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D-Day veteran Fred Spillman of Carrollton. Photo by CAMERON KNIGHT

Surviving Vets Remember D-Day Horrors

By Lew Moores
ChallengerNKY.com

He landed on the beach with the 29th Infantry Division on D-Day plus one a day later because the beach had been cluttered with the debris of war and yet what he saw did nothing to minimize the pain of those images.

"I wound up in a couple of days of grave registration,'' recalls Paul A. Popovich, who lives in Cold Spring. "There were so many. We had to go ahead and get the dog tags so they would have some record of them. That was my first-day assignment.''

As the 60th anniversary of D-Day approaches the battle that brought an end to the war in Europe within a year veterans like Popovich, who is 82 years old, reach back across the decades. While some memories can be harsh, Popovich was glad to be in the service. "Jobs were hard to find back then,'' he says. "It was a challenge.''

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On June 6, 1944, about 150,000 Allied Forces landed on the beaches of Normandy on the coast of France. More would follow. According to the National D-Day Memorial Foundation, located in Bedford, Va., the invasion involved 5,000 ships, 11,000 airplanes. In some cases, the invasion force had to dash across more than 200 yards of beach before reaching cover.

"Blanketed by small-arms fire and bracketed by artillery, they found themselves in hell,'' according to the foundation's website.

Before the end of that first day, the Allied Forces suffered 10,000 casualties, with more than 4,000 killed.

Popovich remembers the pounding that continued the next day.

"What I seen was a lot of bombing,'' he said. "I seen people running off the beach. The Germans were still firing at us. We were waiting for our big guns to go ahead and knock ‘em out. We saw quite a few of our paratroopers hanging up in trees. So we had to cut them down.

"I don't know. You seen somebody up there screaming for you to help him. Or another one has already passed away. It was just…I don't know what to say. It's just…you don't know which one to take first.''

Fred Spillman watched D-Day unfold from a different vantage point from the air. He was a tail-gunner on a bomber and flew over the beaches on D-Day; the Channel was awash in battleships and destroyers.