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WWII
01/10/2010
01/08/2010
Grandpa Burns WWII
The Article Reads:
During World War II, Allied Armies did what many military experts thought was nearly impossible - conduct beach landings of troops and materials successfully under heavy fire.
American, British and other Allied troops had to hit the beaches dozens of times in large and small operations to defeat Axis armies in European and Pacific theaters.
Don Burns of Webster was one US Navy sailor who helped soldiers make those amphibious landings onto hostile beaches, and he also moved supplies from ship to land to support the invasions. On D-Day, he was a member of the US Naval Amphibious Forces serving as a combination quartermaster and signalman on board the LCT 649.
He described the landing craft tank (LCT) as a slow, flat-bottomed ship with 32 sealed tanks attached to its hull to provide buoyancy.
"You could shoot it full of holes and not sink it." Burns said.
Burns said LCTs earned the nicknames "runaway bathtubs" and "bedpans" during the war. The landing craft were built for utility and not beauty, and their purpose was to safely move men ashore for an invasion.
Two officers who were Navy Ensigns, and 14 sailors made up the crew of LCT 649. It was one LCT among a flotilla of 25. Their job on D-Day was to run the craft onto Omaha Beach, drop it's front ramp and get soldiers and Army Vehicles on land as quickly as possible.
On the morning of June 5, 1944 LCT 649 and other ships sailed from Southhampton, England across the English Channel for Normandy and the invasion of France. Stormy weather had delayed Allied landings and threatened to push back D-Day for at least two weeks, maybe months.
Burns' transport was one of the ships which had started out a day earlier, June 4, but they were called back to England due to bad weather. Most soldiers on board transports were seasick, bored and anxious to do something since the men were loaded on the ships June 3.
"Everyone wanted to get it over with and go home," Burns said.
Some veterans warned Allied soldiers and sailors to be careful what they wished for that June. Burns remembers advise given by an admiral in preparation for D-Day.
"He said, 'I don't want anyone out there who isn't afraid. People who don't have any fear do stupid things that endanger other people,'" Burns recalled.
D-Day was quite an experience for a young man who had grown up on farms in the Webster area. Burns' family had moved around the region to Waubay, Roslyn, Clark and Lake City when he was growing up.
Burns was born in 1924, one of two fraternal twins, Don and Ron. Don described his brother Ron as the outgoing one, while he was more shy around others. In the spring of 1943, Ron was drafted, and Don volunteered in order to stay with his brother. At age 18, they went off to boot camp in Fairgood, ID, 15 miles from Spokane, WA.
After finishing boot camp, the Burns brothers were split up, and Don was sent by train to Northfolk, VA. Ron went to the Pacific Ocean and manned weapons on merchant ships carrying supplies to Allied troops. Don was assigned to his LCT in the European theater of war.
After his training in the United States was complete. Burns sailed from New York harbor for England on the third-largest ocean liner in the world. "Isle of France". He was transported with 15,000 soldiers and 3,000 sailors across the Atlantic. Abondon ship drills for troops took two and a half hours to complete.
"At that time, I figured there were about as many troops on the ship as there were people in Aberdeen." Burns said.
Isle of France was able to steam across the ocean without armor escort, because she was considered too fast for German U-boats to catch and torpedo. It still took the liner seven days to cross the ocean using a submarine-avoiding , zigzag course before docking in Glasgow, Scotland. In peacetime, Isle of France would have made the crossing in four days.
LCT 649 was shipped across the Atlantic in three pieces, stored on a freighter which docked in Plymouth, England. The landing craft and its crew visited Liverpool and Dartmouth before docking in Southhampton before the invasion.
Burns' LCT was supposed to land with the second wave of invaders on Omaha Beach. Omaha was a strip of beach connecting three British and Canadian landing areas and a second American landing site code-named Utah. Allied Commanders knew Omaha was heavily defended with weapons, but hoped Axis soldiers assigned that sector would not put up much of a flight. Those hopes were in vain.
LCT 649 carried 115 soldiers of the 1st Infantry Division, "The Big Red One," and their trucks and jeeps across the English Channel. The landing craft was scheduled to drop off its cargo onto French soil at 5a.m. June 6.
Before Burns' ship could land, US Coast Guard vessels responsible for clearing landing zones from underwater mines warned LCT 649 and other landing crafts to turn back and wait. The Coast Guard had found underwater obstacles in their water lanes that they had to clear or find a way around.
Twelve hours later at 5 p.m., Burns LCT steamed on to the beach. During that time, he watched Americans and Germans fight deperately on the Omaha landing site. The US Army lost 2,400 soldiers in the first waves of attackers on Omaha. Despite heavy casualties in dead and wounded troops at that site, the Allies managed to land 34,000 soldiers in France by the end of D-Day.
Burns called the men of the US 1st Infantry Division the real heroes on that June day.
After he initial landings, LCT 649 and her crew had to stay in Normandy to land supplies for troops. The LCT would take on supplies from merchant ships offshore and move them onto the beach.
Landing craft would run up onto the shore when the tide was high, beach during low tide, and wait for the next high tide to move back into the water. When they weren't helping to unload cargo, Burns and his fellow sailors would play baseball or football or explore France and try not to get killed.
Captured German soldiers helped unload Allied landing craft. Burns noticed that many of the Germans were only about 16 years old.
Burns stayed in France with his crewmates for about six months without pay, supplies, or medical services. The sailors "liberated" their chow from Army supplies that they transferred to shore, or merchant ships would supply them with meat, potatoes, or other foods.
"I kind of thought the Navy had forgotten about us," Burns said. "If I had a way of getting home, I would have gone home."
He came back home in January for 30 days leave and reassignment. Burns was assigned to the USS Renate, pronounced "ren-nay," a fast attack transport.
USS Renate sailed from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean through the Panama Canal. The transport shipped 1500 marines from Hawai'i to Okinawa and then waited for the invasion of Japan.
However, US Superfortress bombers dropped atomic weapons on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945, ending the war. American soldiers and sailors were well aware of the heavy casualties predicted for the Japan invasion and were relieved.
"Harry Truman dropped the bomb, and I've been glad ever since then," Burns said.
After Japan's surrender, the Renate landed Marines at Sasebo, a city near Nagasaki, and transported two shiploads of troops from the Philippines to Japan. While docked in Japan unloading troops and supplies, Don found his twin brother walking along the pier. The last Don had heard, Ron was in Australia.
"That was the first time I'd seen him in two years," Burns said. "I had to travel halfway around the world to see my brother."
After the war, Don returned to Day County. He worked for the telephone company, farmed, held other jobs, and then worked for the US Postal Service until retirement.
He and his wife Louise married in April 1948 and had 11 children. Their kids, in turn, have produced 39 grandchildren and two great-grandchildren, and another grandchild is on the way. The family recently held a reunion at Roy Lake.
Looking back on his World War II service in the Navy, Burns said, "It was quite an experience for a country boy who thought Aberdeen was a big city."
There is a story Dad told us kids over the years. When he returned from WWII, he rode a trrain cross-country. Finally transferrin
