When Johnny Pye Sr. returned to Georgia after being wounded in World War II, he told those who asked about his service that he was the “third live man” on Omaha Beach during the D-Day invasion of the French coast at Normandy.
“He always said that because the first wave was up against the barricade, and out of his boat everybody got killed but three men,” said Gary Wood, Pye’s brother-in-law. “They came in right where an MG-42 machine gun was in that German bunker shooting down on them right into the boat.”
The late Pye was a member of the 5th Ranger Battalion. The 2nd Ranger Battalion that went in before the 5th is the unit that scaled the infamous cliffs at Pointe du Hoc and captured the bunkers above the beach. June 6 is the 80th anniversary of the D-Day invasion that began the Allied forces’ attempt to reclaim German-held Europe. Less than a year later the war was over.
In a June 1994 article in the Dalton Daily Citizen, staff writer Sherry Spivey interviewed Pye for the 50th anniversary of D-Day: “Pye said he remembered the day before D-Day. Rome fell that day and the night was beautiful. He was on deck, sitting about 10 miles offshore listening to one of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s fireside chats. From the ship he could see what was happening on the shore.”
Pye told the newspaper, “All night long bombers would fly over and drop flares lighting up the beach. Then more bombers would fly over and bomb the hell out of the beach. That went on all night.”
Wood said Pye would open up at times and tell what happened on that fateful day of June 6 in the penultimate year of the war.
“So the 2nd Rangers went in and half of them were killed, if not three-quarters of them,” Wood said. “Then Johnny’s boat went in, and that’s where he came up with ‘I was the third live man on Omaha.’ So he made it and joined in with the 2nd. I know you’ve seen the D-Day movies where the bangalore torpedo blowed up the wall where they could go up. He was a part of that. From the sixth of June to his birthday, which was Aug. 28, he was in on taking the towns (in France) and moving toward Paris.”
The men in Company E of the 5th Rangers were halfway to the beach when the Germans opened fire on them, Pye said.
“They shot everything at us. You could look up and see bullets in the air,” he recalled.
Pye, who was 19 at the time, said the captain of their landing craft became disoriented and had to redirect and land on Omaha Beach. Immediately they ran into a 2-foot-high sea wall made of rocks and barbed wire. He made it to the sea wall without being shot and kicked rocks around to make a hole to lie in, he told the newspaper.
“The Germans used mannequins to make it look like they had more soldiers along the beach than they did,” he said, noting it was the first time he’d ever seen a mannequin. “Everyone was scared. Although a few had seen combat before, most of us were greenhorns. All the training and rules we learned went out the window. We just did what we could to survive and kill the enemy.”
Shot in the mouth
Pye survived D-Day without being wounded; continuing to push inland was difficult.
“He told the story about one of the towns where he was assigned to clear a house and the only thing he had left was a phosphorous grenade,” said Wood. “He said he went up to the trap door and was about to throw it in, and something just told him not to. As it turned out, there was a French family in there instead of Germans, so he said that was a close call.”
At 11 a.m. on Aug. 28, 1944 — Pye’s birthday — he was shot in the mouth while leading his unit at the front of a column.
“He crawled up to the edge of a field, and said when he got up and turned his head to wave his people on, he was shot with a ‘burp gun’ that the Germans used,” Wood said of the sound the MP-40 submachine gun made when fired. “It shoots a five-round burst. A round shot his front teeth out, and of course the war was over for him and he went to a hospital ship. Then they did plastic surgery on him before he came home. So when he came home (the wound) was kinda concealed, because his front teeth and upper lip had been blown away and they rebuilt it. But you can see it in some of his pictures.”
Starting a career in Dalton
Lionel Ford “Johnny” Pye had married Dorothy Wood before he went overseas.
“Johnny is actually a nickname that he came back from the war with,” said Gary Wood. “I don’t know how he got the name Johnny.”
When Pye returned to Dalton after being honorably discharged with the rank of staff sergeant, Wood said he began selling insurance but eventually sold cars out of his driveway.
“He got to hearing about a shortage of automobiles right after the war — nobody had any — so he started selling a car or two out of that driveway on Glenwood (Avenue),” Wood remembered. “Then he moved to town right across from Johns BBQ (presently on North Glenwood). That lot right there was where Pye Motors got started.”
Wood started working for Pye when he was 12, washing cars with Johnny Pye Jr.
“We went to Toccoa and bought Fords, to Athens in Tennessee and bought Chevrolets, and to Jacksonville, Florida, to the port and bought Volkswagens before Al Johnson had them (on Glenwood Avenue),” he said. “Then he went to Detroit and bought cars and brought them back and fixed them up to sell.”
Johnny Pye Sr.’s commendations include two Bronze Stars, a Purple Heart, Marksmanship Badge, Combat Infantryman Badge, Ranger tab, World War II Medal, the European-African-Middle Eastern Campaign Medal, the Efficiency, Honor and Fidelity Medal and others.