D Day, 0800 hours...Omaha Beach....
Eugene Cogan remembers the June day, a week after he waded
ashore at Omaha Beach in 1944. At 5 a.m.,
13 June at Couvains, two or so miles from the French invasion site, artillery shrapnel pierced his neck. At 5 pm, 100 feet or so away in an apple orchard, a German rifleman took aim, and a slug pierced Gene's back right shoulder. Below right, Gene at his training camp, Cornwall, early 1944, 29th Infantry Division.
The American infantryman lay on a slope, bleeding, temporarily incapacitated,
daring not to move. As the evening wore
on, he tried to crawl only to have a sniper in a tree send a bullet into
his left femur, breaking the bone and splintering it through his muscle and
skin. Night fall came, along with the
Normandy chill and damp.
He scrounged a poncho in an abandoned back pack, covered himself
and swallowed some sulfur pills. The
next morning his sergeant found him, cursing that the medics had missed the private the
evening before.
Gene's career as a scout with Company B, 115th Infantry
Regiment, 29th Infantry Division, was over.
He was evacuated to England, and by September on the S.S. Queen Elizabeth
headed eventually to Ft. Benjamin Harrison near his Indiana home. August 1945, healed but partially disabled,
he was again a civilian.
Noble County, Indiana
near Fort Wayne was his boyhood home.
Born December 7, 1922, he married his young sweetheart, JoAnn Wolf when
she was 18 and he was 19. After a time
in a machine shop, he joined the U.S. Army in February 1943, and spent the next
three months at Camp Walters near Ft. Worth, Texas.
By June 1943, the massive SS Queen Mary had carried him and thousands of others to
England, where he was assigned to the 29th Infantry in Big Camp, Cornwall. There the division trained in the moors of
western England, preparing for the invasion of the mainland of Europe. On occasion, Generals Eisenhower and Montgomery came to
review the troops .
June 4,
1944 at Portsmouth, the regiment boarded a LSI, ready to cross the Channel,
when the word came to halt proceedings due to ugly weather. For a night and day, the troops remained on
board the cramped and damp ship. Their
captain told them to write home and for some, he warned, it would be the
last letter they would ever write.
June 6th, the weather had cleared, and the 29th, along with
the 1st Infantry, ran headfirst into the hell-fire of a reinforced German regiment,
dug in on the bluffs of Vierville sur Mer of what is now Omaha Beach. Gene was in the second wave, running close to
shore at 8 a.m.
As they approached
the beach, a machine gun sighted on the debarking,
overloaded soldiers. He splashed into
the sea, struggling next to another soldier. Spitting water and ever the wag,
Gene remonstrated loudly, "Gee, a guy could get killed around
here!" Then he noted the trooper
was dead, shot through the temple. Shocked,
scared and drenched, he moved away from the body and toward the sands of Europe.
Gene remembers nothing of the beach, or how he got off and
over the bluffs and behind the Nazi pill boxes.
Neighboring Company A of the 116th took 90% casualties that day. The entire division took 50% dead and wounded
while in Normandy, over 125% during the 11 months in action.
The first day, B Company advanced 1,000 yards. That night Gene saw General Omar Bradley
speaking to his company officers. After
that first day, it was hedgerow to hedgerow for B Company. Just before sailing, his platoon had been issued a new fangled
communications radio - the famed Walkie Talkie.
On one occasion a radioman was wounded and lost the radio. Sgt. Lindsay asked for a volunteer to
retrieve it. Gene raised his voice and
soon was crawling through knee high
grass the 75 yards to find it. Machine
gun bullets chopped the grass above his lowered head as cleanly as if a scythe had sliced
off the tops. He survived and crawled
back with the radio. The sergeant promised a
medal, but other events intervened.
A week after D Day, two miles from Omaha Beach, Gene took
three pieces of Nazi metal in 14 hours, and survived. Survived to come home, father three children
and know his numerous grandchildren. He
taught school, served as a principal and later a regional speaker on Indiana
history for school children. In 2012 the
French Government presented him the prestigious Knight of the Legion of Honor
for his service in freeing France from the demonic Nazi occupation.
Below left, Gene Cogan, b. 1922 and Bishop Holliman, b 1919 hold Gene's Legion of Honor medal, the pixie and certificate. Bishop, U.S. Navy was a radioman on the U.S.S. Barker, a destroyer, escorting a convoy through the Straits of Gilbralter on D-Day. The two are neighbors in Avilla, Indiana.
Inside the shadow box of the Certificate and ribbon as Knight of the French
Legion of Honor also is the little pixie, a good luck folklore charm
from Cornwall.
Prior to the Invasion, a
G.I. had purchased the entire stock from a souvenir store in Truro, Cornwall and
distributed them as lucky charms to his company. There were not enough pixie charms to go around,
and Gene's superior, one Sgt. Miller, ordered him to take his. Reluctantly Gene did so.
Gene came home; sadly Sgt. Miller did not. Nor did tens of thousand of others who gave
their lives for our freedom.
If you would like to contact Pvt. Cogan or Seaman Bishop Holliman, just write me at glennhistory@gmail.com.
