WW II vet makes special jump

He wanted to make the jump on his 82nd birthday, but it didn’t work out.

MAYTOWN, Pa. (AP) — Raymond C. Wallace Jr. jumped out of a plane July 12 and, this time around, the skies weren’t cracking with enemy fire, and the plane from which he jumped was not aflame.

Wallace was a paratrooper in the U.S. Army’s 82nd Airborne Division and was among those who parachuted into Normandy, France, on June 6, 1944 D-Day. The Allied landings in Nazi-occupied France on that fateful day would mark a turning point in World War II.

Saturday, the 83-year-old Columbia resident did a parachute jump at the Maytown Sport Parachute Club. He jumped with his son, Kevin D. Wallace Sr., 49, who followed his father into the 82nd Airborne Division in 1977.

Raymond Wallace said that because he was part of the 82nd Airborne Division, he had wanted to jump on his 82nd birthday, “but things didn’t plan out just right.”

So a few weeks ago, he raised the idea again and his son, well, jumped at the chance to jump with his father.

“I didn’t want to pass up a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity,” Kevin Wallace said.

In his own time in the Army, Kevin Wallace, who served as a combat engineer, said he made 51 training jumps, “but none of them measure up to the jump he made on D-Day.”

Raymond Wallace never talked much to his children about his harrowing experiences on D-Day and the days that followed.

“There was a lot of carnage,” he said, somberly. “And the way they died was horrible ... It was stuff you didn’t want to dwell on. Our freedom cost us more than a lot of people realize.”

Wallace’s company sent some 200 men into Normandy on D-Day; only 45 of those men came home.

Wallace was on a plane with 18 other paratroopers. He was 12th in line to jump out of the plane, but the man slated to follow him was superstitious. “He didn’t want to jump 13th because it was unlucky,” Wallace said.

But 13, Wallace said, is his lucky number (after the war, he and his wife, Hannah, had 13 children). So Wallace traded places with the man.

They jumped at 1:30 in the morning of June 6. They had trained hard, had waited anxiously and had thought they couldn’t wait to go. “And 20 minutes after I was on the ground, I was ready to go back to England,” Wallace said.

Because Wallace’s turn to jump was so late, he thinks his plane was only about 300 feet off the ground when he jumped. The plane had been hit by enemy fire and one of its engines was burning. Wallace said he never knew what happened to the first man to jump out of the plane, or the last three.

They were supposed to land near Sainte Mere-Eglise, but they were thrown about 20 miles off course. On the ground, Wallace met up with 14 other men, and they slowly headed north in the darkness. Their objective was to cut communication lines and hold bridges so the Germans couldn’t get reinforcements to the Normandy beaches.

They stayed together for several weeks, until, out of supplies, they received an order to proceed “every man for himself, and good luck,” Wallace said.

“My luck didn’t hold.”

At the end of June, he encountered German soldiers and, in a skirmish, his jaw was broken with a rifle. He was captured and was a prisoner of war for 10 months.

He had weighed 175 pounds when he left England. When he was liberated from a German prison camp near Leipzig in 1945, he weighed 98 pounds.

“You don’t realize what you can do if you have to,” Wallace said.

He is described by family members as a good and quiet man who doesn’t generally draw attention to himself.

“I don’t consider myself to be a hero in any way, shape or form,” Wallace said. “The true heroes are the ones who didn’t come home.”