FRANKLIN, W.Va. — He moves a little slower and his memory is a little more cloudy, but Doug Brown can still remember the day which changed his life and the lives of an entire generation of Americans. Brown, now 97 is a native of Keyser, W.Va., He was among those in the second wave to go ashore on Omaha Beach June 6, 1944.
“We got on the ships and started across the (English) Channel,” said Brown as he recollected the morning of the invasion. “We gathered what we had and hung on. As I remember the sea was pretty rough that morning.”
Brown was a member of the famed 1st Division, “The Big Red 1” and was on a U.S. Navy LCI or “Higgins Boat”. Those are the famous craft built in New Orleans which ferried most American soldiers to the beaches of Normandy on D-Day, many to their doom.
“I remember thinking, ‘Where do I dig a fox hole here?’ Brown recalled in a recent interview with MetroNews.
His recollections were more vivid in a 2004 interview on the 60th anniversary of the Normandy invasion. He recalled the ride from the ship to the shore with a very nervous coxswain at the helm of the landing craft. He was on his third trip to drop off a load of soldiers at the beach.
“He yelled, ‘Hurry up and get off here!’ and I wanted to turn around and tell him, ‘Hey guy, we’re going in, you’re going the other direction,” Brown said.
When the ramp dropped, the a scene of horror unfolded before him like nothing Brown had ever witnessed.
“The first person I saw in the water was a major and he was shot through the head,” Brown said. “I wanted to stop long enough to pull his body up out of the water.”
There was no time.
Brown waded ashore as quickly as possible and found very little room to hide. His unit sought cover from a bank on the beach. It offered limited protection. With bullets flying and shells exploding, Brown did what he had been trained to do and what his first instinct told him to do — he started digging a hole.
“I remember I dug this hole according to what we had been told. Along came this sergeant who asked if we had room enough for him. He jumped in and said, ‘Boy this thing is deep.’ I told him, well, that’s what you trained us to do.”
The hole provided brief cover, but eventually Brown and the rest of his group had to press further ashore. Unlike what many of the allied forces faced, he didn’t have to tackle a cliff.
“Finally somebody said we needed to get off this beach because they were trying to land tanks,” Brown shared. “I didn’t have to climb the cliff. There was a path and I remember when I got up to it there was a sign in German with a skull and crossbones. It was a mine field.”
Brown survived the battle at Omaha Beach, but there would be others as the war dragged on. He suffered shell shock and was pulled off the line for a period of time. He returned to his unit and was wounded by shrapnel in a larger engagement during the Battle of Hurtgen Forest. Brown ended up being wounded three times and finished the war in Czechoslovakia. He was discharged from the Army after finishing his service at Fort Knox, Kentucky.
He returned to West Virginia highly decorated for his service, including two Bronze Stars.
Once home, life picked up where it had left off. He married a friend from high school Lillian Mullenax, and raised a son in Franklin, W.Va. He finished mortuary school and worked as an undertaker until his retirement in 1974.
He returned to Normandy twice since the war. One trip was on the 50th anniversary of the D-Day invasion and a second time on the 60th anniversary. Today he lives in an assisted living faculty in Franklin.
“I told my wife, I want to be the last survivor of Omaha Beach,” he said.