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Al Ropelewski
90^th Infantry Division, interviewed May 1994.

Deafening noise and exploding trucks set the scene for Erie man at Utah Beach

By BILL McKINNEY

It's been 50 years but Al Ropelewski of Erie still can't think of D-Day 1944 without remembering that gold wedding band.

Ropelewski was only 22 years old when he waded ashore at Utah Beach, barely able to keep his head above the choppy water for all the combat gear he carried.

By the time he made shore he was tired and worn out. He had carried a bazooka and six rocket-propelled rounds for it, his rifle and ammunition, and his fatigues were impregnated with water.

Then a German 88mm shell hit an ammunition truck as it began rolling off a landing craft. Any tiredness Ropelewski felt was forgotten.

'When that ammo truck got hit I swear my feet never touched the sand. I was up and running and looking for cover. 'The noise was deafening and it just kept exploding as more rounds caught.' Ropelewski spotted a wall and hole beside it and jumped in.

'There was this other guy in it, leaning over the side of the hole. I asked him how things were going. 'He didn't say anything. He was dead. I looked and saw a gold band on his finger. The poor guy was married; he had a family back home waiting for him.

'It made a big impression on me. I don't know why but that ring is never out of my mind for very long.'

Ropelewski was a private first class and part of the third wave to assault Utah Beach. He was in one of two battalions from the 359th Regiment, 90th Infantry Division, assigned to support the U.S. Army's 4th Division.

As his 200-man company fought its way across France and into Germany over the next 11 months, it took such heavy casualties that its roster turned over 13 times.

Ropelewski was wounded by a shell burst on July 13, 1944, but continued with his unit, spending 122 consecutive days on the front lines.

It began, though, on June 5, 1944, with a truck ride to a docking area in England that he and some of his friends had written off as 'a dry run,' right up until they found themselves in the middle of the English Channel at night.

Like a lot of other veterans who made that boat ride, Ropelewski remembers that it seemed to take a long time to reach their destination.

'When it turned light and you could see out in the channel, there were boats as far as the eye could see. Over 4,000 of them, stretching all the way to the horizon.'

He saw destroyers cutting in and out close to the shoreline. One sank after hitting a mine.

The bombardment from the great guns on the battleships was something he'd never seen before.

'You could actually see the rounds coming out of the barrels; they were that big. They looked like choo-choo trains.'

Later, as his battalion pushed inland, Ropelewski and his friends would see the holes those shells made in the earth -- 'You could put a house in them.'

Not everything went as planned with the landing. Currents in the channel pushed the light landing boats some 2,000 yards away from where they were supposed to be, Ropelewski said.

Also, by the time his outfit landed, courtesy of the U.S. Coast Guard that piloted his landing craft, most of the GIs were seasick.

Even so, he found out later his landing was a lot easier than those made on Omaha Beach with its looming cliffs and continuous enemy fire.

'When we got out, the water was over my head. I yelled at guys to bounce up and down to get to shore, not to inflate these inner tubes we had. With all the weight we were carrying, I knew some of us would have turned over and drowned.'  The technique worked.

Ropelewski and his unit stayed on the beach for only a short time before being ordered inland where they again found themselves knee-deep in water. The Germans had blown flooded inland areas, effectively covering up land mines.

Special pioneer units were brought in to find and stake the mines so the infantry units could continue inland.

'I didn't sleep for 72 hours,' Ropelewski said. 'Then I found a slit trench and conked out. It was raining. If a sergeant hadn't woke me up, I'd have drowned.'

Even in the worst of conditions, there are sometimes elements of humor. For Ropelewski, it was seeing a certain Protestant chaplain who had always kidded the men about 'keeping our socks dry and our butts down.'

'It really isn't funny, I suppose, but you had to be there. When I saw him he'd been shot through both cheeks of his rump. He was a funny guy and even he saw the humor in it.'

Inland from the beaches were hedgerows, some 10 feet tall, walls of stone and earth with shrubs on top separating each field from the next. Germans would dig into the walls to create defensive positions, forcing soldiers to fight them one hedgerow at a time.

Their first real tough battle came about a month after the landing, a three-day-long assault to take Hill 122 where Germans troops had established an observation post and fought hard to keep it.

Fight took heavy toll 

Ropelewski remembers Hill 122 as "a hell of a fight."

It was such a hell of a fight that the men of his battalion became the first unit of the 359th Regiment, 90th Infantry Division, to win the blue Presidential Unit Citation on the right breast of their uniforms.

The 1st Battalion won it for extraordinary courage in the face of the enemy during the capture of a heavily defended German observation point on the Cotentin Peninsula. The battle began almost a month after the D-Day landing.

Ropelewski credits Major LeRoy R. Pond with the heroics, but the citation credits the entire battalion, first for taking the hill against superior enemy numbers and then for holding it while being cut off from reinforcements. "Pond just refused to surrender," Ropelewski said.

The Erie man -- now living on Parade Street Boulevard -- spent 122 consecutive days on the front lines, was wounded several times and was later decorated.

He called the German defense of Hill 122 and their later counterattack "fanatical."

The battle began July 3, 1944 and continued into July 8.

By the time it ended, Ropelewski said, one of the First Battalion's companies was down to 57 men from a beginning force of about 200. Officers and non-commissioned officers, anyone looking like leaders, were dropped fast.

"On July 3 we went into the attack, moving up slowly. We had artillery, our own shells, bursting over our head. "We lost our lieutenant and his runner when they went into a draw and ran into an ambush. I saw my platoon sergeant cut down by machine gun fire. We had to just keep on going."

Ropelewski, part of Charlie Company, and the rest of the battalion started out on a level plain leading up to the hill. At one point he found himself behind a big tree, caught in a crossfire between two machine guns.

"I tried to line one of them up with the bazooka, but they'd keep firing and I'd have to duck back. They had me penned in good. I was lucky that tree was there.

"Then Major Pond came up and took at least one of the guns out with a hand grenade. He threw it so hard his field glasses came back up and hit him above the eye. He needed stitches.

"I don't know what happened to the other gun. It stopped firing, too."

Pond would die months later, killed in the Saar Valley.

First Battalion moved across the plain, through a murderous draw, into a swamp directly below Hill 122, all the while kept low by barrages of German 88mm artillery.

"Just the concussion from a tree burst could kill you," Ropelewski said.

The U.S. Army Signal Corps started laying wire to keep up with the battalion's advance.

By July 5, the battalion, having waded through a swamp that was sometimes neck deep, was moving up Hill 122. Scouts were sent ahead, making their way through the heavy brush and small trees.

"I spotted a wire in the high grass and told a kid who got killed later that I didn't think it was ours, not on this side of the hill. It was German communications wire and I told him to cut it up."

Ropelewski said the 3rd Battalion was engaged in tough fighting on the left flank of the hill while the First was on the right flank.

"We didn't seem to be having trouble getting up there, not like the Third," he said. "I looked around and saw we were all bunched up. I said to one of the officers I didn't like what I saw. We were out in the open and weren't having any trouble.

"Lt. Parrish sent word to move. No sooner were we over a hedgerow, the Germans opened up on us. I was buried when a shell hit on top of the hedgerow I was behind."

Ropelewski's Charlie Company captured the top. When they did, he said, they found a heavily fortified observation post with periscopes that looked out over both Utah Beach where Ropelewski landed and bloody Omaha Beach. "You could see those beaches like you were looking across the street, they were that powerful."

At some point when the unit was surrounded, he said, his commanding officer tapped him to help him hunt any enemy tanks in the vicinity.

"We didn't see tanks but we spotted the Jerries setting up mortars. I planted my bazooka against the side of a hedgerow and used it like a mortar. We got a direct hit and ran like hell."

It wasn't until July 8 that elements of the 8th Division broke through the German ranks to relieve the captors of Hill 122. By that time Company M of the regiment's 3rd Battalion had been captured.

"Both the 1st and 3rd Battalions were pretty well chewed up," Ropelewski said.

Chewed up, but victorious. In securing their division's entire right flank, Ropelewski and his buddies in the 1st Battalion beat hard-fighting, experienced German paratroopers and SS troops. They did it without the support of tanks, tank destroyers or anti-tank guns. They did it in spite of being totally cut off from resupply of ammunition and food for a period of 30 hours. They did it in spite of a strong enemy unit, supported by tanks and artillery, driving a wedge between the 1st and its sister battalion, the 3rd.

They destroyed the Germans' main line of resistance and gave friendly forces the best observation point in the area.

Their citation reads, "As wave after wave of enemy troops assaulted the 1st Battalion's positions with the intent of destroying the unit, the officers and men, suffering from cold, thirst and hunger and their stamina taxed to the breaking point, held tenaciously to their hard won position, repelled the attackers."

Ropelewski would see a lot more combat in the months ahead. In two days alone in August, at the Falaise Gap, he would use his bazooka to destroy two German tanks with hits to their fuel tanks and a half-track.

He, himself, would be wounded by a tree burst and, later, after seeing the bodies of two of his friends lying uncovered, he would wander away from his unit in confusion and be reported as missing in action.

Six days later a tank destroyer outfit would find him still wandering aimlessly. He was sent to a hospital and then to an array of Army Air Force bases for non-combat duty -- 18 units in 10 months. Handed an M-1 carbine at one of these units Ropelewski promptly took it to the nearest pole and smashed it to pieces.

"I'd had enough of the killing," he said.