Col. Lindquist met me and as he stood talking with me a line of
German soldiers started walking out the front door of the house and
turned toward the Colonel and me. The courtyard was now filled with
paratroopers some of whom were patting me on the back. There were
seventeen Germans in a line coming from the house and as they passed by
me they reached out and touched me and smiled at me with a very
frightened look on their faces.
The last four or five men were wounded, one of them badly, and he had
taken off his clothes. A bullet had castrated him and his stomach had
collapsed and his belly button was touching his backbone. His eyes were
sunken back into his skull and he could hardly walk. He had a rather
comical grin on his face and as he passed by me he tried to hug me. I
could not understand why the other German soldiers did not try to help
him along.
Col. Lindquist asked me, "Are you going to shoot them?" (We had been
ordered before we left the airport for Normandy not to take any
prisoners.) I replied, "No." Then I asked him if he was going to shoot
them. He said, "No, but what can we do with them?"
I replied, "We can put them in one of the smaller barns with a guard
until the soldiers from the beach reach us." He agreed, and gave the
proper orders to some paratroopers as to what to do with the prisoners.
I never saw them again.
After the small battle was over I walked around the yards surrounding
the barns and through large stacks of fagots the farmer had collected
and stacked. A dead German lay between the rows of fagots with his legs
all spread out as if he had been running.
Then I walked back into the barnyard between the house and the barn
where I had met Colonel Lindquist; the colonel and I talked again. As we
were talking Gen. Gavin came up the road in front of the house and Col.
Lindquist and I walked over to greet the general.
At that moment both the colonel and the general realized I was a first
sergeant and motioned me away from the conference. By then several
officers had joined the meeting.
I walked down the road a few yards to the causeway that ran across the
Merderet River and watched a fight between what looked like a squad of
paratroopers fighting a larger German unit across the river.
By now there were a lot of Paratroopers milling around the house and
barns. It seemed to me that there was no order for the men and they were
just walking around talking to each other. Some watched the fight across
the causeway and realized the paratroopers over there were not doing so
well.
Then a German halftrack filled with German soldiers started across the
causeway toward us. The conference of the officers broke up and someone
ordered an anti tank gun rolled out in front of the causeway to fire at
the half-track. (I never understand why they didn't put the gun behind
the stonewall facing the causeway as it offered a lot of protection for
the gun crew.)
Anyway, the gun crew knocked out the half-track on the narrow causeway
blocking the roadway. Several German soldiers were killed when the
half-track was hit several times. Then a German tank pulled in behind
the half-track and tried to push it into the river but the half-track
would not cooperate. While this was going on the anti¬tank gun was
firing at the tank but the gun was not powerful enough to knock it out.
Then the tank fired on the anti-tank gun and killed the crew. Then a new
gun crew rushed out and tried to man the gun but the tank fired on them
killing one or two men and wounding the others. The tank's firing then
destroyed the anti-tank gun.
At this time all the paratroopers were called back into their own units
(partial units) that were at the house, called by the French "The Manor
House." The Romans had built a part of the house at the time they built
the causeway.
My small unit of 18 men, representing E Company, was told to fall back
on the sunken railway and dig in along with the other men of the 508th
Parachute Regiment.The next morning I was told to take my men and
clean out a large cheese factory at the edge of the village and located
on the bank of the Merderet River. As we moved out a young French lad
about 16 years asked to join us. I told him no and tried to get him to
leave. He refused and started walking down the road to the cheese
factory. He had picked up an M-l rifle from one of the dead paratroopers
and seemed to me to be very angry while at the same time proud to be
with us.
I found someone who spoke French and a bit of English and he explained
that the lad had been living under the floor of his house for the last
four years and he had witnessed the Germans shooting his mother and
father and two other children.
We did not find any live Germans in the cheese factory but there were
two or three dead ones. The French boy, when he saw the dead Germans,
sat down on one of the dead bodies and took hold of the German's ears
and started beating his head against the ground. As he did so he was
making the strangest noises as tears ran down his cheeks. We pulled the
lad off the German and got him calmed down.
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