The Taunton Daily Gazette, Taunton, MA
  • Mansfield D-Day veteran recevies French Legion of Honor

    • email print
  • By Rebecca Hyman
    Albert Berard didn't set out to be a hero.
    He was just doing his job, he said.
    But on that fateful day in June 70 years ago, doing his job meant manning his station high up on the signal bridge of the transport ship U.S. 538 on Omaha Beach under heavy enemy fire as his fellow servicemen perished all around him.
    "I won't talk about the gory details. Those are the horrors of war. I thank God for giving me the opportunity to take part in the invasion. We did free a lot of people. And I thank God for guiding me and keeping me from harm's way," said Berard, who is originally from Taunton and now lives in Mansfield.
    Along with 10 other area veterans, Berard was presented with a Legion of Honor medal from the French Consul General last week at a ceremony in Natick for his role in the D-Day landings in Normandy during World War II.
    On June 6, 1944, Berard was just 19 years old, far from home and seeing combat for the first time. His job as a U.S. Navy signalman was to hoist the flags that conveyed orders to the other ships in his flotilla.
    But his perch didn't protect him from the barrage of German fire. Just the opposite. He stood out like a lightning rod in a thunderstorm.
    "I was a sitting duck. I still have the pieces of shrapnel they pulled out of my life jacket," Berard said.
    The situation was unimaginably harrowing, he says in retrospect. But at the time he was too busy to be scared or reflect on the enormity of the task at hand.
    "When it's survival time, you do what you have to do," Berard said.
    Besides, it wasn't about him, he said. It wasn't about his personal safety or glory. There was something bigger at stake, he said.
    "Hitler was taking over one country after another. He had to be stopped," Berard said.
    The Allied forces hit the beach at 7:30 a.m.
    "On the initial landing, things were so bad we had to back off. We had already lost a third of our crew and many soldiers," Berard said.
    Minutes melted into hours. Hours melted into days.
    The fighting lasted for five days, he said. Those additional days would come to be known as D-Day Plus 1, D-Day Plus 2 and so forth. Berard's ship was under fire that whole time. Thousands of allied troops and French civilians lost their lives.
    D-Day is now widely viewed as the beginning of the end for the German forces, the turning point in the war. But no one knew that then, Berard said.
    Page 2 of 2 - It was a massive operation, Berard said. To give a sense of the scale, Berard's flotilla contained eight ships. There were 6,000 ships on the beaches of Normandy that day, he said.
    Berard, who worked as an industrial arts therapist at the Veterans Hospital in Brockton for 23 years, has written an account of his experiences, "The D-Day Landing and the Battle of Normandy" as a way to preserve his memories of that pivotal moment in history for his two sons, he said.
    Berard and his wife of 68 years, Genevieve, adopted their older son, Wayne-Daniel Berard, as an infant in 1952. When Wayne-Daniel sought out his birth parents decades later, he learned his biological father was Jewish.
    Wayne-Daniel said it's deeply meaningful to him his adoptive father played a role in freeing Jewish people from the horrors of Nazi Germany, as well as liberating Europe, before he even knew he would one day have a Jewish son.
    "He's doubly a hero to me," said Wayne-Daniel, a Mansfield resident.
    Albert Berard said he's proud of his D-Day service and honored to have France's highest military award bestowed on him.
    But D-Day is "bittersweet" for him. There was a terrible price to pay for victory.
    He watched friends killed before his eyes in ways too horrible to talk about ? young men who had just shortly before been filled with the same hopes and dreams as he was.
    So, when June 6 rolls around each year, he turns to the only people who understand that unspeakable experience without having to say a word – the young men he shared it with.
    "These memories always haunt you. On D-Day I'm in the habit of calling up my shipmates. You know they're going through the same thing you are. You know they're having a bad day, too, and it lifts you up to talk to them," Berard said.