D-Day Landing Chronicler 'Doug' Werner Dies

Merle McDougald "Doug" Werner, 91, a war correspondent who waded ashore at Normandy and filed one of the first reports of the D-Day invasion in 1944, died May 19 at his home in Falls Church. He had diabetes.

After covering many of the leading stories of World War II and the late 1940s for United Press, Mr. Werner joined the State Department and served as a diplomatic press attache in six overseas postings. He is best known, though, for being one of only 20 journalists to land with the Allied invasion force on D-Day, June 6, 1944.

From his base in London, Mr. Werner journeyed across the English Channel with the 9th Air Force Engineers. Carrying his portable Hermes typewriter and an extra pair of eyeglasses, Mr. Werner trudged 100 yards through hip-deep waters as artillery shells burst around him. He stepped onto Utah Beach about 11 a.m., four hours after the beginning of the assault in which 156,000 Allied troops took part.

At dusk, Mr. Werner and his military escort dug a foxhole in a hedgerow near a road on shore.

"I opened my portable typewriter," he wrote in 1994, on the 50th anniversary of D-Day, "and started typing out my description of the day. That dispatch from the beach was taken back to London the next morning by courier and circulated to newspapers throughout the states by the United Press."

It was one of the first eyewitness accounts of the invasion to reach U.S. readers.

"Our expectations of a rough time at the beachhead were more than borne out by the pasting we took from the Nazi mortars," he wrote in his original story. "When there wasn't a foxhole handy, I found myself down on my stomach digging one with my hands and feet."

In an interview with the suburban Journal Newspapers in 1984, he said, "I didn't have time for fear. The invasion meant how the future would look for all of us, how the entire war would go."

Mr. Werner's recollections of his D-Day experiences are included in a current online exhibition of the Newseum, a museum of journalism. He is believed to have been the last surviving journalist who accompanied the invasion forces.

During World War II, he also covered the German bombing blitz of London, the liberation of Paris in August 1944, the U.S. occupation of Berlin in 1945 and the Potsdam Conference, in which Allied heads of state discussed the administration of Germany after the war.

In 1946, Mr. Werner wrote about the Nuremberg trials, in which Nazi leaders were prosecuted for war crimes. The next year, he covered the civil war in Greece. In 1949, as Vienna bureau chief, he wrote about the Communist takeover of Czechoslovakia.

After returning to the United States in 1949, he continued to work for United Press until he joined the Foreign Service in 1952. In the next 18 years, he served as press attache at U.S. embassies in Sweden, Austria, the Philippines, Taiwan, Korea and Pakistan. He was a writer and editor for Voice of America in Washington from 1960 to 1963 and again from 1970 to 1982, when he retired.

Mr. Werner was born Jan. 28, 1913, in Bladen, Neb. He attended the University of Nebraska and received a bachelor's degree in journalism from the University of Missouri in 1934. He worked for newspapers in Nebraska and Wyoming from 1934 to 1937, when he joined United Press, a forerunner of United Press International, in Des Moines.

In 1941, Mr. Werner transferred to UP's Washington bureau. The next year, he was accredited as a war correspondent and was based in London, where his editor was Walter Cronkite.

He was a quiet and stoic man who seldom spoke of his experiences during the war, but in 1989, Mr. Werner returned to Normandy and revisited the beach where he had waded ashore 45 years earlier and written his first-person account of the D-Day invasion.

"Now I realize," he wrote in later years, "how lucky I was: Lucky to have participated in covering the biggest news story of my generation and most of all, lucky to have lived through it."

Survivors include his wife of 53 years, Dorothy Werner of Falls Church; two sons, Michael Werner of Falls Church and Douglas Werner of Fremont, Calif.; and one grandson.