by Barry Hastings
Seventy-one years ago next Saturday, in Burton Heights (Grand Rapids) a group of young boys were playing “Army” a block or so west of Division Avenue. We’d just eliminated Hitler as a threat, and were searching for Mussolini and Tojo.
We’d taken a break to look over a batch of black and white puppies my mom and our downstairs neighbor had hung in socks on the clothes line out back, to take photos. I faintly remember seeing those puppy pictures later in life (teen years, perhaps), but they’ve completely disappeared from what records family members now hold. They were very cute.
It was a bright, sunny morning in Burton Heights. We’d released the pink-nosed puppies from their sock-cells, and they ran here and there in the back yard, chased by a bunch of squealing boys and girls being admonished by mothers, aunts and grandmothers to be careful, as they were only “babies.”
Shortly after our moms returned the puppies to their mom, our immediate world changed — very suddenly. Women (old and young) erupted from neighboring houses and apartments, shouting, screaming, crying, laughing, drinking beer, hugging one another, and hugging the kids. It all played out to background music of clanging church bells, and screaming factory whistles across the city, the state, the nation.
It was happening up and down our street, and the folks we couldn’t see, we could very clearly hear.
It was D-Day —June 6, 1944, and though we didn’t quite understand why the buzz, it marked the beginning of the end for Europe’s “supermen,” and beginning of the last 11 months of the greatest, deadliest, war in human history.
Within a very short period of time, as I remember (6 years old), the shouts of joy and exhilaration slowed, then ceased, as reality of what was happening on the Normandy shore sank in. Women, old and young, the old men in the neighborhood, and soon even the children, more or less spontaneously, dropped to their knees in prayer for loved ones shedding blood on the distant shore of a foreign land we children could hardly imagine. We knew our dad was a soldier, he’d been drafted late in the war because he had three children (and was himself, at the moment, slated for a trip to Okinawa in the far Pacific).
His brother was an early arrival at Normandy, and fought out the remainder of the war with General Patton’s Third Army. He was a sergeant in an engineering (tank retrieval) outfit, and, handed a rifle, fought at the “Bulge” in December ’44, and early January ’45.
At the very moment we were gathered in our yard, my mom’s close childhood friend, Michael George McPharlin (a Hastings boy), was crashing his P-51 Mustang fighter near Evreux, France, where he died after serving nearly three years flying Spitfires for the RAF (Nr. 71, Eagle Squadron), and nearly two years more in the Fourth U.S. Fighter Group, U.S. Army Air Corps. He was one week short of his 31st birthday. His only child, a girl, was born a few days later.
Such sacrifices occurred nearly 4,000 times in Normandy and France that day. The small town of Bedford, Va., lost 29 sons, brothers, dads, in a matter of a few hours.
German soldiers guarding the Normandy coast that morning were greeted at sunrise by the largest armada ever assembled, seemingly rising out of the sea on their very doorstep. Nearly six thousand ships and vessels – aircraft carriers, battleships, cruisers, destroyers, frigates, corvettes, LST’s, LSM’s, merchant ships of every age and description, discharging tens of thousands British, American, Free French, Polish soldiers — all frightened nearly speechless — and two colossal floating docks. With their sights firmly set on Berlin… and Adolph Hitler, the fighting men swarmed ashore. Many, too many, died before they could reach the beach.
Though the issue remained in doubt for much of the day, by sunset many thousands of paratroopers, infantrymen, tankers and support troops were firmly lodged ashore. Though many days of tough (and deadly) combat followed, preceding the breakout from Normandy, the writing was on the wall for the “master race.” Those Yankee soldiers Kaiser Bill (WWI) referred to as “noodles,” and Hitler himself deemed “decadent,” would, in less than a year of heavy combat, reduce the German Army to ruins and Germany to ashes.
They’ve been my heroes my whole life long. The many accomplishments of the American people during those years are too numerous to list, but here’s a sample. Early in the war much of our surface fleet was damaged or destroyed at Pearl Harbor. Next day we had three aircraft carriers — later reduced to two. Upon surrender of the Japanese (a few months after Germans quit) the nation had 16 carriers larger that anything existing on Dec. 7, ’41. In addition there were dozens – yes dozens – of smaller light carriers, and even more, smaller still, “jeep” carriers.
Henry Kaiser was launching a “Liberty (merchant type) ship” a day, and the first of his improved “Victory ship’s” were already at war. Eleven million Americans were under arms — a total of more than 15 million American men and women served. In the year before Pearl Harbor, America produced 4,000 airplanes of all types, for military and civil aviation. Between December of ’41, and September ’45, Americans produced nearly 450,000 aircraft, arming the Brits, France, Free Poles, China, and the Soviet Union, (where we also sent a couple hundred-thousand Studebaker and Dodge Trucks, many ships, aircraft, rifles, ammo, millions of tons of food staples). And this does not scratch the surface of American generosity.
Well, that was then. This is now, and today we can’t get it together in 14 years to defeat and destroy a bunch of ignorant “rag-heads” who’ve set half the world ablaze, and have the other half in fear of it.
Today, I’m almost ashamed to present our case to Uncle Burke, Uncle Bill, Pop, and his pal Corky Laurent, Mickey McPharlin, and the boys from Bedford, Va.