Gunfire like raindrops, a beach as living hell: The D-Day invasion and white crosses in Normandy

Sean Kirst | By Sean Kirst | The Post-Standard
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on June 05, 2014 at 12:33 AM, updated June 05, 2014 at 7:10 PM

Thomas Erwin brought the stones last week to the War Memorial. He'd found them in 2005, on a piece of Normandy shoreline labeled by military planners, 70 years ago, as Omaha Beach. Erwin and his wife, Cathy, stopped there while on the way to visit their son, Tim, an Army captain stationed in Germany.

The couple saw it as fitting to pause in Normandy, where thousands of Allied troops leaped from planes or ships into the teeth of withering fire on D-Day:

June 6, 1944.

About 2,500 Americans lost their lives that day. Erwin tried to imagine the carnage as he walked the quiet beach, beneath the bluffs once commanded by German guns. A plastic bottle had washed onto the shore. Erwin filled it with stones and sand. After he and his wife returned from their trip, he began giving a stone to any old soldier he met who'd lived through the invasion.

Last week, Erwin drove from his Camillus home to downtown Syracuse. Only a handful of D-Day veterans remain with us in Central New York, and two accepted an open invitation to be interviewed in the Memorial Hall at the Onondaga County War Memorial.

Warren Rahrle and Bill Shattuck both spent many childhood years on the city's South Side. While they believe they attended the old Roosevelt Junior High at the same time, they'd never met before they shook hands last Thursday.

Seventy years ago this week, they went to Omaha Beach. At the War Memorial, Erwin told them what he brought home from Normandy, and he gave them each a little bottle of sand and a stone. Rahrle and Shattuck rolled the stones in their hands. The smooth, cold texture had an immediate effect:

Ddaynewz-page-001.jpgThe Post-Standard: Today's front page. 

Loose stones on the beach. That's what they recall. The Germans, with their big weapons, were atop the cliffs. The area at the bottom was a loose stretch of stone and gravel. If you were lucky enough to make it out of the water, you hit the shore and had that nightmare feeling of resistance, as if the land itself did its best to keep your legs from churning.

Rahrle was there in the first, lethal hours. At 89, he is beginning to struggle with his memory, and his children gently help with conversation when he needs it. Yet events of long ago can sometimes be clearer for him, more vivid, than what he did this morning.

At the War Memorial, Rahrle raised his hand and made a delicate motion with his fingers:

"Little puddles," he said, seeing it exactly, the nearby splash-splash-splash of rows of German bullets as Rahrle left a landing craft and pushed through water up to his chin, men getting hit and dying all around him, until he reached a place on land where he could drop to all fours. There was no thought of being a hero. The only hope was digging a foxhole. Rahrle did his best.

He was 19, about a year past high school in Syracuse, digging for life itself in the sand.

If you want a symbol of what it meant, think of this: Nazi Germany controlled much of Europe. Millions of Jews, along with anyone the Third Reich deemed less than human, were dying in concentration camps. Battle-hardened German troops braced for an onslaught along the shores of France, doing everything they could to leave stacks of invading troops along the beach.

Into all that, at Normandy, came this wave of Allied forces. No one knew if the invasion would succeed. The outcome of the war was on the shoulders of young and often untested men. If they had turned around, the world today might be a very different place.

Rahrle, this teenager from Syracuse, crawled forward. He tried to push the sand into a pile, while German gunners, shooting from the bluffs, slaughtered Allied troops. In an interview in 2000 with The Post-Standard, Rahrle said he carried a satchel of explosives, and his job was to destroy railroad ties used as barriers.

In those first minutes, amid the chaos as he dug into the beach, something warm started running down his back.

Rahrle had been hit. A medic, crawling past, told him he was all right, but the blood began soaking Rahrle's uniform. Shrapnel had cut almost to his lung. In the 2000 interview, he recalled how he was placed in a line of wounded on the beach, how he stared for hours at a white sky, waiting -- at any second -- to be killed by a mortar shell.

He was evacuated to a hospital in England. He recovered and was sent back to the front, where he found himself in the middle of the Battle of the Bulge. To Rahrle, those bloody, frigid days were even worse than D-Day. After the war, he'd dream of Nazi tanks in the woods. He spoke last week of how his wife, Arlene, would comfort him when he'd wake up, shaking in the night.

2014-05-29-mjg-D-Day13.JPGD-Day veterans Bill Shattuck, 90, of Camillus and Warren Rahrle, 89, of East Syracuse: At the War Memorial, remembering chaos on a beach. 

Arlene died six years ago. Several of Rahrle's grown children drove him to the War Memorial, where he and Shattuck, as they spoke, rolled the smooth stones in their hands.

"The American people," Shattuck said, "have no idea what we lost that day."

He served in the signal corps, and he came into Normandy on the third day of the invasion. There were bodies in the water, Shattuck said, and soldiers had to sprint across the beach to safety, because there were still fears of snipers and stray fire.

The 405,000 Americans killed in World War II included about 2,700 Central New Yorkers, according to a database of war casualties released this spring by the New York Military Museum. For the invasion itself, the database offers only statistics from the Army: Thirty-three soldiers from this region died in the first 10 days of the invasion. Seventy local soldiers are buried at a military cemetery near Omaha Beach.

Even those numbers underplay the D-Day sacrifice of Central New York. The new statistics do not include Naval casualties, or anyone who died -- weeks or months later -- from wounds inflicted upon them in Normandy. Whatever the toll, it left a pall of grief on Syracuse: Throughout the summer of 1944, the daily papers reported on dozens upon dozens, from this area, among the dead, wounded or lost.

Such as Pfc. William McDonald, raised in Syracuse, who left behind a young wife and an 8-month-old son in Elmira.

Such as Pfc. Stephen Styrzo, who'd gone to war with five brothers from Syracuse.

Such as Ernest Fox, a 21-year-old Navy gunner's mate who -- after 70 years -- is still listed as missing in action, from the early days of the invasion.

Such as Albert Bruce Cassidy, an only child who at 19 was one of Warren Rahrle's closest friends.

On Saturday mornings, during the years when they attended the old Valley High School, Rahrle would walk from Ostrander Avenue to Cassidy's home on Hall Avenue. Rahrle would knock on the door and Cassidy would grab the keys to his dad's car. The two buddies would ride downtown and spend the day dreaming out loud, at a point in life when they were still more boys than men.

War came. Rahrle and Cassidy went into the Army at the same time. They were both placed in the 299th Combat Engineers, one of the first units to go ashore at Omaha Beach. Rahrle, afraid of how his mother would react in front of all the guys, asked her not to come to the train station when they left.

0825cassidy.JPGThe white cross of Albert Bruce Cassidy, a 19-year-old from Syracuse, at an American military cemetery in Normandy. 

He and Cassidy trained in the same camps. Before the invasion, they were in London at the same time. They'd get together when they could, wondering about what might come next.

On June 6, amid utter hell, they headed toward the shore on separate landing craft.

In autumn 1945, the war over, Warren Rahrle arrived in Syracuse on an early morning train. He told no one he was coming. He went to his mother's house on Beard Avenue and rang the doorbell. She came downstairs in her nightgown. Last week, as he described the moment, he could see her face.

That morning, Rahrle's mother told her son that Albert Cassidy had died in the invasion, shot in the water before he ever made it to the beach. A photograph of Cassidy's white cross in Normandy -- an image brought home by a Baldwinsville teacher who knows the story -- retains a central place in Rahrle's East Syracuse living room.

As for Shattuck, he graduated from Blodgett Vocational High School in January 1943, then took a few more classes to remain eligible for basketball. With his diploma, he was also eligible for the draft, which soon took him away from the basketball team. Like Rahrle, he went to war as a teen, and Shattuck, 90, spoke for many in his generation when asked if he feared what awaited him in France:

"You were too young," Shattuck said, "to think it was that serious."

He learned. Shattuck made it through the war, returned to Syracuse, spent a career at General Electric. Like his fellow veterans, he rarely spoke of what he saw. Rahrle's children, alongside their father to the War Memorial, said they heard nothing from their dad, when they were young, about Omaha Beach.

That didn't change until they took their graying father to see "Saving Private Ryan," the 1998 film that opens with a graphic depiction of the assault.

Once it was over, one of Rahrle's sons turned and embraced his father.

At the War Memorial, Rahrle and Shattuck talked about the Syracuse they knew when they were children, and they thanked Erwin for the stones and for the sand. Then Rahrle walked to the wall, with its list of the dead from World War II, and found the name he wanted. Almost 70 years after D-Day, he put his hand to the raised letters of a friend he hadn't seen since they were both 19:

Albert Bruce Cassidy.

A shadow of pain touched Rahrle's face. Flesh against metal, his memory was fine.

Sean Kirst is a columnist with The Post-Standard. Email him at or write to him in care of The Post-Standard, 220 S. Warren St., Syracuse 13202. Read more of his work at or send him a message on Facebook or Twitter.