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Chapter 5
D-Day, Omaha Beach, June 6, 1944
We marched down to the ships and set sail for D-Day on Normandy Beach. My company was in the second wave. It was the worst hell on earth that I ever want to see. There were dead bodies all over the beach. They had told us that there would be bomb craters but there were none. The Air Corps had missed the beach. There was a small stream and I fought from it all day. That night we moved inland and started hedgerow fighting. There were small roads with hedgerows on each side. The Germans would shoot at us from behind the hedges. I was a platoon sergeant and for the first week I did not get much sleep. We had a fight for Coumont, France. A German sergeant threw a grenade at us that landed between my corporal and me. It was a dud. We both shot at him and he was hit twice, once below the heart and once above. He lay there praying and crying. The medics picked him up and gave him blood. I later saw the doctor and he told me that he lived.
We were relieved by the Fourth Division. The Germans attacked them and they ran like scared rabbits. We had to go back up and bayonet them off the hill. We then bypassed Paris and crossed into Belgium and took Liege. I went through a rubber factory and the smell of rubber made me so homesick I almost cried. Then we pushed on to the German border. They had anti-tank barriers that we called dragon teeth. We had tanks with rollers that had big chains on them. They used to break through the dragon teeth. After we got through, we ran into three pill boxes and they pinned us down with machine gun fire. Our tanks threw a barrage on them and they closed up. Then our tanks that had dozer blades on them covered them up to the roof. I went by there about four months later and they had not been dug out.
We fought up to Aachen, Germany. Our column split and went around the city. We gave them 24 hours to surrender but they would not. Our Air Corps and 155 mm rifles started bombing and shelling them. Well, we had to do street fighting there. We had to dig them out of basements, attics and sewers.
We pushed on to the Huertgen Forest. It was planted pine trees. It was October 26, 1944; I was sent on a six-man patrol. We were ambushed and all my men were killed and I was captured. They had me for about an hour. A German captain was asking me questions. He wanted me to tell him the unit I was from and all I would tell him was name, rank and serial number.
He pointed his pistol at me and said if I didn’t tell him, he would shoot me. I was watching for a chance, so when my company attacked, he turned to give his men orders. I grabbed his arm and twisted the pistol around and shot him in the belly. Well, the Germans retreated and I got back with my company. The Germans held some high ground and every time we tried to advance, they pinned us down with machine gun fire.
Well, at 4 o’clock one morning we fixed bayonets and charged that hill. The Germans would not face the blade. Just the other side of that hill was where I almost met my Waterloo. I was in my foxhole with an oak door on top and sandbags on top of the door. A German artillery shell made a direct hit on my foxhole. I woke up in a hospital in Paris. I was all black and blue, my ears were ringing and I had some shrapnel in me. They kept me two weeks and sent me back to my outfit. I was not much good after that.
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