Courtesy Photo A 20-year-old Hersel Masterson smiles proudly from the past during U.S. Army training in Muscogee, Okla., in this 1943 photo.

ALPENA — Hersel Masterson wasn’t told where he was going.

“Just shoot Germans,” his commander told him.

“If you’re going to send a man to die, you’d think you’d tell him, but I guess not,” mused Johnie Kemp, a Hillman resident and Masterson’s brother-in-law.

Masterson, his voice scratchy with age and a little faint over the telephone from his home in Senath, Mo., remembered the day 75 years ago he was sent to fight for his country in what would become one of the most significant military actions in American history.

“My friends was all tore to pieces,” Masterson said, his voice sad but steady. “I seen a lot of dead people over there.”

Drafted into the U.S. Army at age 20, Masterson was shipped via boat to Ireland, then to London when he was 21. He left behind a wife and small child, with another on the way. In early June 1944, he and the rest of his company awaited orders as American military leaders strategized how to defeat the German forces occupying western Europe.

In the dark morning hours of June 6, 1944, American, Canadian, British, and French soldiers poured in from land, water, and sky onto five beaches of Normandy, France. Allied troops surged forward, often over the fallen bodies of their friends, determined to claim the Normandy coast and airspace from German forces.

D-Day — the D standing simply for “day,” indicating that this, at last, was the beginning of the long-planned Normandy invasion — was and still is the largest amphibious invasion in military history, with 156,000 troops crossing the English Channel from England to the coast of occupied France. Under the command of Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower, the operation split German forces, beginning the end of the second World War.

Cut off from the outside world to protect the privacy of the mission, knowing only the simple directive, “Shoot Germans,” Masterson waited on the England shore as his fellow soldiers swarmed the Normandy coast. For several days he waited, his infantry division assigned to serve as replacements for the soldiers killed during the initial attack. Again he waited, for three long hours as his ship crossed the English Channel, not knowing what lay ahead.

In his hands, Masterson carried an M1 Garand rifle with a bayonet attachment.

“That’s what I had to fight with,” he said.

Masterson made it past the beach and engaged in combat, following orders and trying to stay alive.

“He said he was scared only once … From the time he left home till the time he got back,” Kemp said. “He said what scared him most was hand-to-hand combat with those big, blonde Germans. Scared him half to death.”

‘I JUST KNEW IT WAS DAYLIGHT AND DARK’

The battles Masterson tries not to think about. He fought and marched as his company movied toward the occupied city of Cherbourg, losing friends, subsisting on K-rations, and sleeping in trenches.

“I didn’t even know what day it was, what time it was,” he recalled. “I just knew it was daylight and dark, and that’s it. You don’t worry ’bout things on that level. You worry about taking care of your hide.”

A pause and a head shake later, Masterson said, “I done all that, and do you know how much I was making? A dollar and sixty-seven cents a day.”

On June 25, Masterson remembers well, he and two buddies stepped out of a foxhole. There had been a lull in the fighting, and the men believed Cherbourg had been secured.

In minutes, his friends lay dead, killed by a German 88-millimeter anti-tank cannon. Masterson was gravely wounded, his hip and back riddled with shrapnel.

Back home, 75 years later, a heart-shaped medal on a purple ribbon is a reminder of that day, a day of pain and loss and fear.

Masterson was awarded the Purple Heart for having been injured by the enemy in combat as part of America’s great invasion that turned the tide of the war. For many years, Kemp said, Masterson’s children didn’t even know where the medal was, and didn’t ask.

“They were never too interested in their dad’s service time. I don’t know why,” Kemp said. “Just like when I was young and I never asked my mother about pictures in her album.”

‘IT’S GOING TO CHANGE YOUR PERSPECTIVE’

After he recovered from his wounds in a London hospital, Masterson flew home — his first time on an airplane — and returned to his life as a farm boy in a small, rural town tucked into the boot heel of Missouri.

“I think my mother-in-law, she’d as soon I didn’t come back,” Masterson said lightly in his rich Missouri drawl. “She didn’t like me because I married her daughter. But I showed her.”

He raised cotton and a family, working the land on his Missouri farm for the rest of his life. In 2005, his oldest son, the one who had awaited his daddy’s return when Masterson went off to war, died after 20 years’ military service as a result of exposure to the chemical Agent Orange in Vietnam.

These days, Masterson said, he’s not able to get out of his home much, his years catching up to him.

“So that makes me a first-class dishwasher,” the old soldier said, a gentle humor warming his rattly voice. A lifetime of bacon and sausage and eggs fried in half an inch of grease hasn’t much harmed the 96-year-old farmer, his brother-in-law said with a laugh.

“He ain’t got a ripple in his heart, and his mind is still clear,” said Kemp, 12 years Masterson’s junior. “He tells me about stuff I can’t remember myself.

“I did ask him one time what it feels like to shoot somebody,” Kemp admitted. “He said, ‘Well how did you feel when you killed your first rabbit?'”

Some people who came back from the war came back changed, Kemp said, but his brother-in-law didn’t seem much altered by it, at least not externally.

“After you get shot at a few times, and hand-to-hand combat, it’s going to change your perspective, I don’t care how you slice it,” Kemp said.

From his farm home, Masterson looks out at the world of today and wonders what became of the America for which he fought.

“You know what I went over there for? To make America free. And look what’s happened to it, now,” Masterson said, disappointment evident in his voice.

He named with exasperation the politicians of today who he sees as attacking with their decisions what he defended with his blood.

A thank-you for Masterson’s service to his country didn’t draw much response from the down-to-earth soldier/farmer.

“Well, I wasn’t doing it by myself,” he said simply.

“I would have been famous if I’d gotten a shot off at Adolf,” he added as an afterthought.

The 75th anniversary of D-Day is being commemorated around the world by ceremonies, services, flyovers and reenactments. Masterson shrugs off the fuss that’s being made of the day.

“It’s time to forget about it,” said the man who is one of the dwindling few storytellers from that pivotal moment in our country’s history. He didn’t think much one way or the other about the ceremonies planned for the 6th of June.

“The next day, when it’s over, most people won’t remember what happened,” Masterson said matter-of-factly. “But I remember.”

Julie Riddle can be reached at 989-358-5693 or jriddle@thealpenanews.com.