I have an uncle who was there at Omaha beach, first wave and if you can get him to talk about it, it’s powerful. He talks about going by the battleship USS Texas in pretty close dueling with Nazi shore batteries and her firing a broadside as his landing craft was passing by astern. As a kid I was looking at a US Navy History book and he saw it and it was on the picture of the Texas and he said let me see that, I know that ship, I went by her on June 6th.
He will start talking and get to a point and then tell of a mortar or artillery shell hitting. He said he watched several guys who were there one second, then boom and nothing, they were just gone. He gets broken up at these points and has to regain his composer.
He was at the Huertgen Forrest and was shipped to the Ardennes to recover from a bad case of trench foot only to have to deal with the Battle of the Bulge.
Another uncle was in third army and a anti-aircraft gunner. He was also one who talked little about the war until up in the 1980’s. He said he carried an M1 Carbine and never fired it in anger, but said haltingly, I can’t say that about the AA gun. He told me one day an ME-109 was diving on his column and he engaged it and was hammering away and it started smoking and about that time two P-38’s roared through the clouds and cut loose on the 109 taking his kill. His transport was torpedoed in training exercise before D-Day and he managed to survive and eventually get placed in third army. He liberated a concentration camp and told me don’t ever let any leftist tell you those camps were not real and that the Jews were not slaughtered, I saw it, it happened.
Good God. Talk about a tough draw of a hand. DDay...Huertgen Forest (underappreciated for the meat grinder that it was) and The Battle of The Bulge.
You would think that one would be enough, but that wasn’t the way things happened.
I was reading about the Chosin Reservoir in Korea where the Marines were fighting in temperatures around -40 below zero. There were a good number of those same Marines who had been fighting five years before on Peleliu where the temperatures had been between 110 and 120 degrees.
Just wow...I am sure they were asking “What the Hell did I do to deserve this?”