Amityville legion bands heads to Normandy for D-Day tribute
An American Legion pipe band from Long Island will take to Omaha Beach in Normandy, France on Tuesday, performing in a commemoration of the 79th anniversary of D-Day, the largest seaborne invasion in history and the beginning of the end for Nazi Germany.
Forty-four people — members of the Amityville American Legion Highland Pipe Band, their spouses and friends — climbed onto a coach bus outside Massapequa American Legion Hall 1066 late Thursday afternoon to travel to Kennedy Airport, where they would board a plane bound for France.
Drum major Jim Gilchrist of Copiague said his father, a U.S. Army medic in World War II, was in the first wave of American soldiers who landed, under tremendous fire from German defenders, on Omaha Beach on June 6, 1944.
“I’m probably going to cry like a baby, I know it,” said Gilchrist, an Air Force veteran who served in Vietnam. “I’m going to Normandy in a nice air-conditioned bus, we’ll probably have lunch at a golf course. The old man jumped out into 10 feet of water and almost died. No passport, he didn’t fly on a nice modern jet. It was quite a sacrifice.”
The band was formed in 1952 by World War II veterans and based for many years at the Amityville American Legion Post, said business manager Christopher Zeller. It became the Massapequa post house band in 2013, after the Amityville building was sold. The band performs at parades and charity events across Long Island, he said.
The invitation to play at the Normandy event came after a fan — a Korean War veteran — recommended it to Historic Programs, the nonprofit that stages commemorations marking D-Day, the attack on Pearl Harbor and other historic events.
The Amityville American Legion Highland Pipe Band is set to land in Paris on Friday morning, then travel to Normandy later in the day, Zeller said. The band will perform Friday evening in Sainte-Mere-Egliese, the first town liberated by the U.S. Army. The band will participate in a wreath-laying ceremony Saturday at Brittany American Cemetery — which holds the remains of 4,410 American soldiers.
On June 6, the band will perform in a weath-laying ceremony at Omaha Beach, where American forces were met with heavy resistance from German defenders but were ultimately able to secure a foothold. On its final day in France, the group will play at an American Legion post in Paris, where the organization was founded after World War I.
Color Sgt. B.A. Schoen of Baldwin said he expects to feel gratitude and humility when the Amityville American Legion Highland Pipe Band performs on what was blood-soaked sand 79 years ago.
“I march because my brothers can’t, and when I say my brothers, I mean the guys I grew up with,” he said. “Three guys on my wrestling team, two guys in my elementary school, lost in Vietnam.”
Zeller said he expects to feel a wide range of emotions during the trip, but he’s already full of respect for the men who braved German bullets and bombs when they jumped off landing crafts and into the chilly Atlantic off Normandy nearly 80 years ago.
“It’s because of them that we are standing here in front of the American flag, in a democratic society,” he said
