“One of the Lucky Ones”

For the past three or four years, my mom has been embedded in genealogy research. She even took five of our relatives to the root location of our family (at least on my mother’s side), a small port town in the southwestern corner of the island of Sicily, called Sciacca. The group of them wandered through the streets and harbors of Sciacca and marveled about how every person they met or saw reminded them of a long lost uncle or aunt. Sounded like a very surreal experience.

It was only recently that my father caught this genealogy bug. Dad has a cousin in Georgia who had dedicated much of her life to genealogy research, tracking my father’s family all the way back to the age of the Angles and the Saxons in England. Now, neither of my parents had gotten that detailed in their research. They hadn’t been as deeply involved for as long as my dad’s cousin had. So their research dealt with individuals within the past 150 years.

They recently brought my attention to an ancestor who could have been a namesake had they realized his existence earlier: James W. Tucker.

This James Tucker lived between 1919 and 1983, and served as Warrant Officer in the 299th Combat Engineer Battalion during the invasion of Omaha Beach on 6 June 1944. Anyone who has seen the opening scene of Saving Private Ryan gets a good idea of the devastation that those soldiers faced as they approached the beach. It was nothing short of miraculous that any G.I. survived the hail of gunfire and mortar shells detonating around them. Warrant Officer Tucker was even quoted as saying, “I was one of the lucky ones . . . I never thought I’d live through it.”

But live through it he did. After one-third of his Engineering Battalion, Tucker was one of the oly ones left along with a Chaplain to set up a temporary mass grave of the bodies that littered the beach. He took over a tank with a dozer blade after its crew bailed out, and used it to clear obstacles, gaining ground on the beach. The worst that happened was shell fragments slicing throuhg his pantlegs and the tread on the tank blown out from a land mine.

Warrant Officer Tucker then went on to fight in the Battle of the Bulge and five other battles.

It was said once that courage is not what you need before you enter into something dangerous. It is something you gain from entering into the danger. W.O. Tucker dove in and took charge of the chaotic situation. To think that this man was a part of my own family leaves me with the thought that a piece of that courage is part of my makeup as well.

Lest I dare to think that I don’t have what it takes to do what God has called me to, God has given me this example of bravery. God’s angels are watching out for us at every moment, even when we aren’t aware or don’t realize it. It’s obvious that the angels watched over W.O. Tucker.

For more information, please see: D-Day – Normandie 1944: Men of D-Day
Photos from 299th Combat Engineer Battalion – Article1Tucker