The Burial Detail: A Story of D-day
Burying the first dead at “Bloody Omaha.”
THE CONQUERORS’ MAP OF EUROPE LOOKED FAMILIAR AT FIRST BUT for a red-striped rib showing the Maginot Line. But the continent was dotted with red printed circles denoting “Festungen und. Kriegshäfen” (“Fortresses and Naval ports”), the red dots showed over much of the light grey landscape of France, and a few turned up across the Channel, along the faded pine-green coast of Britain. The names of English coastal towns were underscored in blue pencil as future targets — Plymouth, Torquay, Portsmouth, Brighton, Eastborne, Dover — suggesting the map had been tacked up by a German soldier for study before being folded and brought to occupied France.
Following the Allied invasion of Normandy in June 1944 the map came to be separated from its owner, by his death or capture, and was picked up from the field by a U.S. Army chaplain, Maurice A. Kidder, who had rehearsed for the invasion on the British coast the map’s German owner had been studying, in Slapton Sands. Kidder, my maternal grandfather, brought the map home in his footlocker at war’s end, along with an ornament wrenched from a Nazi helmet, some well-made toenail clippers, and the prize battlefield souvenir for any American soldier, a Luger, which he gave to his brother.
In June of 1969, for the 25th anniversary of the landings, Maurice Kidder traveled back to France to show his wife Isabel the pretty roads and beaches he’d last seen filled with corpses. Before the couple flew to Europe, he made a scratchy tape recording about the event for his family: “I landed three times on June 6th 1944, on Omaha Beach, and each time, because the beach was crowded, was obliged to retreat with our troops to the sea again. The next day when I landed I was asked by the division chaplain, with the Jewish chaplain, to read the first service over 800 men lying in a scooped-up trench in the sand at Omaha Beach.…This was probably the first funeral service in the invasion.”
By the time of D-day’s fiftieth anniversary, in 1994, I was lucky enough to work as a fact-checker and writer for a history magazine. This often meant restoring the second ‘T’ in ‘Matthew Brady,’ untangling fatality figures from casualties, or fielding readers’ challenges, which landed in a soft, angry pile in my cube. These nearly always began with a tone of feigned surprise (“I was interested to read on page 73 in the April issue that Custer never laid eyes on our fair state of Rhode Island…” ): Was FDR’s Scottie dog Fala really older than Asta from the Thin Man movies? Was barnstormer Ruth Law’s 1920 flight from Chicago to New York faster than the Twentieth Century Limited? I did my best to defend the magazine’s honor, perched uneasily between the writers and the know-it-alls. When the challenger was wrong, I broke the news regretfully, but other times, the best I could do was congratulate them on their collections of 1920s railroad timetables.
Occasionally, though, my fact-checking duties could be at least as interesting as the writing part of the job. There was the World War Two bombardier I talked to who had apologized in person to the Mayors of each of the German towns he’d blasted as a young man, then, his conscience lightened, died as we went to press. There was the reader who sent in a bullet he claimed Pretty Boy Floyd had fired into his automobile showroom. And then there was DeRonda Elliott, who submitted the saddest story any of us in the office had read.
The article was an account of the father she barely knew, Frank Elliott with the 741st Tank Battalion training for the Normandy landings, and was told simply through her parents’ madly crisscrossing war letters, leading up to and trailing off after D-Day, 1944. It proved unbearable to read because her father’s messages had continued to arrive and raise hopes weeks after the landing in which he’d died, claimed by a bomb from a German plane in the invasion’s first hours. He’d barely made landfall on Omaha Beach, it turned out, but his letters, delayed by the censor, kept tantalizingly arriving home, where his wife read and answered each one in an increasingly one-sided exchange, until the string at last ran out.
Each time I called Ms. Elliott with some fussy editorial question about the use of an ellipsis or the spelling of a marital nickname, I’d end up with tears in my eyes after spending just ten or twenty minutes in her parents’ world. On one call, we finally talked about how her dad had originally been buried, in a mass grave dug out of the French beach where he had barely landed. DeRonda was only two at the time.
That burial story gave me a chill since it so happened that for the magazine’s same D-Day issue I had written a story about my grandfather, Maurice Kidder, an Army chaplain with the 29th who’d landed on Omaha Beach and presided over the first burial ceremony of the invasion.
Warrant Officer James W. Tucker remembered digging the trench and how a Chaplain had helped him with the ghastly work of moving the bodies that were strewn about the beach. Tucker had come ashore with eight armored bulldozers belonging to his 299th Combat Engineer Battalion: “Part of our crew attempted to clear the beach of bodies but there was no place to put them,” he told his daughter Jeannie Tucker. “Orders came down to me to dig a temporary mass grave. I had one of my dozers do it. I had the driver go back and forth until he had a big enough trench dug. Then the Chaplain and I gathered men to collect the bodies. The job was not a pleasant one and they all eventually got sick, leaving only the Chaplain and I to finish the difficult job. The bodies were stacked in the trench like cordwood and covered over with sand.”
Now, decades later, in the midst of what should have been yet another dry phone discussion, DeRonda Elliott and I suddenly realized that my grandfather had probably buried the father she couldn’t remember, along with eight hundred other sons and husbands, in a big trench on “Bloody Omaha.” “Well,” she said cheerfully. “It’s nice to know at least that he was buried by such a nice man.”
Indeed he was. By the time I heard him at his All Saints’ Church in western Massachusetts my grandfather had been giving sermons for more than thirty years. Before that, he gave them to men training in Scotland for the invasion, when five thousand ships converged on the fifty-mile-long stretch of coast from Caen to the Cotentin Peninsula. After landing, he had followed the division to the Rhine before coming home at war’s end.
That June of 1994, standing on a cliff in Normandy, DeRonda Elliott and her daughter Katy watched President Bill Clinton read from her parents’ letters in his commemorative address to veterans of the “least ordinary day of the 20th century.” Later DeRonda visited the hillside cemetery where her father’s body had been finally re-buried along with hundreds of others.
My original D-day article appeared in the same issue with DeRonda Elliott’s that spring. It was the cusp of the popular discovery of the Internet, and although the piece drew many letters from veterans of the 29th, I was unable to find the name of Kidder’s partner in the beach burial ceremony, his “Jewish Chaplain.” Then I happened to email a man, Joe Balkoski, who ran a website devoted to the 29th infantry and Omaha Beach. “You must mean Rabbi Manuel Poliakoff,” he explained. “He still lives in Baltimore, but I hear he’s not in good health.”
Looking him up online, I saw an old news photograph from the war’s closing days that showed a young Rabbi Poliakoff helping to lead services at the castle of the Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels. It had been the first public High Holy Days ceremony in Berlin since the war began. Perhaps he could tell me about D-Day and the burial ceremony on the beach. If so, he’d be one of a vanishing group that could: A slightly smaller circle of veterans sat above the Normandy beach listening to President Obama’s words in 2009 than had heard Clinton speak there on a bluff fifteen years earlier. And before Clinton, they were honored there by Ronald Reagan; officially thanked, in fact, time and again going back to Franklin Roosevelt’s radio prayer on the night of the Channel crossing in 1944:
Almighty God: Our sons, pride of
our Nation, this day have set upon
a mighty endeavor, a struggle to
preserve our Republic, our
religion, and our civilization, and
to set free a suffering humanity
Though Rabbi Poliakoff was in his late nineties by now, I wrote him in Baltimore and waited. The letter I got back from his wife could not have been more gracious. Like my grandfather, who returned home and then rarely mentioned the Army, the rabbi had told his family very little about his war experiences over the years, said his wife. Now, she wrote, there were times when he could not remember who she was, but they were thankful and proud to know something of what he’d done long ago in France. In April of 2011, he died, with a brave picture still on his wall.
[This story was expanded from my op-ed in WSJ 6/6/13]
Thanks to: Jeannie Tucker and her 299th Combat Engineer Battalion website (http://www.299thcombatengineers.com/Article1Tucker.htm )and to Darris McNeely for his father’s photo and remembrance
https://www.ucg.org/beyond-today/beyond-today-magazine/d-day-75-years-what-should-we-learn
