As the day and the adventure unfolded, our first impressions were validated time and time again! The story that surrounds D-Day and this beautiful region was brought to life by Pierre, his passion and his remarkable mastery of this subject. “We’ve never considered this a finished project.Our guide, Pierre-Samuel, collected us in our hotel lobby – at once we felt at ease and in very capable hands. “We’re continuing the search for other names,” Long says. In addition to earning his rightful place on the National D-Day Memorial wall, Onken’s name is included in a new book commemorating the 75th anniversary of D-Day called We will Remember Them: An accounting of the D-Day Fallen, published by the National D-Day Memorial Foundation. “Two men were killed and one of them was John Onken.” “They didn’t find any Germans, but they did run into mine fields,” says Long. Cavalry troops were tasked with clearing two small islands off the Normandy coast of possible Nazi gun positions or enemy lookouts. On Memorial Day 2019, the Foundation announced the addition of John Onken, a German-born soldier who was likely one of the first to die for his adoptive country during the seaborne phase of the D-Day invasion.Īt 4 AM on June 6th, Onken and his fellow U.S. Two decades after the National D-Day Memorial Foundation began its search for the D-Day fallen, another name was recently added to the bronze plaques. “As a result, their losses were just staggeringly high,” says Long.įrank DeVita Describes Landing on the Beach The 19 Bedford Boys were mostly National Guardsman who were some of the first to land on Omaha beach. ![]() Congress chose Bedford, Virginia as the site of the National D-Day Memorial because it suffered the highest per capita D-Day losses of any community in the nation. Once those pillboxes were destroyed and the machine guns silenced, the later waves of troops faced far better odds.Īmong the stunning losses of those first-wave soldiers were 19 young men known as “the Bedford Boys.” The U.S. The first soldiers out of the landing craft were gunned down by German artillery. The vast majority of the men who died perished in the very first waves of the attack. troops were killed, wounded or went missing at Sword Beach and Gold Beach, where 2,000 British troops were killed, wounded or went missing and at Juno beach, where 340 Canadian soldiers were killed and another 574 wounded. The highest casualties occurred on Omaha beach, where 2,000 U.S. While casualty figures are notoriously difficult to verify-not all wounded soldiers are counted, for example-the accepted estimate is that the Allies suffered 10,000 total casualties on D-Day itself. If the figure sounds low, Long says, it’s probably because we’re used to seeing estimates of the total number of D-Day casualties, which includes fatalities, the wounded and the missing. Of the 4,414 Allied deaths on June 6th, 2,501 were Americans and 1,913 were Allies. Long knows that the Foundation’s list isn’t complete, but says that it’s the best figure that we have to date. For example, there were men still fighting in Europe and the Pacific in 1945, so those names had to be scrubbed.ĭozens of dead GIs are covered with sheets only yards from the seashore after D-Day, on June 17, 1944. She needed to confirm that each fallen soldier’s division would have been in Normandy on June 6th. Of course, Tuckwiller couldn’t automatically include all military personnel who died on Jin her record of D-Day fatalities. So many soldiers who went missing on D-Day-some bodies, for example, were swept out to sea or destroyed in violent plane crashes-had a death date on their military records of June 7, 1945, a year and a day later. Something interesting Tuckwiller learned was that the US military would officially declare a soldier dead after he was missing for a full year. Then she combed through what’s left of WWII military records-many were lost in a fire in the 1970s-looking for “after action” reports from the invasion that included confirmed D-Day deaths. ![]() ![]() Tuckwiller began with all of the grave markers at the Normandy American Cemetery inscribed with a June 6th death date. “Their mission was to win a World War against Hitler,” says Long, “not to keep records that would satisfy peacetime researchers 75 years later.” Commanders did their best under difficult circumstances to accurately register the fallen, but death dates weren’t always definitive in the fog of war. In the chaos of the beach landings, for example, some soldiers ended up fighting, and ultimately dying, in different companies. While military records clearly showed that thousands of troops perished during the initial phases of the months-long Normandy Campaign, it wasn’t nearly as clear when many of the troops were actually killed. Men from the Red Cross give a blood transfusion to an injured man on the shore of Omaha Beach on June 6, 1944.
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