And the Lord God made all kinds of trees grow out of the ground trees that were pleasing to the eye and good for food. In the middle of the garden were the tree of life and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.
October 10
The young French girl was fast asleep when the walls of her house seemed to shake. She then heard loud voices and got out of bed to see what was happening. The nine-year-old Marie-T Lavieille opened the door to the kitchen and saw a strange sight. A large man was seated in the middle of the room. His face was painted black, and he was wearing a helmet with leaves and a khaki uniform full of pockets. He was holding his right arm and speaking words that she could not understand. Her mother and brothers stood around him as he kept saying over and over, “Broken, broken.” After a while, the injured man bandaged his own shoulder and gave Marie a chocolate bar from one of his pockets. One of her brothers drove him somewhere to get medical attention. It was a night she would never forget. Her family had helped an American paratrooper of the 82nd Airborne Division. Marie later said of the incident:
‘Broken’—this first English word remains burned in my memory. For me, I was just 9 years old—and because of this extraordinary experience—I became an English professor, often serving as an interpreter during ceremonies of the anniversary of D-Day.423
Sometimes we forget how impressionable a child can be. My wife and I once met an extremely talented illustrator of children’s books. I will never forget his concern for how a young mind might perceive his artwork. He was convinced that a violent image could be fixed in the memory of a child, with lasting consequences. In our present age of television and video games this seems like an almost quaint notion: to guard the images and protect the minds of our children. The story of Marie and the paratrooper is a reminder of how important it is to keep trying, no matter how difficult is seems. A child’s images are lasting. We need to make sure that as many as possible are wholesome and uplifting.
But if anyone causes one of these little ones who believe in me to sin, it would be better for him to have a large millstone hung around his neck and to be drowned in the depths of the sea.
October 11
Hours before daylight on D-Day four men in a rubber boat approached Omaha Beach. Three Navy frogmen dropped off into the water. The fourth man, Lt. William Smith, continued to the beach where he crawled ashore in darkness and dug a shallow foxhole for protection. His dangerous mission was to get to the beach undetected and to adjust naval gunfire by radio.
Lieutenant Smith, or “Smitty” as he was called, understood his overwhelming responsibility. He had landed in North Africa and Sicily, and knew what the weapons hidden above him could do to troops and landing craft. He was a twenty-seven-year-old veteran, handpicked for this new and untried assignment, and had trained for weeks in the difficult art of coordinating the fire of moving ships against stationary targets.
Smitty was also a very religious man. When he packed his duffel bag, the last thing in and the first thing out was his Bible. When he wasn’t on the job, his first priority was reading it, and he did this every night without fail. He also turned to God frequently in prayer. His son later described how he prepared for his D-Day mission:
He had long ago resolved himself to the near certainty of his own death. He was going to call fire as long as he had a single breath in his body. He would leave his own fate, and thus the fate of many of those coming ashore in his sector, to God… he asked only that God look out for them. As usual, there was no thought of his personal safety. On this day God certainly had more important things to think about than him.424
At the end of a long and harrowing day on Omaha Beach, Smitty turned off his radio and thanked God, not for his own survival, but that he had been able to do his job successfully. He also said a prayer for “those brave, brave men that had fallen in service to their nation, and their God.”425 He was awarded the Bronze Star for his heroic actions on D-Day.
Sing to the Lord a new song, for he has done marvelous things; his right hand and his holy arm have worked salvation for him.
October 12
The boat ride to Omaha Beach was somewhat peaceful until the ramp of the landing craft went down. Sgt. Hy Haas looked out on a scene of pure terror. Smoke and machine-gun bullets filled the air. The sound of mortar and artillery shells exploding was ear-splitting. Haas went into the water first to scout for mines, and then drove his self-propelled anti-aircraft gun off the landing craft into the water. It was pandemonium. He had been on the beach only a few minutes when an officer ran up to him gesturing to a point ahead. There was a German bunker blocking the advance to the bluff overlooking the beach. Through a clearing in the smoke, Haas got a clear shot at the bunker and destroyed it.
This proved to be an important action in the drama on Omaha Beach. Haas had opened up one of the vital egress routes off the beach, allowing his comrades to advance onto the high ground beyond. Not long after, he was moving past the destroyed bunker:
There were the Germans we had shot. They were in an awful state. And you could say, “Look, thousands of our guys were hit, and I don’t know how many dead.” Yet when I saw what we had done, I didn’t feel too good. Because I had never really hurt anybody before. Those Germans were our enemies, and yet to see those guys bleeding from the mouth… They just lay out there on the bunker. I don’t know if they lived or not.426
We read the description of battles and see the casualty figures, and think that we understand what happened. However, we either have to see it for ourselves, or we have to read a first person account such as this, to truly grasp the tragedy. Combat is not a video game. Men inflict real pain and suffering on each other, and many
