When Ray Vaz stepped off the landing craft far from his unit’s beachhead in Normandy on D-Day, he nearly drowned before he made it ashore.
The landing zone on Utah Beach was already dense with landing craft and bodies, so his unit was forced to disembark in deep water. Vaz couldn’t swim and was saved by his inflatable “Mae West” water wings.
“When they dropped me off, I went to the bottom. I used my ‘Mae West’, took off my helmet, lost my rifle, walked onto the beach,” Vaz recalled following Veteran’s Day ceremonies in Mineola on Sunday.
It was only months before dodging machine gun bullets on Utah Beach as a member of the 90th Infantry Division that Vaz was a senior in Mineola High School. He was called up after enlisting, went through basic training and left from Fort Dix for the cross-Atlantic voyage on a troopship without having any idea that the D-Day invasion was his ultimate destination.
Vaz, 88, was among the oldest veterans honored In Mineola Memorial Park. But the memories of his landing on the beaches of Normandy 68 years ago and the battles that followed remain fresh in his mind.
Vaz said it was only several days before the Normandy invasion that members of his unit were ushered into a large tent under tight security and shown maps of the landing zones across the English Channel. And at that age, he said, he and his comrades still didn’t have a sense of the immensity of what was afoot.
“We had no idea what we were getting into,” Vaz said. “We were like young kids going to a ball game.”
He remembered being on the deck of a troopship off the Normandy shore, transfixed at the sight of the Allied bombers filling the sky as they attacked German positions on the French coast. But he said there was still a certain detachment about watching the action, even though he knew he was about to land on that same coastline.
“I never thought that I might be killed until we boarded the landing craft,” he said.
The landing craft was bobbing up and down violently in the rough water and some men were throwing up. Otherwise, the men on his landing craft remained silent.
“We were very quiet. Some were praying,” he recalled.
It was the sheer weight of what he was carrying – five days’ worth of ammo and a 6-millimeter mortar shell to be delivered at the beachhead – that weighed him down when he went into the water. After struggling to the beach, he found an abandoned rifle and started making his way inland. The Normandy countryside was lined with thick hedgerows and he recalled fire fights with German infantry only several yards distant.
At nightfall on that first night in combat, Vaz thought he heard German troops approaching his unit’s position on one side of a hedgerow. He and one of his comrades threw several grenades over the hedgerow at what they imagine to be the enemy – but at first light they realized they were mistaken.
“We killed a lot of cows that night,” he said, smiling at the memory.
On his second day in combat, he caught a German sniper’s bullet in the leg and was shipped back to England, eventually rejoining his unit in France in time for his 19th birthday on July 30. He was also in time to take part in fierce fighting as the 90th Division broke through the German defense at St. Lo, encircling 27,000 enemy troops in the effort. The 90th was now part of Gen. George Patton’s 3rd Army and Patton was intent on making progress at breakneck speed.
“We broke through at St. Lo and we took off,” Vaz recalled.
They rushed through the German defenses and “had them on the run” until Patton’s tanks outreached their supply lines and ran out of gas. They sat for three days, awaiting resupply while the Germans had a chance to reorganize an effective defense.
“We were doing 20 miles a day until we hit the Ziegfried line,” he said.
In early September 1944, Vaz was part of an advanced infantry unit that crossed the Mosselle River in pontoon boats under cover of darkness – and under fire.
“We had to take the Moselle River at night,” he said. “The thing I hated most was night patrols, and I went on a lot of them.”
Ordered to check the rear after landing on the other side of the river, he found his way into an outhouse as German shells began whistling overhead. A medic happened into the same outhouse and the next thing Vaz recalled was a brilliant red flash. He was knocked out and woke up hours later in the light of morning, bleeding from shrapnel wounds in his leg, right arm and hand. He said he woke up the medic, who patched him up.
He was sent back to England to recuperate, but his arm was never the same. To this day, Vaz cannot straighten his arm.
In April 1945, he had his most ghastly experience of the war, when his unit liberated the Buchenwald death camp. The briefing the troops received about the camp didn’t prepare them for the desperate condition of the prisoners who remained there. Vaz still recalls the telltale odor of the crematoria three miles away from the camp the Germans had just abandoned.
“It was just pathetic,” Vaz said. “There was not a soldier there who was not crying.”
The sight of the Buchenwald inmates clinging to GIs and begging for food, and the sight of the ovens in the camp gave the soldiers a renewed sense of purpose, he said.
“After that, you wanted to go out and kill every German,” he said.
He ended his 11 months of service on the front line, from the D-Day landing, as an MP in Germany when the war ended.
He was immediately shipped back to New York, was mustered out and returned to Mineola, where he remembers his mother, Carolina, crying each time she looked at him.
Vaz took it easy for awhile, returning to his former love of tap dancing and eventually appearing on the Ted Mack Amateur Hour, and taking the top prize.
”I had a couple of nice dancing partners,” he recalled.
His wife, Ann, recalled seeing those dancing partners as rivals for the man she met at her cousin’s wedding.
“I fell madly in love,” she said, recalling that she did anything to get his attention.
Eventually she did, and they recently celebrated their 60th anniversary in the home they built on Hampton Street in Mineola, where they raised three children. Today, they also have seven grandchildren.
“There was nothing here. This was all potato farms,” he recalled.
In another milestone, he was recently made a life member of the Mineola Portuguese Society, which his father, Antonio, helped found.
“I helped build that Portuguese club,” Vaz said.
Ray became a wholesale salesman dealing in appliances and Ann became a teacher’s aide at the Hampton Street School.
Lifelong residents of Mineola, they have are longtime members of Corpus Christi Church. Ray is also a member of the Adolph Bock VFW Post 1305 and the American Legion Post 349.
Over the past 15 years, after being reluctant to speak about the war for years, Vaz has annually visited the sixth grade classes his daughter, Caryl Salesi, teaches at the Mineola Middle School.
He tells them his story, but he said he still can’t stop the tears when he thinks about the bodies on that beach in Normandy and a death camp called Buchenwald.
Reach reporter Richard Tedesco by e-mail at rtedesco@theislandnow.com or by phone at 516.307.1045 x204. Also follow us on Twitter @theislandnow1 and Facebook at facebook.com/theislandnow.
