80 Years Ago Today, a Bull Rider Helped Save the World

Bill Parker, then a teenager from Chocktaw Nation, led the D-Day charge onto Omaha Beach

Bill Parker overlooking Omaha Beach Bluff / Bill Parker

It’s common knowledge that cowboys settled the American West.

Few know this: the first soldier to storm Omaha Beach on D-Day, June 6, 1944, leading the charge that tilted the trajectory of World War II, was a bull-riding cowboy from Oklahoma.

Last September, one month shy of his 99th birthday, he passed away in Tulsa surrounded by family and friends. He left us on the eleventh hour of September 11, a.k.a. Patriot Day.

Today, we remember the history-altering invasion along with the swashbuckling cowboy who was out front – a man named Bill Parker.

Young Bill imagined rodeo would be his life. The evil scourge of totalitarian genocide that swept the world in the first half of the 1940s changed those plans.

At age 19, Parker—a member of the Choctaw Nation and then a private in the 116th Infantry, 29th Division of the U.S. Army—awoke one morning at 3:30 a.m. for a beans breakfast on a Navy ship rocking across the choppy English Channel heading for a daring mission that pretty much looked like a death sentence.

As a wire cutter responsible for taking out razor barriers set across the beaches of France by German forces, Parker was “first boot” on Omaha Beach, the spear tip of a massive seaborne invasion that landed 133,000 allied troops on five French beaches.

When his craft carrying 33 men came to a halt in the shallow surf far from the beach, Parker waded through waist-deep water, carrying a rifle and a backpack filled with ammunition and dynamite for blowing the barbed wire.

Chewing a wad of gum, he scrambled onto Omaha Beach at 6:31 a.m. Machine gun bullets kicked up sand around him. Stealing a quick look around for the rest of his unit, he saw no one. Seconds after Parker left the boat, a German artillery shell had scored a direct hit—96% of the men in the entire infantry unit were dead or wounded within a half hour.

From a hill in front of Parker a German pillbox started firing machine-gun rounds. He was completely exposed, with no protective cover. Death seemed seconds away.

But the sand kept spraying up three feet in front of him. The German gunner never raised his weapon.

“The Navy had orders not to bring the battleship close to shore, but they saw we were hung up. They came in closer and fired shells eight or 10 feet over our heads to knock that pillbox out,” Parker, then 98, said. “I give the Navy credit for saving the invasion.”

The artillery burst from the USS Doyle sounded like a hundred freight trains screeching past his head. Parker’s hearing would never be the same. But the barrage sprung him loose, saved his life and helped change the course of the battle.

Bill Parker in his uniform / Bill Parker

Pvt. Parker didn’t have a pile of bars on his uniform, but he was clearly a leader. Once on the beach, a few dozen stragglers began following the cocksure cowboy. In the afternoon he led them past a set of bluffs to a sunken road. The dazed privates, out of ammunition, wanted to know what to do next. Parker said he’d be staying until daylight. He knew his fallen brothers had ammo on them, and he had a plan. He ran back to Omaha Beach to re-arm.

“You can’t imagine what that beach looked like. There were bodies everywhere. The sea was blood red,” he said.

Parker took as much ammunition from dead soldiers as he could carry. Eventually he reunited with the stragglers and led them to the town of Vierville Sur Mer, where an Army lieutenant approached Parker.

“Sergeant, get your men in this foxhole, we’re fixing to take this town,” he ordered.

“All right, sir,” Parker replied, “but I’m a private, not a sergeant.”

“Well, you are one now,” the officer said.

Within a day of landing in Europe, the courageous private was promoted to staff sergeant.

Over the next year, Sgt. Parker would fight through France, Belgium, Holland, Luxembourg and Germany, hedgerow to hedgerow, farmhouse to farmhouse, a .45 six shooter strapped to his hip, like his hero John Wayne, marching some 600 miles until Germany surrendered in May 1945.

Parker wasn’t aware of the victory until his unit crossed the River Elbe into Germany and found Russian soldiers drinking and dancing with a group of girls. The war had actually ended three days earlier.

Legend has it that Parker was the only man to have landed in the first wave on Omaha Beach then fought all the way to Germany and survived the war.

Parker on the left joking with soldiers / Bill Parker

William Norman Parker’s life as a cowboy began the moment he was born in a tent in a Southern California oil field on Nov. 1, 1924. His father, Guy, a self-sufficient farmer who took the family to California when times got tough in Oklahoma, declared: “This boy’s name is Bill. He was born a cowboy. He’ll be a cowboy. And he’ll die a cowboy.”

Guy was standing on sandy ground, but that proclamation might as well have been set in stone. His dad horse-traded, and Bill was put on a horse before he could walk. At five, he was riding milk cows and steers. The family was too poor to afford a saddle; Bill rode bareback until he was 12. By 16, back in Oklahoma, he was entering rodeos, riding broncs and bulls.

“On a Friday night, they’d pay you a dollar to ride a bull and a dollar to ride a bronc,” he says. “I’d ride one of each, then go on Saturday and make two dollars more. Sometimes I’d be back again on Sunday. I could buy my girlfriend a candy bar and a soda, and I imagined I was the richest cowboy in the country.”

The bulls, pulled from the pastures and the mountains, were erratic. Still, Parker stayed on most of the time.

“If war didn’t come around, I’d have given (bull riding legend) Jim Shoulders some competition,” he chuckled. “But two years of crawlin’ on my belly and shootin’ at Germans, it was time for other things.

“First thing I did when I got back was got married. And it was the best thing.”

Bill Parker

Before being drafted, Bill had attended a pie-supper fundraiser where he’d met a beautiful girl named Colleen, also of Choctaw descent. He spent a quarter – everything he had – and won her chocolate pie. Later, when Colleen was leaving with friends, Bill rode his horse up to the black-haired beauty, took her by the hand and pulled her up onto the horse. They were both high school seniors but made plans to be married.

That was before the teenage boy who couldn’t locate Europe on a map was drafted and sent for infantry training. They put off the wedding.

“I don’t want you to be a widow at 19,” Bill told Colleen. “Wait for me.”

Colleen waited. And wrote to Bill every week, hoping her letters would reach him wherever he was fighting on the European continent. He wrote back every time he could.

The winter of 1944 was brutal—frigid and miserable. At one point, Parker was unable to shower for 43 days and grew a thick red beard. Then, at the outset of the Battle of the Bulge, Bill took a shrapnel hit. A nurse said his shoulder looked like hamburger.

Battle of the Bulge / Bill Parker

He could barely hold a rifle but was released five days later to take part in the largest and bloodiest battle fought by the United States in World War II.

Parker remembers one afternoon talking to wounded soldiers resting against some trees in the Belgian forest. When he returned at night, the men were frozen solid, icicles dangling from noses and beards.

Parker nearly lost a foot when he was hit by exploding shrapnel. He gritted through two weeks of battle then couldn’t remove his boot. He was diagnosed with gangrene. A medic in an English hospital said the foot needed to be amputated.

“When I heard that I hollered, ‘You are not taking my foot!’” recalled Parker.

A nearby captain overheard the ruckus.

“Get a bucket of hot water and Epson salt. Soak this until the metal comes out,” he ordered. “That’s what my grandma did.”

The remedy worked. Parker kept his foot. Two weeks later he was back on the front lines.

Parker sometimes had trouble describing the horrors of combat. Gallows humor helped soldiers endure the emotional toll. Once, in dim lighting, as Parker was clearing out a building to secure his platoon a place to sleep that night, he encountered an imposing man standing, looking out a window.

“Put your hands up and turn around!” he shouted.

The man stood stone still. Parker yelled again. Then he drew his .45 and shot his head clean off.

“I went to see what I’d done,” Parker said. “It was Hitler … a life-size statue of Hitler. My men would never forget that. Every chance, they’d introduce me as, ‘This is Sgt. Parker, the man who shot Hitler.’”

Parker in WWII / Bill Parker

Parker was awarded two Purple Hearts, the French Legion of Honor medal, a Bronze Star for bravery and several other medals.

The war in Europe ended on May 8, 1945, and Colleen awaited her dear Bill’s return. Parker, however, was ordered to stay in Germany several more months for the American occupation. His trip back to the states was further delayed when a Jeep he was traveling in rolled, tearing up his leg, and sending him to the hospital for six more weeks.

He finally made it home and married Colleen two months later. He took work wherever he could, traveling to Oregon and Kansas for construction and framing jobs. He fixed filling station pumps for the Sun Oil Co. He bought a two-ton Chevy truck to haul gravel for building the Keystone Dam.

Nine years after the war ended, with two-year-old son Keith in tow, the couple settled in Oklahoma.

With the help of the GI Bill, they bought a modest house in North Tulsa, a mile from a rodeo arena where Bill could ride and rope, and a block away from a one-acre field he rented for two decades, teaching neighborhood kids to ride, rope, and be cowboys and cowgirls. He paid off the $58 monthly mortgage in 1985 and lived in the house until his last breath.

Parker with his family /

For many years, Parker carried a heavy weight of battlefield horrors. His nightmares wouldn’t stop. Although he never discussed the horrific things he’d experienced in Europe, Colleen understood the deep pain he carried inside.

“Bill, the war is over,” she would often tell him.

“I think about it every night. There’s no way getting away from it,” Parker told TulsaPeople.com in 2021.

On June 6, 2022, Sgt. Parker returned to Omaha Beach for the first time since 1944. He looked out from the same bluff he’d crawled up against enemy fire and again saw all those bodies. Then he noticed nobody was shooting at him.

The sounds of gunfire and explosions had been replaced by the squealing laughter of children, splashing in the water below. Dogs rolled in the grass. Families had picnic blankets spread out.

A Frenchman put his hand on Bill’s shoulder and thanked him for saving his country. The blue sky and clean green water cleared his mind. The images of horror flew away like birds through prison bars. He would never have another nightmare.

A few months after visiting Omaha Beach, Parker was presented with a Choctaw Warrior flag in a special ceremony. He was also honored by PBR with the sport's "Be Cowboy" award at an elite series event in Tulsa. 

“I don’t know if you realize what you mean to us as the Choctaw Nation,” said Choctaw Nation Chief Gary Batton. “We fight, but we fight for the right causes. We fight for the good things in life and that’s what you’ve done. You fought for our freedom.”

Bill and Colleen were married for 73 years until her passing in 2018.

“I’ve lived a good life,” Parker said in early 2023. “I didn’t have much. But I had the best wife, a good saddle, a good horse and that’s all I needed.”

Nothing in life was worse than losing Colleen, Bill said. Every day, he would visit the cemetery in Sperry, Oklahoma to speak with his soulmate.

 Bill now rests next to Colleen forevermore.