TRAVERSE CITY -- Not a man spoke as the landing craft edged through the English Channel on June 6, 1944.
Clarence Weber was among those on board, 65 years ago today. D-Day, the Allied invasion of Normandy. Weber and the other soldiers knew what they faced. No words were needed.
"They had us packed in there like sardines. Not a word was spoken all the way across the channel. Too nervous. Too scared. What would you talk about? Getting killed?" said Weber, 90, of Traverse City.
Weber and thousands of fellow Allied soldiers stormed the beaches. He landed on Omaha Beach in a third wave of troops, and ran and crawled through death and destruction.
"We lost a lot of men that day on Omaha Beach. The water was red. That beach was littered with dead bodies. Others were moaning and groaning. It scared you to death," Weber said.
It was much the same for Wendell Holmes, 83, a World War II veteran who lives near Tustin, about 12 miles south of Cadillac. He also landed on Omaha Beach on D-Day.
"It was hell," he said. "I didn't know what it was going to be like, what I was getting into."
The instant landing craft doors opened, it revealed the chaos of the largest military invasion in history, right before their eyes. Weber and Holmes found themselves in the thick of it.
Weber splashed into chest-deep, blood-stained water and moved to the beach as fast as he could, 50-pound pack on his back and rifle in hand.
"There was so much noise, all that firepower. All you heard was machine guns and bombs," Weber said.
Holmes was 100 feet from shore in water over his head, a terrifying prospect for a man who couldn't swim. But he walked to shore, step-by-step atop the bodies of killed or drowned soldiers beneath the surface.
"It sounded worse than any scene you'd ever heard, the shouting and banging," Holmes said.
Weber took a bullet in his right leg that day in France.
"Anyone who said they weren't scared wasn't human. Everyone was scared with all those machine guns going off," he said.
German gunners on the bluffs were merciless: Allied soldiers died the instant they stepped onto the beach, sometimes before they managed to get off the boats.
"They just slaughtered them. It was like going into a suicide trap," Holmes said.
Holmes found himself pinned down on the beach; he lay motionless to avoid snipers' bullets.
"You didn't dare move or they'd shoot you," he said.
When dark fell, Holmes ran for the bluffs, like many of the soldiers around him.
"You never figured you were going to make it, anyway. You lived from day-to-day and hoped the next day you'd see daylight," he said.
Weber and Holmes watched men they knew and trained with die all around them, while others lay wounded, bleeding on the sand. American D-Day fatalities totaled at least 2,499, and another 1,915 soldiers from other Allied nations perished for a total of 4,414 dead, according to the D-Day Museum in Portsmouth, England.
Evidence of the devastation lingered for days, when World War II veteran Harold Price, 87, of Boyne City, arrived in Normandy with an armored tank division.
"There were still a lot of bodies out there floating around," he said. "They really took a beating."
And it wasn't only the soldiers: bodies of French civilians littered the ground, animals lay dead, rubble replaced buildings.
Price considers himself lucky to have come ashore after the initial invasion. And he looks back with pride at the Allied effort to liberate Europe.
Weber also is proud of his role in that fierce, monumental battle, as well as his efforts in the famous Battle of the Bulge in the Ardennes Forest during the winter of 1944-45.
For years, he struggled with nightmares; once he crashed through his bedroom window at night, an attempt to escape the vivid, bloody memories.
"But time heals everything," Weber said.
Holmes also fought in the Battle of the Bulge, where he took shrapnel and was captured and held by Germans for six days after he ran out of ammunition. He managed to escape, though, and made his way back to Allied forces.
Memories don't come easily for Holmes since he suffered a stroke several years ago. But some linger.
"You're never the same after you shoot somebody. You live with it for the rest of your life. There's not many days you don't think about it," Holmes said.
Weber, Holmes and Price belong to a dwindling group, as more than 1,000 World War II veterans die each day, according to the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs.
Weber looks back at World War II with a sense of awe at the Allied forces' accomplishments. He often chats with other veterans and recalls the hardships, struggles and sacrifice required to bring freedom to Europe and the Pacific.
"The greatest generation, they call us," Weber said. "I don't know how we did it, fighting on two fronts. I had the will to make it and I always stayed positive."
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