War stories.
There are war stories, still.
As bullets snapped the air and frazzled soldiers darted their eyes this way and that, one sergeant sighed, shouldered his weapon — and answered his own order.
Halfway across the world, on the home front, a young woman in a defense plant set her expression and planted her feet — while a stubborn rivet gun stared her down.
Another soldier mired on the most contested stretch of beachfront property in the world tried not to look at the dead bodies bobbing in the surf as he fixed his bayonet for a grim, scary detail—remembering a milestone in the process.
This coming Tuesday is the 79th anniversary of D-Day, the Longest Day.
By now, the events of June 6, 1944, have morphed from grainy newsreel footage to Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg, all the while arranging themselves into a kind of sepia-toned collage of composite memory, for a twilight unspooling.
In the 21st century, that fading memory is all the more poignant, as the Greatest Generation is now all but gone.
But the above vignettes of Harrison Summers, Helen Shope and Foster Feathers—all north-central West Virginia residents whose lives were forever informed by D-Day—will remain as sharp and pronounced as the ambient drop of the needle on a Glenn Miller record in a PX jukebox, so long as their great-great-great grandchildren and other citizens see fit.
The trio has since passed on, and The Dominion Post is honoring their service with capsule accounts of their duties on D-Day and in World War II.
‘It was all kind of crazy’
Harrison Summers was far inland from the bloody tumult of the Normandy beaches, but it wasn’t any easier. The affable sergeant with the 101st Airborne had parachuted in to the French countryside as a second arm to the invasion.
He and others were pinned down by heavy fire when an officer ordered an attack on a row of French farmhouses serving as German artillery barracks.
A patrol of 15 was assembled and Sgt. Summers, who at 25 was the “old man ” of the unit, was placed in charge.
He wasn’t exactly well-known among the ones who were tapped, however.
And they weren’t exactly enthusiastic about following a stranger into battle, either.
So Summers went alone.
On the longest afternoon of that longest day nearly 80 years ago, he became a one-man army.
Four of the enemy killed in one rush. Six more, in another.
According to the account by famed historian, Stephen Ambrose, Summers was perplexed as the soldiers he was supposed to be commanding hung back.
“They don’t seem to want to fight and I can’t make them. So I’ve got to finish it.”
A captain agreed to help, but in the literal second after he said it, he was shot dead by a German sniper.
Meanwhile, some 15 more German soldiers fell in another solo onslaught by Summers.
When it was done he was credited with single-handedly killing 31.
He earned a battlefield commission to lieutenant and was recognized with a Distinguished Service Cross—but the paperwork was misplaced nominating him for the Medal of Honor.
In the Normandy countryside a soldier asked a visibly shaken Summers if he was OK.
“It was all kind of crazy, ” he said of the solo assault that took almost five hours.
“I’m sure I’ll never do that again.”
Back home in Rivesville, Marion County, a lot of people didn’t know the coal miner had even worn the uniform for his country until they read his obituary.
His beer-drinking buddies at Dominick’s Place and other taverns in Greentown didn’t pay him any mind, since they were all veterans, too — and that was exactly how he wanted it.
Summers was 65 when he lost his battle with lung cancer in 1983. His gravestone makes no mention of his military service.
‘We were fighting the war, too’
D-Day was Helen Shope’s first day on the job at the Glen L. Martin factory in Baltimore.
The plant cranked out bombers and seaplanes, and Shope, who was 21 and fresh off the bus from Booth, Monongalia County, was a Rosie the Riveter.
Her first task ? She was dispatched for an order of “skyhooks “—the Martin equivalent of a snipe hunt.
“Oh, boy, those skyhooks, ” she said with a giggle still girlish.
“They always sent the new girls looking for the skyhooks. That was your initiation. I said, ‘OK, you got me.'”
She was two weeks into the job when she got the best of the rivet gun. Before, it outmuscled her.
Shope deftly used her slim, diminutive frame to shimmy into the recesses of those planes for critical “blind ” rivets—so named because she couldn’t actually see what she was doing.
“We were fighting the war, too, ” the Morgantown woman said of her Rosie-tenure.
“I guess I know what’s going in my obituary.”
She was right. She died seven years ago at the age of 93 and her wartime service to her country received prominent attention in the funeral home write-up.
‘I’m no better than anyone else’
Foster Feathers gave an audible groan when the captain sounded the “Check your bayonets, ” order.
So did every other member of the 359th Engineers. The company was churning to Omaha Beach on June 8, 1944: D-Day, Plus Two.
“I didn’t want to hear that, ” the Westover man said. “That meant the Germans had the beach booby-trapped.”
You deployed your bayonet to look for mines. A metallic clink under a layer of sand meant you found your deadly treasure.
After the invasion came the infrastructure.
The 359th built the roads, airstrips and bridges that followed, often doing their work with bullets snapping past their heads. That’s what getting shot at sounded like: A “snap ” of air.
Technically, Feathers didn’t have to be there. He worked at the former DuPont chemical plant just across the river from Morgantown.
The plant was integral to the war effort.
He was a good employee and his boss wanted to get him a deferment, but Feathers politely said no.
“I’m no better than anyone else, ” was the reasoning of the soldier who was later wounded in the Battle of the Bulge.
As said, bodies were still on the sand and in the chop, when he landed on Omaha Beach two days after June 6.
Makeshift graves were still being prepared for the fallen American boys.
There would be no happy homecomings or victory parades for them.
The kid from Westover willed himself not to look — but he did anyway.
About midday, he remembered something.
“I realized it was my birthday. I hit 21 on Omaha Beach.”
Feathers was 93 when he died in 2016.
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