Caretaking our Memories

This article was published and copyrighted in the Beacher Magazine. www.thebeacher.com/pdf/2017/BeacherMay25

The Caretaking of Memories - Omaha Beach and Uncle Bill

First Wave, 116th Division, 29th Regiment

“Your Uncle Bill was killed on D-Day,” my father would tell us. Curiously, he’d always refer to Bill as our Uncle, not his.

My earliest memories of my father talking about our Uncle were from the 1960’s. The oldest of my siblings were probably seven or eight. We didn’t understand Vietnam then, much less Normandy.

Just because we didn’t understand World War II didn’t mean couldn’t see how dad was different when he spoke of Bill. He seemed more vulnerable. Sometimes, when he spoke of Bill, he’d pull off his glasses and wipe a hand across his eyes.

In the 60’s, we were too young to understand more than that we had an uncle that was killed on D-Day. For a time, dad would spare us from learning more. But the story was there, and it would eventually need to be remembered.

Someday, but not then.

Dad was only eight years old when Bill was killed on that June morning in 1944. At that age, I’m sure he knew nothing of the “liberation” of France; why Uncle Bill and the 116^th Division would be asked to open a path on Omaha Beach. That it would allow for 1.5 million soldiers to move toward Berlin and ensure the end of the European conflict.

He wouldn’t know, until he was much older, about the bodies, like Bill’s, which floated in the French surf. Of the dead and dying that covered every stretch of beach, lying in the sand like broken and crushed seashells and twisted seaweed.

His mother, Esther, or his father John, would certainly not tell dad about what his other uncle, Robert, faced in the Pacific. Robert, Bill’s twin, was the determined and eager one, and he enlisted in the Marines.

Esther and John probably learned later that, in the Pacific, Robert and his Marines would witness unspeakable things - in battles of unspeakable horror.

Only Oppenheimer and the other physicists, working beneath the grass fields at The University of Chicago, would end that conflict. Then, Robert would return home, scarred and “shell-shocked,” as my father described him. With his brother lost, his family changed forever, PTSD likely pushed Robert to his unpleasant end.

Of Oppenheimer’s instruments, Big Boy and Fat Man, my young father would probably think they were comic book characters, not the hydrogen bombs of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Not weapons that would end the war and later change the world. Weapons so destructive that when their scientist-creator witnessed their devastation, he felt the need to cite a quote from the Hindu Bhagavad-Gita: “I have become death, destroyer of worlds.”

Dad was an only child. In 1944, his backyard comprised most of his world. In his small, leafy Blue Island backyard, he built his own sort of play-house, cobbled together with scraps from nearby alleys and garages. My grandfather probably helped.

I remember seeing a black and white photo of the play-house, a tiny Kodak picture that was like looking through a keyhole and into the past. A glimpse into his innocent pre-war world. It helped me understand where my father’s imagination was seeded; there, among the dappled shadows of the tall maples on the summer grass.

In that tiny fenced fortress, his Blue Island backyard, our Uncle Bill would visit him.

My father eventually became a sort of caretaker of Bill’s story.

He was a good caretaker, for he was quite the storyteller. One story we especially enjoyed was that of his pet rooster, Blackie. He would describe how he’d ride his bicycle, with Blackie on the handlebars, around the neighborhood; sometimes to the gravel pit, where he’d shoot his BB gun. In one adventure, Blackie’s misbehavior made him crash, and he allegedly broke his nose.

“See, that’s from Blackie,” he’d claim, pointing to the bridge of his nose as proof. But my sister would be born with the same nose, the same bump. Perhaps a Blackie inheritance, perhaps not.

My siblings and I would tease him about Blackie – that the story, while entertaining, was on the edge of disbelief. We considered it more of dad’s creative lore – a kid and a bicycle and his crazy pet rooster. Until the day we discovered a faded photograph in some attic box; that of a child on his bicycle with a large black bird perched on the handlebars.

Like the Blackie story, it was hard to imagine dad’s favorite uncle in the first wave on the deadliest beach on D-Day.

It was just anecdotal. Until a box appeared, and dad began removing items we hadn’t seen before. A purple heart. A telegraph from the War Department, dated June 6, 1944 – August William Diedesch, missing in action. Another telegraph, killed in action.

He told us of the heartache of his grandmother Diedesch, of her worry with both sons in the war, and her unending grief at the loss of Billy.

The rest of Bill’s story we’d have to learn on our own.  

We learned that Bill was the more peaceable of the twins. Robert enthusiastically enlisted in the Marines. Bill didn’t. He would instead go to the Blue Island library and enlist in the Army Reserves. Robert was sent to boot camp and then to the Pacific.

Bill stayed in Blue Island, a twenty-year-old Reservist. But that lasted mere weeks. After basic training, his Reserve Unit was immediately “called up” to active duty. In a profound turn of fate, his unit was placed into the 116th Division, 29th regiment, a unit destined to be the spearhead of the invasion force on D-Day.

Their unit would ride the Higgins boats into the surf - and into history.

Their story was memorialized, in part, in the movie Saving Private Ryan. Its opening scene portrayed the carnage on that infamous beach; in shocking and upsetting ways that most Americans had never imagined.

Before that movie, the reality of Omaha Beach would largely be captured in print. In its November 1960 issue, The Atlantic Magazine published a story by S.L.A. Marshall about the 116^th and 29^th.

It sought to describe the real fate of those caught in the first wave of the assault. Marshall noted that historians had taken great efforts to document what happened to each unit as they came ashore, in detailed accounts from the survivors.

“At exactly 6:36 A.M. ramps are dropped along the boat line and the men jump off in water anywhere from waist deep to higher than a man's head.  Already pounded by mortars, the floundering line is instantly swept by crossing machine-gun fires from both ends of the beach.

The first men out try to do it but are ripped apart before they can make five yards. Even the lightly wounded die by drowning, doomed by the water-logging of their overloaded packs. From Boat No. 1, all hands jump off in water over their heads.”

And that was the fate of Uncle Bill, who was lost departing his Higgins boat, there in the surf.

As I’ve discovered this more complete history of Bill, I’ve tried to keep the memory alive; to share the story more completely than my father would, or could.

When my father passed, he left me a framed collection of Bill’s memorabilia, including the purple heart and the MIA and KIA telegrams from Western Union. And I cannot imagine a more cherished, valued item among anything I own.

Thus, I also have become a caretaker of memories. To remind our family about their famous Uncle Bill. Most years, I’ve posted stories on my blog about Bill on or around June 6^th.

And thus, I come to this. I believe that we are entrusted to keep memories alive - even if we don’t have an uncle who rode a Higgins boat into the French surf. Even if we don’t have a sibling or relative or friend who served in Southeast Asia or Afghanistan or Iraq. 

It’s up to each of us, on this Memorial Day, to remember all of our Uncle Bills, from every family, who found themselves to be in the path of destiny; who would be a part of history.

For we are entrusted to remember the soldiers and families that were willing to sacrifice upon “the altar of freedom.”

In Saving Private Ryan, a letter is recalled and quoted, by heart, from a general. He recalled words penned in 1864 to Mrs. Lydia Bixby, a widow believed to have lost five sons during the Civil War. While it authorship is debated, It reads:

Dear Madam,--

I have been shown in the files of the War Department a statement of the Adjutant General of Massachusetts that you are the mother of five sons who have died gloriously on the field of battle.

I feel how weak and fruitless must be any word of mine which should attempt to beguile you from the grief of a loss so overwhelming. But I cannot refrain from tendering you the consolation that may be found in the thanks of the Republic they died to save.

I pray that our Heavenly Father may assuage the anguish of your bereavement, and leave you only the cherished memory of the loved and lost, and the solemn pride that must be yours to have laid so costly a sacrifice upon the altar of freedom.

Yours, very sincerely and respectfully,

A. Lincoln