World War Ii Combat Knives

D-Day veterans remember fighting, fear, courage

For Harry Powers, the longest day began the night before, aboard a British submarine in the choppy waters of the English Channel.

Powers, a U.S. Navy frogman, was part of a 25-man team tasked with getting off the sub into rubber rafts, rowing toward the Omaha beachhead and swiftly and silently taking out the formidable German defenses perched along the foreboding, 175-foot-high Point du Hoc in the hours before the invasion of Normandy.

Things immediately went haywire, says Powers, now 90. A resident of Sun City Center, Powers will be one of four D-Day veterans honored today at the Sun City Center Community Hall, which is hosting a commemoration on the 67th anniversary of one of the pivotal moments of World War II. Powers was supposed to share his story at the ceremony but had to cancel because of a family emergency.

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The sub was rolling back and forth in the darkness, buffeted by 10-foot swells, recalls Powers.

It was shortly after 10 p.m., June 5, 1944.

"We were launched from the deck of a submarine when we surfaced in the channel," says Powers. "It was pretty rough. We actually had four rubber rafts, but we lost two of them. The seas were just horrible."

Lashed to the remaining rafts, Powers' team of frogmen – precursors to the Navy SEALs that killed Osama bin Laden – wound up three miles from their landing point but found their way back to the beachhead.

Using ropes, they scaled the bluff, stopping occasionally at shelves carved by the elements. After about an hour, the team reached the top, where they found about 60 Germans.

"Some Germans were in bunkers," says Powers. "Some were sitting and waiting. Some were smoking. They were totally surprised."

The ensuing fight was up close and horrific, says Powers.

"We didn't open fire," he says. "We got up behind them with and got them around the neck. We had silencers on our .45s and used knives and garrotes. We couldn't afford to have too much noise."

By now, the invasion was on. Bullets were flying, bombs were dropping, parachute troops were floating to earth and thousands of troops were streaming on shore.

Before getting off the bluff, Powers' team lost 18 of its 25 men.

"When we left, there were bodies all over the beach," says Powers. "We had to step over bodies and dead heads. You can't conceive how bloody Omaha was.

Skeeter Vaughan's Combat Knife Throw

This past weekend I was in New Hampshire taking some training and got a chance to speak with knife-maestro Mike Janich. While discussing knife throwing, I told him it was my impression that this was a skill that had rarely, if ever, served a practical purpose in combat. He told me of the one exception he knew of--that of Sgt. Skeeter Vaughan, a full-blooded Cherokee who served in Europe in World War II. I am embarrassed to say I had not heard of Skeeter's deed, as I included in my book as many accounts of the use of knives in modern warfare as I could find and I hadn't come across this one. George "Skeeter" Vaughan was born in California in 1922 and as a boy hunted small game with throwing knives. As a teenager he worked as a lumberjack in Oregon. According to one internet account: "One day, a 225 pound foreman held back a $10 bill from the 110-pound George, telling him to come and take it if he was man enough. George turned and started to walk away, but turned back and threw his belt knife into a tree, just 3 inches from the foreman's head. As the foreman pulled the knife from the tree, George pulled his boot knife. The frightened foreman threw the $10 bill on the ground and left. One of the other lumberjacks who had seen the whole encounter laughed and said, 'For a little Skeeter, he sure carries a big stinger.'" In his book Knife & Tomahawk Throwing: The Art of the Experts , Harry K. McEvoy describes Sgt. Skeeter Vaughan's famous knife throw. His six-man patrol was tasked with taking out a German pillbox, guarded by a sentry. Though it was dark, the ground was covered with snow, against which the Americans would be clearly silhouetted should they attempt to approach. Knowing of his skill, one of his men asked him to try to kill the German with his knife. With a skill developed over many years of continual practice, Skeeter hurled his bayonet knife in a high trajectory, aiming for a spot about three feet above the head of the sentry. The weapon turned silently over and over in its long downhill pinwheel flight, and to Skeeter’s amazement, the sentry dropped face down into the snow without a sound--the weapon had penetrated the sentry’s head at the base of his skull. Had Skeeter missed, or only slightly wounded the sentry, his Moccasin Ranger team would have had to open up with rifles or automatic fire, thus alerting the pillbox. The entire mission might then have been a failure. As for the truth of the war story, I'll withhold judgment.

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