The War Comes to Plum Street

10. Invasion, 1944

10. Invasion, 1944 THE WEEKEND AFTER commencement for the Class of ’44 was quiet, and Monday was the same. The Allies took Rome that Sunday and Monday when German forces decided to evacuate and fight farther to the north. Gemma had a small radio on the table next to her bed in the house on Plum Street, and in the early morning hours of Tuesday morning, June 6, 1944, she sleepily turned over and switched on the set. It took thirty seconds or so to warm up, and she had almost fallen asleep again when she heard General Eisenhower’s plain Kansas accent come through the air suddenly. Allied troops had landed that morning on the coast of France, embarking on a great crusade to liberate captive Europe from Nazi oppression. Soon, paperboys were walking neighborhood streets shouting ‘‘Extra!’’ and offering the invasion news in print for three cents. The headlines read ALLIES BEGIN INVASION OF EUROPE; TROOPS SWARM FRENCH BEACHES Reports placed Allied forces all along the coast from Brest to Le Havre, which included much of Brittany and Normandy. Allied battlewagons, cruisers, and aircraft of every sort smashed, shelled, and bombed targets everywhere in the vicinity of the landings, and naval gunfire was reported by Allied reporters landing as far as eleven miles inland. Toward midday, a second extra edition of the paper came out, Invasion, 1944 215 announcing that American, British, and Canadian forces had actually secured beachheads in Normandy and Brittany and were digging in for expected counterattacks by the Germans. Churchill told the House of Commons that four thousand ships had taken part. Among these had been hundreds of minesweepers which had gone ahead of the landing craft to clear channels through the floating obstacles which ringed the coast. Waves of aircraft followed one after another, looking for an opportunity to strike at anything flying with a German cross on it. Parachute and glider infantry landed in many areas behind the beaches, disrupting German deployments and creating havoc in rear areas. Entire divisions were reported ashore and pushing inland. A third edition of the Courier-Times came out that evening at the usual time. INVASION PROGRESSING RAPIDLY, the headline shouted, with fighting reported at Rouen, forty-one miles inland, and Caen, nine miles inland. As many as eleven thousand available Allied bombers and fighters filled the air all day with the drone of their engines and the crash of bombs. There was already a New Castle connection in the invasion. Lt. Col. Mike Murphy, a stunt flier who had run a flying service on the old Carpenter farm south of the city in 1929 and 1930, had been among the first glider pilots to land in France with airborne troopers aboard. Murphy was also among the first casualties returned to the states. He broke both of his legs when his glider skidded into a tree on D-Day. Gemma prayed that if Ed was involved, he would be safe. She knew it could still be weeks before she would receive any mail from him. Gemma had other worries, too. Her best friend Sarah was very pregnant and due the first week of June. Clay was gone overseas, and Sarah was on her own as Gemma would be sometime in August when her own time would come. Sarah finally went into a long labor on the fifth of June, and gave birth on D-Day to a baby son they named James. Clay, unaware in Hawaii of what was transpiring in New Castle with Sarah, developed serious abdominal pains which persisted for several days. They suddenly stopped on June 6. When they compared notes in their letters later, they discovered that Clay’s pains had stopped at the moment that Sarah had given birth to their son. Gemma visited Sarah when she came home after her week-long stay in 216 The War Comes to Plum Street the Clinic, but there was not much she could do for her. The new arrival did not help the unhappy atmosphere that Sarah’s mother maintained in the house. Pictures began to come in from England showing chipper soldiers embarking on ships and pulling away from the docks, headed for France. LSTs (landing ship tanks) jammed with tanks, trucks, jeeps, supplies, and men labored toward the beaches in a front-page photo. The Allied Command would not say exactly where the invasion beaches were, but the...