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Area veterans recalled their role in D-Day on 50th anniversary

Area veterans recalled their role in D-Day on 50th anniversary

-Messenger file photo
“Every time you think back, you want to know how in the hell you got through all that,” said Herb Zobrosky, of Fort Dodge, who stormed Utah Beach during the invasion of Normandy. The Allied landing on the coast of France on June 6, 1944, spelled the beginning of the end for Nazi Germany.

Editor’s note: This article appeared in The Messenger on June 6, 1944, on the 50th anniversary of the Allied landings in Normandy. All three of the veterans featured have since died, but their story is still relevant. Story and photo by Kevin Potter, former Messenger staff writer.

Herb Zobrosky recalls the buddies who died on Utah Beach 50 years after the Allied invasion of Normandy.

Bud Baker remembers clearly the moment he realized he was stepping into the middle of World War II.

And Ernie Larson thinks about the Normandy invasion when he goes to bed at night.

Fifty years after Allied forces stormed the beaches of Normandy, all three Fort Dodge area men recall vividly the invasion — and the impact it had on their lives for years after.

The invasion gave the Allies their first foothold in northern Europe– the first step in the vicious Western Front fight to drive the Nazis back to Germany.

And it left a lasting mark on the men who survived the bloodshed and destruction at places like Omaha Beach and Utah Beach.

Robert “Bud” Baker, 71, was in the fourth wave of soldiers to land on Omaha Beach, between 8:30 a.m. and 9 a.m. on June 6, 1944.

“It was about midnight June 5 when we took off to go across the Channel, and it was rough,” said Baker, who farms near Badger.

Many soldiers on his landing craft spent the journey vomiting into their helmets — until they neared the shore and prepared to land, he said.

When Baker’s boat was about a half-mile from the beach, another boat 100 yards away — carrying about 45 men — blew apart.

“They hit one tremendous big mine. And I can still visualize, I can still see in my mind when that thing went up. There were bodies that went up in the air up to 40 feet,” he said.

“Then Bud Baker knew this was war.”

Not long after, soldiers in his troop transport poured out into the sea and ran 150 yards to the shore.

“Here’s where we had real good physical training because we’d run two or three miles every morning with our full field pack,” he said. “You had to be in good physical condition, otherwise you were dead.”

Baker, a machine gunner, carried his gun over his head through water up to his chest — and around obstacles the Gennans left on the beach.

“There were railroad ties, channel irons — stuck this way and this way and all ways. You had to work around them, and the majority of them, when the tide was up, had mines on top of them,” he said.

He found himself on the beach in the midst of ferocious gunfire from Germans entrenched on the beach and on the cliffs above.

Baker wasn’t totally unprepared, even though it was his first combat experience. He was a member of the much-decorated First Infantry Division, which had invaded North Africa and Sicily, and whose members were sure the First would be a spearhcad in the invasion of France.

If it weren’t for the help of the veterans in his outfit, Baker says, he probably wouldn’t have survived the war.

“Here’s where I was very fortunate — my sergeants and that who were in charge of us, they were all professionals,” he said. He didn’t panic — although he was scared — because he was confident his leaders knew what they were doing.

“I can remember the first thing as soon as I got out of the water to the beach there, my sergeant told me to dig,” he said.

He dug.

Once the members of his outfit took out the German machine-gun nests and concrete bunkers — called “pillboxes” — they moved inland below the bluffs where the Germans were firing down on the Allied troops.

Baker and his brothers in arms would take cover during an Allied “roll” of artillery on German positions, and then charged with bayonets fixed on their rifles, ready for hand-to-hand combat.

”Here’s these Americans coming with fixed bayonets — pretty soon the white flags came up,” Baker said. “We didn’t have one casualty because the Germans knew that they were meeting somebody in front of them that knew what they were doing.”

“And thank God that’s the only time throughout the entire war I heard that word to fix bayonets,” he said.

Normandy was Baker’s first taste of battle, but it was enough for him todevelop a “sixth sense” that helped him survive the war.

“You can hear an artillery piece going off back there, and you can pretty much tell by the sound of the shell whether it’s going over or if it’s going.to come in on you — what we call ‘incoming mail,'” he said.

Baker also feels there was some sort of divine hand keeping him alive throughout the war. Had he not been transferred from the inexperienced l06th Infantry Division before Normandy, for instance, his chances of survival would have been slim. During the Battle of the Bulge, the l06th was overrun — and the result was “murder,” he said.

“This is what I mean when I say the good Lord or somebody watched after me, that I was transferred to a professional outfit.” Baker said.

During the push across France, Baker had more than one close call. Once he was going to walk out of a barn, where he was getting a drink of water, when he felt the urge to stop.

“I got up and went to the door and got a hold of the handle and I was going to open it. Something told me, ‘Don’t do that.’. I turned around and sat down, and about three seconds is what it took — a German artillery shell came in and directly hit on the jeep,” he said.

“You see, if I hadn’t have listened to that intuition, I’d been gone,” he said. “The good Lord was looking out for me.”

Baker’s combat instinct didn’t disappear right at the end of the war. Even being in woods in Iowa scared Baker because of the “tree bursts” he experienced in Europe — the artillery shells that would hit the tops of tre and scatter shrapnel in all directions.

“When I got back, it was at least a year before I would even drive through any wood -Loomis Park or anyplace -because of the fear that got instilled in me in the damn woods, “ he said.

And it was 10 years after Baker came home that he would talk about his combat experiences.

Now, 50 years later, he remembers that two of his grade school chums from Badger died June 6, 1944, while serving as tailgunners in B-17 bombers.

Glen Larson was pulled out of the English Channel — drowned. Warren Rudolph didn’t make it that far.

“Rudolph’s plane spun down, and I don’t think he ever made it out, from what his family told me,” Baker said.

“It’s kind of ironic — here I was on the beach, and they were up there getting shot down,” he said.

Glen Larson was the first cousin of Ernie Larson, who was invading Utah Beach that day as a machine-gunner for the Fourth Infantry Division.

The two were born on the same day and grew up together in Badger, recalls Ernie Larson, now 72.

“I didn’t find out about it until after I came back home,” he said. Larson, like Baker, was a machine-gunner. He hit the Normandy beach much earlier, however — at about 5:30 a.m.

“We figured those were our last days,” Larson said about the days leading up to the invasion. “We didn’t think we could make it.”

The invasion was originally set by Gen. Dwight Eisenhower for June 5, but the English Channel was too choppy, Larson said. “So Eisenhower says, ‘Tomorrow morning will be our invasion.’ He said we can’t go back, we have to go forward. And he said ‘Take no prisoners.'”

That was when Larson knew he was in for a rough time.

The soldiers in his outfit spent most of the journey across the English Channel alone with their thoughts.

“They were all praying and holding hands and wondering if it would be their last day,” Larson said. “And for many of them, it could have been.”

The soldiers were fed well on the large transport ship before they disembarked onto the smaller troop transports, Larson recalls.

“We had a pretty good meal on . that big ship, but I couldn’t eat because I was too shaky — I had one orange,” he said.

Later, he left the large vessel for a smaller one before storming the beach.

“Coming off the ladder on the big ship onto the small ship was preuy terrible,” he said. “There was so much strong winds and stuff — choppy seas.”

“The bullets were like hail on the English Channel,” he said. “And I’ve never seen so many ships.”

Larson was one of about 150,000 soldiers transported by an armada of 4,000 ships from staging areas in Ireland, Scotland and England.

It was the task of his unit to meet up with the paratroopers of the 101st Airborne and 82nd Airborne, who had landed on the beach four hours earlier.

“They were glad to see us and we were glad to see them,” he said.

The Fourth had to take the nearby port town of Cherbourg, a task it took 10 or 12 days to accomplish. From there, the Fourth went to Paris.

Outside Paris, shrapnel hit Larson in the thigh. After he had recovered, he was hit in the other leg with a piece of artillery metal — this time in Germany.

He had lots of other close calls, but this soft-spoken man feels the hand of fate helped him get through the war. Larson returned home to Iowa, and is now a retired 17-year Fort Dodge employee living south of the city.

“You said a lot of prayers. God didn’t want us to die, I guess,” he said.

Of more than 100 men in his company, only a handful remained relatively unscathed — like Larson — at the end of the war.

“I think about it every once in a while; like when I go to bed at night I think about it.”

Herb Zobrosky, 70, was also a member of the Fourth Infantry Division, storming Utah Beach at about 5:30 a.m.

“They gave us the order, ‘Take no prisoners. That’s the only way you can survive,” Zobrosky said.

A shell hit the back of the transport vessel he was on about 1,000 yards from the shore. Zob-rosky had to swim and wade to the beach with a full field pack and a nine-pound tommy gun.

Many of the men on board — men Zobrosky had trained with for months — drowned in the cold and choppy water.

When the troops reached the shore, they faced fire so heavy that , they couldn’t even dig foxholes. “When we hit the beach, we were pinned down and we just lay flat for a couple hours,” he said.

Out of the 33 men on Zobrosky’s transport boat, five survived the Normandy invasion unscathed, Zobrosky said.

“My sergeant, he said ‘Herb, let’s go on,’ “ he said. “It’s hard to take, but you’ve got to take it”

Zobrosky was an observer for an 81-mm mortar crew, directing fire on German installations and weapons.

“You know, when we hit that beach, we weren’t planning on getting killed or nothing — we didn’t think nothing about that,” he said.

The Germans were entrenched on the beach in pillboxes — behind 6 feet of solid concrete. Some of the Germans in those pillboxes — killed by Allied flamethrowers — were found chained behind their guns so they wouldn’t flee, Zobrosky said.

His unit fought its way through the Germans on the beach and headed toward Cherbourg as quickly as it could because waves of soldiers were hitting the beach every 15 or 20 minutes.

“You shot anything that walked, talked or crawled because you had one guy to worry about to bring home — and that’s yourself,” he said. “That’s what you had to worry about — bringing yourself back home.”

That first night, members of Zobrosky’s outfit stayed in a swamp — up to their waists in cold water. No one slept.

In the days following the landing, his outfit helped to capture the Cherbourg airport, and then headed back east to Caen. After that, it helped to take the town of St. Lo before fighting its way to Paris.

“That battle lasted 73 days without a break — hedgerow after hedgerow,” he said.

Like many veterans, Zorobsky says his sixth sense got him through the war alive. Once, he avoided death by not accepting a ride on a truck near the Normandy town of St. Lo.

“A truck was coming along and the driver offered to give us a ride. We said, ‘Nope, we’ll walk,'” he said. “He got down the road about 500 feet and an artillery shell hit the truck and blew it up.”

In November 1944, at the Battle of the Bulge in southern Belgium, Zobrosky was hit with shrapnel in the ribs.

He healed up and rejoined his unit in Germany, where he was captured by the Nazis. “There were about eight of us altogether. They held us in a barn — they couldn’t get us back because the railroads were bombed out and everything,” he said.

After three and a half months there, the men killed the guard and headed off in different directions so the Germans wouldn’t be able to catch them all.

“I don’t know how many got back,” Zobrosky said. “I traveled at night, and at daytime I’d sleep in snow or in the bushes.”

When he got to Leege, Belgium, he ran into a Belgian man — with whom he still corresponds — who gave him a revolver and some food.

After returning to combat, he was hit again, and was eventually sent back to the United States.

“Every time you think back, you want to know how in the hell you get through all that,” he said.

Zorobsky was edgy for years after he returned to his native Iowa. Born and raised in Humboldt, he lives in Fort Dodge.

“As soon as I got out of the service, my nerves were bad — and once in a while they come back,” he said. “Sometimes you sit down and talk about it; other times you can’t.”

But the battle experience has remained an important part of his life.

About four years ago, Zobrosky attended a national reunion of Normandy veterans in Des Moines, where he talked for hours with an old buddy from Fort Lauderdale, Florida, who was in his outfit when it stormed the beach.

“You get buddies like that, and they’re really true buddies,” he said. “They stick by you.”

Zobrosky is saving up to go back to Normandy, so he can go to the cemeteries where his buddies who didn’t make it are buried.

“That means a lot,” he said. “I think about them all the time.”

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