Page 10 - Aerotech News and Review June 17, 2016_Neat

D-Day and a member of ‘The Band’
“Band of Brothers,” the fine book by Ochsner, who lives in California City
by Dennis Anderson Stephen Ambrose that became the with his wife of 70 years, Violet. Courtesy photograph
Special to Aerotech News epic miniseries produced by Steven
Spielberg and Tom Hanks. “We’re getting by,” Henry said, Henry Ochsner and Dennis Anderson at the Senior Expo.
The significant dates about World cheerfully. “We are doing all right.”
War II and its calamitous conclusion Once that lot has their hands on and fireball. Meanwhile, thousands sions scattered across miles of French
feel like they flash by nearly as fast your history you are in legacy terri- Was the Day of Days on his mind of young men, many of them still in hedgerow country. As Ambrose re-
as the rate that we lose veterans of tory. Live or die, today, or tomorrow, 72 years after the events that changed their teens, waited for a green light counted, they landed, grouped up with
the Greatest Generation — about and you will live on with the other his life and the shape of the world by the door, and the jump command buddies they had never met, heading
1,000 a day and accelerating accord- immortals in the memory books. The forever? “Go!” that would propel them into the toward destinations, they knew not
ing to actuarials calculated by the impact of “Band of Brothers” was so windstream, and the fire-filled night. where.
Department of Veterans Affairs some sweeping that it prompted millenials “Oh yes,” he said. “I’ve been
years back. to sign up and become paratroopers, thinking about it all day today, where Some parachutes failed, stream- “I landed about three-fourths of a
and it inspired spin-offs, like the I was, what we did.” ered, sending young men plummet- mile south of the town of St. Mere
There’s Dec. 7, Pearl Harbor re- autobiography of the company com- ing to earth, their bodies bursting like Eglise,” Henry said. “I stayed near a
membrance. And VE-Day, Victory mander, Dick Winters, C.O. of Easy What Henry and his brothers in melons. Some were shot from the hedgerow till I could find out who was
in Europe. And D-Day, the Day of Company, 506th Parachute Infantry the band did was to climb into C-47 ground while still in their canopies, where, and what was what.”
Days. Then the days that mark Hiro- Regiment. transports, two-engine Douglas air- and other young men plunged into
shima and Nagasaki and the terrible craft, packed with paratroopers and fields that had been flooded, and they “I saw a bunch of G.I.s ... I was rea-
dawn of the age of nuclear warfare, For years at the Valley Press, on the excess of 100 pounds of gear that drowned without firing a shot. sonably able to figure out they were
then VJ-Day. the anniversary of D-Day I would try they carried. Americans, and I let ‘em know I was
to track down a survivor or two to The Drop Zones became mostly
And these days tell us about the share their story for a younger au- They climbed into the tubed alumi- imaginary, with elements of both divi- See D-DAY, Page 11
speed-up in losing the mortal com- dience, which would be most of us. num and steel, took some Dramamine
pany of the ones who fought and won One of them was Lew Shoemaker, they had been issued, smoked last
World War II, history’s greatest and a high school football coach who cigarettes, got drowsy and napped,
most terrible conflict. waded ashore with the Big Red One, or sat awake, lost in their thoughts.
a draftee and reluctant warrior who
There are fewer survivors of made it home to teach at Quartz Hill The aircraft, part of the vast D-
World War II every day; as it was High School and marry a sweetheart Day armada, took off in the pre-dawn
with World War I, and the Civil War, he met in a military hospital after he darkness to drop tens of thousands
and all the wars preceding. So, if life was wounded out of the war. of young men hours ahead of the
is uncertain, death certain, and only seaborne landings at Omaha, Utah,
the time unknown — a phrase bor- I finished my work at the Valley Juno, Gold and Sword beaches. The
rowed from Buddhist philosopher Press a little over a year ago, but the young men were from the 101st and
Stephen Batchelor — we have to en- dates still flash past, and because I’m 82nd Airborne Divisions, joined by
joy each others’ company while we a lucky guy, sometimes the friends the British Airborne, and other Allies.
have it. still show up.
Crossing the Channel, the planes
In this case the company I enjoyed On this June 6, 72 years after the thundered past the Normandy coast-
on the 72nd anniversary of D-Day “Day of Days,” I called up Henry line and the German anti-aircraft fire
was a veteran of Easy Company. made a deadly fireworks of the night
That was the group immortalized in sky, tracer rounds and flak, some of
the aircraft exploding, some catching
fire and spinning into a death spiral

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10 Aerotech News and Review June 17, 2016

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