Roanoke College graduate Robert Homer Anderson ’42 was “a handsome, hollow-cheeked boy with a lot of style and a sort of easy petulance.”
At least, that’s how he was described by Nobel Prize-winning author Ernest Hemingway, who happened to be on Anderson’s boat as it motored toward the beaches of Normandy on June 6, 1944 — 80 years ago this week.
Hemingway, then a war correspondent, later documented his view of the invasion in a Collier’s magazine piece called “Voyage to Victory.” The article heavily featured Anderson, or “Andy” as Hemingway called him, and the considerable courage he displayed that day.
Hemingway had shown up on the naval ship Dorothea Dix just days after sustaining a concussion in a car accident. From the ship, he boarded a 36-foot landing craft vehicle, personnel, or LCV(P), skippered by Anderson (pictured at left), then a Navy lieutenant junior grade. The writer was positioned near Anderson throughout the mission, attempting in vain to stay dry as waves crashed against the hull. With confusing directions, the two men debated their exact location, especially after Anderson’s map was whipped to sea by the wind.
At one point, two destroyers — Texas and Arkansas — lobbed shells over their heads at the shore. Hemingway described the concussion and report as a punishing punch to the ear, writing that they “sounded as if they were throwing whole railway trains across the sky…”
While other craft retreated from enemy fire, Anderson directed his forward through a mine field toward a floundering LCV(P) near shore. With Hemingway by his side, Anderson and his crew managed to dodge contact mines, wooden stakes and other obstructions to rescue men from the sinking boat, which was taking enemy fire from a German machine gun nest on shore. They successfully loaded the men, retreated through the treacherous waters, and delivered them to an offshore destroyer. Then they returned to the beach to deposit the troops with their TNT and bazookas.
Later, Hemingway marveled at Anderson’s courage amid the invasion, recommending the junior lieutenant for the Navy Cross.
“The story of all the teamwork behind that has to be written, but to get all that in would take a book, and this is simply the account of how it was in a LCV(P) on the day we stormed Fox Green beach.”
Ernest Hemingway, "Voyage to Victory"
“I wish I could write the full story of what it means to take a transport across through a mine-swept channel; the mathematical precision of maneuver; the infinite detail and chronometrical accuracy and split-second timing of everything from the time the anchor comes up until the boats are lowered and away into the roaring, sea-churning assembly circle from which they break off into the attack wave,” Hemingway wrote. “The story of all the teamwork behind that has to be written, but to get all that in would take a book, and this is simply the account of how it was in a LCV(P) on the day we stormed Fox Green beach.”
Anderson, pictured at right in a Brackety-Ack article announcing his election to class president, was the son of another accomplished Maroon. His father and namesake had earned the nickname “Bulldog” for his performance on the Roanoke College football team in the early 1900s. Anderson Jr. went on to earn a Bachelor of Divinity degree from the Lutheran Theological Seminary in 1950 and a law degree from the University of Virginia in 1957. After stints with the Norfolk City Attorney’s Office and Commonwealth’s Attorney’s Office, he became a partner at Goldblatt, Lipkin, Cohen and Anderson in 1969. He married and had two children. In 2009, he was awarded the Roanoke College Medal. He passed away that same year at age 88.
On the 50th anniversary of D-Day, Anderson and his wife, Betty, returned to Omaha Beach to pay their respects. Anderson told The Virginian-Pilot that he hadn’t known Hemingway would be on the boat that day and never saw him again afterward. “Hemingway had a way of throwing his weight around,” the article said, “and Anderson had gotten his attention by reminding him when he stepped aboard that he was in charge of the boat.”
“He could really use those binoculars,” Anderson told the reporter. “He had a great eye for detail and, frankly, I was glad he was along when things got hot. He was very cool and capable of dealing, you felt, with whatever we came up against.”
Hemingway could have said the same for Anderson, one of the more than 150,000 Allied troops who participated in the D-Day invasion. Some 4,500 men did not survive that day, but Anderson and the men he rescued sure did — and, thanks to Anderson’s leadership, so did one of the most celebrated American writers of all time.
This famous public domain photo, used here courtesy of The National World War II Museum, shows Allied forces pouring out of an LCV(P) to storm the Normandy beaches.