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Normandy Thoughts
(8 of 10) |
We regrouped, and Lt. Quade took some of the aforementioned troopers who
were strangers to us, as his point. I said to Sgt. Ganz that I was going
to ask Quade for he (Ganz) and I to take the point, I felt somehow if I
had the point instead of Koziel, I wouldn't have been killed as was
Koziel. It was a gut feeling, and in reality I would probably have been
just as dead as Dan Koziel. Lt. Quade told me he wanted to use some of
the people who were not up front yet, and said for me and Ganz to take
the rear guard with Lt. Stevens.
Well, we couldn't have travelled more than a few hundred yards and our
luck ran out. They probably had our movements pretty much for certain
after we ran from the trucks, because they were waiting for us behind an
innocent looking hedgerow that the point approached. The first salvo of
machinegun fire killed everyone up front. It is difficult to tell just
how many were killed, but Quade and the entire point went down
instantly. There was a small opening in the left rear of the field in
which we were being slaughtered. We were funneling ourselves through
this tight space, and the kid next to me got hit in the head. When we
finally got out of the field of fire and assembled, we had one trooper
with a bullet wound through his thigh. We administered first aid giving
him a morphine syrette and put some sulphur powder on his leg. Then we
had to leave him and move out. He just sat there and understood our
predicament. He certainly was a cool piece of work.
We travelled about four or five hundred yards through hedgerows until we
came to an area that appeared safe for the moment. We hid there for over
an hour. The Colonel then told me to take someone with me and see if I
could locate the trooper we left, and bring him back. I took a Staff
Sgt. from the 507th Prcht. Regt. and we went to the area where a few
hours earlier the Krauts had slaughtered us. It was very eerie, late
afternoon, the sun filtering down through the leaves on the giant
hedgerows and birds fluttering around and chirping, and any second
waiting for a German machinegun to open up. We were crawling around on
our hands and knees whispering for our wounded comrade, but he was
nowhere to be found, Whether the Germans captured him or he crawled away
from the area and hid, we didn’t know, so we returned to our group and
reported it.
We kept traveling at night and it was very tiring. We were going almost
continually since the night of the jump without a square meal or a
night's sleep. With three or four days of no real sleep, you start to
get bug-eyed. So it was, when we made contact, about 4 o’clock in the
morning with our forces holding Hill 30. Before we entered into the
perimeter of our own lines we had to lay almost in single file for what
seemed over an hour to insure that our own troops didn't open fire on
us. There was not a sound to be heard - just the stillness that was
compounded by the morning dew and blackness. Then a terrific explosion
broke the silence and it was all still again. Soon an agonizing voice
started screaming out, "my legs, my legs, help anybody, help me." His
voice was almost undistinguishable. At first I thought he was a German,
but in retrospect he would have been yelling in German; but the pain
must have distorted his diction. Whether he stepped on a land mine or a
grenade rolled in his foxhole God only knows, but it was one of the most
pathetic sounds I’ve ever heard. [Note: this man could have been Lewis
Van Leuven, HQ 2nd, who lost both of his legs on 8 June 44 from a
grenade explosion. He was captured, treated and survived.].
When we finally entered our lines there was about a Battalion of
paratroopers, and they were surrounded by a German Division. But to us,
after being on our own since D Day, it felt as secure as a baby in its
mother's arms.
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