Reviews
D-Day Remembered: A Veteran’s Story
Omaha Beach and Beyond: The Long March of Sergeant Bob Slaughter
By John Robert Slaughter
Zenith Press, 288 pages, $26.95
Reviewed by Karen Adams
It has been many years since a tall, skinny teenager named Bob Slaughter lied about his age in order to join the Army and go off to fight in World War II. That lie changed his life, a life he was lucky to keep, for when 16-year-old citizen soldier John Robert Slaughter left Roanoke, Virginia, in 1941, he eventually landed in hell.
Now 83, Slaughter has published his long-awaited memoir, "Omaha Beach and Beyond: The Long March of Sergeant Bob Slaughter." Slaughter’s journey is one stirring chapter after another: The stateside training, which prepared him to join the 29th Ranger Battalion (whose motto was "29, Let’s Go!"). The ocean crossing, uneventful until his troop ship disastrously collided with another and caused the deaths of 332 British sailors. The grueling training in England. The "rough ride to hell" – the English Channel crossing and the D-Day invasion. The death march through Normandy to St.-Lo, "the city of ruins." The end of the war. And the return home, to Roanoke, where he tried to forget it all.
And to Bedford, the town that lost 19 young men on D-Day, and where now stands the National D-Day Memorial, a tribute that Slaughter helped make a reality.
On June 6, 1944, he was among the first to land on Omaha Beach. Slaughter describes with chilling clarity what it was like on that historic cloudy day, when the eyes of the world were upon him. One private, in the water and heading toward shore, shouted to him, "Slaughter, are we going to get through all of this?" The author writes, "To tell the truth, I thought we were all going to die."
He then describes how he and his squad "had to run through a gauntlet of chattering machine guns that sent strings of fiery tracer bullets crisscrossing our front. . . . What scared me most was the screeching and booming of the German artillery and mortars zeroing in at the shoreline." When he later removed his jacket, there was a bullet hole through it. But, miraculously, no injury.
Yet for those who survived the beach, there was more to come: the long, harrowing journey into Normandy, along the dreaded hedgerows, where the enemy lurked. Slaughter’s account of his slow walk inland is as gripping as the nightmare on the beach. When he and a few spirit-shattered buddies finally emerged 42 days later, still wearing everything they had put on in England, down to their underwear and socks, their "shaggy, dusty hair, haggard faces, and sunken eye sockets gave evidence that we had about reached our limit." For, as Slaughter writes: "No American soldiers had endured more than the survivors of the D-Day invasion and the dogged battles for the Norman hedgerows."
All these years later, Slaughter looks back at the largest land, sea and air invasion in the history of the world and thanks God that he lived through it all. Like thousands of others, he left home a boy, was tested beyond imagining, survived, and came home a world-weary adult.
He writes: "[O]rdinary men and women can do extraordinary feats if they believe the cause is great." The National D-Day Memorial, and now this powerful book, will never let us forget that.
Karen Adams is the author of historical fiction for young people, including the D-Day serial "Across Two Oceans: A Story of World War II."
