Andrew L. "Shad" Crockett, a retired postmaster and a highly decorated World War II infantryman who landed at Normandy on D-Day with the 29th Division, died Wednesday of heart failure at the Edward W. McGready Memorial Hospital in Crisfield. He was 85.
Mr. Crockett was born on Tangier Island, the son of a waterman and a homemaker.
After graduating from Crisfield High School, he moved to Baltimore and went to work in the Bethlehem Steel Corp.'s Fairfield yard building Liberty ships.
In 1943, he enlisted in the Army and was sent to England aboard the RMS Queen Mary, where he joined the 115th Regiment of the Army's 29th Division.
Mr. Crockett was in the second wave of troops that landed at Omaha Beach on the morning of June 6, 1944, and then participated in the historic battle for St. Lo that liberated the Norman city from its four-year occupation by German forces.
Mr. Crockett, who later fought in the battle for Berlin, received three Bronze Stars and the Combat Infantryman's Badge.
After the war, Mr. Crockett remained an active reservist in the Maryland National Guard, attaining the rank of chief warrant officer when he retired in 1983.
He became a Maryland state trooper in 1950, and retired seven years later after being hit by a car that left him with a broken neck.
Mr. Crockett then worked as a manager and safety director for Eastern Freight Ways and later Service Trucking Co., until being named postmaster of the Crisfield Post Office in 1979. He retired in 1987.
Mr. Crockett returned to Normandy on the 50th anniversary with a group of fellow Crisfield D-Day veterans.
"I think the 50th anniversary triggered those memories and he started talking about it," said his son, Andrew L. Crockett Jr., a Vietnam veteran and Westover poultry farmer.
"He often said he made it through when so many didn't and had served in several squads that had been decimated," his son said. "He definitely had been in the thick of it."
Mr. Crockett recalled his father saying that he and a fellow infantryman who were in a building were able to single handedly destroy a German machine gun nest. Other memories included seeing Gens. Dwight D. Eisenhower and George S. Patton Jr.
When he returned to France for the first time since 1944, Mr. Crockett stayed with a host family in St. Lo because of a shortage of hotel space.
