Dunnie’s Red Wagon

By Chris Gibbons

During the early morning hours of Tuesday, June 6, 1944, Philadelphia Mayor Bernard Samuel was awakened by his secretary with urgent news – the long awaited invasion of France by Allied forces had finally begun.

The Philadelphia Inquirer reported that that the mayor, “accompanied by his secretary and a few policemen, went to Independence Hall shortly before 7(am) o’clock.  With a wooden mallet he tapped the Liberty Bell 12 times…The tapping of the Bell was carried throughout the Nation over an NBC hookup, and to other parts of the world by short wave.”  The Mayor then asked all to pray for a “victorious outcome”, and to “remember the fathers and mothers of those who are fighting on the battlefields of France.”

Word of the invasion spread across the neighborhoods of Philadelphia, and for many families it was the start of a period of great fear and anxiety.  Like so many streets in Philadelphia, Stillman Street in the city’s Fairmount section was lined with numerous row-homes that proudly displayed flags with blue stars in their windows, indicating a family member in the service.  At the Keenan home, there were 2 blue stars on their flag.  “They were for my two older brothers, Joe and Dunnie” Ed Keenan recalled.  “I was only 8 years old at the time, but I remember the flags vividly – our’s and our neighbor’s.   My brothers, like a lot of the guys in our neighborhood, were alumni of Roman Catholic High School.  Joe enlisted during his junior year and was serving in the Pacific.  Dunnie enlisted after graduating in 1943, but the last that we heard following his recent Christmas visit home was that he was somewhere in England.  On the day of the invasion, and the days that followed, we just kept thinking, ‘Where’s Dunnie?  I hope that he’s OK.’”

Unknown to the Keenan’s was that Charles “Dunnie” Keenan’s 330^th Infantry Regiment of the 83^rd Infantry Division was not part of the initial invasion force on June 6th, but was with the second wave of forces that landed at Omaha Beach in Normandy on June 23, 1944.  The 83^rd sustained heavy losses during the bitter “hedgerow” battles that followed the invasion as Allied forces tried to push inland.  On July 4^th, Dunnie’s regiment began a series of attacks just southeast of the key French town of Carentan.  Colonel R.T. Foster, Commander of the 330^th Infantry Regiment, wrote that “we attacked every day for twenty-three straight days, from dawn til dark.  We repulsed the enemies’ counter-attacks and we moved forward.  We became exhausted, physically and mentally.  It showed in our dirty and drawn faces.  We lost our closest friends.”

Dunnie’s regiment was met with near-fanatical resistance, as opposing the 330^th were some of Hitler’s best troops: the 37^th and 38^th SS Panzergrenadier Regiments.  On July 5th a captured SS soldier from the 37^th informed American interrogators that the Germans were ordered to hold the line “to the last drop of blood.” 

Back home in Philadelphia, young Eddie Keenan and his buddies, Billy Lamb, Billy McGahey, and Charlie Czarnecki, wanted to do something to help the war effort.  They had heard the radio promotions urging Americans to collect scrap-metal so that it could be recycled for use by the military.  “We wanted to try and help the war effort”, Ed recalled.  “Some of our older brothers were fighting, and we wanted to do something, too.  So we decided to go door-to-door in our neighborhood with my old wagon to collect scrap-metal pieces.  But, my wagon was a hand-me-down, and we felt that for an effort like this, we needed to spruce it up a bit.  So we got some bright red paint and started to paint it.”

On the day that the boys were putting the finishing touches on the wagon, they were startled by a woman’s voice.  It was Billy McGahey’s mother, and she had an odd look on her face.  “Eddie,” she said.  “You have to go home.  Something is wrong with your Mom.”  Eddie ran home and found his mother and sister sobbing.  Time then seemed to slow down.  Words and phrases became jumbled.  Something about a “telegram from Washington”…”deepest regret”…”Charles Keenan had been killed in action on July 8^th”.  Dunnie was gone, and a gold star would replace a blue.

As grieving relatives arrived to help comfort the family, a despondent Eddie returned to his friends and told them what happened.  One of the boys had an idea, and after all of them heard it, they agreed it was a great way to honor Dunnie.

A few hours later, Eddie returned to his home, now filled with relatives and neighbors.  He found his grief-stricken father, tugged on his shirt, and said, “Come to the window, Dad.  Look outside!”  His father walked to the window, pulled back the curtain, and there was the red wagon.  Emblazoned upon it, in bright white paint, were the words: “PFC Charles T. Keenan.”

His father closed the curtain, and with sad, red-rimmed eyes, he looked down at Eddie.  “Oh Eddie”, he said.  “Please take that off.  It’s too soon.”  A confused and dejected Eddie painted over his brother’s name.  “I was just a little boy,” Ed told me.  “I didn’t understand then why my father wanted it removed.”

The innocence of childhood is often lost to the cruel indifference of tragedy, and life would never be the same again for Ed and his family.  “The red wagon fell by the wayside”, Ed said.  “The joy of what we had done was diminished after Dunnie died.”

In the summer of 2019, to commemorate the 75^th anniversary of D-Day, and the death of his brother, Dunnie, Ed Keenan returned to a place he had been once before.  It is a place of honor, that’s filled with the names of the fallen.  And when Ed arrived there with his son, he sought one name in particular: Charles T. Keenan PFC.  There, it is not emblazoned in white paint on a child’s red wagon but permanently carved upon a stone cross.  And as Ed looked out among the 9,387 gravestones of the Normandy-American cemetery in France, he remembered the wisdom of his father, a World War 1 veteran who understood that there would be a proper place and time for Dunnie’s name – it would be here at Normandy, forever alongside the names of his fellow heroes.

Chris Gibbons is a Philadelphia writer.  He can be reached at gibbonscg@aol.com