A Day at the Beach

A really unlikely thing happened to two young brothers seventy-five years ago. They hadn’t seen each other for a couple of years and had lost touch. Neither knew what had happened to the other, or even if the other was still alive.

Harold left his home in western Massachusetts at his first real chance. When he turned 18, he enlisted in the army. The Japanese had attacked Pearl Harbor a couple of months earlier, and like most Americans at that point in time, Harold wanted to do his part.

Also, he would be escaping a rough family situation. His mother had died of cancer and his father met another woman who didn’t want anything to do with the five kids still at home. The kids were split up – the oldest girl becoming an au-pair elsewhere, the youngest sent to an orphanage, and the others kicked around as best they could.  It was the Great Depression and there was no money, no job, no chance for education, and nothing to look forward to but struggle, deprivation, and strife.

For Harold, the army represented independence and adventure, and Charlie, only 16 at the time, wanted to follow his brother’s example. He hitched a ride to New Jersey and, using Harold’s identity to “prove” his age, joined the army as well.

For two years Harold did whatever the army told him to do, and on June 6, 1944, they told him to bob around in the English Channel for 17 hours and then jump into the chest-deep water off Normandy with his M1 and hit the beach firing. So he did.

It was chaos. Things didn’t go as planned for a million reasons. The weather was bad and waves mid-channel were five to six feet high.  Twenty-seven of the thirty-two tanks that were supposed to go ashore to support the infantry at Omaha Beach never made it out of the water. The Germans, high up on the bluffs above the beach, were mowing the Americans down as they waded ashore. There were 12,000 allied dead on the five landing beaches that first day.

Harold was one of the lucky ones. To his surprise, he was not hit.  But an even bigger surprise was waiting on the sand – Charlie was already there! The brothers were reunited after two years amidst the withering Nazi fire raining down on them.

Miraculously, they both survived the war and lived to tell about the unlikely meeting. Except they never did. It wasn’t until a couple of weeks before his death many decades later that Charlie ever mentioned it to his niece, Mrs. Stewie Generis, the daughter of the au-pair in the story.

Until that point, no one in the family knew anything about the brothers’ experience on D-Day  or what happened on Omaha Beach. As far as they were all concerned, the two had been in the army in WWII like everyone else, and that was about it.

To a couple of guys who had seen what they had seen and done what they had done, the amazing coincidence just didn’t seem important enough to mention.