Editor's note: This is part of a series of interviews with World War II veterans. The articles will continue in each day's edition until May 28, prior to the World War II Memorial Dedication and Recognition Day, May 29.

John Doyle's good sense may have saved his life and the lives of two other Kosciusko County residents as they approached northern France the morning of June 6, 1944.

Stretched out before the young Hoosiers were the beaches of Normandy, the killing zones of Sword, Juno, Gold, Omaha and Utah beaches.

Doyle stood with 13 others in an LST, including Leonard Stouder of Etna Green and Herbert Hughes of Warsaw.

"Me and Herbie were very close friends. The three of us, being from Kosciusko, kind of stuck together," said Doyle, 80, from his Fox Farm Road home.

The 20-mile crossing had been rough and stormy. The sky was just light enough to read a newspaper, Doyle recalls. Navy destroyers fired on the cliffs to take out the German pillboxes and their deadly artillery.

Doyle, Stouder and Hughes, in the company of Army engineers, pulled closer to the stretch of sand below Vierville-ser-Mar. The water lapping the beach was red, littered with the bodies of the fallen.

Doyle said of D-Day. "It wasn't anything you could describe. I was 20-years-old at the time. I had no idea what I was looking at but I knew it wasn't good.

"The Limey we was with on the back of the boat said, 'Fellas, I'm telling you, you want to get out quick. Because they lace the front end with machine gun fire. They do everything they can to get you before you get off.'

"I told Herbie 'I ain't going to be no fool. I'm not going out the front of that, I'm going out the back.' We did, now in water up to our necks, believe you me.

"Those LSTs carried quite a few people and they were long. So when you jumped out the back you're in deep. Loaded down like we were, by the time you got to shore, fighting your way in there, your legs were numb. Your stomach felt like you'd been hit by a prize- fighter from the shells going off in the water.

"Me and Herbie hung together pretty close. I don't know what happened to Leonard. We didn't see him until later. But we all got ashore."

Doyle paused, remembering. When he spoke again his voice was hoarse.

"And there was boats and stuff laying everywhere. They used fishing boats. They used landing barges. They used troop ships, everything you could think of to get troops onto that beach because they wanted as many numbers as they could get.

"Time stood still.

"It's hard to explain. All at once things seemed like a monotone with shells going off. You're really just not with it. We were pretty well pinned down."

The Americans suffered 2,400 casualties at Omaha June 6. By day's end 34,000 troops had landed.

Doyle had spent the preceding six weeks in England, stationed along the Cliffs of Dover.

A machine gunner for the 481st AAA AW Battalion, Doyle taught the Brits how to use the more powerful American weapons. The ordnance would arrive in its shipping crate, the troops would unpack it and put it together under Doyle's supervision as a part of a lend-lease agreement.

Different British crews would come in, Doyle said, pick up their weapons, learn how to use them and deploy them.

"There were troops everywhere, for miles and miles and miles, as far as you could see, ready for loading.

The first wave of soldiers had arrived at Normandy. As fast as the soldiers unloaded in French waters, the boats came back and for more.

Doyle learned he would be assigned to the engineers set to employ Project Mulberry - artificial dockworks - prior to his trip across the English Channel.

The engineers were to install concrete blocks, 200 feet long, 60 feet wide and 60 feet high, called "phoenixes." They would create an artificial port to bring equipment and supplies ashore.

Doyle and Hughes caught up with Stouder later, working around the phoenixes. A truck driver, Stouder was to deliver supplies off the barges onto the trucks.

"It didn't quite work out that way, because it was all mass confusion."

Doyle stayed in the Vierville area until the rest of his unit arrived, two weeks later.

In a wrecked fishing boat he found a large ceramic cup, made in England, and carried it with him throughout the war. He still has it.

The engineers constructed the floating piers, allowing more tanks, trucks and supplies to come in where they were needed.

"Somewhere along the line me and Herbie were grabbed up because we weren't really attached to anybody. We were more or less with the engineers guarding the beach. That's when they were started the clean up and g0t the dead off the beaches.

"It was unimaginable; one of the sights of war that burns in your memory. You never forget and can't describe it. So you just don't talk about it. It was one of the places I feel very fortunate to have gotten through."

"We also were assigned to guard the German prisoners in the American Cemetery."

"And then the hedgerows," he said, his voice halting again. "That was something else."

The battalion went through through St. Lo and Caen securing the area for the liberation of Cherbourg.

"I think that threw Hitler for a loss," Doyle said. "He would have expected us to attack a major port. Instead we came in on the beaches and captured Cherbourg pretty well intact. Now we had a place to bring in supplies."

With their highly mobile guns the 481st could be moved anywhere. The unit's main responsibility became guarding front line airports and ammunition dumps' "tagging along behind the First army.

"Every fifth vehicle had a gun like mine. You always raked a tank with it. If you could hit rivets or slits, you could knock the tracks off them very easily. If you knocked the tracks off the Germans would get out and run. Then you could take the bazooka and set them on fire. And you always had the old reliable Molotov cocktail, the infantry used it a lot.

"That's where you took a gasoline-filled bottle and, if you could get close enough, you would throw that on the tank. Once a flame got started they came out of there in a hurry. It was a rare occasion something like that came our way, though."

During the Bulge the 481st dug in near a crossroads a mile south of Bastogne, Belgium. The Germans came up to them, but didn't get past them. Gen. George Patton's Third Army swept in from southern France.

"They picked us up and we guarded ammunition dumps for the rest of the war. I saw Patton once. He drove by in a jeep with his big boots and six-shooters."

Red Cross stations provided coffee, doughnuts, paper and pens, a place to wash up. No one carried anything but weapons.

"At St. Desiere, where we guarded an airport, we had it made. Red Cross personnel were in one end of a hanger. That was our longest stay before we started to Trier. Then we were steered away from Berlin, south, to Nurenberg.

"In one of our convoys we come across Dachau, the concentration camp for the poor unlucky people.

"We first started noticing it about 20 miles away. Everybody was wondering what in the world that odor was. But it was Dachau. We weren't allowed within half a mile. When the Germans knew we were coming the infantry division had already gone through.

"We sat there to watch over things until the Red Cross got arrived. It was one of the most pitiful sights of war."

Near Nurenberg, the Allies sat by the Alta River, warily watching the Russians troops' march to the capitol city.

"There were tensions between us. We were 30 miles south of Berlin when it fell to the Russians. One of the mistakes we made was to let them take Berlin."

Somewhere in his travels Doyle picked up a long German knife, which he retooled for his own purposes. On the long handle under clear plastic is a picture of his wife, Patricia or Patsy, as he calls her, standing and smiling. Her long dark hair is blown back from her face. On the other side she is holds a toddler, the couple's daughter, Janet. His baby was born while he was in Europe. She was nearly two-years-old before they met.

Doyle and Patsy Albertson married Nov. 21, 1942.

"I was 19 when we went together. We often talked about getting married in June 1943. Then they passed the law and 18 to 21 year olds and 35 to 40 year olds would be drafted. I got my draft notice. So I told her I wouldn't be getting married in June. We would wait. No. No. She said. 'We'll get married now. That way when I'll be writing you letters, I know you belong to me.' We've been married 61 years and we hope to have a few more."

Patsy's brother, Donald, was a casualty of the war. Hit in the head with shrapnel in the summer of 1944, the wound was covered with an experimental plate. He lived with the Doyles for many years, suffering terrible headaches. He is now in a nursing home.

Doyle received the EAME Theatre medal with ribbon and five bronze stars, for Normandy, Northern France, Central Europe, American Theatre, the Good Conduct medal and the World War II Victory medal.

When Doyle returned to the states there was a transportation strike. Troops had to either hitchhike or ride a school bus going their way.

He was discharged at Camp Atterbury in Indianapolis and rode a school bus to Fort Wayne. From there he thumbed it, accepting a ride with a Columbia City man.

The two started talking and the next thing Doyle knew he was reading the sign for Larwill.

"I said 'Hey, I thought you said you lived in Columbia City.'

The driver said, 'I do.'

'You better let me out here then.'

He said, 'No, I'm going to Warsaw.'

"He wouldn't take one red cent for bringing me all that way.'"

Doyle was let out on the corner of Bronson and Center streets. His mother lived on Fort Wayne Street, two blocks north.

"I started down that way and I got to Main street. I seen her coming. It had been two years, almost, since I last saw her," he said.

"I saw him coming out the window. I had to help him get home the last block, you know," said Patsy, filling in the facts as her husband had suddenly gone silent.

When he spoke again he said, "That was one of the happiest days of my life, when I got home in one piece." [[In-content Ad]]