Chesapeake City veteran, John Luzetsky, remembers his service to our country during World War ll.

John displays his Silver Star for Valor

John Luzetsky: “I was in the D-Day Invasion of Normandy.”

John Luzetsky, a life-long resident of Chesapeake City (deceased at 90), was one of 100,000 troops to land on the beaches of Normandy in 1944. In his quiet, thoughtful way, John told me his story, as if his bravery was the most natural thing in the world. In our talk, John didn’t emphasis the ferocity of that landing, but, reluctantly, he did reveal that several of his buddies were killed as they trudged next to him towards the shore. He said that he never expected to make it back alive. John’s story:

 “I was in the D-Day Invasion of Normandy. I was in the 29^th Division and the guys from Elkton were in it also. They were in the 115^th Infantry and I was in the 175^th from Baltimore, the Fifth Regiment Army. We landed at Omaha Beach. The first wave of troops went ashore at about 6:00 a.m. We went in at about 9:00 a.m. There was great confusion; things didn't work the way they were supposed to. You were just trying to save your life and get to shore. We jumped overboard into waist-high water and tried frantically to get to shore as the navy fired over our heads. So many crafts were there that you couldn’t see the water.

“It was sandy underfoot, and once we got to shore we started firing our weapons. We must have fought for five or six weeks before we hit a pretty good town called Saint Lo. We had to capture Saint Lo, of course, and I got hit by shrapnel in the leg. It wasn't a bad wound; I was lucky.

“I went oversees on the Queen Elizabeth. I remember that she had really thick rugs with lots of space on her, but by the time the carpenters finished building bunks there was just enough room for us to squeeze through in order to get down to the galley for food. There were 3,000 of us on board. It took us six days to reach Scotland. The Queen Mary, also loaded with troops, was ahead of us, and when British cruisers came out to protect her, the Queen Mary hit one of them and cut it in two. The Queen Mary kept right on going because of all the German subs out there. They weren't allowed to stop to pick up survivors because they didn't want to risk the lives of those 3,000 men on board.

“Before I was sent overseas I was a soldier guarding the Chesapeake City Bridge for a while. I trained at Fort Meade and then I guarded a number of bridges in the Baltimore area. We would move from one bridge to another during the early part of the war. When I guarded our lift bridge we bunked in a small brick building located just as you got off the bridge on the North Side. They fixed it up for us. They brought carpenters in to build the bunks. They're similar to the kind that was built on troop ships.

       “We were in England preparing for the Normandy Invasion when our Chesapeake City lift bridge was destroyed. I received a letter from home telling me about it. And I have to laugh when I think about the time I spent guarding it, because as soon as I went oversees it was hit by a ship and destroyed. The company commander at Fort Meade assigned me and five other men to guard the bridge. That happened after the Japanese hit Pearl Harbor. Everybody was scared, just like now after September 11^th. We had to walk back and forth over the bridge with a rifle. We couldn't have stopped a ship from hitting it or anything. We just had to report anything suspicious.”