World War II Remembered

A Quartermaster on D-Day

73 This memoir was transcribed from a recording made by Edith Gieg World War II really split our family up; we didn’t get back together again until the end. Sadly, we lost my brother Don, the brother I was closest to, which was a real blow to me. But my brother Bob sort of moved in and filled the gap. Much to the consternation of my father, when I came home for Christmas in 1942 after my first semester at Dartmouth, I announced that I had joined the Navy. Father was upset because he felt I should have tried to get into an officer training program. But I had three brothers all out there exposed “on the line,” and I just couldn’t stand not being there with them. I went from Buffalo, I remember. I shipped out the day after Christmas , 1942, to Samson Naval Training Station, on the Finger Lakes in upstate New York. We were the first group to go in there, helping to A Quartermaster on D-Day • Edward M. Scheu U.S. Navy 74 World War II Remembered build the facility. After I had been there for about three months, I was fortunate to be selected for Quartermaster School. This was right up my alley: it involved training in navigation and signaling, rather than dealing with stores and so on, as in the Army. From Samson I went to my ship, an LCI (Landing Craft Infantry), which I picked up at the Quincy Yard in Boston. We took the ship on a shakedown cruise down the East Coast and up the Chesapeake to Solomon Island, a site for amphibious training. After training there for a number of months, I got promoted to Petty Officer Third Class—QM3. We left Solomon and headed for the North Atlantic, crossing by way of the Azores. The fun thing for me was that we had a wonderful skipper who was an educator. He had been principal of a school in Philadelphia and was a great one for working with young people to improve whatever they were doing. We also had three officers none of whom knew the first thing about navigation. So, as an enlisted man, I ended up as the ship’s navigator. And the skipper proudly defended that. He probably broke all kinds of regulations to do it but, being the kind of guy he was, he took me under his wing, and I became the navigator. All I can say is we hit the Azores right on the nose. From there, we went up to England, where we joined a whole armada of ships practicing for the Normandy invasion. As D-Day dawned, the weather was overcast, with a sort of on-andoff light rain but not too much wind, fortunately. So Eisenhower made the decision to go ahead with the invasion. Landing Montgomery’s Troops Since ours was one of the 20 U.S. ships assigned to take Montgomery’s First Army to the beachheads, we weren’t part of the regular U.S. fleet. But that simply didn’t matter. We were in the second wave to hit the beach at Gold, just down from Omaha. We crossed the English Channel all night long, each ship following the one ahead. It was completely dark except for a little blue light on the stern of the boat ahead. All in all, there were about 3,000 ships, all—or the majority of them—going across the Channel at one time. Yet as far as I know, there were no accidents; you just had to be on your toes. In the gray dawn, we could see hundreds and hundreds of ships A Quartermaster on D-Day: Edward M. Scheu 75 massing along the French coast. We took our position. Loaded with troops from Southampton, England, we had about 170 men on board. The unique thing about my ship was its very shallow draft, so that we could run it right up on the beach and disgorge our infantrymen. The Germans were showing very strong activity against us, but those Brits were something. They had all been fighting in Africa; they were tough guys. And they took the beach. One of the great advantages was that the weather limited the German Luftwaffe, so that few German planes were raiding the beaches, though there were some the first night. We were stuck on the beach...