Laredo veterans reflect quietly on D-Day landings
Web Posted: 06/06/2006 12:00 AM CDT
Sig Christenson
Express-News Military Writer
mysanantonio.com
Many things likely will cross Luis Martinez's mind today as he visits a plaza across from Laredo's old downtown post office.
It's his wife's birthday, but it's also the anniversary of D-Day.
He was there 62 years ago.
A band of buddies from Laredo were, too. They may meet at the plaza, where fallen heroes are honored, and Martinez, 91, might talk about that day.
"But not too much," he said.
As they reflect, the voices of two Laredo D-Day survivors often fade to a whisper. The men tend to play down their roles in the invasion and, perhaps, try not to think too much about it.
They were strong, with roots in the Great Depression. Poverty was common among Hispanics on the border, said Maggie Rivas-Rodriguez, director of the U.S. Latino and Latina World War II Oral History Project at the University of Texas at Austin.
"I think generally the World War II generation had been hardened by so many of their childhood experiences," she said. "They grew up in poverty and a lack of opportunities, so when they were in the war, they may have been 18 or 19 years but they were a very old 18 or 19 or 20 years old. They were a very tough group of people, and they tell us that over and over."
Martinez planted corn and cotton. He also spent two years in the Civilian Conservation Corps.
Francisco Guerra was a toddler when his dad, Refugio, died. The family came to Laredo, where he shined shoes and threw the San Antonio Express as a carrier.
They'd cross paths again.
Martinez, a retired Kelly AFB civil service worker, landed on Utah Beach the afternoon of D-Day. Guerra, now an 87-year-old retired accountant, arrived on Omaha Beach two days later.
Omaha was still hot. Nazi snipers worked it, occasionally picking off GIs. Artillery rounds fired from Allied ships whizzed overhead, as did U.S. planes.
Guerra quickly dug a foxhole and watched for snipers. There was no missing the bodies of dead Germans and Americans that littered the beach.
"I thought maybe that was going to happen to me," he said. "And when you see them dead, it's bad. You say, 'Why do we have wars? Why do people have to kill each other?'"
Five thousand ships and seven divisions struck Normandy, with the first waves of soldiers landing at 6:30 a.m. June 6, 1944. There were 176,000 troops and 4,000 ship-to-shore craft that landed at five French beaches.
British and U.S. battleships pounded the entrenched Germans, but that firepower didn't spare GIs and Tommies from fierce fighting.
D-Day was a generic term for the start of a military operation, but it became forever linked to the landings. It's probably better known now than the title of the massive operation, Overlord, but by either name the offensive was the turning point in Europe during World War II.
By its end in August, the dug-in Nazis had been pushed off the Normandy peninsula. The Allies were on their way to victory.
A Laredo native, Martinez drove a heavy truck full of equipment and ammunition. He said Utah was quiet when he landed, but the beach still gave him a case of nerves.
"I made it though the day, but I don't know how," he said.
Guerra maintained equipment with the 74th Ordnance Battalion, a unit attached to a combat engineer brigade. Born on the other side of the river, in Nuevo Laredo, Mexico, he became a U.S. citizen while in the Army.
A brother, Luis B. Guerra, never got that chance. He was killed in the South Pacific while fighting the Japanese. Francisco Guerra got the news while training for the invasion in England.
Guerra thinks about his brother and the guys with the 29th Infantry Division who cleared the way for him.
Like Martinez, he married and has children and grandchildren. He earned a degree from St. Mary's University and has lived to old age.
But 62 years after D-Day, he wants folks to know one thing.
"Don't consider me a hero."
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