EDITOR’S NOTE: This article was published in Sand Castles, July 25, 2024.
In 1993 I was having dinner with my late father-in-law Charles W. “Woody” Schmoe, when he said that he wanted to attend the 50th anniversary of the Normandy Invasion.
When I asked why, he said that “he had been a First Lieutenant on General Eisenhower’s staff and carried the invasion plans from Eisenhower’s headquarters in London to General Bradley’s headquarters in Southampton where the invasion was launched.
He added that at the time he was sure of what he had but was not certain until he delivered the package and was ordered to stay for the briefing, which scared him because of what he knew.
On hearing this, my first thought was that I had been married to this man’s oldest daughter for a dozen years and he never even mentioned that he had been involved in something so historic.
Later, I was to learn this was typical of the Greatest Generation that considered what they had done as just their duty, about which there was little to say as the real heroes were the ones who had sacrificed their lives for our freedom.
Pressing him for more information, I learned that he had also been ordered to land on the mats at Omaha Beach the first day of the Invasion with a plane load of maps, but they could not land because of the intense enemy fire and severe weather.
Consequently, they turned back and landed in Scotland from where Woody took a train back to Southampton, gathered up 60 troops, a doctor and two boats with which he headed back to Omaha Beach. Landing in the dark, they spent the night outside a German bunker with five dead Germans inside while the battle raged just hundreds of yards away.
Eventually the Allies pushed the Germans off the beaches and out of Paris upon which Woody got orders to head for Paris to establish the American headquarters.
Being a practical man, on arrival he asked where the German headquarters were and was told that it was at the Hotel Wagram, just across from the Arc de Triumph on the Champs Elysee. Going in there he said was an eerie experience because it looked like the Germans had just run out as their maps were still on the walls and their phone systems and everything else was working.
Once inside he said he went up to the roof where he took down the last German flag over Paris and put up the American flag. At this point, I asked him “where the German flag was?” To which he calmly responded, ‘in a drawer in the living room at home.’
This made me realize that while not claiming to be any kind of hero, my father-in-law had been caught up in a special part of history from carrying the invasion plans to taking down the last German flag over Paris.
Woody saw the rest of the War from Paris where he lived in the house of a French General’s niece whose husband was a professor at the Sorbonne.
During that period, he got the opportunity to escort Vice President Alvin Barkley and a delegation of Senators around to the concentration camps at Dachau, Buchenwald and Bilsen along with other sites around the European Theater on the first official visit to those locations. He also accompanied the Chief of Chaplains on official trips to the concentration camps and other spots while meeting many other famous people of that time who shaped our history.
Having heard my father-in-law’s story, I agreed that we should make the trip for the Anniversary and ended up joining a group of 82nd Airborne veterans that met in Leister, England, where the division had trained before the invasion.
While there, the English people were wonderful to us with several official events honoring those men who were extraordinary people just like the characters portrayed in the HBO series, “Band of Brothers.”
Our next visit was to Sainte-Mere-Eglise, in France where an entire battalion of 82nd Airborne troopers staged a drop over our location. The event was exciting and well attended by military personnel, members of Congress and other government officials who readily engaged in conversations with those interested in meeting them.
Among those people was Gen. Gordon Sullivan, the chief of staff of the U.S. Army. I approached him and told him about how Woody had obtained the last German flag over Paris that he said he would like to give to the Army on behalf of those who had sacrificed their lives for our freedom.
This interested Gen. Sullivan and ultimately, at his direction and that of General Brown, the Chief of Military History, a delegation of people from Fort Stewart in Georgia visited Woody’s home, Blackwater Plantation, to receive the flag.
I must say, that when the flag was opened to be presented to the director of the Fort Stewart Museum, I was chocked to see a Nazi symbol the size of a bed sheet with a huge black Swastika in the center. Only then did I fully appreciate what that symbol must have done to the hearts and minds of our French allies who passed below it daily for five long years, but then through the sacrifices of our men and by Woody’s hands no more.
By way of background, in April of 1942 when he was 29 years old, Woody was drafted. Having been a 1935 graduate of Butler University, he was considered good officer material and found himself in Officer Candidate School.
Later in November 1943, he was shipped to London to join Eisenhower’s headquarters in the Adjutant General Section where he was in charge of British Publications and updating air traffic maps. Then, after serving in Paris, he ran the personnel office in Marseille before taking a B-17 to Randolph Field in Texas and mustering out at Wright Field, in Dayton, Ohio, where he returned to Shelbyville, Indiana and the life of a teacher.
Woody married a Georgia girl, the former Nancy Young of Berrien County, Georgia, whom he met at a USO Dance while he was in Officers Candidate School in Gainesville. They were married on Christmas Day in 1945 and lived in Indiana until 1949, when they moved to Georgia to continue teaching and eventually to go into farming and cattle.
This always reminds me of Cincinnatus, the Roman citizen soldier, who like Woody and others of our Greatest Generation, returned home from war to tend their land.
Louis S. Shuntich
Woody’s son-in-law
