yogi bear...

 On June 6th, 1944, one of baseball's most beloved personalities found himself on a US Navy support landing craft heading toward the bloodshed on the Normandy beaches.

In the spring of 1943, Lawrence "Yogi" Berra was part of the farm system of New York Yankees and was preparing for a career as a big-league ball player when he received his draft notice. He decided to join the US Navy.

Initially, when Berra reported to the induction center he was earmarked for the Army, but the baseball coach at the Norfolk Naval Training Station heard about Berra and made sure he got assigned to the Navy so he could play on the base's team. Unfortunately for that coach, Berra was shipped to a different training school without even taking the field for the team.

After training at the Navy Amphibious Training Center, Berra was shipped overseas in early 1944, and was assigned to an attack transport stationed in England preparing for the invasion of the European continent.

During the Normandy invasion, the crew of Berra's thirty-six-foot-long Landing Craft Personnel Support (LCPS) was tasked with cruising off the landing beaches, using their rockets and heavy machine guns to soften up the landing zone and give fire support to the infantry going in.

These boats quickly became targets for the German defenders, and Berra recalled that almost everyone on his boat was hit by enemy fire that day.

But the trauma for the boat's crew didn't end on D-Day. In the days following the initial landings, Berra's boat was called upon to cruise off the landing beaches and pull from the water the bodies of servicemen they found floating off the French coast.

Berra had just turned 19 years old, and he carried that experience with him the rest of his life. But his war didn't end in Normandy. Later in 1944 he was sent to cover the invasion of southern France.

It was during the beach-landing phase of Operation Dragoon that Berra's boat engaged a German machine gun position concealed in a build behind the beach. During the firefight, a bullet struck Berra in the hand, but, according to his autobiography, he didn't report his wound because he didn't want to scare his mother.

After Operation Dragoon, Berra was posted to different locations around the theater of operations until sent back to the United States in January of 1945, finally getting to play baseball for the US Navy as the war wound down.

In May of 1946, Seaman Second Class Berra received his Honorable Discharge from the United States Navy. Four months later on September 22, 1946, he made his delayed debut in Major League Baseball once again playing for the New York Yankees. That day the Yankees bested the Philadelphia Athletics twice in a doubleheader.

Sixty-nine years later to the day, Yogi Berra died at the age of 90.

~*~

"Being a young guy, you didn‘t think nothing of it until you got in it. And so we went off 300 yards off beach. We protect the troops."

~ Lawrence "Yogi" Berra