D Day

150 years ago in The SunAugust 30: Baltimore Hod Carriers -- Owing to the peculiar XTC inscription upon the banner paraded through the streets a few days since by the Baltimore Hod Carriers' Association, it was very naturally inferred by many who saw it, that a strike for wages was the ostensible object of the procession. The primary object of the public demonstration was a grand commemoration of the anniversary of that association, by a dinner, harangue, & c.100 years ago in The SunAugust 31: EASTON, Md., Aug. 30 -- The oyster tongmen are ready and eager for the beginning of the open season on Thursday.

Richard "Herk" Herklotz remembers the barrage balloons thick over the vast D-Day fleet and the bodies thick in the water as his landing craft sped toward Omaha Beach."

The 29th Division Association of the Maryland National Guard will conduct a memorial service Friday to commemorate the D-Day landings of June 6, 1944, and a crab feast from 3 p.m. to 7 p.m. at the Normandy Room, 3919 E. Lombard St., Baltimore.Information is available from association historian Bernard Nowakowski, 410-276-0426.Pub Date: 6/04/97

John Kernan Slingluff was aboard a landing ship tank that was plowing its way across the English Channel on June 1, 1944, when he walked into the ward room and realized he was about to participate in one of history's greatest events."

High above the English Channel, the twin-engine C-47 transport plane hammered through the midnight sky toward France. Anti-aircraft bursts startled the dozing paratroopers awake; they were over Nazi-occupied territory. The longest day had begun.It was D-Day, June 6, 1944 -- 53 years ago today.Although no major memorials are scheduled this year on the international scale of the 50th anniversary, individual groups plan their own solemn services today.But survivors don't need formal D-Day ceremonies -- they were there, and they remember.

Irving P. Krick,89, a pioneering meteorologist who issued the crucial weather forecast that scheduled the Allied D-Day invasion of Normandy in World War II, died June 20 at his home in Pasadena, Calif.He established the Meteorology Department at the California Institute of Technology before leaving in the early days of the war to become a colonel in the Army. He headed the Weather Information Section of U.S. Strategic Air Forces in Europe. His forecasts were necessary to enhance the success of Allied bombing runs.

WASHINGTON -- Retired Brig. Gen. Alvin D. Ungerleider remembers fighting his way into a German-run slave-labor camp near Nordhausen, Germany, with other soldiers in his company in April 1945.They had stumbled upon a camp being guarded by about 50 German soldiers, whom they quickly overpowered. The American soldiers freed about 300 prisoners, many of them virtual skeletons."The sight that met my eyes is still burned intrinsically into my soul," Mr. Ungerleider said. "We thought we had entered the gates of hell."

BILL CLINTON gave a great D-Day speech about generations and won over the hearts and minds of the least narrow-minded of his critics.That he is not himself a veteran didn't matter at all. And why should it? Veteran commanders-in-chief are the rule, but there have been plenty of exceptions -- including the one when D-Day occurred.Franklin D. Roosevelt was assistant secretary of the Navy when the U.S. entered World War I. Partly out of the romanticism that still existed about war then and partly because he thought it would be a political liability not to have served, FDR asked the secretary of the Navy for a commission.

WHEN our wise Allied leaders decided to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the D-Day landings, the question immediately arose, "Should the Germans be invited?" It was a sticky one and it's still being debated by those who served in World War II.The anti-German argument is that Hitler's troops should not be invited to the commemoration of an event at which they killed so many of our guys in the name of Aryan superiority.The pro-German planners insist that they should be invited because if it hadn't been for the Germans there would not have been a D-Day in the first place.

Like many of his peers born in the latter half of the 1940s, Blaine Taylor loved movies about World War II.But his infatuation didn't end when the theater lights went up. In fact, it grew."

James Daniel Nolan, a retired lawyer and former president of Blue Shield of Maryland who landed at Normandy with the 1st Infantry Division on D-Day, died Wednesday of cancer at Mercy Ridge in Timonium. He was 86. Mr. Nolan, the son of Irish immigrant parents, was born in Baltimore and raised on McKean Avenue and later in Howard Park. "His father was a streetcar motorman for United Railways and Electric Company, and his mother was a housekeeper," said a son, Stephen J. Nolan, a Towson lawyer and a Timonium resident.

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.

Even in 1671, pioneers were astounded by the blue mountains and vast valley in southwestern Virginia. Now the Roanoke Valley, less than a five-hour drive from Baltimore, is a place for visitors to explore the natural beauty of the Blue Ridge Mountains and discover both the historical and modern features of Roanoke. Here are five things to see and do: 1 Tour the Taubman. This museum is a work of art - inside and out - and displays early American art, exquisite handbags and contemporary photography.

ELISHA RAY NANCE, 94 Last surviving D-Day 'Bedford Boy' When World War II broke out, the "Bedford Boys" left home to serve. Many of them didn't come home - so many that the community had among the greatest losses per capita on D-Day. Now the last survivor has died. Elisha Ray Nance died Sunday in Bedford, Va., a spokesman for Tharp Funeral Home and Crematory said Monday. Mr. Nance was among 38 National Guardsmen from the close-knit community of Bedford who were in Company A of the 116th Infantry, a spokeswoman at the National D-Day Memorial Foundation said.

He described his experience at the Allied invasion of Europe as "90 percent boredom and 10 percent terror." Dr. Edmund G. Beacham, who as a young Army physician crossed the English Channel to land in France on June 7, 1944, died of heart disease Tuesday at Stella Maris hospice. The Towson resident was 93. "Almost whole neighborhoods of men were killed. I don't think anyone envisioned those kinds of casualties. We had clearing stations set up for maybe 900 men over a three-day period. And we were getting 2,100 casualties a day," he told a Sun reporter in 1989.

Thomas F. Cadwalader Jr., an insurance agent and World War II veteran wounded in the D-Day invasion of France, died Monday of prostate cancer at Joseph Richey House in Baltimore. The former Tuxedo Park resident was 94. Mr. Cadwalader was born in 1912 at a West Mount Royal Avenue home to parents who traced their lineage to a Declaration of Independence signer and a Revolutionary War general. "He was a very modest man, and a man of the utmost integrity. A very loyal friend," said his wife of 61 years, the former Phyllis Jane "Jonnie" Clegg Norrie.

I knew John Leo Virgil Murphy Jr., who was the father of a friend of mine, back in the 1970s and 1980s. He was a former safety engineer for U.S. Fidelity & Guaranty Co., and when I knew him, he was working as a city housing inspector. Murphy was one of Baltimore's great characters. He was an inveterate lunchtime walker and could be seen wearing his trademark crushed fedora or summer straw hat while slowly puffing on the extra-long cigarettes that were a fixture of his daily downtown perambulations.

On July 6, 2005, LEONARD F. VIERS, 2nd Day D-Day Veteran, served with the 29th Division of the US Army and retired from Harry T. Campbell after 38 years of service, beloved husband of Luwanda Dixon Viers, loving father of Eugene and Wanda Len Viers. Also survived by four sisters, and three brothers.The family will receive friends in the LEMMON FUNERAL HOME OF DULANEY VALLEY INC., 10 W. Padonia Road (at York Road) Timonium-Cockeysville on Friday, 7 to 9 P.M. Funeral services will be celebrated in the Particular Primitive Baptist Church at Black Rock, Falls and Butler Roads on Saturday, July 9, at 11 A.M. Interment the adjoining cemetery.

On July 6, 2005, LEONARD F. VIERS, 2nd Day D-Day Veteran, served with the 29th Division of the US Army and retired from Harry T. Campbell after 38 years of service, beloved husband of Luwanda Dixon Viers, loving father of Eugene and Wanda Len Viers. Also survived by four sisters, and three brothers. The family will receive friends in the LEMMON FUNERAL HOME OF DULANEY VALLEY INC., 10 W. Padonia Road (at York Road) Timonium-Cockeysville on Friday, 7 to 9 P.M. Funeral services will be celebrated in the Particular Primitive Baptist Church at Black Rock, Falls and Butler Roads on Saturday, July 9, at 11 A.M. Interment the adjoining cemetery.

In 1942, Sun publisher Paul Patterson recruited a young Yale grad, Holbrook Bradley, to the staff of the paper. After a year covering cops and the waterfront, the 27-year-old was tapped to cover the 29th Infantry Division - the heralded Blue and Gray, made up mostly of Maryland and Virginia soldiers - as the division trained in the United States and England for the invasion of France. Sixty-one years ago tomorrow - on D-Day - Bradley watched the bloody charge of Omaha Beach from an offshore transport.