would land in Boston, would be given several days of R&R and would then be sent to California to train for the invasion of Japan.
By the time they crossed the Atlantic, the invasion was called off. (The reason why would not be understood until a year later when atomic bombs were dropped on Nagasaki and Hiroshima.) R&R was extended.
So my father and Foley and others embraced the free time with enthusiasm and one night, after too many drinks at an officer’s club in Boston, a navy admiral saw my father’s shoulder and wrote out an order on a cocktail napkin that he was to get to the nearest naval hospital or he would face charges.
My father obeyed. The next day he went to the Chelsea Naval Hospital and was immediately operated on. When he awoke he was greeted by a young woman who was a volunteer with the Red Cross.
The woman, Sally Willits Young, became his wife and my mother.
Well told story. Amazing to find those photos. I think talking about their lives was not as acceptable as it is today. WWII and the depression silenced people. It certainly did my parents.
Wow! That's a story! And there's a story for every man and boy that was lost. Thanks for sharing.