My dad was at Utah beach... I guess that was lucky because that beach was not as contested.
However, he said that about a mile inland, German snipers were very busy and you had to walk bent over at the waist. He said he walked like that for so long, that he thought he’d have to walk like that for the rest of his life.
Anyway, he followed Patton across Europe to Germany. He had a lot of stories.
Get him in a talking mood and record him!!!
Then make a book
We need to hear it
A STORY OF TWO CIVILIAN WAR HEROES
June 6, 2013
On this anniversary of the Normandy invasion to liberate Europe, I am reminded of a couple of men that helped save America in two different wars, two different eras.
The first, my grandfather, participated in the War effort in the 1940’s as an electronic engineer developing something we take for granted every day in almost every aspect of our lives with one small exception, the speeding motorist. I’m talking about RADAR.
At the beginning of WWII, very few of our ships had the capability of detecting other ships and aircraft other than the eyeballs of the posted lookouts.
Radar was a very new technology that was still being refined and the United States Navy was in a race to get the latest technology installed on their warships.
My grandfather and grandmother put their lives on hold to spend an entire year in New York working for RCA in the 1940’s.
His job was to install a radar system on Navy ships that came in port one at a time. His team would board the ship, take measurements, engineer the plans and fabricate a working radar system for each ship.
Electronics engineers, machinists, welders and electricians swarmed the ship and after 2 or 3 days, the ship left port to go into harm’s way.
Later in life, my grandfather taught electronics engineering at Texas A&M. While I was serving in the US NAVY I got a call that he had passed away. I was at a radar school in San Diego.
The second, my father, spent 53 years working as a civilian for the Department of Defense at Kelly Air Force Base, Texas as an electronics engineer like his father.
Before being hired by the DoD, he was working as a broadcast engineer for a local radio station, but with a growing family, the need for higher pay and job security pressed him into applying for the job at Kelly AFB.
Eight months before I was born, he was hired and told to report on a day that was a federal holiday. He showed up anyway and was told to go home.
The next day he began a 53 year career that took him around the world and helped shaped world history.
Unfortunately, most of the details of his travels have to remain in the dark and unreported due to the sensitive nature of his job, however some of them can be told because they were long ago.
My father’s job as an electronics engineer was to design and install electronic listening devices on aircraft that would gather intelligence by collecting information on electronic transmissions and emanations known as Signals Intelligence, or SIGINT.
This was a fairly new method of gaining Intel in the 50’s and my father helped develop highly selective, very sensitive amplifiers and data collection devices that helped the US win the cold war.
During my childhood, I remember my father being gone for weeks at a time, returning in the late evening most of the time. My mother would grab all three of us boys and go pick up dad at Kelly Air Force Base because we only had one car.
Dad died on Good Friday of this year after suffering Alzheimer’s, but I remember the few stories he was allowed to tell us and I wanted to remember him and my grandfather on this day. They didn’t put their lives on the line like the boys of Normandy, but they played a small part in keeping America safe.
My grandfather was as well. When asked, he would say “they weren’t there as tourists”. He talked little of it until going to France for the 50th Anniversary. After that, we learned that he was “lucky” to have been in one of the later craft. I found it interesting that you mentioned they had to walk bent over at the waist- he had his hip shattered by rifle fire after he had made it inland “maybe a mile”. Makes me wonder if that was his highest point at that moment and gives me even more of a picture of him. He said he was propped up against a fence pole so that when medics got there they would recognize him as one that might live with their attention.