SOUVENIRS OF THREE MEMORABLE VISITS TO NORMANDY
My first time Charles H. Neighbor laid eyes on continental Europe was shortly after dawn on 6 June, 1944, better known as D-Day. His latest visit to Normandy was in June 2004, and he returned in the company, literally, of many of his acquaintances from the first time around.
This is a personal philatelic story of June 1944, 1994 and 2004 has been made much easier to tell because my father has written and privately published a book about his experiences in the Second World War, "One Man's War Story: An Account of my Experiences in the United States Army During World War II."
In the introduction to it he explains: "I write this for myself so that I shall never forget those days nor fail to appreciate what I fought for and what I now have; for others who experienced that time that they might see or remember a little of how it was to fight the war; and for those who have come afterward, that they might know something of the World War II years."
After the usual long, drawn-out training in the US and England, Charles H. Neighbor boarded the USS Thomas Jefferson, a troop transport ship, for the slow and uneasy trip out into the English Channel. He was 19 and a half years old. He and other members of E Company landed on Omaha Beach in the first wave, in fact 10 or 15 minutes ahead of the planned time of 6.30. He was a flame-thrower operator, which made him a walking human bomb.
"I assumed the attitude, `I must do it, even if I am shot at, so I'll just start and hope I make it,' and, finally, rose and moved a few yards ... A lane had been marked off ... I crawled through ... only Sgt. Hatchet, and, perhaps, one or two others, had reached the ravine, so we were able to stop and rest while waiting for the others. The firing continued as we took our break ..."
In fact his unit, unlike the others in his company, had hit a relative weak spot in the German defences, and suffered less than 10 per cent casualties the first day. His flame-throwing equipment proved to be of little use and he reverted to rifleman.
When he was reunited with the rest of E Company, sobering reports awaited him and the others. "It was then that I became aware of the holocaust D-Day had been and how fortunate any of us were to be alive."
And yet the sending and receiving of mail figures prominently in my father's account. In fact, only eating seemed to have been a more popular activity. He found time after a few days to write a short letter to his mother using paper tucked in his helmet liner and a pencil stub. One limited mail call came at about the same time.
More than two weeks after D-Day, in defense of St-Lo, conditions began to improve in some ways. "As soon as we were settled, mail began coming in ... We received stacks of letters. Some of them were as old as the hills, but it was if they had been written the day before. After the backlog of letters had been delivered, they brought our packages ... For a while, I was averaging a package a day ..."
He generally employed postal stationery that prepaid the airmail rate of 6 cents for military personnel outside the continental U.S. These personnel could write via surface mail for free, but they tended to prefer, not surprisingly, the more expedient air mail service. His US Army Postal Service covers contain a "29" above the date for the 29th Division. The envelopes were signed by the censor as well as being stamped. Some examples received an parcel front stamp of Iola, Kansas, my fateher's home town, which indicated that a request in the letter for a parcel had been met. (To keep postal traffic to a minimum, soldiers could not be sent a parcel unless it had been requested.)
In his book, he writes of this period 20 days after D-Day: "I caught a glimpse of myself in a full-length mirror. I was startled at the image I saw. I hardly recognized myself! Instead of the carefree, easy-going kid I considered myself, I had the look of a hardened fighter. My face was hollow, with dirt smudges and several days' growth of beard. I had my steel helmet on, my clothes were dirty and the BAR was slung over my shoulder. I really had the appearance of a combat soldier."
A cover mailed two days later is similar in most respects but bears no arrival marks. As was standard practice to assist in monitoring of mail, the writing was in pencil.
Of this period he remembers one of many close calls: "In the thin dawning light, we tried to glean something of worth from the rubble that was strewn around. Soon, it was becoming light enough to see, so we hurried back to our lines and ran across the last field in broad daylight. We did not return any too soon, for just as we were scrambling over the last hedgerow, shots rang out behind us."
He also employed some of the hundreds of millions of "V-Mail" letters sent to or from American military personnel. To save fuel, letters were microfilmed, flown to a special postal facility, reproduced and delivered as normal postal items. A letter to his grandmother dated July 3 starts with a report of receiving mail.
By this time, the daily struggle to survive was becoming harder and harder. "Except for Lt. Garcia, all our casualties (six or eight) had been fatal. This began to have a depressing effect upon us, for it was no longer a matter if whether or not you were hit, but when. As our numbers diminished, we each carried more responsibility, and our chances of survival grew slimmer," he writes of the period before lost comrades could be replaced by significant numbers of reinforcements. One green replacement who did arrive was killed before most of the soldiers learned his name.
A V-Mail dispatch from 13 days later was sent under much different circumstances. In fact, this typewritten letter was sent just three days after the "inevitable" occurred: "As several shells came in, I huddled up to the hedgerow ... Then a shell came my way. It sounded as if it landed right in my ear. Well -- my helmet went somewhere and I knew I'd been hit ..."
In fact, perhaps not surprisingly, this letter is highly economical with the truth. Despite talk of being "wounded slightly", the reality was more serious. Years later he wrote that as well as head injuries, "I received what was called a sucking wound. Shrapnel entered my diaphragm through the lower right part of my back, leaving a hole through which inhaled air could escape."
It was nearly Christmas 1944 before my father was able to return to his unit, by then in Germany. Two weeks later he tripped a grenade booby trap, was seriously injured in the leg and did the hospital circuit a second time. This time he managed a trip to Scotland to visit a pen friend in Penicuik, a town outside Edinburgh, where, coincidently, I live. Again he returned to his unit in Germany, this time to see the war out safely.
Back to Normandy
Along with several hundred veterans of the 29th Division and their families, my father and mother, Clarice, participated in the vast array of activities marking the 50th anniversary of D-Day. The American guests were wined and dined from morning until midnight by their grateful French hosts.
For my father, the highlight of the week and a half was a parade through the streets of St-Lo on June 5. French schoolchildren took the hand of each veteran and other guests. My father appeared in a photo in "France-Ouest" newspaper on June 6.
My parents stayed in the town of Vire and, with a minimum of persuasion from me, my father took advantage of the local post office to create several philatelic souvenirs.
A fitting Franco-American one is a 29th Division card posted from Vire on June 6. The card was written on the 5th and the French commemorative stamps had not yet been issued. Calvados, by the way, was just one of the souvenirs handed out to guests.
The message says, in part: "Going to the beach again today and, of course, tomorrow for the big one with Pres Clinton. Then several more occasions before winding up the tour in a return to Paris and a march down the Champs Elysees."
He also made up first-day covers of the two French stamps issued on June 6. One bears a block of the French Debarquement stamp while the other features the stamp commemorating liberation. Both bear a 6-6-94 Vire handstamp. He signed them later in Scotland.
First-day ceremonies for the American issue marking D-Day and other 1944 milestones were held, appropriately enough, in Normandy and stamps received the cancellation of the USS Normandy aircraft carrier. Unusually, President Clinton and the postmaster general of the US Postal Service, Marvin Runyon, were present. This MS, half of a sheet, was one of up to several thousand handed out to veterans in Normandy on June 6.
Some veterans showed no interest in these souvenirs but my father, well into the philatelic swing of things, was only too happy to accept unwanted copies. Even though he does not consider himself to be a collector, he has acquired all the U.S. World War II stamps and souvenir booklets. He kept a copy of the 1944 sheet for himself, to be sure. Other philatelic items, some of which I prepared for him, count among his treasured souvenirs of his Normandy days.
As my mother had died in the intervening years, I accompanied my father to the 60th anniversary, a highly memorable occasion. I used 1994 FDCs and postcards to make up mementoes, obtaining signatures of French village mayors and US generals and veterans. The St-Lo Philatelic Society put on a superb display of D-Day and local postcards, and many reproduction cards of wartime photos were available.
On 6 June 2004 my father and I had such good seats for the speeches by Presidents George Bush and Jacques Chirac that Tom Hanks, the actor, and Steven Spielberg, who directed the D-Day film Saving Private Ryan among many others, were seated in the row behind us. They kindly signed my programme.
This is a personal philatelic story of June 1944, 1994 and 2004 has been made much easier to tell because my father has written and privately published a book about his experiences in the Second World War, "One Man's War Story: An Account of my Experiences in the United States Army During World War II."
In the introduction to it he explains: "I write this for myself so that I shall never forget those days nor fail to appreciate what I fought for and what I now have; for others who experienced that time that they might see or remember a little of how it was to fight the war; and for those who have come afterward, that they might know something of the World War II years."
After the usual long, drawn-out training in the US and England, Charles H. Neighbor boarded the USS Thomas Jefferson, a troop transport ship, for the slow and uneasy trip out into the English Channel. He was 19 and a half years old. He and other members of E Company landed on Omaha Beach in the first wave, in fact 10 or 15 minutes ahead of the planned time of 6.30. He was a flame-thrower operator, which made him a walking human bomb.
"I assumed the attitude, `I must do it, even if I am shot at, so I'll just start and hope I make it,' and, finally, rose and moved a few yards ... A lane had been marked off ... I crawled through ... only Sgt. Hatchet, and, perhaps, one or two others, had reached the ravine, so we were able to stop and rest while waiting for the others. The firing continued as we took our break ..."
In fact his unit, unlike the others in his company, had hit a relative weak spot in the German defences, and suffered less than 10 per cent casualties the first day. His flame-throwing equipment proved to be of little use and he reverted to rifleman.
When he was reunited with the rest of E Company, sobering reports awaited him and the others. "It was then that I became aware of the holocaust D-Day had been and how fortunate any of us were to be alive."
And yet the sending and receiving of mail figures prominently in my father's account. In fact, only eating seemed to have been a more popular activity. He found time after a few days to write a short letter to his mother using paper tucked in his helmet liner and a pencil stub. One limited mail call came at about the same time.
More than two weeks after D-Day, in defense of St-Lo, conditions began to improve in some ways. "As soon as we were settled, mail began coming in ... We received stacks of letters. Some of them were as old as the hills, but it was if they had been written the day before. After the backlog of letters had been delivered, they brought our packages ... For a while, I was averaging a package a day ..."
He generally employed postal stationery that prepaid the airmail rate of 6 cents for military personnel outside the continental U.S. These personnel could write via surface mail for free, but they tended to prefer, not surprisingly, the more expedient air mail service. His US Army Postal Service covers contain a "29" above the date for the 29th Division. The envelopes were signed by the censor as well as being stamped. Some examples received an parcel front stamp of Iola, Kansas, my fateher's home town, which indicated that a request in the letter for a parcel had been met. (To keep postal traffic to a minimum, soldiers could not be sent a parcel unless it had been requested.)
In his book, he writes of this period 20 days after D-Day: "I caught a glimpse of myself in a full-length mirror. I was startled at the image I saw. I hardly recognized myself! Instead of the carefree, easy-going kid I considered myself, I had the look of a hardened fighter. My face was hollow, with dirt smudges and several days' growth of beard. I had my steel helmet on, my clothes were dirty and the BAR was slung over my shoulder. I really had the appearance of a combat soldier."
A cover mailed two days later is similar in most respects but bears no arrival marks. As was standard practice to assist in monitoring of mail, the writing was in pencil.
Of this period he remembers one of many close calls: "In the thin dawning light, we tried to glean something of worth from the rubble that was strewn around. Soon, it was becoming light enough to see, so we hurried back to our lines and ran across the last field in broad daylight. We did not return any too soon, for just as we were scrambling over the last hedgerow, shots rang out behind us."
He also employed some of the hundreds of millions of "V-Mail" letters sent to or from American military personnel. To save fuel, letters were microfilmed, flown to a special postal facility, reproduced and delivered as normal postal items. A letter to his grandmother dated July 3 starts with a report of receiving mail.
By this time, the daily struggle to survive was becoming harder and harder. "Except for Lt. Garcia, all our casualties (six or eight) had been fatal. This began to have a depressing effect upon us, for it was no longer a matter if whether or not you were hit, but when. As our numbers diminished, we each carried more responsibility, and our chances of survival grew slimmer," he writes of the period before lost comrades could be replaced by significant numbers of reinforcements. One green replacement who did arrive was killed before most of the soldiers learned his name.
A V-Mail dispatch from 13 days later was sent under much different circumstances. In fact, this typewritten letter was sent just three days after the "inevitable" occurred: "As several shells came in, I huddled up to the hedgerow ... Then a shell came my way. It sounded as if it landed right in my ear. Well -- my helmet went somewhere and I knew I'd been hit ..."
In fact, perhaps not surprisingly, this letter is highly economical with the truth. Despite talk of being "wounded slightly", the reality was more serious. Years later he wrote that as well as head injuries, "I received what was called a sucking wound. Shrapnel entered my diaphragm through the lower right part of my back, leaving a hole through which inhaled air could escape."
It was nearly Christmas 1944 before my father was able to return to his unit, by then in Germany. Two weeks later he tripped a grenade booby trap, was seriously injured in the leg and did the hospital circuit a second time. This time he managed a trip to Scotland to visit a pen friend in Penicuik, a town outside Edinburgh, where, coincidently, I live. Again he returned to his unit in Germany, this time to see the war out safely.
Back to Normandy
Along with several hundred veterans of the 29th Division and their families, my father and mother, Clarice, participated in the vast array of activities marking the 50th anniversary of D-Day. The American guests were wined and dined from morning until midnight by their grateful French hosts.
For my father, the highlight of the week and a half was a parade through the streets of St-Lo on June 5. French schoolchildren took the hand of each veteran and other guests. My father appeared in a photo in "France-Ouest" newspaper on June 6.
My parents stayed in the town of Vire and, with a minimum of persuasion from me, my father took advantage of the local post office to create several philatelic souvenirs.
A fitting Franco-American one is a 29th Division card posted from Vire on June 6. The card was written on the 5th and the French commemorative stamps had not yet been issued. Calvados, by the way, was just one of the souvenirs handed out to guests.
The message says, in part: "Going to the beach again today and, of course, tomorrow for the big one with Pres Clinton. Then several more occasions before winding up the tour in a return to Paris and a march down the Champs Elysees."
He also made up first-day covers of the two French stamps issued on June 6. One bears a block of the French Debarquement stamp while the other features the stamp commemorating liberation. Both bear a 6-6-94 Vire handstamp. He signed them later in Scotland.
First-day ceremonies for the American issue marking D-Day and other 1944 milestones were held, appropriately enough, in Normandy and stamps received the cancellation of the USS Normandy aircraft carrier. Unusually, President Clinton and the postmaster general of the US Postal Service, Marvin Runyon, were present. This MS, half of a sheet, was one of up to several thousand handed out to veterans in Normandy on June 6.
Some veterans showed no interest in these souvenirs but my father, well into the philatelic swing of things, was only too happy to accept unwanted copies. Even though he does not consider himself to be a collector, he has acquired all the U.S. World War II stamps and souvenir booklets. He kept a copy of the 1944 sheet for himself, to be sure. Other philatelic items, some of which I prepared for him, count among his treasured souvenirs of his Normandy days.
As my mother had died in the intervening years, I accompanied my father to the 60th anniversary, a highly memorable occasion. I used 1994 FDCs and postcards to make up mementoes, obtaining signatures of French village mayors and US generals and veterans. The St-Lo Philatelic Society put on a superb display of D-Day and local postcards, and many reproduction cards of wartime photos were available.
On 6 June 2004 my father and I had such good seats for the speeches by Presidents George Bush and Jacques Chirac that Tom Hanks, the actor, and Steven Spielberg, who directed the D-Day film Saving Private Ryan among many others, were seated in the row behind us. They kindly signed my programme.
posted by Chad Neighbor at
16.5.08
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