Editor’s note: As the 82nd anniversary of D-Day approaches, The Sun Times News is honored to share a remarkable series of stories about Chelsea-area veterans whose lives were forever shaped by World War II. Drawn from extensive interviews, letters, photographs, and local history research by Cynthia Furlong Reynolds, these accounts preserve the voices of men who witnessed some of the war’s most defining moments, from Omaha Beach to the skies over Normandy.
Merle Barr, Jr.
Author’s note: Merle Standish Barr (1924-2012) was the great-great-grandson of Chelsea’s founder, Elisha Congdon. He landed on Omaha Beach as a first lieutenant, but quickly made captain in the Army Corps of Engineers. Merle wrote home frequently, describing how his unit fought Germans, built bridges, detonated mines, liberated a slave labor camp, and participated in the de-militarization of Germany. Fortunately, his family kept his letters.
“Our generation grew up fast.
“Movies can begin to show the horrors of war—the sounds, the crashes, the explosions, and the sights of bodies blown apart and men wounded and dying. But movies can’t convey the smells. Blood. Gasoline. Phosphorous. Cordite. Unwashed bodies. Decaying bodies. Dying bodies. And fear. Unless you’ve been in the midst of battle, you can never truly understand what it is like on a gut level. I still lurch straight up in bed sometimes in the dark of night, smelling those smells. I don’t think a combat soldier can ever really get them out of his system, even decades after the war.
“We had no idea when or where we were headed when we boarded a vessel and put out to sea on June 3, 1944. Four days later, we landed on Omaha Beach at 6:40 a.m., seventy minutes after the initial landings. I was the second man off the starboard side. I assume about a half-dozen men got off behind me. We sank into water up to our chins, weighed down with packs, guns, and ammunition. I looked back just in time to see our landing craft explode—it had gotten a direct hit with an 8-millimeter shell. I saw two of the sailors who’d wished us luck hanging over the railing. They were dead, their bodies in flames…