Memories of D-Day Still Vivid

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By MANNY GAMALLO World Staff Writer

Bob Plumlee was an eyewitness to history, but there was no way he could describe what he saw. It was just too shocking.

“It was the worst thing I’d seen up until then,” he said of the American bodies strewn up and down Omaha Beach on D-Day, June 6, 1944.

“It shocked all of us.”

A machine gunner aboard a half-track, Plumlee was part of the initial invasion force attacking German-held positions along Normandy, France.

The game was on.

The invasion of northern Europe was about to unfold, leading to the ultimate conquest of Nazi Germany.

Plumlee remembers his gut feelings that day as he and other troops and armor were loaded in the early morning darkness onto ships for the short hop across the English Channel.

“Yes, I was scared. We all were. But we knew it was a job that had to be done. And we knew that the sooner we did it, the sooner we’d be going home,” he said.

As he approached Omaha Beach, Plumlee said, his landing ship was disabled by German fire, preventing it from unloading its troops and armored cargo for several hours.

From the ship, Plumlee said, he and fellow troops could see the fighting on the beach.

“We knew what was going on,” he said. “We could feel it.”

After hours of being stranded in the water, Plumlee’s ship was finally pulled into shore so it could off-load its heavy cargo.

As Plumlee’s half-track made its way onto the beach, he and other crew members aboard glanced

down along the beach, and “what we saw was too much.”

As hard as he tried, Plumlee could not describe what he saw. His emotions bottlenecked in his throat as he tried to speak. His eyes began glistening with tears, and then he looked away for a minute or two as he tried to regain his composure.

The memories of that day 66 years ago still haunt this 88-year-old.

And more wartime horrors lay before him in the months ahead.

A Tulsan for the past 62 years, Plumlee grew up in Springdale, Ark. When the war broke out, he enlisted in the Army.

Right from the start, Plumlee said, he knew what he wanted to do in the Army — be a machine gunner.

He held to that desire, he said, even though he was repeatedly urged to enroll in an officer training program.

After months of training stateside, Plumlee was shipped to England in 1943 to prepare for the D-Day invasion.

For the trip across the Atlantic, Plumlee found himself aboard the Queen Elizabeth, which had been converted into a troop ship.

The accommodations, however, were far from posh, as the ship was crammed with thousands of Americans, in stifling conditions and sleeping in bunkbeds stacked six or seven high.

After the Normandy invasion, Plumlee, a private first class with the 1st Army, raced across France. By year’s end he found himself in Belgium, in time for the Battle of the Bulge.

“Omaha Beach was bad, but the Battle of the Bulge was absolutely the worst thing I had seen,” Plumlee said. “I was there for all of it.”

That battle, the bloodiest campaign for Americans during the entire war, began on Dec. 16, 1944, and lasted until Jan. 25, 1945.

Plumlee credited his faith in God with his survival during the war.

“All of my life I felt that God was looking after me,” he said.

He must have had more than one guardian angel, as well, because he escaped a near brush with death on March 17, 1945.

Just 10 days earlier, U.S. forces captured the Ludendorff Bridge at Remagen, Germany, allowing heavy armor and troops to cross the Rhine River.

The Germans had failed to bring down the bridge with explosives, and for the next 10 days they kept up desperate attacks on the railroad bridge to bring it down.

The bridge finally collapsed from its damage on March 17, killing 28 U.S. engineers working to fortify the structure.

“My unit was the last to cross the bridge before it collapsed,” Plumlee said.

“Another few minutes, and I would have been in the water,” and presumably drowned.

Plumlee may have had more than God’s watchful eye working in his favor.

Before shipping out to England, Plumlee had met the “best little gal in the world” while he was in Philadelphia, and the thought of marrying her helped keep him alive.

When the war was over, he was Philadelphia-bound in a flash, and it was there that he and Margaret married on Dec. 15, 1945.

They’re coming up on their 65th wedding anniversary.