Tolley Fletcher was just 19 years old on June 6, 1944, when he manned the Bofors 40-millimeter anti-aircraft gun on a wooden submarine chaser. He was escorting the Higgins Boats that were ferrying troops of the U.S. Army's 4th Infantry Division onto Utah Beach.
Many things about that momentous morning, when Allied forces landed on the beaches of Nazi-occupied Normandy in France, have stayed with him through the decades.
"The way you feel when those 12-inch shells from the German shore batteries start landing," said Fletcher, of Denham Springs. "The shrapnel was landing on the deck and it was close. I was nervous but I was surprised that it didn't bother me as much as I thought it would."
Visitors to the National World War II Museum gather for the 80th Anniversary of D-Day. (Photo by Brett Duke, The Times-Picayune)
Fletcher was one of 10 World War II combat veterans marking the 80th anniversary of the D-Day landings at the National WWII Museum's commemoration in New Orleans on Thursday morning. The U.S. Navy veteran was one of just three in attendance who were involved in Operation Overlord, the code name for the invasion.
At 99, he is the only living Louisianan who took part in the landings.
The ceremonies in began at 6:30 a.m. with a remembrance gathering of mostly veterans and their family members laying roses at a section of the Nazi's infamous Atlantic Wall. The Utah Beach Museum at Sainte-Marie-du-Mont, in France, gifted the concrete section of the defensive barrier to the New Orleans museum in 2011.
At 9 a.m., the band of the Blue and Gray Division, the 29th Infantry Division of the Virginia Army National Guard, played at the Battle Barksdale Parade Ground. The band's division was one of the hardest hit on D-Day, suffering over 1,000 casualties at Omaha Beach.
Visitors to the National World War II Museum gather for the 80th Anniversary of D-Day. (Photo by Brett Duke, The Times-Picayune)
A formal procession at 11 a.m. included Fletcher and his fellow veterans and was followed by an open house exhibition featuring the museum's "Living History Corps," a group of reenactors staging interactive events from D-Day.
Louis Michel, an Air Force veteran of the 2003 Iraqi Freedom campaign, said he brought his kids, Emma, 12, and Kale, 10, from St. Tammany Parish for the ceremonies on the spur of the moment after his son saw it on the news and said he wanted to go.
"They're both starting to catch onto history and how important it is," he said.
The first of the two days of D-Day commemoration culminated in a keynote lecture from Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Rick Atkinson, whose works include the Liberation Trilogy covering the Allied Powers in the Second World War.
The symposium on Friday in the museum's Liberation Pavilion will focus on the defeat of Nazism in Europe and the lessons learned, said Maggie Hartley, director of public engagement at the museum.
"It is really an opportunity to remember what happened on D-Day but also to educate about what happened after the beaches," she said. That includes special talks on the two-month campaign after D-Day through Normandy and other parts of France to finally liberate Paris on Aug. 19, 1944.
The Michels were among about 1,000 visitors to the museum for Thursday's events, Hartley said.
The Liberation Pavilion opened in November. It was the seventh and final major portion of the $420 million museum project that had grown over two decades from the initial $1 million exhibition focused only on D-Day. The project was the brainchild of historians Nick Mueller and Stephen Ambrose and celebrates its 24th anniversary this year.
Another battle
The D-Day action was not Fletcher's first landing of the war.
He also survived the Nazi's shore guns as a crewman on the battleship USS New York, which provided support for the Allied invasion of North Africa, Operation Torch, on Nov. 8, 1942. Later, he was also in combat against German coastal artillery near Casablanca.
Fletcher, whose family had survived the Great Depression as sharecroppers in Sherburne, in Pointe Coupee Parish, joined the Navy at age 17, three weeks after the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor.
"Three weeks of boot camp and the next day I was on the Battleship New York," he said. "Talk about a change for someone who the biggest thing I'd ever been on was a pirogue boat."
Fletcher's story is one that has been preserved by the museum in interactive recordings enhanced by artificial intelligence that allow visitors to question veterans about their experiences. The collection, called "Voices from the Front Line" was curated by the museum's multimedia historian Hannah Dailey.
Kim Guise, the museum's head curator, said there are other recently acquired D-Day highlights that she hopes visitors will check out.
They include the Medal of Honor citation for Walter Ehlers, who fought a series of actions in Normandy on June 9-10 under heavy German fire. The Forbes Rare and Iconic Gallery, which opened in March, also exhibits the burial flag of Ehlers' brother, Roland, who died on Omaha beach on D-Day.
Fletcher came home to Louisiana after the war. He worked for a chemical plant near Baton Rouge for more than two decades until the fumes drove him to instead use his carpentry skills and become a furniture restorer. He competed in the National Senior Games — known as the Senior Olympics — for 12 years until he was 84.
"I have always been thankful that not a soul got a scratch in either ship I was on despite shells falling all around us," he said. "Man, we had some experiences over there."
