‘Average American fighting man’ focus of D-Day talk
Harry Funk / The Almanac
Glenn Flickinger discusses the events that took place at Omaha Beach on June 6, 1944.
Harry Funk / The Almanac
Glenn Flickinger and his mother, Virginia
Harry Funk / The Almanac
Stephen “Red” Andes listens to Glenn Flickinger’s talk.
Harry Funk / The Almanac
Hartley Baird Jr., a World War II Army Air Corps veteran, attended the D-Day event.
As a strapping lad who already stood over six feet tall, 15-year-old John Robert Slaughter walked into the Army recruitment office in his hometown of Roanoke, Va., and joined the National Guard.
John Robert Slaughter (1925-2012)
“Why did he join? He got a buck a month,” historian Glenn Flickinger said. “His family was really poor, and a buck a month made a lot of difference. And all he had to do was go down to the parade grounds with his friends in Roanoke and march around and play soldier.”
That was in 1940, and they “had no clue that there was a war coming.”
Flickinger chose to speak about Slaughter, who went by Bob, for his presentation during a June 6 event at Country Meadows of South Hills in South Fayette Township commemorating the 74th anniversary of D-Day, the World War II invasion of Normandy.
“To me, Bob Slaughter represents the average American fighting man in all the wars that we’ve had,” Flickinger explained.
The Upper St. Clair resident often gives talks on military history, his interest piqued in part by the fact that his mother, Virginia – now 98, she was in attendance at the Country Meadows event – was working as a nurse’s aide in Pearl Harbor when Japanese forces attacked on Dec. 7, 1941.
Harry Funk / The Almanac
Harry Funk / The Almanac
Glenn Flickinger introduces his mother, Virginia, who was in Pearl Harbor when it was bombed in 1941.
By then, Slaughter and others in the 29th Infantry Division already had been activated in anticipation of the U.S. entering the war that had raged in Europe for two years, and they were sent to England shortly afterward. Eventually, they started training for what became Operation Overlord, the Allied plan to retake France from the Germans.
As he wrote in his memoirs, published in 2009 as “Omaha Beach and Beyond: The Long March of Sgt. Bob Slaughter,” the then-teenager was in charge of a squad that was dispatched on a small craft known as a Higgins boat early in the morning of June 6, 1944.
The beach codenamed Omaha was one of five landing points across the English Channel that the Allies chose for landing, and it turned out to be the bloodiest of the D-Day battles, with some 2,400 U.S. troops killed, wounded or missing.
Harry Funk / The Almanac
Harry Funk / The Almanac
Mary Jane Olsavsky accompanies her father, Stephen “Red” Ames, who was aboard a ship at Omaha Beach on D-Day.
Among the guests at the Country Meadows of South Hills D-Day commemoration was 98-year-old Stephen “Red” Andes, a Navy veteran who served on the USS Doyle during the invasion of Normandy.
One of the Carrick native’s duties aboard the destroyer was loading artillery shells, according Mary Jane Olsavsky, his daughter who accompanied him to the event.
The Doyle provided fire support to the landing forces on D-Day and received 37 survivors of landing craft that were damaged during the invasion. The ship returned to England in mid-July for a brief overhaul, then embarked for escort and patrol duty for the invasion of southern France the following month.
A workhorse for the Navy, the Doyle received two battle stars for World War II and six for Korean War service.
“The first wave or two, the first groups of ships that landed, were just slaughtered, for the most part,” Flickinger said, referencing Steven Spielberg’s 1998 film “Saving Private Ryan.”
“It depicts things very, very well in some ways, but they’re wrong about one thing,” he said. “If you landed in the first wave at 6:30 in the morning in front of a bunker like that, you didn’t survive. You didn’t make it up the hill.”
Slaugthter’s unit approached the beach about half an hour later, with the boat having drifted and landing to the west of the heaviest concentration of Germany defensive positions.
“They got really, really lucky,” Flickinger explained. “That was not the intention.”
Once they reached the beach, the soldiers then climbed the bluffs behind them, which turned out to be somewhat of a ghoulish enterprise.
“The sides of these hills were all mined, and the way they found their way was that they followed the dead bodies,” Flickinger reported. “They would step around the dead bodies and lay white tape down, so there would be a trail.”
The Allied offensive led the Germans to abandon their fortifications at Omaha Beach later that day, but the Battle of Normandy stretched on for several weeks.
Harry Funk / The Almanac
Harry Funk / The Almanac
Norman Rosfeld, 92, was among the World War II veterans who attended the D-Day commemoration.
“Finally, after 50 days of continuous combat, his regiment is taken off the line to rest for 10 days,” Flickinger said about Slaughter’s 116th. “Out of a thousand men who started on Omaha Beach, there are about 150 left. The rest are either dead or casualties.”
Slaughter later survived taking a piece of shrapnel, returned to action just in time for the Battle of the Bulge, and was sent home in 1945 at age 20. He returned to Roanoke and, like hundreds of thousands of World War II veterans, did his best to lead a normal life.
As the 50th anniversary of Operation Overlord approached, he joined with others who had shared similar experiences to help establish the National D-Day Memorial in Bedford, Va., a small town about 30 miles from Roanoke that lost 19 young men during the invasion. Slaughter died in 2012 at age 87.
Flickinger said he could have focused his talk on some of the more notable D-Day figures, such as Dwight Eisenhower, Omar Bradley and George Patton.
“But I like to dig deep into people you’ve never heard of, just the average guy, the average soldier, the average sailor who was there,” he said. “I think that’s the most interesting way to look at this.”
Harry Funk / The Almanac
Harry Funk / The Almanac
Glenn Flickinger speaks about the D-Day invasion at Omaha Beach.