Tommaso Ottaviano, dutiful Italian son that he was, spared his mother the bloody truth when he wrote home to Rhode Island. He talked about how slow the mail was, how good his health was, and how hopeful he remained that the war would end soon; he wrote to ask whether his sister had received the handkerchiefs he sent as a gift; he inquired about the relatives in Italy; he talked about his buddies, especially his best pal Antonio Giosi, another Italian from Rhode Island. He wrote at length about money—how he had instructed the army to send half his monthly pay of $30 home to Rhode Island, and how he was paying $6 of his own $15 share each month into his army life insurance. Three days into the Meuse-Argonne offensive Tommaso wrote to ask his mother if she had received a document indicating that he had taken out a $10,000 insurance policy—“you must have the document to be sure,” he cautioned her.
It wasn’t until the middle of October that the violence began to shadow Tommaso’s letters home. On October 13, he told his mother that he had been at the front for fifteen days, though only six of those days were in the “first line”—the rest of the time they had been in reserve. Now, however, they were en route to “another front, whose name I can’t reveal to you.”
That new front, a bleak, dangerous place, provoked the one shudder of horror that Tommaso let slip in his letters home to his mother.
War zone, 18 October, 1918
Dear Mother,
With a little time that I’ve been indisposed I’m going to resume telling you my news, which by the grace of God is good aside from what we’ve been through this past week. I really can’t say anything at length, but it would be hard enough just to describe the devastation. . . . Now we are at the heels of the Germans—what I really mean is that we still need good luck and the grace of our Lord: this is what I pray for always.
The full charge of horror was loaded into a single word—sconvolgimento which can be translated as devastation, convulsion, or personal tragedy. But it was a word that spoke volumes about everything Tommaso was holding back. Having given his mother this glimpse, Tommaso dropped the war and went on to inquire after family and friends—Uncle Pietro, Uncle Nicandro from Italy, Uncle Giovanni Giuseppe, Carluccio, Patrino—and to insist that he lacked for nothing, though if they did want to get him a Christmas present he could use a pair of gloves lined with fur inside that would be good in the rain. He went on for a couple of pages more, another of his warmhearted upbeat letters from “somewhere in France.” But sconvolgimento burned like a coal in the first lines.
What Tommaso did not tell his mother on October 18 was that the previous two days had been the worst of the war for Company I, 310th Infantry—and that there was nothing ahead but darkness and more fighting.
Tommaso’s regiment had been rotated into the Argonne only a few days earlier. When the great American battle opened on September 26, the 78th Division had been holding a trench system near Thiaucourt, well east of Verdun—one of those so-called quiet sectors where instead of being slaughtered wholesale men were picked off daily by snipers and shells. By the time they headed north for the Argonne on October 5, the 310th had suffered losses of 121 killed, 446 wounded, and 95 gassed. Not such a quiet sector after all. It took them a week to reach their new position—the “other front” whose name Tommaso could not disclose. Their new home was a bluff just south of the Aire River commanding the villages of St. Juvin and Chevieres, with tiny Champigneulle beyond folded behind a rise. Lush productive country, at least it had been productive in peacetime, with fields sloping up to the feet of compact villages, a big boxy church rising like a fortress in the center of St. Juvin, a neatly squared-off block of woods covering the crest to the west of Champigneulle. Bois des Loges the wood was labeled on the maps—a name the men would come to hate in the weeks to come.
The attack on Bois des Loges, the first of several as it would prove, began on the dim, rainy morning of October 16. The 310th was assigned the job of advancing to the northern edge of the wood—a couple of kilometers from their jump-off point—by the following morning. This in itself was ambitious, but the orders came with an ominous coda: “This is most important,” read the communiqué from Corps headquarters. “Whole military situation demands success of push through the Bois des Loges tonight. Go to it. Good luck. Your work has received much praise.” Given the fact that the “whole military situation” hung on this advance, it’s remarkable how rushed and poorly planned it was.
Tommaso and the other men of Company I equipped themselves with two bandoliers of ammunition and a hundred extra rounds in their belts and jumped off “with all possible vigor,” as their orders demanded. Casualties were heavy as soon as they emerged from the ravine of the Agron River into the open fields. From here to the woods there was no cover at all—just a wide open expanse that rose gradually to the edge of the woods, uphill all the way. The Germans timed their artillery barrage precisely to catch the first waves of American infantry. “The 310th was learning how to fight,” wrote the regimental historian. They were also learning how to die. “Third Battalion [to which Tommaso’s Company I belonged] held up on line approximately S. W. corner Bois des Loges to village Champigneulle,” read an urgent field message sent by runner that afternoon. “MG [machine-gun] fire from all directions makes it impossible to advance beyond this line. Meantime enemy artillery pounding both Battalions. Casualties extremely heavy caused entirely by artillery and MGs. What shall we do.” By some miracle, a forward party made it all the way to the objective line at the northern edge of the woods—but the unit to their right had failed to advance. It would have been suicidal to remain in place with their right flank entirely exposed, so at the end of day one the 310th retreated.
The attack resumed the following day, this time with Tommaso’s company in support. The woods were dense, the trees that had not been shelled were spindly and close together, the ground, pitted and spongy, was crumpled in a series of corrugated ridges that made rapid forward movement impossible. The stagnant air held captive by those trees was so permeated with gas that the men had to fight wearing masks. Not all the gas had been released by the Germans: the All-American Division’s field artillery, which had been stationed just east of the 78th for the past week, had been directed to put down 2,600 rounds of phosgene on the village of Champigneulle (at the eastern fringe of the wood) at 6:10 that morning, and another 1,200 gas rounds at 11:30. Very likely Tony Pierro carried some of these gas shells to the big guns, since his artillery unit was involved in the fighting. In the event, the only thing the All-American’s gas barrage accomplished was to drive German soldiers out of the village and into the woods where they fell on the struggling 310th infantry.
Again the casualties were horrific. In the course of the day the aid stations set up in St. Juvin were overwhelmed. The next day, October 18, Tommaso’s company was pulled back, which explains why he had time to write his mother about the sconvolgimento he had witnessed. But other elements of the 310th kept fighting—to no avail. The men reported that the central ridge of the woods was infested with thirty German machine guns arranged in an impenetrable interlocking network. On October 20, after another costly push, the entire regiment withdrew to a position straddling the east-west road between Grandpré and St. Juvin and there, in the valley below the cursed Bois des Loges, they hunkered down and absorbed whatever shells the German fired down on them.
There followed ten days of waiting, wondering, and trying to remain sane and alive through the intermittent German artillery barrages.
On Monday, October 23, burial details were organized to collect the bodies of the men who had been killed in the first failed Bois des Loges attack. The corpses of thirty-five soldiers from Tommaso’s regiment were taken off the fields between the Aire River and the Grandpré–St. Juvin road—there were many more in the woods, but those would have to wait until the Americans dared to set foot in that toxic forest again. On October 29, Tommaso and the rest of Company I were marched five miles to the rear to the village of Cornay. Rumors were rife, as always, that they were being relieved—but those rumors proved false. The men were ordered to strip off the filthy uniforms they been wearing for most of October, bathe, delouse, and pick up fresh uniforms. By six o’clock that night they were back in the line. Now the rumor was that another assault on the Bois des Loges was to be mounted any day, though why the men should have been prettied up only to be sent into action again no one could figure. Maybe it was supposed to be good for morale.
Two days later, on a turnip field in Belgium, scrappy little Peter Thompson had his moment of glory, bittersweet though it was. After suffering through some of the worst fighting in the first weeks of the Argonne, the Wild West Division had been pulled off the line on October 12. The division as a whole had lost a quarter of its men in the Argonne—five thousand killed or wounded. The Montana boys in Peter’s 362nd infantry regiment had fared even worse—more than half were casualties by the time they were relieved.
The respite from fighting was welcome but brief. “The Capt went out this evening,” Leonardo Costantino wrote in his log on October 15, “am Keeping the fire going at his Room. Good feed to-day. Had beans twice to-day.” Two days later the Wild West men were in trains bound for Belgium. “Oct. 18. Arrived at some place in Belgium at 6:30 P.M.,” recorded Leonardo. “Pitched tent at 8 P.M. While doing it, saw many rats, large AS CATS. We are some distance from the lines. The country is full of shell holes.” In fact, they were near Ypres, scene of some of the worst and most prolonged fighting in the war. Forty-eight hours later they were on the move again, marching through a lunar landscape of mud, rubble, and leaden skies. Leonardo’s log: “Oct. 20. In hiking, saw nothing but shell holes and dead trees. All muddy hard hike. Saw many tanks but they were out of order on account of being shelled.” “Oct 21. While waiting for orders to move to the front line, saw a Belgium lady, middle age, take off socks from a dead French soldier.”
The division took its position at the front outside the Belgian town of Waereghem on October 30, and at 5:35 A.M. the next morning, Peter’s regiment attacked (Leonardo’s regiment, the 364th, was held in reserve that day). The fighting went relatively well, and when they dug in that night on the flat expanses of western Flanders, the men felt pretty good about things. They all agreed that the mud of Flanders was preferable to the Argonne forest. Peter spent the long night in a trench watching the sky light up with the occasional exploding shell—German shells. Unable to sleep through the noise and stench, Peter sat up and scanned the flat expanse before him. At some point his eyes fell on Arnold Pratt, a sergeant in the regiment he had never had any use for. Peter’s granddaughter, Christy Leskovar, describes what happened next in her riveting family memoir One Night in a Bad Inn:
Peter watched [Sergeant Pratt], and then suddenly, the sergeant lurched and fell to the ground. He’d been shot and was lying there helpless, fully exposed to enemy fire. Without thinking, Peter scrambled out of the trench and ran to him, and with shell after shell exploding all around and machine gun bullets whizzing by, Peter knelt down and bandaged his wounds. Then he got up, grabbed Sergeant Pratt, and though Pratt was nearly twice his size, Peter singlehandedly dragged or carried him back to the trench. Once at the trench, Winks Brown [a comrade in the company] helped Peter pull Sergeant Pratt down into it. He was very badly wounded and had to be evacuated to a hospital, but he was alive. Peter had saved his life and at grave risk to his own. He would later tell his sister Nellie, “I only did it because I hated him.”
The fact that Peter hated Pratt didn’t matter. Rescuing him from certain death was enough to make Peter Thompson a hero.
Tommaso went back into the Bois des Loges the following day. The word going around was that this was meant to be the knockout punch—not only in the Bois des Loges but along a wide swath of the front stretching from Grandpré in the west to Cunel in the east, territory divided between seven American divisions. If the punch landed right, the American First Army would finally succeed in breaking through to the strategic transport hub of Sedan and severing the German supply line. Any doubt that something big was brewing was laid to rest by the magnitude of the advance artillery barrage: for two days, the Americans relentlessly pounded the woods with explosives and poison—50,000 rounds of mustard gas, 10,000 shells. It was the most massive single release of poison gas in the history of the U.S. Armed Forces. “Day and night was continuous pandemonium,” as one of the officers put it.
The 310th was a heavily Italian regiment—lots of immigrants like Tommaso who been drafted from the big East Coast cities. Some of the guys spoke only rudimentary English, just enough to understand orders and gripe when the going got rough. Pasquale Marcone, serving with Company A, remembered that the night before the attack, the Italians sang songs they remembered from when they were kids and swapped family stories. To keep old memories alive for one more night.
On the morning of November 1, Tommaso and the men of Company I were rousted out in the pitch black and given breakfast at 4 A.M.—coffee and stale bread. They were instructed to roll their packs and leave them behind—officers didn’t want anything to slow the men down. Four companies, fewer than nine hundred men in all, were assigned to the front line, Company I placed second from the right. Everything was the same as in the previous attempt to clear the woods—it would be another frontal assault into the teeth of the German machine guns—the exact same strategy that had failed before.
Whistles were blown to alert the men to get ready; the final preparatory barrage opened at 4:30, reportedly the largest high-explosive barrage the American army had ever seen—16,000 rounds of HE and phosphorus crashing down on a scrap of woods that measured maybe a half-mile square. Then at 5:30 came the whistle to charge. Things went all right for the first couple of hours—the men advanced in pace with the rolling barrage; they took cover from German fire in shell craters; the first wave managed to infiltrate the southern fringe of the woods. But at 8:00 A.M. they hit heavy machine-gun fire along the western edge of the woods and the advance halted. The men discovered that their massive artillery bombardment had accomplished almost nothing: the Germans had simply waited it out under cover and then popped back up unscathed with their machine guns.
At 10:40 the 3rd Battalion commander sent an urgent message back to the command post: “We are completely held up by many m.g. nests in left half of Bois des Loges. . . . We are using T. M’s [trench mortars], 37 mm’s and M.G’s on few known locations. Many E M G’s [enemy machine guns] are on crest of hill which we cannot locate”—the same crest fortified with interlocking nests of machine guns that had repulsed the earlier attacks. “Am trying infiltration to the right and left. We need further artillery on northern and western sections of woods. His artillery is shelling our positions heavily with gas in woods.” The 10:45 message: “Am held up at all points by m/g nests. . . . Trying to knock out m/g nests while infantry pushes forward around left flank. Casualties heavy. One Company probably wiped out.”
Tommaso never wrote to his mother about the fighting that morning, and even if he had, he would not have told her the truth about what really happened. But other soldiers left accounts that capture something of what Tommaso must have seen and smelled and felt in his gut in the Bois des Loges. Leslie Allen McPherson, a private from St. Paul, Minnesota, serving with Company E of the 360th Infantry, 90th Division, was fighting at the exact same time about ten miles away from Tommaso’s regiment. This is what McPherson wrote in his diary about the morning of November 1:
As I looked at the faces of my comrades I saw no fear, but every face was set for they knew what was expected from each one of them and they as well as myself [knew] that some that went out into that hell of bursting shells and poisoned gas would never live to see sundown. Our Sgt. got us together and started with us but we only got a few yards when a gas shell bursted and one of our Lieutenants fell to the ground gassed. . . . Every step we took some poor boy fell either dead or wounded and believe it would unnerve the bravest of men to go thru a place like that was that morning it was not a surprise to see your pal or comrade with his head blown off and in lots of cases a shell would kill 6 or 8 men and there they would lay in a pile torn beyond recognition. I had a friend who was Scotch by birth who I had soldiered with ever since I came to the army he was attached to the machine gun co and had just stooped over to pick up his box of ammunition when a shell bursted and tore his head off. It was an awful sight to see that morning the ground was almost covered with dead and wounded from both sides.
Precisely when the bullet hit Tommaso was never recorded—but odds are it was shortly before 11:00 A.M. when his company was being mowed down by the machine guns that held the crest of the Bois des Loges. Nor was the place where the bullet entered his body ever specified. His medical records carry only the three letters GSW—gunshot wound. There was no need to indicate that the wound was serious—before antibiotics, any gunshot wound sustained in those conditions of filth, gas, mud, and rampant infection was serious. There is no knowing how many hours Tommaso lay bleeding on the damp forest floor, but it’s likely he was not evacuated until there was a break in the action after dark.
The German machine guns and artillery finally, mercifully, fell quiet around 7:00 P.M., and teams went in with stretchers to bring out the wounded. Regimental casualties for that single day in the wood ran to 519—18 officers and 501 enlisted men, “a deplorable waste of life,” the division’s commander, Major General James H. McRae, conceded afterward.
Did Tommaso know that his best friend, Antonio Giosi, had been killed in the Bois des Loges that day? The friends no doubt fought and fell side by side, so he probably did know.
Nothing survives about Tommaso’s 370-mile journey from the Bois des Loges to Base Hospital 34, located in a seminary in Nantes near the Atlantic coast in western France, but it was certainly agonizing. From this point there are only feeble, contradictory glimmers. A paper filed with the state of Rhode Island suggests that Tommaso may have contracted influenza in the hospital: this paper states that Tommaso died of purulent meningitis—an inflammation of the membranes covering the brain and spinal cord often associated with influenza. But the chaplain who filled in the grave location blank indicated the cause of death as GSW. And on yet another form in Tommaso’s burial file, the cause of death is given as DWRIA—died of wounds received in action. All that is known for certain is that Tommaso Ottaviano died at Base Hospital 34 on November 22, 1918, twenty-one days after he was wounded in battle and eleven days after the Armistice, and that he was buried the next day in Grave 188, Section B, of American Cemetery 88 near Nantes. He was twenty-two years old.
Tommaso’s death was all the more bitter for his family because he fell on the last day, indeed during the last hours of serious fighting in the Bois des Loges. When the German guns fell silent that night at 7:00 P.M., they fell silent for good. Over the next five hours German troops quietly and efficiently cleared out of the woods and beat a hasty retreat to the north. For nineteen days they had fought the 78th Division to a standstill, and now they just turned and walked away as if the place had a curse on it, just as they had done at Blanc Mont. It wasn’t an American victory; it was a German abandonment. But it amounted to the same thing.
One more day, and Tommaso and his buddy Antonio would have lived to chase the Germans—and eventually return home to America.
On the morning of November 2, what was left of the 310th Infantry strolled incredulously through the Bois des Loges past German bodies and elaborate observation posts still equipped with gleaming modern instruments. When it finally sank in that the enemy had packed up and left, the American infantry lit out after them.
The retreat from the Bois des Loges was, in the words of one historian, “the first stage of the great Kiregsmarsch, the withdrawal of the German armies to the Meuse.” All along the Argonne line from the Bois des Loges in the west to Cunel in the east, American divisions were giving chase as the Germans pulled back. The military breakthrough precipitated a political crisis for Germany and its allies. Turkey surrendered on October 31, Austria-Hungary capitulated on November 4, and as the German government tottered, the kaiser fled Berlin to take refuge in Belgium. With Germany’s navy on the brink of mutiny and German workers rioting in the city streets, the Fatherland seemed headed for a Bolshevik-style revolution. But still the German army refused to surrender. The outcome of the war was now all but certain, but the killing and the dying continued.
Indeed, for some American soldiers the war was just beginning. Joseph Chmielewski was one of them. Though the Polish coal miner from Fifficktown, Pennsylvania, had enlisted in the army only two months after the United States declared war on Germany, he had yet to fight on the front line when the Americans broke through on November 2. Joe had dutifully trained for the better part of a year with the 6th Division’s 16th Machine Gun Battalion, and he shipped out of New York with tens of thousands of other Doughboys on July 6, 1918. But since their arrival in France on July 23, Joe’s unit had done nothing but drill, march, and camp. On September 24, two days before the jump-off in the Argonne, the 16th Machine Gun Battalion took up a position in a quiet sector of the Vosges Mountains (near where Andrew Christofferson was stationed with the Wildcat Division), and here they remained, four miles back from the front lines, until October 12. The Vosges was beautiful, conceded divisional historian Captain Lloyd C. Parsons, but the men found it depressing on account of “all their traveling by hiking.” Finally, on October 23, orders came to load their guns and ammunition on trains in preparation for a move to the Argonne. “Cars were scarce,” wrote Parsons, “so the property was spread over the floors of the boxcars and the men crawled up on top.” Cramped though they were, the men were nonetheless glad to be riding rather than marching in the rain—which had been their customary mode of transport since arriving in France. In fact, the incessant marching had become something of a joke, giving rise to the division’s nickname, “the Sightseeing Sixth.”
After a twenty-six-hour train ride to the city of Sainte-Ménehould south of the Argonne, the division was back on the march again. For four nights they camped fifteen miles from the front—close enough to hear the boom of the big guns—and then on November 2, they were ordered to take up a position above the Aire River south of Grandpré and St. Juvin, the same spot that Tommaso and the 78th had occupied before the first assault on the Bois des Loges. Bivouacked in the ruins of Grandpré on the night of November 4, Joe and his comrades had a brush with fire when a German plane flew over and, spotting their campfires, began to bomb them. A major was killed in the attack and several men were wounded. “Within half a minute after the explosion of the first bomb every fire was smothered,” wrote the division’s historian.
The next day they marched through Authe, a village nine miles north of the Bois des Loges that the 310th infantry had secured three days earlier. The marching Americans were greeted by villagers “amazed and appreciative” to be free after four years of German occupation. There was some hugging and waving of handkerchiefs, but the joy of the moment was dampened for the Sightseeing Sixth by the fact that their packs had doubled in weight from absorbing so much water in the incessant rains. Since the battalion lacked for horses, Joe and the other machine-gunner privates had to drag the loaded carts themselves. From Authe the march proceeded on to Oches. “In a valley just beyond Oches 2 shells screamed overhead, bringing gas masks to the alert and a more satisfied look to the faces,” wrote the historian of Joe’s battalion. “At last we were near it.” The following day, they assumed, they would be in it: the orders on November 6 called for the Sixth Division to take a position on the front line. “How did the news affect them? After all those long and weary days and nights of continuous hiking; after all these months of training; not for a moment were they dissatisfied with their lot. They sat down coolly, even smiling, got out their oil cans and gun rags and cleaned their rifles.”
But those weapons were destined never to be fired. On November 9, the division was ordered to turn around, retrace their steps to Grandpré, and continue east to Metz. With the 16th Machine Gun Battalion in the lead, the Sightseeing Sixth hit the road and marched to the rear.
And that was Joe Chmielewski’s war. The Polish immigrant who had joined the army a year and a half earlier in order to become a U.S. citizen never did much fighting, but he learned one heck of a lot of marching songs.
During the first week of November, the now seasoned Texas and Oklahoma fighters of the 36th Division, having chased the Germans from Blanc Mont as far north as they could in the Champagne sector, were transferred east to Lorraine. The story goes that when Sam Dreben’s outfit, the 141st Infantry, reached the post marking the border between Champagne and Lorraine, the march was halted. Since Germany had annexed part of Lorraine after the Franco-Prussian War, this line could be taken as the symbolic boundary between France and Germany, and so the commander of the 141st chose to take it. While the column of soldiers stood in place, an order got passed from front to rear—“Sergeant Dreben, front and center!” Dreben dutifully made his way to the front of the column, and when he got there the regiment’s commander saluted smartly and boomed out for all to hear: “Sergeant Dreben, we are entering German territory. You’ve earned the right to set the first foot on enemy soil. Take the point.” The regimental band leader raised his baton and led his musicians in a rousing rendition of “My Old Kentucky Home,” and the Fighting Jew strode into the Fatherland.
For Andrew Christofferson, combat began in earnest on the first hours of November 11. Ten days prior, his Wildcat Division had been ordered to proceed to the Woevre Valley bordering the Meuse River east of Verdun to relieve the 139th Infantry. They traveled by train as far as Sampigny, about thirty miles due south of Verdun, and proceeded by foot along muddy roads until they reached the front lines near Vaux-devant-Damloup, the scene of intense fighting during the ten-month battle of Verdun in 1916. Here on November 5 they took up position in extremely muddy trenches and awaited orders. By now wild rumors were circulating about an imminent armistice—but nonetheless the business of war went on as usual. Artillery barrages were launched, infantry went over the top, machine guns mowed them down. Andrew’s turn to experience all of this for the first time came at 6:00 A.M. on November 11. The orders that day were to move on a tiny hamlet called Moranville—to “make the assault vigorous and keep pushing ahead.” It began as just another grueling day of war. The Germans laid down a “terrific bombardment” at 5:55 A.M.; despite the German bombs, the men of the 1st and 3rd Battalions moved out promptly at 6:00. Their officers soon realized that a wide gap had opened between the two battalions (Andrew, in Company M, was with the 3rd Battalion), so the position of the advance had to be adjusted. At 7:30 Andrew and Company M passed through the southern part of Moranville. By 10:00 A.M. both companies hit a snag as a heavy German artillery barrage and machine-gun fire held them up. At 10:35, the 2nd Battalion commander scribbled this message—“Commander of F Co attack vigorously to the left of H Co move north east, cut off woods”—and handed it to a runner to take to the line. The message was never delivered. Major Louis E. Schucker of the 321st Infantry explained why in an account written after the war: “The reason this message was not delivered: just as the runner was starting we received the order to cease hostilities which we sent immediately to all Co and unit Commanders at 10:55 a. m.”
Major Schucker could not resist adding that in the last seconds, “H. Co pushed one automatic under the wire and had taken hold in the enemy trenches, killing two machine gun crews of seven men. G Co also had men through the last wire and in 15 minutes the enemies [sic] trenches would have been in our possession.”
If only the damn war hadn’t ended.
Private Christofferson had a different reaction to the “cessation of hostilities.” As his daughter, Nellie C. Neumann, said nearly ninety years later, “I remember Dad saying, ‘I trew dat gun as far as I could trow it.’ He told me that men were shouting and embracing their comrades. Suddenly, what uniform you were wearing made no difference as Americans rushed forward to hug Germans. Dad made it all quite personal as he told me one time, ‘I had nothing against those German fellows. Why should I shoot them? A lot of them were farm boys just like me, just doing what we were told to do.’ ”
Major Schucker’s desire to keep killing right up to the bitter end was shared by many. Taking all sides together, some 10,900 men were killed and wounded on this last day of the Great War—a higher number of casualties than during the invasion of Normandy on D-day less than twenty-six years later.