The opening scene of Steven Spielberg’s “Saving Private Ryan” has been cited as one of the most gut wrenching and emotional representations of battle ever filmed. Through Spielberg’s cameras, we see the Allies, struggling to control the strategic French beaches as German troops sit high on the cliffs above. The first waves of determined men are picked off one by one as they doggedly make their way through the breaking surf. Soldier after soldier forges through the bloodied waters of the Atlantic Ocean, passing by fallen comrades, plodding through a human massacre horrendous even by Hollywood standards.
While the cinema’s greatest talents have offered audiences around the world an accurate and moving account of that infamous day, no one tells the tale with more authority than Danville’s 78-year-old Dan Franklin; he was there.
Dan Franklin, 17, sat on a Navy vessel on the morning of June 6, 1944. With just a single year of training under his belt, Franklin was certainly one of the youngest witnesses to the bloody battle at Omaha Beach.
“You were supposed to be 17 to join up with the Navy,” Franklin said. “But I wanted to go. Everyone wanted to enlist. There was a real sense of urgency back then, a feeling that our country was threatened. The tenor of the times was different. You knew it was a time to participate. So I lied about my age.”
Franklin was not naive about the dangers of combat; his older brother, a member of the Air Force, was already a prisoner of war in Germany when Dan decided to enlist.
“They offered me the chance to serve in the Bay Area,” said Franklin. “But I told them no; I wanted to fight for my country. I wanted to go.”
And so he went, straight to one of the most chronicled battles of World War II.
“I was on a 50-foot landing craft,” said Franklin as he began recounting the real-life version of the Spielberg blockbuster. “The primary function of the landing craft was to ferry Army troops from the ships to the beach. With a five-man crew, the landing craft could transport 25 troops at a time.”
At 5 a.m. on the dawning of D-Day, Franklin’s craft pulled up next to one of the troop ships and the waiting men descended down a rope ladder to Franklin’s boat. As they started to shore, Franklin felt the boat begin to turn away from land.
“I heard the coxswain say, ‘I’m not going there. You could get killed out there,'” said Franklin. “Of course, he was right.”
Another sailor delivered a swift blow to the frightened man, knocked him out, and steered the boat back on course to deliver the soldiers close to the sandy shore.
“We pulled in,” Franklin continued, “the soldiers unloaded and not a single one made it to the beach. They were all killed. They were so loaded down they were like sitting ducks for the Germans who were firing from the top of the bluffs just beyond the beach.”
There was no time to contemplate the horror on shore as the wounded were already being loaded for transportation back to a waiting ship.
“It took awhile to get back out, an hour or so, and we spent that time talking to the soldiers,” Franklin recalled. The landing craft pulled up next to the ship, the injured were unloaded, and blankets and stretchers were handed down to be taken back to the beach.
“We must have glanced a mine while we were heading back,” explained Franklin, “because I suddenly realized that we were sinking.”
As the engine room filled with water, the men quickly loaded the supplies onto a nearby member of the flotilla, and Franklin’s ship sank to the ocean floor.
“We were supposed to release a yellow marker if we were losing the ship,” Franklin recollected. “I yelled to my buddy not to forget about the marker. As the ship went down, he let the marker go.”
Franklin laughed as he remembered the moment they realized no one had tied the marker to anything on the ship, and they watched the yellow buoy float away.
“So even in the midst of all that, there were some moments of humor,” he said.
The moment of levity passed quickly. “Ten of us headed back to the beach with the supplies. As we approached, we informed Army personnel standing on shore what we were bringing in. He replied that we were carrying ‘Navy’ supplies, and the ‘Navy beach’ was a quarter mile down the beach. Well, we didn’t argue with him, we just started to back away. But the shore was lined with mines, and while we had been lucky to miss them all coming in, we hit one as we backed out. Two of the 10 of us survived.”
Though he has no idea how it happened, Franklin was blown from the boat and landed on his feet.
“I quickly realized the beach was no place to be, and I got back on an incoming boat,” he said.
While it might be assumed that this was enough for one day, resting was never an option. Franklin spent the rest of the afternoon and evening ferrying soldiers and supplies from ship to shore and back again.
“That night we tied up against a sunken ship not too far from shore and listened to the bullets still flying back and forth. The boat was open; there were no sleeping accommodations. We just piled life jackets up, they were fluffy back then, and we slept on them as well as we could.”
Has Franklin seen Spielberg’s silver screen version of D-Day?
“Well,” he answered wryly, “my grandson was a film major at UC Santa Barbara when that movie came out, and he got to see an advance screening. He called me and told me not to see it. That it would be too much for me. Of course, that meant I had to see it. I don’t know how Spielberg did it, but he got it right. The rest of the movie is just a story, but that opening scene … it was just as though I was there. It took me right back. It was pretty horrific.”
The days following June 6 are a bit blurred for Franklin.
“I don’t know if I’ve blocked them out, or if I just can’t remember,” he said. “I know once the beaches were secure we were all so relieved that it was over.”
Franklin does have some stories to share about life in a war zone.
“Just beyond the encampment where the cemetery is now, was a field filled with poppies,” Franklin remembered.
This is significant because poppies were adopted as the official flower of the Veterans of Foreign Wars in 1922. The Germans correctly predicted that a souvenir poppy from Normandy would be difficult to resist.
“The Germans had mined the field,” said Franklin. “Everyday someone would die trying to pick the flowers in that field. I was a pretty light guy, so I would sit on someone’s shoulders and lean way over and pick poppies for the guys to take back home. I still have mine.”
A similar pursuit brought a quick reminder of the realities of war to the young soldiers, really still boys, as they searched for souvenirs of the day they were lucky to have survived.
“We were getting ready to take German prisoners of war to England,” said Franklin, “and one of the boys said they wanted a German helmet and a pair of boots. There were no helmets on the boat, so we started to make our way back to the beach. A sergeant asked us what we were up to, and we told him. He thought for a moment and said, ‘Well, there are plenty of helmets out there. But there may still be some heads in them.’ That put a quick end to our quest.”
Franklin’s Navy career concluded with the end of his three-year enlistment commitment.
“I didn’t want to spend my life in the service,” he said. “At the end of my time, when we landed in Long Beach, they asked if I wanted to re-enlist, but I told them no, thanks. And you know, everyone who signed up again ended up in Korea.”
Franklin has, however, returned to Normandy more than once, most recently to commemorate the 60th Anniversary of D-Day, in 1994. He and his wife, Marilyn, sat on the viewing stand at the cemetery, with President Bush and his entourage.
“I have a lot of friends buried in that cemetery,” said Franklin. “It’s pretty emotional to be there again. When I stood on those bluffs looking down on the beach where those soldiers just kept coming, it’s amazing what they were up against. It’s incredible that they succeeded.”
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