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June 6, 2004Veteran recounts 'chaos' of D-DayEDITOR'S NOTE: Sixty years ago today, allied troops stormed the beach at Normandy, France, a bloody invasion against German-held territory that signaled a changing tide in World War II. The following is the final installment of a three-part series profiling local soldiers who fought on that momentous day - June 6, 1944.By Record-Eagle staff writer SUTTONS BAY - There was little time for fear when Richard Grout landed in the first wave on Omaha Beach in Normandy 60 years ago today: He was there to accomplish a mission. Grout was an Army first lieutenant platoon commander in Company B, 112th Engineer Combat Battalion with the 29th U.S. Infantry Division. Their assignment: create gaps for U.S. ships by destroying obstacles, some rigged with explosives, that Germans placed in the water. "Chaos is a good description of what it was like the first few hours," said Grout, of Suttons Bay. "It was very difficult to get organized. The main thing was to protect yourself because we were getting heavy, heavy fire from the hills above us." Grout survived the onslaught, but he said little about his experiences during the invasion of Normandy for nearly five decades. A good friend in Suttons Bay, who was in the Italian theater during the war, served as a lone confidant for many of those years. But mostly Grout stayed silent. "I hadn't spent any time talking about it to anybody," he said. "Other than talking to another veteran, nobody who was in the war really did. You felt that they just didn't understand it." Grout, 82, couldn't express his emotions until he returned to Normandy 50 years later with a group of veterans and his wife, Marion. He was able to walk near the same site he had scrambled across as a young man - where he lost so many friends - a site much quieter and serene, full of rows of white crosses. The experience affects him to this day. "The tour leader had phoned ahead to the...to the cemetery and when we got there they had identified a lot of the men, the graves," said an emotional Grout. "Anyway, that was great, to be able to visit those men." Originally from Wellesley, Mass., Grout joined the Army after graduating from Brown University in 1942. After basic training, the 23-year-old officer and his battalion were stationed in England for nearly a year before receiving orders. Grout, who earned the rank of Army major before leaving the service, said his battalion had no idea where they would go or where an invasion would take place. When the battalion found out its assignment, Grout said, the soldiers prepared well and knew they would put their training to good use. And despite the chaos of that first day, Grout's platoon opened an entrance from the beach, blowing through a stone wall with dynamite to create a corridor to a small road to allow U.S. tanks to fight the Germans above. "At that point, we didn't realize what it would be like, but we were confident because we had so much training. We were very close-knit, almost like family," he said. "I can't remember any instance where they went to pieces or anything like that. ... There was an additional German regiment in the area that our intelligence didn't know anything about. "We were scared, but at the same time, we finally got organized and went ahead and did what we were supposed to do." As that night ended, Grout discovered that 37 officers and men from his battalion died or were missing, and 34 were seriously wounded. All totaled, the 1st and parts of the 29th Division took more than 3,000 casualties the first day of the invasion on Omaha Beach. Now, with the dedication of the WW II memorial and the 60th anniversary of the Normandy invasion, Grout said he thinks about his memories of Omaha Beach often. "During World War II, everybody was in this. We were united," Grout said. "Everybody was special, and that hasn't happened since. It didn't happen in Vietnam, didn't happen in Korea and it certainly isn't happening now. But then, everybody, the entire nation, was in the same boat."
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