Part of one man’s account:
(SNIP)
Dodging sniper fire, Baumgarten made for the rally point — the road leading to Vierville-sur-Mer.
“At 1 p.m., I joined up with 11 wounded guys,” he said. “I didn’t know them, but one was a Ranger because he had that insignia on the back of his helmet.”
“So 12 of us, the walking wounded, went up the wall, past the trenches and moved west,” he said. “We took on two German strong points.
“One was a farmhouse with a wall around it.”
With rifle fire and hand grenades, they took the farmhouse. The hodgepodge group also took out a machine gun position manned by four Germans about 4:30 p.m.
At 5 p.m., Baumgarten was wounded again, shot in the foot.
On the road, Baumgarten and his now six remaining comrades decided to take shelter for the night and made for a ditch when they were attacked by a machine gun. Baumgarten was hit in the face again.
“I landed on top of the Ranger when I got across the road,” he said. “All of them were fatally wounded, they stayed alive for a while and I heard, ‘Help me Jesus,’ and all that stuff.”
At 12:30 a.m. on June 7, Baumgarten gave himself his last shot of morphine. Though the Germans behind the machine gun came later looking for cigarettes, he was passed over.
“I felt a hand on my shirt and heard someone say, ‘You’ll by OK, Yankee.’”
Baumgarten was taken by ambulance and put on board a hospital ship hours later, one of only two survivors from his boat.(END SNIP)