GLADBROOK - Lawrence "Doc" Schaeferle was not practicing his medical craft under ideal conditions.

His operating table was a sandy beach.

His instruments and supplies were stored in a bag he carried ashore out of deep surf.

The number of patients was overwhelming, more than he could help.

And he had to concentrate while bullets were hissing by him and bombs were exploding around him, and over the cries of the wounded.

Schaeferle, now 97, a graduate of the University of Iowa medical school and a longtime Gladbrook-area doctor, was a medical officer at Omaha Beach during the D-Day invasion of Normandy during World War II on June 6, 1944.

"I was the aid station, if you want to put it that way," Schaeferle said. "In Normandy, when I landed there, my 'aid station' was in a trench the Germans had nicely built before we got there."

He went ashore with the second wave, within the first hour of the invasion. The Jeep he tried to ride ashore on, pulling a trailer, was waterproofed and designed to be able to run through the water. But it was a short, ill fated trip.

"A destroyer pulled in behind us and the wave of the destroyer tipped us over," he said. "We had to swim the rest of the way in." The landing craft had run up on a sandbar too far from shore.

They came ashore under heavy enemy fire, not unlike that seen in the motion picture "Saving Private Ryan."

"Shells were dropping around us," he said. "Some of them hit the (other) landing craft as we were going in. We were fortunate."

"I had a musette bag and another bag carrying a few bandages and primarily morphine. And that was all I had when I landed on the beach," Schaeferle said.

As a member of the 1st Infantry Division of the U.S. 1st Army - "The Big Red One"- he'd been in a tough landing before, during the invasion of Sicily the previous year. "We got there just in time for the Germans to have a counterattack" with howitzers. But at Omaha, the beach was strewn with casualties.

"There's not a heck of a lot you can do with a half-dozen injured men," he said. "You're trying. You just slap on a few bandages and send them out. We'd get them out just as fast as we could. The more severe ones, we'd try to get out first, but sometimes it just didn't work out that way."

In one case, he did save one comrade whose leg was injured by a mortar shell, and later served as his best man at his wedding.

But he couldn't save all the men he worked on. It was frustrating work.

"Very much so," he said. "You didn't have many tools to work with in the first place - sew up a few minor wounds, but anything beyond the mere scratch was sent back to the clearing station."

Schaeferle doesn't know how close he came to being wounded himself.

"You know, you don't know how close you are to being hit. You do know when you do get hit, and that's about the end of it. You can hear them whistle when they go by you, but that's it."

The soldiers displayed great courage and resourcefulness.

"These GIs were a great bunch of fellas," Schaeferle said. "When we landed there on the beach, Col. (George A.) Taylor (the regimental commander) got his men as well organized as he could on the beach, and he told them, 'We're dying here on the beach; let's go up on the hill and die.'"

Schaeferle also later participated in the breakout from the Normandy hedgerow country, the sweep across France and the Battle of the Bulge in December 1944. His unit was on the north end of the Bulge.

Schaeferle left the military at the rank of major and returned to medical practice in the Gladbrook area at war's end. He and his wife of 43 years, Mary Jane, both previously widowed, have five children, 12 grandchildren and 14 great-grandchildren. One of Schaeferle's sons served as a reconnaissance pilot in the U.S. Air Force during the Vietnam War.