Johnston County’s Victors in Europe

By Benjamin Sanderford

Monday, June 5, 1944, found Edwin S. Smith of Four Oaks aboard a troop ship in Weymouth Harbor, England. The young artilleryman was anxiously awaiting the time when he and thousands of others would be ordered to assault Adolf Hitler’s “Fortress Europe.”

Finally, the order came.

“Tomorrow is D-Day,” Smith wrote in his diary.

Some 5,000 Allied ships set sail for Lower Normandy that night. The infantry landed on five beaches the next morning. Another artilleryman from Four Oaks, Lester Stewart, was not far behind.

He and his comrades were in a small landing craft with their two guns and trucks by 11 a.m. They took several minor hits from German bullets as they raced towards Omaha Beach, but, just as they reached the shallows, a shell blew a hole right in front of their boat, causing a truck to fall into the water.

Fortunately, Stewart and most of his unit managed to pull a howitzer ashore and fire on the enemy bunkers. Stewart gained the Bronze Star for his actions that day, but lost a friend, one of among 2,400 Americans who became casualties at “Bloody Omaha.”

Smith landed later that afternoon and, after surviving enemy artillery fire in a German-made dugout, described June 6, 1944, as “the most momentous day of my life!!!”

It took weeks for the Allies to drive the Germans out of Normandy, but events elsewhere were picking up speed. Smith recorded hearing about the July “revolt” by a small group of principled German army officers against Hitler. The coup only failed because the conspirators’ colleagues were either afraid of the dictator, or still loyal to him.

More encouraging was the news that the French Resistance had liberated Paris in August. The German garrison commander had surrendered rather than carry out Hitler’s insane order to destroy the city.

Then Romania sued for peace with Soviet Russia, depriving Germany of its oil reserves. By the end of October, Aachen became the first German city to fall to U.S. forces.

Stewart was in the Belgian Ardennes Forest that winter when the Germans launched one last, desperate counterattack. The Battle of the Bulge was the costliest engagement for the United States in Europe, resulting in 75,000 casualties.

Nevertheless, around 81,000 Germans were killed, wounded or captured during the battle. The back of the German army was broken, and the Soviet Red Army demonstrated this in January 1945 by launching an offensive that drove the enemy out of Poland and across the Oder River, 43 miles from Berlin.

By March, the Western Allies were confronting the mighty Rhine. German demolition teams frantically worked to blow up every bridge over the river, but the American advance was too swift. U.S. troops captured the vital crossing at Remagen just as the enemy was trying to destroy it. Stewart was among the first across, and had to endure two weeks of increasingly futile German attacks.

The heart of the Reich was now vulnerable. Some of its servants, however, remained as murderous as ever. Lieutenant Hardy D. Narron of Kenly fell into German hands after being shot down over Italy. As a POW, he was entitled to humane treatment, but Hitler’s followers equated mercy with weakness. Narron did not survive long after his capture.

American soldiers were not the only people to experience the horrors of Nazism. Captain Glenn W. Grier, Jr. of Smithfield saw the results of the Holocaust firsthand when he visited a concentration camp in April 1945. He later wrote of being appalled by how the Jewish inmates “were reduced to live the lives of animals by starvation and torture.”

One month later, on April 30, Adolf Hitler committed suicide rather than face the consequences of his decisions.

The following week, May 8, 1945, at Eisenhower’s headquarters in Reims, France, the German armed forces agreed to capitulate. Shortly after midnight on May 9, at a formal ceremony in Berlin, representatives from Britain, France, the Soviet Union and the United States signed the document terminating the war in Europe.