D-Day in Amsterdam, Part 2
D-Day, June 6, 1944. The greatest armada in the history of the world descends on the beaches of Normandy.
Preparing the way were the paratroopers and the engineers (including Malcolm Tomlinson, coming ashore before the troops on his fourth D-Day after North Africa, Sicily and Italy).
Private Daniel Klute of Amsterdam parachuted behind enemy lines in the early morning hours and immediately found himself facing a startled German soldier. He waved his rifle and addressed him in a universal language.
“Scram!”
The German cheerfully obeyed and Klute walked away in search of his unit.
Regulations prohibited his simply shooting his adversary. Paratroopers were not to engage the enemy until they had organized themselves into a fighting force.
Fellow paratrooper PFC Harold Premo was not so lucky. The Malone, NY native who had been living with his sister on Florida Avenue when he was inducted was Amsterdam's first Supreme Sacrifice on the Longest Day.
Eighteen-year-old Richard Dantini from the South Side headed for shore with the famous “Company A” in the first wave to hit Omaha Beach, the ones who got chopped to pieces by the mortar and machine gun fire of the Nazi defenders. Of the 197 men on the landing craft, only 18 were still fighting two hours later. All of the officers were killed or wounded in the first ten minutes. Seventy per cent of the casualties came in the first half hour.
“Scared? Oh my God was I scared! Everybody was. Men were praying, crying, getting sick. It was hell,” he remembered vividly almost half a century later.
The Germans opened fire on them when they were still five hundred yards from shore. Dantini was the third man out. The first, a lieutenant, took a round in the neck and died in the surf. Dantini fired three or four clips from his rifle, then took cover behind a concrete obstruction in the water. When he finally noticed the live floating mine attached to it he decided to take his chances and headed for the beach.
He only made it twenty or thirty feet before being hit the first time, a shot to the arm. He kept going.
Once on the beach, he bent over to help a wounded comrade. They came under machine gun fire and the friend and a medic died right there, while Dantini was hit in the right leg.
The longest hour and a half in his life had passed since exiting the landing craft. The tide was coming in, and the Germans were shooting at anything that moved.
“I started to crawl-- I tried to get up, but I couldn't. And then I got hit for the third time - the worst - it was in my left leg.”
His body resembling bloody swiss cheese, he managed to crawl behind a rock at the end of the beach before losing consciousness. The next day, after the fighting had moved inland, a crew assigned to recovering the bodies of the dead found him alive, barely.
After thirteen months of recovery in military hospitals, he made it home and resumed the life of a neighborhood grocer.
Being General Eisenhower's barber didn't exempt Nick Fratangelo from service on D-Day, and his future competitor Arthur Iannuzzi was there as well.
The son of an American citizen, Iannuzzi's father brought him to America from his native Italy on the last boat the Mussolini regime allowed to leave for the United States before they declared war on us. He was sixteen. Two years later, having safely avoided the Italian draft, he received his greetings from President Roosevelt.
He was part of a cannon platoon. Their orders were to remain off-shore until the beach had been cleared. As it happened, that took three days. Stranded on a small launch, artillery fire landed all around them. “When you have the big guns, it's very easy to get hit, so they don't send you in until near the end. When we got there, though, there were a lot of wounded and dead soldiers. The beach was covered with them. I was scared and thinking, 'I don't want to die.'”
Others didn't see the sunset on June 6.
Private John J. Schilling, 19, of Tribes Hill, a 1942 graduate of Wilbur H. Lynch High School had his rendezvous with death storming the beaches as a member of an anti-aircraft machine gun unit. At the time of the announcement of his death, his sister's husband, Wilbur Borst of Amsterdam, was a prisoner of war in Germany.
Technical Sergeant Nicholas Foti, 23, had been in the Infantry since 1939, and wounded in North Africa. He returned to action in time to take part in the decisive push on Troina in Sicily. When asked to compare his experiences at the time, he told a war correspondent, “I don't know if there is any particular difference between here and Tunisia, but I do know we didn't have to do so much walking and climbing in Tunisia.” D-Day was his last day.
**********
News of the D-Day invasion began trickling into Amsterdam about 6 a.m. on June 6, 1944. Bulletins from the Recorder were posted around town. The churches opened, and at the direction of Bishop Gibbons every Catholic church in the Diocese of Albany had exposition of the Blessed Sacrament.
At Wilbur H. Lynch Senior High School, a program was quickly put together and 18 year old Senior Class President Walter Tatara addressed his schoolmates:
Today has been set aside as a day for prayers, for mercy and grace. Throughout the land many hearts are heavy because D-Day has finally arrived and with it will come the horrible news of tragedies of war. Right now, someone very dear to us may be lying wounded or bleeding on a battlefield. We have got to prepare ourselves for whatever news is to come. Will our enemy's zeal for the cause of anti-God overcome our indifference to God?
In times of peace, prosperity, good times, how easy it is to ignore God, but as soon as we are subjected to pain, suffering, confusion, turmoil, we immediately turn to our Almighty Father and pray reverently for aid. Right now we need God's intercession in this struggle. We should be united as never before, and we should all lift our hearts in prayers, whether we be Protestant, Jewish or Catholic. Let our prayers be sincere, simple, and uttered from the bottoms of our hearts. In that way we will become more powerful than any weapons used in this war. Our boys will be comforted in knowing that we, here at home, are praying for them to have strength and courage so that they may walk hand in hand with God, unafraid and prepared for whatever may befall them.
Students, do we take this war seriously? Do we hope for a better world after this war? Some of us do because we realize that this world in the next fifty years will be what we make it. It won't be better unless we ourselves make it better. We must have strength in character, a purpose in life, and above all, faith in God. We, in the United States, are fortunate because we are a Christian nation and we can speak our thoughts without being afraid of a dictator shutting us up.
Let us hope and pray it will always remain that way. Thank God for America.
The program continued as follows:
Flag Salute
"Star Spangled Banner"
Entire School
Solo-"The Lord's Prayer"
Albert Sochin
Song-"America the Beautiful"
Entire School
Reading-"Recessional" -Rudyard Kipling
Evelyn Moyer
Song-"Onward Christian Soldiers"
Entire School
Buy my murder mystery The Evil Has Landed NOW AVAILABLE ON KINDLE FOR UNDER A BUCK!
and don't forget The Judge Report (THE BOOK) is now available, too!
Preparing the way were the paratroopers and the engineers (including Malcolm Tomlinson, coming ashore before the troops on his fourth D-Day after North Africa, Sicily and Italy).
Private Daniel Klute of Amsterdam parachuted behind enemy lines in the early morning hours and immediately found himself facing a startled German soldier. He waved his rifle and addressed him in a universal language.
“Scram!”
The German cheerfully obeyed and Klute walked away in search of his unit.
Regulations prohibited his simply shooting his adversary. Paratroopers were not to engage the enemy until they had organized themselves into a fighting force.
Fellow paratrooper PFC Harold Premo was not so lucky. The Malone, NY native who had been living with his sister on Florida Avenue when he was inducted was Amsterdam's first Supreme Sacrifice on the Longest Day.
Eighteen-year-old Richard Dantini from the South Side headed for shore with the famous “Company A” in the first wave to hit Omaha Beach, the ones who got chopped to pieces by the mortar and machine gun fire of the Nazi defenders. Of the 197 men on the landing craft, only 18 were still fighting two hours later. All of the officers were killed or wounded in the first ten minutes. Seventy per cent of the casualties came in the first half hour.
“Scared? Oh my God was I scared! Everybody was. Men were praying, crying, getting sick. It was hell,” he remembered vividly almost half a century later.
The Germans opened fire on them when they were still five hundred yards from shore. Dantini was the third man out. The first, a lieutenant, took a round in the neck and died in the surf. Dantini fired three or four clips from his rifle, then took cover behind a concrete obstruction in the water. When he finally noticed the live floating mine attached to it he decided to take his chances and headed for the beach.
He only made it twenty or thirty feet before being hit the first time, a shot to the arm. He kept going.
Once on the beach, he bent over to help a wounded comrade. They came under machine gun fire and the friend and a medic died right there, while Dantini was hit in the right leg.
The longest hour and a half in his life had passed since exiting the landing craft. The tide was coming in, and the Germans were shooting at anything that moved.
“I started to crawl-- I tried to get up, but I couldn't. And then I got hit for the third time - the worst - it was in my left leg.”
His body resembling bloody swiss cheese, he managed to crawl behind a rock at the end of the beach before losing consciousness. The next day, after the fighting had moved inland, a crew assigned to recovering the bodies of the dead found him alive, barely.
After thirteen months of recovery in military hospitals, he made it home and resumed the life of a neighborhood grocer.
Being General Eisenhower's barber didn't exempt Nick Fratangelo from service on D-Day, and his future competitor Arthur Iannuzzi was there as well.
The son of an American citizen, Iannuzzi's father brought him to America from his native Italy on the last boat the Mussolini regime allowed to leave for the United States before they declared war on us. He was sixteen. Two years later, having safely avoided the Italian draft, he received his greetings from President Roosevelt.
He was part of a cannon platoon. Their orders were to remain off-shore until the beach had been cleared. As it happened, that took three days. Stranded on a small launch, artillery fire landed all around them. “When you have the big guns, it's very easy to get hit, so they don't send you in until near the end. When we got there, though, there were a lot of wounded and dead soldiers. The beach was covered with them. I was scared and thinking, 'I don't want to die.'”
Others didn't see the sunset on June 6.
Private John J. Schilling, 19, of Tribes Hill, a 1942 graduate of Wilbur H. Lynch High School had his rendezvous with death storming the beaches as a member of an anti-aircraft machine gun unit. At the time of the announcement of his death, his sister's husband, Wilbur Borst of Amsterdam, was a prisoner of war in Germany.
Technical Sergeant Nicholas Foti, 23, had been in the Infantry since 1939, and wounded in North Africa. He returned to action in time to take part in the decisive push on Troina in Sicily. When asked to compare his experiences at the time, he told a war correspondent, “I don't know if there is any particular difference between here and Tunisia, but I do know we didn't have to do so much walking and climbing in Tunisia.” D-Day was his last day.
**********
News of the D-Day invasion began trickling into Amsterdam about 6 a.m. on June 6, 1944. Bulletins from the Recorder were posted around town. The churches opened, and at the direction of Bishop Gibbons every Catholic church in the Diocese of Albany had exposition of the Blessed Sacrament.
At Wilbur H. Lynch Senior High School, a program was quickly put together and 18 year old Senior Class President Walter Tatara addressed his schoolmates:
Today has been set aside as a day for prayers, for mercy and grace. Throughout the land many hearts are heavy because D-Day has finally arrived and with it will come the horrible news of tragedies of war. Right now, someone very dear to us may be lying wounded or bleeding on a battlefield. We have got to prepare ourselves for whatever news is to come. Will our enemy's zeal for the cause of anti-God overcome our indifference to God?
In times of peace, prosperity, good times, how easy it is to ignore God, but as soon as we are subjected to pain, suffering, confusion, turmoil, we immediately turn to our Almighty Father and pray reverently for aid. Right now we need God's intercession in this struggle. We should be united as never before, and we should all lift our hearts in prayers, whether we be Protestant, Jewish or Catholic. Let our prayers be sincere, simple, and uttered from the bottoms of our hearts. In that way we will become more powerful than any weapons used in this war. Our boys will be comforted in knowing that we, here at home, are praying for them to have strength and courage so that they may walk hand in hand with God, unafraid and prepared for whatever may befall them.
Students, do we take this war seriously? Do we hope for a better world after this war? Some of us do because we realize that this world in the next fifty years will be what we make it. It won't be better unless we ourselves make it better. We must have strength in character, a purpose in life, and above all, faith in God. We, in the United States, are fortunate because we are a Christian nation and we can speak our thoughts without being afraid of a dictator shutting us up.
Let us hope and pray it will always remain that way. Thank God for America.
The program continued as follows:
Flag Salute
"Star Spangled Banner"
Entire School
Solo-"The Lord's Prayer"
Albert Sochin
Song-"America the Beautiful"
Entire School
Reading-"Recessional" -Rudyard Kipling
Evelyn Moyer
Song-"Onward Christian Soldiers"
Entire School
Buy my murder mystery The Evil Has Landed NOW AVAILABLE ON KINDLE FOR UNDER A BUCK!
and don't forget The Judge Report (THE BOOK) is now available, too!