Private Edward Stanley Lewandowski, United States Army. Service Number: 36833311

Early Life

Edward Stanley Lewandowski was born on 11 October 1905 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

No additional information on his early life or his family has been located during multiple Internet searches conducted in 2021.

He married Angeline (maiden name and date/location of marriage unknown).

Military

Edward S. Lewandowski registered for the Draft on 16 October 1940 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. After basic training and follow-on training, he was assigned to Company C, 149th Engineer Combat Battalion, 8th Infantry Regiment, 4th Infantry Division.

A first-hand account from a surviving member of the 149th Engineer Combat Battalion follows:

Verle Buck is 91 years old. Not long ago, he was still fighting World War II. "Ask the wife," he says, pointing to his wife, Bonnie. She knows. She heard him call out in the dark. She's grabbed his arms when he thrashed about in his dreams. "He'd have terrible nightmares -- jerk all the time, waving his arms around," she said. Those dreams took him back to a narrow strip of sand on the northern shore of France on June 6, 1944.

It was a day he saw men drown in the deep surf off the beach. The day he heard thunking on the side of his landing craft from machine gun fire. The day he saw Nazi 88 mm artillery shells whistling over his head -- and the one he didn't see that exploded in front of him on the beach and made a friend a memory in a second. "He never knew what hit him," Buck recalled. If Buck had raised his head too high, he would have been a memory, too. It was the day 300 of the 600 men he'd trained with were killed or wounded -- just as a commander had warned them. He also told them they would have to survive by their wits. "They were moaning and groaning" and calling in agony for their mothers, Buck said of the wounded. "But you couldn't do a damn thing about it. You had to do your job, save your damn neck and keep going. It was somebody else's job to take care of them."

That day, June 6, 1944, is now known in the history books as D-Day. Verle Buck knows it a different way.

"It was the longest day of my life," he said. The strip of beach he was on -- the one that came back to him in nightmares, was given the name Omaha by his commanders. Those with whom he served called it Bloody Omaha. It's no wonder those of Buck's generation seem so rugged and tough, his wife says. "World War II did a number on these old vets, believe me. It hardened them," she said. Flashbacks started haunting him about five years ago. They were so bad he sought medical attention and received prescriptions to allow him to sleep at night. Doctors told them it is not uncommon for flashbacks and other kinds of post-traumatic stress to show up in aging veterans, when long-term memory becomes more pronounced. "I still remember everything like it happened yesterday," Buck said.

He was a sergeant in the U.S. Army's 149th Engineer Combat Battalion at Omaha. Buck believes they were in the first or second wave of troops to hit the beach at about 6:30 a.m., among a huge flotilla of ships behind them "as far as the eye could see." Their job was to clear the beach of obstacles and mines the Nazis had set up, so equipment and supplies in later waves could move inland. They had no idea of the resistance they would face.

"We were just damn kids," said Buck, 21 at the time. But reality set in quickly. "When bullets hit the LCT" landing craft, about a half mile from shore, "then we ducked down." "When we got out, we only had water up to our knees. Then all hell broke loose," Buck said. "We were pinned down for about four or five hours," under a withering hail of Nazi artillery and small arms fire. He couldn't see the enemy, dug in in bunkers. Armed with a Thompson submachine gun, all he and his comrades could do was shoot in the general direction of the enemy fire. "We knew he was there," Buck said. "If you put your helmet up -- bing!"

While American, British, Canadian and other Allied troops fought on other beaches, many historical accounts say the invasion's success hinged on taking Omaha. "When we were pinned down we could see the 88s coming over the top," Buck said of the German artillery shells. "You could see a ball going over our heads. The ones we didn't see were the ones that landed. A guy was laying ahead of me and an 88 blew him up. I was close enough that everything blew over the top of me" and he was unhurt by the debris from the blast. He would have been hit had he been further away. "But he never knew what hit him," Buck said. "Sacrificed his life for a lot of kids who don't even know where their freedom came from."

Buck recalls his arms and legs being sore just from the constant impact of the Allied and enemy shells hitting the ground. He and his friends were pinned down until an American warship offshore let go with every gun it had. "A big destroyer or a cruiser came up broadside. They literally turned the bank inside out," Buck said. "They shot over our heads; that bank was probably 50 or 60 feet in from us. They literally shot into the bank to get rid of the enemy that was dug in. That let us loose to get off the beach." "They saved our lives," Buck said.

It took another three days of rough going before Buck's battalion reached an assigned rallying point inland. It was there, Buck said, they discovered how close they had come to dying in an inferno on the beach. Allied ship-to-shore artillery had also wiped out an enemy command center directing artillery units equipped with rocket-mounted petroleum bombs. The Americans found the abandoned, unlaunched bombs. Had they been used, the beach would have been set afire. "We would have all burned to death," Buck said.

The 149th Engineer Combat Battalion received a unit citation from Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower for its performance on D-Day. "If I had to do it again, I would," Buck said. "We were young and didn't know any different. But we grew up on a hurry that day. "I thank the good Lord for 91 years, thankful for everyone involved, my wife too. I'm just thankful for being alive and being able to talk about it."

He talks about it to keep alive the memories of all the soldiers who didn't make it.

Death

Edward S. Lewandowski was Killed in Action on 6 June November 1944 on Omaha Beach in Normandy, France during the D-Day invasion. He was posthumously awarded the Purple Heart Medal. He is buried at Fort Snelling National Cemetery in Minneapolis, Minnesota, Plot: C, Block: 7897.

Sources

https://www.fold3.com/page/638798582/edward-s-lewandowski

https://www.honorstates.org/index.php?id=548919

https://search.ancestry.com/cgi-bin/sse.dll?indiv=1&dbid=4750&h=514153&tid=&pid=&queryId=e01ced8a1afad7dc770efcfc7540b2b0&usePUB=true&_phsrc=5ru162492&_phstart=successSource

https://www.ancestry.com/discoveryui-content/view/605369:60525

"This story is part of the Stories Behind the Stars project (see www.storiesbehindthestars.org). This is a national effort of volunteers to write the stories of all 400,000+ of the US WWII fallen here on Fold3. Can you help write these stories? Related to this, there will be a smartphone app that will allow people to visit any war memorial or cemetery, scan the fallen's name and read his/her story."