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IN YOUR PRIME
D-Day
Maybe the finest piece of journalism about D-Day, and the Allied landings in France, came 10 years after the epochal event. It was titled: “I Took My Son to Omaha Beach.”
W. C. “Bill” Heinz, my friend, wrote it then for Collier’s magazine.
With the approach of D-Day’s 60th anniversary, on June 6, the suggestion here is Americans, of all ages, pause long enough to honor an unquestioned American hero, the late Col. James Earl Rudder, once of Brady, TX.
Calling himself “just a country boy coaching football” at a Texas high school, Rudder led his handpicked Second Ranger Battalion up the sheer cliffs—as tall as a nine-story building—that overlooked, and thus controlled, the French beaches.
General Omar Bradley said Rudder’s assignment was the most difficult he had ever given a soldier. Heinz writes of Rudder’s objective, Pointe de Hoe, “It was the Germans’ strongest point and had to be taken.”
The Germans shot down upon the Americans and easily dropped grenades into their midst. Yet, as Heinz describes, “In less than five minutes…the first Ranger had scaled the cliff, and within 30 minutes the whole force, minus casualties, climbing the ropes attached to the grapnels that had been rocket-launched, had reached the top.”
When the former Ranger colonel saw the cliffs, for the second time, he said: “Will you tell me how we did this? Anybody would be a fool to try this. It was crazy then, and it’s crazy now.”
Heinz traveled with Rudder, and his 14-Year-old son and namesake, back to the invasion sites. His narrative recaptures the drama of D-Day as the Ranger colonel explains to young “Bud” Rudder what it was like, and why, “A lot of men froze from the horror of it…”
“I want you to try to picture this, Bud,” Rudder begins, turning to look along the length of the beach: “A lot of American boys died here.”
Called “Omaha Beach” by the Allied strategists, Heinz writes: “…there it was, three and a half miles of deserted crescent, curving eastward, the blue-gray waters of the Channel on the left, the white waves rolling up onto the stretch of smooth, tan sand.”
It today is a tourist attraction, but on the sixth of June 60 years ago was the site of the greatest invasion in military annals, beginning what was called World War II’s Second Front. If successful, Germany would be caught between the Soviets in the east and the Anglo-American forces, advancing from the west.
And so 154,000 fighting men went ashore by foot, parachute and glider, debarking from 5,000 ships and under the protective cover of 11,000 planes, each flying over to bomb or strafe the German fortifications.
What helps the Heinz piece to be both powerful and poignant, in part, is the father-son dialogue.
The colonel: “…picture this whole beach covered with all kinds of equipment, with boats and trucks and jeeps and tanks, a lot of them wrecked, and with American soldiers, and the Germans firing into them from the high ground and a smoke haze over everything.”
Rudder, when he views the cliffs again: “Can you imagine anybody going up that thing?”
The son: “It’s twice as high as I thought.” Then, “Do you think we’ll be able to climb it?”
Rudder: “No, son. We won’t.”
Bud: “But you climbed it before.”
Rudder: “I was younger then, son, and we trained for it. We had special equipment, too.”
For his bravery, Rudder was awarded the Silver Star, the Bronze star with cluster, the Purple Heart with cluster, and from the grateful French the Croix de Guerre and the Legion d’Honneur.
While leading his Rangers, Col. Rudder was shot in the left leg, above the knee. Earlier, he had been sent flying by an artillery shell that landed directly above him. He took shrapnel in the right forearm as a result.
Neither wound stopped him from fighting on.
On March 23, 1970, at age 59, the colonel died in Houston, of heart disease. Each year, on this date, the French conduct a memorial service at Criqueville. Moreover, at the cliff’s edge there is an obelisk of native stone, in tribute to the American Rangers.
Lastly, the access road leading to the cliffs, the one taken by thousands of visitors—including many Germans—is the Allee du Colonel Rudder.
(The Heinz article appears in “American Mirror”; Doubleday & Co.; 1982, with the subtitle: “A distinguished writer on courage.” More recently, Da Capo Press released, in 2002: “When We Were One, Stories of World War II,” by Heinz. “D-Day Relived” begins on page 162.)
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Outrageous Associations
