On anniversary of D-Day, a sailor recalls his lost ship

LYNCHBURG

In the predawn hours of June 6, 1944, Grant "Gully" Gullickson's world nearly came to an end.

He was a 23-year-old chief machinist's mate on the Navy destroyer Corry, one of the lead ships in the D-Day invasion of France, when it was blown out of the water by a fierce barrage of German artillery fire from the Normandy shore.

Gullickson was one of the lucky ones. He was plucked out of the frigid water of the English Channel by a companion ship, the Fitch. Two dozen of his shipmates, some no older than 17, perished.

Today, 65 years later, Gullickson and fellow survivors will gather at the National D-Day Memorial in Bedford, Va., for a solemn remembrance of the estimated 10,000 Allied casualties of the biggest amphibious assault in history.

There, on a rounded hilltop of the Blue Ridge, a marble monolith looms above a heroic sculpture of troops scaling a bluff above a beach. In a sweeping semicircle around the plaza, engraved on brass plaques, are the names of the dead.

The memorial was built eight years ago in Bedford, the small town - population 3,200 in 1944 - chosen because it suffered among the highest per capita losses of any community in America.

This will be one of the last such gatherings. The remaining D-Day veterans are in their 80s and 90s now.

For the past two days, Gullickson, 88, of Virginia Beach and a group of his comrades, some in wheelchairs, have been telling their stories at a commemorative conference at nearby Liberty University.

The older he gets, Gullickson said, the more he understands the importance of passing those stories on.

Gullickson grew up on a farm in North Dakota. "I was always interested in what was on the other side of the hill," he said. "Well, there aren't many hills in North Dakota, so I joined the Navy."

That was in 1939. He served on the battleship Mississippi until after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, when he reported to Norfolk and was assigned to the Corry. For two and a half years, the destroyer plied the Atlantic, leading the invasion of North Africa, sinking a German submarine, and participating in a secret raid on German ships anchored in the fjords of Norway.

Then just before midnight as D-Day loomed, the Corry and its two companion destroyers got their orders to begin the advance on Normandy, leading the flotilla of landing craft that carried the invading ground troops.

"Around 1 o'clock the skies lit up," Gullickson said. "It looked like 10,000 bombers in the air."

By 5 a.m., German artillery fire had become incessant. The airplane that had been laying a smokescreen to obscure the Corry from the barrage crashed into the channel, leaving the ship exposed.

The Corry came apart under the withering fire, Gullickson said. The keel split. Two boilers blew up. The lights went out. The engine room filled with steam.

Gullickson and his crew wrestled the hatch open and climbed out on deck, in water up to their knees. He grabbed onto a floater net attached to a lifeboat, bobbing in the 50-degree water as the ship went down. By the time the Fitch arrived two hours later, hypothermia was setting in. "I was just about gone," he said. "They had to come down and pry me loose."

Many of his friends were gone, mowed down in the water by shellfire. In a husky voice, Gullickson recited the names: Petersen. Brewer. Robinski. Radsinski. Wade. Sessions.

The surviving sailors were moved to the transport ship Barnett, which took on scores of the dead and wounded. The bodies, Gullickson said, were stacked like cordwood.

Around the time of Gullickson's rescue, Jim Bryant's D-Day was just getting started.

A Southampton County native who grew up in Norfolk, Bryant joined the Army at 18. He is now 84 and living in Daleville, near Roanoke.

Bryant served in the 82nd Airborne's Glider Infantry Regiment. Towed by a C-47 airplane, he crossed the channel in a glider - a lightweight, motorless craft with a metal frame and canvas covering.

"The glider was the only aircraft ever designed to crash - and most of them did," Bryant said. He later wrote a book about the experience, titled "Flying Coffins Over Europe."

Bryant's glider landed behind German lines seven miles inland from the Normandy beach. The craft went down between two trees, shearing off both wings and the tail, but all aboard survived. Another glider plowed into a hedgerow and nine men died.

Bryant then endured savage fighting in Normandy's hedgerows for 33 days. Of 170 men in his outfit, only 30 survived.

"The whole thing was a nightmare," he said.

Today's observance of D-Day's 65th anniversary at Bedford comes at a bittersweet time for those trying to preserve the memory of the climactic invasion.

The president of the memorial's nonprofit foundation, William McIntosh, said last week that the memorial is running out of money and is in danger of closing.

As the surviving band of veterans continues to dwindle, the memorial needs a long-term fix, McIntosh has suggested - perhaps annexation by the National Park Service.

"The real audience for the memorial," he said Friday, "has not been born yet."

Bill Sizemore, (757) 446-2276, bill.sizemore@pilotonline.com