One Man's War: Sacrifice and Remembrance
- St Pete First
- May 24
- 5 min read
by Mac Fite
Several years ago, my wife and I took a long-discussed vacation to France and Great Britain.
Normandy was to be the highlight of the trip for me. I had studied the D-Day landings since high school, and they were the settings for such great movies as Saving Private Ryan and The Longest Day, and the TV series Band of Brothers. A trip to Normandy had to include a visit to the Normandy American Cemetery at Colleville-sur-Mer, on the bluffs above Omaha Beach, the scene of the heaviest fighting on June 6, 1944. If you have seen Saving Private Ryan, the cemetery appears at the beginning and end of the movie and plays a crucial role in tying the film together and putting it in perspective.
The cemetery is breathtaking. It covers 172 acres and was completed in 1956, over ten years after the war ended. There are 9,386 American war dead buried there. Three hundred and seven of the beautiful Italian marble headstones mark the graves of "unknowns." The Garden of the Missing contains the names of 1,557 missing and presumed dead servicemen on a long, curving wall. Every so often, a missing person's remains are discovered and identified, and a small brass rosette denotes that the person shown as missing has been found. When the cemetery opened in 1956, the remains of approximately 14,000 service members—originally buried in temporary cemeteries in the region—were returned home at the request of next of kin and at the expense of the U.S. government. It says something that so many families felt their loved one would have wanted to be buried with his friends on the battlefield. General Patton is similarly buried with his troops at another military cemetery in Luxembourg.
It is easy to get bogged down in statistics, but here are a few:
There are 33 brothers buried side by side.
There is a father and son buried side by side.
There are three Medal of Honor recipients buried there, one of whom is the son of an American president—Theodore Roosevelt Jr., a hero at Utah Beach.
There are four women buried in the cemetery.
As parents of two daughters, we were interested to learn about these women. With some research, I found that three of the four women buried in the Normandy Cemetery were African American members of the 6888th Central Postal Directory Battalion—the only all-female, all-Black battalion to serve overseas in World War II. In spite of government-tolerated and officially sanctioned segregation, many African American women were eager not only to serve in the military but to serve overseas in combat zones. The Six Triple Eight worked 24/7 sorting millions of pieces of mail and worked tirelessly to make sure, for example, that the right Robert Smith—of the 7,500 Robert Smiths in the European Theater—got his mail. The battalion's commander was the highest-ranking African American woman in the Army at that time. The unit's contributions to the war, even as non-combatants, have only recently been acknowledged, and there is now a Netflix movie (The Six Triple Eight) that is well worth watching.
A couple of weeks before we departed on our vacation, Carolyn Climes, a member of my church at the time, came to me and said she had heard we were going to Normandy. Would I do a favor for her on our trip—visit and photograph the gravesite of her uncle, Donald J. Climes, whom she had never met but who had been killed in action—she thought—in Normandy and buried somewhere “over there”? She knew little more than that. She did not know the place nor circumstances of his death, nor his unit. She only knew from family history that he was known as “Donnie” and had been married with no children at the time of his death. Nobody in his family had ever seen his grave.
I quickly learned over the internet that Donald was not buried at the Omaha Beach cemetery, but rather at the Brittany American Cemetery in the village of St. James, France, about two hours from Colleville-sur-Mer. I told Carolyn that we would visit Donald if at all possible on our trip—and we did.
There are 4,410 war dead buried in the Brittany American Cemetery, including two Medal of Honor recipients. There are 20 sets of brothers side by side. Almost all were killed in the bitter battles of early August 1944 as the Allied forces broke out of the Normandy beachhead. I was able to learn the exact location of his grave in the cemetery over the internet. We were photographed with Donald’s headstone by the custodian of the cemetery, a retired Army Master Sergeant, and took photos of the beautiful, peaceful cemetery that is not bustling with tourists as Normandy is. When we returned home, I gave a full report of our visit to Donald’s grave to Carolyn, with the photos we had taken.
I came home very curious about Donald, about whom I still knew little. I went back to the internet, where what I learned was both inspiring and sobering. Donald’s story is one of sacrifice and deserving of remembrance, which is what Memorial Day is all about.
I learned that Donald had been a member of Company D, 1st Battalion, 115th Infantry Regiment of the 29th Infantry Division. This really stirred my interest, because the 115th Infantry Regiment had been one of the first units to come ashore on Omaha Beach on June 6 and had taken terrific casualties. Digging deeper, I learned that Donald had arrived as a replacement soldier in late July—long after D-Day—but in the middle of the bitter fighting at and south of St. Lo, which proved much more deadly than the landings themselves. This fighting was what Donald, a new replacement, was thrown into on the very day he was assigned to his company.
Donald was killed on August 11, only a couple of weeks after arriving in France. At that time, the fighting was continuous and brutal. To illustrate: on August 1, the total strength of the 115th Regiment was approximately 3,000 officers and enlisted men. At the end of the day on August 11, the day Donald was killed, the 115th was relieved from the front. At that time, the total strength of the three battalions of the 115th had gone from almost 3,000 men on August 1 to fewer than 700 on August 11! On the same day that Donald died, 38 other members of the 115th were killed, with many times that number wounded.
Donald Climes was 36 years old on the day he died. He had been drafted into the Army in September 1943. He had been married for 14 years but had no children. He had been promoted to PFC shortly before or after he arrived in France. He was awarded the Bronze Star posthumously, so he must have been a good soldier.
While no one reading this will have heard of Donald Climes, some of you will know someone who made the supreme sacrifice in the service of our country. If so, take a moment to remember that person this Memorial Day.
This inscription is found in the chapel at the Omaha Beach cemetery:
"These endured all and gave all that justice among nations might prevail and that mankind might enjoy freedom and inherit peace."
And on the wall of the chapel of the Brittany American Cemetery:
"Oh Lord, support us all the day long until the shadows lengthen and our work is done. Then in Thy mercy grant us safe lodging and peace at the last."
Amen.
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