By Amanda O’Rourke
WASHINGTON, D.C. — Jack Plotts was 400 feet above Normandy, France, praying for a soft landing.
“I leaned back in the plane to relax, and I heard a hell of a thump,” the former paratrooper remembered Saturday. “I looked down, there was a hole between my legs. A 40mm come up through — it was time to leave.”
Plotts was just a teenager, 18, when he leapt into the blackness of the French coast on D-Day — June 6, 1944.
“The flak,” he said of anti-aircraft fire, “was so thick you could walk on it.”
He landed alone, tangled in an apple tree, and — against all odds — survived.
In the plane with him before he jumped were 12 other paratroopers.
He doesn’t know how many of them survived.
He doesn’t know if any of them survived.
He never saw them again.
“Everyone was off course,” Plotts, of Milton, said Saturday while spending the 65th anniversary of the Allied invasion of France by visiting the National World War II Memorial in Washington, D.C.
His immediate mission, he said frankly, was to kill people. His larger mission, to save France.
“You learn to be an adult pretty damn quick,” he said. “Pretty quick.”
Plotts, along with about 20 other Valley World War II veterans, visited the memorial during a trip funded by a community effort.
Many of the veterans were impressed with their first sight of the memorial dedicated in their honor in 2004. Valley residents contributed more than $65,000 toward the construction of the memorial.
Plotts, now 82, went on to fight 29 more days in France before being wounded, which put him in the hospital for six months and forever mangled his right hand.
“The night before I got hit, my company of 120-some people was down to 33 people,” he said. “When I got hit, they were down to 32.”
While Plotts found himself in the thick of D-Day, his fellow veterans who accompanied him to Washington Saturday were fighting elsewhere.
Soldier Robert Wendt, 84, of Sunbury, and sailor Mark Schreffler, 83, of Lewisburg, were stationed in the Pacific Theater. For them, D-Day was just another day in a long, brutal war.
“We all knew it was coming sooner or later,” Wendt said. “We were just happy that it happened and things were getting started to get the war to an end.”
Still other Valley vets were on U.S. soil while their comrades stormed France.
Soldier Bob Carlson, 84, of Lewisburg, was stationed in Louisiana, preparing for his tour of duty to Europe, which also brought him to the shores of Normandy.
“Omaha Beach was quiet at that time; the invasion was past,” Carlson said. “We landed like they did from landing craft into the water and walked ashore, but there wasn’t anyone shooting at us. Thank goodness for that.”
Carlson, like tank driver Andrew Divers, 84, of Milton, saw his fair share of combat without participating in the great invasion. They both fought through the Battle of the Bulge, during which Carlson was captured and later escaped.
These unassuming men who have been called the greatest generation milled quietly around the memorial Saturday, as content to sit in silence amidst the memorial’s fountains as pose for photos and give autographs, as some were asked to do.
They didn’t do any more for history than their Revolutionary, Civil War or World War I brothers did before them, Wendt said.
“We had a job to do,” Wendt said, “and we did it.”
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