Charles (Ace) Parker’s D-Day Heroics Will Live On
By Curt Brown
Charles (Ace) Parker
Lt. Charles (Ace) Parker dodged the smoke, gunfire and maimed bodies littering Omaha Beach, leading 23 Army Rangers up the 100-foot bluff as D-Day exploded into chaos on June 6, 1944.
Suddenly, a German sniper wounded two of the Rangers by Parker’s side and those zinging bullets were starting to pierce his backpack.
“I was lying flat so that I had to struggle out of the pack and abandon it so I could go faster into the ditch,” Parker recalled 50 years later in 1994. “So I came out of the thing without even a holster. I just had a .45 in my hand.”
More than 80 years later, that Army-issued Colt .45 pistol tops a cache of Parker’s D-Day artifacts headed to the Minnesota Military and Veterans Museum at Camp Ripley near Little Falls. When the massive $32 million museum opens in 2026, an accurately uniformed, life-size mannequin of Parker will be among the highlights on display. His family has donated all his papers and that pistol — along with the Distinguished Service Cross awarded for Parker’s D-Day gallantry.
“Dad accepted responsibility and made good decisions that saved many lives on D-Day,” Jeffrie Parker, the eldest of Parker’s four children at 76, said from his home near Medicine Bow, Wyo. “He was very surprised by all the attention he received later in life.”
Parker died at 80 in 2000 in Anoka, his home for the second half of his life. He had just turned 25 when he led the Fifth Ranger Battalion’s A Company up from Omaha Beach to the Pointe du Hoc overlook — arriving at 9 p.m. on D-Day. Most of the Allied forces took days to clear the beach before reaching that pivotal perch.
Parker returned to Omaha Beach for the first time for the anniversary 50 years later, along with son Jeffrie and nephew, Gerry Parker.
“It was an unbelievable experience and the moment he walked into the airport reception area, a wave of people came toward us with hugs and so many stories,” said Gerry, 82, a retired dentist in Casselton, N.D. “On the chartered plane over, wives kept coming up and down the aisle, saying you’re the only reason my husband made it.”
The fifth of a small-town doctor’s six children, Parker was born in Helca, S.D. on May 13, 1919. His father came to tiny Hecla, just across the North Dakota border, after that town’s doctor joined the millions killed by the 1918 influenza pandemic.
“Little did I know that the struggles and values I learned growing up in the Depression would prepare me for the greatest challenges to face me and my country,” Parker said in “Reflections of Courage on D-Day & the Days That Followed,” a book written by his twin nieces, Margo Heinen and Marcia Moen, and completed just before Parker died. In it, he summarized his World War II experience succinctly: “Each day,” he said, “was a struggle to survive.”
Ace Parker posing next to 5th Ranger Battalion, Company A sign
And no day was more grueling than June 6, 1944.
“The two of the worst places to be on D-Day were Omaha Beach and Pointe du Hoc — and Ace was at both,” said Doug Thompson, curator at the Military Museum.
Lean and quick, Parker stood 6 feet tall and weighed only 152 pounds, according to his draft card. He remembered his landing craft being lowered into a roiling, stormy English Channel.
“It was so rough,” he said, “that three-quarters of the men were vomiting. Boats were floundering.” And his fellow fighters “were just being slaughtered” on Omaha Beach. His battalion commander steered their landing 500 yards east of the worst mayhem. While others were neck-high in the water with heavy packs, Parker’s boat came ashore on a sandbar, “so we stepped out in not more than knee-deep water,” he said, recalling how the tide was out, leaving 150 yards to scamper with the full pack he’d soon discard.
“By the time you got all the way in,” he said, “you’re down to a walk despite all the fire coming in on you.”
Climbing the cliff with relatively few causalities, Parker and his men “knocked out a number of machine gun nests,” he said. That was part of the mission along with capturing Pointe Du Hoc to spearhead the Allies’ sweep inland amid a ferocious Nazi counterattack.
After jettisoning his pack and dodging sniper fire, Parker crawled through a ditch before he counted only 23 of his 65 men. He’d lost the rest of the Ranger battalion. Parker thought he had stayed in that ditch too long but learned three days later that a lieutenant midway back in his column took a bullet to the arm, standing up and being redirected by higher ranking officers.
“It was a lonely feeling,” Parker said in 1994. “But what else are you going to do? You just can’t quit.” As the noise from the beach quieted, “as far as I knew we were the only ones left. We were running constantly into knots of Germans, and we took a bunch of prisoners.”
According to the Ranger Hall of Fame at Fort Benning, Ga., Parker and his men captured and disarmed 13 Nazi soldiers, who were “humanely told to head to the rear, thereby probably starting the massive flood of Germans who later surrendered.”
“Ace” Parker (at right) is awarded the Distinguished Service Cross for his actions on D-Day
As the battle shifted to centuries-old hedgerows of thick brush, grenades were being tossed from both sides. “But they were getting behind us,” Parker said.
So Parker turned loose all the prisoners and “we just took off on a dead run to the rear until we ran beyond where the Germans were coming around us.”
Covering four more miles to Pointe du Hoc, they reunited with fellow Rangers as daylight faded at 9 p.m. He’d earned his Distinguished Cross Award, the military’s second-highest award for bravery after the Congressional Medal of Honor.
But their work wasn’t done. At 4 a.m. on June 7, Parker and seven men crawled along the cliff edge in an attempt to get reinforcements on Omaha Beach.
As German machine gun fire whizzed around them, “we’re on our bellies probing ahead of us, every man touching the heel of the man ahead of him.” Using bayonets, they defused anti-personnel mines known as mustard pots, “digging them out and setting them carefully aside,” he said.
A Navy destroyer was repeatedly striking a German radar facility just down the bluff, so Parker and his men crawled back to Pointe du Hoc where two days of fierce combat raged before American forces reached them. As they gained the upper hand, they discovered a suitcase with 50,000 French francs earmarked as payroll for German soldiers in the area.
“Some of the guys were lighting their cigarettes with 100-franc notes,” Parker recalled. “And some of them were wiping their butts with it.”
Parker kept fighting until May 1945 — “I never missed a day at the office” — surviving the war mostly unscathed despite bullets once having ripped through his shirt.
Museum Executive Director Randal Dietrich and Four Ace Parker Descendants with Ace Parker’s Original Gear
After the war, Parker drilled oil wells in Oklahoma and Texas before going to work for Pfizer pharmaceuticals. In 1946, he married Lois Geysler in Moorhead, Minn. (His older brother Ken had earlier married Lois’ sister, Muriel). Chuck and Lois Parker’s marriage lasted 49 years until she died in 1995. They raised four children, Jeffrie and his three sisters, Victoria, Laura and Kathryn.
“The family couldn’t be more excited” about the Military Museum opening in 2026 and retelling the story of Parker’s heroics with artifacts they’ve donated, said Gerry Parker, his nephew. “Believe me, I’ll be there with bells on. We’re so thankful because these men were giants of the earth and now he will not be forgotten.”