My late Grandfather was on the second boat to hit the beach on Bloody Omaha. He would have been on the first, but a near miss had the coastie driving it turn back for a bit. The first boat, when it dropped the ramp, everyone on board got machined gunned down.
He made it all the way to Paris unscratched before they pulled him out and sent him home because my great grandfather had died.
Thank You veterans, and thank you Walter
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Lest we forget
My grandpa was in Italy when this occurred.....it is still mindboggling to this day that they managed to claim victory at the beachhead on this day. In all honesty, if Rommel had been there, it might have been another Dunkirk.
my grandfather was also there...never said a word until shortly before he passed. and then it was the guys that were the most scared seemed to be the first ones to die.
after it was over one of his jobs was to check dead germans for booby traps. it seems that was an issue.
other than that, all he would say was austria was the prettiest place he had ever seen.
yamaha wrote: My grandpa was in Italy when this occurred.....it is still mindboggling to this day that they managed to claim victory at the beachhead on this day. In all honesty, if Rommel had been there, it might have been another Dunkirk.
yeah, from all I've read, it seems that the German army pretty much gave this one away ... thank goodness
They had a special on TV last night that I had never seen. So many things went wrong D-Day, it's amazing it was a success. Some of the wrong things were a blessing.
racerdave600 wrote: my grandfather was also there...never said a word until shortly before he passed. and then it was the guys that were the most scared seemed to be the first ones to die.
My grandfather never talked about it till he went back for the 50th anniversery. After that, it was like a weight had been lifted from his shoulders and he would talk freely about it.
My late Grandmother was in London during the bombings.. she -never- talked about it
My grandfather was there. He was a paratrooper. Never talked about it other than the time a buddy of mine was going skydiving. He said the Army cured him of ever wanting to jump out of a plane again.
The only other time he talked about the war was when we bought my wife's Wrangler back in '98. He told us about strapping stretchers to the sides of them and pulling the wounded out of the battlefields. Said they rode rough but always did what they needed them to do.
That had to take some seriously large titanium balls. It had to be terrifying.
mad_machine wrote:racerdave600 wrote: my grandfather was also there...never said a word until shortly before he passed. and then it was the guys that were the most scared seemed to be the first ones to die.My grandfather never talked about it till he went back for the 50th anniversery. After that, it was like a weight had been lifted from his shoulders and he would talk freely about it.
My great uncle was on Omaha in the second wave and received a silver star and purple heart. He never talked about it either.
One of my grandfathers landed with the 4th ID, made it throught the whole thing with out getting a Purple Heart. When we lived in Germany he and my grandmother came and stayed with us for 6 weeks one summer. We traveled around to some of the places he remembered including a gasthaus where he spent his 21st birthday.
My other Grandpa landed in North Africa, then Sicily and ended the war in Austria.
Thank you both, we miss you.
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