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Vet credits war for his success

"My whole life depended on having served in the military," says D-Day veteran Frank Hepner.

By ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published June 12, 2006

ORANGE PARK - It was because of war that Frank Hepner's diet of cheap and filling lima beans ended, and he could dine on the Army's tasty canned rations.

It was because of war that poverty no longer kept him from Harvard, and the GI. Bill gave him the money to go to the school he was accepted to but only dreamed of attending.

It was because of war that at 19, he saw bodies in the tide on D-Day.

"We veterans have talked about what it was in soldiers' minds that willed them to land on a beach with enemy fire," Hepner said. "Once you're told, you do it. You follow any command, and you're trained not to question.

"You just didn't have any way else to go."

Hepner, 81, completed his first mission as part of the invasion of Normandy, France, during D-Day. Hepner, who moved from Maryland to Orange Park four years ago, said it is hard to remember down to the hour what happened when the United States made its first, mammoth effort to liberate Europe from Nazi control on June 6, 1944.

During a rocky trip from England to France that would mark the largest seaborne invasion in history, Hepner was one of the few lucky enough to find a place in his landing vessel's cabin as a haven from the whipping rain. Most of the vessel's 72 men who weren't rotating in and out of the cabin spent the night on deck, trying to find shelter beneath six trucks.

"We didn't think about it as this great invasion," said Hepner, a private first class in the Army.

As Hepner prepared to ground himself on French soil, he watched as the men in his battalion stepped into the nearly head-high chilly water and began wading to shore. Each man was laden with about 100 pounds of equipment, and Hepner had volunteered to carry an extra can of 20-pound machine gun shells that he tied on his shoulder with ropes.

Before he hit the water, he watched a friend slip off the deck, buckle under the weight he was carrying and become submerged in the bay. As the man's helmet began to float away, Hepner grabbed it and handed it back to the soldier. Then Hepner gathered his courage, plunged into the bay and waded 150 feet to shore.

"It was the most terrifying thing of the whole operation, to jump in with that weight," Hepner said.

Under the blasting protection of Navy ships, the men in Hepner's battalion made it to shore, dodging German bullets that were hitting the water from all sides. At 9:30 a.m., three hours after the invasion began, the men started to cross the beach where Hepner saw his first casualties of war - American soldiers.

"Their bodies were all parallel to the shore, and they were rolling in the surf," Hepner said. "Their skin had turned black."

The Navy's shelling of the coastline was so deafening that one of his comrades still on deck while they were firing lost his hearing.

But without that protection, the troops may not have been able to take the beaches, said Greg Streeter, a retired Navy captain who lives in Jacksonville.

"They were getting chewed to pieces," Streeter said. On the evening of D-Day on the first transmission, he said, one high-ranking officer offered: "Thank God for the United States Navy."

Preserving the legacy of what Navy veterans did on D-Day is essential, said Streeter, chairman of the Navy D-Day Monument Project, which is an effort to raise funds for a veterans memorial in France. The Navy is the only branch of the military that does not have a memorial at one of the 65 Normandy sites.

"If you read the letters you get from veterans, it almost brings tears to your eyes," said Streeter, who took on the cause, although he did not serve in World War II. "They say, 'My God, why hasn't this already been done?' "

About 1,000 World War II veterans die each day around the country, according to the Department of Veterans Affairs. Hepner's wife of 49 years, Jeanne, said they have lost track of fellow D-Day veterans, and it's becoming more difficult for him to travel to reunions.

"He still has problems with his hip from where shrapnel hit," Jeanne said.

None of the men in Hepner's unit, the 238th Engineer Combat Battalion, were killed during the initial D-Day invasion. Hepner said nearby Omaha Beach, one of the five beaches invaded on D-Day, was hard hit because the Germans could fire from above.

Hepner would go on to wrap explosives around trees, court Belgian girls and have countless brushes with death before he being wounded in Germany in 1945. After Hepner, who received a Purple Heart, returned to the United States for treatment, he was discharged from a hospital and deployed for full-time duty in Georgia in preparation for an invasion of Japan.

"If the war hadn't ended, we would have been sent," Hepner said. "That's why the soldiers don't think the atomic bomb was such a bad thing."

With the end of the war, Hepner returned home. He started his education at Harvard and graduated in 1949. He later became an archivist in Washington.

"My whole life depended on having served in the military," Hepner said. "At school, we'd joke that thanks to Hitler, we were successes in life."

[Last modified June 12, 2006, 05:56:33]