On D-Day anniversary, I revisit Chaplain Frank Arnold’s diary

On the 66th anniversary of the D-Day invasion, I repost links to the World War II diary of Chaplain Frank Arnold, my uncle. I originally posted these last summer with the permission of his son, Frank Yunk-Arnold. Uncle Frank crossed into France to join combat forces a few weeks after D-Day, though his entries in advance of the invasion and on the day itself make interesting reading today. The first of the five posts includes D-Day:

Chaplain Frank Arnold’s World War II diary

“Indescribable hell”

“This is the day Satan hath made”

“16 below. What a day to ride a Jeep”

“Visited Nazi extermination camp”

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Chaplain Frank Arnold’s World War II diary

 

Chaplain Frank Arnold about a decade after the war with son Frankie, daughter Jean and wife Florence.

We laid my Uncle Frank to rest 44 years ago. But he was alive in my living room this weekend, speaking from the pages of a diary he wrote as an Army chaplain during World War II.

Frank Mitchell Arnold II was a hero in my family: idolized by my mother, his younger sister by 12 years, and admired by my father, who followed him into the Air Force as a chaplain. Chaplains aren’t normally viewed as war heroes, but Uncle Frank was a war hero in my family. He was awarded a Silver Star, three Bronze Stars (one of them with “V” for valor) and a Purple Heart. I didn’t know much more than that the medals had something to do with tending to casualties under enemy fire and that he had been in the Battle of the Bulge and had been appalled at Gen. George S. Patton’s profanity.

I was just 10 years old when Uncle Frank died, just weeks before Dad was to be transferred into his command in the Pacific, stationed at Wakkanai, Japan. We would have visited Uncle Frank in Hawaii on the way to Japan. But he died of a heart attack on a trip to Thailand. His was the first funeral I remember attending.

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