Sunday evening, Durning will appear at the National Memorial Day Concert to read a letter written by a 19-year-old American soldier describing the horror of that day. Those experiences, along with his familiar television presence, made him an ideal choice to take part in a Memorial Day event and two productions pegged to the 50th anniversary of the Normandy invasion. During a spring visit to Washington, he discussed his experiences guardedly. In recent weeks, Durning has been unpacking his D-Day recollections. More than 70,000 men went ashore on D-Day, 15,000 of them to their deaths. The invasion of Omaha Beach was assigned to the United States' 1st Infantry Division, to which Durning belonged, and the untested 29th Division from Maryland and Virginia. Operation Overlord deployed the largest naval armada ever assembled: 6,000 ships in a fleet that stretched 20 miles wide carrying troops from the United States, Britain and Canada across the English Channel to five invasion sites at Normandy. Later, Durning found that his brother in the Navy also had been part of the landing. There are many horrifying secrets in the depths of our souls that we don't want anyone to know about." "I dropped into a void for almost a decade. "I'd like to have a decade of my life back," he said. A bullet in the chest finally ended his wartime duty.ĭurning endured four years of hospitalizations for his physical and psychological wounds. A few months after that, he was taken prisoner at the Battle of the Bulge, survived a massacre of other prisoners, then had to return to help identify the bodies.
Later, he was stabbed eight times by another bayonet-wielding German teenager. But so were the German soldiers on the bluffs above, strafing the Normandy beach from concrete bunkers that are still there.ĭurning survived the invasion - he had to kill seven German gunners to do it - and suffered serious machine gun wounds to his right leg and shrapnel wounds over his body. He holds the Silver Star for valor and three Purple Hearts for wounds he suffered. They were so painful he's rarely unpacked them since.ĭurning is the only survivor of a unit that landed on Omaha Beach that June 6 in 1944. Charles Durning tucked away his D-Day memories 50 years ago.
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