See our special report: D-Day, in the words of the Virginians who were there, which has first-hand accounts from 15 Virginia-based units.
Bob Sales lied about his age. He wanted to join the National Guard but was just 15.
His father didn’t seem too worried. “Don’t worry, because he won’t last a week,” his father told his mother. This was 1941, and the United States was still at peace.
The Amherst County teen who fibbed about his age lasted a lot more than a week, and, come one December morning that year, the United States was no longer at peace.
Eighty-one years ago today, Sales was on a boat bobbing in the waters off the coast of France. It was June 6, 1944, and an operation we remember today as D-Day, the largest successful amphibious assault in history. It may not have seemed that way to Sales at the time.
About a thousand yards from the shore, his company commander, Capt. Ettore Zappacosta, turned to his young radio operator. “Sales. Step up there and see what’s going on on the beach, if you can see anything.”
Sales peered over the edge of the landing craft toward the beaches of Normandy. It was a gray morning, following a storm. Sales’ company, B Company out of Lynchburg, was behind A Company out of Bedford County. As we know now, that Bedford-based company had been slaughtered on the beach, with 19 of its men dying that morning. It’s believed to be the largest per-capita loss of life for any American community in World War II, and the reason the National D-Day Memorial is today in Bedford. Sales didn’t know that, though, although he got a glimpse of the horror. “I can’t see ’em,” he told Zappacosta. “It looks like bodies laying on the beach, but I cannot tell.”
The landing crafts plowed on through the rough waters. They were 300 yards from shore when the German mortar fire started raining down. They kept going. About 75 yards from the beach, the British coxswain in charge of the craft said it wasn’t safe to go any closer. The landing craft stopped, and the ramp dropped down. Bullets now pinged off the metal hull. Zappacosta jumped out first and made it 10 feet before he was gunned down. “I’m hit,” Zappacosta cried out. He slipped under the water.
The second man jumped out of the landing craft and was shot dead before he hit the water. The third man made it into the water but was shot dead when he reached the beach. Sales was the fourth one out. He had a bulky radio strapped to his back. Whether because of his 35-pound load, or the choppy sea that was banging the ramp up and down, or both, Sales stumbled on the ramp and “fell sprawling into the water,” as the official account later described things. “It probably saved his life. Man by man, all of those leaving the ramp behind him were either killed or wounded.”
Sales finally got upright but hadn’t made it far when a mortar shell burst nearby, nearly knocking him out. Sales had the presence of mind to grab hold of a floating log before he blacked out. Reviving, Sales clutched the log to keep from drowning. For two hours, he drifted in the water. The incoming tide eventually took the log — and Sales — to shore, where he had strength enough left to roll it beyond the high-water mark. There, he hunkered down, using the log as a shield against German gunfire. In time, other soldiers joined him. One was a man who had been shot three times in the face. A medic arrived and bandaged him up. Then another soldier, shot three times in the leg, sought safety behind the log. Sales bandaged him.
Then they waited. “The dead washed up to where they lay and then washed back again,” the official report says. When the fighting died down, Sales and the others behind the log pulled the dead from the water.
Somehow, by the time the light faded from that bloody day, the Allied armies clung to a strip of land along the Normandy coast. The liberation of Europe was underway.
* * *
Last year marked the 80th anniversary of D-Day — a nice, round number that occasions reflection. We at Cardinal used that anniversary to publish the military’s official after-action reports from all the Virginia units involved in the operation. The account above is drawn from those reports, augmented by interviews Sales did in his later years with the BBC, the History News Network and The (Lynchburg) News & Advance. (Sales died in 2015 at age 89.)
The odd-numbered 81st anniversary today will doubtless draw less attention, although it shouldn’t. This is a good opportunity to look at just how successful those D-Day landings were, not just the first day, but in the overall context of the war.
For a time, the landings — we shouldn’t call them an “invasion” because we weren’t claiming European territory, we were liberating it — appeared stalled. The Allies made little progress, hemmed in by the tangle of French hedgerows, not to mention the German military. The Allies had hoped to reach the French town of Caen, 9.3 miles inland, on the first day. It took them until July 21. In time, Allied progress picked up. The Germans retreated across the Seine on Aug. 30.
Then, less than a year after the D-Day landings, the war in Europe was over. On April 30, 1945, Adolf Hitler put a gun to his head and pulled the trigger. On May 7, Germany formally surrendered. Months of fighting still lay ahead against Japan in the Pacific, but in Europe, World War II was now over.
On this day, 81 years ago, men like Sales were trying to make their way ashore in Normandy. On this day, 80 years ago, they were either preparing to go home or were dead. Six years of war — if you date World War II from Hitler’s invasion of Poland in 1939 — ended after an 11-month land campaign in Europe.
By the first anniversary of D-Day, the Allies were already deep in figuring out the details of administering an occupied Germany and the big picture of what the post-war world should look like. The conference that would lead to the founding of the United Nations was already underway in San Francisco. American generals were headed home — temporarily — to take part in victory parades. Gen. George Patton headlined a parade in Los Angeles that June; Gen. Dwight Eisenhower one in New York City. On the ground in Europe, Allied militaries were on the hunt for fugitive Nazi leaders.
Exactly one year from the D-Day landings, the Soviets announced that they had found Hitler’s burned remains, although there remains much dispute over whether they really did. Later in June, a Frenchman working with Belgian forces found the Nazi foreign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop; the following year he’d become the first of 10 Nazi officials led into a prison gymnasium at Nuremburg and dropped into eternity. They were hanged.
Much of Europe lay in ruins, its future in doubt. Pope Pius XII warned that June of “mobs of dispossessed, disillusioned, disappointed, hopeless men who are going to swell the ranks of revolution and disorder in the pay of a tyranny no less despotic than those for whose overthrow men planned.” Two more years would pass before a Virginia Military Institute graduate — Secretary of State George Marshall — would propose the reconstruction plan we know today as The Marshall Plan.
The Europe of today — indeed, the world of today — is far different than what anyone could have envisioned at war’s end. Germany is an ally; Europe as a whole is a global economic power. Although tensions remain in the Balkans and war rages in the east, where Russia is trying to take a piece out of Ukraine, most of the continent is at peace.
All that because young men such as Bob Sales were willing to jump into rough waters and wade toward the gunfire.
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