Page 30 - Desert Oracle June 2020

On June 6, 1944, less than a week shy of turning 20,

“Jim” Hanna and his crew mates aboard the Navy
Two airmen dead in
Landing Ship Tank (LST) 308 were delivering a couple of shooting at Grand

hundred British troops to Gold Beach at about 11:30 a.m. Forks Air Force Base in

It was the second wave of the D-Day landings as the North Dakota
Allies sormed the beaches of Normandy to reclaim

Europe from the Nazis in World War II. Infltrator who killed
two US service
members in insider
At the time, it was the greates amphibious military attack released from

operation undertaken in hisory. There were 5,000 ships, Afghan prison

backed by thousands more smaller craft, 11,000 aircraft
and over 150,000 service men. Before the day was over, Air Force’s top enlisted

thousands – Allied and German soldiers, as well as leader speaks out on
black rage, urges
French civilians – would perish. It would set the sage for change
the Allies to beat back the Nazi juggernaut that had

gripped mos of Europe since the fall of Paris four years
earlier. STRIPES REWARDS

For Hanna, D-Day was not the frs time he had 1 of 1

experienced such a massive operation to bring soldiers,
tanks, equipment and supplies to a beachhead.

Nine months earlier, Hanna and LST 308 had come face
to face with the Nazi Luftwafe and SS Panzer divisions at

Salerno when the Allies invaded Italy.

And, three months before that in an assault nearly as Stripes Store

large as Normandy, he’d helped deliver an armored

division of U.S. troops to Sicily. It was there, Hanna says,
that he was mos afraid in his introduction to war.

Hanna grew up at 24 Hawthorne St. in Springfeld’s Six
Corners neighborhood, the eldes of three sons from a

tight-knit Irish family who had gone of to serve their FOLLOW US ON:

country in World War II. Today, closing in on 96, Hanna
lives in the same neat and tidy red ranch house in Sixteen    