Several young men who had been on the 1940-41 basketball team at Bushong Rural High School in Kansas — William Moreland, far left, middle row; Rex Gore, third from left; Jay Moreland, fourth from left; and John Herrick, fifth from left --- were killed on D-Day when their ship hit a German mine and caught fire. Credit: Dianne Smith
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Landing craft 92 had left the English Channel port of Weymouth on the evening of June 5, 1944, and now, in the early hours of June 6, it was steaming in darkness for the coast of France.
A cold wind blew sea spray across the deck, a crewman remembered. Flashes of gunfire were visible on the horizon, and the sound of distant explosions could be heard.
Down in the hold, scores of American soldiers waited. Some slept. Others shot dice. Most were quiet.
Jay Moreland, 21, from Bushong, Kan., was there with his brother, William, 19, and their high school buddies John Herrick, 19, and Rex Gore, 20. Three years earlier, they had all been on the Bushong Rural High School basketball team.
Also on board were Robert N. Shotton, 32, who had worked in a hardware store in Washington, D.C.; Orie Krieger, 33, one of 11 children of Dutch immigrants in Hawthorne, N.J.; and at least 19 others who would die later that morning in the hold of the ship when it struck a mine and caught fire as it headed to Omaha Beach.
As the United States marks the 80th anniversary of D-Day today, the remains of most of the men killed in the fire have never been identified, and many have never been recovered.
But this year, the Defense Department announced that, with the help of modern technology, it had identified three: Herrick, Elmo F. Hartwick, 38, of Onaga, Kan., and Julius G. Wolfe, 20, of Liberal, Mo.
Their remains had been exhumed from the Normandy American Cemetery near Omaha Beach in 2021, as part of an ongoing project to account for the missing from World War II.
The soldiers were among 2,500 Americans and 1,900 other Allied service members who died in the assault on the beaches of Nazi-occupied France.
Experts from the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency (DPAA), which searches for missing service members, and from the Armed Forces Medical Examiner System made the identifications using DNA comparisons and other tools.
"It's awesome," said Gail Herrick, John Herrick's nephew. "And 80 years later."
"It was pretty darned emotional for me," he said, when he was told by an official that his uncle's remains had been identified. "It kind of tore me up a little bit. … [A] young man, basically blown up in that landing craft."
"I couldn't help but get a vision of his last moments and how horrific that would have been," he said in a telephone interview Tuesday.
Many men on the ship were burned beyond recognition. Some intact remains were retrieved and buried but never associated with a specific soldier. The dog tags of Shotton, Jay Moreland and Robert Pitts, 23, of Kennard, Ind., were found but later lost, and their bodies still have not been identified.
More identifications may be coming, said Eric W. Klinek, a historian with the DPAA's Europe Mediterranean detachment - providing further pieces long missing from the story of D-Day.
At dawn on June 6, the vessel - technically LCI(L)-92 for landing craft infantry, large - was about 16 miles off the coast of Normandy.
"There were ships in all directions, as far as the eye could see," U.S. Coast Guard photographer Seth Shepard, who was onboard, recalled in a memoir written a few weeks after D-Day.
They were part of an Allied armada of some 5,000 ships, carrying about 150,000 men, that was preparing to free Western Europe from the grip of Adolf Hitler's Nazi Germany.
LCI(L)-92 was a small ship, about 158 feet long and 23 feet wide in the middle. It was designed to go into shallow water close to the beach, lower two ramps and deliver its cargo of soldiers. It had a U.S. Coast Guard crew of about 25.
Also on board were 192 soldiers from the 500th Medical Collecting Company, whose job was to gather casualties, and from the 149th Engineer Combat Battalion, whose task was to clear obstructions on the beach and create pathways for equipment.
They were from many backgrounds and occupations and from all over the country.
Bushong, the hometown of Jay and William Moreland, is in Lyon County, in eastern Kansas. In 1940, the town had a population of 135, according to the U.S. Census.
The brothers had enlisted on Feb. 16, 1943, with their friend Herrick, who lived in Dunlap, a few miles away. Another friend, Gore, also from Dunlap, enlisted a week later.
In a photograph of the Bushong Rural High School basketball team from 1940-41 the four are sitting in the middle row wearing team jackets.
Three years later, they were in the 149th engineer battalion, waiting in the hold of the landing craft.
Among those with them were Joseph Borysiewicz, 23, a steelworker from Gary, Ind., and the son of Polish immigrants; Hiram H. Collins, 25, of Crisfield, Md., whose mother had been in the state legislature; and James Lee Harrington, 21, from the small coal mining community of Cincinnati, in southern Iowa.
As the ship neared shore that morning, Shepard, of the Coast Guard, remembered feeling the explosions from enemy shells and seeing huge splashes of water when they landed.
Then he saw another landing craft - number 91 - already ashore and ablaze.
"The beach was under very heavy rifle and machine gun fire," Coast Guard Lt. Robert M. Salmon, 31, the skipper of 92, wrote after the battle. "LCI(L) 91, which had beached a half hour earlier, was in flames and being bombarded by heavier guns."
From the ship's open bridge, he ordered his vessel to veer to the left "in the hope that we might prove a less obvious target, and that we might gain some protection from the smoke of the 91," he wrote.
He maneuvered past several rows of obstacles in the water.
"The outer three rows were successfully passed, and we had what was apparently clear water to the beach," he wrote. "The ship was straightened out and began the run in."
Suddenly, there was a huge explosion near the front of the ship, and "the number one troop compartment broke into flames, spraying the entire forward deck with burning fuel," he wrote.
The ship had hit a mine that blew a hole in the hull and ignited the fuel.
Shepard, the photographer, recalled, "A sheet of flame and steel shot out from the forward hold. … The heat was like [being in] the midst of a blast furnace."
"Everywhere were faces blackened from the smoke and fire," he wrote.
Several enemy artillery shells struck. Some men were blown overboard. Then the ship ran aground.
The soldiers tried to get off the ship, but the hostile fire was too heavy on one side, and the water was more than four feet deep on the other.
"The cries of some of the helpless soldiers in the deep water were pitiful," Shepard recalled.
Salmon, the skipper, wrote, "All troops going over the side were advised to forget their packs and take only their rifles and ammunition."
Meanwhile, as the rising tide carried the vessel onto the beach, he and his men tried in vain to fight the fire. After everyone who could get off was clear, the order to abandon ship was given.
The Coast Guard crew got away, apparently, with no deaths, Salmon wrote.
He believed that soldiers up on deck when the ship caught fire may have escaped. But there were others still down in the hold.
"It is doubtful that any of these men were able to reach safety," he wrote.
As the battle went on, the ship's cold and wet survivors huddled on the beach and dug in for cover. "We sank exhaustedly on the pebbles, reaching the lowest point of human existence," Shepard remembered.
The American and Allied forces eventually fought their way off Omaha Beach and on to the end of World War II in Europe 11 months later.
Several days after the battle, a soldier from the 500th Medical Collecting Company went to check on the wreck. "I was inside hold number one which was completely wrecked by fire and explosion," Sgt. Thomas R. Smallwood reported.
The scene was disturbing. He saw charred equipment and human remains. "I could not remain below very long," he wrote.
News of the D-Day tragedies slowly filtered back to Bushong and to other towns that had sent their sons to the war.
On June 23, word came from the War Department that the four Bushong-area men were missing in action, according to the Emporia Gazette.
Zola Herrick, John's mother, had already had a premonition that her son was dead, said Gail Herrick, John's nephew.
"She knew that John got killed when he got killed," Gail Herrick said. "She was just an old Kansas farm lady, but she just knew."
On June 28, Everett and Elsie Moreland got a telegram saying that their son Bill was dead, the Gazette reported. Bill's brother, Jay, was declared dead by the Army on Dec. 17, according to official records. Neither body had been recovered.
It was not until Sept. 1, 1949, more than five years after D-Day, that the Army informed the Morelands by letter that the bodies of their sons had been destroyed in the ship fire and were not going to be recovered.
"It is not easy to express condolence to you who gave your loved ones under circumstances so difficult that there is no grave at which to pay homage," Lt. Col. W.E. Campbell wrote. "May the knowledge of your sons' honorable service to their country be a source of sustaining comfort to you."
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