They’ll see you!’ I said, ‘Excuse me, they already know we’re here.’” I’d stand and look up and someone would say, ‘Get down. It’s funny how there’s a herd ?instinct that makes people take cover on an open beach. “I was blessed or cursed with a very intensive curiosity about everything. “You get fatalist, or you go crazy,” he said. Van Roosen knew his turn was coming soon. I looked at where they were going and there was a wall of tracers you wouldn’t believe.” The lights were on and the cargo doors were open. “About half an hour into the watch, we heard this roar ?behind us, and the whole airborne was flying overhead. “Around 1 o’clock in the morning someone woke me up and said, ‘You have to go on watch in the bow,’” he said. In the hours before the invasion, waiting aboard ship, Van Roosen saw waves of C-47s carrying paratroopers of the 101st and 82nd who jumped behind the beaches. “That two or three hours that it took us to get off the beach, we saw an aspect of war and world history that hopefully won’t have to be repeated.”
Five?miles of land covered in ?corpses,” Van Roosen said.
“Everything I saw was on such a grand scale that I knew it would never happen again. We looked at the guy next to us and we said, ‘Too bad, man.’” said Normand Drapeau, 89, of Holyoke, who as a Navy petty officer piloted?a landing craft to Omaha Beach 12 times under German fire before his boat struck a mine.ĭonald Van Roosen, 90, of Newton, enlisted as a Harvard sophomore, was a private when he waded ashore on Omaha with the 29th Infantry Division. “Before we left the harbor, they said, ‘Half of you will not be alive tomorrow.’ We didn’t say nothing. Three Massachusetts men who stormed the Normandy?beaches on June 6, 1944, ?believed they would not live to see nightfall, but 70 years later, they are among the last witnesses to the carnage of the largest amphibious invasion? of all time - what many consider the turning point of World War II.
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