'This is it. This is D-Day.'

By WILLIAM K. ALCORN

alcorn@vindy.com

YOUNGSTOWN

When Irving “Irv” Lev, an Army Air Corps B-17 Flying Fortress bomber navigator, arrived at what he assumed was a routine briefing for that day’s mission, he got the surprise of his life.

The date was June 6, 1944.

“This is it. This is D-Day,” Lev said the briefing officer announced.

That stark news plunged Lev and his crew and hundreds of others of the 452nd Bomb Group into the heart of the historic Allied Forces invasion of Normandy, France.

Young men from the Mahoning Valley who landed on Normandy’s beaches helped change the course of World War II in Europe.

D-Day, four years in the planning and called Operation Overlord, was the Allied invasion that marked the beginning of the end of World War II, the eventual fall of Nazi Germany and the liberation of Europe.

More than 425,000 Allied and German troops were killed, wounded or went missing during the Battle of Normandy.

“We did three missions that day flying at low altitude knocking out German artillery and supply lines and personnel. We dropped our bombs, turned around and went back across the English Channel and re-armed and looked for targets,” Lev said.

Lev’s son, Douglas Lev, researched the activities of his father’s unit, the 452nd. In addition to strategic targets such as factories in Germany, it supported ground forces and helped prepare for the Normandy invasion by bombing German weapons sites, bridges and other targets in France.

The 452nd struck coastal German defenses on D-Day and, later in the war, received a Distinguished Unit Citation for action April 7, 1945, when despite vigorous fighter attacks and heavy flak, it accurately bombed a jet-fighter base at Kaltenkirchen, Germany.

Douglas’s father, Irv, 96, a 1940 graduate of Youngstown Woodrow Wilson High School, was one of four Lev brothers who served in the military during World War II. Besides Irv, they were Milton, Army Air Corps; Harry, Navy Seabees; and Edward. His youngest brother, Danny, fought in the Korean War.

“All of us made it back, and none of us were injured. But I often wondered about our parents, who immigrated in 1913 from Russia, how worried they must have been,” Lev said.

Lev said he doesn’t remember being afraid during combat even though he had a number of close calls.

“I don’t think the war changed me at all. I was gung-ho. I wanted to kill the Germans,” Lev added.

“My plane was never shot down, but on several occasions, we had to leave formation and go back to base after being hit by flak. Once we came back with only two engines operating and considered ditching in the English Channel,” he said.

After graduating from the University of Southern California at Berkley on the GI Bill, Lev came back to Youngstown to help in his father’s business.

He and his late wife, the former Alice Raful, originally of Newton Falls, who was executive director of the Youngstown Area Development Corp., a minority business and community development agency, had three children – Steven of Atlanta, Roselyn Malloy of Maryland and Douglas – along with five grandchildren and seven great-grandchildren.

Alice’s family had movie theaters in Cleveland and then Newton Falls, where she spent most of her childhood. About 1941, the family moved to Youngstown and built the Newport Theater on the city’s South Side. In 1988, she was inducted into the Ohio Women’s Hall of Fame as a “community organizer and advocate for social justice.”