Remembering D-Day

"The eyes of the world are upon you. The hopes and prayers of liberty loving people everywhere march with you." – Dwight D. Eisenhower’s message to the troops before D-Day

Most of my generation will never be able to comprehend how awful it must have been. Maybe those combat veterans of Iraq or Afghanistan could come close, but even then, the death and destruction in the desert sands never reached the scale it did on those beaches of Normandy on that gruesome morning in 1944.

However odd it may sound, World War II was simply the perfect war — it could not have been written better. It had the perfect villains, the perfect heroes, the perfect motive for fighting. And, considering the murderous war machine that the Allies were up against, maybe no amount of rhetoric is too much when describing what those noble thousands did on June 6 — they were, in every way, freedom’s last gasp.

But on a more visceral level, D-Day was just another terrible battle in another terrible war. It was kids born on one patch of land slaughtering those born on another, shooting and stabbing and lighting each other on fire and doing it on French beaches that rank among God’s most gorgeous creations.

Last Thursday was the 69th anniversary of that battle. There is nothing "important" about that number in itself, and it will no doubt be overshadowed by the 70th anniversary, and even more so by the 100th. But in the next 12 months, more of those men of the Greatest Generation will die. Even those who were 17 in 1944 are now 86 years old. The boatman waits for them. He will only wait a little longer. How many thousands more will be gone by next June?

It is always hard for those of us who are young to remember that the old were once just like us, and that the men, hobbled by the years and reliant upon crutch and walker, were once steady and strong. They drove too fast and boxed and wrestled and chased girls on Friday nights. They didn’t want to be on those transports churning their way across the English Channel any more than I would now — as Stephen Ambrose once wrote, "They wanted to be throwing baseballs, not hand grenades, shooting .22s at rabbits, not M-1s at other men."

But, he says, "When the test came, when freedom had to be fought for or abandoned, they fought." And fight they did, like wildcats, with all the weight of the future of humanity strapped to their backs. And they won, beautifully.

We like to think that as a race we’re past warfare on that scale and that the memories of our near self-destruction will always serve as a dire warning about what happens when we let fear and ignorance guide us. But they won’t always remain as fresh as they are now, and with every veteran’s funeral, they drift a little further out into the seas of history.

So we are left to simply remember and hold solemn pride in the fact that we were able to share the earth with these men. And we must hope that should the dark hand of evil ever wrap its fingers around the globe once more, others will rise, as they did, to wrench them off.

Email: janoski@northjersey.com

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One veteran’s longest day

BY STEVE JANOSKI

The red cover is faded and tattered, its gold lettering slowly beginning to wear to the point of illegibility.

The pages have taken on a yellow hue, and small, dark smudges of fingerprints — dirt? blood? — festoon the corners.


It sits quietly on the table, with its owner of nearly seven decades having recently departed this world after 88 years, with the story of how it came into his possession known to but a few.

Frank T. Semeraro was born in 1922. Following the death of his mother, he had to quit school early to work on his father's garbage truck, and came up in a hardscrabble Paterson existence in the earliest decades of the American Century.

His father had been wounded while serving in the Italian Army during the Great War, and had left that country just as Mussolini's shadow began to rise over Rome. As the storm of World War II began to gather, he was positive of one thing: he didn't want his son to go to war.

But, as the long fingers of fascism began to wrap around the globe, there would be few families who remained untouched, few children that remained unscathed. The Semeraro home on McBride Avenue was to be no different.

After the Dec. 7, 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor, the young Semeraro, like so many others, decided that he was going to go to war.

He planned to join the US Navy so he could fight the Japanese, but an ill-fated fishing trip left him so seasick that he reconsidered that course.

He decided to leave it up to the government, and figured that when they drafted him, they'd send him where they needed him. When the US Army called in 1943, it decided that he was needed in Europe, and so after boot camp, Semeraro was sent to England.

As 1943 wore on into the following year, rumors abounded over whether, where, and when the Allies would make their great landing on the European mainland to begin the final stage of the great battle to save civilization.

The plans for the landing, ominously named Operation Overlord by high command, were unknown to the troops on the ground…until the day that the call came.

And as they herded troops into the transports sitting along the coast of the English Channel on the morning of June 6, 1944, Semeraro wasn't sure where he was headed, but he knew that whatever was happening, it was big.

The seas were rough that day, and men vomited as the boats shook; a result, no doubt, of a brutal combination of seasickness and devastated nerves.

As they closed on the French beach, it's likely that the scene that greeted Semeraro was one straight from the depths of hell — steel abatis, known as "Czech hedgehogs," strewn across the sand as the great cement pillboxes of Hitler's fearsome Atlantic Wall rose into the heavens — but there was little time to take in the sight, for as they neared the shore, his landing craft was struck by a shell.

In an effort to save their lives, troops began streaming over the sides and into the water. Semeraro did the same, but realized quickly that his comrades, weighed down by their heavily-loaded packs, were sinking straight to the bottom and drowning.

Fearing this would be his fate, he pulled his knife and cut off his pack before desperately swimming for shore. Once there, however, there seemed to be no respite from the flurry of German bullets — until he saw one man waiving him over.

The man was another American soldier, and had already dug out a small foxhole to provide cover. When Semeraro reached him, the soldier began giving him his rations, weapon, and the like.

"I've got to get back to the boats, I need medical attention," the man told him. It was then he noticed that the soldier was holding his stomach and intestines together with his hands.

"Just wait for the others," he told Semeraro.

Before he left though, he handed him a small, red prayer book, Army issue, 1943, with its title, "A Spiritual Almanac for Service Men," printed across the front in golden letters.

"You're gonna' need this," he said, before disappearing back to the ships, never to be seen again.

Semeraro stayed in that foxhole as long as he could on D-Day, listening to the gruesome bark of the German MG-42s as they mowed down American troops and turned the Channel's water red with their blood.

He held onto that prayer book later on as he fought his way off the beach and through the pillboxes and trenches of the Atlantic Wall, and then through the hedgerows of Normandy, where the Germans fought tooth and nail to try to keep the Allies from breaking out.

It stayed with him through the rest of his service, and after the war, too, as he established a family construction company, married, had children, then grandchildren, and then great-grandchildren.

The world would eventually come to know the ghastly horror of that day, and that beach — Omaha Beach — would come to join the ranks of places like Verdun, Antietam, and Iwo Jima as being amongst the most infamous killing fields in history.

And when "Grandpa Semeraro" (as he was known to all of us) passed away on Oct. 6, he joined all of the other spirits of the Greatest Generation who are slowly passing on to eternity, forever to be remembered as those valiant few who faced down true evil, and saved the world from unimaginable darkness.

This story was related to me by his grandson, Frank T. Semeraro, who is proud to share his grandfather's name.

E-mail: janoski@northjersey.com


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