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EN ROUTE TO FRANCE – Robert Pedigo had a hunch.
He and his bomber crew, based in England, had been flying missions against the Nazis. Then, on a late spring evening in 1944, a commander took each squadron into a nearby wheat field to give them special instruction.
“Men, go get a good night’s rest,” he said, “because we have an important mission tomorrow.”
The commander, he has always remembered, was Jimmy Stewart, the star who had left Hollywood to lead air attacks throughout World War II. Pedigo and the rest of the flight crew bedded down. The wakeup call would come at 2:30 the next morning, June 6.
Pedigo, from Indianapolis, had sold scrap metal and worked other jobs during the Great Depression to help support his family before enlisting in the Army Air Corps. Now he was a nose gunner and air bomber on a crew of 10 in the 453rd Bombardment group. Their B-24J Liberator, nicknamed the Silent Yokum, took off into the morning sky.
As they crossed the English Channel, Pedigo looked down and couldn’t believe his eyes. He had been right. It was something big.
Instead of just water, he saw ships, so many that he could have walked across the channel, using the boats as stepping stones.
Instead of just sky, he saw fighters, heavy bombers, C-47 troop transports, every kind of plane imaginable.
It was June 6, 1944, the day the rest of the world would soon know as D-Day.
From his seat at the nose gun, Pedigo could see it happening. Above, below and all around him, every boat and plane was headed in the same direction he was. Toward Normandy.
May 30, 2024: Fort Worth, Texas
With the ballroom lights dim, a 50-member choir of cadets from the U.S. military academies assembled on stage. They launched into a patriotic number, the closing event of the evening.
Spread out in front of them was a crowd of hundreds, but 66 were particularly important.
World War II veterans, each was accompanied by a family member or guardian. Eight decades after D-Day, they were gathering in Texas for the start of a new mission.
They were chosen to make an honor flight aboard a chartered Boeing 787 provided by American Airlines. The party also included six Medal of Honor winners from wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Vietnam and two “Rosie the Riveters,” women who made invaluable contributions to the war effort by working in factories and shipyards. In total, some 280 people would make up the entourage.
Together, they would be headed back to France, back to the scene of D-Day itself.
The journey would lead them to the beaches once code-named Omaha and Utah, where several of the men among the 66 had fought in some of the bloodiest combat of D-Day.
Atop the steep cliffs above Omaha Beach, President Joe Biden and other world leaders will mark the 80th anniversary of the invasion on Thursday.
The 66 vets will be there, too, at Normandy American Cemetery, where more than 9,000 fallen Americans – people who were once just like them – rest forever beneath French soil.
The trip to get there required more than a year of planning. But its official beginning was with a gala ball on May 30, the night before departure.
One or two at a time, the vets entered. People pulled out their phones and snapped pictures. David Yoho, 95, from Vienna, Virginia, did an animated bow as the crowd cheered.
Behind him, some rode in wheelchairs. Others, slightly stooped, leaned on canes. A few wore military uniforms decorated with medals.
Inside the ballroom at American Airlines’ headquarters, the veterans exchanged war stories and dined on Provencal short ribs, lump crab cakes and apple pie topped with creamy French brie. A few got up from their tables and slow danced to bands covering Frank Sinatra, Bob Hope and the Andrews Sisters.
Dan Dougherty, an Army veteran who was on the first ship to go directly from the United States to France during the war, celebrated his 99th birthday. The entire room serenaded him with “Happy Birthday.”
The mood was celebratory, but statistics added some poignancy to the pageantry.
The youngest of the 66 making the journey was 95; the oldest 107. Their average age: 100.8.
About a third of the adult male population of the United States served at some point during World War II. The armed forces included about 16.5 million men and women in all.
Today, according to the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, less than 1% of them are still alive.
For some of the 66 veterans, this flight would be their first trip to Normandy since the war. For all of them, it would most likely be their last.
“You launched the largest wave of freedom across our world,” former President George W. Bush said in a videotaped message. “Billions of people have lived in liberty because of what you did 80 years ago.”
Watching him was Dominick Critelli, 103, an Army veteran who landed on Utah Beach a few days after the D-Day invasion and fought in the Battle of the Bulge.
Critelli had immigrated to the United States from Italy when he was only 8, during the dictatorship of Benito Mussolini, “where they were shooting everybody and giving them poison.”
“I can’t forget that,” he said.
In America, he found a new home, one he would later fight for.
Finally, the choir took to the stage. The song filled the room.
From the mountains, to the prairies, to the oceans white with foam.
From his table at the back, Critelli silently mouthed the words.
1944: D-Day at Omaha Beach, France
Sid Edson got up early and went from breakfast to a briefing and then to his bomber.
“My God,” he thought just before he climbed into his plane. “Today is the day.”
Edson had been a welder in Brooklyn before he was drafted into the Air Force in 1943. He worked as a radio operator and a gunner in a B-24 Liberator as part of Bomb Squadron 491. On the morning of June 6, the squadron’s mission was to bomb a German airfield in France.
“We were hoping it would help the soldiers invading all of the beaches,” recalls Edson, who now lives in Lake Worth, Florida.
Edson wouldn’t remember much about the flight to France that day. He was too focused on doing his job. A radio operator had to make sure the flight crew was monitoring correct frequencies. And that the bomber’s complex intercom system was functioning properly so the crew could communicate with each other. Edson also doubled as a gunner. He had to be prepared, on a moment’s notice, to man the bomber’s giant machine guns and open fire.
An eerie radio silence filled the plane as it neared its target. The approaching Americans didn’t want to say anything that might tip off the Germans about what was about to hit them.
May 31, 2024: Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport
By 5 p.m. Friday, a sizable crowd had begun to form in Terminal D to watch the parade pass by.
Boy Scouts in tan-and-green uniforms waved American flags. Travelers hurrying to catch a flight slowed to check out the commotion. Others squatted beside the white-haired men and asked for permission to take selfies.
American Airlines began planning the trip 18 months ago. The Old Glory Honor Flight, a nonprofit group that has arranged other trips for veterans, helped recruit applicants, train their guardians and provide the medical staff volunteers. A foundation led by actor Gary Sinise also helped put the trip together.
Veterans selected to make the trip were required to get a medical exam to determine that they were healthy enough to travel. Seventy-five wheelchairs were available if needed – enough for every veteran on board.
Most of the veterans stayed in wheelchairs for the short ride from gate D24 to D29, where they would board a plane for the 5,000-mile, 8½-hour flight to Paris.
Willie Clemons, 96, who joined the Navy after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, saluted the cheering crowd that swelled with each passing minute.
Passengers waiting at gate D27 for a flight to Barcelona jumped from their seats and applauded. A woman working the counter at Dickey’s Barbecue Pit collected orders while keeping her eyes on the festivities.
Andi Goldsticker of Dallas stood off to the side and held a sign thanking the veterans for their bravery and sacrifices in service to the country. “Because of YOU,” it read, “we are safe and free.”
Goldsticker’s father-in-law, Ralph Goldsticker, 102, a bombardier who flew missions on D-Day, was making the trip to France. His son, Andi’s husband Larry, was accompanying him.
As she watched, she recalled the way her father-in-law had described the war. “Every time I dropped a bomb,” he would say, “I thought I was going to die.”
At the boarding gate, the wheelchairs turned down the jetway.
The 66 made their way down the plane’s double aisles. Above them, a photo and bio of each was taped to the overhead luggage bins.
Festoons of red, white and blue stars were draped across cabin walls. Small American flags were tucked behind the passenger seat headrests.
Over the intercom, the announcements were tailored to the century-old travelers.
Take your medicines. Drink plenty of liquids. Be sure to change sitting positions every few hours.
In the rows behind the vets was a 12-member volunteer medical team. Emergency room doctors and nurses, a paramedic and nurse practitioners would roam the plane throughout the flight.
Anyone experiencing a health issue should alert the crew right away.
The orange Texas sunset glared through the cabin windows as the plane rolled, lifted off and pointed toward France.
1944: Omaha Beach, France
Dead bodies lay scattered on Omaha Beach when Vernon Mitchell landed.
Mitchell, a gunner, had known precious little about the military before he enlisted in the Army in 1940. But jobs were hard to come by in St. Augustine, Texas, after the Great Depression. After working his entire young life on a farm, he signed up for the service at age 19. A few short years later, he was wading ashore in France.
It was Wednesday, June 7. The first wave of the Allied invasion – and the most intense fighting – had taken place the day before. Over the course of the invasion, about 2,400 U.S. soldiers, more than 1,400 British and nearly 1,100 Canadians would be killed.
Countless German soldiers died, too, but the Germans had already picked up many of their corpses by the time Mitchell landed. Dead soldiers were bad for morale.
When Mitchell and other members of the Army’s 2nd Infantry Division stepped onto the shore, they were smacked by German artillery fire.
“They were still bombarding the place,” Mitchell remembers. “It was terrible.”
Mitchell and his comrades fought their way out of Omaha Beach. Days later, however, Mitchell was heavily wounded when a German shell hit his squad. Two of his fellow soldiers died.
June 1, 2024: Somewhere over the Atlantic Ocean
The overhead lights in the first-class cabin were on dim as the airliner zipped across the Atlantic Ocean at 37,000 feet. A little past midnight, there were still 2,300 miles to go – roughly the halfway point to Paris.
Several veterans dozed quietly as a medical crew roamed periodically through the cabin. John Gleeson, however, was wide awake.
A blanket thrown over his legs to stay warm, Gleeson, 100, of Honolulu, was recalling the story of how he ended up among these 66 veterans.
His midnight memories were snippets of the entire war.
How the news of the bombing of Pearl Harbor had enraged him as a teenager in Long Beach, California.
How he couldn’t pick out Oahu on a map, but the day after Dec. 7, 1941, he enlisted in the Army. How he qualified for the Air Corps.
How he was sitting on a bluff overlooking the beach three years later when the radio blared with the news about D-Day. The feeling when he realized so many of the men being killed were the same age as he was.
Gleeson recalled going to his commanding officer and asking to go to gunnery school. How he was finally sent to fly combat missions over Europe.
“I just had a feeling,” he remembered, as the 787 soared through the night. “I’ve got to do something to help save the world, or save the United States.”
1944: Utah Beach, France
The landing craft pitched and swayed on the choppy water as it approached Utah Beach. But Martin Sylvester never got seasick.
The Brooklyn native had always been prone to carsickness. Around him, other soldiers from the Army’s 4th Infantry Division had grown sick from the turbulent tossing of their amphibious military vessel and were throwing up. Not Sylvester. Maybe, he surmised in his 2009 memoir, he was just too frightened.
The son of a tailor and a stay-at-home mom, Sylvester landed as part of the third wave of Allied forces on June 7. He and the other troops could hear gunfire in the distance as they waded through 3 feet of water and approached the shore. Yet they encountered no resistance from the Germans.
They walked to the top of a hill, where they came across a cement bunker with dead Germans inside and a field strewn with the corpses of animals – cows, horses, pigs and dogs, all killed by Navy artillery fire that had overshot the beach.
The crackle of small rifle fire suddenly filled the air. The Germans were shooting at them. The soldiers quickly ducked into a patch of hedgerows about seven feet apart and fired back. “When we fired, we went from hedgerow to hedgerow,” Sylvester recalled in an interview.
Sylvester and his comrades suffered only minimal casualties. The following January, however, he was hit by a sniper and taken as a prisoner of war in Fuhren, Germany. He escaped a couple of months later and hid in the basement of a one-room schoolhouse until he was picked up by an American armored unit that came through the town. He was recuperating in a Paris hospital when, on May 8, 1945, he heard loud noises and celebrations in the street.
The Germans had surrendered. The war would soon be over.
June 1, 2024: Paris
“Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to Paris,” a member of the flight crew announced as the plane touched down at 11:48 a.m. Saturday at Charles de Gaulle Airport, named after the French general and World War II hero. The exhausted passengers applauded and cheered.
One at a time, the veterans disembarked with the help of family members and assistants, who pushed their wheelchairs down the narrow jetway. Inside the terminal, a long line of spectators held up photos of the veterans, waved French and American flags and shouted “thank you” in French accents.
At a brief airport ceremony, a handful of veterans slowly rose from their wheelchairs as young students in blue sweaters sang “The Star-Spangled Banner” and the French national anthem, “La Marseillaise.” Others, too tired to rise, stayed seated, hands over their hearts.
In France, veterans who had a role in the D-Day landings are not only considered honored guests, but are embraced as “cherished heroes,” Denise Campbell Bauer, the U.S. ambassador to France, told the gathering.
“Your presence here reminds us that behind the monumental scale of D-Day are real people, individuals with their own stories,” she said.
The last surviving World War II veterans are “the living witnesses to an era that shaped our world,” said Philippe Étienne, the former French ambassador to the United States.
From the back row, Pedigo was overwhelmed as he silently listened to the accolades.
“I have a tremendous connection, tremendous feelings for the buddies I lost there,” he said. “Tremendous feelings for people worldwide, especially the French people.”
While in Paris, the veterans would attend a ceremony at Suresnes American Cemetery and another beneath the Arc de Triomphe. Then on Monday, they would board buses to Normandy for the final leg of their journey, to stand where thousands of other Americans – people who were once just like them – rest forever beneath French soil.
Aboard the buses would be Martin Sylvester, 98, who had endured each day as a POW on two slices of bread and a cup of watery soup.
Vernon Mitchell, 103, who survived the shelling that killed two of his comrades, and was later awarded with the Purple Heart, Bronze star and the French Legion of Honor.
Sid Edson, 100, who dropped his bombs successfully that day and only later pondered the fact that he had been in the air the entire time – and never set foot on French soil.
And 100-year-old Robert Pedigo, who always had the feeling that on June 6, something important was going to happen.
Michael Collins covers the White House. Follow him on X, formerly Twitter, @mcollinsNEWS.
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