Leonard T. Schroeder

Schroeder was born in the Baltimore suburb of Linthicum Heights, Maryland, on July 16, 1918. Although bullied as a child, Schroeder became an outstanding athlete in high school, graduating in 1937 from nearby Glen Burnie High School where he played soccer and baseball. While captain of his high school's soccer team in 1936, they won the Maryland state championship. He then attended the University of Maryland, College Park, on a full athletic scholarship. While there, he was enrolled in the Reserve Officers' Training Corps (ROTC). In June, 1941, Schroeder graduated from the University of Maryland and was commissioned as a second lieutenant in the U.S. Army at the age of 22. In December, 1941, he married the former Margaret Nicholson, whom he had met while in high school. The couple's first child, a son, was born the following year. They would later have two more children (a daughter and another son). ==Army career==

Assigned to the 4th Infantry Division, Schroeder was stationed at Camp Gordon, near Augusta, Georgia, until September 1943, when his division began training in Florida for assault landings using various amphibious craft. In January 1944, the Division left the U.S. and arrived in the south of England, where they continued practice amphibious landings in preparation for the unprecedented Normandy Landings. D-Day Invasion On D-Day, June 6, 1944, Schroeder was a 25-year-old captain in command of the 219 men of Company F of the 2nd Battalion, 8th Infantry Regiment, 4th Infantry Division. The 8th Infantry Regiment was ordered to make the initial D-Day landing on Utah Beach as part of the invasion. , six months after D-Day As they sailed to France from England on the night of June 5 aboard the navy's USS Barnett on the rough English Channel, they heard Supreme Allied Commander General Dwight D. Eisenhower's exhortation to the troops over the radio, "Together, we shall achieve victory". At 2:30 a.m. on June 6, Schroeder's company left the Barnett to board their LCVP landing craft. Before departing the Barnett to face the enemy, Schroeder wrote a letter to his wife: "I told her where I was, what I was about to do, and how much I loved her". Schroeder's own assault boat, commanded by navy Lieutenant (j.g.) Abraham Condiotti of Brooklyn, New York, was the first to hit the beach. In his boat were 32 men, including Brigadier General Roosevelt. He recalled to a television interviewer in 2008 that "80 percent of the guys on the boat were sick" due to the rough seas and, as his landing craft in the first wave neared the shore, Allied forces were still shelling Company F's designated landing site on Utah Beach. "They were dropping all those bombs on the place where we were going in" and his company had to disembark "without getting bombed by our own guys". Schroeder recalled years later that American air support was "running a little late and we were running ahead of time. They were dropping all those bombs on the place where we were going in," he said. Afterwards, he was hailed in a Pentagon press release as "the first GI to invade Europe". Upon the outbreak of the Korean War in 1950, he was an Air Operations Officer, coordinating air support for ground forces and planning bombing strikes. After the Korean War ended in 1953, he participated in a British Staff College critique of World War II battle strategies. One of his fellow students was Israeli military leader and future prime minister Yitzhak Rabin. Later, Schroeder served during the Vietnam War in the late 1960s. He had frequent overseas assignments during the 1950s–1960s, including England, Greece, and Turkey. In the U.S., he was stationed at Fort Knox, Kentucky, and Fort Meade, Maryland (very near his boyhood home in Linthicum Heights). ==Later years and death==

Following his retirement from the Army as a full colonel in 1971, Schroeder and his wife Margaret moved to Largo, Florida. On the 50th anniversary of the D-Day Invasion in June, 1994, he was feted in Normandy and featured on a French television broadcast describing his experiences that day as the first American to come ashore at Normandy. Produced by Jean-Christophe Giesbert, Les héros du 6 juin: Le débarquement de 1944 ("The heroes of June 6: the landing of 1944"), is available in French on DVD. A 50th anniversary cover feature in the French magazine VSD, published June 2, 1994, profiled Schroeder's life and D-Day exploits. In an interview for the magazine article, he said, "Today, I realize that to be the first man ashore is an immense honor, yet I do not merit it more than anyone else. Five of my men died down there at Normandy. They alone are the heroes". Shortly before his death from emphysema early on the morning of May 26, 2009, Schroeder reflected on his 30 years of military service to the nation, saying he still missed the comradeship and family-like brotherhood of army life. At televised ceremonies on June 6, 2009, commemorating the 65th anniversary of the D-Day invasion, the Armed Forces Military Museum presented Schroeder's family with a plaque in his memory. The plaque displayed the insignia of the 19 Army divisions that landed on the Normandy beaches. He is interred at the Florida National Cemetery in Bushnell, Florida, alongside his wife, Margaret, who died on January 8, 2010. ==References==