The longest day 60 years later
D-DAY JUNE 6, 1944
D-Day events etched in the minds of two Tucsonans

C.T. REVERE and MARY BUSTAMANTE
news@tucsoncitizen.com 

Ralph Dorff made his first flight from England to the coast of Normandy, France, 
in the earliest hours of D-Day with only enemy artillery lighting the night sky.
"We didn't get a lot of fire, but it was there," said the 88-year-old Tucsonan. "It looked like tennis balls going by - burning tennis balls. 
But you don't feel fear. You just wonder what's going to come next.
You just hope it's going to be over soon and that you're going to be out of the firing zone."
 
Sixty years ago tomorrow, some 156,000 Allied soldiers, including 73,000 Americans, participated in the Normandy invasion, 
which proved to be a turning point in the war against Nazi Germany.
The battle, the largest seaborne invasion in history, took place on five beaches along a 60-mile front on France's northern coast. 
Nearly 10,000 Allied soldiers - 6,603 of them Americans - died in the assault, which marked the beginning of the end of Nazi occupation in France.
After midnight on June 6, 1944, Dorff, an Army Air Corps navigator, 
and the other four crew members aboard a C-47 transport plane found their drop zone near the town of Ste-Mere-Eglise, 
beyond Utah Beach, and watched 25 paratroopers jump into the darkness.

Later that same fateful morning, Chetney Lubben stepped off a landing craft into foot-deep water off Omaha Beach 
and began his dash for cover from relentless German gunfire.
Six decades later, the 95-year-old Tucsonan swears he can still feel the weight of two extra ammunition belts 
slung over his shoulder as he and other soldiers left landing crafts "like fleas off a dog."
"A fellow next to me fell, and I stopped to help him, and someone yelled to go on. 'Let the medics help him!' " he recalls.
He never saw the fallen soldier again.

Dorff's trip to Normandy started shortly after Japanese warplanes drew the United States into World War II. 
He visited a New York City library and discovered the role he would play in winning that war.
"I checked out a book on aviation mathematics, and I read it and took the quizzes, and then I applied for the aviation cadets," he said.

From that academic beginning, a career in flight navigation was born that ultimately led Dorff to play a role in D-Day.
Dorff, who was a 26-year-old marketing employee for a New York furniture maker when he decided to join the Army Air Corps, 
finished his navigator training in Louisiana in November 1943. 
He was then assigned to the 436th Troop Carrier Group in North Carolina, where he learned how he fit into the Army's plans.
"They were getting ready to leave for Europe, and here we were, a bunch of really green guys," he said. 
"We were scared as hell when they told us."

After staging with the 436th Group's 82nd Squadron in Michigan, Dorff got his first taste of wartime navigation 
aboard a C-47 cargo plane on a long and dangerous journey from Florida to England.
The squadron of 12 C-47s flew to the British Isles via Puerto Rico, South America, the Ascension Islands off the west coast of Africa and Morocco, 
all the while keeping watch for German U-boats, Dorff said.
After six months of flight training in England, the 82nd took off carrying 25 paratroopers per plane 
late on the evening of June 5 for the two-hour journey to France.

"We flew in lines of nine planes, and the planes never stopped all night," Dorff said. 
"We dropped our stick at 12:30 a.m. on D-Day on Ste-Mere-Eglise on Utah Beach, and then we flew back."
Five hours later, the squadron was in the air again, towing British gliders loaded with troops and supplies back to the beaches of Normandy.
"My involvement was just a small part of everything that went on that day," he said. "There were a half-million heroes on the ground."
Lubben, then a 36-year-old Army private first class, followed other soldiers through enemy gunfire to the base of the cliffs looming above Omaha Beach, 
to find refuge from the big German guns above that rained death on the beach.

That night, many Americans were killed by friendly fire after smoke laid down to direct Allied fire to enemy positions was blown back over them, Lubben said.
"No one knows how many people were killed by our own people," he said.
Lubben made it off Omaha Beach and went on to fight in the Battle of the Bulge, 
where he was hit in the head by a machine gun bullet that left him with a metal plate in his skull, which he calls his "little war souvenir."

His other souvenirs include a Purple Heart and a Silver Cross, which he gave to his daughter.
Lubben has good and bad memories of the invasion, he said.
"I was one of the first scouts in my unit," he said. "French people would see us and have us come in and eat dinner with them."
He also remembers the exhaustion.

"After working all day long, we'd pull guard duty for the tanks so the drivers could rest. 
We didn't get much sleep," he said. "We'd walk for miles all day long, and at night trucks would pick us up and take us back where we started. 
The next day, we'd march off in a different direction, and the same thing would happen that night. 
We were trying to be decoys, to make them think there were more of us than there actually was."

The sacrifice and hard work soon paid off as Allied forces took control of the beaches and began to work their way inland for the liberation of Paris.
Dorff recalled, "Four days later, one of the planes from my squadron landed on a beach in France. 
That's how quickly we secured a landing strip. In no time at all, there were flight strips everywhere.
"The planning, the execution, everything was just terrific."
-TUCSON CITIZEN, June 5, 2004