A Jewish veteran is preparing to commemorate the 80th anniversary of the D-Day landings
Even as he prepared to embark for the battlefields of Normandy, Pvt. Mervyn Kersh was summoned by his commanding officer and threatened with arrest. Why, the officer demanded, had Kersh refused to eat his army rations of canned beef and vegetables, subsisting only on canned peaches? Was he trying to make himself so weak that he would be unfit to fight in France? Kersh, then 19, was indignant. “I said that was the last thing I wanted to do,’’ Kersh told The Associated Press. “I’m Jewish.
“If there’s ever a soldier who is going to fight with spirit in the field against the Nazis, of course it would be a Jewish-American or an Anglo Jewish citizen of the British Isles,” Citino said. Assigned to the Royal Army Ordnance Corps, Kersh’s role in the invasion was to help ensure a steady flow of vehicles — everything from motorcycles to 48-wheel tank transporters — to British Army units fighting their way to Berlin.
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