Corpsmen Getting Bronze Stars for D-Day Actions
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Corpsmen Getting Bronze Stars for D-Day Actions
Jun 07, 2012
ALBANY, New York - Kenneth Davey said the grim reason his father and other medical personnel from his Navy unit never received the Bronze Star for their actions at Normandy on D-Day was because many of the officers who would have made the required recommendations were killed before they even landed on the beach.
The oversight is being rectified for the dozens of corpsmen and doctors in the 6th Naval Beach Battalion who hit Omaha Beach on June 6, 1944, an hour after the first wave landed.
On Wednesday, the 68th anniversary of the Allied invasion of France, former corpsman Frank Walden of California, received the Bronze Star and a Combat Medical Badge during a ceremony at Naval Amphibious Base Coronado, outside San Diego.
The medals also will be presented at later dates to the unit's nine other surviving medical personnel, as well as the families of some 70 deceased battalion veterans.
The upper echelon of the battalion, a forerunner of the Navy Seals, was "basically wiped out" by German machine gun and artillery fire, said Davey, the unit's history consultant for its website.
Davey's father, J. Russell Davey Jr., was a 26-year-old doctor from Philadelphia when he landed at Normandy. Davey was only a year old when his father died suddenly in 1948.
David Catallo of Waterford, near Albany, made it to the beach but was hit by an exploding shell.
"I remember going up in the air, and that's all," said the 87-year-old retired postmaster in a phone interview.
He woke up in a hospital bed in England, suffering from a concussion, Catallo said.
The corpsmen, as the Navy and Marines call their medics, weren't faring much better. Five were killed instantly; many were wounded as they struggled ashore and tried to treat wounded soldiers and sailors.
http://www.military.com/daily-news/2012/06/07/corpsmen-getting-bronze-stars-for- d-day-actions.html?ESRC=marine.nl
