Today, June 6 is the 70th anniversary of D-Day, the day of the Allied landing in Normandy, France during World War II. D-Day was not a one day event, but rather a fight that continued for 10 weeks until August 20, to clear out northern France of enemy troops, re-open ports, and establish a supply line and depot to support the Allied advance into Europe.
My father and mother-in-law are D-Day veterans. PFC Egon Pettersson of Company D of the 342 General Services Engineering Regiment immigrated to the United States from Sweden in 1937 and although not yet a citizen and still learning to speak English, signed up to serve at age 28 to do his part for his new country. He became a naturalized citizen on June 19,1942. His duties were as a carpenter with a rifle, building ports, bridges, roads, and fortifications as needed by the advancing army. To the day he died in 1993, he grew flowers for the wholesale cut flower market in Boston.
Captain Neta Reinecke, who grew up in a rural town of 400 souls in southern Minnesota and spoke German as a small girl, had left that small town for the big city of Minneapolis and was a supervising nurse in the maternity ward of a major hospital in early 1942. Soon after Pearl Harbor, she was called into an office at her hospital and told she had been drafted into the US Army. For the next four years, she cared not for new mothers and their babies, but for blown apart and too often dying young men in an Evacuation Hospital, American and German alike, from Normandy to Czechoslovakia, as Patton’s Third Army advanced across Europe. She could not return to caring for young mothers and their babies after the war. On every Christmas Eve, she would remember the 22 men who died in her care on that night during the Battle of the Bulge. She was recognized for her meritorious service with a Bronze Star medal.
