More Top Picks Wood Chippers
He hasn’t spoken about it much over the past 60 years, not to anyone.
His generation wasn’t much for talk, and besides, he wouldn’t have wished
those images on anybody. And cometo think of it, few people really asked. But
the prospect of talking now — in public, for Pete’s sake, in front of friends
and family and the few buddies who survive, and right there on the beach where
the bullets flew, where the mines blew up, where he stood over a wounded pal
in the chaos but had to keep on going — well, it rattles him almost as much
as the din of Hitler’s guns.
Charles Heinlein is 82, an emotional man – and not afraid to say so.
Remembering that day makes his voice catch, his eyes water. It’s hard to get
things in perspective.
When something is big enough to turn you inside out, when it changes the
course of history, and when you’ve carried it inside you for six decades, how
do you find five minutes’ worth of words to let it all go?
That’s the question Heinlein is doing battle with these days, as he
prepares to return to Normandy, France, for the first time since he approached
Omaha Beach’s 80-foot bluffs on June 6, 1944: D-Day.
He was a private in the 29th Infantry Division then, part of the fabled
“Blue and Gray,” a young man from West Baltimore who drilled at Fort George G.
Meade, crossed the Atlantic on the Queen Mary and trained for 19 months on the
moors of England for one of the decisive events in the history of Western
civilization. When the ramp of his landing craft came down at 7:40 a.m. that
day, Heinlein was one of the first several hundred ashore, a vanguard of the
fighting force that would liberate Europe from the death-grip of Adolf Hitler,
battle by bloody battle, over the 11 months to come.
This week, just a few days before the 60th anniversary of D-Day, Heinlein
will stand again on that windblown stretch of sand. This time, he’ll face not
artillery fire but 71 of the men he fought with that morning, family members
who know only snatches of their stories, and, perhaps, the feelings he buried
long ago just to get across that beach.
Nearly 10,000 29ers took part in the D-Day landing. Heinlein and the other
returning members will convene in the cemetery where their buddies are buried.
On June 6, they’ll hear the words of Maryland Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich Jr. and
George W. Bush, a new wartime president. Like friends at a funeral that was
delayed for 60 years, the veterans will pay their respects.
“The heroes,” Heinlein says, “are the fellows still there.”
On a day in late May, just before his departure for France, Heinlein sits
with his wife inside the brick rowhouse in Violetville that they have owned
since the 1950s. Their nephew, Ed Hullett, is here, too, and Charles is
worrying aloud about the speech he is still polishing.
“Whatever you say will be fine,” says Hullett, 66, a self-taught D-Day buff
who has helped his uncle with an early draft. “Lord knows, you’ve earned the
right to say it.”
Irene, the West Baltimore girl he married the month he got home from the
war, wonders what the weather will be like in Normandy. She’ll be there, too,
with Hullett’s wife, Carol; the Heinleins’ daughter, Darlene; and two
grandchildren, all of them curious to put the man they know so well together
with the scene they’ve only read about.
Ed suggests Charles should type the final draft of his speech, make it big
enough that he won’t lose his place or his thoughts. But who knows what might
come to the mind of a man in such a place, at such a time, during five minutes
the likes of which few of us will ever know?
“I don’t mind when a grown man cries,” says the former Company D
machine-gunner. “We do, you know. I did over there, pretty regular. You had to
let things go. It didn’t make me a chicken.
“It’s just that – well, I know I’m going to start that speech. I just can’t
say what’s going to happen after that.”
Ordinary people
Sometimes, especially in America, the heroic has roots in the ordinary.
Historians say it was citizen-soldiers who won World War II, regular guys who
saw acts of heroism in service to country as just another kind of heavy
lifting.
That all sounds a bit like Baltimore, and a bit like Charles “Harry”
Heinlein, a sheet-metal worker from the time he turned 16. Baltimore is where
Heinlein’s story begins and where, God willing, he says, it’s going to end.
His father, Frederick, was the son of a German immigrant, an Army man
himself. He served in a cavalry unit in the Philippines, where a horse kicked
his leg.
In 1929, when Harry was 7, his father caught a fever one day, lay down on
the sofa and never really got up again. “Complications,” Harry says. “I’ve got
a picture of him somewhere. He’s sitting on a big white horse. In uniform.”
No one recalls just how Charles became Harry. “It’s one of my aliases,” he
says. “The others, you can’t print.” Whatever name he went by, he always had
luck. It’s tough when your dad dies, a Depression hits, and your mom has to do
housework in the neighborhood to support the family. But when Harry left
school at 14, he landed a job at the Burkom Bros. store on Monroe, where he
mopped floors, stocked shelves and schlepped groceries for 90 hours a week.
His pay: $7.50. “You were happy for a job,” he says. “With people throwing
themselves out of windows? You bet you were.”
Better still if you could apprentice in a good field, like sheet-metal
work.
On his first day, in 1937, Harry’s new boss left him dangling on a rope
seven stories up in a gusting wind. Harry flung a kit of tools at the man but
stayed employed. “Thirty-six fifty, just 40 hours a week,” he says. “I was
rich.”
He had use of a brother-in-law’s old Ford, and it took him all over
Baltimore. He saw pictures at the palaces on Lexington (mostly Westerns),
shows at the Hippodrome (the organ rose from the orchestra pit). He
roller-skated at Carlin’s. Every winter, at Waxter’s Ice Pond in Westport,
they let you skate on the ice before they chopped it up for sale.
When a girl he was “palling around with,” Lillian Orr, brought a younger
sister to a 1940 roller-skating outing, he felt a pang that still hasn’t let
go. Little Irene, four years Harry’s junior, was hard to get from the start.
When he pulled up to the family’s Brice Street rowhouse for their first date
and leaned on the horn, he met Irene’s mother – from a distance of six inches.
“You’ll come in the house and pick my daughter up properly,” said Edith
Orr.
“She’d have made a good drill sergeant,” Harry says.
Shaping copper for church domes and other roofs, he got his first wind of
war in 1939. He took a job at American Hammer and Piston Co. on Pratt Street,
and by the time the roof was finished, the company was fitted out to make
anti-aircraft guns. No one talked much about the war at the time. “Some
companies in town were helping to supply the British,” he says. “That was
about it.”
Irene recalls the day that changed. At a picture show in December 1941, she
nearly flipped when the projectionist stopped the film and announced the
bombing of Pearl Harbor. The next day, lines at the recruiting office wrapped
around the block. “You didn’t ask if it was necessary,” she says. “We were in
a fight, and all the boys wanted to go.”
“We’ll never see a time like that again,” Harry says, “where everyone
unites for the good of the country – and wants to.”
Just like America, Baltimore was coming together. A war effort was taking
shape.
Becoming a soldier
In war, you can prepare all you want, but things tend to happen before
you’re ready.
For Harry, enlisting was that way: One day in February 1942, he left his
house a sheet-metal man and went to bed that night in a barracks.
Most of his pals from McKean Avenue — Richard Webb, Billy Bingle, that gang
— were in, picked by the Selective Service board or through enlistment. Harry
had half a mind to join, then decided not to, then changed his mind again.
Instead of having lunch, he hiked to the recruiter’s office on Baltimore
Street.
Two hours later, they brought him in a panel truck to his mother’s house,
got her signature, and took him with some other boys to a cafeteria. An hour
and a half later, he was checking in at Fort Meade. “Guess they didn’t want us
changing our minds,” he says.
He didn’t even have time to tell Irene.
He was assigned as a fill-in to the fabled 116th Infantry Regiment, a
mostly National Guard outfit that had been based in Virginia, in various
guises, since the time of Stonewall Jackson. Many had joined in the 1930s, and
most were farm boys. “Never heard so many ‘y’alls’ in my life,” Harry says.
“Back then, we called ’em hillbillies.” It got easier when replacements from
New York, Pennsylvania and California arrived and helped city boy Heinlein
feel more at home.
He missed Irene and asked for a leave just about every weekend, to the
mounting annoyance of Sgt. Willard Norfleet, Lt. Verne Morse, a tall,
red-headed fellow from Pennsylvania farm country, and the company commander, a
tough Roanoker with wire-rimmed glasses, Capt. Walter O. Schilling.
“Don’t think I’ll be seeing you this weekend, hon,” Harry wrote Irene in
March 1942. “The lieutenant doesn’t think we’re drilling up to capacity. … I
want to get in good with the sergeant so he’ll keep giving me passes, [but]
today on the rifle range, I hit everything but the target.”
More Top Picks Best Borescopes
The 29th Division — the 116th was one of its three regiments – still lacked
supplies. The U.S. military then was only the 17th largest in the world. In
Harry’s first few weeks, they drilled with broomsticks for rifles. Helmets
were World War I-era, pan-style affairs. The rifles that finally arrived were
bolt-action Springfields, made just after the turn of the century. The machine
guns were behemoths from the prior war, water-cooled monsters whose tripods
alone tipped the scales at 50 pounds.
“Yes, I was wondering what I’d gotten myself into,” Harry says.
He was becoming a soldier.
They learned to march in lines and salute smartly. In bayonet training,
they used dummies and learned where to sink the blade and how to twist it,
hard, to sever arteries and cartilage. Men crawled under 18-inch-high layers
of barbed wire while machine-gunners sprayed live fire above them. They were
taught to hate the Germans – such bastards that they bombed ambulances and
shot wounded men. “You didn’t want to go into combat liking ’em,” he says.
On “Carolina Maneuvers” in North Carolina, the men were split into “red”
and “blue” armies for war games not unlike modern paintball. Judges assessed
formations and rifle hits. Planes dropped sacks of flour, not bombs, on trucks
marked “TANK.” Those that turned white were “kills.”
Harry hit it off with Winfred Wieskamp, a swarthy kid from small-town
Wisconsin; together, the pair sometimes haunted “Boomtown,” the strip of bars
and souvenir shops that sprang up next to the base. Harry had never taken a
drink before the Army and was coy with Irene on the subject. In a letter home
he said that yes, he’d had a bit too much one time, but a sergeant had twisted
his arm. “I would’ve had to fight him, hon,” he wrote, “and you know I could
never do that.”
The “sarge,” he remembers, was Winnie.
On maneuvers, friends became family. When the boys were moved to Camp A.P.
Hill near Fredericksburg, Va., for fitness training, they had to march the
whole way, 100 miles along Route 301. One of Harry’s buddies, Elmer “Pops”
Teets, was a 36-year-old draftee. “Those were desperate times,” Harry says
with a laugh.
Harry, then 20, humped a lot of Pops’ gear. “You’d get in trouble if they
caught you,” he says, “but you wanted to keep everyone together.”
All the while, a pining Private Heinlein stewed about Irene, the
15-year-old beauty he feared would take a shine to someone else during his
absence. He hung out at her place when he could get a pass. Her only brother,
James, a weightlifter, acted as “my officer on Brice Street,” he says. “He’d
interrupt us all of a sudden, point at me and say, `Is HE still here?'”
Heinlein recalls that one New Year’s Eve, an old buddy made a pass at
Irene, right in front of him, and the private went ballistic, decking his
former friend on the spot. “Tried to kiss her!” he says, still indignant.
“Why, you have to protect your territory.”
Irene still has the letters he sent home, neat but brittle, in a cellophane
bag. In every one, he sought assurances that she loved him back. He also
warned her time and again that his platoon might ship out soon.
After A.P. Hill, they trained at Camp Blanding, Fla. He became the No. 1
shooter on a machine-gun squad, which meant he lugged the tripod, set it up,
mounted the “receiver” and discharged the weapon.
Within the 29th Infantry Division, he belonged to the Commonwealth-based
116th, Company D, the 1st Platoon, and the 1st Squad. His serial number?
“13069334,” he says without a moment’s hesitation.
When you’re a soldier at 19, you remain one, come hell or high water. Or
both.
To Britain’s aid
The 116th was training at Camp Blanding, in the muggy wastelands of
interior Florida, in the summer of 1942. Word came down in early fall that the
29th Infantry Division would be needed in England. Privates Heinlein and
Wieskamp and their mates found themselves on trains bound for Camp Kilmer,
N.J., the point of embarkation for Europe.
Whatever the division’s mission, though, at a time when no member had heard
of a place called Omaha Beach, they lived through their own version of hell
and high water.
The Allies had decided to employ two British ocean liners operated by
Cunard to transport American troops. The Queen Mary and Queen Elizabeth could
each accommodate up to 15,000 men, and naval experts had calculated that their
average speed of 32 knots on the open sea, and their capacity to zigzag
sharply, would thwart attacks by German submarines.
In September 1942, Heinlein and some 6,500 29ers were among 13,000 men
crammed aboard the Queen Mary. The week-long voyage was a lesson in war’s
capacity to invert the familiar.
On a craft that epitomized grace and style in peacetime, bunk beds stacked
six or seven deep, row after row, packed every conceivable space. Heinlein’s
bed, not far from Winnie’s, was on the floor of a swimming pool.
For several days and nights, a North Atlantic storm roiled the waters. The
floating skyscraper rocked side to side, flinging food, cards, dice and
soldiers to the floor. Bunks slid back and forth across the pool, smacking
into its sides. None of the men were sailors, so most were repeatedly sick —
“We learned to use our helmets for all kind of things,” remembers Harry. They
lived in fear of German torpedo hits.
On the sixth day of the crossing, as the ship chugged toward the Scottish
coast, a half-dozen Royal Navy destroyers and cruisers came out to escort the
ship to port.
Harry was below deck, engrossed with Winnie and others in a game of
five-card draw, when a huge crash jolted the vessel. Cards and dice, mess kits
and mattresses flew everywhere. The Queen Mary shuddered stem to stern. “It
felt like it would shake apart.”
Few were in their assigned areas, fewer still in life vests. Everyone flew
into a panic, returning to their stations. “We had a five-inch gun mounted on
the rear deck,” says Harry, “and someone grabbed it and started shooting into
the water. Guess they thought they’d hit a U-boat. We all thought we were
hit.”
He rushed up top in time to see half of a cruiser, the HMS Curacao, sliced
off neat as a sheet of copper, roaring past on the starboard side and sinking
into the sea. “I couldn’t see any men,” he says. “On the open sea, you batten
down. Most were below decks.”
He raced to the port side, where the other half of the ship was foundering.
The Curacao’s skipper had turned too sharply, and the Queen Mary had cut it in
half.
More than 300 men were lost.
No one had to tell Harry and his mates that “loose lips sink ships.” The
Curacao disaster was hushed up until after the war.
Greenock Harbor wasn’t deep enough to accommodate the Queen Mary, so it
weighed anchor a few miles offshore. Commercial ferries hauled the men in.
When Harry and Company D made it to the wharf, a Scottish military band was
there to greet them.
Bagpipe music keened on the cold sea air, sad and strange, a mournful
Highlands greeting that penetrated the soul.
“It was nice they wanted us,” Harry says, “but I’d never heard sounds like
that. And I had only heard of men in skirts. My word, here I was, just a young
fellow from West Baltimore.
“What a sight! I was in a whole different world.”
Private Heinlein didn’t know the half of it.
Editor’s note: Baltimore-based historian Joseph Balkoski, author of Beyond
the Beachhead: The 29th Division in Normandy (1989) and Omaha Beach (2004),
offered research and historical background in support of these articles.