‘We knowed what we had to do’: Kentucky World War II veteran remembers frenzy of D-Day
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Kentucky World War II veteran Charles Adams remembers D-Day 75 years later
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Charles Adams hit the beach behind schedule.
On the fateful morning of June 6, 1944, the landing craft accompanying Adams’ unit of combat engineers was overloaded and overmatched by the choppy seas off the coast of Normandy.
“The water was so rough, it got over the sides of the boat and sunk,” recalled Adams, who lives in Bowling Green. “So we lost all of the equipment. We fooled with that for probably eight hours. (But) we didn’t miss anything. It was still all there.”
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Seventy-five years later, Adams laughs at a memory from his first day in combat, and he laughs again at the folly of his own fearlessness at the age of 18 on D-Day.
“I wasn’t scared,” he said. “I guess I was crazy. I don’t want to put no brag on myself, but I played football with the big 200-pound people. One time I weighed 90 pounds and was playing against a 200-pound football player, and he didn’t scare me more than anything else.
“I ain’t got a bit of sense when it came to that.”
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More than 2,000 Americans would lose their lives on D-Day, and the bloodiest fighting occurred on the same stretch of sand where Adams came ashore, 5 miles of French coastline code named Omaha Beach.
At 93, Adams is unable to forget the sight of lifeless bodies floating in the water that day, and he remembers thinking, “Thank the Lord it’s not me.” But he believed in the mission and continued to move forward as the Allies fought to free Europe from Nazi occupation.
“What are you going to do?” he asked. “Turn around and walk away? … We knowed what we had to do. If we didn’t do it, you’d be saying, ‘Sieg Heil.'”
While playing his small part in what Gen. Dwight Eisenhower called “The Great Crusade,” Adams would earn a Purple Heart, nearly lose his legs from occupying a frozen foxhole at the Battle of the Bulge, encounter Gen. George Patton while building a pontoon bridge and stand guard at the postwar prison housing defendants on trial in Nuremberg.
Serving mainly as a mechanic, Adams rose to the rank of staff sergeant and would be one of the youngest participants in the greatest seaborne invasion in history.
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Just 16 years old when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941 — two years below the Army’s standard minimum age — Adams secured his mother’s permission to enlist early.
“Daddy didn’t want much of it, but my mother’s signature was all I needed anyway,” he said. “I took it to the draft board, and they said they’d put me on the list. They said it (would) probably be about seven or eight months before we call.
“I started back into (Bowling Green High) school. I was in 11th grade, and they knocked on the door. It was Feb. 13. I thought it was a Valentine’s prank or something, but there were three soldier boys with (military police) stripes on. I told them I was 16. They said, ‘Well, you’re old enough now.'”
An experienced hunter with National Guard experience, Adams remembers being the only man with military experience among the 43 new soldiers in his first unit, a distinction he said made it “very common for me to get the gravy (assignments) without any problems.”
Sent first to Camp Campbell (later Fort Campbell), Adams trained in Mississippi, California and New Jersey before being shipped to England to await an invasion to be launched more than 4,000 miles from home.
The war carried a moral clarity that often has eluded later generations. Forty years after the D-Day landings, President Ronald Reagan stood on a cliff overlooking the beaches to address an assembly of Army Rangers. Reagan’s speech, a remarkable piece of oratory written by Peggy Noonan, eloquently embroidered the sentiment Adams expressed as, “We knowed what we had to do.”
“The men of Normandy had faith that what they were doing was right, faith that they fought for all humanity, faith that a just God would grant them mercy on this beachhead or on the next,” Reagan said. “It was the deep knowledge — and pray God we have not lost it — that there is a profound moral difference between the use of force for liberation and the use of force for conquest.”
Adams said he has never reflected on the significance of D-Day. Neither does he dwell on the possibility that some of the shots he fired during the war may have been lethal.
Though he was an accomplished marksman, Adams said he was too far from his targets to be certain that he struck them.
“I don’t want to think I did,” he said. “I probably did, but I don’t want to think that I did because I wouldn’t sleep at night.”
Some of Adams’ days were devoted to fitting tanks with equipment capable of clearing paths through the thick hedgerow terrain that slowed the Allied advance. But his duties also included infantry patrols near the front lines.
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“We worked all day and fought all night …” he said. “We were trying to find a location for the unit (near Bastogne, Belgium). I got on the point and I was going up there a mile, maybe 2 miles, when I felt something sting real fast. Then I felt around, but kept on going. I probably walked 100 yards when this guy beside me said, ‘Adams, you got blood all over.’ A bullet hit me right in the thigh and went all the way through.”
This would be the only time Adams was hit by enemy gunfire, but it was hardly his most harrowing experience in World War II. Pinned down during the Battle of the Bulge, he spent days in a foxhole duringsubzero temperatures.
Before he could be rescued, a fellow soldier would have to break up the ice with a bayonet that had formed around Adams’ feet.
“I didn’t walk for better than three months,” Adams said. “They doctored me hour on hour. They’d use ice, then they’d use hot water, getting the circulation to come back. The doctor would stick a little needle in me (and ask), ‘Can you feel that?’ I got to wondering what he was doing.”
Fearful at first of amputation, Adams gradually regained sensation in his feet and, eventually, his mobility. Rather than burden his family with another mouth to feed, he stayed in the Army until 1949, four years past Nazi Germany’s surrender.
Following his return to Bowling Green, Adams bought a Shell station. Later, he would take a job in Saudi Arabia. Proud, he said, “of everything I’ve done,” he is careful to avoid claims of heroism.
“A lot of times there seemed like a lot of bravery,” he said. “But it wasn’t bravery. It was common sense. Being shot at is not a common sense thing. But it’s one of those things where if you’re going to fight a war, you’re going to shoot somebody.”
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Tim Sullivan: 502-582-4650, tsullivan@courier-journal.com; Twitter: @TimSullivan714. Support strong local journalism by subscribing today: courier-journal.com/tims.
This article originally appeared on Louisville Courier Journal: ‘We knowed what we had to do’: Kentucky World War II veteran remembers frenzy of D-Day