Marvin Bennett landed on D-Day ‘plus one’

Published 8:00 am Tuesday, June 6, 2023

When Marvin Bennett landed in Normandy on “D-Day plus one” — the day after the massive June 6, 1944, assault on German-held France in World War II — the pilot of the landing craft let his jeep out in water that was too deep. Bennett, who was sitting behind the wheel of the jeep, found himself submerged in the Atlantic Ocean.

“He drove his jeep off the front of the LST (landing ship, tank) and it sank,” said Bennett’s nephew, Marvin Lewis of Dalton. “Somebody threw him a rope to pull him to shore, but the jeep was lost. Otherwise, he probably would have drowned.”

Lewis said Bennett was in Europe for the duration of the war, but didn’t talk about it much. However, he did reveal some of his work after he joined up with his unit in the Army’s Signal Corps.

“Back then, they had to run wire from unit to unit to talk on the phones, and I don’t know how they didn’t all get killed,” Lewis pondered. “Because if you have to run the wire however many miles to connect units, all the Germans had to do was find the wire and follow it to find your unit.”

Bennett graduated from Dalton High School in 1929 or 1930, Lewis noted, back when students only went through the 11th grade. The morning after the Japanese sneak attack on Pearl Harbor of Dec. 7, 1941, Bennett got up early and was first in line at the draft board in Dalton. There was soon a long line behind him.

“He was 28 years old — just short of his 29th birthday on Dec. 14,” said Lewis. “He was single and an early riser, so on Monday morning (Dec. 8) he went down to the draft board and was first in line. He said by the time the place opened there were 12 to 15 guys behind him, but he was the first volunteer from Whitfield County following Pearl Harbor. He said it wasn’t a patriotic thing, but the thought of ‘I’m single, I’m 29 and I’m going (eventually).’”

Bennett was promoted to captain while training in England for the D-Day operation. After the war, he brought back a couple of phones his unit had used in the European campaign.

“You could hook them up with wire and crank the phone and it rang on the other end; I think they used a battery,” Lewis recalled. “As a child, we used to get them out and play with them. You could get somebody to hold the wire and crank it and it’d shock them.”

Bennett was stationed at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, for around three years after the war, and while there met his wife, Rebecca Oehler. Her grandparents were German, and she had a rare job for women during the war years and thereafter — she had trained as a civilian pilot and flew newly-built military aircraft from Lockheed in Marietta to Army air fields for deployment.

“During the war, for the men to be able to fight, there were a lot of women who worked for Lockheed — and presumably other aircraft companies as well — and would take the planes off the assembly line and fly them to wherever they were going and take the bus back to Marietta, then get on another plane (and make another flight somewhere),” explained Lewis. “I assume it was around the Southeast, but I don’t know that for a fact.”

After telling her future husband about the time she experienced engine trouble and had to land her plane in an Alabama corn field, Bennett — who was “very conservative,” Lewis said — told her if they were going to marry she must agree to give up flying. They went back to Germany from 1950 to ‘53 and their first son, Jay, was born there. Henry was born at Fort Benning in 1954. Bennett retired from the Army in the early 1960s as a lieutenant colonel and he and Rebecca settled in Dahlonega.

Another relative died in combat

One of Lewis’ second cousins, Rafe Hilliard Smith, was killed in action on April 8, 1945, four days after his 20th birthday and exactly one month before V-E (Victory in Europe) Day. Private First Class Smith was a 1943 graduate of Dalton High, enlisted in the Army after graduation and was deployed to Europe in the summer of 1944. Smith’s sister, Vondell Wilson, was 12 when “Hillard” lost his life while serving in Lippoldsberg, Germany. He was attached to H Company in the 413th Infantry Regiment of the 104th Infantry Division, according to fieldsofhonor-database.com.

“During the war I knew the things that was going on then, and I also have all kinds of papers they sent my mother and daddy,” said Wilson, age 90. “He wrote letters; in fact, I have one he wrote to my daddy — who worked in Savannah at a shipyard a couple of years during the war — just a few days before he got killed.”

Wilson and her next-oldest brother, Dan, were at home when they got the bad news.

“My mother was working the night shift at Crown Cotton Mill while my daddy was working in Savannah, and me and my brother was at home when they brought the telegram to our house, and we read the telegram,” she recalled. “My mother walked to work, but our neighbor next door could drive and he drove us to (the mill) to tell her. Of course, she came back home with us.”

Wilson remembered it was a “very sad time, and still is.”

“I still think about him, and I always go over on Memorial Day to the courthouse — I have for years and years,” she said. “We have a (memorial) flag over there for him, but I haven’t been able to find it the last year or so.”

In a few years, the family received a letter.

“The medic that attended to him wrote my parents and told them the town they were in when he was killed, and that he lived about 20 minutes after he was wounded,” she relayed. “We did have that much, to know that he didn’t suffer long. The medic said he was killed by a German sniper.”

Wilson and her husband, Joe, who still works at the family’s Dalton business, Wilson Insurance, traveled to Europe to see her brother’s grave.

“He’s buried in Holland near the German (border),” she said. “We got a driver and he drove us from Amsterdam down there. The first town in Germany you would come to past the cemetery is Aachen; I believe there’s 8,000 buried there (8,288 exactly).”

‘Very sad’

The grave is in Holland for a reason.

“Anyone killed in Europe during the war was buried in a temporary grave,” Lewis pointed out. “After the war, they were dug up and either reburied in one of the many military cemeteries in Europe or sent home to the states. I recall my grandmother telling me that Hilliard’s father, Lake, was very bitter about losing his oldest son. They offered him the choice of him being buried in Europe or being returned. The story I recall as a child is that Uncle Lake told them to bury him in Europe. His reasoning was that he would never be sure he got the right body back.”

Vondell Wilson affirmed the account, adding that the undertaker at the cemetery in Holland “told us it would have been 99% that it would have been him (after being disinterred).”

Lewis was asked his thoughts as Memorial Day approached last month.

“I’m proud of the fact that Uncle Marvin served, that he volunteered, even though he would have gone (through the draft) anyway,” he said. “I’m proud of Aunt Becky — how many women in the early 1940s would have done what she did (flying military aircraft)? And I’m sad about the fact that Hilliard was killed a month before the war was over. He was very personable and well-liked, and to lose that type of person at such a young age is very sad. And I reflect on the tens of thousands of kids who died.”

Lewis, who served as a first lieutenant, was commanding officer of the First Army Area CBR School (chemical, biological and radiological defense) during the Vietnam era. He’s reflective about Memorial Day.

“If you look at the people killed in a war, 98% of them are 18 to 20 years old,” he noted. “But World War II was something we had to do. If I was in that situation, I hope I would have volunteered and done what was necessary to win it. Since World War II, we have fought in a lot of unnecessary wars. I believe there should be a law that every politician’s son or daughter should participate in our wars.”