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July 28 - August 21, 2017
“Give me allies to fight against,” said Napoleon,
Pvt. Tom Porcella, also of the 508th, was torturing himself with thoughts of killing other human beings (this was common; the chaplains worked overtime assuring soldiers that to kill for their country was not a sin). “Kill or be killed,” Porcella said to himself. “Here I am, brought up as a good Christian, obey this and do that. The Ten Commandments say, ‘Thou shalt not kill.’ There is something wrong with the Ten Commandments, or there is something wrong with the rules of the world today. They teach us the Ten Commandments and then they send us out to war. It just doesn’t make sense.”49
“It was a time of prayer,” Pvt. Harry Reisenleiter of the 508th PIR recalled, “and I guess we all made some rash promises to God.” He said that so far as he could tell everyone was afraid—“fear of being injured yourself, fear of having to inflict injury on other people to survive, and the most powerful feeling of all, fear of being afraid.”
Private Oyler, the Kansas boy who had forgotten his name when General Eisenhower spoke to him, remembered his hometown as he got to the door. His thought was “I wish the gang at Wellington High could see me now—at Wellington High.”21
one suggestion was that every pilot of Troop Carrier Command be made to jump from a plane going 150 miles per hour.
What Hitler had sown he was now to reap. The free peoples of the world were sending the best of their young men and the products of their industry to liberate Western Europe and crush him and his Nazi Party.
“I don’t think there has been a day that has gone by that I haven’t thought of those men who didn’t make it.”
The industrial miracle of production in the United States in World War II was one of the great accomplishments in the history of the Republic. The job the Army did in creating and shaping the leadership qualities in its junior officers—just college-age boys, most of them—was also one of the great accomplishments in the history of the Republic.
The soldier replied, “I can’t, Lieutenant. What will I do with this?” In his right hand he was carrying his left arm.
What we did was important and worthwhile, and how many ever get to say that about a day in their lives.”
In concluding his oral history, Wiehe recalled his crying episode and declared, “To this day I’ve never shed another tear. I would give anything to have one good cry or one good laugh. I hurt inside but I cannot get my emotions out since that day. I’ve never been able to.”
As the afternoon wore on, there was talk among the rangers about shooting the prisoners, but Weast pointed out that “not only is that illegal and immoral, it’s stupid.” When the light began to fade, “we had them lay real close to each other and we put a man with a BAR at the end and we made it plain to them that when it got dark we wouldn’t be able to observe them but we could hear them and if anybody made any move we were going to get the whole bunch of them with the BAR. They lay there through the night and believe me, those were some damn quiet enemy.”
“It had been a frontal assault in broad daylight, against a mined beach defended by all the obstacles military ingenuity could devise. The beach had been defended as stubbornly and as intelligently as any troops could defend it. But every boat from the Dix had landed her troops and cargo. No boat was lost through bad seamanship. All that were lost were lost by enemy action. And we had taken the beach.”9 • •
The supreme commander did not give a single command on D-Day. Hitler gave two bad ones.
Code name for this operation was Gambit. Honour was not a chess player; he looked the word up in the dictionary and was a bit set back to read “throwing away the opening pawns.”
“It was quite amazing. I still remember very vividly some of the machine gunners standing up in their posts looking at us with their mouths wide open. To see tanks coming out of the water shook them rigid.”
Sergeant Gariepy nearly got stuck in Courseulles. His tank ended up in a narrow street “and there was one of those funny-looking trucks with a charcoal burner on the running board. I couldn’t get my tank by, and I saw two Frenchmen and a French woman standing in a doorway looking at us. So I took my earphones off and told them in good Quebec French, ‘Now will you please move that truck out of the way so I can get by?’ “They must have been frightened because they wouldn’t budge. So I then called them everything I could think of in the military vocabulary. They were amazed to hear a Tommy—they
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The British and Canadian armies can’t fight three and a half minutes without tea,” according to Robert Rogge, the American volunteer in the Black Watch.)
The Atlantic Wall must therefore be regarded as one of the greatest blunders in military history.II
One soldier who did not forget to thank God was Lt. Richard Winters, 506th PIR, 101st Airborne. At 0001 on June 6, he had been in a C-47 headed to Normandy. He had prayed the whole way over, prayed to live through the day, prayed that he wouldn’t fail. He didn’t fail. He won the DSC that morning. At 2400 on June 6, before bedding down at Ste.-Marie-du-Mont, Winters (as he later wrote in his diary) “did not forget to get on my knees and thank God for helping me to live through this day and ask for His help on D plus one.” And he made a promise to himself: if he lived through the war, he was
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