What an absolute death trap. Ropes of machine gun tracer fire everywhere, mines on the beach, c-wire laid down, artillery and mortars exploding everywhere. The courage it would have taken to even move a muscle once the ramp dropped….
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.
CorsairObsidian on June 5th, 2024 at 19:02 UTC »
What an absolute death trap. Ropes of machine gun tracer fire everywhere, mines on the beach, c-wire laid down, artillery and mortars exploding everywhere. The courage it would have taken to even move a muscle once the ramp dropped….
_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.