For Seniors : Memories of D-day and Forgotten Heroes

Everything Barney Oldfield ever learned, he learned from the movies. He even made it into “Ripley’s Believe It or Not” by seeing all the movies that came out between late 1936 and the end of 1937. For a kid from a small town in Nebraska, the Saturday night movie was the biggest thing in life.

Until June 6, 1944--D-day, the Allied invasion of Normandy, the biggest military operation yet and the turning point of the war in Europe.

Oldfield didn’t see any action on the front lines but he might as well have.

Col. Barney Oldfield U.S.A.F. (Ret.), 85, of Westwood, had the unique job as the liaison between the military and the war correspondents. A public relations man with the most important campaign in history.

His job was twofold: Before the invasion he had to satiate reporters hungry for tidbits on the rumored invasion and, when it was on, he had to figure out how to move 100 million words out of Normandy--without modern luxuries such as fax machines and satellite telephones.

“One of the many problems was the question (of) which reporter had the right to the Normandy dateline,” Oldfield recalled.

“That was settled when a journalist named Robert Reuben took two carrier pigeons with leg capsules, one in each hand holding the wings down, and parachuted with the 101st Airborne onto Carentan at 3:30 a.m. on June 6. Reuben (of the Reuters news agency) had decided to gamble on carrier pigeons as part of his personal communications equipment. At impact he let the pigeons go. A call was directed to me and the voice on the other end said, ‘We got some pigeons here with leg capsules, can we open them?’ Well, when they did they saw the words ‘Landed Normandy Reuben Reuters (sic)’ written on cigarette rolling papers,” Oldfield said.

One problem solved.

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Oldfield remembers the names and spellings of every correspondent he ever met and every town he visited. He still has that way of talking, which a generation of the great journalists share. It is a kind of knowing that seems to say, “I was a part of history that could only be told through the power of words and pictures.”

So listen as Oldfield tells and tells.

“Fifty-eight correspondents were selected to be on the first wave for the invasion of Normandy,” he said, recalling a grim task in the days before the invasion. “In May, 1944, I was told to secure some apartments in an obscure section of London. The correspondents were instructed to come to this address alone. I was there in one of the apartments--no furniture--with a typewriter and asked them their telephone numbers so that they can be told when to go and I also told them the items they could take with them.

“I told them they had to understand if they leaked information they could die. They weren’t above the fray; they were part of it. Then I had to ask them to sit down at the typewriter and write their own obituaries. Ernie Pyle of Scripps-Howard had a premonition that he would be killed and when he wrote his obit I remember he said, ‘. . . and when this happens’--not ‘if’--’please tell my syndicate manager and have him tell my wife, not the military.’ He died in the Pacific and I never had to handle that one.”

Before the invasion there was speculation that it was imminent. Many news stories talked about how “sorrow will come to a million homes.” Oldfield did the advance work for a visit from President Eisenhower, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, British Gen. Bernard Montgomery and U.S. Gen. Omar Bradley to the troops waiting in England for the order to invade. Oldfield remembers how Eisenhower told the soldiers they would be given the best chance to get on shore and not to be dismayed by the rumors. There were smaller moments at this visit too.

“The 101st Airborne had a display of weapons. Churchill asked Eisenhower how many yards the 81 mm mortar would reach and Eisenhower said 3,000. One of the soldiers piped up and said ‘3,250.’ Eisenhower turned to him and said, ‘Son, you’re not going to make a liar out of me in front of the prime minister for a lousy 250 yards.’ ”

Oldfield goes on.

“Churchill had a cold. There were 9,000 troops standing at attention in front of him. He told them to break ranks and he got up on the hood of a Jeep. He took off his bowler hat and out of his mouth came the words I will never forget: ‘I stand before you with no unrealized ambitions except to see Adolf Hitler wiped off the face of the earth.’ The troops went crazy.”

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Once the invasion was on, Oldfield used his ingenuity to ensure words and pictures made it out.

To get the film back from the many photographers who risked their lives on the beaches, Oldfield had courier boats and special canvas bags with red stripes on them. The order was if you saw the bag, throw it on the boat.

He also distributed condoms to press and Army Signal Corps photographers, but not for what you might think.

“History will always owe a debt to these contraceptives, at least, the ones used according to our directions. Each cameraman was advised to drop his completed film pack into one of these rubber receptacles and close it tight with a knot. This would provide the negatives with a raincoat of sorts to ward off seepage or splashing salt water.”

Today, 50 years after D-day, Oldfield is launching yet another campaign. He wants to publicize the Nebraska Scholarship Fund, endowed in honor of four men from Nebraska who died on Omaha Beach in the first hours of the invasion: Privates 1st Class Marcellino Shata, Paul Scott Rodstrom and Lester J. Horn and Corp. Herbert Leonard, technician 4th grade. They were four of the 2,132 Allied troops who died on the first day of the invasion.

Said Oldfield: “It ain’t about great patriotic giants. It’s about the little guys who stay in a position that they know is untenable. They’re the ones who win the war.”