A 99-year-old World War II veteran here in Allentown, Pennsylvania, is among vets going to France this week for the 80th anniversary of D-Day.
Matt Gutman is well-known in the Lehigh Valley veterans community. He rides in parades and speaks in schools and elsewhere about his service in the Navy.
I’ve known him for years. As a volunteer Veterans Affairs driver, I once gave him a ride to the VA hospital sixty miles away in Wilkes-Barre. I’ve taken him to picnics held to honor vets. Two years ago, I interviewed him for an “in their own words” war story in The Morning Call and wrote a blog about the first time he crossed the Equator.
On Friday, the newspaper ran my story about his upcoming journey to the beaches where the Allies landed June 6, 1944, against a hail of German gunfire.
Matt will be one of eight vets the Tennessee nonprofit Forever Young Veterans is taking to Normandy for seven days, all expenses paid. He’s the only one who didn’t fight in Europe, but in the Pacific, where he had a berth on a landing ship, tank, the LST-553. As the coxswain on one of its two Higgins boats – the same type of landing craft used in the Normandy invasion — he ferried troops to Japanese-held islands. Forever Young wanted him along to represent the Pacific Theater. Matt said he’s excited about what he’ll learn. It’s his first trip to France.
Each of the vets is going with a companion. Matt’s will be his eldest son, Mike, who lives in Florida and was the Air Force crew chief of an F-4E Phantom jet in the Vietnam War.
Before my story about the trip ran last week, my wife and I visited Matt. We chatted in his apartment, where I was struck by two photos on the wall – images I must have overlooked in previous visits. Matt told us about them and gave me the OK to use both in this blog.
One is a family portrait Matt believes was taken in 1936, when he was 11. The other is a candid shot showing him and six other LST-553 crew members standing on a Japanese boat on Leyte Island in the Philippines. It was 1945, the war was over, and they were assigned to disarm Japanese troops – a job that brought Matt a prized possession, an officer’s sword.
The photos reflect the American story. Matt’s parents were immigrants from Yugoslavia, the part that is now Slovenia. His father was a blacksmith. Matt and his pals on the LST were young men who, like millions of others, took up the fight when their country called.
When I asked about his siblings in the family portrait, Matt shook his head. Everyone but him is gone. Among the sailors, it’s likely he is the only one still living. He keeps these two pictures on the wall among others he values. For an old salt, they’re a reminder of home and far away, of peacetime and war, of family and friends he had long ago.
David Venditta 