A 100-Year-Old D-Day Survivor Reflects - The Atlantic

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Joe Picard perched atop a precarious mound of 300-plus-pound high-explosive shells as his ship churned toward Normandy’s beaches. The teenager had been at sea only once before, to cross the Atlantic, and now he was sailing across the English Channel to pile into the breach that Allied forces had opened in Hitler’s defenses weeks earlier, on D-Day. Smoke from the fighting still rose on the horizon, but Picard’s eyes scanned the gray water below for signs of German U-boats. “You know,” he told the soldier next to him, “if we ever get hit with a torpedo here, they won’t ever find a trace of us.”<br>More than 80 years later, few men like Picard remain: those who participated in the boldest military operation of the 20th century and can lay claim to membership in the “greatest generation.” Less than 0.5 percent of the more than 16 million Americans who served in World War II are still alive. Before long, the great invasion of France that began on June 6, 1944—and the Second World War itself—will be recounted only in documentaries and books alongside other historic conflicts such as the First World War and the American Civil War. The immediacy of personal experience will vanish. But Picard, now 100 years old, can still recall the feel of the straw he stuffed into his mattress, the blast of a mine soon after he landed on Utah Beach, negotiations in French for the use of a château, and a friend’s death in a cold forest in Germany.<br>“A lot of people have said to me, God, how do you remember all that stuff?” Picard told me when we spoke at his retirement community in Rhode Island, near where he grew up. “I don’t remember what happened yesterday, but I remember what happened 80 years ago.” The memories have “always been vivid ever since the day they happened.”<br>Picard is still doing his part to maintain D-Day as living history. He has become, in his later years, the narrator of his own war experience. He speaks with classes of schoolchildren, constantly amazed that they care enough to listen. He has revisited and reminisced on the battlefields of Europe with the Best Defense Foundation, a nonprofit that returns veterans to the places where they served. His repetition of war stories across the years has also become a marker against which to measure how much he, and the country, has changed.<br>Joe Picard, one of the last remaining D-Day veterans, points to a picture hanging in his bedroom from one of his trips to Normandy to commemorate the D-Day invasions. (Christopher Churchill for The Atlantic)<br>Back then, he and millions of others joined the military as volunteers or draftees. Most viewed fighting as a duty to be discharged before real adulthood began. The experience of war may have defined their lives but did not determine them. And the veterans were lauded for their service by grateful citizens, whether in France, in Germany, or at home.<br>Today’s service members are professionals, many of them dedicated to a career in uniform, separated to some degree from civilian life. The rancor and fissures in society run so deep that Picard finds it hard to imagine the national unity and resolve that would be required to risk millions of conscripts’ lives in pursuit of the liberation of others. “I hope that this type of situation won’t happen again,” Picard told me, with New England understatement, “because here in the U.S., I think our attitude is off a bit.”<br>Picard’s war began with a train ride south. A few months earlier, he’d graduated from Woonsocket High School on his 18th birthday—June 25, 1943. He registered for the draft the same day, then received a letter bearing President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s signature that told him to report for duty.<br>He headed for Fort Bragg, North Carolina, to join the 552nd Field Artillery Battalion. Its signature weapon was the 240-mm Howitzer M1, nicknamed the Black Dragon and the Army’s most powerful field-artillery piece. The massive gun, which was transported in two pieces and took as many as eight hours to set up, could hurl 360-pound shells as far as 14 miles. Picard trained as a lanyard man, the puller of the firing cord. But as the battalion prepared to depart for England, the clerk of his battery went AWOL. The commander needed someone who could type. Picard had taken typing lessons—a man in a class filled with women, he had been an anomaly—to bolster his long-term prospects of becoming an accountant. Armed with a portable typewriter and a box to store records, Picard became the de facto historian of the 552nd, a role he would keep throughout his service.<br>Clockwise from top left: Picard’s official photo taken on entering the service, in Woonsocket, Rhode Island; a photo that Picard shot of a smoke screen on the Rhine River used to camouflage troops; and U.S. servicemen standing near military equipment. (Courtesy of Joe Picard)<br>In New York, Picard boarded a liner bound for England. Whatever its former...