06/06/2007

D-Day

Area veterans remember the largest invasion in military history

BY SHERI McWHIRTER

smcwhirter@record-eagle.com

Record-Eagle/Tyler Sipe
Area veterans, from left, Jim Kolka, Harvey Rowland, both of Grayling, and John Gembel, of Johanessburg, all served with U.S. forces on D-Day, June 6, 1944.

GRAYLING — Whether by sea, land or sky, some northern Michigan veterans vividly recall the historic D-Day invasion of France 63 years ago, perhaps a little clearer than they'd prefer.

"It's a thing you like to forget about, seeing guys getting killed like that,” said Jim Kolka, 81, of Grayling. "We're getting fewer and fewer of us that can remember it anymore.”

Kolka was a seaman first class in the U.S. Navy aboard the S.S. E. W. Scripps off Omaha Beach, a ship loaded heavy with tanks, ammunition and other supplies for the largest military invasion in history. He and his fellow crew members worked to unload their cargo and send it to the shoreline during the enormous battle, just a half-mile away.

"We had to watch it because there were mines all through there. We lost six or seven ships in there to the mines,” Kolka said.

An enormous fleet of ships and planes left England on June 6, 1944, as part of the D-Day invasion of German-occupied Western Europe. Thousands of Allied and American military members were killed, from pilots to paratroopers, sailors and soldiers on the beach.

John Gembel, 83, of Johannesburg, said he never before or since witnessed so much death.

"It was terrible. When I came in the afternoon, they were picking up the bodies. There were dead soldiers and they had a lot of wounded and prisoners by the cliff,” he said.

Gembel was in the U.S. Army's infantry in a company that delivered heavy artillery equipment after the initial assault on Omaha Beach. He was grateful not to be a part of the first wave of soldiers to invade.

"I probably wouldn't be talking to you if I was,” he said. "You came up in the water and you could see the bodies, but you had to keep going. But you stored it in your mind and remember it forever.”

There was no gunfire when Gembel was on the beach, just German artillery launched from inland. He remembers watching the battle all morning from offshore and wondering how he would ever make it safely to the beach.

"You could tell it was a hard-fought area. It was almost like the climate changed around us. There was a haze across the beach,” Gembel said.

Harvey Rowland, 85, of Grayling, said he never saw the battle on the beach as a pilot of a U.S. Army Air Force B-17 bomber plane, with a D-Day target of a bridge in southern France. He said he was lucky to have been at 20,000 feet that day, his first mission.

"Sure they shot at me, but I wasn't down on the ground where they'd be shooting machine guns and everything else at me,” Rowland said.

Heavy cloud cover kept his targeted bridge out of sight, so his crew bombed another strategic spot and flew back across the English Channel.

"As a young man, I had no idea of the magnitude of what we did. You are just a small part of the whole thing and it's only when you get back and later think about it that you realize what was done,” Rowland said. "We were trying to set the rest of the world free.”

Gembel said it's important to recall D-Day and all of World War II.

"You have to remember the people who died, fighting for the freedom of others, sacrificing their lives and they knew it,” he said.