Tuesday, June 6, 1944
Omaha Beach, France
Later, when asked to describe D-Day, Babe would call it, “A shitshow from the beginning. At least for us. The Black troops. Especially us in the Three Twenty.”
Intending to draw enemy fire and provide cover for the initial wave of Allied troops, the 320 Barrage Balloon Battalion hit Omaha Beach first, their amphibious landing crafts nosing through blustery winds, roiling seas, and pelting rain. Blown and dispersed by the winds, the landing crafts—thick rubber rafts with the helium balloons trailing above them—arrived at the beach randomly. Antiaircraft and machine guns strafed the balloons, blowing most of them to bits. A hundred helium balloons departed England, crossing the English Channel. Only twenty survived.
Still, the remaining balloons served a purpose, diverting antiaircraft fire as Allied troops hit the beach behind them. But not without consequence, casualties, chaos. Babe and his team and the other members of the balloon battalion found a beach pocked with mines, patches of jagged metal spears sticking out of the sand, and rows of half-buried barbed wire. Machine gunfire ripped through balloons and men, the white moist sand turning black with blood and strewn with bodies. Scattered body parts lay among petrified sea glass and pieces of driftwood.
It felt unreal to Babe. He felt momentarily like a bystander, almost as if he were sitting in the one movie house back in Caruthersville, watching himself on-screen, a soldier appearing in black-and-white newsreel footage. But within an instant, the blasts of artillery, the otherworldly screams, the stench of smoke, gunfire, and death wrestled him back into reality. He felt himself not acting, but reacting. He would later define this simply as surviving.
His balloon remained tethered behind him when his landing craft plowed onto the muddy shore. He was alone, his team lost, overboard, swallowed by the sea or cut down on the beach. He had to squint to see through the wall of smoke in front of him. All around him, the sound of gunfire deafened him and bullets pinged around his ears like insects buzzing, chopping the ground at his feet. By reflex and training, he rolled onto the beach, shoulder to sand. Above him, bullets tore through the balloon. Babe grabbed the rope to the balloon, trying to save it, but the balloon sailed off, drifted up, the remaining pieces of it skittering away, its body torn to shreds, pieces of it floating on the sea. Babe clasped a three-foot length of rope, holding on, all that was left of his six months in England. He wrapped the rope around his wrist. A souvenir. A memento.
Embracing his new purpose—to stay alive—Babe rolled further up the beach through an orchestra of gunfire, wails of human suffering, and artillery explosions, the sound blaring behind, in front, above, and through him, the noise itself an assault. His eardrums vibrated, closed up. His head throbbed, his field of vision swimming in an aura, burning in an otherworldly blaze of light.
I’m in hell, he thought. This is hell.
He crab-crawled on his elbows, heading toward—well, he didn’t know. He just kept crawling, inching forward through this inferno on the sand.
Up ahead, maybe twenty yards away, he spotted a large mound. He squinted and made out what looked like a lumpen, misshapen sand dune. Curious and cautious, Babe slowed his crawling. Suddenly, the dune rose and shook, undulating, moving from side to side, then the sand groaned. Babe fumbled for his knife. He gripped the handle, pulled the blade from its sheath, and stuck the knife in his mouth like a pirate. He didn’t want to stop moving. He couldn’t stop moving. Stopping meant death.
He crawled closer toward the mound and made out a human form. A giant of a man. Hard to tell from this angle, but Babe measured him at six ten, maybe seven feet, and massive.
A Black man, Babe saw. One of us. A balloon man.
The soldier’s shoes had been ripped away. Strangely, he wore civilian clothes, except for his muddy helmet. Babe returned his knife to its sheath and continued to crawl, finally arriving a yard or so away from the massive man. From here, he saw blood streaming down the giant’s right leg. The man stifled a scream as he tried to pull himself up, again shaking the sand, but he couldn’t put any pressure on his right side. He tried again, swore, and collapsed.
“Hey!” Babe shouted. “I’m right behind you. I got you.”
The man craned his neck as Babe slid next to him.
“My leg,” the man said.
“You shot?”
“No. Cut on one of them metal spits.”
“Okay. I’m gonna pick you up and drag you. Then we’re gonna hop off this fucking bitch.”
He meant beach, but the huge man grunted. “I hear you, man.”
Babe started to grab the man around the neck, then stopped. “Damn, you’re big. How much you weigh?”
“Two of you,” the man said. “And a few pounds more for luck.”
“Where’s your uniform?”
“Army couldn’t find one to fit. It’s on order. I almost hit this beach with nothing but my helmet and my birthday suit.”
“Thank God the water was unseasonably warm,” Babe said.
The man tried to laugh, then gritted his teeth in pain. “How we gonna do this?”
“Fireman’s carry,” Babe said. “Easy.”
He paused, then considered the length of rope around his wrist.
“This’ll work. Maybe. Can you turn onto your back?”
The man exhaled, grimaced, and using all his strength, forced himself from his left side to his back. He bit down on his lip and stifled a scream.
“Good,” Babe said. “Give me your hands.”
The man extended his hands. Babe looped the length of rope over and under his wrists, once, twice, tying and knotting them expertly. He pulled on the rope, felt it was tight and strong.
“That should do,” Babe said. “Now we’re about to get extremely familiar.”
Babe rolled on top of the man, chest to chest, face to face.
“Here we go.” Babe grabbed the rope around the big man’s wrists, yanked, and thrust his hips forward at the same time.
He and the big man moved forward a foot. Then Babe shoved himself forward again. They managed another foot. Then another.
For the next two hours, Babe pulled the big man up Omaha Beach until somehow, miraculously, they came to an Allied soldier with a red cross on his sleeve. A medic. He’d set up a tiny medical tent at the tip of the beach behind a seawall. Babe gasped, wondering for a moment if he were hallucinating. Is this a mirage? But then he felt the man’s actual, real human hands reaching toward him, touching him.
“I’ll take it from here,” the medic said, untying the big man’s wrists and helping Babe roll off his body.
Babe lay on the sand, panting, his lungs burning, his head booming.
“You saved my life,” the big man said.
“I lost my balloon,” Babe said. “I had nothing better to do.”
“I’m Karter,” the big man said.
“Babe.”
“Hey, Babe,” Karter said. “Any chance we can go back and get my shoes?”