Letters, stories and artifacts help family remember Iowa soldier killed in D-Day invasion

Clair Scott Sr. thought he was going to come home to Eastern Iowa to join his wife Margaret and infant son after being wounded in the invasion of Sicily in late summer 1943.

Instead, he was killed in action less than a year later during the invasion of Normandy, which began on D-Day, June 6, 1944.

Scott Sr., who was from the small Benton County community of Shellsburg, was a hard worker. He was kind and attentive, his wife would tell their son, also named Clair.

'She just thought he was the greatest thing since sliced bread,” said Clair Scott.

Margaret, of Cedar Rapids, and Scott Sr. married in August 1942. By September, Scott Sr. had enlisted.

He served as a paratrooper in the U.S. Army's 82nd Airborne Division, 505th Regiment. Margaret kept copious notes, tracking her young husband's progress to Des Moines, then Arkansas and Georgia, later traveling to Algeria and Tunisia.

And, she kept his letters.

'(The letters were) so special because they were married such a short time,” Scott said.

A letter sent from Sicily after the allied forces took over the island in July 1943 - the same month Margaret gave birth to Scott - informed her that her husband had been injured. He was due for some rest and recuperation and thought he would be able to come home.

But in the next letter, which was heavily redacted, Scott Sr. said he was being sent to England. He had one more jump before he could come home.

On June 6, 1944, allied forces began the largest seaborne invasion in history in an effort to lead the liberation of Nazi-controlled northwestern Europe.

Scott Sr., 21 at the time, was part of the first drop of soldiers parachuting into the area. He was killed in the early hours of June 6, before the U.S. soldiers stormed the beaches. His last letter, sent from England, didn't reach Margaret until a few weeks after D-Day.

'You have to understand the delay of the mail,” Scott said. 'She (Margaret) probably got that letter in a couple weeks of D-Day.”

While her husband was away, Margaret lived in Cedar Rapids with her parents, who had lost their son, William Shanahan, Margaret's brother, in the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941. Like many other families during the war, personal tragedies compounded, but community groups helped Scott's family cope with the emotional trauma.

'It wasn't good for her,” Scott said. 'But my grandmother was very active with the (American) Gold Star Mothers. I know she had taken my mother to some of the meetings.”

Though he never got to meet his father, Scott learned about him through his paternal grandparents and his mother, who kept her husband's letters, pictures and Purple Heart in a special drawer, after marrying Robert Elias. When Margaret began suffering from heart disease, she wrote down the details of her life with Scott Sr. on sheets of notebook paper.

Chuck Elias of Cedar Rapids, the son of Margaret and Robert Elias and Clair Scott's half brother, recalls a suede wallet Scott Sr. picked up in Algeria that was stashed in the drawer. Inside the wallet were his war ribbons with blood encrusted on them. .

He said he also remembers a morning in early summer when he was 6 or 7 when his mother didn't have his cereal bowl waiting for him.

'Every morning she would have my cereal on the table, and she'd have coffee and a cigarette,” he said. 'This morning she wasn't out there. I got panicked. I remember coming into my mom's room. She was laying down holding his (Scott Sr.'s) picture and visibly upset. I remember just laying down beside her, and eventually she got up.”

Fifty years after Scott Sr.'s death, Margaret had plans to visit his gravesite in Normandy, Elias said.

'But two days before, she broke down and couldn't do it, he said. 'She was overwhelmed with grief.”

She never made it to the gravesite before she died.

Now, Scott Sr.'s artifacts remain with his son, who is now 73 and living in Arizona.

Chuck Elias, co-founder of Cedar Rapids' Freedom Foundation, which serves active-duty military members and veterans, said as years go by and battles of World War II become more distant, remembering the struggles veterans endured becomes crucial.

'While these things might not seem so pertinent now, we still have troops in Korea, in Afghanistan and Iraq,” Elias said. 'It's very important we remember all the blood and sacrifice.”

DAY IN HISTORY

June 6, 1944, marked what many call the beginning of the end of the Nazi regime and World War II. In the largest amphibious military operation ever, more than 175,000 Allied troops in 6,000 landing craft and about 18,000 parachutists in 822 planes stormed the beaches at Normandy, France, in Operation Overlord.

By the end of the day, about 2,000 Allied troops were dead and many more wounded. But more than 155,000 American, British and Canadian troops broke through.

German opposition was hampered by confusion and Hitler's initial belief that the attack was a feint meant to distract the Nazis.

Within three months. Allied troops had liberated the northern part of France and began advancing on Germany.

Source: History.com