95-Year-Old Wanamingo Vet Recalls D-Day Landing
Wanamingo, Minn. (WCCO) -- In the heart of Wanamingo, a memorial ballfield grows as a living reminder. It recounts and honors the service and sacrifice of local veterans like Ken Axelson.
"Yes, we all knew what we were up against," Axelson recalls.
He was among the 150 thousand allied troops sent to penetrate the Nazi stranglehold of Europe on June 6, 1944.
"Just after seeing those pillboxes, those Germans had that beach covered," Axelson said. "They had all the advantage."
75 years after Axelson landed at Normandy on D-Day, memories of that momentous day haven't faded. He thinks of the bloodshed and sacrifice of those on the first wave of landings.
"Boy, those first guys-- it goes through my head many times what they walked into," he added.
Axelson was fresh out of Red Wing High School when he joined the Army and was assigned to the 393rd Medical Collecting Company.
"We were all medics. Our job was to clear the beach of wounded," Axelson firmly stated.
The carnage he encountered on that fateful day-- and those to follow-- remain hard to comprehend.
"We stayed right on the Omaha beach and set up the hospital-- a tent hospital," he said.
He and many of his fellow medics remained in Normandy throughout the summer months, tending to the wounded who were fighting their way through France.
Months later, he'd become a paratrooper medic for the 101st Airborne Division. He'd narrowly escape gunfire and explosions and live to recount harrowing experiences of the unit in the Battle of the Bulge.
As to why he survived while so many others didn't, Axelson simply says, "It was just dumb luck. Nothing else. When this shell exploded in the treetops and killed one and wounded another guy on this side of me, that was pretty close."
Instead of being another casualty, Axelson was captured by German soldiers and would spent the final months of World War II in a prisoner of war camp. That was until April 2, 1945, on his 21st birthday.
"Six Sherman tanks from Patton's outfit (arrived) and they came right through the prison gate without opening it," he said.
Axelson's wartime service was near the end and he would taste liberation, along with millions of Europeans.
What began on the beaches of Normandy is-- all these many years later-- one man's memories in freedom's greatest fight.
