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Published: June 06, 2009 04:30 am
2 Oneonta men remain witnesses to D-Day, 65 years later
By Jake Palmateer
Staff Writer
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It has been 65 years since D-Day, but the memories haven’t faded for two Oneonta men who fought in the invasion of Normandy, the Allied offensive that was a turning point in Europe during World War II.
Marshall Smith was a sailor aboard an American minesweeper that helped protect the invasion force.
Ernest Goodman was an infantryman fighting with the elite British Coldstream Guards. Both volunteered for the military as teenagers.
From his eighth-floor apartment at Nader Towers, Smith, 83, spoke fondly of the Navy and his ship, the YMS-349.
“I loved it,” Smith said. “I wouldn’t change it for nothing.”
Smith was 17 years old when he got his father’s signature allowing him to enlist in the Navy, he recalled.
The year was 1943. That winter, his 270-ton minesweeper sailed for England as part of a convoy that included 40 merchant ships, troop carriers, 12 minesweepers, eight destroyers and two light cruisers, Smith said.
The smallest ships, the minesweepers, were placed on the outside of the formation.
“I was in the Navy long enough to know we were over there for an invasion. We didn’t know when it was going to be,” Smith said. “It was very hush-hush.”
By June 1944, the Soviet Union had turned the tide of war on the Eastern Front against the Germans and had retaken much of the land seized by the Wehrmacht, or German armed forces, in 1941 and 1942.
The Allies had invaded southern Europe through Sicily in 1943, opening up a second front in the war.
An invasion of northwestern Europe was designed by Allied strategists to open up a third front that would ultimately lead to a march on Germany itself and the fall of the Third Reich. Operation Overlord was its code name.
Great Britain in early 1944 swelled with troops from across the globe preparing for the invasion.
Goodman’s road to war with the British Army started in Germany. A native of Breslau, he fled to England as part of the kindertransport, an initiative to evacuate predominately Jewish children from Nazi Germany and German-occupied territories.
Goodman’s escape happened a week before the Nazi invasion of Poland on Sept. 1, 1939.
“I was one of the luckiest people in the world,” Goodman said from the small office at his hillside home.
Drafts of the 84-year-old’s memoirs lay stapled together on a desk near his laptop computer, and books about the war line his shelves. A former political science professor at the State University College at Oneonta, Goodman said he did farmwork until he enlisted in the British Army at the age of 18, eager to fight the Nazis.
“We knew that there was an evil empire. A cancer, really. And that cancer had to be removed,” Goodman said. “This was a gangster regime.”
There was another motivating factor, he said.
“We knew about the concentration camps,” Goodman said.
Goodman was eventually assigned to the elite Coldstream Guards _ a rarity for a non-British citizen, he said.
“Everyone knew there was an invasion coming,” Goodman said.
As Goodman trained with the Coldstream Guards, Smith and his minesweeper moved between several ports on the British coast.
Smith said he enjoyed his time in England, especially the port of Plymouth, frequently getting out to see the sights.
Three days before D-Day, the sailors were confined to their ship. It was then they knew something big was about to happen, Smith said.
D-Day was originally planned for June 5, but bad weather caused a one-day delay.
The invasion
On the first day of Operation Overlord, about 160,000 troops landed on beaches the Allies named Gold, Juno, Sword, Omaha and Utah, as well as at Pointe du Hoc. Another 195,700 sailors and merchantmen, including Smith, served aboard more than 5,000 ships that supported the landings.
About 20,000 Allied paratroopers and glider troops landed behind enemy lines during the night before the amphibious assault at dawn. Overhead, thousands of airmen flew combat and reconnaissance missions.
Smith said his ship was tasked with clearing safe lanes of navigation for the invasion fleet and were assigned to support the landings at Omaha Beach, where the heaviest D-Day casualties were suffered.
During the invasion, the 14-inch guns of the 23,000-ton battleship U.S.S. New York fired from about 1,000 yards away, the massive shells passing overhead, Smith recalled.
“That was nice to know they were there,” he said. “The adrenaline was so high that you had no fear, just anxiety about doing it right.”
The landing craft went ashore, and the initial waves of men were raked with machine gun, mortar and artillery fire from the hardened German positions. As he sat in his apartment this week, Smith reflected on the horrific casualties he said he knew were being taken on the beach. He paused and covered his face with his right hand. Tears welled.
“It was that bad. It was that bad,” Smith said. “D-Day was not a good day.”
Ships were hit. Bodies floated near the boat.
“You cannot understand the feeling of something like that,” Smith said. “It was not nice.”
But Smith said he knew the job had to be done.
“Secret work,” then over to Normandy
D-Day was ultimately a tactical and strategic success despite heavy losses in men and equipment.
Allied casualties were estimated at about 10,000 dead and wounded, with 1,465 Americans killed. By the end of August, there were more than 2 million men fighting against the Germans in northern France.
“The Guards didn’t go over right away on D-Day,” Goodman said.
Goodman said on June 6, he was involved in “secret work” in Newhaven, England _ work he said may never be declassified.
But the Guards soon found themselves in Normandy carrying the fight to the Germans.
The troops were short on food, ammunition and other supplies, he said.
“Everything had to be brought from the beaches,” Goodman said.
Goodman said that in the initial defense of northern France, the German Army relied heavily on horses and troops from countries it occupied. The stench of burned human and animal flesh remains with him, he said.
Later, the Germans brought more skilled units to bear against the Allies, including paratroopers.
“That was a tough bunch,” Goodman said.
The going was slow for the Allies. Caen, a key D-Day objective, was not taken by Allied forces until weeks later.
Goodman said he and the Coldstream Guard were involved in the operation to close the Falaise Pocket, which began after Caen was liberated. That battle resulted in the capture of an estimated 50,000 German soldiers by Aug. 21. Paris was liberated four days later.
The Coldstream Guards continued to pushed hard through northern France and Belgium.
Goodman said he was wounded when an enemy patrol ran into Allied lines in Belgium. The patrol opened fire and Goodman was hit in the arm. He contracted rheumatic fever while recovering from his wound.
There were 12 minesweepers in the YMS-349’s flotilla and all survived D-Day, Smith said, but four were destroyed by mines in the weeks and months afterward.
Even though the Germans had been pushed away from the beach heads, the threat from mines remained.
If the small minesweepers, which carried about three dozen men each, were to strike a contact mine, it would devastate the ship, leaving only those who were on deck with a chance of escaping, he said.
“You had to be lucky to survive,” he said.
On one occasion, the minesweepers were also fired on from shore by German 88 mm guns in areas that were bypassed by the Allied advance, Smith said.
“None of us got hit, luckily,” he said.
The D-Day beachhead was 50 miles wide. Later, after the Germans were driven from coastal areas, the minesweepers cleared mines along the French coast from Cherbourg to Brest.
“We swept a lot of mines,” Smith said.
Thousands died in push toward German surrender
Between D-Day and when the last German forces retreated across the Seine River about three months later, 36,976 Allied soldiers were killed _ more than nine times the number of coalition deaths during the six-plus years of the Iraq war.
Eleven months after D-Day, Germany surrendered, ending a war that killed tens of millions and wrought untold devastation on millions more.
Goodman said the removal of the Nazi regime was a just cause.
“We fought for the redemption of civilization. We wanted to give history another chance,” Goodman said. “It was the absolutely essential battle that had to be fought. We had to get rid of that bunch of gangsters.”
Goodman became a British citizen after the war and in 1953 moved to the United States. He later became a U.S. citizen and had a long career in higher education.
After the war, Smith went to work in a New Jersey factory. He retired and later moved to Otsego County.
Smith said he tries not to think too much about what he saw on D-Day.
“I usually put it out of my mind,” he said. “It never really disappears.”
Although 16 million men and women served in the U.S. Armed Forces during World War II, there were only about 2.5 million still alive in October 2008, according to the Veterans Administration.
They are dying at a rate of 900 a day, according to the VA’s figures.
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