Youngstown vet shares memories of D-Day assault on Omaha Beach

RELATED: D-DAY 1944 70 YEARS LATER: AP was there as it happened

By WILLIAM K. ALCORN

alcorn@vindy.com

YOUNGSTOWN

John E. Bistrica’s memories of D-Day are as vivid today as if the Normandy invasion had happened yesterday, instead of 70 years ago.

It was between 7 and 8 a.m. on June 6, 1944, when, as a 20-year-old Army infantryman, he was part of the bloody first assault wave of the Normandy invasion to hit the Easy Red section of Omaha Beach as a member of “C” Co. of the 16th Infantry Regimental Combat Team.

“How could you not remember?” said Bistrica, 91, who with other D-Day survivors are guests of honor this weekend at the First Infantry Division’s McCormick Museum in Wheaton, Ill.

The museum is commemorating the 70th anniversary of World War II’s D-Day and honoring veterans Saturday.

“At the time, I was thinking, how did I get out of there? I still wonder. We were all just trying to stay alive and get back home,” Bistrica said of the invasion.

“The French don’t like the word ‘invasion.’ They refer to it as the Normandy Liberation. They told me that many times,” he said.

A 1942 graduate of The Rayen School who grew up on Norwood Avenue in the Brier Hill section of Youngstown, Bistrica said he planned to wear to the weekend’s activities his uniform — it still fits — that includes an Eisenhower “Ike” jacket loaded with his decorations.

He said he was looking forward to meeting guys and hoped to swap memories with assault infantrymen like himself.

But Bistrica said he feared he wouldn’t find many because they were either killed in the assault or have since died of old age.

He has many stories about the combat he endured as a member of “C” Co.

“You swore you could reach up and touch the shells from the Navy battleships as they were coming in. We were in neck-deep water and had to inflate our life preservers. The first dead GIs I saw were combat engineers,” he said.

On the beach, the German six-barrel rocket launchers sounded like lions roaring, and when he was on the ground he could hear rounds from German small-arms fire whizzing by, he said.

“You knew they were close,” Bistrica said.

But, he said, war is not all about killing and dying; there also were some touching events, even some that were funny.

He said the most valuable decoration on his “Ike” jacket is an unofficial homemade, knitted red, white and blue patch given to him by a little girl in a small town south of Paris a few weeks after Normandy.

“We were riding on tanks and had stopped. A woman held up her little girl — she couldn’t have been more than 3 or 4 — who handed the patch to me and said in perfect English: ‘Thank you, American soldier.’”

“I wanted to get off the tank and kiss the woman, but we moved on before I could,” said Bistrica.

He thought he still might get that kiss when, two years before the 60th anniversary, French television learned of the story and tried unsuccessfully to find the woman or the little girl. It was not to be, he said.

Among Bistrica’s decorations are the Combat Infantry Badge, Bronze Star Medal, French and Belgian Croix de Guerre, and the French 50th Anniversary and Legion of Honor medals.

He chuckled as he told the story about two young women in a Red Cross truck who drove up to his outpost and asked where the front line was.

“I asked which one, U.S. or German. I told them the U.S. line was about two hedgerows back. They got out fast. I didn’t get a donut,” he said.

During the Allied forces’ drive across Europe, a shell exploded near him, giving him a concussion and causing him to be separated from his unit near Stolberg, Germany. He was picked up by the 3rd Armored Division, and when he asked where “C” Co. was, they sent him to a medical unit. He eventually ended up in a hospital in Southhampton, England, and out of the war because of damage to his hearing.

Unknown to him, he was listed as missing in action, and his family in Youngstown was notified as such.

Drafted in October 1942 and shipped overseas in November 1943, Bistrica was in the Army 33 months, 25 of which were overseas, before being discharged in December 1945 as a private first class.

He came home on the Queen Mary with 11,000 other troops, arriving in the United States on Dec. 19, 1945, and in Youngstown on Dec. 22, 1945, just in time to celebrate Christmas with his family and friends.

It wasn’t until he got home that he realized he had been listed as MIA — and that his family learned that he was OK.

Bistrica, a member of Sts. Peter and Paul Croatian Roman Catholic Church, returned to Commercial Shearing, where he had worked before the war. After being laid off, he was employed at General Fireproofing for 11 years, but because he kept getting laid off he quit and started a carpentry business.

He married his childhood sweetheart, Ann Marie Misic, in the summer of 1947. She was a registered nurse working at St. Elizabeth Hospital and a graduate of Ursuline High School.

They had four children: Roseann Reames of Eastlake, Joseph of Boardman and Michael of Marietta, Ga.; and several grandchildren and great-grandchildren. A son, John Jr., is deceased.

Bistrica’s living room is filled with memorabilia and pictures reminding him of D-Day and WWII. He is a member of the Army’s 1st Division Big Red One Association and has attended many of its reunions, and of American Legion Post 15 in Poland. He has returned to France several times, including the 50th anniversary of the invasion.

During a battlefield tour in Europe, they walked down to Omaha Beach. “No one said anything. We were all wrapped up in our own memories,” he said.

Bistrica can’t forget and said he doesn’t want others to either: “If we didn’t do what we had to do, maybe we’d be speaking German or Japanese. Maybe there wouldn’t be a United States.”