HOLYOKE — Joseph Johns had never heard of Normandy, France, when he received his first combat assignment for the Navy in 1944.
On June 6, Johns was among 73,000 American troops who fought in the largest seaborne invasion in history, a day now remembered as D-Day. A total of 156,000 Allied troops stormed the beaches of Normandy by sea, land and air that day. Johns recalled his experience at Normandy on Wednesday, the eve of the invasion’s 75th anniversary.
“D-Day was a bad dream to me,” said Johns, 89, while sitting in the lobby of the Soldiers’ Home in Holyoke. He was 15 at the time of his recruitment into the Navy, living by the Okefenokee Swamp in Georgia with his Creek tribe. His indigenous name is Kayoni Wahali.
Asked if his age was a problem for enlisting, Johns responded, “They didn’t give a damn.”
D-Day, a military term for the first day of an operation, marked the start of the campaign to liberate Nazi-occupied northwestern Europe, and it began on the northern coast of France.
“When I got ashore, I crawled up a hill, and I couldn’t see any Germans,” Johns said. Many Allied soldiers lost their lives before seeing combat as they drowned attempting to swim ashore from their ships while carrying heavy equipment, but Johns said the swamp had made him a good swimmer.
“I could hear them firing in the distance, but I didn’t know where it was coming from,” Johns said. “I called back to the sergeant in charge, and I asked him, ‘What the hell does a German look like anyway?’”
It did not take long to find out. While crawling on the hills of the French beach, Johns came across a large pipe coming out of the ground where he could hear people speaking German. They were Nazi soldiers waiting to fire upon Allied troops with a machine gun from a hole hidden on the side of a hill.
“I reached back and got a hand grenade and dropped it down that pipe,” Johns said. He shot at German soldiers the rest of the night, and it was not until the next day that he was told there were 15 Germans in the hideout. “I just did my duty of firing a machine gun.”
Johns served as part of the Underwater Demolition Teams, also called frogmen, which were the precursor to the modern-day U.S. Navy SEALs. Johns served a total of 24 years in the Navy, with tours in Korea and Vietnam.
Many consider D-Day among the most consequential days of World War II. On that single day, up to 4,400 Allied troops died, while an estimated 9,000 were wounded or missing. The total number of German casualties is unknown, with estimates ranging from 4,000 to 9,000.
The Battle of Normandy, which lasted from June to August 1944, claimed over 100,000 Allied and German troops, as well as the lives of around 20,000 French civilians as a result of military bombings.
Edward Wrobleski, a 102-year-old WWII veteran living at the Soldiers’ Home, remembers listening to the invasion of Normandy on the radio while stationed at an airfield in Montgomery, Alabama. He is a Hatfield native who enlisted in the Air Force at the age of 25.
Wrobleski said he signed up for the Air Force after the bombing at Pearl Harbor, and eventually, he helped build the first B-29 bombers in Seattle. He served from 1942 to 1946.
“We knew it was a very important day,” Wrobleski said of D-Day. “Everything closed down like a holiday, and we listened to the radio … It was a horrible assignment, but it was necessary.”
Luis Fieldman can be reached at lfieldman@gazettenet.com.