HANOVER — In the memoir he hopes his great-grandchildren will read someday, World War II Army veteran John Yocom recalls landing on France’s Normandy coast in 1944, a few months after D-Day.
“Unlike those poor devils of the previous June, we did not have to face enemy fire as we disembarked,” writes Yocom, now 96 and living at Kendal at Hanover. “The steep, sandy cliffs looming over the beach had provided the Germans with perfect vantage points for taking easy pot-shots at the GIs struggling through the surf and across the beach with heavy packs. … I have been eternally grateful to those brave, young fellows.”
And while Pvt. 1st Class John Yocom dodged his share of bullets and mortars during the 84th Infantry’s ensuing advance through Nazi-occupied western Europe into Germany, he continues to count his blessings on the eve of the 75th anniversary of the landing of more than 150,000 Allied forces in Normandy.
“If I’d gone in that first wave,” Yocom said during an interview at Kendal last week, “I might not have survived.”
Most historians estimate that out of nearly 10,000 casualties on June 6, 1944 — among them 6,603 Americans, 2,700 British and almost 1,000 Canadians — the Allied forces endured more than 4,000 deaths, many of them drowning in rough surf before German bullets hit them on their way from their landing craft to the beach.
Before he died in 2017, longtime Norwich resident Clint Gardner spoke and wrote often of the mayhem he witnessed and suffered as a 21-year-old officer and scout for an anti-aircraft artillery unit on Omaha Beach.
“Bullets and mortars flying everywhere, hundreds of dead bodies in the surf and on the beach,” Gardner, then living at Kendal at Hanover, told the Valley News in 2014, for a story published on the 70th anniversary of the invasion. “It was total chaos, a complete fiasco, the worst sector to be in.”
Things didn’t improve on dry land. In a foxhole later that afternoon, fragments from a mortar pierced Gardner’s helmet, opening a wound that medics treated for 24 hours, until he could be evacuated to England.
“Someone from (England’s) Imperial War Museum told me the hole in the helmet was the largest of any survivor in World War I and II,” Gardner said in 2014. “They wanted the helmet. I told them I wanted it to show my grandchildren.”
Bob Christie heard Gardner’s story, and he came to know his fellow veteran and Kendal resident, while contributing his recollections of the Battle of the Bulge to World War II Remembered, the book of frontline and homefront reminiscences that Gardner assembled and edited in 2011.
Last week, Christie recalled that he was training tank teams for the 11th Armored Division in Lompoc, Calif., in the late spring of 1944, while the Allies were preparing for Operation Overlord.
“I didn’t hear about the D-Day invasion until two days after it actually happened,” said Christie, now 95. “We were coming in from some field exercises, and when we got back to the base, we got the news.”
And while they knew they would be joining the fight in Europe, the then-21-year-old Christie wasn’t sure where or how. Finally, after crossing the Atlantic on the converted British luxury liner Aquitania — worrying all the way about torpedoes from U-boats — he joined the Third Armored Division’s 33rd Regiment for the bloody, frightening Battle of the Bulge over the frigid winter of 1944-45.
After retiring from a long career in medicine, mostly in northern New Hampshire, in the late 1990s, Christie wrote a memoir of his experience for his descendants. Eventually, Christie turned it into a semi-autobiographical novel, Fate’s Finger, that features almost all guts and next-to-no glory.
“Every day I put my feet on the floor,” Christie said. “I’m thankful.”
Christie added that he looks forward to sharing Battle of the Bulge stories with Yocom, an environmental-engineering consultant who moved to Kendal from his native Ohio in 2016, and perhaps to help Yocom organize and revise his own written recollections.
“I’ve seen him casually in the hall,” Christie said. “He’s only other guy here I know who went through it.”
In addition to war stories, Yocom expects to utter a few more words of praise for the landing forces who did a lot of the heavy lifting for soldiers like him 75 years ago this week. In 1994, during a visit to the D-Day sites and ceremonies in Normandy with friends from England, he and his wife honored the 9,400 fellow Americans resting in the cemetery at Colleville-sur-Mer.
“That was an amazing experience, knowing what those guys had to do,” he said. “It was touch-and-go.”
David Corriveau can be reached at dcorriveau@vnews.com and at 603-727-3304.