Biographical Note
Charles Lee Burwell was born in 1917 in Millwood, Virginia. After graduating from Harvard in 1939, he moved to Paris, France, with plans of pursuing graduate studies in history and literature at the Sorbonne. With the breakout of war in Europe in 1939, he briefly drove an ambulance for the Comité Americaine de Secours Civil until departing for an oil industry job in Haiphong, then French Indochina. He returned to the United States in the summer of 1941, and age 27 enlisted in the Navy, joining Naval Intelligence. In summer 1944 he assisted in planning the amphibious assault on Normandy beaches. With the aid of a large foam rubber map of Utah Beach made at the last minute in Camp Bradford, Virginia, he briefed General Eisenhower, Field Marshall Montgomery, and other Allied leaders in Plymouth, England, on the timing and feasibility of launching "Operation Neptune," the naval and amphibious operations that launched and supported the D-Day invasions on Normandy, otherwise known as "Operation Overlord," on June 6, 1944. After Normandy, Burwell participated in planning other amphibious assaults as part of "Operation Anvil" in southern France, in the Lingayen Gulf on the island of Luzon in the Philippines (January 1945), and on the Japanese island of Okinawa in April 1945. He returned to San Francisco to begin planning for "Operation Olympic," the invastion of the Japanese home island of Kyushu slated for November 1945. Discharged from the Navy in January 1946, he eventually returned to the Far East with his own import-export business and subsequently a fabric company. He retired to "The Vineyard," formerly a part of the Carter Hall plantation in Virginia's upper Shenandoah Valley.