Up until seven years ago, Vern Ollar couldn’t talk about D-Day.
Even now, his time on Omaha Beach in sight of Pointe du Hoc, its cliffs scaled by Army Rangers whom he and his buddies supported with mortar fire, isn’t easy to discuss.
Ollar broke out in reddish-white splotches after coming home in 1945 that were diagnosed as a war-related stress reaction. He still has flashbacks whenever he unwinds the tale.
But a weight was removed when Ollar joined 27 other Veterans on a trip to mark the 70th anniversary of the landings, in 2014.
“I went down on the beach and I looked up at that hill. When I looked up at that hill, there were homes up there, houses on that hill, and I couldn’t get over that,” Ollar said. “We lost a lot of guys going up that hill and now there’s houses up there.”
“It kind of lifted something off of my head,” he said. “I was carrying that D-Day thing in my head all those years and for some reason, I just don’t understand it to this day, I can talk about it.”
At 100, Ollar is one of the last of his wartime generation’s 16 million Americans in uniform who deployed around the globe, fighting from Dec. 7, 1941, to Aug. 15, 1945.
He remained in Europe six months after Germany’s surrender on May 8, 1945, before being greeted back home at a train station in Rock Island, Ill., by his family and a skeptical daughter, Judy, who he hadn’t seen since she was 11 months old.
“I said, ‘I’m your daddy,’” Ollar recalled. “She said, ‘No, you’re not.’”
On Saturday afternoon, Ollar and his wife, Diane, will make the 75-minute drive from their home in Ingram, west of Kerrville, to join hundreds of other Veterans and active-duty troops at the seventh annual Whiskey & Wishes Heroes Gala at Pedrotti’s North Wind Ranch in Helotes, a fundraiser to help military families facing hardships.
Another San Antonio-area centenarian will be there: Pearl Harbor survivor Kenneth Platt, who turned 100 on May 16. Platt was asleep in his bunk at Schofield Barracks on Oahu when the Japanese attack began. He had joined the Army two months shy of his 16th birthday in 1937, a skeptical recruiter saying, “I guess you know how old you are,” and had learned to march at San Antonio’s Fort Sam Houston.
Ollar joined after the war began. He was married, a new father and working at a Rock Island ordnance plant when his draft notice came. Both the job and only child could have exempted him from the draft, but friends with whom he’d played semi-pro baseball and football already had been drafted. He didn’t mention his little girl or the job and was shipped to Gadsden, Ala., for boot camp in December 1942.
Ollar called it being “voluntarily drafted.” He was ready to do his part.
“I was no gung-ho patriot, but I felt that I shouldn’t be home when all my buddies were gone,” Ollar said, then added with a laugh, “Now I wish I hadn’t. Everything worked out all right, but it was some pretty scary times I wouldn’t have had to have.”
He would see other battles in Europe, but D-Day was the worst. Ollar was in the 116th Infantry Regiment of the 29th Division, assigned to link up with the Rangers on the western end of Omaha Beach. Ollar was in the third or fourth wave.
His mortar squad had to transfer to another landing craft after theirs was hit by artillery and took on water, the coxswain struggling but unable to control it.
In their Mae West life jackets and lugging a pair of two-wheel mortar carts, they finally jumped into cold water that was above their heads as they closed on the beach sometime after 8:30 a.m. — well behind schedule.
They were at the wrong spot. Their landing craft had navigated around a mine attached to an obstacle designed to stop tanks or boats in the low water near the shore. Ollar’s squad pulled the carts and mortar forward with chains and didn’t get noticed or targeted until they got to their position.
At that point, “I think every Jerry in the German army fired at us,” Ollar said.
The mortar squad took cover behind the carts. The noise was deafening. The German weaponry included the MG-34, similar to the American Browning Automatic Rifle, or BAR. No one in his mortar team was hit.
Their next objective was a hill, but they had to drive the Germans off of it. The enemy had cleared it of bushes and trees and fired on the Americans from foxholes and pillboxes.
“There was absolutely no cover going up that hill,” Ollar said, noting there was some tall grass. “Once you got on the crest of the hill … I know there was machine guns on top of the hill because they were dug in there.”
An open area “a good football field long” next had to be crossed before the 116th’s infantry could reach the cover of woods, with Ollar’s mortar team lobbing shells ahead of them. The fighting lasted for hours and new arrivals on the beach were still being hit with German artillery.
“I mean, people don’t realize how bad it was all day,” he said. “The artillery was going right over our heads. We were on top of the hill, like I say, and it just whispered over our heads, and landing on the beach. They had them all zeroed in.
“I remember one case, there was a (DUKW, an amphibious transport) that was loaded with gasoline, had a direct hit. And the gas, of course, it exploded, with the gasoline cans flying through the air and they lit on the hill and our sector there, it was on fire below us.”
It would take two days for the 116th to reinforce the Rangers, who were almost dislodged from Pointe du Hoc by repeated counterattacks.
“In combat, if you’ve ever been in combat, you know you never really relax but you don’t carry it around on your shoulder,” Ollar said. “You want to be able to take care of yourself and always be conscious of your surroundings. If something happens, you know where you can go for cover and so on.”
If that was his foot soldier’s philosophy, there was one other thing he learned from 11 months of war.
“Actually, you’re not going to do any good if you’re dead,” Ollar said.
There would be bloody days ahead, with a division history noting the 29th had bitter clashes with the Nazis in France’s hedgerow country before a big battle for St. Lo five weeks after D-Day, followed by fights at Vire and Brest in August and, later, the Roer River.
Ollar came home in the fall of 1945 to Rock Island, a manufacturing community where he had grown up as an only child swimming in the Mississippi River. His dad, Charles Henry Ollar, a machine operator and World War I Veteran, and his mother, Velma, were of Choctaw Indian descent. They had one child because it was the Depression. His dad said life was hard enough.
At the train station, Ollar realized he had a situation with his daughter.
“It took me about a month to win her over,” he said.
Ollar eventually started a business in Moline, a nearby city, that made acoustical ceilings and metal door frames. It grew to 20 employees before he retired at 67 and, having fallen in love with the Texas Hill Country in Ingram, he moved there in the 1980s.
Ask him about the secret of his longevity and Ollar will talk of his days as a semi-pro ballplayer. But he always exercised, doing push-ups and sit-ups and jogging a mile or so at night into his 50s.
These days Ollar walks around the car in his garage about 20 times in the morning, a thing he’s done since turning 100 in July. But it could be he’s lived so long for another reason, he said.
“I guess Jesus isn’t ready for me,” Ollar chuckled. “He’s probably waiting for me to get straightened out. I’m trying. I really am, I’m really trying. I talk to him all the time. I hope he’s listening.”
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