Can You Name the GI in this Iconic D-Day Photo?

The one on the left is a gimme. If you said the one on the right (#23) is Lieutenant Wally Strobel of the US 101st Airborne Division, you are correct. Strobel and his comrades were about to embark on their first wartime mission, the June 6, 1944 invasion of France. D-Day. They would be part of an enormous force, some 156,000 men hurled at a hostile shore. Many had been training for this moment for the better part of two years, and the stakes could not have been higher. Failure was unthinkable, yet entirely possible.

So naturally the conversation captured here was about . . . fishing.

General Dwight Eisenhower (the easy ID on the left), the overall commander for this effort, the most complex military operation ever attempted, had come to Greenham Common to spend time with the soldiers who would spearhead the assault by parachuting into battle before first light. It’s likely that Ike, an experienced leader, was trying to relieve a little bit of the stress Strobel and the others were feeling, get their minds off the dangers they faced. It was also possible, as one of the paratroopers present that day would point out later, that Eisenhower was equally anxious, that he had come to seek as much as to spread reassurance. 

Strobel, from Saginaw, Michigan, exchanged a few pleasantries about Michigan fishing with his fifty-three-year old commander. The number hanging around the lieutenant’s neck marks him as a jumpmaster, responsible for getting an aircraft full of paratroopers (called a stick) out over the right drop zone. Once on the ground, Strobel would then lead his men in ground combat against the German defenders. 

June 5 was Wally Strobel’s twenty-second birthday.

At another airfield not far away, paratroopers of the US 82nd Airborne Division were also preparing for battle. Ken Russell, who had joined the unit as a replacement a few months earlier, almost missed the invasion. Hospitalized in May with a fever—the result of multiple vaccinations—Russell was told by his doctor that he would not be discharged in time. The resourceful young trooper befriended the orderly charged with storing patients’ gear. Russell got his kit and, when the ward was empty, exchanged his hospital gown for his uniform, then walked to the parking lot and hitched a ride. He rejoined his unit just before they were quarantined; another hour and his buddies would have moved on without him.

The troopers boarded their aircraft late on June 5—the same day Russell’s high school class was graduating back in Tennessee. Russell slept during the flight to the continent, thanks to airsickness spills, and woke with a start to the sound of German anti-aircraft fire. When the troopers heard shrapnel hitting the plane—it sounded like gravel thrown against the aluminum skin of the bird—everyone wanted out. Around 1:45 AM Russell and his stick jumped, not over their planned drop zone, but over the town square of Ste. Mere Eglise, which at that moment was brightly lit by a burning building on the east side. The townspeople had formed a bucket-brigade to fight the fire. Of more significance to the Americans, the German garrison had also turned out. The startled enemy soldiers immediately started shooting at the paratroopers, who were helpless as they floated down. Russell hit the roof of the thick-walled Norman church on the north side of the square, his chute catching on the ridge. His buddy John Steele got hung up on the steeple, stuck there while the bells beside his head rang in alarm.

Down below, Russell saw a German soldier come around the corner of the building. The man spotted Russell and Steele and got into firing position; at such close range there was no way he could miss. And just at that moment another paratrooper-- Sergeant John Ray, Russell’s squad leader—landed beside the German, who shot Ray at point blank range. As the German turned again to dispatch Russell and Steele, the mortally wounded Ray drew his pistol and killed the enemy soldier with a shot from behind.

Russell cut himself free from his chute and leapt nearly twenty feet to the ground. The entire square, still lit by the burning building, was filled with panicked civilians and enemy soldiers engaged in a running gunfight with a handful of paratroopers. Russell sprinted for the darkness at the edge of the square. Just outside town he came upon a German anti-aircraft battery, which was shooting at the follow-on waves of Allied planes. Russell’s overwhelming emotion was anger—he had just seen much of his squad slaughtered, some before they ever reached the ground. He crept close and used a grenade to destroy the gun and crew. Minutes later he found another GI crawling around in the darkness, but it was a man from the 101st Airborne Division, which meant that neither solider had been dropped on target. They were both lost.

Ken Russell had been at war for forty-five horrifying minutes.

He was seventeen years old.

In all my study of this war, in all my interviews with veterans, on all my visits to France, I have often been struck by just how young these men were. Even among those who were a little bit older, there were not many professional soldiers. Most of the men who did the fighting and flying, the men who drove the landing craft or clawed their way up the bluffs above Omaha Beach—most of them had other plans for their lives. They had dreams and ambitions and desires they put on hold, dreams they risked losing altogether.

A bit later on D-Day Lieutenant Harry Coyle, also of the US 82nd Airborne Division, was confronted by a terrified civilian in Ste. Mere Eglise. The man came outside amid all this noise and shooting to find American soldiers in his yard. Coyle understood enough French to get the meaning of the man’s questions.

“Is this a raid?” the civilian wanted to know. “Are you commandoes?”

He wanted to know if this was, at long last, after 1453 days of German occupation, la liberation, or would the Americans retreat back to England somehow, leaving the French at the mercy of their German oppressors?

Would these boys from Tennessee and California, from Pennsylvania and Idaho and Louisiana—many of whom had never been out of their home states, much less their home country—would these boys who knew so little of France, its history and its language and its culture, who knew so little of its suffering—would they leave?

Coyle had been told not to share information with the locals. Security was paramount. But he told the man, “Nous restons ici.”

We’re staying here.

And, of course, thousands of them are still there.

If you’ve never been to Normandy, put it on your bucket list. Go to the American Cemetery at Coleville sur Mer, above Omaha Beach, walk among the marble crosses and Stars of David. You may marvel, as I did, at the neatness of it all, the geometric precision, the healthy grass and straight-as-string walkways. In all its cleanliness and order it is the opposite of war, except that it is so, so sad. 

 Wally Strobel survived the war and moved back to Michigan, where he briefly met Presidential candidate Dwight Eisenhower in 1952. Strobel died in 1999.

Ken Russell passed away at home in Tennessee on the sixtieth anniversary of D-Day, June 6, 2004.