Rapid City’s Wayne Brewster: First Wave, Omaha Beach
(US veterans salute at Omaha Beach military cemetery)
As dawn broke off the coast of Normandy on June 6, 1944, the greatest amphibious invasion of all time was unfolding. US Coastguardsman Gordon Lease of Rapid City, South Dakota, was right offshore trying to get materiel and troops to the battle zone. Army Cpt. Walter Marchand, later a doctor at the VA Hospital in Sturgis, was leading men ashore at Utah Beach.
On Omaha Beach, Army combat engineer Wayne Brewster of Rapid City was fighting his way through the battlefield. In his memoir, he describes wounded soldiers crying for help: “There was one young wounded soldier, in an exposed situation a few yards from where I was, his eyes pleading for help. He apparently couldn’t move, I asked him if the Medics had seen him and he said they had, so I was afraid to try to move him. About all I could do was try to pile up a few rocks around him, not much shelter but I hope it helped. He was still there the last I saw. One of our sergeants, so I was told, had a foot blown off, besides other injuries. The foot was only hanging by the Achilles tendon. He told the medics to cut it off, which they wouldn’t do, so he got out his knife and cut if off himself.”
Brewster remembers that he didn’t get off the beach until dusk, “and the dead were left where they died.” From Omaha Beach, Brewster fought his way through Normandy, then on to Paris, before entering the horrors of the Battle of the Bulge. With the 29th Infantry Division, he finally crossed the Rhine River.
