Project Omaha Beach: The Life and Military Service of a Penobscot Indian Elder

Book by Charles Norman Shay

In 2007 Charles Norman Shay went to Washington, DC, to receive the Legion of Honor medal from French President Nicolas Sarkozy. The medal has joined the others bestowed on him, including a Silver Star and four bronze battle stars from World War II and the Korean War, in his home on the Penobscot Indian Island Reservation in Old Town, Maine.

As a young Army medic he had been in the famed 1st Infantry Division that landed in the first wave on Omaha Beach, Normandy. He does not recall how many men he pulled from the water while bullets were streaming past him. “We’ve all had our individual experiences, and none are more dramatic than the next,” said Shay, characteristically modest.

Shay was a medic who saved many lives that D-day in 1944 when 3,000 Allied troops died and some 9,000 were injured or went missing. Shay repeatedly plunged into the treacherous sea and carried critically-wounded men to safety.

The Holocaust and WWII books blog

President Barack Obama in Israel at the Holocaust Museum in 2013. We must never forget.

Of the nine million Jews who had resided in Europe before the Holocaust, approximately two-thirds were killed. Over one million Jewish children were killed in the genocide, as were approximately two million Jewish women and three million Jewish men. A network of over 40,000 concentration camps in Germany and German-occupied territory were used to hold, and kill Jews, Romanians, homosexuals, and people with disabilities. Once in a concentration camp victims were forced into labor, starved, raped and eventually gassed to death.

Recent estimates based on figures obtained since the fall of the Soviet Union indicate some ten to eleven million civilians and prisoners of war were intentionally murdered by the Nazi regime.