'Just chaos': A son recalls his late father's experiences during D-Day, 80 years ago

It was the noise that John Shelby remembered most vividly, the whine and roar of aircraft engines, the thunderous boom of big guns from destroyers, the mechanized rattle of German machine guns, the explosive babble of erupting bombs, a frenzied turmoil that muffled the piteous sounds of dying men.

“He lands there on the beach and it’s just chaos,” said Shelby’s son, Luke. “He said you couldn’t believe the noise.”

The beach was Omaha Beach, a code name for one section of a 50-mile stretch of Normandy, France, coastline invaded by Allied troops during World War II.

John Donald Shelby, a Texas native and longtime Albuquerque resident, was a first lieutenant with the U.S. 1st Infantry Division, 16th Infantry Regiment, 2nd Battalion, H Company — a mortar company — during that deafening and deadly day.

Best known now as D-Day, the date was June 6, 1944, 80 years ago.

‘Bloody Omaha’

On D-Day, 195,000 naval personnel and 133,000 troops — U.S., British Commonwealth and their allies — hurled themselves against German fortifications on the Normandy beaches. It was the start of a campaign that would culminate in Germany’s surrender on May 8, 1945.

But the fighting on D-Day, that first day, was brutal. Estimates are that German casualties — dead and wounded — ranged between 4,000 and 9,000. Allied casualties were at least 10,000, including 4,414 dead.

In addition to Omaha, Allies landed on sectors of beach code-named Utah, Gold, Juno and Sword, but Allied casualties were most severe at Omaha because the high cliffs there offered a distinct advantage to German defenders.

Luke Shelby said his father, who died in Albuquerque in 1989, always referred to the perilous piece of beach he and his men landed on as “Bloody Omaha.”

John Shelby and his men came off their landing craft into rough, chest-high, blood-chilling water that knocked them off their feet. Most of them managed to gain shore.

“But my dad looks back and sees this soldier floating in the water,” Luke said during an interview Monday at his Four Hills home. “He goes back and grabs this soldier by the leg, and the leg came off in his hand. He said it unnerved him. He’s just standing there with this man’s leg in his hand, and his men behind him on the beach are seeing this.”

Lt. Shelby quickly regained his composure, however, found his first sergeant and the two of them went looking for Bangalore torpedoes, which consist of an explosive charge placed into a section of connecting tubes. The torpedoes are used to clear the way of obstacles such as heavy brush or coils of barbed wire.

The men located two of the torpedoes, enough to blow a giant hole in an imposing expanse of barbed wire.

“My dad leads his men 200 yards across a mine field, and they are getting shot at,” Luke said. “He attacked an anti-tank gun position. He kills one man in hand-to-hand combat and captures six.”

Luke said when he was about 15, he asked his father what it felt like to kill a man in close combat.

“He just got this kind of blank look on his face and said, ‘Don’t ever ask me that. What do you think it felt like?’”

About an hour after landing, John Shelby and his men were off the beach and in a hay barn in a little town occupied by the Germans. They figured they were in a pretty good spot to cause some havoc, but that was before an American battleship, the U.S.S. Texas, started bombarding the town with devastating effect. Shelby and his men were forced to get out quick or get pulverized by “friendly fire.”

“We had that town. We were in it,” John Shelby told Journal staff writer Jim Belshaw during a 1984 interview for a column marking the 40th anniversary of D-Day. “Until that damn battleship came along.”

Luke Shelby smiled when recalling that quote.

“For my dad, it was ‘the damned Navy this’ and ‘the damned Navy that,’” he said.

Except on D-Day, when U.S. destroyers came in closer to the beach than John Shelby thought possible, bringing their guns to bear on German positions and providing covering fire for Allied troops scrambling to advance on the beaches.

“Then it was ‘our Navy,’” Luke said. “Then it was ‘our destroyers.’”

Counterattack

John Shelby was presented the Distinguished Service Cross, the U.S. Army’s second-highest medal for heroic action in combat, for his bold and decisive action on D-Day. But that was not his first DSC. He also earned the medal for bravery displayed in July 1943 during fighting in Sicily. Other decorations awarded Shelby during the war included the Silver Star, the third-highest medal honoring valor in combat, and the Purple Heart, awarded to those wounded or killed in action.

Luke Shelby, 67, retired from the New Mexico Game and Fish Department in 2008, following a 25-year career that saw him go from game warden to assistant director of the department. He has been working on a book about his father for three years.

Luke said his father was born into a family of eight kids in 1916 in Slaton, Texas, a small town 17 miles southeast of Lubbock. He said his dad’s father, a railroad engineer, died as a result of a train accident when John was 9.

John, a wiry 6-foot-2, was on the baseball and boxing teams in high school, cowboyed some and did rodeo. While still a young man, he followed an older brother, Gordon, to Chicago, where John was employed first at making ice cream for a country club and then as a bartender in a lounge owned by Barney Ross, a lightweight and welterweight boxing champion during the 1930s.

Luke said his father paid attention to what was going on in the world, so he knew the United States was headed to war. John Shelby joined the Illinois National Guard before Pearl Harbor and then the Army in 1942.

His first action was in North Africa, and his performance under fire there earned him a battlefield commission as a second lieutenant.

Luke said there were two times during the war when his father admitted to being scared.

“One was on D-Day when he pulled that guy’s leg off,” he said. “The other time was in North Africa when he was off by himself in the desert and this German fighter pilot is bearing down on him. The pilot must have been out of ammunition, because he dropped a spare fuel tank. It landed about 30 feet from my dad, skipped across the desert and blew up.”

Other than being shaken, John Shelby was unscathed.

After North Africa, he was on to Sicily and the fighting that started with an invasion on July 9-10, 1943.

“Unlike the invasion on D-Day at Normandy, which was at daylight, the invasion of Sicily was at 3 a.m.,” Luke said. “There was very little opposition. But that is so typical of the Germans. They would let them get up, and then they would counterattack. That’s what happened. Here come the panzers (German tanks), and there were a lot of them.”

Disregarding personal risk, Shelby moved to an observation post ahead of his battalion and called in coordinates to his mortar platoon, which dropped shells among the German infantry following the tanks with such accuracy that the German attack was routed.

Shelby received his first Distinguished Service Cross for the “inspired courage” he displayed in that engagement.

The way he was

Such coolness under fire belied the true effect the war wrought on John Shelby. Luke said that is revealed in letters his father wrote during the war to a great-uncle and an uncle, both named Joe.

Excerpts include:

”I’m ready for this to be over. I have seen all I want of it.”

”We can say a little bit about what happened, but it is something I would rather forget than remember.”

”I was given the DSC the other day for something I did in Sicily. I sure hope I don’t get in a fix that I win another one.”

That last was written before “Bloody Omaha,” of course.

During the course of his combat, Shelby took some shrapnel in the neck in Algeria and injured his back on another occasion when an explosion flung him into a ditch.

But he was still moving forward in Czechoslovakia when the Germans surrendered, ending the war in the European Theater.

He returned to Chicago after the war and took a job selling beer. He was making a delivery to Chicago’s Club Alabam when he saw a former USO singer named Melba Vick performing on stage. They got married in 1951.

He returned to the Army during the Korean war, training troops, and retired from active duty with the rank of major in 1959, settling in Albuquerque because he was advised that the climate would be good for his damaged back.

Shelby worked in real estate until his retirement in 1981.

“He was not one to toot his own horn,” Luke said. “He once said, ‘The pleasure was to do my duty.’ Which sounds corny, but that was the way he was.”

Luke is set, however, on telling his dad’s remarkable story in the book he is writing.

“It’s been very satisfying going through mountains of documents and seeing my dad’s name every now and again,” he said. “If a book gets published, that’s great. If not, my kids will have it.”