Remembering D-Day

By CLEON RICKEL, Herald Senior Writer

GARNETT — When he was drafted in 1943, Willis Henderson was 30, married and the proprietor of a successful trucking business based in Bush City.

He owned his own truck and car and the household furniture was paid off.

But the demands of World War II for manpower were ravenous and he found himself with other guys from Kansas, Missouri and Iowa in the new 149th Combat Engineer Battalion of the U.S. Army.

Henderson said he wasn’t surprised he was drafted.

“They were taking about everybody in Anderson County,” Henderson recalled.

While his wife Ruby followed him in their car from training post to training post, he learned about explosives, bridge building and what it was like to bob around in the water on small craft.

Training was tough and they didn’t know what they were training for until one day 64 years ago.

The invasion

Sixty-four years ago today — D Day, June 6, 1944 — the Garnett truck driver-turned-combat engineer was in the second wave of American soldiers hitting Omaha Beach on Normandy peninsula of France.

“I remember it like it was today,” Henderson recalled.

He was bouncing in the rough English Channel in a Navy landing craft numbered 613, next to a bulldozer with 1,500 pounds of explosives.

“If anything had hit us, there sure wouldn’t have been anything left,” he said.

Besides building bridges and roads, sawing logs and operating heavy equipment, combat engineers often pinch-hit as infantrymen. In addition to his favorite Thompson submachine gun and 90 rounds of .45-caliber bullets, Henderson and his buddy had a .50-caliber machine gun.

They weren’t looking forward to lugging the machine gun, a big ugly brute nearly 5 1/2 feet long and weighing 128 pounds with tripod but not counting the ammunition, onto the beach.

They decided to sneak the machine gun onto a nearby jeep and trailer to be driven by one of their lieutenants.

When the ramp of the landing craft opened, they dropped into chest-high water. The jeep, lieutenant, machine gun and all dropped to the bottom and disappeared.

When he waded to the beach, Henderson found himself in a Dante’s Inferno of smoke, noise and lots of bodies.

“It was terrible,” Henderson said. “Talk about hell.

“... It’s not like all those movies and TV shows where all those guys run onto the beach,” Henderson said. “We crawled on the beach; we crawled like snakes.”

Almost immediately he and his buddies and other soldiers were pinned down by snipers and heavy machine gun fire.

They began moving against a network of trenches and concrete pillboxes, using Bangalore torpedoes — long screw-in, expandable tubes packed with explosives — to blast holes in barbed wire entanglements and minefields.

As they approached one strongpoint, they were surprised to see the German defenders race out with their hands up.

“They were all Polish,” Henderson said. “They were put in there by Hitler.”

After they cleared the exit off the beach for the infantry, the combat engineers went back to what they were originally supposed to do — clear the beach of obstacles, lay down metal tracks for wheeled military vehicles to drive on the beach, organize the mountain of supplies coming onto the beachhead, bury bodies and duck German snipers, artillery and airplanes.

Sixty years later, Henderson still proudly shows visitors a copy of a unit citation written by Gen. Dwight Eisenhower for the 149th.

A stone memorial dedicated to the 149th and other D-Day units also was placed above Omaha Beach.

Moving forward

After spending a few weeks setting up the Normandy beachhead as a supply terminal, Henderson’s unit followed American units through France, Belgium, Holland and Germany, often fighting their way through.

One side trip included liberated Paris.

“I drove all the way around the Eiffel Tower in my jeep,” he said. “That was nice.”

Other highlights included digging trenches and tensely waiting for Nazi soldiers during the Battle of the Bulge. He also recalled throwing a large bridge heavy enough to support American Sherman tanks across the Rhine River into Germany in record time as other units desperately tried to save the Rhine River railroad bridge at Remagen from German counterattacks.

During their drive into Germany, they met Russians coming from the other direction as both sides squeezed weakening Nazi forces.

Henderson said he enjoyed meeting the Russians, “although one big Russian saw a little girl on a bicycle. ... He shoved the girl off the bicycle, grabbed it and went peddling away.”

When Germany surrendered, the 149th made its way back to the large Belgian port of Antwerp in stages.

When they got to Antwerp, they learned their next assignment — Operation Olympic, the invasion of Kyushu Island in Japan, the first phase of the assault against Japan’s homeland.

On to Japan?

As a combat engineer unit with amphibious attack experience, the 149th was at the top of the list of European units to be thrown into the invasion of Japan, he said.

As they readied for their voyage, Japan surrendered after President Truman ordered the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Henderson figured that saved his life.

Instead, their voyage had a different destination — the United States.

After he was discharged at St. Louis, Henderson went to Kansas City, Mo., where his wife Ruby, who died in 1985, had been working at a Pratt-Whitney aircraft engine plant. He married his second wife, Dorothy, in 1988.

“She was making 15 cents an hour on the night shift,” he said of his first wife. “... She wanted to stay in Kansas City.

“But I said ‘I’m going home.’

“And she followed me.”