Welcome to Veterans Chronicles. I'm Greg Corumbus. Our guest in this edition is retired US Army Major General John Ron, Junior. He is a veteran of World War Two, including the D Day landings at Omaha Beach, for which he received a Silver Star. He is also a veteran of the Vietnam War. In all forty years of service in the United States Army and General Ron, thank you very much for being with us, sir, Well, thank
you for being here. When and where were you born, sir? I was born at Fort Benning, Columbus, April twenty second, nineteen twenty two, and your father was in the service current. My father was a graduate of what they now call the class of nine June nineteen nineteen. Well, actually it was November first of nineteen eighteen, and the war was over on eleventh, November eleventh, so they suddenly had themselves a couple of hundred second
lieutenants available and nowhere to send them. There wasn't any war anymore. Now. You grew up in a military family, of course, and your family had regular interaction when you were a kid with figures who had become extraordinarily famous later on right, well, yes, yep, very very true. As for me personally, I knew Eisenhower, I knew Bradley. I even double dated with Bradley's daughter. Johnny Eisenhower was a friend of mine from junior high
school. We also he was in my company at West Point, as was Georgie Patton, as was Mark Clark. Arnold was in b company. I was in a so I knew all of these people. I knew their father I knew their fathers when they were lieutenants that type thing, played tennis with them, played golf with them, and later their four stars, things like
that. It was a very very useful growing up period living on army posts, because you did meet all these people when they were lieutenants, when they were captains and soul and your father also taught you how to shoot correct he did. I was in fourth grade when he bought me a twenty two short rifle weighing eight and a half pounds, which was the standard weight for a springfield, and got some armor plate from the salvage yard and set up some
targets and taught me how to shoot. He also taught me how to shoot a caliber forty five automatic pistol, but I didn't get to shoot any live ammunition with that. That would come later. That came later. So, like your father, you went to West Point. You began there in early July of nineteen thirty nine. Two months later Hitler invades Poland. World War two in Europe begins a couple of years into your time at West Point Pearl
Harbor, we're in the war. What's it like to be at West Point when all these major events are happening and you probably know you're going to be in the middle of it since Well, the point is that we contracted not expecting war, but when the war came, that's what we were preparing for. So it went very well. It made you quite a bit more attentive to your studies, particularly your military studies, things like that, but it
really didn't change anything. Were the same happy Golokie people we would have been without a war. And you were commissioned in nineteen forty three with an engineering degree that actually helped you get in with the Rangers. Explain that a little bit, well, in a sense, I'm afraid there was a little exaggeration there. It didn't help me, but it didn't prevent me. I was
an engineer officer and the Rangers were infantry. But when they sought volunteers for the Ranger Battalion, I went ahead and volunteered, and lo and behold, I passed the personal interview and found myself in the Rangers. And the excuse was that being an engineer officer, I knew about field fortifications, I knew about mine fields, I knew about barbed wire, I knew about all kinds of things. Engineering demolitions was another one, things like that, and they
said, we need somebody who specialized in those things in the Rangers. So I expected to be in headquarters and so on. The first thing they do is throw me out an a Ranger platoon and I'm in the arranger tune for about two to three months, and they moved me up to staff, where I really belonged. And how much training did you do before heading to England? And when did you head to England? Well, on September first of nineteen forty three, I joined the Ranger Battalion at Camp Forest, Tennessee.
This was an army post very near Tullahoma, Tennessee. And the first night they made me B Company commander, just because the B Company commander hadn't showed up yet. We came in over a period of about five days, and I was in the first wave, so I had to hold down B Company and they were exuberant young soldiers. There were a few problems that occurred, but we got over that period and I ended up, as I say,
in C Company as a leader. When did you head to England? We headed to England in early January of nineteen forty four, I say early January. We docked in Liverpool on January nineteenth, which was exactly one year after I graduated from West Point. So January nineteenth is the big day for me because of the other association, definitely, And so what did you do to
prepare then for the invasion that Union was coming. We went initially to Leominster, England, which is over on the Welsh border, and we trained. Much of it was physical training. I mean, we knew our mission involved a long march, a fast march, so there was a tremendous amount of marching, night marching, distis marching, double time marching and things like that to get us in physical condition. They had rifle ranges and we had to all qualify with our own weapon. We had to qualify expert. We did
a lot of scouting and patrolling. But the nastiest thing that we had to do was somebody coming up flashing a map in front of us and saying, you are there, get there within nine hours period. Goodbye. No bus tickets, know nothing. You could hitchhike, you could jump the railroad and do all sorts of things to get there, but everybody succeeded. Oh you could use the thumb expressed too. But it was a lot of fun. The training was interesting. The training was challenging, but that was what we
did there. From Lemster we went to Scotland and there we had battlefield training. We even had a mash unit mobile Army surgical hospital with us because they expected us to take so many casualties and we lost. We lost quite a few men. I don't remember, but I think it was something like eight men either very serious wounds or killed in training. We also did a great
deal of training with landing craft. They brought the ships in that we would use in the invasion, and they brought the landing craft in that we would use in the invasion. And as a result, when we actually loaded out for the invasion, we knew half the people we were dealing with in the Royal Navy, because the rangers all used Royal Navy transport to get to the
beaches and we used Royal Navy boats. Things like that. We were very lucky because they had done it before, they'd done it in Africa, they'd done it in Sicily, they'd done it twice in Italy and so on, and knowing them, we got along very well. Very few hitches. None with the English crews, none. Absolutely. What kind of resistance were you told to expect, well, we were told to expect that the bombing of
the beaches would leave us a plenty of good cover. The cover if it were on the beaches, a bomb crater would be filled with water, but it was better than being up on the sand. So that was the type thing we expected for ourselves. We expected a sea wall, We expected enemy wire. We expected mines, mostly anti personnel minds, but minds, things
like that, but that's we trained for. We also accepted expected very hostile positions of the enemies on the crests, that they would have trenches, they would have mine fields, they would have wire in front of the mine fields and things like that. We did not expect an easy show. But we got an easy show. When did you actually find out what your assignment was, what he'd have been training for all this time. Not until we got on board the ships. We got maps of the entire area. When we
were still ashore in the Dorchester camps. We had these wonderful maps without a word on them. You didn't know the name of that town. You didn't know the name of that locality, you didn't know the name of the woods that were on the map. All unit saw was the maps, and we memorized those maps. And the sand tables were the same way. They had no names. All you were doing was you were memorizing the terrain, which
is what we all did. And I mean the enlisted men they learned it as much as we officers because they were sitting right beside us as we got the information from the maps. We had wonderful aerial photos, and the aerial photos were of such a scale that, I mean you could practically put a dot and locate yourself within two or three yards on the aerial photos. I
mean, we were really prepared that way. When we moved aboard the ships, they took away all those nameless maps and gave us the real maps with all the names and the coordinates and things like that. And so we got to about three or four days. Still had the sand tables, but now they had maps, still had the aerial photos, but now they had names
and that type thing. The preparation was very good. The preparation was so good that when we landed one mile from where we were supposed to, one of my sergeants said, you know where we are, Captain, and I said, sure, the only place there's a wooden sea wall is at lemou Land. So we're at leymou Land And turned out that's where we were, one mile exactly from the fier View exit. Tell me about being on board the ship and getting ready to get into the Higgins Bouts. Well, the
ship was a wonderful ship. The British officers were became personal friends, and they were the ones that would run the flotillas and things like that of landing craft. The British Navy has a bar that opens at about five o'clock in the afternoon, which meant that we had all the liquor we wanted, because the British officers had all liquor they wanted. I don't know about the enlisted men getting grog still, but I think they still get grog, and so
our Rangers did fairly well in all respects. We continued very heavy physical training, and we continued very heavy map reading, terrain recognition and memorization and things like that while we were aboard the ships. The physical training had to be that stupid set up stuff of exercises. The decks were not arranged so that we could do any walking or running. Our physical exercise was with rifles us them like dumbbells and things like that. And it was thorough and it was
hard, and we did have a chaplain with us. He had a lot of business. There were one, two, three, four, five I think five Ranger vessels, could be six. He visited all of them, said mass, took confessions, and did all the things that chaplain should. In fact, they gave him a private motor boat so he could get from one place to another things like that. He was a pretty good little guy
in just a moment. John Ron arrives at Omaha Beach on June sixth, nineteen forty four, as the Allies invaded Normandy as part of the D Day landings. I'm Greg Corumbus, and this is Veterans Chronicles. This is Veterans Chronicles. I'm Greg Corumbus. Our guest in this edition has retired US Major General John Ron. He served as a US Army Ranger captain on June sixth, nineteen forty four, as the Allies stormed the beaches of Normandy as part
of the D Day operation. And that's exactly where we are with our conversation with General Ron as he explains what it was like to arrive at Omaha Beach. I had served watch for three straight two hour watches, and the reason why was the people that were to relieve me would really be busy on D Day. One the battalion deputy commander and one was a company commander, and me, I was headquarters company commander. All my people were farmed out.
I really didn't have a job because I'd already farmed him out. They'd been trained in the proper place, and as soon as they hit the shore, they went over and reported to the S one or the S four or whoever they worked for. So I was sort of a loose cannon without any real assigned duties. So I got all the odd jobs, and the odd jobs were very interesting going on one man patrols and things like that. That was not very much fun. It had to be done, but it was flat
plane interesting. Most people ask what about fear, and I would say that, with very few exceptions, we did have one officer that turned to jelly, but the non coms took care of that. They hauled him by his armpits until he got his battle legs under him, and he became a very good commander after that. But the initial shock of all that, all those machine gun bullets and rifle bullets and artillery and mortar coming in on us, he sort of had problems. But as I say, trust the non coms
to straighten the junior officers out. All right, So tell me how you came ashore. I know you had an original location that got changed, but maybe I better go back to an earlier question. I got a little diverted by telling you I had these three watches and I went below. There wasn't enough time to sleep, and so I just went over my equipment, made sure I had everything, made sure everything was working, and suddenly we heard
attention US rangers. Attention US rangers. I'm trying to get the exact words, but it meant manned the boats, and so we went up on the deck and all of our assault boats, being British, were hoisted by davits up to the loading decks. So we just climbed into the boat while it was there on the deck and they lowered us with the davits into the waters.
Now, we did crash into the side of the boat and things like that, and the tackle got jammed, and fortunately the British hadn't necessary to us and acts and they cut enough of the lowering ropes that we were lowered
into the water really without incident. We then proceeded on our mission, which was to go to the Laplantec and land there after the second Ranger Battalion they had three companies assaulting those cliffs and after they had successfully reached the top, they were to send a message to us and then we would go in with six actually eight companies of Rangers and we would exploit the point to hawk capture and then go out and set up blocking positions so the Germans could not get
any infantry in to support the German defenses of the beaches. The second battalion never showed up. They were sent to the wrong point by their guideboat and as a result they were a half hour late, but we had to leave at the end of half an hour. We weren't allowed to wait over in case they were late, so we had left. They did land first man up the cliffs was up in something like fifty one seconds. He cheated. There was a bomb crater and the edge of the cliffs and sort of a
hemisphere of bomb crater. There. There was debris that fell out on the bottom, maybe thirty feet of it. So he ran up the thirty feet of debris. He was a marvelous athlete. He climbed up some thirty feet and was in the bottom of a bomb crater, had a rope with him, threw the rope out, and all of a sudden he was building up members of his squad. That type thing. Other people had more difficult times using rope ladders, using metal ladders, using toggle rope climbs, and all
sorts of things like that. But the second battagion got up on top of the cliffs and radioed their message were there, but we were already practically at Vierville. We passed landing control, which are boats about a thousand yards off shore. But tell you any events you need to know about, and they said, do not attempt to land at vier Ville. The casualties are ninety five percent. Half of them killed land on dog White Beach. So we
shifted over to dog White Beach and we landed our first wave. There two companies of the second battagion plus the headquarters boat, and they were cut like everybody else on Omaha Bee, they were cut down to about fifty percent, all the officers killed or wounded. And my battalion commander was watching a thousand yards out, but the waves were about a thousand yards and he said,
they quote, I'm not gonna lose my battalion on that beach. So he talked the British flotilla commander into going farther east, and the commander was not at all averse to it. He did coordinate with the higher people up and they all agreed. So we moved a mile more and suddenly we found a
beach with breakwaters. Well, the breakwaters come up to the seawall. They're the same height as the sea wall, about four or five feet, but they formed little barriers, made us like we were in forts on three sides and water were on the other. And as a result, when we went in there, we took five casualties. Other people were taking fifty percent casualties, so we got our whole battalion landing intact, which by the way,
is the name of my book. But in any event, we landed and we took very few casualties on the beach, but only because of the breakwaters. Now above us, who should be shooting at us? The hills were a fire, and I mean active grass fires, so they Germans couldn't see us through the flames and smoke, and they couldn't shoot at us. There was a nose on the hill to our left, and nobody down there from the left could shoot at us because all they saw when they looked to where
we should have been, all they could see was water. The only place we were getting shot at was from down the beach to our right, and it was thirty or forty machine guns, plus probably two three hundred infantrymen, plus mortars and things like that, which was enough. The artillery that everybody feared was located at Vier View, and the artillery was shooting at the boats and the ships as they came in. So once you got off the boats and on the beach, all you had to contend with was small arms fire.
Well, we had these breakwaters in between us and the small arms fire. So we got off the beach within fifteen twenty minutes and went up the bluffs, and the Germans, at least half of them, because the flames of the grass fire, at least half of them had deserted their positions and left their explosives there in the foxholes. And so we got up the hills
with relatively little resistance. When I say relatively, I mean relatively because there were some people killed on the way up, but nothing like people were losing on the beach who weren't protected by these sea walls and breakwaters. Actually, so we got up there into the bocage and we were very lucky there.
Again, harvest had not taken place, so the fields were filled with mostly grassy crops that were three to six feet tall, and if you got caught by a machine gun or by ambush in there, all you had to do was to drop down. They couldn't see you, they had no idea where you were, they knew what the range was. You just rolled over a few times and then crawled to the nearest hedgerow. Maybe when over came in behind the resistance, and we had very little problems initially with hedgerows. Later
when they got vehicles up, the tanks could not penetrate the hedgerows. Tanks will not venture forward without infantry, so they had a lot of problems later with the hedgerows. But it was mostly the tanks and the vehicles that had the problems. But the early on infantry, those grasses were just worth their weight in gold because they could not see you. An unaimed rifle fire doesn't
hit anything, so it was good in just a moment. General Ran shares even more critical information about his service at Omaha Beach on D Day, June six nineteen forty four. I'm Greg Corumbus, and this is Veterans Chronicles. This is Veterans Chronicles. I'm Greg Corumbus, our guest in this edition as retired US Major General John Ron. He served as a US Army Ranger captain on June sixth, nineteen forty four, as the Allies stormed the beaches of
Normandy as part of the D Day Operation. Now, General Ron picks up the story and explaining how just as his craft got close to Omaha Beach, he began to understand the carnage that occurred on the earlier waves that morning. We didn't know until we hit that first landing control that it was murder on
the beach, and it was. And a company of the one hundred and sixteenth Infantry from the Blue and Gray Division the twenty ninth they did suffer ninety eight percent casualties, of whom half were killed and half were just wounded. Only eight men in an entire infantry company escaped unwounded. And those eight men do not accompany me, believe me. So we learned the conditions there. When we made our landing at the boundary between Dog Green and Dog White,
there were two companies of the second battalion. B company landed on Dog Green the edge of it, and the other company landed on Dog White, so they had different results. The company that landed on Dog Green lost their boat. One of the boats was sunk about two hundred yards out, so they straggled through the surf to get ashore, all the time exposed to machine guns on the ridge. The other platoon managed to escape all that came through in
pretty good shape. The two companies and the headquarters boat landed on a Dog White and they were met immediately with fifty percent casualties, of whom ten percent at least were killed. So they had a rough time. And that's when we diverted one mile and it's almost to the inch one mile to find the breakwaters, and we came in on the breakwaters. Now you're blessed in a couple of ways. You got rerouted to a less oh yeah, intense spot. You mentioned the smoke on the bluff. Also, as as you've said,
you came amendment about seven fifty am. I believe he's seven fifty. My foot hit the water at seven fifty and at that point the difference between the tides then and when the first wave had gone in or it's quite different. Correct, Absolutely, there were There was approximately fifty yards of beach when I landed. When the original troops had landed, there were two hundred and
fifty yards of beach. They had to walk that beach through the obstacles with the artillery and small arms fire dogging them all away, and frankly, there weren't very very few heroes in those early units that landed. They just got chewed up badly. And when they got to the beach, the bomb craters weren't there. The Air Force didn't release their bombs until them a mile later, and it was a mess. The first Division and the twenty ninth Division
both took it on the chin, terrible losses. One of the challenges for you is to cut through the wire. You know what weapons did you used to? Well, the wire was on the far side of the coastal road, and when I say coastal road, it was nothing but beach bungalows. It was mcadama, but it wasn't wide enough for vehicles to pass each other without running off the macadamized road. On the other side of that road there
was the equivalent of a double apron fence barbed wire fence. It was not only double apron, but it was two double one double apron fence and then another about thirty feet of barbed wire. What we did was we inserted Bangalore torpedoes which were about six feet long. But you can screw them together. So now you've got twelve feet, you can screw them together. Now you
got eighteen feet, and so on. So when the grenadiers went forward, they had already gotten themselves about twenty feet and people on the beach helped move the Bangalores forward, and then the Bangalore torpedo men themselves took the last Bangalore torpedo ranted across the road under the wire. Having got it to the wire, they pulled the fuse lighters which gave them three seconds, and they took three seconds to run back across the road, and in the process we didn't
lose a single torpedo man. In the hole that I went through, there were two Bangalore torpedo man who went in ten feet apart, and they really blew us a big hole. It would like a twenty foot hole to go through. But there were little strands of rot wire still there under your feet, and some of them had loops and your feet caught in them. You had to be very careful going through the blown area, but you got through.
Nobody got became casualties or anything like that, because it was almost impossible for anything on the bluffs down here to shoot at the foot of the bluffs here and the bluff were close to a hundred yards from the beach, so I mean it was impossible. So we got through pretty easily and started up the bluffs, and we took a lot of casualties in the hedgerows and things like that. You also dodged a couple of problems in your final approach to
the beach. Your boat went over a teller mine, I believe, and a piece of artillery hitch fantail. Yeah, I was standing up. Generally speaking, I was down only to be a good example for the enlisted man. But occasionally Sullivan, who was the senior man on the boat, I was the number two man. Occasionally he would ask me to stand up and look at something and what's my opinion of it? And I happened to be standing up and I saw the bow of our LCA headed right down on a
telephone post with a teller mine on the end of it. And we were no more than four feet away at the point that I saw it. And I said, well, goodbye, this is it. And the next thing I knew, a wave caught us, threw us over. We didn't even come close to that. Tell her mind, we actually were probably three or four feet from it when we passed it. Just lucky, Just lucky.
And you mentioned the seawall earlier, and how you know you're really on the beach about fifteen or twenty minutes before you made your way up the bluff. But you had an interesting encounter while you were still on the beach with an old friend. Oh yeah, Well he wasn't my old friend, but I knew his kids from Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. He would Brigadier General Koda. He was a Daniel Kota two, but everybody called him Dutch and Dutch Koda.
Well, we were sitting there in our little fort waiting for orders from Battagon Sullivan. The deputy said, you stay here and I'll go down and get the orders. So he went down and got the orders, and he was back in two or three minutes. But during that time, my rangers were very curious. Man. They couldn't look at anything without wondering what it is, what does it do? And they said, hey, Cap, and I said, what do you want? They said, who's that guy
down there on the beach? And I looked down the beach and here was a little, old fat man. He was just at the very far edge of the beach, I mean where the dunes began. I said, I don't know. He's either a crazy reporter who doesn't know what he's doing, or he's a high ranking officer who does know what he's doing. Because he was just circulating to the troops and waving at him and shaking his fist. He had a cigar in his mouth which occasionally it was not lit, which
occasionally he would wave and things like that. And as he moved the twenty ninth Division troops who were called on the beach moved up to the dunes and on the dunes and started up the plateau and up the bluffs. Finally, and it took him about two minutes and he finally got to my position. He went down to the end of the retard the breakwater, and I said, I'd better get down there and find out which do I follow Plan A, tackle him and turn him over to the medics, or Plan B salute
him and report Well. He came around the end of the breakwaters and I looked at there was a little tiny silver star on his collar, and I said, whoof's Plan D. So I went up to him, and people criticized me for it. I did a snappy hand salute, which he returned, and I said, Sir Captain Ron Ranger, Infantry Battalion, we've just landed on this beach. Actually, I told him those where the situation. A little bit later, and he looked at me. He said Ron,
and I said yes, General Ron. And he said you're not jack Ron's son, are you? And I said yes, I am jack ron Son. He said, well, welcome to Omaha Beach. But in any event, he then, after I gave him the situation, how we had landed, and what troops there were, how the enemy, what the enemy resistance was, he asked me to go to where's your battalion commander? And I could actually point him out. He was not more than seventy five yards away. And I said I'll take you, and he said you will not.
You will stay with your men. They need you more than I do. We didn't say that, but that was what it meant, and so I stayed with the troops and he walked his way down. But as he was leaving, he turned to my troops and said, you men are rangers. I know you won't let me down. He wasn't encouraging us to move out.
He knew we would, so he expected things of us. And as he went that seventy five yards over to Colonel Schneider, he would stop with every group and he could see the goal, or rather the orange diamonds on
our helmets. He could see the Arranger patches and he said the same thing, but it finally morphed into by the time he said it the last time, it was Rangers lead the Way. And that's where we got our motto, and it was all rangers got their motto from that, Rangers lead the Way, which the first time I heard it was you men are Rangers. I know you won't let me down. He changed the whole complex of the
Norman invasion. The orders that we already had were to proceed by platoon infiltration to the assembly points up on the land, and they were two three four miles away. But what General Coda did was he said to Schneider, get your companies together and fight your way to the assembly points because you're going to operate as a battalion now. And that was the way it went. So you were right there when the Ranger model was born. I was right there
when the Ranger model was born. True enough, not the exact same wording, but the exact same wording was the last time he gave it as we were going through the gap. So did that become the model because he told the story air somebody else told the story. I don't know. I don't know. They may have gotten from one of the very very early editions of my book. I went through about eight writings of the book before it published. We're gonna talk about that book too, And just a little bit.
We said, you landed at seven fifty, So it's I guessing it's not that long after eight o'clock by the time near at the top of the bluff. Yeah, it's just a little after eight. I landed at seven fifty, but the other group landed essentially five to ten minutes ahead of me. I never knew exactly when they landed, but they were pretty well reorganized,
unfortunately going up the bluffs when they went through the smoke. One platoon leader told me that when I went through that smoke, or entered that smoke, I had a full ranger platoon with me, and when I came out, I had one runner. They'd all gotten lost in the smoke. So we had to pause at the top of the bluffs and we reorganized, and by that time the two companies from the second battagon that were part of our force had worked their way down and joined us, and we made them into a
single company. Took the remnants of both A and B Company, the second Rangers and made him into a provisional Ranger company, and they were a little bit larger than that, but we put him in what I will call reserve for the first day. The second day they were up there with the tanks, giving the tanks the protection they needed to move out. The US Army Major General John Ron, who served as a US Army Ranger captain on June sixth, nineteen forty four, at Omaha Beach. This is just part one
of our conversation with General Ron. There will be three in total. In our next installment, we'll continue our conversation with General Ron about his actions on D Day itself as well as a couple of days that followed, and in our final installment will examine his service at the Battle of Brittany and the Battle of the Bulge, and we'll who passed World War Two to look at his work during Vietnam. We're a forty year military career. I'm Greg Corumbus and
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