Charles Norman Shay is one of the few remaining US veterans of World War II, but as a Native American, the story of his people’s courage and sacrifice on the battlefield is little known.
Seventy-five years ago, Shay was a 19-year-old military medic on Omaha Beach, the bloodiest of the five Normandy sites picked for the D-Day landings.
Nearly 500 Native Americans fought alongside Allied soldiers to dislodge German forces from the French coast, marking the start of France’s liberation from its Nazi occupiers.
Photo: AFP
Some of them did not even have the right to vote in their home state, but decades later, their stories are finally coming to light.
After several years of discreet spiritual ceremonies with traditional garb, feathers and smoke, the first official Native American commemoration was held on Utah Beach in 2014.
It honored 14 Comanche “code talkers” who worked in their indigenous language, unintelligible to Germans or Japanese.
Eighty tribe members were expected to attend another Native American commemoration on Omaha Beach yesterday.
In 2017, Shay returned to the spot where he saved lives as a young medic for the dedication of a granite sculpture of a turtle, a symbol of longevity and wisdom.
At nearly 95, Shay is thought to be the last surviving Native American who participated in the D-Day landings, when his infantry division, called the “Big Red One” after the number on its insignia, was one of the first to hit the water.
He watched as friends fell from their boat, shot down by German gunfire. Others jumped into the sea, but were dragged under the water by their heavy equipment.
“It was every man for himself,” he told reporters, perched in a deckchair at the French home where he was being hosted in Bretteville-L’Orgueilleuse, a half-hour drive from Omaha Beach.
“I had to adjust my mind to seeing so many dead and wounded and helpless men, and once I was able to do this, I was able to function in the job I had been trained for, and that was to treat the wounded, to make them comfortable and to try to save the dying,” he said.
At home in Maine, members of the Native American Penobscot community called him “Little Muskrat,” an animal that, according to legend, saves people.
Thousands of kilometers away in Normandy, the nickname would turn out to be more fitting than ever.
“I landed in the water, up to my chest,” he recalled. “I had the beach under my feet. I made my way to the obstacles the Germans had placed in the water to hide behind ... for protection against the fire.”
Once he made it onto the beach, Shay said he “selected a spot where I could heal the wounded,” before going back into the water to pull the injured to shore.
“The tide was coming in very fast. I noticed there were many men lying on the beach where the water was coming in. I thought: ‘If somebody doesn’t help these men, they are going to drown,’” he said. “I put them on their backs, grabbed them under their arms, and tried to get them up to the high water line as best I could.”
An estimated 30,000 to 50,000 Native Americans fought in World War II, including 44,000 from the US and 5,000 from Canada, according to Harald Prins, a Dutch anthropologist at Kansas State University who cowrote a biography of Shay.
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