Private David Webster,
a paratrooper in E Company, 506th Regiment of the 101st Airborne Division on the eve of D-Day
This was the unit immortalized in the book and HBO movie "Band of Brothers"
The engines roared louder. Facing down the aisle, the lieutenant yelled “Look, men, look! It’s the fleet!” I turned stiffly to the window and gasped, “Man, oh man.” 500 feet below, spread out for miles on the moonlit sea, were scores of landing barges, destroyers, cruisers and attack transports. They were bearing the infantry to a dawn assault on the shore of Normandy. My shoulders swung away from the window. I stared at the men opposite me in the racketing, vibrating, oil-reeking, vomit-scented darkness. Our lieutenant staggered erect. “Stand up and hook up!” he shouted. How did we ever get into this? we asked ourselves, and why? A stream of tracer bullets floated up at us, speeded up as they passed the windows, and disappeared with a rattling burrat. Someone threw up and cursed as the pilot took evasive action to avoid another flak nest that had opened fire on the planes ahead. Oh God I prayed. Get me out of here. I don’t want to blow up in the sky and burn to death. I want to die fighting. Let’s jump. Let’s go! “Check your equipment!” the lieutenant shouted. I felt the snap fasteners on my leg straps. They were closed tightly and in place. How about the reserve snaps? Also good. And the bellyband? In place. I knew the chest buckle was snapped, for it had been digging into my ribs ever since I had put on my chute. Burrat! Another machine gun burst crackled around the plane. “Sound off for equipment check!” An 88mm shell burst outside with a quick flash and a metallic bang. The blast tilted the plane, throwing men onto the seats. They clutched their way back up again. The plane dived toward the ground. The pilot twisted and raced back up again. I smelled the smoke and oil and puke and gagged on my supper as it rose in my throat. I shook my head and clamped my teeth shut. I was beyond all hope.
A man’s life and death are decided by forces that he cannot fight. The plane slammed up and down, zigzagged, rattled and roared, threw us from side to side with such violence that several of us fell down again, cursing the pilot. It was all I could do to remain upright and not dissolve into a gutless, gibbering blob of fear. Too weak to stand, I clung to my static line with both hands. I felt like crying, screaming, killing myself. This is a night for murder. I thought. God must have planned it that way. “Close up and stand in the door!” the lieutenant yelled. Left foot forward in a lockstep, each man pushed hard against the man before him. The plane bounced up and down and gasped for altitude. I had forgotten all about everything and everybody but Private David K. Webster, who wanted to get out of this plane more than anything else in the world. I had an insane urge to jump. “Go!” the lieutenant shouted. The line of men surged forward. Two men fell down on the threshold. There was a wild, cursing tangle as others fought to lift them and push them out, and then the line moved again, sucked out the door like a stream of water. I shuffled up, glanced down, and stopped, dumbfounded. All I could see was water, miles and miles of water. But this was D-Day and nobody went back to England, and a lot of infantry riding open barges seasick were depending on us to draw the Germans off the causeways and gun batteries. I grabbed both sides of the door and threw myself at the water.
I fell 100 feet in 3 seconds, straight toward a huge flooded area shining in the moonlight. I thought I was going to fall all the way, and yet I could do was gape at the water. Suddenly a giant snapped a whip with me on the end, and my chute popped open, and I found myself swinging wildly in the wind. Twisted in the fall, my risers were unwinding and spinning me around. They pinned my head down with my chin on the top of my rifle case and prevented me from looking up and checking my canopy. I figured that everything was all right, because at least I was floating free in the great silence that always followed the opening shock. For several seconds I seemed to be suspended in the sky, with no downward motion, and then all at once, the whole body of water whirled and rushed up at me. Jesus. I thought. I’m going to drown. I wrenched desperately at my reserve chute’s snap fasteners as the first step in preparing for a water landing. I didn’t even have time to begin the procedure. We had jumped so low--from about 300 feet, instead of the scheduled 700--that while I was still wrenching at the first strap, I saw the water 20 feet below. I’ve had it. I thought. I reached up, grasped all 4 risers, and yanked down hard, to fill the canopy with air and slow my descent. Just before I hit, I closed my eyes and took a deep breath of air. I held my breath, expecting to sink over my head and wondering how I was going to escape from my harness underwater--and hit bottom 3 feet down. My chute billowed away from me in the light wind and collapsed on the surface. Immensely relieved at the safe landing, I undid the reserve and discarded it, yanked loose the bellyband, unsnapped the leg straps and chest buckle, detached my rifle case and let the harness sink into the swamp. I was on my own at last.
The silence ended abruptly with a long, ripping burst--burrrrrrrp!--that made me look around in fright. That’s a German machine gun. I told myself. I dropped to my knees in the cold, black water and passively waited to be killed. So this is what war is really like? I couldn’t believe that someone wanted to kill me. What had I done to them? I wanted to go up to them and tell them that I didn’t want to kill anybody, that I thought the whole war was a lot of malarkey. All I ask of the world is to be left alone. You’ve never seen me before. Why do you want to kill me? I shook my head to make sure it was all real, and it was. The bullets were not in my imagination. They were real, and they were seeking me out to kill me. They wanted to kill me right there in the swamp. Then my courage returned when I noticed that the shooting was all quite far away. I rose from the water, assembled my rifle and loaded it, and rammed on my bayonet. I was ready to go. Lost and lonely, wrestling with the greatest fear of my life, I stood bewildered in the middle of a vast lake and looked for help.
They’ve wrecked the invasion. I thought. Where is the drop zone? Where are the other regiments? 6 regiments jumped tonight, and I am alone in Normandy. I shivered convulsively and started to cry, then thought better of it. At least I can try to get out of this swamp before sunrise. But where will I go? Which way is out? I took the compass from my pocket and looked at it. I shook the compass and cursed, and holding it close, saw that it was filled of water. “Son of a bitch.” I hissed, throwing it away. A wise guy probably made a fortune off those compasses in the States. And now men will die because somebody gypped the government. Suddenly the whole thing struck me as ludicrous; all the preparations and briefings, all the maps and sand tables, and for what? Why had they bothered? Instead of a regiment of over 1500 men carefully assembled on a well-defined drop zone, D-Day was one man alone in an old swamp that the Air corps said didn’t exist. From inland came the strange tolling of a church bell. Invasion, invasion. it seemed to clang to the Germans. The invasion will fail. We’ll be rounded up and butchered by the SS. Now a new noise came--the distant rumble of a massed flight of planes--and my spirits rose. The planes were coming towards me. I followed their progress by the fountains of tracer that splashed up at them. Come on down and we’ll get ‘em together! The bullets lit the planes and the shadowy parachutes and the men tumbling out of them like strings of ball bearings and followed the men to the ground. Sick at my stomach, I watched the men swing helplessly in the heavy fire. I wanted to help them, but there was nothing I could do but watch with mounting anger and hate. “Those freaking Krauts!” I whispered. I wanted to kill them all. I threw away my gas mask and adjusted my bag on my back. The box of .30 caliber ammunition I had carried on the jump was dropped at my feet. Where was the machine gun that would use it now? I took my Hawkins mine from a big pants pocket and threw that away too, for there were no tanks in the flooded area. I had to travel light to reach the Germans before dawn...I was alive, and I intended to stay that way.
Sgt. Thomas Valence,
29th division, 116th regiment, A company
One of just 24 survivors from his company to land in Normandy on D-Day
As we came down the ramp we were in water about knee high and we started to do what we were trained to do, that is, move forward and then crouch and fire. One of the problems was we didn’t know what to fire at. I saw some tracers coming from the concrete emplacement, which to me looked mammoth; I didn’t anticipate any gun emplacements being that big. While I attempted to fire at that, I had no concept of what was going on behind me. There was not much to see in front of me except a few houses. The water kept coming in so rapidly and the fellows that I was with were being hit and put out of order so quickly it became a struggle to stay on one’s feet. What I did was to abandon my equipment, which was very heavy and tended to drag us down. In my case I was wearing 2 bandoleers of ammunition across my chest, plus the ammunition in my belt, plus the hand grenades, gas mask and M-1 rifle with the light pack we had on our backs. We weren’t going to accomplish very much and I remember floundering in the water with my hand up in the air, trying to get my balance when I was first shot. I was shot through the left hand and suffered a broken knuckle and shot through the palm of my hand. I remember feeling nothing but a little sting at the time, but I was aware that I was shot. Next to me a fellow in the water named Private Henry G. Witt was rolling over toward me and I remember him very clearly saying “Sergeant, they’re leaving us here to die like rats!” I don’t know why I remember that statement so clearly; I certainly wasn’t thinking the same thing. I didn’t know whether we were being left or not.
It turns out he either had great perception of what was going on or made a statement that coincidentally was factual because it turns out that subsequent waves did not come in behind us as planned originally. I made my way forward as best I could; my rifle jammed; I remember picking up a carbine and got off a couple rounds. Again, we were shooting at something that seemed inconsequential; there was no way that I was going to knock out a German concrete emplacement with a .30 caliber rifle. I was hit several other times: once in the leg, left leg and thigh, which broke a hip bone, and several other times which were not injurious. I remember specifically being hit in the pack a couple times and my chin strap of my helmet was severed apparently by a bullet. I worked my way up to the beach and staggered up against a wall and sort of collapsed there. As a matter of fact I spent the whole day pretty much in that same position. Eventually the bodies of the other guys washed ashore and I was one live body amongst so many of my friends, all of whom were dead and in many cases, very severely blown to pieces. I don’t recall any troops coming in; essentially my part of the invasion had ended, with everyone wiped out as most of the company was. I’ve wondered over the years about one thing: why we, in A Company, were chosen to be the American equivalent to stormtroopers. Was it because we were so highly trained? Was it because we had such potential? Or was it because we were simply expendable?
Robert Dyas,
of the 15th Air Force faced death in each of his 52 missions in a B-24, but this time was saved by a brave P-38 pilot
It sounded as if we were flying through a heavy hail storm. Some of the spent flak was penetrating our ship’s thin aluminum skin. Bomb-bay doors were again opened, our bombardier yelled “Bombs away!” over the intercom, and what was left of the original formation went into a steep, left-turning dive toward the ground. We were still in the air and still flyable. Flak had penetrated most of the ship...hydraulic fluid was spewed all over the deck as several hydraulic lines had been punctured. Suddenly, directly out of the sun and coming straight at us was a single Me-109 with all guns blazing. Our nose gunner was blasting away with his trigger on continuous fire, but our top turret gun was silent, and he should have been shooting at that crazy Hun. The warning light for fire in the number two engine was flashing rapidly and our engine instruments told us number two was “cooked." The Captain ordered that I “feather” the number two and push the fire extinguisher button for that engine, which I did immediately. While we continued to try and get back into our formation, we found that this was impossible due to the decrease in power caused by the dead engine. As our airspeed and altitude diminished, we found ourselves a sitting duck for the Nazi fighters still attacking us from all directions.
Our gunners were firing continuously from all gun positions, except for the top turret, as we were being raked by machine-gun fire from the Hun. The Hun fighters, which had been dogging us all the way and which had been kept at bay by the accuracy of our gunners, abruptly disappeared. Far in the distance we could see the American fighters coming out of the south. They caught up with the slowly retreating Nazi aircraft as we were approaching the loft peaks of the Alps. Suddenly, a P-38 Lightning peeled off his chase after a Me-109 that he was about to shoot down, when he noticed our crippled B-24. Without a second thought for his very possible air victory, he pulled alongside us and pointed to his radio headset trying to have us obtain radio contact. Captain Jawatte shook his head, indicating that we could not respond, trying to explain what he was going to try to attempt. The pilot of the P-38 threw up both of his hands to gesture that he understood and, shoving his throttle ahead, flew around us. He then took up a position directly in front of us, matched our airspeed, and guided us through the treacherous mountain range. the P-38 had more sophisticated radar and sonar equipment aboard than a B-24 and he was better able to judge how far away those jagged and deadly peaks were. If it were not for the P-38’s courageous pilot leading us through the small openings in the Alps, I am sure we would have crashed into the side of the mountains.
General Johannes Steinhoff,
Luftwaffe ace who shot down 176 planes in his 900 missions and was shot down 12 times before nearly dying in a Me-262 crash
When we fought the RAF, it was almost evenly matched in fighters against fighters, so true dogfights were possible. The British were born fighters--very tough, well trained and very sportive. They were brave and I never fought against better pilots at any time during the war, including the Americans. That was the truest test of men and their machines, and only the best survived. Attacking hundreds of B-17 and B-24 bombers with fighter escorts was not what I considered sportive, although I must admit it had many moments of excitement and sheer terror. The Soviets were disciplined, principled and somewhat intelligent, but not well trained in tactics. They were very brave for the most part, but unlike the British and Americans, they would break off combat after only a few minutes and a couple of rotations. The Soviet pilot was for the most part not a born fighter in the air. In fighting the Soviets, we fought an apparatus, not a human being--that was the difference. There was no flexibility in their tactical orientation, no individual freedom of action, and in that way they were a little stupid. If we shot down the leader of a Soviet group, the rest were simply sitting ducks, waiting to be taken out. We fought as a team from the beginning. We had excellent training schools and great combat leaders from the Spanish Civil war, as well as the early campaigns in Poland and the West. We really learned our trade during the Battle of Britain, and that knowledge saved many German lives. Well, the Soviet pilots did get better. In fact, there were some hotshot pilots formed in the famous Red Banner units, which had some of the best pilots in the world. I fought against them in the Crimea and Caucasus later.
General Johannes Steinhoff
But the hardest thing about the Russian Front was the weather, that damned cold. In many cases we had no operations. The cold would freeze all machinery and moving parts. Sometimes we could not fly because the snow was piled so high that we had no way to remove it. It was very poor weather, and navigation was absolutely impossible. This and the cold were the greatest handicaps. That was absolutely the worst time. The second thing, and probably the most important, was the knowledge that if you were shot down or wounded and became a POW--that is if they did not kill you first--you would have it very bad. There was no mutual respect. You were safe only on your side of the lines. The Soviets did not treat our men very well after they were captured, but then again, the Soviets we captured did not always fare well either, which was unfortunate. At least in fighting against the Americans and British, we understood that there was a similar culture. The Americans and British treated us as gentlemen, as we did our enemy pilots when they were captured. But with the Soviets, this was unheard of. There was no mutual respect. It was a totally different war...
I was shot down 12 times; in the 13th incident I almost died from a crash. I only bailed out once. I never trusted the parachutes; I always landed my damaged planes, hoping not to get bounced on the way down when I lost power. I was wounded only once lightly, but never seriously until my crash. I was taking off in formation on April 18, 1945 for my 900th mission. Our airfield had suffered some damaged over the last several days due to Allied bombing and as my jet was picking up speed, the let undercarriage struck a poorly patched crater. I lost the wheel, and the plane jumped perhaps a meter into the air, so I tried to raise the remaining right wheel. I was too low to abort takeoff, and my speed had not increased enough to facilitate takeoff. I knew as I came toward the end of the runway that I was going to crash. The 262 hit with a great thump, then a fire broke out in the cockpit as it skidded to a stop. I tried to unfasten my belts when an explosion rocked the plane, and I felt an intense heat. My rockets had exploded, and the fuel was burning me alive. I remember jumping out, flames all around me, and I fell down and began to roll. The explosions continued, and the concussion was deafening, knocking me down as I tried to get up and run away. I cannot describe the pain. Even the surgeons had no idea that I would survive, but I tricked them.
Lt. Paul Fussell,
a 19 year-old US Army infantry officer during the Battle of the Bulge, cold and afraid in his foxhole
The Germans attacked all along our Alsace line on New Year's Day, 1945. The Americans retreated everywhere. Whole battalions were wiped out. Many men were captured. Quite a few deserted. The roads were icy and it was snowing much of the time. When the snow let up, the temperature dropped to -20º. Pushed back and back, by January 20th F Company was in the town of Niederbronn-les-Bains, which we abandoned at night for a 9 mile march in a raging snowstorm back to the River Moder. There we set up what we hoped would be a final defensive line between the towns of Mulhausen and Bischoltz. The retreat in the snow and ice was a nightmare: tanks and trucks skidded off the road and had to be abandoned--to the Germans. We had a day or so to slow them down and they pursued us, and at one point someone laid out on the road a number of inverted dinner plates, hoping that when covered with a bit of snow they'd resemble anti-tank mines and cause a brief German delay.
While we were struggling back, our positions along the Moder were being prepared by engineers. The ground being too solid for digging, they used blocks of TNT to blast out 3 and 4 man holes roofed with railroad ties. Three feet of snow quickly covered these emergency emplacements, leaving nothing visible from the front but a dark slit 2 inches high and 10 inches long. Through such a slit for the next 5 days I watched the Germans on the other side of the river getting ready to attack us. The only entrance was through a slippery slide at the rear, which became increasingly nasty because there we had to throw out our excrement, deposited first on a spread-out K-ration carton. To appear outside of the hole in daylight was to be shot instantly. What an attack would mean for us was too frightening to dwell on. We could fire only forward, out of the slit, and only one man could fire at a time. If the German attack were to come during snow or fog, we couldn't fire effectively at all. All the Germans would have to do would be to approach invisibly from a flank and toss in a grenade, either through the slit or the rear entrance. At night one of us was always on guard at the slit. It was terribly cold. The only warmth we had came from burning the K-ration cartons and lighting the little heat tablets we warmed coffee over. We tried various expedients to survive the cold: there was disagreement over whether sleeping with the hands in the crotch or the armpits was the best way to avoid frostbite. On January 25th the attack came. It followed a really terrifying artillery preparation. We cowered at the bottom of the hole, dreading a direct hit, and dreading equally a German attack during the barrage, which would catch us utterly unprepared to repel it. The troops of the 6th SS Mountain Division soon indicated that they were the ones against us. Stimulated by schnapps, shouting slogans and abuse, they swarmed toward us--to be torn to pieces by our machine guns.
But thank God, the axis of the attack was 500 yards to our right, and our hole remained unassaulted. On the right the SS burst through our line, capturing a town behind, from which they were finally ejected after a brutal struggle. These SS men were the best troops we ever fought. They behaved as if they actually believed that their wounds and deaths might make a difference in the outcome of the war. The SS attacks having failed, with corpses left all over our snow-covered hills, in our hole we resumed our quiet life of watchful terror until we were relieved by another battalion. Throughout, our problem had been less how to help win the war than how to survive the cold. The war was being won, actually, by the Russians, who at this moment were moving toward us, even if they were a thousand miles to the east. They seemed not yet likely to appear at any moment coming over the mountains we were facing, wearing fur caps with red stars on the front and brandishing submachine guns. When we were finally back in a town behind the lines, washing and shaving for the first time in weeks, I came down with pneumonia, and with a temperature of 104º was evacuated to a hospital. It was warm and quiet and safe, and I hoped I'd never have to return to the line. But I did, and the winter war went on.
Weika Koenraad,
a young Dutch girl whose town was liberated by the Allies in 1945
I was just a little girl during the Second World War, born in Haarlem Holland, in 1937. The Netherlands was occupied by the Germans in 1940, and the scariest thought in my mind were soldiers, with black shiny boots and a gun; nobody ever smiled, there was nothing to smile about. The games we played as children were war games. We had built a play hospital and I was the nurse. My friends were wounded and brought to the hospital. There were no toys. The most severe winter in decades was the winter in 1944. The southern part of the Netherlands was already free, but the western part which is above the river Rhine was still occupied. Because of the weather, there was nothing more to eat. Everybody was hungry and our daily meal consisted of sugar beets, which we now feed to the hogs, and tulip bulbs. I still remember the taste of tulip bulbs. Suddenly there was spring, and the bad weather was gone, and it was May 1945. Big tanks rolled through the streets and for the very first time I saw people who smiled and waved to us. They were soldiers! It was like a miracle--they were supposed to be scary, and now they were friendly and smiled. They threw chocolate bars and chewing gum into the crowd, something we had never seen or tasted before. Every time I meet somebody who has served in the Second World War, I give him a hug and say, “Thanks to you we are alive.”
Raymond Daum,
US Army photographer who was sent to rescue priceless Beethoven artifacts at various locations in Germany
I served in the Army as a motion picture combat cameraman, assigned to fighting units in the ETO, mainly the ground forces of infantry divisions. In one armored attack about the time of the Battle of the Bulge, I was wounded as I got in the way of German artillery and was whacked by an 88 shell that pierced my helmet as I knelt to reload my camera.
As the Allied armies penetrated deeper into Germany, Göring, who was infamous for his looting of Europe’s artistic treasures, dispatched orders to all museums to disperse their collections so that they would not be looted by the invading armies. One of these historical sites was the Beethoven-Haus in Bonn. This was the birthplace of the composer and had been converted into a museum. The museum collection included 3 pianos owned by Beethoven, several musical instruments and oil portraits important to him in his life. Just months before, German transports had appeared at the museum, where the treasures were loaded and the convoy, headed by Dr. Wildemann, travelled to various rural sites in the Rhineland Province. I caught the scenes in my camera’s viewfinder as we approached each site on Wildemann’s list. Then they would come out--the crates, the trunks, precious art works, and boxes of musical manuscripts. Dr. Wildemann asked me to hand-carry a huge bundle of autographed music manuscripts--the originals and priceless! The manuscripts for the piano sonatas were present, including “Moonlight Sonata” and scores of the Pastoral and 9th Symphonies!
We finally reached Bonn, which was like a ghost town with blocks and blocks of incendiary ruins. In filming inside and outside the museum, I was shown, by the caretaker, the room upstairs where Beethoven was born in 1770. One question we all asked ourselves: How was it possible that this little 200 year old tinder-box-building had survived the severe and prolonged incendiary bombings? The German caretaker’s story was one of the most amazing to come out of the war. Each night, as the incendiary bombs began to fall, he would crawl up to the roof of the house with a garden hose and he would douse the walls and roof all night long until the bombing had ceased, to keep the wood and plaster as wet as possible, for the structure to survive another night. The experience proved that the only glory of war is in the hope of cooperation between the enemies afterward. At Beethoven-Haus, conquerors and the conquered had joined hands to preserve mankind’s priceless heritage and culture. Additional Sources:
fcit.coedu.usf.edu
www.denktag.de
www.yad-vashem.org
www.stukas.freeservers.com
www.fatherryan.org
www.menziesvirtualmuseum.org.au
www.wssob.com
www.valourandhorror.com
timewitnesses.org
www.nzhistory.net.nz
www.skalman.nu
www.vflintham.demon.co.uk
benito.virtualave.net
volkerradke.looplab.org
sbl.salk.edu
www.rrz.uni-hamburg.de
www.arts.auckland.ac.nz
www.ubootwaffe.homestead.com
www.milmag.com
www.afno-is.eu.odedodea.edu
images.amazon.com
www.army.mil
search.eb.com
www.1id.army.mil
www.theatlantic.com
www.mecri.org
www.lexikon-der-wehrmacht.de
www.nt.net
www.cyberus.ca
www.fuerboeck.at
