On June 6, 1944 — D-Day — more than 156,000 American, British and Canadian forces landed on five beaches in German-occupied France to start one of the most famous battles in history: the invasion of Normandy.
Pvt. William J. Bremer was not among them.
Bremer, of St. Paul, didn’t arrive until at least 10 days later, when he and other members of the 8th Infantry Regiment were sent to replace lost troops. His last letter home, written June 16, 1944, is believed to have been written just before he shipped out of southern England.
Bremer, 30, was reported missing the last week of June. In August, his family learned that he had been killed in action on June 25.
On May 10, 2017, almost 73 years later, Bremer’s possessions at the time of his death and his Purple Heart medal were brought to North Lakes Academy Charter School in Forest Lake. Among them were Bremer’s monogrammed timepiece, six dice, two decks of cards, a perpetual calendar, a lighter and a guardian angel figurine. Bremer’s letters — more than 200 of them — had been delivered in April.
How they ended up in the hands of Evan DuFresne, a junior at the school, is an amazing tale of timing and fortune.
In December, DuFresne, who lives in White Bear Lake, and his social studies teacher, Christopher Stewart, were selected to study — in exhaustive detail — the Allied landings in Normandy.
They were one of 15 student-teacher teams in the country picked to participate in “Normandy: Sacrifice for Freedom,” a project of the Albert H. Small Student and Teacher Institute; the program is produced by National History Day, a competition for middle- and high-school students.
In June, they will travel to Washington, D.C., to do research and then fly to France to visit the D-Day battlefields and the Normandy American Cemetery, Bremer’s burial place. While there, DuFresne, 17, will deliver a graveside eulogy.
A PRIVATE’S STORY
During an interview at North Lakes Academy earlier this month, DuFresne said he was allowed to pick which soldier to study.
DuFresne, who plans to join the Minnesota National Guard as a private after he graduates, wanted to study a soldier of the same rank. “Plus, somebody who is a private doesn’t have their story told as often as an officer would,” he said.
When he couldn’t find a private from Washington County or Chisago County who died at Normandy, DuFresne turned to the Ramsey County rolls. He selected the names of three privates; National History Day officials suggested he focus on Bremer and the 8th Regiment.
Starting with just Bremer’s name, the student and his teacher tracked down a story about Bremer’s death in the Aug. 24, 1944, edition of the St. Paul Pioneer Press. The story gave the name of Bremer’s wife, Norma, and noted that Bremer had “enlisted in the Army in September 1943 and was overseas with the Infantry since April.”
They later found another Pioneer Press story about Bremer that ran on Aug. 17, 1944.
“Pvt. William Bremer, 1472 Arona Ave., was killed in action in France June 25, according to word received Wednesday by his wife,” the article read. “He was 30 years old and a graduate of Cretin High School.”
DuFresne and Stewart arranged to tour Cretin in February; Bremer attended the private military academy from 1928 to 1930 but did not graduate. By studying past issues of “Cretinite” yearbooks, they learned that Bremer participated in debate and was on the student council.
“For me, to get to Cretin and to see his picture for the first time, that was an emotional moment,” DuFresne said. “To see him at 17, that’s me right now. It’s very similar, but, at the same time, it’s opposite. Although he was in a military school, later on it’s quite apparent he didn’t want a military life, and that’s all I’ve ever dreamed about.”
Bremer’s mother, Sophia K.H. (Ellit) Bremer, died of heart disease in 1919, and Bremer lived with different relatives in St. Paul throughout his childhood. As an adult, he worked as a credit clerk and a warehouseman. He lived with a sister, Henrietta, in St. Paul, before marrying Norma Schmuck, a 1932 graduate of Harding High School.
“We discovered that he did not have any children, and that Henrietta did not get married or have any children,” Stewart said. “His mother and his other sister, Marie, both died in 1919, when he was just 5½, and his father, Charles John Bremer, died in 1940 right before the war, so he had nobody.”
Without much information to go on, Stewart decided to enter the name “Norma” and Norma Bremer’s date of birth on the genealogical website Ancestry.com.
“Finally, I found a Norma Harper … with the same birthdate, so I plugged it into a search engine,” Stewart said. “That’s when I found her obit in the Forest Lake Times from 2008.”
After William Bremer died, Norma Bremer met and married a man named Herbert Harper, who later taught biology at Forest Lake High School. “That’s right down the road from here,” DuFresne said. “He actually taught biology to my grandfather and great-uncle. Another connection that we made: Norma was on the hospital board in the 1950s. So was my great-grandfather Wilmer DuFresne.”
Norma Harper’s obituary listed three surviving sons: Irvin, Doug and Todd. DuFresne and Stewart reached out to the sons and learned that Doug Harper, professor emeritus of sociology at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh, was moving back to the family house in Forest Lake and had Bremer’s possessions and letters with him.
“It was an incredible stroke of luck,” Stewart said. “What Doug did was transform our research process. Getting access to primary sources like that allowed us to fill in gaps and tell the human side of Bill’s story.”
A WIDOW’S TORMENT
Harper said his mother would be “deeply happy” that Bremer’s story is being told.
“She would want to be part of it,” he said. “I’m not religious, but I have the strong feeling that my mom’s spirit is being put to rest with the information that Christopher and Evan have uncovered pertaining to Bill’s death. She was long tormented by not knowing how he died, and all the implications of that.”
Norma Harper fell into a deep depression when she learned of Bremer’s death on her birthday, Aug. 15, 1944, he said.
“She just stopped eating and was down to 85 pounds,” he said. “Her doctor told her to make a decision to either live or die. … My mom got on a train and went to visit her brother, Irv, who was stationed in Portland, Oregon.”
She met Herbert Harper of Pikeville, Ky., in Portland in January 1945; he was seven years her junior.
The couple got to know each other over a “handful of days” between January and August, and “she went from deep despair to falling in love with my father,” he said. “It was just like that.”
Herbert and Norma Harper married in August 1945 and had a great life together “once they figured out who each other were,” he said. “It was one of these marriages that happened very quickly during World War II.”
But Bremer was “always kind of a shadow in the background” of their marriage, Harper said.
“I don’t even know how I first knew about him,” he said. “There was a picture of him in a desk drawer. He was this mystery of a person. He and my mother were married for six, seven years, and they were unable to have children. I owe my life to his death.”
In 1976, Harper took his mother to France to visit Bremer’s grave. “It was a forlorn day at St. Lo, but there was a dignified French soldier waiting for her in the otherwise deserted graveyard,” he said. “I waited for her for 30 minutes, as she and the soldier went to Bill’s grave, and we didn’t speak about it after that. She had made it clear she wanted to go alone to the grave.”
Harper went back to visit Bremer’s grave during a research trip to France in 1998.
“I didn’t have directions to find the grave, but I found it by wandering around,” he said. “I’m not religious, but I actually sat on his grave, and I had this feeling of all these spirits in the ground saying ‘Bill, Norma’s son has come.’ I knew he loved my mom and that she loved him, and so the emotions were very deep and conflicted.”
LETTERS TELL THE STORY
Harper has shared Bremer’s letters — more than 200 of them — with DuFresne and Stewart for research purposes. Portions of the letters will appear on the website that DuFresne will create once he returns from Normandy.
The first batch of letters paints a portrait of a homesick man. “He was very forlorn — he wrote three letters on the first day, two from the train leaving near Fort Snelling,” Stewart said. “You can tell he is anxious to receive first word from home and is frustrated and depressed when he doesn’t.”
Other letters, posted from Camp Fannin near Tyler, Texas, talk about passing rifle and gear inspections, the difficulty of gas-mask training and the physical pain he was enduring.
“From what I can tell from the letters I’ve read, he didn’t really like the military life,” said DuFresne, who served as a cadet in the Civil Air Patrol, the official auxiliary of the United States Air Force, from 2013 to 2016. “He didn’t like the environment that I like about the military: the hard-core, let’s go, physical kind of thing.”
His last letter home is dated June 16, 1944.
Dear Norma,
I’m terribly sorry that it is necessary that I neglect writing to you now and then. Believe me, it’s not my fault. Blame it on the Army. I just don’t have time on certain days. I will write whenever possible. I believe my past record will speak for itself. I just don’t want you to worry if you don’t hear from me too regular.
Here it is in the middle of June. I thought Minnesota was supposed to be cold. I feel sorry for these Englishmen. They don’t get a chance to thaw out from one year to the next.
What invasion news we hear is rather favorable. Let’s both hope it keeps on being that way. It’s too bad our square-headed enemy can’t see a hopeless cause and quit. Perhaps in a way, it’s just as well, though, if enough of them die for their fatherland, they won’t be able to rear up again in 20 years.
Well, hon, that’s it for this time. I love you, dear. Be my good girl and good night for now.
Yours, Bill
Bremer’s letters will be returned to Harper after they have been transcribed. Harper has agreed to let Stewart and DuFresne keep possession of Bremer’s items, while he retains ownership. The items will be on display at North Lakes Academy, and Stewart plans to use them to teach a new course, Wartime Narratives, next fall.
Stewart and DuFresne could not believe their good fortune when Harper arrived at a meeting at the school with Bremer’s Purple Heart and other artifacts.
“Some people go through this whole process without ever seeing a picture of the person they were studying or any sort of documents or artifacts,” Stewart said. “These … have changed the story we’re able to tell. It’s unbelievable.”
Harper said he is the fortunate one.
“What you guys have done, which I’m so impressed with, is you have created this portrait of Bill Bremer as a human being,” Harper said. “He was going through his own dislocations and disruptions with all the deaths in his family — this was America in the ’20s and ’30s. He dropped out of high school in his last year because of the Depression. There was just that feeling of a dislocated life.”
Harper said his mother was bothered by the fact that she didn’t know what happened to Bremer when he died.
After Harper’s father died in 2000, he and his mother tried to access Bremer’s war records but were told they had been destroyed in the 1973 fire at the National Personnel Records Center in St. Louis.
In April, DuFresne and Stewart received Bremer’s Individual Deceased Personnel File from the U.S. National Archives and shared it with Harper. Among the details in the report: cause of death, items he carried, place of burial and a copy of his dog tags.
“It’s very good to know, now, through Christopher and Evan’s work, how he died — likely a momentary shock as a machine-gun bullet went into his back,” Harper said.
LESSONS TO LEARN
Stewart had a replica of Bremer’s dog tags made for DuFresne; he wears them tucked into his shirt.
DuFresne’s great-grandfather Wilmer DuFresne never spoke about his experiences during World War II, he said. “He died without me knowing a lot about what happened or what his experiences were,” he said. “There’s a hole there that I want to fill with information.”
His grandfather Kenneth DuFresne, 73, of Columbus, Minn., whom he lives with during the week, has instilled in him a love of history.
“My grandfather — every day, he will talk about something that happened in the last 200 years,” he said. “He and I share a lot of similarities: One of them is the importance of history. We both understand that no matter what you say about what happened, it happened, and that is reality, so what can you learn off that?”
Here’s what he has learned about Pvt. William J. Bremer:
“He was a guy who went through a lot of hardships,” DuFresne said. “He had a lot of struggles. You can tell it would have been hard to go through that, but he always somehow got through the hard times at home. The fact that he was able to get past the Great Depression and then fall in love, it’s just, honestly … it’s something that I wish for myself.”