D-Day memories: Hampton Roads welcomes last surviving Army diver

Daily Press ^ | May 1, 2009 | Hugh Lessig

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NEWPORT NEWS — Jim Kennedy slogged onto Utah Beach in 1944 and saw the bloated bodies of American servicemen in the water.

The tide washed them out. The tide washed them back in.

It was three weeks after D-Day, June 6, 1944. The drama of the landing had passed, and the grim work of cleaning up the beach had begun. The Allies were pushing inward.

And Kennedy's own story was just about to start.

He belonged to a unit of U.S. Army deep sea divers who were dispatched to the port city of Cherbourg. The Allies had captured it after a bitter fight, and the Germans had done their best to make it unusable as a supply point.

Whatever could be sunk in the harbor was sunk. Among the debris were 24 rail cars crammed full of sea mines. The job of Kennedy and his crew: Clear the damn harbor.

He and fellow divers worked around the clock in two-man teams. They lifted out mines one by one. They strapped cables around chunks of wire-reinforced concrete — chunks as big as Buicks — and waited for a steam-operated crane to do the heavy lifting.

"They would bring it up," he recalled, "and at the very beginning, the minute it broke the surface, the cable would snap."

Lovely.

"Yeah, lovely is right," he said with a laugh.

He can smile about it today, at least once in a while.

Now 85 years old, Kennedy holds a special place in the rapidly disappearing World War II generation.

He is the last known surviving U.S. Army deep sea diver, and he is being honored this week in Williamsburg, where the U.S. Army Divers Association is holding its reunion.

[yarddog]

Yes the show was on “the History Channel” and if my memory is right they said the Combat Engineers suffered 80% casualties, doing just what you suggested.