Herald and Review from Decatur, Illinois • Page 4

A4 NATIONWORLD Decatur, Illinois Sunday, June 5, 1994 xv DWIGHT D. EISENHOWER Supreme Commander, Allied Expeditionary Force ERWIN ROMMEL Field marshal in charge of defense of Europe north sector mm Hi aujs: 52 SERVICE: Commander of troops guarding Hitler at start of war. Led Panzers through 0 AGE: 53 SERVICE: Trained tank battalions in World War I. Promoted to brigadier general in 1941, then major general and lieu XX 4 f. Ax VS xxw iv French lines in 1940.

Was known as "The Desert Fox" after leading Afrika Korps' victory in North Africa finally losing to Montgomery's troops. His advice to reserve strong forces for counterattacks was ignored in planning for European invasion. Implicated in plot to kill Hitler, and committed suicide by poison. tenant general the next year. Promoted over 366 others to commander of American forces in Europe in June 1942.

Commanded campaigns in North Africa, Sicily and Italy, as well as D-Day. After the war, served as president of Columbia University, chief of NATO and president of the United States. DIED: 1969. xx XNSv Nxv x- x. Ovxx file photo IN THE LINE OF FIRE: Paratroopers from the American 101st Airborne Division land behind Utah Beach during the Normandy invasion.

Some Americans fell into the sea or drowned in land flooded by the Germans. Others fell far from the mark behind enemy lines. OMAR BRADLEY Commander, U.S. 1st Army KARL RUDOLF GERD VON RUNDSTEDT German commander in chief for the West Zm if BlfflM Mm lid AGE: 41 SERVICE: At start of war, commandant of Infantry School at Fort Benning, Ga. First commanded 82nd and 28th divisions, and as AGE: 68 SERVICE: Was head of Army Group that defeated France.

He commanded Many French still harbor hatred for old enemies By MORT ROSENBLUM AP Special Correspondent if then II Corps in North Africa administered key defeat for Germans at Bizerte, Tunisia, and led his forces in Sicily. Was given command of 1st Army in 1943; led men ashore at Normandy, and on to Paris. Given command of 12th Army Group, largest force ever under one commander. DIED: 1981. German southern wing in invasion of Soviet Union, but was dismissed when forced to retreat.

Was brought back to prepare to defend against invasion of France replaced again. Returned to fight the Battle of the Bulge. BDIED: 1953. MILES CHRISTOPHER DEMPSEY Commander, British 2nd Army BERNARD LAW MONTGOMERY Field commander, D-Day forces while still alive; loved ones beaten and starved. "My kids say we should move on, that Germany is different," she said, pouring juice in an airy apartment filled with bric-a-brac.

"Maybe they're right, but I am afraid." As Morisson spoke, delegates gathered in Le Havre for the annual congress of the National Federation of Victims of Nazi Forced Labor Camps, one group among many of people who suffered in the war. Besides several million POWS and the civilians held in death camps, 600,000 young Frenchmen were taken to work in German factories where they lived like prisoners and earned a token wage. Scattered conversations with delegates suggested a wide range of feelings about their former bosses. Andre Baudry, 72, vice president of the federation, nearly lost his eyesight in an accident at a Cologne factory were he was forced to make tank tires. He sneaked away to join the British army.

In 1982, he took his wife back to the factory. "They threw their arms around us and said we should have called ahead," Baudry said. Today, he said, "We are better off as friends, not enemies." But Pierre Cornitte shook his head in silence. "I can't look at a German," he said later. "When I see a German and he offers his hand, I freeze.

I can't bring myself to speak to him." Morrisson shares his view. "A lot of people hate said. "I don't know if that's right, but it is fact. People say the country has changed. To me, a German is a German." LE HAVRE, France France is turning the page on World War II to build a new Europe.

But Josette Morisson, a kindly old woman with a scrapbook, is not about to forgive or forget. "I detest Germans, I hate them," she said, with a diffident smile, as if to excuse feelings she could not help. "I wanted to see them all dead. I still hate them." Her view is extreme even among the millions of surviving French victims of Nazi crimes. Most younger Frenchmen are ready to write off the past.

After 50 years, however, fear and hatred linger. Morisson, 82 and active in a handful of organizations that aim to keep memory fresh, is a living monument to a war that won't go away. She moved into the rubble of postwar Le Havre with her second husband, who has since died. He had spent years in a camp designed to punish prisoners of war who did not mask their scorn for Nazis. Her first husband was freed from a POW camp when he developed tuberculosis.

He then joined the Resistance. The Gestapo seized him in France and said he would never return from Germany. He didn't. That was in the Atlantic port of Royan, where Morisson stayed to raise her two children and work in the Resistance. When Allied bombs leveled Royan, she spent six weeks in a body cast.

A half century later, she and her friends tell the old stories: kicked-down doors and terrified children; deportees cast into the crematorium AGE: 47 SERVICE: Fought in France, Belgium and Iraq in World War and was wounded. Was a lieutenant colonel AGE: 56 SERVICE: Was a major general at outbreak of war. He took command of 8th Army in North Af at start of World War II, and a hero at Dunkirk for the rear-guard action he fought against the German advance. Fought in North Africa, Sicily and Italy; named leader of 2nd Army in January 1944. DIED: 1969.

rica in 1942 stopped German forces at El Alamain. Led troops up east coast of Italy. Served as deputy supreme allied commander in Europe, fl DIED: 1976. Associated Press NO FORGIVENESS: Josette Morisson, 82, holds a photo of her first husband, a resistance fighter who disappeared after he was captured by the Gestapo. After 50 years, she still vividly remembers the terror inflicted by the Nazis.

MASON: Strategy was distinctly American D-Day facts Knight-Ridder News Service Even though we commonly refer to the Allied invasion of the Normandy beaches of France as "D-Day," the real name of the inva-; sion was "Operation Overlord." "D-Day" is a general military term used in planning an operation. The specific hour of an attack or operation is called "H-Hour." Seven months before D-Day, Adolf Hitler fretted about Germany's "costly struggle against Bolshevism" on the Russian Front but said a greater danger to Germany lay to the west. He predicted that the Americans and British would launch a beach offensive in the spring, perhaps earlier. Hitler was so convinced that Normandy was a trick even hours after it had been launched that he kept his commanders from responding until it was too late. Gen.

George Marshall, not Gen. Dwight Eisenhower had been President Franklin Roosevelt's first choice to lead the invasion. omy. Nothing fancy. The plan called for landings on five beaches along a 60-mile stretch of coast the Americans on Omaha and Utah beaches to the west, and the British and Canadians on Sword, Juno and Gold to the east.

Glider-borne troops and paratroopers would preface the attack by dropping on the flanks and to the rear to block German reinforcements. About 3.5 million troops were lodged in Britain, thirsting for action. It is nearly a miracle that the Germans did not detect the final assembly for the assault. As a result, they also could not spot a coming break in the stormy weather that had forced Gen. Dwight D.

Eisenhower to postpone D-Day by 24 hours. With much of the force bobbing off the coast, he felt delay was impossible. One of the biggest strike forces ever assembled coasted to its target on waves of nausea. The waters were brutal, and most soldiers became seasick. On the western flank, disaster was unfolding.

Because of the wind and panicky pilots, paratroopers from the U.S. 82nd and 101st Airborne Divisions Continued from A1 mandy. The towns they liberated have embraced them, and President Clinton and other VIPs are tossing in wreaths of oratory. As if to say the war against fascism never ends, Nazi swastikas and slogans temporarily are banned in the region. The seeds of the D-Day invasion were sown in England's humiliating retreat five years earlier.

The British had avoided total devastation of their army with the frantic evacuation of 338,000 troops from Dunkirk on the French coast. In 1941 the British began planning for an invasion of Europe across the English Channel. The United States brought its uniforms to the table shortly after the Pearl Harbor attack. Although Britain initially plotted the invasion, U.S. commanders ultimately took over because they were investing the most troops.

The strategy of Operation Overlord was quintessential American: bowl 'em over with a head-on assault and keep grinding away to victory with a flood of troops and materiel, the wallop of a mighty econ were scattered across dozens of miles. Hundreds of heavily laden men plunged into fields flooded by the Germans and drowned. Some drifted over St. Mere Eglise and were shot in the air. As dawn approached, bombers began pounding German positions and soon were followed by naval bombardments.

When the first troops crept toward shore about 6:30 a.m., confusion abounded. Many boats drifted off course in the current, with troops landing in the wrong sectors. On Utah Beach, this proved to be a godsend, as U.S. forces met light resistance and swiftly advanced off the beach. On Omaha Beach, however, it only added to the anarchy of enemy fire.

The Battle of Normandy would rage on for nearly two months. As Allied troops gradually pushed into France, they could give thanks for small favors, that Hitler slept late on June 6 and, because his generals were afraid to wake him, did not send deadly Panzer divisions to the front. And that the lousy weather had convinced the Germans that the invasion was days or weeks away. Ghosts of Hitler's Reich haunt German veterans By FRANK BAJAK Associated Press Writer WRw. I had nothing to do with 'Schindler's List' I was a i'i.

Ludwig Laubscher, on his World War II service for Germany fen SS second lieutenant, Wilhelm still believes in Hitler and the Thousand Year Reich. "An unending series of lies have been spread about the war," says Schermeng. But for most of these old soldiers, the spell wore off when the war ended. Men like Zischke and 75-year-old Ludwig Laubscher say they fought for their fatherland not Hitler. Many expressed regret for Germany's crimes.

Now, Laubscher must persuade a grandchild that he is not a criminal. A few days earlier, Laubscher's teenage grandson Christian had seen "Schindler's List." "He came home very perplexed. He didn't speak to me at all," says Laubscher. "And yesterday, my wife said to me, I talked with Christian about the film and he said, 'I can't understand my "I had nothing to do with 'Schindler's Laubscher says. "I was a EDENKOBEN, Germany The farmer's son who had dutifully enlisted in Germany's army in 1933 looks up from a conversation with old soldier friends and offers a few words on the Allied invasion of Normandy.

"I learned how to pray at Normandy," says Paul-Ernst Zischke, the distance of years and the warmness of wine softening the memories. So did a lot of his buddies in the Wehr-macht's 44th Infantry Regiment; more than three in five didn't survive the summer of 1944. An artillery shell that collapsed a farmhouse on top of him got Staff Sgt. Zischke out of Normandy hurt but alive less than two weeks after the Allies hit the beach. Zischke knew then and there that the Third Reich was finished.

"It didn't take long for our unit to be blown to pieces two or three days," he says, recalling the "crane swarms" of Allied bombers and nighttime flashes of naval guns that pounded its position just south of Caen. Zischke leaves his buddies in the tavern and tells his story in the parlor of an army recreation hotel perched above Rhine River vineyards. His chapter of the German Soldiers' Union is holding its annual meeting. The old soldiers men shot up at Stalingrad and shot down over France proudly wear the union's Iron Cross pin on their lapels. But German society doesn't give them much notice.

Hearing them reminisce might only reopen that old war wound that periodically jolts the country's psyche like a piece of shrapnel surgeons couldn't remove. Postwar Germans don't take much pride in their military. Roughly one in 10 doesn't even want an army. Germans have no independence day to celebrate. And their Nov.

13 holiday for remembering war dead is annually poisoned by the acting up of young right-wing extremists. About the only major attention D-Day is receiving in the German news media this year is the controversy over whether Chancellor Helmut Kohl, who is 64, should have been invited to the 50th anniversary. Among the three dozen veterans at the Edenkoben Hotel was a stout former Waf- wsmx mm: wrMmmm Associated Press MEMORIES: 'I learned how to pray at said Paul-Ernst Zischke..