King's Corner: For the Fallen
King's Corner column for May 23, 2025
A reporter at a local Reno television station had the idea of interviewing a WWII veteran for a Memorial Day segment. She and her crew came out to the house to meet my dad, Robert “Mark” King. They wanted to discuss D-Day, the landings in northern France at Normandy’s beaches that started on June 6, 1944. Mark had been in the third wave and received a purple heart for his wounds that day.
As they setup the equipment, their talk was light and comfortable. Mark, by then well into his 90s, started by describing how he’d been sent to Fort Bliss, Texas, for six weeks of training, then sent to Sutton Surry, England as part of Operation Fortitude, the fictional buildup of troops in Southern England with the hope of drawing German attention to the Calais region and away from Normandy.
His job was to move rubber tanks, trucks, landing craft and troops constantly to make it look like they were busy. Inflatable dummies consisted of a fabric covering supported by a network of pressurized rubber tubes that formed a kind of "pneumatic skeleton" supporting a structure of wood, sheet metal and canvas. They had a large hanger to store all these inflatables when they weren’t in use.
Germans started sending over V2 rockets, but these couldn’t be targeted so they hit indiscriminately. Everyone would get into their underground shelters for safety. And on his occasional days off, he went to London and attended concerts designed to both entertain struggling locals and lift the morale of the troops.
Then the reporter asked him to describe D-Day.
Mark explained he was in the third wave because he wore glasses. Those who were our very best soldiers stormed Omaha Beach just after sunrise in the first two waves that day. What he didn’t know was by the time his group’s turn came over 2,000 soldiers at that beach were already casualties.
He remembered climbing over the side of his transport ship and down a thick rope ladder to a Higgins boat in the choppy waters of the English Channel off the coast of France.
As he got near the bottom of the ladder, a man told him to let go and drop into the landing craft. Mark did. His feet hit the deck — and down he went.
"I slid in puke," he said. The bottom of the landing craft was covered in it. Which made him wonder how the men would fight while suffering from a combination of nervousness and seasickness.
"As soon as that bullet comes by you, you get over being sick," he recalls being told.
Mark was grateful for the neck-deep water that he stepped into when the ramp finally dropped. It washed the vomit from his clothes. A soldier behind him had thrown up on the back of Mark’s shirt during the ride to shore.
The German machine guns that mowed down so many troops in earlier waves had been taken out by the time his boat arrived. Mark recalled mainly having to deal with mortar and artillery fire as he waded toward the beach.
They had to pass through an obstacle course of floating bodies, constantly being pushed up against them by each incoming wave. These were bobbing up and down with bloated stomachs, and the water was red with blood from their fatal wounds.
“The best and brightest had been the day’s first sacrifices,” he said. “Having to wade through them, pushing them aside, is something I’ll never forget.” But the need to urgently get to shore drove him forward.
The shore was mined and covered with obstacles such as wooden stakes, metal tripods, and barbed wire, making the work of the beach-clearing teams difficult and dangerous. The highest number of D-Day casualties were there at Omaha beach, with its high cliffs.
Most of the men from his boat made it. Mark reached the beach and made it halfway up the cliffside before a bullet passed through his hand and into his hip. Fortunately he was able to get medical help.
As Mark described this vivid memory in graphic detail, the reporter began to cry. Mark made clear that, in his view, he didn’t deserve to be the focus of the interview, to be celebrated as a survivor. To him, Memorial Day belonged to those who lost their lives, who were willing to storm up the beach in a hail of bullets that stopped far too many of them.
The reporter cried so much during this interview that eventually they decided not to use the footage. Instead she gave a heartfelt on-air tribute on Memorial Day to all who had fallen.
The men who made it up the beach that day had almost a year to go before victory over Germany. They then came home, remembering that the sacrifice of others gave them the opportunity to build their lives anew.
As Laurence Binyon wrote in the poem “For the Fallen”,
“Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning
We will remember them.”
