Every Man a Hero Read online

  Dedication

  Dedicated to those I’ve lost—Bill, Estelle, my medics, my good friends . . .

  And to those who help me remember—Arthur, Linda, Barbara, my family & my good friends.

  Epigraph

  Almighty God: Our sons, pride of our Nation, this day have set upon a mighty endeavor, a struggle to preserve our Republic, our religion, and our civilization, and to set free a suffering humanity.

  Lead them straight and true; give strength to their arms, stoutness to their hearts, steadfastness in their faith.

  They will need Thy blessings. Their road will be long and hard. For the enemy is strong. He may hurl back our forces. Success may not come with rushing speed, but we shall return again and again; and we know that by Thy grace, and by the righteousness of our cause, our sons will triumph.

  They will be sore tried, by night and by day, without rest—until the victory is won. The darkness will be rent by noise and flame. Men’s souls will be shaken with the violences of war.

  For these men are lately drawn from the ways of peace. They fight not for the lust of conquest. They fight to end conquest. They fight to liberate. They fight to let justice arise, and tolerance and good will among all Thy people. They yearn but for the end of battle, for their return to the haven of home.

  Some will never return. Embrace these, Father, and receive them, Thy heroic servants, into Thy kingdom.

  And for us at home—fathers, mothers, children, wives, sisters, and brothers of brave men overseas, whose thoughts and prayers are ever with them—help us, Almighty God, to rededicate ourselves in renewed faith in Thee in this hour of great sacrifice.

  —FRANKLIN D. ROOSEVELT, D-DAY PRAYER, JUNE 6, 1944

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Maps

  Introduction: 0-Hour+15, by Jim DeFelice

  Prologue: Why We Remember

  One: Early Days

  Two: Echoes of War

  Three: Infamy and England

  Four: Lighting the Torch

  Five: My Life in My Hands

  Six: Husky

  Seven: (Some) Rest for the Weary

  Eight: A Mighty Endeavor

  Nine: Beyond Despair

  Ten: Deliverance

  Eleven: Breakout

  Twelve: The Rewards of Peace

  Thirteen: Legacy

  Collaborator’s Note: Bringing Ray’s Story to the Page, by Jim DeFelice

  Acknowledgments

  Appendix A: The Combat Medics of World War II

  Appendix B: Battle Fatigue, Psychoneurosis, and PTSD in World War II

  Appendix C: Further Reading

  Notes and Sources

  Index

  About the Authors

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Maps

  Major Operations of World War II in Europe and North Africa, 1939–1945

  Tunisia, February–April 1943

  Allied Plan for the Invasion of Sicily, July 1943

  Normandy Invasion, June 6–12, 1944

  Omaha Beachhead, June 6, 1944

  Introduction:

  0-Hour+15

  That Day, 75 Years Ago

  By Jim DeFelice

  0645, 6 June 1944. D-Day.

  Omaha Beach, Normandy, France

  Imagine you are one among 160,000, about to join the greatest battle of the twentieth century.

  The sun has been up for well over an hour, but you haven’t seen it, partly because it’s blocked by a shroud of thick clouds straining to hold back rain. The bigger reason is this: you have neither the energy nor the space to raise your head, let alone the will, for to look up is to break the spell keeping you safe.

  The spell is an illusion, and you know it. Yet you cling to it as firmly as you can, gripping it harder even than your well-wrapped M1 rifle, as you shift uncomfortably in the landing craft. You’re hurtling toward Omaha Beach in Normandy, France. Dark smoke already covers your target. The whole world seems black, except the red flames from the burning boats nearby.

  You’ve dreaded and prayed for this day to arrive for weeks. At turns you’ve been stoic, ambivalent, confident, fearful. Now it’s finally here, and those emotions and twenty more are exploding inside you, threatening to pierce the thin shell of your psyche. Around you bullets ricochet off the hull of the boat.

  For all the landings you’ve practiced, there is no model for this, no precedent, no preconception to force the shattered kaleidoscope of chaotic reality surrounding you into an ordered outline.

  You cannot hear distinct sounds. The engines, the shells, the gunfire—they’ve blurred into a roaring mix, half-thunder, half-symphony, orchestrated by distant, angry gods.

  The landing craft stops. The ramp splashes down. People shout, “Go!”

  You blink your eyes and try to stir, only to realize you’re already moving, propelled forward by a mysterious momentum, not by courage or duty or even will. Two steps onto the ramp and you’re now half-swimming. You’ve been let off in deeper water than you thought, farther away from the beach, but not the danger. The only direction is forward—toward something both more violent and more epic than you’ve ever experienced.

  Your brain is clogged with a thousand competing thoughts, most of them useless, some paralyzing.

  But one rises above all others:

  Who will save me if I am hit?

  * * *

  The answer is already ashore, plunging and wading and pushing against the wind and wild waves amid mortar shells and gunfire. He has saved dozens of others this momentous day: Ray Lambert, an army medic from Alabama. By the time the ramp on your Higgins boat goes down, he’ll have been doing this for nearly a half hour.

  Staff Sergeant Arnold Raymond “Ray” Lambert is twenty-three, an old man by the standards of this battle. He’s in charge of a medical team, and this is his third seaborne invasion. He previously saw action in Africa and Sicily. As difficult as those battles were—and they were among the worst of the Second World War—Normandy is a different hell. By the end of the day, some two thousand men will be wounded or killed on Omaha Beach; many of those will die in the wildly misnamed “Easy Red,” a small rectangle of sand targeted by the 16th Infantry. The fighting on Omaha will be the most horrific of the invasion, so bad that the general in charge will think seriously of retreating—a development that could bring disaster to the other beaches and the entire operation, perhaps even the war.

  It’s Ray’s job to stave off defeat by helping as many men as possible. In some ways, he was a born soldier, hunting from an early age in a time and place where it was a means of survival rather than a hobby. As a teenager, he carried a pistol in his belt to deal with unruly farmers trying to keep him from doing his job as a county veterinarian. He spent summer months chopping down trees for a lumber business. He has a well-tested middleweight’s hook, honed in army boxing rings as well as Alabama farm country.

  But this fighter was trained by the army to be a medic. Selected almost by accident, he has learned the art as well as the science of battlefield medicine.

  The most important thing: make sure the infantrymen know you’re there.

  That means Ray can’t hide when the bullets fly. He can’t dig a foxhole. He can’t retreat. He can’t think of himself, but rather the men he must save.

  By this point in the war, he’s won Silver and Bronze Stars and two Purple Hearts. He may be the only medic in the army with a sharpshooter’s badge.

  At the moment, Ray Lambert is not thinking of any of that. He hit the beach twenty minutes ago aiming to establish a station where the wounded could be triaged and receive first aid. But it was evident even before he left t
he landing craft that no aid station could be set up on Easy Red for quite a while.

  Now Ray is looking, scanning the water for men who have been hit and can’t make it to shore on their own.

  One is clinging to an obstruction.

  Foolish—the German weapons are zeroed in on each. Stay there and die.

  Ray leaps toward him. Weighed down by sodden clothes and his med bags, the medic struggles hard against the waves. He reaches the man, yells but can’t be heard.

  “We’re going to the beach!”

  He tugs, but the man doesn’t move. Belatedly, Ray realizes the man is caught on barbed wire below.

  He dives down, tries to pull him loose, then unhook him. The salt water stings his eyes. He resurfaces for air, keeping his head low to avoid the bullets flying overhead.

  Ray pulls again. When that doesn’t work, he dives below once more. He sees a snagged strap and unhooks it, resurfaces, then by some miracle yanks the GI free.

  The soldier’s head slides back and sinks beneath the waves. His rucksack is so heavy that it counteracts the life belt he’s wearing.

  Ray gets him upright. Together they start toward the beach, and the only safe place Ray has found: a slab of rock, perhaps the remains of a concrete bunker, that stands like a thumb on the beach ahead of the obstructions.

  They move toward shore. The noise is so loud that eardrums shatter. People go down in front of them, but Ray knows that they can’t stop or they will be swept back by the waves, or worse, under them, back to the worst of the mines and booby traps, wire and steel that lay ready to slice or blow them open.

  At last, they make it to the row of bodies floating in the bubbled surface at water’s edge. Ray pushes the man along, hoping he doesn’t see.

  Finally, they reach the rock. Ray takes a minute, then begins checking the man’s wounds.

  This one, he thinks, will live. If he stays behind the rock.

  Ray Lambert will be seriously injured minutes later. But those wounds will not stop him. Nothing will, until he’s saved several more lives. Then his back will be broken so severely he will lose consciousness. And in an ironic turn utterly characteristic of war, it will be an American landing craft, not a German bomb, that does him in.

  Energy spent, he’ll curl up behind the shattered wall of concrete where he had taken so many men before. There he will wait for whatever comes next, be it salvation or death, or both.

  Prologue:

  Why We Remember

  The Beach and the Rock

  Colleville-sur-Mer is a picturesque village in northern France, blessed with a lovely beach on the English Channel. Take the winding road down to the water just after sunrise on a nice summer day, and chances are good you will find riders exercising their horses along the surf. Go a few hours later, and the place will be filled with families camped out in the sun, enjoying the sand and water.

  I’ve seen it that way myself. But for me, a far different scene is never far from my mind.

  In the early dawn of June 6, 1944, it was a place of death and sacrifice. For the beach below Colleville was the center of a place known to me and my companions as Omaha Beach, the bloodiest of all the beaches where the Allies landed on D-Day. Where tourists and vacationers see pleasant waves, I see the faces of drowning men. Amid the sounds of children playing, I hear the cries of men pierced by Nazi bullets. Where tall grass on the bluff wavers in the wind, I catch glimpses of GIs treading through barbed wire to turn the tide of battle.

  Today, the sand and rocks are pristine. In my memory, they are stained red with blood.

  This is a place where I saved more than a dozen men. It is also the place I nearly died. Above all, it is the place where courage proved that even the worst evils can be overcome. The joy on the beach today is proof.

  Reminders of the battle are close at hand: A beautiful museum dedicated to the combat here. An austere yet inspiring cemetery on the bluff above. Monuments, and the remains of bunkers and embattlements, long since pacified.

  And there is a rock, a mass of aggregate some six or eight feet wide and four feet high that interrupts the smooth expanse of sand below the village. In any other place, it might seem an aberration. But it is here because on that momentous day it provided shelter for the wounded.

  I know that rock well. I dragged several men to it, as did my medics from the 2nd Battalion of the 16th Infantry Regiment, part of the American army’s 1st Division. It was all the shelter we could find in the first hours of the assault. It has remained, a testament to the French who still celebrate their release from occupation, and a memorial to the men who gave their lives so the French might be freed.

  For many years, I kept my story of that day to myself. Largely, this was because I chose to move on. The war, as life-changing as it was for me and for my entire generation, was only a part of who I was, who we were. I had a family to feed; we had a nation and a world to rebuild. But I also felt that my story was not worth sharing. I landed at Omaha, but thousands did. I fought from Africa to Sicily and then to France, but hundreds of others did the same. I was and am no better than they. Others call me a hero, but I would never use the word to describe myself.

  I did what I was called to do. As a combat medic, my job was to save people, and to lead others who did the same. I was proud of that job, and remain so. But I was always an ordinary man, not one who liked being at the head of a parade.

  Most of all, I am a man who looks forward, not back. Even at age ninety-eight, I have a slate of things to accomplish. Simple things, mostly—repairing a water heater to donate to a church, cleaning the yard of winter debris.

  Lately, though, I have come to see that I have yet another important task, one I never wished for or imagined when I was first on that beach. My job now is to remember, not for my sake, but for the sake of others. For at ninety-eight, I am one of the last men left who was there on that day. I am one of the few remaining links to the courage and strength that carried the Allies to victory, and to the men who made June 6, 1944, D-Day, a day to remember for all time.

  President Franklin D. Roosevelt called it a “Mighty Endeavor.” It was that, and more. One hundred and sixty thousand men, some five thousand ships, and thirteen thousand airplanes took part in an assault that ultimately decided the war. It was one of the bloodiest days in one of the bloodiest conflicts mankind has ever fought. It ended in a tremendous victory, but one that was far from preordained.

  Every man on that beach was a hero. Each one braved incredible gunfire, artillery, mortar shells, obstructions, mines. Each man had his own story.

  This book tells mine. I share it not for myself, but to tell you what we all went through—and to show that whatever difficulties you, too, encounter, they can be overcome.

  While we were working on this book, I found an old newspaper with a story about my medic unit from before the war. The page was brittle, the ink faded, but if you were patient and careful, the words came clear enough. It seems to me that is a metaphor not only for memory, but my aim: to pass down what I remember before it fades, so you, too, can know and remember.

  Age tugs at me, dimming what I can see when I look back. But I found that working on this book sharpened what I knew, making my memory clearer. That, too, is a metaphor. The harder we work to remember, the better we get at it. The more we remember, the better we become at mastering the present.

  But let me start at the beginning, so you will see that I am just an ordinary man like you.

  One

  Early Days

  Down on the Farm

  I like to tell people I’m older than Noah and the Flood, but that’s not true. I’m not even older than America, or the farm I was born on, where the barn, still standing last time I looked, was put up some 250 years ago.

  The day was November 26, 1920. There was a midwife, no doctor—doctors at births were a rare luxury in the rural farmland of Alabama where I made my debut as Arthur Raymond Lambert, the second son of William and Bessie Jane Lambert.
/>   The farmhouse where I was born belonged to my grandparents and was located a few miles outside of Clanton, Alabama, which even today is a fairly small town. For the first years of my life, my parents rented a house nearby in Maplesville, a town even more rural and smaller than Clanton. My father and his two brothers, Alvin and Walter, worked for their dad in a lumber business. Grandfather Lambert, who had a store and other interests in Selma, would buy a piece of land for its timber. His sons would move a sawmill there—it had a big gas-powered automobile engine to run the blade and conveyor belt—and set up the operation.

  The logs didn’t just waltz themselves over to the machine. Trees would be cut down, trimmed, and then transported to the sawmill. Depending on what was called for, they would be milled into shape and then transported to Grandfather’s business for sale.

  It was hard and sometimes dangerous work. It also meant that we moved several times while I was young, renting houses near the timber and staying there while the wood was harvested. Eventually, my father rented a piece of property big enough to farm. We kept livestock—he and my Uncle Alvin eventually owned some fifty head—and a lot of the day-to-day work caring for the animals and tending to crops like corn fell naturally to myself and my brothers.

  America in 1920 was just starting to wake up to its potential as a world leader. We’d turned the tide in World War I, joining Great Britain, France, and the other Allies after three years of being tested by Germany.

  We were reluctant to join that war, and maybe reluctant to recognize our responsibilities as a world power. But once we were in it, there was no turning back. America had gone through some extreme changes since World War I, becoming an industrial powerhouse and transitioning from a mostly rural nation to one where cities not only dominated the economy but held most of the population. It was the start of the Roaring Twenties, a time when, at least by legend, anything went. Mass production of cars and airplanes, the adoption of radio as a mass medium, medical advances—so many different inventions altered life on many levels. Women finally got the right to vote in America the same year I was born.