This is a story about a veteran from my home town. The Cadillac paper ran this story. You can read it here:
http://www.cadillacnews.com/news_story/?story_id=1819107&year=2014&issue=20140606&fb_action_ids=10152181261482781&fb_action_types=og.likes#prettyPhoto
Wendell Holmes is 88 years old. Behind his Tustin home is his pride and joy, a greenhouse filled with vegetable plants. But his passion is buying and selling furs. A former trapper, he now pores over trade magazines to check fur prices in China, Korea and Scandinavia.
The pelts he buys at local auctions are shipped to Canada and sold all over the world.
Holmes is a World War II veteran with two Silver Stars, one pinned on his chest by Gen. George Patton, who told him: "We're still alive because of good men like you."
He was just 18 when he landed on Omaha Beach on June 6, 1944. It was the bloodiest and hardest-fought battle of the invasion of Normandy. It was a day he has spent his entire life trying to forget.
The beaches of Normandy
D-Day is a military term that means the day an operation starts.There have been many D-Days, but the Allied invasion of Normandy owns the term.
The Normandy Landings took place on June 6, 1944, along the coast of France on five beaches that face the English Channel: Omaha, Sword, Gold, Utah and Juno.
Wendell Holmes is one of the few remaining eyewitnesses to that historic day. After being drafted in 1943, he was sent to invade France. Many servicemen lost their lives that day, and on Omaha, nothing went as planned.
"Normandy was an American victory," stated the Atlantic Monthly in 1960. "But the story of Omaha was an epic human tragedy which, in the early hours, bordered on total disaster."
Holmes agreed to share his recollections of landing on Omaha Beach 70 years ago but added that there were things about war he would never speak about.
After crossing the English Channel, troops were transferred from large ships onto amphibious boats that were supposed to land on the beach. Instead, strong winds and tides caused some troops to be dropped into deep water.
Holmes was waiting to unload when he noticed that men were sinking under the weight of their gear.
"The first few soldiers jumping off yelled back at us to drop our backpacks because the water was too deep," Holmes recalled. "I don't know how deep it was because (when I jumped), there were a lot of bodies underneath (me.) A lot of them drowned."
Many who made it to shore were mowed down by German machine gunners, who had been ordered to fire when the men were knee deep.
"The water was red — nobody can imagine what it was like," Holmes explained to the Cadillac News in 2009. "You see movies, but when it came down to the real thing, it's a different ball game. It's always on your mind — you never forget."
The German assault came from bunkers that hadn't been destroyed in air raids the night before. The hail of enemy fire continued all day.
Holmes made it to the beach by noon and was pinned down until nightfall.
"We lay on the beach for hours before we dared move.I saw a lot of people shot next to me. It was pretty sickening. When it got dark, we got up and ran."
Omaha Beach is six miles wide and surrounded by cliffs. That night, the men had to climb.
Surviving that battle was one down and four major battles to go. The men of the Third Army spent 281 days in combat and fought their way across 24 major rivers. They liberated 150 cities and towns. They captured 956,000 enemy troops and killed or wounded 500,000 others, fighting until Victory in Europe Day, May 8, 1945.
Fighting across France into Germany
"From Omaha, my dad pushed into France and Germany," explained Tom Holmes. "By then, a lot of his unit was wiped out and pretty thin. Dad saw a lot of American soldiers die of exposure. When they made the invasion in June, they thought the war would be over before winter. That winter was one of the coldest ever in Europe. The Americans didn't have much clothing. He had men die in fox holes with him."
Tom believes he father survived because he "was a farm boy from Tustin." Holmes quit school at 14 to help his dad and worked long hours to feed a household of 13.
Not long after surviving D-Day, the soldiers who pushed through France found themselves in the Battle of the Bulge, a prolonged battle in the Ardennes Mountains. By then, only eight men were left out of 120 in his company. During this battle, Holmes was captured by Germans but made a daring escape six days later. The Allies were surrounded by Germans until Patton's Third Army arrived to break the stalemate. Holmes joined Patton in the 11th armored division and fought in three more major battles.
From there, they fought through Belgium and Luxembourg and reached the Rhineland on March 9, 1945. They crossed the Rhine River and headed toward Berlin before heading southeast. Moving into Austria, they liberated the Mauthausen-Gusen group of concentration camps, releasing thousands of starving prisoners. Mauthausen was a camp for educated members of the countries taken over by Hitler. The method of death was "extermination through slave labor."
Holmes noted that he "was almost killed" by Germans at one of the concentration camps. When he was hospitalized for shrapnel wounds, he met his future wife, Theresa. Her chilling story is also one of bravery. She fled Hungary at 15 to escape the Russians, who were known to brutalize women. Captured by the Germans, she was taken to the Baltic Sea for hard labor. Too malnourished to work, she was sent to a German youth camp to be executed. She escaped, made her way to Austria, and was given a job in the hospital where Wendell was being treated.
Allied victory parade in Nuremberg
On April 25, 1945, the U.S. Army took Nuremberg, home of Hitler's rally grounds and shrine to Nazism. There, Holmes marched in a victory parade with Allied troops led by Patton, who personally shook Holmes' hand and pinned a Silver Star on his chest.
After the victory in Europe, Homes was on a boat headed for the invasion of Japan when the war ended.
Theresa and Wendell Holmes have been married for 67 years and have four children: Tom Holmes, Joey Holmes, daughter Vickie Pangborn, and one deceased son.
Holmes received an honorary high school diploma from Traverse City Central High School in 2007, along with his granddaughter. The ceremony was held in the auditorium at Interlochen Arts Academy. He received a standing ovation.
