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WWII paratrooper from Valley remembers D-day combat jump
YOUNGSTOWN
Edwin “Doc” Morgan, a paratrooper with the Army’s 82nd Airborne Division, landed behind German lines at Normandy, France, several hours before ground troops hit the beaches on D-Day, June 6, 1944.
The D-Day offensive, the Battle of Normandy dubbed Operation Overlord, launched the invasion of German-occupied Western Europe during World War II that led to the surrender of Germany, ending the war in Europe.
But Morgan, who landed in a lowland flooded by the Germans near Sainte-Mere-Eglise around midnight June 5, almost drowned before the battle got started.
“When I jumped, I looked down and could see the moon [its reflection in the water] and when I looked up I could see the moon,” he said, reflecting on the event of 69 years ago.
Morgan, 95, a resident of Park Vista Retirement Community, is one of the few remaining WWII paratroopers. He said when he landed in the deep water, the wind caught his chute and was pulling him under. He used his leg knife and cut himself free of the chute but was not yet out of trouble.
“All you could see were tracer rounds as the Germans fired at us. A lot of guys didn’t make it,” he said.
Morgan eventually found what was left of his outfit, headed by Lt. Gen. James Gavin, who had developed tactics of airborne warfare and was later given command of the 82nd Airborne Division.
“We were there about 30 days. They only used us for combat until relief troops came,” he said.
Before his service in the war ended, Morgan had made two combat jumps, in Normandy and Holland, where he was seriously wounded requiring him to spend several months in a hospital in England.
He fought in campaigns in Africa and Italy and in the Battle of the Bulge, a German offensive between Dec. 16, 1944, and Jan. 25, 1945, in the Ardennes region in Belgium, France and Luxembourg.
During a German bombing run on Oct. 2, 1944, Morgan said he and five others manning machine guns were wounded.
“I laid there and watched the bombs exploding coming toward us. I turned my head and was hit in the right arm, hip and leg,” he said. He recovered in time to rejoin his unit for the Battle of the Bulge.
At the end of the war, Morgan’s unit had fought its way to the Elbe River where U.S. and Russian troops met, effectively cutting Germany in half.
“Suddenly, everything went quiet ... from boom, boom, boom to nothing. We didn’t know what was going on ... that the war was over,” Morgan said.
“The Germans surrendered to us by the thousands because they were afraid of what would happen to them if they surrendered to the Russians,” he said.
The war was over for Morgan, but he still carries some of the shrapnel in him, said his wife, the former Betty Green, who grew up in Girard and lived near Morgan in the Parkwood area of Girard.
“I didn’t like him then,” she said.
But when he returned from the war they were quickly married.
“We started dating in November 1945 and were married in February 1946. He had a lot of letters from girls, but I got him,” Betty said. The couple has two children, Donna Contrears and Ron Morgan, both in California.
When Morgan came home from the war, he learned welding and worked at Truscon Steel Co. in Youngstown for 19 years and retired from Wean United. His wife worked at Packard Electric’s Plant 12 in Warren and earlier at Niles Steel Products making incendiary bombs during the war.
The couple went to Europe on the 55th anniversary of D-Day with their children and toured the battle grounds and cemeteries where U.S. service personnel are buried The cemeteries are sad but beautiful, too, Betty said.
“If I had been killed, that’s where I would have wanted to be buried, with my comrades,” he said.
He also renewed an old acquaintance while on the tour. They stopped at a pub in England and a woman, seeing his 82nd Airborne jacket, asked if they knew Edwin Morgan.
“It was a woman he had known during the war. What are the chances?” Betty said.
Besides the shrapnel and a chest full of medals, including the Purple Heart and two stars on his jump wings and several campaign medals, he brought home a German parachute made of silk that a Warren tailor converted into Betty’s wedding dress. The unusual dress is now a part of the Historic Costume and Textile Collection at Ohio State University.
Morgan also brought back his memories of the war.
“After the war, no one talked about it,” he said. “We wanted to just let it go. But then, as we got older, we began to think that maybe the children wanted and needed to know ... and we began to talk.”