HANCOCK COUNTY — U.S. Army Pvt. John Torok landed in France about two months after D-Day, which on this date 75 years ago began the Allied liberation of German-occupied Europe.
The member of George Patton’s Third Army, which at that time was chasing German units across southern France, climbed a water tower to scout the land ahead.
It wasn’t what was on the ground that posed an immediate threat, however. A German fighter plane soon zoomed past him during his climb. It was so close that he could look in the pilot’s face.
The fighter started to turn around and head back toward him. John looked down. It was too far to jump, and he didn’t have enough time to climb back down.
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Click here to purchase photos from this galleryHe prayed.
Instead of firing, the pilot waved the plane’s wings at him before roaring off.
John Torok can no longer tell this story, having passed away near the turn of the century after surviving World War II and living a long life. But the account lives on through descendants like his nephew, Ronald Torok of Greenfield. Oral histories and family lore are increasingly becoming the mediums for World War II chronicles now that it’s been three-quarters of a century since the climactic invasion that eventually helped end the war.
In history’s biggest amphibious invasion, on that fateful June 6, some 160,000 Allied forces came ashore to launch Operation Overlord to wrest Normandy from Nazi control. More than 4,000 Allied forces were killed on that day alone. Nearly half a million people were killed on both sides by the time the Allies liberated Paris in August 1944.
It’s unclear exactly how many D-Day veterans are alive today. The survivors are now in their 90s or 100s.
Of the 73,000 Americans who took part, just 30 were scheduled to be in France for this year’s anniversary. The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs estimates that about 348 American World War II veterans die every day. All but three of the 177 French forces involved in D-Day are gone.
The same can be said for the troops who came ashore in the much less heralded invasion of southern France, which took place in August.
Every veteran who was in France in the summer of 1944, like John Torok, had a story. But other than the close call with the German fighter plane, Ronald said his Uncle John didn’t speak much of his experiences in the war.
“It was just a look of pure joy when he told me the water tower story,” Torok said. “But, like a lot of veterans, he just didn’t want to talk. It was a painful experience. He didn’t want to go into detail about World War II.”
It wasn’t the only joyful story for the family to come out of the war that was passed on to Ronald, however. John’s brother and Ronald’s uncle, Steve, also served in the Army during World War II. He had landed in Italy. The brothers’ respective divisions advanced into Germany and one day Steve looked down from a mountain on what he learned was the Third Army. Knowing his brother John was attached to Third Army, he asked a superior if he could head down for a quick visit. Steve was given an hour. He jumped in a jeep, drove into the valley and happened to find John standing in front of his tent. Ronald fondly recalled the looks of joy on his uncles’ faces in the photographs taken of the brief reunion in the midst of the world’s deadliest conflict.
“They just had a few minutes to spend together in the middle of a war,” he said.
Ronald said he also remembers John telling him about the trip he took with his son long after the war to revisit the places the Third Army advanced. While John joked about trying to find the many foxholes he had dug, he was serious about the calm he found all those years later.
“He said it brought back some peace and tranquility to him — to see what had been ravaged by war back at peace and functional again,” Ronald said.
Ronald’s father, Franklin Torok, served in the U.S. Navy in the the Pacific in World War II. He and his brothers were the sons of Hungarian immigrants raised in Lansing, Michigan.
Ronald, who served in the U.S. Army National Guard for six years, said he’s proud of his family’s commitment to the country.
“They call it the Greatest Generation,” Torok said. “You look at the brutality of the Nazi regime — what would it be like if they had succeeded?”
Jeremy Oesterling, who lives outside of Cumberland in Hancock County, was a guardian on Indy Honor Flight’s first excursion to Washington, D.C., several years ago and has been involved with the organization ever since. The nonprofit group takes about 75 to 80 U.S. military veterans on trips to the nation’s capital two to three times a year.
Oesterling estimated that the first 10 Indy Honor Flights were made up of mostly World War II veterans. After that, there started to be far less.
“It was like somebody just shut the valve off,” he said.
Lately, the flights have had anywhere from only two to 10 World War II veterans, Oesterling said.
He remembers his first Honor Flight well and the World War II veteran he was accompanying. The former U.S. Navy sailor served on a destroyer in the Pacific and showed Oesterling photographs of the wreckage from Japanese kamikaze pilots’ planes that attempted to crash into his ship.
“I learned a lot about history, learned a lot about what he went through,” Oesterling said.
Kurt Vetters, a U.S. Army veteran and vice commander of the Dale E. Kuhn American Legion Post 119 in Greenfield, said it’s imperative to preserve the firsthand experiences from World War II.
“If people don’t know that, it’s easy to lose who we are,” he said.
One of the biggest challenges on that front, he continued, is the abundance of people coming into the U.S. whose families were not in the country during the war.
“I think the best way to do that is to get them to become interested in the stories, realize that our stories overlap,” Vetters said. “…We were the bulwark that really stopped world domination.”
Ann Bowyer of Markleville regularly attends Dale E. Kuhn American Legion Post 119 meetings with her husband, Ralph, a Vietnam War veteran. She lost two of her uncles in World War II before she was even born.
Her uncle Sam Calabria was killed in the sinking of the USS Cushing off Savo Island in 1942. His remains were never recovered, and his name is among those listed on a memorial wall in the Philippines’ capital of Manila.
Bowyer’s uncle Joe Calabria was killed during the Battle of the Bulge, the last-gasp German offensive that began in December 1944 and lasted more than five weeks.
She said her family didn’t speak much of the losses.
“I knew I had two uncles killed in World War II, but that was the extent of it,” she said.
She learned much of her uncles’ stories by conducting her own research. Gaining the knowledge was bittersweet, she said.
“It makes you appreciate more what the veterans did, I think, when you have a tragedy like this strike your family,” Bowyer said. “And it’s sometimes kind of hard reading this stuff, wondering what would they have been like.”
Getting to know more about the family members she never got to meet was ultimately worthwhile, she said.
“I think they’re due,” she said. “They should be honored for what they did. They gave the ultimate sacrifice, with no questions asked. To them, they were doing their job.”
The Associated Press contributed this this story.
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Famed war correspondent and Hoosier native Ernie Pyle landed on the invasion beaches at Normandy the day after the first troops came ashore. He wrote three dispatches in the next week about the carnage he saw. “Now that it is over it seems to me a pure miracle that we ever took the beach at all,” he wrote in his first column after landing at Omaha beach. “For some of our units it was easy, but in this special sector where I am now our troops faced such odds that our getting ashore was like my whipping Joe Louis down to a pulp.”
The third column in his series can be found today on Page A4.
Also inside: “After 75 years, a debt we still owe,” an editorial, Page A4.
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Today is the 75th anniversary of the invasion of France by Allied forces in World War II. It was the climactic military action of the war, because it immediately began pushing German forces — which had occupied almost all of Europe for nearly five years — onto the defensive.
The vast majority of the 160,000 or so troops who landed on the first day came via sea, landing on beaches along the Normandy coast code named Utah, Omaha, Gold, Sword and Juno. American troops landed at Utah and Omaha beaches. Troops at Omaha Beach suffered the worst losses.
About 4,000 Allied forces died on what has been called “The Longest Day.” German losses are imprecise, but they are believed to number 4,000 to 9,000.
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