On this day 80 years ago, a farmer from Alden, Kansas, boarded a landing craft off the coast of Normandy and headed for Omaha Beach.
As the ramp descended and they began to jump into the cold water, some of his men, who could not swim, sank and drowned under the weight of their heavy equipment. Others were shot before landing.
He walked to the beach, told his men to follow him as he had experience locating mines, and they made it to the base of the cliffs. There, he found other men trapped and motionless.
He said he told the men that if they stayed there they would die, so they had to climb the cliff.
When he addressed his fellow combat engineers, he said, “I have never asked my men to do anything that I was not willing to do myself.” Then he started climbing.
I believe he was one of the many men that day on Omaha Beach who turned the tide by running up and off the beach to what must have seemed like certain death.
He was in two invasions before D-Day.
He landed in North Africa and watched from a mountain observation post as German General Erwin Rommel’s tanks destroyed Allied forces at the Kasserine Pass.
He landed in Sicily, in Gela, and was responsible for removing mines from roads and paths, while being machine-gunned by Nazi planes.
He was a very quiet man. Often, at noisy family dinners, he would wait until everyone had gone on at length and then pronounce the legal equivalent of summary judgment, which often ended any discussion with a brief, eloquent sentence.
He was an excellent chess player, and in tennis he could exhaust his opponent’s stamina, carefully returning their powerful blows with small, silent but precise returns, making them run back and forth until, like Rommel in Kasserine Pass , would run out of energy. gas.
He loved strategy and as a reserve officer took postwar classes at West Point, where he met and became friends with Creighton Abrams — namesake of the Abrams tank — a young officer in World War II who would later serve as a general and Head of State -Major in the Army during the Vietnam War.
Years later, when Huey and his wife Virginia Huey took a trip around the world, he stopped in Saigon to see his old friend and argued that we should withdraw from Vietnam because he believed there was no good outcome possible.
He once joined a Hutchinson anti-war march and was good-naturedly cheered on the sidewalk by his brother-in-law.
Wounded in action
Huey cleared the top of that Normandy cliff and went into the countryside, where he searched for mines and cut holes in the ancient wall-like hedges. He spoke of these hedgerows with vigorous frustration, because they allowed the enemy to establish free-fire zones in open fields and had to be blown up to penetrate.
By the time he arrived in Belgium, Huey had already been promoted to lieutenant and, again, led by example.
He was once with a newly appointed lieutenant from West Point in a jeep to scout ahead of his troops. He used to stop and listen and he would hear Panzer tanks coming down the road. He told the jeep driver to go under a nearby bridge and the line of tanks passed over them. When they got back on the road, a stray tank appeared and the new guy opened fire on the tank while Bruce and the jeep driver shouted “No, no.”
The tank hit the jeep and killed the driver. Huey was shot in the stomach and crawled into a nearby field.
He recovered in England and returned when his unit was thrown into the battle of Hertgen Forrest. It was a dark, hellish forest, with a tree canopy so tall and narrow that it was often dark even at midday.
The Nazis spent months building hidden positions, from which airborne mortar rounds would rain shrapnel on everyone below, no matter how entrenched they were. Nearly 5,000 men died there in a battle that many say should never have happened. They say the forest should have been isolated and the Germans would have starved to death.
Immediately thereafter, he was in the Battle of the Bulge and then crossed the Remagen Bridge, only to be seriously injured by shelling.
His recovery was long and painful, and for the rest of his life, German steel coursed through his intestines.
But he wouldn’t go to a new hospital, even though he was well off. He insisted on going to VA hospitals for repeated surgeries because those “are the hospitals my men have to use.”
He was so modest that in his 21-page memoir he quickly glossed over the details he spoke of later in Ft. Riley at the 50th anniversary of D-Day.
He died in 1994. Therefore, he never saw “Saving Private Ryan.” If he had seen it, despite his very unassuming and even humble nature, I believe he could have recognized himself.
Dan Rouser is a project manager at HFG Architecture in Wichita. A former Wichita Eagle employee, he is the nephew of the late Robert Bruce Huey.
