Imagine being one of the unlucky ones. You are physically fit, trained hard, and know all there is to know about combat. Then the ramp drops and you are instantly killed by a MG42 before you have a single chance to put anything you learned or trained for into action.
Great grandpa was here as an engineer in the third wave. Before the ramp dropped, he quietly cut away his gear and prepared to jump over the side. Having done this while his platoon was torn to pieces by interlocking machine gun fire, he spent hours slowly moving from body to body, making his way up the beach. By the time the U.S. Navy destroyers moved in to offer point blank suppressing fire, he had reached the shingle while surrounded by corpses. D-Day for him ended in a tiny foxhole up on the bluffs once the German position in front of him had been seized. He had spent most of the remaining afternoon finding and disarming mines between the shingle and the bluff. He was one of three men to survive from his Higgins boat, and the only one not to be wounded. He didn’t talk about any of this until a week before his death, when he allowed tape recorders to record his wartime experiences.
My grandfather was there. Purple heart during that operation.
He was a Sergeant. His guys were his best friends.
He spent the rest of his life with a pain I think most can't even imagine- every one of his best friends never made it off that boat or to the beach.
Understand that he was as stoic as they come. He had a knack for being a real pita, and drank Schlitz. A lot of it. After I joined, he told me to tell my Sarge, "tell him to kiss your ass and no I ain't doing that." (I never did that, lol, but he used to laugh about it a lot, in that I'm not really joking but I'm joking kind of way). A couple months before he passed, he told me some of the story- and wept. Probably for the first time in his entire life, he wept. "Those were my friends. Those were my friends." Over and over. I will never, ever forget that encounter and what it means.
A few days before he passed, at my behest (that's a polite way of saying I was a pita to him in the last days of his life, paybacks a bitch, but his story wasn't just his anymore, it needed to be passed down!), he finally told some guys at his local VFW post the whole story. Normandy. Battle of the Bulge. Liberation of camps.
People forget what all out war really is too easily.
He is interred at the national cemetery outside Minneapolis.
_aware on June 5th, 2024 at 20:19 UTC »
Imagine being one of the unlucky ones. You are physically fit, trained hard, and know all there is to know about combat. Then the ramp drops and you are instantly killed by a MG42 before you have a single chance to put anything you learned or trained for into action.
SirJudasIscariot on June 5th, 2024 at 20:31 UTC »
Great grandpa was here as an engineer in the third wave. Before the ramp dropped, he quietly cut away his gear and prepared to jump over the side. Having done this while his platoon was torn to pieces by interlocking machine gun fire, he spent hours slowly moving from body to body, making his way up the beach. By the time the U.S. Navy destroyers moved in to offer point blank suppressing fire, he had reached the shingle while surrounded by corpses. D-Day for him ended in a tiny foxhole up on the bluffs once the German position in front of him had been seized. He had spent most of the remaining afternoon finding and disarming mines between the shingle and the bluff. He was one of three men to survive from his Higgins boat, and the only one not to be wounded. He didn’t talk about any of this until a week before his death, when he allowed tape recorders to record his wartime experiences.
Cruezin on June 6th, 2024 at 00:24 UTC »
My grandfather was there. Purple heart during that operation.
He was a Sergeant. His guys were his best friends.
He spent the rest of his life with a pain I think most can't even imagine- every one of his best friends never made it off that boat or to the beach.
Understand that he was as stoic as they come. He had a knack for being a real pita, and drank Schlitz. A lot of it. After I joined, he told me to tell my Sarge, "tell him to kiss your ass and no I ain't doing that." (I never did that, lol, but he used to laugh about it a lot, in that I'm not really joking but I'm joking kind of way). A couple months before he passed, he told me some of the story- and wept. Probably for the first time in his entire life, he wept. "Those were my friends. Those were my friends." Over and over. I will never, ever forget that encounter and what it means.
A few days before he passed, at my behest (that's a polite way of saying I was a pita to him in the last days of his life, paybacks a bitch, but his story wasn't just his anymore, it needed to be passed down!), he finally told some guys at his local VFW post the whole story. Normandy. Battle of the Bulge. Liberation of camps.
People forget what all out war really is too easily.
He is interred at the national cemetery outside Minneapolis.