Charles Norman Shay, a Penobscot Native American and decorated U.S. Army medic who waded repeatedly into the surf at Omaha Beach on D-Day to carry wounded soldiers to safety, died Wednesday at 101. He passed away peacefully at his home in Bretteville-L’Orgueilleuse, Normandy, his longtime friend and carer, Marie-Pascale Legrand, said.
A native of Indian Island, Maine, Shay earned the Silver Star for his actions on June 6, 1944, and was awarded France’s Legion of Honor in 2007. He had lived in France since 2018 to remain close to the Normandy coast where nearly 160,000 Allied troops landed — a place where he said he could honor those who fell. “I will die here,” he told CBS News in 2019, adding that he believed he could “talk with the souls of the men that are still wandering on the beach here.”
On D-Day, amid mortar and artillery fire, Shay watched men in his landing craft cut down when the ramp fell and saw many wounded swept by the tide and unable to reach safety. He later said he was prepared to give his life but remained focused on his role as a medic: “I had been given a job, and the way I looked at it, it was up to me to complete my job.” After spending a night exhausted among the dead in a grove above the beach, he continued to rescue and treat the wounded for weeks as American forces pressed inland.
Shay moved with U.S. forces through eastern France and into Germany, was captured in March 1945, and was liberated a few weeks later. After World War II he reenlisted in part because conditions for Native Americans in Maine remained harsh — reservation residents in the state were not allowed to vote until 1954. He served again as a medic in the Korean War, took part in U.S. nuclear testing in the Marshall Islands, and later worked at the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna.
For more than six decades, Shay spoke little about his wartime experiences. He began attending D-Day commemorations in 2007 and in later years became a regular witness and advocate for remembrance and peace. He performed a traditional sage-burning on a bluff above Omaha Beach to honor the fallen, and a monument bearing his name stands nearby. On June 6, 2022, he entrusted the remembrance ceremony to Julia Kelly, a Crow veteran, and lamented the return of war to Europe, calling the conflict in Ukraine “a very sad situation.”
The Charles Shay Memorial group said he “has returned home to the Creator and the Spirit World,” remembering him as “an incredibly loving father, grandfather, father-in-law, and uncle, a hero to many” whose legacy is “love, service, courage, spirit, duty and family.” Legrand said Shay died surrounded by loved ones.