Fred – June 6, 1944

A story of an improbable coincidence that gave me the story of my father's day after landing in the second wave of the Normandy invasion -- a subject he never discussed when he was alive.

My Dad is on the far right looking towards the camera which was his and he’d tossed it into someone in the boat.

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. He had never spoken about the war or about that day.

That Sunday morning in 1994, I awoke and went downstairs to read 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.

There he was. Standing up to his thighs in water, staring straight into the camera, his arm in a sling, his Red Cross helmet slightly drooping over his eyes, unshaven, looking exhausted. The photo was taken from inside a landing craft looking out; beside my father were five medics helping a wounded man onto the vessel.

I was overcome — by his absence, by not knowing anything of his experience that day, wishing I had asked him about it, pressed him. I realized I would never know what that day was like for him. Or would I?

This is what we knew: He was a doctor in the U.S. Navy, a lieutenant. His unit had participated in every European invasion: Africa, Sicily, Italy and Normandy. He was in the second wave of the Normandy invasion. He was wounded early on but did not evacuate; he was 29 years old.

A year before he died we learned this curiosity: He and my mom went to Normandy and visited the vast graveyard of soldiers. 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 he returned, he would not tell her a thing about it.

And here I was staring at his face from 50 years previous. I called Uncle Joe as we called him. Dr. Joseph Foley was one of my Dad’s closest friends, Navy buddies. They’d grown in different Boston neighborhoods, had gone to college and med school but first met on a ship in the Mediterranean. Foley was a neurologist in Cleveland; he was still alive but was ill. I called him. He had his daughter go out and get the paper.

“That’s Freddie all right.”

“Can you talk about that day?”

“You bet. Fact is I was thinking of going down to the mall with a sandwich board saying, ‘I was in the Normandy Invasion. Ask me about it.’”

But he didn’t have much stamina. So I kept the interviews to 20 minutes and each day asked him to tell me stories based on the senses — what did he see, hear, feel? What did it smell like? Sounds brought out the most stories. The rain and wind and sea coming in, the explosions of the German artillery, strafing airplanes, the screaming of the men with “shell shock.”

He told me that he didn’t land with my Dad. Each mile-long section of beach was assigned a military commander and a medical commander. He had the mile adjacent to my Dad.

“I was called over during a lull to patch him up and get him the heck off the beach to a medical ship,” Foley said. “But he refused to leave. Your Dad could be kind of a stubborn son of bitch.”

“Don’t I know,” I said.

So Foley cleaned out as much of the shrapnel as he could from my father’s shoulder, packed it with gauze and wrapped him tight in a sling. “That was all I could do.”

Foley went back to his section of beach and my father stayed in his and for the next five days they dealt with the wounded. They triaged. They patched up those they could. Some they evacuated. They used morphine to quiet the men who’d lost their minds. They tried to endure the dying all around them.

“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, he said, all the docs and their teams were ordered off Normandy and put on a ship back to the States. Their orders were to have a little R&R before heading out to California to train for the invasion of Japan. But by the time they crossed the Atlantic, orders had changed; the invasion was off. “We learned why a year later,” he said.

With no orders, Foley and my father and the others did a lot of R&R in Boston. One night in a café, after a “cheery night” of drinking, Foley said, my father bumped into an admiral — literally. The admiral took one look at my father’s shoulder and ordered him to go to the nearest naval hospital and have it taken care of and to do it within 24 hours or be court-martialed. The orders were written on a cocktail napkin.

So my father went to Chelsea Naval Hospital. After surgery, he met and took a shine to a Red Cross volunteer named Sally Willits Young. She became his wife and my mother.

Foley had this odd detail: “Your father disappeared for a couple of days after he got out of Chelsea. When he got back he said he’d taken a train out to Indiana and back. … No. I don’t know why.”

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. “You just didn’t do that sort of thing. Besides, anyone who wasn’t there wouldn’t really understand what we went through.”

In the final interview, when I asked him again why the silence? he said the only way to really 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.”

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And that was the ending to the story I wrote for the Sunday Akron Beacon Journal. The story was also carried by the Knight-Ridder News Service and the Associated Press and appeared in papers all over the country. A story of coincidence, a story of a story found.

At work the next day, I got a call from a man in Chicago. “My name is, Charlie Potter. Does that name mean anything to you?”

“Why yes,” I said. “You were an usher in my parents’ wedding. You were in the Navy with my Dad.”

“You don’t know how much that heartens me,” he said. “I just wish you’d called me before you wrote your article. I saw your dad get wounded.”

Potter was the military commander of my father’s section of the beach. He was in the landing vessel with my father. He had more stories of the day; he filled in a few more gaps.

Here’s what I now know: Fourteen minutes after the first wave of the invasion, General Eisenhower ordered in the doctors, so my dad set out for Utah Beach in a crowded, small landing vessel, a LCVP. Eisenhower’s thinking was that sending in the docs would boost morale, on theory that if they’re sending in the docs, things couldn’t be too bad; they wouldn’t risk killing all of them would they?

It was windy and loud and the waves were high and tossing the vessel around like a toy boat. It was cold. It was raining. As they made their way towards shore, a teenaged soldier in the bow, a boy from rural Indiana, lost it and started screaming.

“Your father went forward and settled him down and stayed with him,” Potter said. But when they landed at 6:30 in the morning, when the front of the LCVP flopped down, and he and the kid jumped out together in the water, the boy was killed instantly by a bullet to the head. “Your father dragged his body to the beach and yanked the medical (dog) tag,” he said.

In the first hours of battle, the Allies knocked out the German guns. Almost all of them. At mid-morning, as a new wave of soldiers was landing, a German 88 mm shell whistled overhead and hit one of the vessels. Bodies went everywhere. My father, close to a protective cliff, leapt up, yelling “medics!”

Potter tried to pull rank: he told my father to stay put, to let the medics handle it. My father refused.

“You Dad could be kind of stubborn, you know.”

My Dad and the medics ran towards the water. Another 88 came over and exploded 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.

Potter filled in another detail. “After he got back, your Dad went to Indiana to see the parents of that boy.”

But there was still more to the story.

I rewrote the story a few years ago with Potter’s information. I posted it on my old website. Out of the blue, I got an email from a history buff in France who bumped into my story. “I’ve been doing research because at the 75th Anniversary we realized there was nothing written about on your father’s unit.”

He attached the photo you see below. “I think that’s your Dad in the center.”

There he was, 29 years old, the morning of June 6, 1944.

Chaos all around him. The wounded. The exhausted. The dead. My father standing over a soldier covered with a blanket, my Dad’s right arm in a sling, his left forefinger pressed on the bottom of his nose. I had seen him do that once, at a time he was trying to hold back tears, not wanting to show his emotion. Here trying to keep himself under control.

What were you thinking, Dad? What was going through your mind?

(Note. A few of you may have seen an earlier version of this that I published quietly in January. I did a major revision and sent this out to my subscribers. I’ve pasted in the comments from the previous version.)