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In this image provided by the U.S. Coast Guard, while under attack of heavy machine gun fire from the German coastal defense forces, these American soldiers wade ashore off the ramp of a U.S. Coast Guard landing craft, during the Allied landing operations at Normandy, France on June 6, 1944. (AP Photo/U.S. Coast Guard)
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<h1>Oregon veterans recall D-Day</h1>
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By <a href="mailto:christian.hill@registerguard.com">Christian Hill</a> | The Register-Guard
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June 1, 2014
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<p>Friday marks 70 years since Robert Heurgue returned home. He won’t soon forget it. Neither will we.</p>
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Robert Heurgue, a French citizen when he joined the Army's 82nd Airborne, was among the paratroopers who landed in the pre-dawn hours of the D-Day invasion at Normandy. (Pual Carter/The Register-Guard 2011)
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<p>It was on D-Day. June 6, 1944.</p>
<p>Heurgue was a 14-year-old French citizen visiting his sister in Boston when war broke out in Europe in 1939. France would fall to Nazi Germany the following year.</p>
<p>Heurgue, now an 89-year-old Eugene resident, joined the U.S. Army as the best way to get back to his homeland. On D-Day, he joined thousands of other paratroopers with the 82nd and 101st airborne divisions who gazed down from the door of a C-47 cargo plane before jumping into a night sky filled with peril and uncertainty.</p>
<p>“That was my way of going home,” he said. “It was somewhat different for me.”</p>
<p>For more than 150,000 Allied troops who followed by sea — in the largest amphibious landing in history — Normandy was hardly home. It was a foreign land they’d been tasked to liberate.</p>
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Robert Heurgue holds a snapshot of himself at the end of the war in Germany. (Paul Carter/The Register-Guard)
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<p>D-Day has been memorialized in books, television and film. For local residents who found themselves on and off the beaches during and after the invasion of Normandy, however, its scale and significance can’t be overstated.</p>
<p>Wars between nation-states on giant battlefields and across wide fronts appear to be of another era for a nation that has spent more than a decade fighting terrorists and insurgents hiding in plain sight among civilian populations.</p>
<p>“There will never be anything like (D-Day),” said Heurgue, who would see for himself the hundreds of ships anchored off the Normandy coast three days after his jump.</p>
<p>“It was,” he said, “something incredible.”</p>
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Listen to Robert Heurgue, a French citizen when he joined the Army's 82nd Airborne, was among the paratroopers who landed in the pre-dawn hours of the D-Day invasion at Normandy. (Rob Romig/The Register-Guard 2011)
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<p>This link to America’s “Greatest Generation” is fading rapidly. World War II veterans are dying at a rate of more than 550 a day, according to the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs.</p>
<p>With the 70th anniversary approaching, The Register-Guard set out to reconnect with more than a dozen World War II veterans in Lane County who had earlier indicated some tie to D-Day.</p>
<p>The newspaper had profiled these veterans — the youngest, like Heurgue, are now in their late 80s — in a special series 2½ years ago commemorating the 70th anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor.</p>
<p>Three of them have died since then, including one just last month.</p>
<p>Invariably, the others who were interviewed recently remarked how much society had changed since the nation mobilized to fight WWII.</p>
<p>One has to doubt that D-Day, the success of which hinged on secrecy to avoid alerting the Nazis to troop buildup in Britain and the targeted landing locations, would even be possible in a era of satellite imagery and instant communication.</p>
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Sally Lou Bonzer, shown in a 2011 portrait for The Register-Guard's "Call to Duty" series, was among of the first group of nurses to set foot in France after D-Day. (Paul Carter/The Register-Guard 2011)
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<p>“I think nowadays about how much was accomplished in that time,” said Sally Lou Bonzer, a 95-year-old Eugene resident. “How much since that time everything has moved so far faster forward. It’s sort of scary.</p>
<p>“I have great-grandchildren, and I wonder what on earth will happen in their time. Everything is different.”</p>
<p>Bonzer was one of the first Army nurses to step foot on French soil, four days after D-Day. She remembered the dead bodies floating in the water.</p>
<p>Bonzer would spend a year in Europe, working at a field hospital and patching up troops injured on the front.</p>
<p>Her most vivid memories aren’t of the injured soldiers she tended. An operating room nurse, she was used to those bloody scenes.</p>
<p>Rather, there are memories of the dead cows and lost dogs that littered the open fields where the field hospital was set up. Or the apprehension that gripped her walking to the latrine or recovery tent in pitch dark — “You couldn’t see a hand in front of your face,” she remembered — knowing she was exposed to German fire.</p>
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<h2>Fortune smiles and frowns</h2>
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<p>The luck of the draw is a deep vein that runs through the stories these veterans share.</p>
<p>Heurgue, the French-born paratrooper, noted that many who jumped on D-Day were killed by German fire or landed in swamps and drowned due to the weight of their gear.</p>
<p>“You either were lucky or unlucky,” said Heurgue, who walked into Sainte-Mère-Église, the first French town liberated by Allied forces, the morning after D-Day.</p>
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Kenneth Hatlelid proudly wears the "Greatest Generation" cap he received on an Honor Flight tour to the World War II memorial in Washington, D.C. He will be 94 on June 3. (Paul Carter/The Register-Guard)
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<p>He was lucky. So was Kenneth Hatlelid, now 94 and living in Eugene.</p>
<p>Hatlelid, who landed at Utah Beach a week after D-Day, had several close scrapes. He did reconnaissance for a tank destroyer company, scouting out the terrain and directing fire if German tanks were spotted.</p>
<p>A sniper shot the loop off his belt. He survived the blast of an artillery shell while huddled under his armored vehicle.</p>
<p>A German plane with its bomb bay doors wide open made a pass over his tank column three times before flying away.</p>
<p>“We think they didn’t know if it was a German column or an American column,” he said. “That’s what saved us.”</p>
<p>He’s seen the re-enactments of D-Day and the ensuring battles captured by film. Most of it is “strictly Hollywood,” he said.</p>
<p>“They have to make a better story,” he added.</p>
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A bootcamp portrait of Kenneth Hatlelid, his "tank busters" shoulder patch and a photograph of his battalion are among mementos he has kept from his Army service across Europe after landing at Normandy. (Paul Carter/The Register-Guard)
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<h2>Memories linger</h2>
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Merrill McKern, shown in a 2011 portrait for The Register-Guard's "Call to Duty" series. (Paul Carter/The Register-Guard 2011)
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<p>Another story: Merrill McKern, a 94-year-old Eugene resident, was a radioman aboard a destroyer providing fire support off Utah Beach.</p>
<p>Two days after D-Day, he picked up an unusual signal and jammed it. He suspects it was a glide bomb dropped from a German bomber and acquiring a target. Jamming that signal, he said, likely saved an Allied ship.</p>
<p>McKern returned stateside later that year, but the memory and emotion of D-Day have stayed with him to this day. He lamented that he’ll never have the chance to return to Normandy, where white crosses cover several cemeteries to honor the fallen.</p>
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<h4>It would be a very emotional experience and probably bring some tears when you saw all those cemetery crosses.</h4>
<p>- Merrill McKern</p>
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<p>American WWII veterans continue to be laid to rest, albeit at a declining rate now, with more than 1.1 million remaining, according to VA estimates. A million of them have died in the last four years, the estimates show.</p>
<p>The Telegraph newspaper in Great Britain reported in January that the Normandy Veterans Association, which started in Britain in 1981, will disband after the anniversary because its membership has declined.</p>
<p>“Members are dropping off the perch, and this is sad, but inevitable,” George Batts, the association’s national secretary, told the newspaper. “Many of the ones we’ve got left are in nursing homes, and a lot are in their 90s.</p>
<p>“We haven’t done bad, and it is a miracle that public interest in the events themselves hasn’t dimmed.”</p>
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<h2>In memoriam</h2>
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<p>The last WWII veteran profiled in the The Register-Guard’s special series, Ted Schwartz of Florence, died from complications of pneumonia on Oct. 27. He was 96.</p>
<p>The other two profiled D-Day veterans who have died since are Taylor Ramsey, 95, who landed on Utah Beach, and Dennis McLarin, 94, who served aboard the USS Bayfield as it disembarked troops during the invasion.</p>
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Dennis McLarin, Taylor Ramsey and Ted Schwartz in 2011. Click an image for more information. (Paul Carter/The Register-Guard)
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<div class="bat_story"><p>Schwartz was among the second wave that landed on perilous Omaha Beach on D-Day, a engineer tasked with clearing obstacles designed to rip up the hulls of the landing craft.</p>
<p>Schwartz survived by hiding behind dead bodies.</p>
<p>Schwartz went on to fight in the Battle of the Bulge. He witnessed firsthand the horrors of Buchenwald, the first concentration camp liberated by U.S. troops.</p>
<p>“The odor, my God,” Schwartz told The Register-Guard in 2011. “We were thinking, ‘Let’s get the bastards (Germans) and throw them in the trenches themselves.’</p>
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<h4>Then we figured, why make the bad worse?</h4>
<p>- Ted Schwartz, 2011</p>
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<!-- <p>“Then we figured, why make the bad worse?”</p> -->
<p>Jim Jordan, Schwartz’s son-in-law who served in the Air Force during peacetime, said the significance of D-Day on World War II and his father-in-law’s role in it is not lost on him.</p>
<p>“I know it was necessary,” he said. “I think it launched the U.S. into being a very powerful country. It brought us out of the Great Depression.”</p>
<p>D-Day was a crucial offensive in World War II, opening up a western European front against the Nazis just as the massive Soviet army was moving rapidly against Germany from the east.</p>
<p>U.S. and British military and political leaders agonized and argued for months over how, where and when to launch the seaborne invasion.</p>
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<h2>To the memorial</h2>
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<p>Jordan said he was completing the paperwork so his father-in-law could take an Honor Flight to visit the World War II Memorial in Washington, D.C., when Schwartz fell ill and died.</p>
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<h3>Honor Flight Network</h3>
<p>The Honor Flight Network provides free trips for veterans across the U.S. to visit Washington D.C. Through 2012 they had helped nearly 100,000 veterans.</p>
<p>For more information, visit their website: <a href="http://www.honorflight.org/">HonorFlight.org</a>
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<p>It was a trip that Bill Rugh, an 88-year-old Coos Bay resident, made last year.</p>
<p>Rugh was a gunner aboard the destroyer USS Walke, which participated in the Normandy invasion and later several invasions in the Pacific Theater.</p>
<p>The destroyer was damaged badly in January 1945 when a kamikaze slammed into it. Rugh was the only man in his gun mount to survive the attack; he was burned on his face and hands trying to extinguish a fellow sailor who was on fire, said his wife of 65 years, Jean.</p>
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Bill Rugh shows his Purple Heart in a 2011 portrait for The Register-Guard's "Call to Duty" series. He served in the Navy. (Paul Carter/The Register-Guard 2011)
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<p>Doctors said he would never again grow a beard, but he proved them wrong, she said.</p>
<p>Rugh suffered a bad reaction to medication administered during a heart procedure following his trip to Washington, D.C. He gets easily confused now, she explained.</p>
<p>But she recalled warmly the emotional welcome her husband and other veterans on the flight to Washington, D.C., received when they landed in Chicago.</p>
<p>“People were lined up and clapping,” she said, “wanting to hug them.”</p>
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