Still just a teenager, combat medic Jake Ruser clung to the netting, knowing that one slip could be fatal as he came down from a ship to a landing craft bound for Normandy. “They had these big cargo nets draped over the side of the ship,” he recalls with a clarity that defies the decades. “I had to climb down these nets and had my equipment with me, which made it harder.
“As the wave would pass under, the big ship would rise up and the little boat would drop down. So you had to time it between those few seconds to get from that big ship cargo net into the boat without falling. If you slipped, you went between the two and got crushed.”
Ruser made it to the Utah beach a week after D-day, codenamed Operation Overlord, the biggest amphibious invasion in the history of warfare. On 6 June 1944 the Allies used more than 5,000 ships and landing craft to land more than 150,000 troops on five beaches in Normandy, leading to the liberation of France and Europe from Nazi Germany’s occupation.
Joe Biden is set to attend the 80th anniversary commemorations in France along with world leaders including the French president, Emmanuel Macron, and the Ukrainian leader, Volodymyr Zelenskiy. Dozens of second world war veterans are expected to return, many perhaps for the last time, to Normandy’s beaches.
Ruser is among America’s dwindling band of brothers. The great-grandfather will turn 100 years old on 27 December. He is still mobile, climbing and descending the stairs of his home in Philadelphia, and has a remarkable memory for dates and details. His wife, Claire, died in 1997 after 48 years of marriage.
Ruser’s home on a tree-lined street in north-east Philadelphia is full of memories of the war. A French Légion d’Honneur certificate sits in a frame above the fireplace. Other certificates, newspaper clippings, photos, mugs and US flags rest on sideboards, along with a vintage map showing the paths of the allied advance through France. A boxed DVD set of Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks’s TV series Band of Brothers rests by the TV. Upstairs he keeps a shirt bearing 12 medals, including a combat medal and Purple Heart.
Ruser was born in Philadelphia in 1924, the same year as Marlon Brando, George HW Bush, James Baldwin, Truman Capote and Jimmy Carter. He grew up with his sister in nearby Conshohocken. As a boy he sold magazines, delivered newspapers and helped clean a pharmacy. The first president he remembers is Franklin Roosevelt.
When he left school he was immediately drafted into the army on 18 August 1943. He recalls having 18 weeks of basic military training plus medical training. The following March, sailing from New York on the Queen Mary, he landed in Britain, just south of Glasgow.
He continued training at a camp about an hour from Manchester and then at one near Bristol. Then the war came to him. Wearing a blue shirt with red stripe, sitting on a sofa with a plastic sheet covering, Ruser recalls: “I think it was the 4th of June a German bomber came over to bomb Bristol because of the manufacturing there.
“We were caught in between. We weren’t allowed to dig any holes on that property that we were leasing so we had to turn around and just stand in a tree and watch the planes go over.
“I had never seen a bomber who was full with bombs manoeuvre like a pursuit plane. He was dodging the ack-ack. He got over, he dropped his bombs over Bristol and got back. They claimed they hit him going back over the Channel but I don’t know.”
D-day had initially been set for 5 June but was delayed due to poor weather. Dwight Eisenhower, supreme commander of the allied forces in Europe, decided to go with 6 June. Allied airborne forces parachuted into drop zones across northern France; ground troops then landed across five assault beaches – Utah, Omaha, Gold, Juno and Sword.
Ruser was still in south-west England. “We could see an airfield near us where the C-47s were taking off and landing and we saw they started getting their fuselage and the wings painted with their stripes to identify them so they could be picked up easy. We didn’t even think about the D-day. I don’t think we heard about it for a couple of days till the papers told us.”
A week later, Ruser sailed from Plymouth to Utah beach. By then the evidence of the carnage was already fading. “They had the beaches well cleaned. Only a few days after they had cleaned up and I don’t recall seeing any real destruction on the beaches.”
Ruser, assigned to the Fourth Infantry Division, went with a group to establish the first evacuation hospital in the Utah beach area. But on 15 June the division sent out an emergency call for medics. “We turned around and, from taking care of our hospital people and treatment, we wound up being on the frontlines.”
Ruser set off with the infantry through Normandy and became a litter (stretcher) bearer for nine and a half months. “Our job was to go out and if a fellow was seriously wounded we’d go out and pick him up and try and bring him back. Now, you have artillery shells falling, your have mortar barrages falling on you or you may have a guy shooting at you.
“But we would go out and get ’em and try to evacuate them. We would try to do our best to get it done and save as many as we could. We also picked up German casualties and we’d bring them back and evacuate them.”
Was he afraid? “All the time. I said many prayers.”
The allies liberated the port city of Cherbourg on 25 June. At the start of August, Ruser and his unit were rushed up to help the 30th Division at Mortain. He saw some terrible injuries. “I still remember to this day the driver turned around and was peppered from head to feet with the gravel from the land mine.
“When we treated him, he asked the doctor when he was done if he’s going to be able to see. The doctor said you’re all full of gravel, the nurse will wash your eyes, I think you’ll get your eyesight. Both his hands were burned to a crisp – no bones at all, just skin hanging. I always remember that and it was 80 years ago.”
The memories keep coming: a 165-mile (266km) road trip in teeming rain, his division liberating Paris, going into Belgium and making it all the way to the German border. Ruser crossed the Siegfried Line on 14 September. “We were lucky it was a rainy, misty day and the Germans didn’t have good object observation, so we were able to get through it in two or three days.”
He continued to move back and forth and, in December, reached Hurtgen Forest, which he regards as the most difficult battle the US army fought in Europe. “Every outfit that went in, it was like going through a meat grinder. We just got chewed up. We had such serious casualties badly wounded from mines.”
One day he was confronted by the sight of dozens of dead American bodies. “They were neatly stacked, four abreast, shoulder to shoulder, maybe about five feet high. You wonder in your head, how could this happen?
“Well, later we found out there had been two truces called. The Ninth Division called a truce and then the 28th, when they took over from the Ninth, called a truce to gather up the dead and wounded. That’s how these bodies had been stacked. They stopped the war and the two armies worked together.”
At one point Ruser was among three companies cut off from the rear and surrounded by German troops. He says: “We were all day in this old German bunker we took over and we had 20-some casualties in there, and seven of them were litter casualties. Now we only had two litter teams, but we needed seven.
“As the day went on towards evening, their wounds started hurting them and so we decided to take a chance. Looking around, we found a German red cross on a white banner. We tied that to a piece of tree and one of our litter bearers carried that and the other seven of us others carried our litter patient and the Germans let us through.”
Ruser, who revisited the site 78 years later, continues: “They recognised the red cross and they didn’t want to be bothered with the casualty. Then the slightly wounded helped the more serious wounded and we got all of them out. None of them were allowed to carry their guns because medics did not carry any guns in world war two in Europe, so we were all unarmed.
“We had to take them down a steep ravine and up the other side. To this day I think back, how do we do it without dropping them off the litter? It would take a couple hours to get down one side, a couple hours to go up the other side because you didn’t want to spill a patient off the litter. So, we did it but you wonder how.”
Ruser’s unit was sent to the Ardennes region of Belgium and Luxembourg in what became the Battle of the Bulge, the biggest and bloodiest single battle fought by Americans in the war. Asked what effect all the death and destruction had on him, he answers matter-of-factly: “I don’t know. I just assumed that it helped make you grow up a little sooner and recognise things and realise their values.”
He left France a week before the war in Europe officially ended, arriving back in the US on 15 May. He had 30 days’ leave then was reassigned to the paraplegic ward in a hospital in Atlantic City, New Jersey. Eventually he left the military, went to business school and became an accountant, later working at IBM. He retired at 55.
It has been a life well lived but, as the sun sets on the greatest generation, Ruser worries about the state of the world – including America’s fragile democracy. “I never expected to have so many wars after world war two. I’m very discouraged with the situation. I’m afraid this country’s not going to exist.”
Joe Biden, he says, “devoted his entire life to the government”, whereas his presidential election rival Donald Trump “when he was in his early 20s was called a draft dodger and a yellowbelly”.
Ruser wonders if, on 6 January 2021, Trump had planned to replace the American flag with his own version and declare a new republic. “All his good friends are dictators, or the ones he loves and thinks so much of are dictators. Now he’s talking about, if he gets in again, he’s going on his first day to set up as a dictator.”
What would the soldiers of D-day, who fought and died to resist fascism, think about the rise of authoritarianism on America’s own shores? Ruser feels certain: “I think they would be very disturbed because people are being told one thing and they’re buying what they’re being told. They’re not paying attention.”
