June 6, 1944, is a momentous day in history. Yet because it was 77 years ago, most people either know little or may care little about the event. However, for two strangers and one family, it has tied them all together in a unique way.
The invasion of Normandy, D-Day and Operation Overlord are some of the names associated with the event where Allied Forces, including the U.S., Great Britain and Canada, joined together to storm the five beaches in Normandy, France. Many historians credit it as the turning point in Western Europe during World War II.
But the story hits closer to home, especially for a Pine Burr woman, Sherry Dennis, who lost her oldest brother, Elbert Beasley Jr., on one of those beaches that very day. Dennis never met her brother, having been born a couple of months before the invasion. However, two individuals, one from Texas and one from Alabama, who have no relation to the Beasley family, have helped keep her brother’s legacy alive.
In 2019, the C-P published an article in honor of the 75th anniversary of D-Day involving the story of Beasley’s sacrifice and how a stranger felt the need to reach out to Beasley’s family. In that story, B.C. Robinson of Katy, Texas, had taken a picture of Beasley’s grave at the American Cemetery in Normandy during the 70th Anniversary of the event, and he felt the need to share it with the family.
The American Cemetery in France contains the graves of soldiers who died during the invasion and their march going inland. The graves were not situated in any particular order, and there are more than 9,300 graves at the cemetery. Robinson walked through the cemetery searching for any grave of a soldier who actually died on June 6, 1944, and he found Beasley’s. After an article ran in The Clarion-Ledger looking for family members of Beasley, Robinson was eventually able to speak with Dennis.
Unbeknownst to anyone, Thomas Borcher of Huntsville, Ala. had taken a tour of Normandy in 2001. While walking among the graves at the cemetery, he too searched for a grave of a soldier who died on D-Day. Out of all the graves in the cemetery, he also happened to come upon Beasley’s grave.
“The graves are not in chronological order, alphabetical or anything. It is just all random, so I had to walk around a while amongst all those, and I finally found one,” Borcher said.
He placed a photograph of the grave on his mantel to remember the event and the sacrifice of the soldiers. The experience of Normandy and his connection to the picture stayed with him. When the World War II Memorial opened in Washington D.C., Borcher took the picture with him and took another picture that included the photograph of Beasley’s tombstone at the Normandy portion of the memorial.
Borcher had a harder time than Robinson in trying to locate family members of the soldier. He attempted through the years without success. In May, he discovered the website newspapers.com, a collection of newspapers from all over the country. He decided to search the soldier’s name, hoping to find an obituary. Instead, he saw two stories about how someone else had done the same thing.
For Dennis, it just meant to her that “God wants him (her brother) to be remembered.” He was only 22 years old when he passed away in battle.
While Dennis never met him, she has seen and heard enough about him to know he had to be very special. Beasley’s mother died while he was only eight, yet he signed his military allotment to his father and stepmother.
Dennis also witnessed the pain of his loss more than once. She used to see her father take Beasley’s flag, that the family received after his death, out of a trunk and sit there rubbing it every so often when she was growing up.
While these connections may cause her to relive the pain she saw in her family’s eyes growing up, it also brings her joy. She is very proud of her brother’s service. While she hated that he paid the ultimate sacrifice with his life, she is proud of what he stood for in defending the country and caring for his family.
An interesting side note that Borcher discovered, in the Oscar winning movie “Saving Private Ryan,” the lead character Capt. Miller (played by Tom Hanks) is assigned the task of putting together a team to save the private. In the movie, Hanks requests Beasley to be included on his team but is informed that Beasley died on D-Day. While the character of Beasley in the movie is fictitious, the only Beasley that got killed on D-Day just so happened to be Elbert Beasley Jr.
