(Newspapers.com)
In civilian life, Steve Kleman machined parts for Mack trucks in his hometown of Allentown, Pennsylvania. Transformed into a soldier for World War II, he helped lead a unit of combat engineers onto Omaha Beach early on D-Day, the epic invasion of Nazi-occupied France on June 6, 1944.
“The landings were made under heavy mortar, artillery, and machine gun fire inasmuch as no infantry had preceded the landing of the engineers on Dog Green and part of Dog White beach.”
That’s from the after action report of the 121st Engineer Combat Battalion, 29th Infantry Division.
Staff Sergeant Kleman and the 40 other men of the battalion’s 2nd Platoon, Company B, neared the Normandy beach in an LCM, a landing craft mechanized, about 6 a.m. Each engineer carried satchel charges of TNT, a Bangalore torpedo, a rifle and full field pack. Melvin B. Farrell, who was on the craft, described what happened:
About 200 yards out, our LCM floundered, nosed up on a hidden sandbar and stuck fast. The operator seesawed back and forth, but she wouldn’t give. The machine gun fire rattling off the sides set up such a din of noise you could hardly think. The operator threw the ramp down and yelled, “Hit it!”
I was the third man out. We three wheeled left and jumped off the side of the ramp. Machine gun fire was now raking the inside of the LCM, and a high percentage of our men were killed before they could get out.
(6juin1944.com)
When the first three of us jumped, we landed in a shell hole, and what with all the luggage, we had plummeted to the bottom like a rock. We walked along the bottom until we climbed out of the hole. It seemed an eternity before we reached the surface. We were then on the barren sand, but there was another stretch of water between us and the beach. This stretch contained a maze of tank traps, mines and every object the Krauts could plant to thwart a landing attempt.
It all seemed unreal, a sort of dreaming while awake, men were screaming and dying all around me. I’ve often wondered if all the men prayed as fervently as I did.
The engineers’ immediate job was to blow up a masonry wall so tanks could get through.
Farrell made his way around tripwires attached to a Tellermine and blew a 20-foot gap in a tangled mess of barbed wire. He reached the wall, threw his satchel charges onto it and crawled to safety just before the explosion. As he and others huddled behind the wall’s wreckage, he looked toward the water where the first wave of infantry was about to land and saw his sergeant, Steve Kleman.
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Kleman was the third of four children born to immigrants from Austrian Galicia. His parents, Wasyl Kleman and Anna Bujar, were married in 1915 in Allentown. Steve had a sister, Stella, and brothers Walter and Joseph. The family lived in the 6th Ward, between the Jordan Creek and Lehigh River. For much of his life in the city, Wasyl was a sweeper in a Mack Trucks machine shop.
Steve Kleman belonged to Boys Haven, which sought to steer kids away from delinquency, “to teach young people properly in their social hours, thereby acquiring the knowledge of what is the right and safe thing for young boys to do.” A 1944 story in The Morning Call says he attended Allentown High School, but I couldn’t find any mention of him in old school yearbooks.
In 1938, when he was 18, Kleman toiled out west for the Civilian Conservation Corps. At 6 feet and 185 pounds, he was suitably built for the work.
The Army called him in March 1942 while he was a turret lathe operator at Mack. Training followed at Camp Blanding, Florida. He left for England via Camp Kilmer, New Jersey, in the fall of 1943 and wrote to his parents that he arrived on October 12. The buildup for the Normandy invasion was underway. Kleman had seven months to get ready.
His brothers were in the war as well. Joseph was an Army private in Europe and Walter a Navy seaman on the aircraft carrier Ticonderoga in the Pacific. Both would survive.
At 1 a.m. June 6 aboard a ship in the English Channel, according to Farrell’s account, the engineers were rousted and had breakfast of toast and coffee. A half-hour later, they began boarding the landing craft for transport to the beach. The channel was exceedingly rough.
“Waves would throw the LCM up out of the water, and it would slam down with a bone-breaking jar. Every man jack of us were so seasick we had regurgitated on ourselves and everyone around us by 5 a.m.”
Farrell got safely ashore despite a torrent of German machine gun fire. He and other engineers succeeded in blowing up the masonry wall, about four feet high and four feet thick.
“At this time our initial mission was completed, so we huddled behind the ragged remnants of the wall we had just blown. I turned my gaze toward the coming infantry and saw my sergeant, Steve Kleman, not 40 yards from me. He was sitting down, had been hit through both hips. I tried four times to get out to him to drag him in. Each time I left cover, a hail of machine gun fire would drive me back. By this time he had been hit so many times, it was hopeless.”
The battalion’s after action report notes: “It is estimated that 50% of this initial force were casualties, and 75% of the equipment was lost.”
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(Newspapers.com)
Within two weeks, Kleman’s parents got a telegram from the War Department saying he had been missing in action since D-Day. A follow-up telegram near the end of July reported he was killed June 6. His parents received their 24-year-old son’s last letter four days after his death.
St. Mary’s Ukrainian Orthodox Church, where his family worshiped and his father helped lead a war bonds drive, held a memorial Mass for Kleman on July 30.
In 1948, his remains were brought home. Military honors greeted him at a service led by Veterans of Foreign Wars Post 13 of Greater Allentown, and another Mass was said for him at St. Mary’s. He now lies in the parish cemetery.
David Venditta 