Pistol in hand, 70 pounds of gear on his back, eyes wide open, the
Army private from Baltimore never lost his focus. Hard to believe, given
all he’d lived through in the previous few hours, but Charles “Harry”
Heinlein kept moving inland on June 6, 1944.
Omaha Beach had been chaos — botched boat landings, piles of corpses,
the ground-shaking roar of guns — but he made it across and up the bluff
through Les Moulins Draw. At the top, he had seen his good friend, Joe
Walentowski, take shrapnel in the leg but had had to leave him, struggling,
behind. As he emerged onto a gently rolling plain, he remembered what his
Company D platoon leader, Lt. Verne Morse, had said: However you do it,
keep moving toward Vierville, a village to the west, and gather there by
nightfall with the rest of the 1st Battalion.
He had no way of knowing the price the Americans paid in those first
24 hours. He wouldn’t learn for days that Capt. Walter Schilling, his
company commander, had been killed by a shell in the English Channel.
Still, he could see that things were bad. German resistance, final tallies
would show, was ferocious enough to create 8,200 American casualties on
D-Day, including about 1,800 dead on Omaha Beach alone.
Lieutenant Morse would win the Distinguished Service Cross for, among
other things, scaling bluffs to take out a German gun emplacement. Heinlein
and hundreds like him held their nerve in the bloody first three hours to
cross the German killing ground and help the Allies gain a foothold on the
Continent. Though the cost was steep, the assault on Omaha Beach saw them
secure a strip up to a mile and a half wide by nightfall.
As he made his way west, along hedgerows and patches of trees, Heinlein encountered more than one intense firefight. Germans seemed to be shooting from everywhere and nowhere at once. “It’s tough when they’re firing on you, and you can’t see where they are,” says Harry.
Harry fell in with other GIs, some of them his own mates, and, standing 10 feet apart, they moved six abreast toward Vierville. During a lull, Harry and a friend made their way to a bench near a group of cottages and sat down. When the time came to leave, he saw that his friend had a bullet hole between the eyes. “Clean shot,” he says. “There was nothing I could do to help him.”
By nightfall, Heinlein joined some 300 of his surviving 1st Battalion mates a few hundred yards southwest of Vierville, where they dug in.
Next morning, Heinlein and what was left of his 1st Battalion were summoned to action. Four miles to the west, along the coast, 200 men from the 2nd Ranger Battalion had climbed 100-foot cliffs at Pointe du Hoc to capture a gun emplacement on D-Day, but in the aftermath they were trapped by a German assault. More than half the men had been hit; the remainder were threatened with annihilation.
Harry was one of 250 Stonewallers who set forth in an infantry column at 8 a.m. on June 7 to rescue them. For four miles along the Grandcamp highway, the unit, accompanied by 10 Sherman tanks, pushed back enemy forces with a fusillade of machine-gun fire, arriving in the Pointe du Hoc vicinity by 11.
There, Heinlein set up his heavy tripod, his squad mate mounted the M1917 machine gun, and with the others feeding him 30-caliber ammunition, he blazed away at the Germans, distracting them until the other two 116th battalions could arrive on June 8.
No break in the stress
What Harry remembers is the stress. Anything could happen at any moment.
The first problem was the hedgerows.
They weren’t simply hedges, but actually long earthen dikes, three feet thick and four feet high, topped with vegetation so tall that they blocked a soldier’s view in all directions. “You’d camp next to one and not know if there were Germans right on the other side,” he says.
Then there were the weapons. “The Germans were so much better equipped,” he says. “Our tanks, the Shermans, were called ‘coffins.’ The British called them ‘Ronsons’ because when a German shell hit them, they lit up like lighter fluid. Their antitank guns could cut them to ribbons. We couldn’t dent their Tiger Tanks with our anti-tank guns. The most you could do was aim at the tracks, try to disable ’em, or try to put something right in the viewing slit where the guy looked out.”
Artillery shells, he says, you could hear coming; their muzzle velocity was so high that they were on you almost the second they were fired. Mortars were silent until the shells hit nearby.
Even dug in, you weren’t safe from “aerial bursts,” shells calibrated to detonate three feet off the ground and drive shrapnel down. “Every time we took a town,” says Harry, “we’d look for an empty house, take the doors off and lay ’em across our foxholes for protection.”
And there was death. Before the war, he had never seen a lifeless body. He won’t be specific, but by this point he had likely created a few. “Sometimes there were so many dead Germans you’d have to move ’em out of the way to dig a foxhole,” he says grimly.
As he lay dug in at night, his mind would wander. He’d picture his sweetheart, Irene, wonder what she was doing and with whom. Would he see his mother again? He’d clutch his pocket Bible, “talk to God,” talk to himself.
“You’re going to make it,” he’d say. “You’re going to make it.” He was always afraid, but mostly believed, or convinced himself, that he’d survive the next battle, the next day.
That tension, grimness vs. faith, sparked inspired lunacy. Harry and his mates used the noses of their gas masks as a place for storing rations. “If there’d been a chemical attack,” he says sheepishly, “the entire U.S. Army would have been wiped out.”
At the front, the company prankster disappeared for a couple of hours one night. When he came back, he had a sack of potatoes – from a German camp.
“Guess he was hungry,” Harry laughs. “Guess he was crazy, too.”
Harry, now Sergeant Heinlein – like most survivors, he was promoted after D-Day – fought hard, but he didn’t make it to St. Lo. In a field near Couvains, Harry was hit.
“Felt hot, real hot, right up and down my leg,” he says. “Funny feeling. It hurt, but not too bad. Clean hit, all the way through. Could’ve been shrapnel; that can tear you right up.” He was airlifted to England.
He spent six weeks in a hospital bed in London, wondering how his buddies were doing, trying to forgive himself for thinking he was in paradise.
Back to the front
In the hospital, Harry caught up on sleep, got fussed over by the nurses and counted his blessings. His leg hurt, but most of the men around him were worse off. “Maimed, wounded, screaming,” he says. “I can’t tell you all I saw. I was one of the lucky ones.” By the end of July, the Army deemed him ready to rejoin to his unit.
The 29th Division had finally taken St. Lo on July 18, and Harry rejoined his Stonewallers, the 116th regiment, on July 31 as part of the so-called Normandy Breakout in fighting around Vire. Within three weeks, they had helped crack the Normandy Front wide open. Then the 29th moved to Brest, France, on the western tip of Brittany, where the brass had resolved to capture critical German submarine pens. Harry’s company used flame-throwing tanks to help capture Montbarey, an 80-year-old fort, on the outskirts of town.
Later, they were moved across France, by rail, to an area on the German-Dutch border where they fought intensely for the next four-plus months. There, Harry had to start learning about other kinds of recovery.
What happened to his best buddy, Winnie Wieskamp – that’s the kind of thing that stays with you forever. It’s 60 years ago now, and it seems like six days.
In late 1944, in the midst of a three-day bombardment, they were holed up in a chilly basement near the town of Julich. Harry and Winnie decided to head upstairs for a smoke. Looking back, Harry wonders if both didn’t have an excess of that trait that makes a great soldier: confidence.
“You’re young, and you’re pretty good, and you’ve made it that far,” he says. “Maybe you think you’ll live forever.” They found a living room on an upper floor and lit up.
Just then, a shell crashed into the place. Harry still won’t tell you exactly what he saw in the ruins of plaster and smoke, but there was no doubt that Winnie was dead.
Harry clutched his head and staggered downstairs, where he noticed that the world had gone silent. His eardrums had been perforated. Two months in a hospital somewhere in Holland brought his hearing back, slowly, but when he got out, he was transferred to a quartermaster corps, a trucking unit that moved material to the front and brought prisoners back.
“I guess you notice from my address that my unit has changed,” Harry wrote Irene in a letter. “I’ve been having a little trouble with my ears, sweetheart.”
Heinlein spent the rest of the war, until V/E Day on May 8, 1945, driving trucks.
Irene says yes
Three months later, on Aug. 10, he sailed from Antwerp, Belgium, on the Henry Graves Connor, a Liberty ship built in Baltimore. Over those few months, his fervent correspondence had fallen off, but in the few V-Mail pieces he did manage to compose in his meticulous hand, he never stopped professing his love for the girl he’d met at a roller-skating party a few years before.
And at last, in a feverish exchange in 1945, Irene stopped dodging. His life started getting back to normal a month after his return. “That’s when I married her,” he says beatifically, pointing at his smiling wife. “That’s what saved me.”
They settled in a rowhouse in West Baltimore, and he got back to work. His company specialized in architectural sheet metal such as copper domes on churches.
The work was fun, and he didn’t mind the heights, but like combat, it took a toll. Hammering a million nails over the years cost him, gradually, the use of his hands. Curtis Institute doctors implanted a cadaver bone last year, his 24th operation.
Like most World War II vets, when he returned, he said he’d rather not talk about what happened. The thought of a normal life got him through all that horror, and he didn’t want to go back. Nor did he want his loved ones exposed to the things he’d rather forget. “You couldn’t get a word out of these guys,” says Irene with a thumb in his direction. “We knew better than to ask.”
And there began an odd tug-of-war that typified “The Greatest Generation.” They had fought a war 3,000 miles away, their deeds confined mostly to newspaper and radio accounts and letters home that were heavily censored. World War II had been waged in secret, its horrors traumatizing into silence its only witnesses. Men like Harry, used to heavy packs, thought nothing of bearing the full weight of history in their minds, their memories, their souls.
Getting people talking
Harry’s nephew, Ed Hullett, now 66, remembers newsreel war footage and Aunt Irene and Uncle Harry’s wedding. At 8 or 9, he stopped wrestling with his surrogate dad long enough to ask him if he’d killed any Germans. “A few, I expect,” said Harry, heading out the door.
Over the years, as he read more about the war, Ed asked a lot more questions, enough to become a self-taught expert on the 29th Division. “Over the years,” he says, “Uncle Harry got more interested in talking.”
And Saving Private Ryan came out. Heinlein scoffs at the plot – “the Army would never risk men on a mission like that” – but found the battle scenes compelling. They got people talking, at least.
Harry started finding himself the center of attention. At church, his pastor often cites his war service. At Curtis, his doctor does the same. “Do you know this man fought on Omaha Beach?” he’ll ask a roomful of patients.
Harry was there on June 6, 2001, when the D-Day Memorial in Bedford, Va., became a reality.
He has dealt with some mysteries of the war, but not others. For years he wondered whether he should contact Winnie’s family but feared it might be an intrusion. Would they like to know, or would knowing be too much for them? It was enough to keep him awake nights. “I don’t think I have survivor’s guilt,” he says, “but I do wonder sometimes, you know? What if we hadn’t gone to get that cigarette?”
In 1982, a fellow D Company vet, Bob Slaughter of Roanoke, invited him to a June 6 reunion in Salem, Va. The Heinleins got in their Oldsmobile and made the four-hour drive. As they entered, he was struck.
“Honey, look at all these old men,” he said with a laugh.
One man limped toward Heinlein. “Do you remember me?” he said.
Harry did not. The last time he’d seen Joe Walentowski, he was bleeding and writhing atop a bluff on Omaha Beach.
Joe had survived, been sent back into action, and taken a graver hit weeks later when shrapnel tore out a chunk of his calf. The leg turned gangrenous. A general ordered him into surgery, saving both the limb and Walentowski’s life.
“Oh, it was good to see my friend again,” Harry says. They got caught up, and it was like meeting a part of himself he had lost.
Until lately, neither was ready to return to Omaha Beach. But on Tuesday, they met at Dulles Airport, where the two vets and their families made the six-hour trans-Atlantic flight to France together. It was their mission to hit the sands of Normandy again.
A Chinese sage had advice for men of war: “Conduct your triumph as a funeral.”
For 60 years, Harry Heinlein honored exactly that advice, regarding his triumph, and America’s, with quiet acknowledgment. Now, for five minutes on a windswept beach in France, he’ll get to deliver the eulogy.
He’ll see those same landmarks, hear the waves on the sand. He’ll remember the boats coming ashore, the ramps descending, gripping his .45, storming out. He’ll ponder those 15 minutes of running with his head down, through that unthinkable barrage.
He’ll stand with 71 other survivors and their families, medals on his blazer, wait his turn, pull a speech from his pocket and begin to read.
Once again, on Omaha Beach, Harry Heinlein just hopes to make it through.
<!– ART CREDIT
ART CREDIT–> <!– CUTLINE TEXTSgt. Charles "Harry" Heinlein enjoys leave in Paris in May 1945 after the end of the war in Europe.
CUTLINE TEXT–> <!– ART CREDITDOUG KAPUSTIN : SUN STAFF
ART CREDIT–> <!– CUTLINE TEXTHarry Heinlein reviews the text of the remarks he intends to make at Normandy on his return to Omaha Beach for the first time in 60 years.
CUTLINE TEXT–> <!– ART CREDIT
ART CREDIT–> <!– CUTLINE TEXTCharles and Irene Heinlein and attendants at their wedding, within weeks of his return.
CUTLINE TEXT–> <!– ART CREDITDOUG KAPUSTIN : SUN STAFF
ART CREDIT–> <!– CUTLINE TEXTHarry Heinlein's wartime letters to his future wife have been treasured and preserved.
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