(The following story by Peter Johnson appeared on the Great Falls Tribune website on June 6.)
GREAT FALLS, Mont. — The huge D-Day invasion 60 years ago June 6 that started Nazi Germany’s downfall brings bittersweet memories to two Great Falls area participants who’ve only begun to talk about their World War II deeds in recent years.
“I consider myself pretty fortunate as well as blessed,” said retired Great Falls train engineer Bill Wilson, 80, who worked with the sea transports that landed 130,000 men on the shores of Normandy. “We left so many men over there and had so many wounded. It’s a little tough to talk about.”
Retired Choteau rancher Bud Olson, 82, an Army paratrooper, said letters from his then-fiancée and now-wife Vi kept his spirits up after all the suffering he saw.
He was the only survivor among 30 men on a glider that crash-landed five miles inland from the Normandy beach. Some 23,000 paratroopers were dropped from the sky by 10,000 transport planes and gliders.
The Allies suffered more than 10,000 casualties the first day of the operation alone, including 2,500 deaths.
“Looking back, I had some good experiences, too, and was really lucky to be working with people who really knew what they were doing,” Olson said.
Shooting rattlers
He joined the U.S. Army in 1942 shortly after the Pearl Harbor attack and was assigned to the 82nd Airborne Division. He had grown up shooting rattlesnakes on a farm south of Great Falls and his excellent marksmanship impressed a colonel who sent him to special training schools.
Olson volunteered for glider duty and soon was the only member of his battalion assigned to Gen. Dwight Eisenhower’s headquarters to help plan the D-Day invasion.
“I can’t remember what happened last week,” he quipped, “but I vividly recall what happened that morning.”
His glider unit was set to launch on D-Day but was delayed a day because of the fog.
Eisenhower warned the paratroopers that 30 percent might not survive the glider landings, “and told us to ‘give our lives dearly,’ ” Olson recalled. “I wanted to say, ‘My life is not for sale,’ but kept my mouth shut.”
Olson was given a silk scarf printed with a map of Normandy, to help direct the lead glider pilot to the right landing spot.
“I was standing in the nosecone of the glider when we passed 900 feet above Omaha Beach where our solders were still trying to establish a foothold,” he said.
A short time later, the glider’s tow plane was shot down and the glider pilot cut the rope loose. That gave him 90 seconds to pick out a field in which to land among tall hedgerows.
The glider crash-landed and when Olson came to his senses, he was underneath the wheel, with an injured back and torn pant leg. But the 29 others on the glider had perished.
Germans surrendered
Some 1,500 paratroopers on 56 trailing gliders had landed, and French patriots were arriving to help, so most of the older German troops nearby surrendered.
The Allied paratroopers were about five miles inland from the beach and had missed their landing zone, but soon were able to perform their mission of blockading roads so the Nazis couldn’t bring reinforcements to the Normandy beach.
A few days later Olson was part of a small unit that took out a German machine gun near the Mederet River and led troops through intense fire. He was awarded the Bronze Star for his actions.
Action in Holland
Later his outfit took part in the glider invasion of Holland, where his 13-member crew again crash-landed. Dutch patriots wearing orange armbands got to the downed paratroopers first and pulled a fast one on the Nazis.
The Dutch got somebody to start a fire on Allied-held soil and hid the 13 men in a horse drawn fire tank truck and transported them to safety under the guise of rushing to the fire.
Olson also took part in the Battle of the Bulge, his “absolute low point of the war.” As a staff sergeant, he assigned 90 green replacements to work with more veteran troops. About 80 of the replacement troops were killed in battle the next day, while most of the savvy troops survived.
“The veteran troops were like gophers who learned that, if you’re shot at once, you don’t stick your heads out a second time,” Olson recounted sadly.
Fairfield dropout
Wilson was born and raised in Great Falls before his family homesteaded on the Greenfield Bench.
He dropped out of Fairfield High after his sophomore year to earn money and training with one of President Roosevelt’s Civilian Conservation Corps work crews.
Wilson tried to join the Army at age 16 and the Marines the next year, but his father wouldn’t give his consent.
He finally enlisted in the Navy in November 1942 at age 19 and was trained as an engine mechanic.
He and Great Falls railroad buddy Joe Klesh both were hoping for duty maintaining submarine or PT boat engines.
Wilson was disappointed to be assigned to amphibious ships, not realizing that planning was under way for history’s largest invasion.
His friend Joe was assigned to a PT boat and was killed in February 1945 at age 22 in the protracted Battle of Luzon in the Philippines.
Wilson got to southern England in November 1943, where his unit spent the next six months in training maneuvers.
“We knew something big was up with all the people and ships that were training,” he said. “But our leaders kept us in the dark about what was planned.’
By late spring he sensed something would happen soon because the twin harbors of Portland and Weymouth were jammed with ships, some taking feinting actions to fool the monitoring Germans.
‘The black gang’
Wilson was a member of what was jokingly called “the black gang” because he normally worked below deck keeping the very hot diesel engines running on a landing ship tank, or LST, that was longer than a football field.
He would play a more visible role during the D-Day landing.
Wilson’s LST 374 began sailing in a convoy of other ships just after midnight on June 6, crossing the English Channel in about eight hours.
Recognizing the greater risk, his supervising officer assigned Wilson and another unmarried sailor a special role.
They would be in charge of a Higgins landing craft that would usher several smaller amphibious supply trucks called ducks toward a departure point closer to the beach.
From his vantage point a half mile from shore on the dark day, Wilson said he could hear “a tremendous hullabaloo of noise” as German snipers in concrete pillboxes shelled the Allied troops trying to land on the beach.
The battle was touch and go for hours, and Wilson said he couldn’t tell if the Allied mission was succeeding.
“But it didn’t look good when I saw bodies and body parts floating by and staining the surf pink,” he said, adding that there were so many casualties that Coast Guard ships picked up only the wounded soldiers and left the corpses.
Finally, Allied soldiers were able to break through some of the German lines, but at a tremendous loss of life.
Over the next several days, weeks and months, Wilson and his Navy mates used the Higgins boats as workhorses to shuttle men and equipment back and forth between England and the continent.
At one point Wilson got to tour one of the nearly impenetrable Nazi pillboxes built into the cliffs above the beach. It was made of concrete nearly four feet thick.
On leave in London
In the coming months Wilson would get a few five-day leaves and travel to London by train.
“It was nearly destroyed by German bombing and the grateful British people welcomed us with open arms,” he said, recalling that he liked English pubs and fish and chips, but couldn’t stand the way they brewed coffee.
Wilson wasn’t mustered out of the Navy until early 1946, but happened to be in New York City on leave when the victory in Europe was celebrated on May 8, 1945.
“It was crazy and so crowded you couldn’t move,” he said.
Wilson went back to work for the railroad, rising to locomotive engineer and working until age 70 in 1993.
But he would go home after work and stare at the walls the first several months after the war, still shell-shocked, as were many of his war comrades over what he’d seen on D-Day.
Wilson didn’t marry until 1958. He described his war experiences a few times to his wife, Eddie, but usually clammed up around their three children.
“I didn’t think anybody wanted to hear me refight old battles,” Wilson said. “Besides, the war was something I’d just as soon forget because of the unpleasant memories it brought up.”
Son proud of dad
But his son Bill, a state legislator and railroad engineer, began gently pressing his father for information after seeing the award-winning 1998 movie, “Saving Private Ryan” that begins with a graphic re-creation of troops trying to land under heavy fire at Omaha Beach.
“I’ve got a lot of pride in my dad for being part of the war effort and needed to know more about what he did,” the younger Wilson said.
“It did feel good to let out a little steam and tell him some of the stories I’d kept bottled up inside me,” said the elder Wilson.
“I was just a little cog and I know a lot of people who served in World War II have their own tough situations to deal with,” he added.
“I’m glad I did my part and got back successfully. The only thing that bothers me is that we’ve had so many wars and conflicts since World War II. Haven’t we learned anything? Lord only knows how we’re going to get out of this Iraq situation.”
Olson said he didn’t talk much about his war experiences for the first 40 years.
“Then my grandson, Jim Olson, urged me to talk to school kids about what was fast becoming a forgotten era,” he said.
Olson now talks regularly to schools in Choteau and neighboring towns and even has personalized “D-Day 44” license plates on his pick-up truck that lead to frequent parking lot conversations.
Choteau school counselor and friend Shelly Johnson said Olson enthralls students with his very human stories about war.
He told the students about sharing coffee and even pictures of girlfriends or wives with German soldiers during an attempted truce and then having to shoot at the same soldiers a few hours later when the negotiation effort failed.
Olson also brought tears to the children’s eyes when he told how he shared food with a starving little German girl in Berlin after peace was reached in Europe.
“I was a patriot and I’m still a patriot,” Olson said. “My four years in the military was the biggest and best adventure I ever had. But make damn sure you don’t make me out to be a hero. I was just an ordinary soldier.”