D-day survivor: 'I just put my hands in His'
Sunday, June 6, 2004 12:55 AM PDT
By M. L. Madison
Printable version
E-mail this articleNineteen-year-old Richard Grewelle woke up at 3 a.m. on June 6, 1944. About a half-hour later he ate steak and eggs. Four hours after that, he landed at Omaha Beach in Normandy, France.
"Some of us thought, 'Well, maybe this is our last meal," recalled Grewelle, now 79 and living in Ryderwood. "My best friend -- we ate breakfast together, and then after we hit the beach, he was killed."
Sixty years after the Allied Forces landed at Normandy, details of the battle known as "D-Day" are still fresh in Grewelle's mind. As a Navy pharmacist's mate who invaded the beach in the third wave, Grewelle attended to an unknown number of wounded soldiers. He remembers pulling bodies from an ocean of water that "was pink as could be, from all the blood."
Trained in secret, Grewelle and other Navy medical corpsmen were supposed to go in on the third wave of the invasion, "but there was a mix-up," and some went in on the first wave.
They weren't told where they were going until they boarded the USS Henry Cole in Weymouth, England, on June 4, so that "information couldn't leave the ship."
The invasion was supposed to take place on June 5, but a major storm forced a delay, he noted.
Although the men were told to expect heavy fire, he said the Air Force "was supposed to have hit the beach before we went in."
"Evidently, there was a mix-up and they hit inland further," he said. In addition to that, the crews that were supposed to have come in and taken explosives off of "tank traps" didn't make it, either.
"The Germans had these railroad ties welded together and they looked like crosses," he explained. "When the high tide came in, it would just cover it. All you had to do was drive over them and the explosives would go off."
Was he afraid?
"I'd be a fool if I wasn't," he said. "But being a Christian, I had my hopes. I just put my hands in His hands."
Grewelle said the 91st Psalm was running through his head during those first several days, when he doesn't recall eating or sleeping. The Psalm "talks about there being thousands on your right being killed, and 10,000 on your left hand, and nothing happening to you," he said.
Grewelle said there were 114 pharmacist's mates and nine or 10 doctors attending the wounded and the dead. The Army had combat medics as well, he said, estimating that there "must have been 150,000 men crossing the beach that day."
At the end of the battle, the Allied Forces had suffered almost 10,000 casualties, including more than 4,000 dead.
"After 20 days, we must have evacuated almost 9,000 casualties," he said. "After six days, we started calling the grave registration people in the Army, so they could come collecting the bodies."
He recalled pulling body parts out of the water for days.
"Being just a kid ... that was kind of hard for me to take right then," said Grewelle, who later worked in the Navy morgue.
Grewelle saw his best friend, 19-year-old Morris "Rick" Rickenbach of Camden, N.J., get killed on D-Day when shrapnel from a German "88" gun tore through his helmet. Grewelle, injured by shrapnel that scraped his back, survived and earned a Purple Heart, as well as several other medals, including the Cour de Guerre, France's highest military honor.
He described the injury that earned him the Purple Heart as "just a little scratch."
"I don't really think I deserve it," he said.
Grewelle said he wanted to enlist in the Navy after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941. Being just 16, his mom wouldn't let the Kelso High School Junior go off to war.
Just a few months into his senior year, in 1942, Grewelle convinced his mother to let him sign up. He had enough credits to graduate as a junior, he said, and the school waved a requirement that seniors have an additional semester of English. His mom picked up his diploma in 1943.
Before and after D-Day, the Navy took him across the country and across the world. He spent time in Casablanca and Sicily during the war, transporting Italian prisoners of war back to the U.S.
"It was great, because they didn't want to fight anyway -- at least the ones we talked to," he remembered. "They cooked us a meal of spaghetti."
Grewelle and other medical corpsmen in the 6th Naval Beach Battalion were amphibious sailors who are still largely unmentioned in the annals of Naval history. Although Grewelle said he didn't talk about the war for several decades afterwards, he is now eager to talk to junior high and high school history classes about his experiences.
He has never returned to Normandy.
"I'll get there someday," he said.
Grewelle said he corresponds with other D-Day survivors, and that the ones who live in the Washington, D.C., area "are the ones getting the Navy historians to include our stories" in historical records.
"Each one of us has a different story," he said.
After the war, Grewelle went to Guam. He returned home to Kelso in December 1945 and married his high school sweetheart, Betty, two months later. The couple have six children.
Although Grewelle said he wanted to go into medicine, he stayed in the military until 1952, serving in the Korean War. He worked at the Longview Post Office for several years. In 1965, he was called up to serve in Vietnam. He retired from the Navy as a Chief Hospital Corpsman in 1979.
"I think our generation is the greatest," said Grewelle, who said he sent an e-mail to journalist Tom Brokaw after he wrote "The Greatest Generation" honoring the WWII era citizens. He said Brokaw sent him a reply.
"Our generation gave up so much so that people nowadays could have their freedom," he said. "A lot of us quit school, because this was something that we believed in."
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