We landed in England on October 11th, 1942. We thought we were a pretty tough outfit when we started out, and when we got to England we found out differently. I was a company commander of a rifle company, which is just an ordinary line company. I am going to kick the teeth down the throat of the Air Corps before I am through tonight. I am going to take a rap at the artillery before I am through tonight, and I am going to give you the story of G.I. Joe, because I was one of them.

While we were in England during the training there, we learned how to march forty miles in a day; never learned how to like it but we learned how to march forty miles in a day, and keep on going afterward. The training was a little bit severe. We trained on the Dartmoor up around Princetown, the famous prison is there, and at one point our own mortar laid down on my company when it was out front, and I had about four casualties there, just in the training.

Later on in the training in 1943 we had some amphibious maneuvers on the Bristol Channel, and there they threw all safety regulations to the wind. We allowed men right from then on to squeeze the trigger of a loaded rifle as long as they couldn't see a man through the sight, and it certainly was a great relief. We turned everything over to the platoon leaders and the men began to learn how to fight there. We did very well on those 1943 maneuvers on the Bristol Channel, and at that time we were notified that we were to be a part of the initial landing force whenever D-Day came around. So that, beginning in October, 1943, we knew what we had coming to us.

At that time we were given a free rein as to the men we were to have. We got rid of any men who couldn't stand the gaff, and we got a replacement for him. The One Hundred and Seventy-Fifth Infantry of thirty-two hundred men during our stay in England got rid of fifteen hundred men that we sent to the S.O.S. and got replacements for them because they couldn't take the gaff. We were a pretty cocky outfit by the time we got through doing that. We were just about as cocky as any outfit can get. We could sit and figure it out, and we could think to ourselves, well, there are one hundred and forty million people in the United States. About twelve million of those are in the army. About seventy-five thousand are going to make that initial invasion, and we are it. We were damn proud of it.

Well, springtime came around, as it usually does every year, and in the middle of May we were shoved into what is called a marshaling area, where you go in and the M.P.'s guard the outside, and you don't go out again, and we were told that we were in there for the invasion. When we were well locked in they began to show us maps of just where we were to hit the coast of France. We knew we were to go right in on the Cherbourg Peninsula, and they had perfectly magnificent maps of the whole area that we were to hit. They had aerial photographs, correct photographs, which are about one over fifteen thousand roughly, that is, about four inches to a mile. We had oblique photographs that give you a picture of the terrain, although they are not very accurate as far as maps are concerned. We had pretty good situation maps, one over 63,360. That is one inch to a mile. So that you could get a broad picture of the thing. We also had maps one over five thousand, which is twelve inches to the mile which really gave you a picture of the little area you were to hit yourself.

Aside form that they had sponge rubber maps, that showed the whole picture of the terrain, including all the trees. So that although we had never seen the ground, we knew where to hit.

The area that was picked out for us was called Omaha Beach in all the orders that came down, and we didn't know at the time that Omaha Beach was going to be anything except another beach. But we saw the terrain there from our maps which showed us that the beach itself went back fairly flat about two to three hundred yards, and then went up sharply in a sand cliff that went about two hundred feet high. It had two draws coming down to the sea in our area. The one at the right went up to a little town called Verville. The one at the left went up just into the fields. My orders for my company were to go up the left-hand draw into the fields, and to a regimental assembly point there where I would get further orders.

About June 1st we left this marshaling area. We went to Falmouth Harbor in the Helford River and we went aboard an LST, a ship of three or four thousand tons. The real name is Landing Ship Tanks. Those ships are supposed to berth about one hundred and forty-five men. I was the troop commander on the ship I went on, and I had four hundred and seventy-six on board. You get the idea that maybe it was a little crowded. It was.

We went on about the first of June. Then we pulled out into Falmouth Harbor and anchored. I went into the ward room and there was a big sign that said, "D-Day June 5th." So I knew that beginning roughly at that time life was going to be very uncomfortable and might be very short. But anyway we began to get a little tightened up inside because of it, and there isn't a man who didn't begin to get tightened up inside when he knew it, and then after we had been there for a couple of days the sign was changed to June 6th, and we entightened twenty-four hours worth and then started to tighten up again. The One Hundred and Seventy-Fifth Infantry, contrary to my father's statement, was in the third wave which was to go in on the -- I believe they called it the third tide. The first wave would go on the first tide, the second wave the second tide, and the third wave the third tide, which brought us over into D-Day plus one.

So about June 5th we started on down the English coast keeping very close to the British shore, and then on the night of June 6th, June 7th, we headed right straight across the channel towards the Cherbourg Peninsula, and toward Omaha Beach. I woke up on the morning of June 7th after having slept out my shift, and went out and looked at the sky, and listened to the noise and looked and could see the coast of France way over in the distance about twenty-five miles away. I could see one hell of a lot of planes up overhead, and I could hear an awful lot of rumbling off in the distance. All the planes that were used over our heads are called P-38's. They are Lightnings. They are pursuit ships of ours, and they used nothing but P-38's over us because they are very easy to identify. They have the twin tail boom. It is the only fighter plane that has the twin tail boom. It was very consoling to look up in the air and see those planes overhead, because for those of you who haven't been on an invasion -- I don't think very many of you have -- you have the feeling that you are making it all by yourself, and you have done a whole lot of studying about the German west wall. You know that it is going to be tough to crack, and you think, "God Almighty, the United States has picked me to crack it," and you look up in the air and you see a whole lot of fighter planes and think, "Well, maybe I am not doing it quite by myself, I've got a little bit of help."

Getting about ten miles from the shore -- there were ships all over the place, just all over the water as far as you could see in any direction, and the big battleships were throwing shells in toward land. You would watch them throw a broadside, and rock back, and straighten up, and about a minute later they would light up again. God knows what they were shooting at.

When we got about ten miles from the shore control boats began coming by us with loud speakers on board saying, all elements of the One Hundred and Seventy-Fifth Infantry are wanted ashore immediately. That was our call. We went over the side on cargo nets into little boats that are known as LCVP's. That is a landing craft vehicle personnel. It holds about thirty men or one jeep. We loaded it up with about thirty-five men in each one, and we had broken ourselves down into little fighting teams of roughly thirty men that knew how to knock out a pill box, and so forth, so that we were all set up to go over the side, and we went over the side in these little things. It was pretty tricky because it was very rough, and if you have ever gone over a cargo net into a canoe or whatever it is, you know one minute you are about to step on it, and the next minute it is eight feet below you, and you have got about thirty or thirty-five pounds of equipment strapped around you, you are trying to take care of a rifle and a gas mask, and God knows what all, yourself too, and it is a little hard.

But when you go over the side they form up into what is known as a wave. Your little craft gets filled up, and it goes over somewhere and starts going around in a circle, and as other craft get filled up that are assigned to your wave they start following it around in the same circle, and pretty soon all the craft are there, and then the lead craft breaks off and heads in for shore, and you head in just like a line of geese, and then finally you branch off on both sides and form up a wave and you hit the shore all at once so as to deliver the maximum fire power on whatever your objective is going to be. It is the shock action that makes an invasion work.

Well, we started in to the shore, and we were crouched down behind the ramps on these little boats, and we were crouched down like that for about an hour, I suppose, while they move in toward the shore, and you have plenty of time to think about home and mother and "medium rare," and all of those things that you liked. You are very uncomfortable. That was the worst part of the invasion for me. I was plenty scared. we began getting in close to the shore, and occasionally machine gun bullets would rattle across the ramp in front of you, and then you would maybe stick your head up a little bit. I stuck my head up once in a while to take some pictures, and pulled it down again very quickly. But you always had that thought in your mind that, "My God, it is going to be about five minutes and that ramp isn't going to be there, and I am." So it was pretty tight.

The landing craft on my left hit a mine, and it didn't sink. It went right straight up in the air. Pieces of it in all directions. It must have hit a big mine and parts of it sort of sprinkled down on top of us.

The craft that I was on got all the way inshore, and most of the others did, and we spread out as we went in so that we wouldn't be too good a target, and there wasn't terribly much fire on the beach at that time. I was able to get my company together to some degree pretty quickly, and we started up the draw on the left that I had been ordered to go through to get to the regimental assembly area. I had put my scouts out in front, and as soon as they got well into the draw there was a great deal of machine gun fire that opened up on them.. They were very unhappy. They came back to me and reported it and reported that that draw was completely covered, and I knew that my battalion commander was ashore, and I went to him to find out whether he wanted us to attack up that draw or not, and he said no, he did not, that the draw on the right that went directly into Verville was open, that it had been opened up, and that I would follow the troops that were going up through the draw.

Now, to drop back a little bit and throw a bouquet or two at that point. That draw on the right was opened by our first wave, which was comprised of elements of the One Hundred and Sixteenth Infantry, the Virginia Infantry Regiment of the Twenty-Ninth Division. The first division which had come in I believe on our right was a division that was supposed to be the crack division of the United States Army. It had seen action in Africa, it had seen action in Sicily, it had been in two other landings before, and it had stalled on the beach. The One Hundred and Sixteenth Infantry of the Twenty-Ninth Division attacked through that draw. They opened a hole through the beach, and the first division had to follow us through. We had never seen any action before that, and we were as good as we thought we were or we wouldn't have gone through.

Anyway, when we got there that hole was open. But there was a traffic jam such as you would see at the corner of Forty-Second and Broadway, vehicles bumper to bumper, tanks, men just jammed up in there, occasional 88's dropping in among them, and there was no possible way of moving up in there. I had learned a lesson coming into the shore that waiting was the hardest thing to do when you were under fire, and I wanted my men to be busy, and busy quickly. I knew I couldn't take it waiting, and I was pretty sure they couldn't. So we slipped up the side of this draw, the left side of this draw and climbed back over the top of this cliff. There were flat fields back over there, and we could go right back over the cliff, and I formed my men up into three or four man teams, because it was a sand cliff that you could slide down. While we had been on the beach we had been able to see these holes all through the cliff where machine gun fire was coming out and sniper fire was coming out at us, and we knew they were shooting real stuff because I had four or five men hit.

So we got a little initiation in how to catch Germans right there. These three man teams would locate one of these holes. They would see a puff of smoke down underneath them. The first man would get a grenade in his hand. He would dig his heels into the sand and he would slide down and get astraddle of one of these holes. Then he would fling a grenade down between his legs, and then he would back back right up against the cliff again, and as soon as the grenade went off he dived down into the hole, and his friends would follow him and they would just spray the hole with automatic rifle fire. Of course, they couldn't see what was inside. There was just a cloud of dust and everything else inside, and after they sprayed it a while everything would quiet down and they would look around to see what they had done inside. Occasionally they would find a dead kraut and occasionally they would find some that came out with their hands up. They had had enough.

Those holes incidentally were very elaborate. They were part of the west wall. They had electricity in them. They had beds built in them. They had tables in there with half-consumed bottles of cognac, which were very completely consumed bottles of cognac very soon. But the Germans definitely had just lived right there looking out over the channel, and they led a pretty comfortable life. We changed that for them.

The traffic jam broke after a while, and I got back into proper position, and followed into the regimental assembly area. By this time it was about six-thirty or seven in the evening of June 7th. That was D-Day plus one. We got into the area and all of us being new to action -- there wasn't much firing going on when we got back there -- we thought well, we are a hell of a fine outfit, we have cracked the west wall. Now is the time for a good night's sleep, and we will go get them tomorrow. So about nine o'clock that night after we had sort of found comfortable places in ditches, I got a call to come to Battalion Headquarters immediately. I went to Battalion Headquarters immediately after alerting my company to move, because whenever you go to Battalion Headquarters you are going to move, and it is going to be something unpleasant. We got orders that we were to attack somewhere. I was a little vague as to where we were to attack. The staff work I guess was not too hot.

Anyway, we were all ready to move. I wasn't to lead the battalion, so all I had to do was follow. We waited until dark. Dark came about eleven o'clock at that time of year in that part of France, and then we took off down the road and we parallel to the beach. It turned out later that we were heading for a little town called Isigny. Incidentally, when we took Isigny it was the first port taken in France by the United Nations Troops, and this time the One Hundred and Seventy-Fifth Infantry took it.

We started moving on this parallel line. Isigny was about twelve miles away, and we marched and kept on marching without any opposition, and about one o'clock or one-thirty, from where I was I heard some shooting up ahead and then a tank that was right about beside me -- it was rolling down the road moving with us -- it opened up back on this firing ahead, and we had a hell of a battle there for a while with this tank firing. And then there would be firing off there, and then this tank would fire some more with its fifty caliber machine guns. It turned out we were on a winding road, that these two tanks had come around face to face with one another, and they were both our tanks. But nobody got hurt.

We got it all straightened out after a while. At least, nobody was hurt by the tanks but I will say that it was unfortunate. When shooting starts at night it makes a lot of flashes and it can be spotted from the air. These flashes were spotted from the air, and there were German planes in the sky at the time. The German planes were always in the sky from dusk until dawn. We called them swing shifts. They were always there, and there was never and American plane up there. And they came in and gave us our first dose of butterfly bombs. Butterfly bombs are anti-personnel bombs. They are like what in this country I suppose they are known as Molotov cocktails. It is one big bomb that breaks out and a whole lot of little bombs come down and there are explosions all over the place like the Fourth of July all at once., and they are very uncomfortable things to have bouncing around you because if they hit you they might kill you, and they do hurt you. We had a few men hurt there, I don't know how many. I didn't have any men killed in my company.

We got all that straightened out and kept on going, and after a while somebody up front said it was quitting time, that we would knock off and sleep in the gutters for an hour. So we posted sentinels out from our column, and I had wondered whether I would be able to sleep or not. I had been pretty tightened up over the whole thing until that point, and I didn't know whether insomnia had finally caught up to me or not. But it hadn't. It wasn't thirty seconds from the time I hit my cozy little ditch that I was asleep, and somebody had to wake me when the time came to move out.

But we moved out just before dawn. We were still heading for this town of Isigny, and we kept on going toward it. This was in the daylight again. We came out on to a main road that went from Isigny to somewhere. Anyway it went through a little town called La Cambe. The head of our column got into La Cambe, and we had had practically no opposition up to that point. It was about noon when we got there.

I looked up in the air about that time. I hadn't quite gotten into the town yet, and there came four planes over, and I could recognize my planes pretty well and I saw a pair of P-51's, and P-47's, both American fighter planes, and I looked again and they had American insignia on their wings. I thought no more of it and we kept on going. Well, they got down about four hundred feet over our column and the front one opened up with his machine guns, and ripped right down the column, and the second one followed suit, and the third, and the fourth followed suit, and they strafed the hell out of us. We had tanks in our column, and on the second time around our tanks knew better than to sit there as sitting ducks. They turned their fifty caliber machine guns on these planes and tried to drive them up in the air, and they came over and took a second helping at us. We gave them all the orange smoke we had. Orange smoke was supposed to signify we were friendly troops to them. So they came back for a third helping, and on the third helping they bombed us. They got a direct hit on one of the tanks, and when you put a five hundred pound bomb directly on a tank there is very little tank left. It was messed up. We lost a good many men at that point, and it was very disheartening. You could almost feel the morale of the men drop at that point when they knew that we had been strafed by our own planes.

We got over that. They finally let us alone. There was some high ground to take between La Cambe and Isigny, and we went for the high ground and we ran into enemy fire, the head of the column did. Now, it was fairly heavy fire so that we had to deploy the whole regiment in order to take this high ground. Our battalion got the right flank of the regiment to fight on. Our intermediate objective was an orchard that was on the high ground, and we fought our way up to this orchard. We were drawing pretty good fire while we went up to it, but it was like fighting a will-of-the-wisp. You tried to hit it, and it was always just beyond you, and just shooting right at you, and very irritating. They held us up very considerably with this fire, and we finally got to our objective by about nine or nine-thirty in the evening, and we immediately got into ditches and things to reorganize, to get our ammunition redistributed to the men so that we could continue, and the Germans had planned that we would do it just that way. We had no more than gotten well set in there then they began plastering us with 88's, and they had registered every inch of ground that we were on. They raked those 88's up and down the hedgerows that we were in, and they gave us a good shellacking at that time, and as our artillery was not ashore yet we had no counter battery fire to deliver. We couldn't do anything to them.

There was a little lull in this concentration at one point. There was a sergeant of mine Avery Lazenby who was in a hole about twenty-five feet from me, and he stuck his head up out of the hole during this lull and he yelled over to me, "Captain, how do those poor bastards in the Pacific stand it?"

Anyway, we survived that, got over with it. It was pretty exciting because it was the first heavy artillery concentration that we had to take. Then we got orders to continue the attack. The Germans had been very smart up until that time. They expected us to attack Isigny at dawn. We attacked Isigny at two-thirty in the morning, and we went through it like a bullet through a hunk of cheese. We just overran the Germans in the town there. We captured a bridge over the Vire River, I guess it was, that we had been very anxious to take before it was blown up, and we went right out the other side of Isigny. We left one company back there to clean up the debris and the snipers who were firing, who were both German men and French women, and we went to the other side and rested for a while. My company got into an assembly area about noon the next day. Incidentally, Isigny was something such as I hope no one will ever see. Our B-26 bombers, which are the ones Martin made, had bombed it the day before in preparation for our attack, and brother, don't ever get prepared because it was prepared. Don't ever get like that. It looked as though somebody had picked it up and dropped it. It was just piled up and the rubble was burning. You have never seen such a mess in all your life.

We learned what some of our weapons were for in that town. We found out that if you were to use a bazooka for other things than stopping a tank it is a very fine weapon. If a sniper is sticking his head out of a window and taking a quick shot at you and ducking down again, if you aim a bazooka in the general direction of that man you take the room out from under him and you don't worry any more about the sniper. From our tanks we fired at snipers with 75 mm guns at the tremendous range of at least fifty yards at times. They were unhappy when we let them have that.

But we dug out the other side and at about noon I hit this assembly area, and shortly after that a truck got me through the town of Isigny and brought us a whole lot of C-rations. We hadn't had any sleep for two nights. We hadn't had anything to eat since we left the ship two days before. We were very glad to see some food, and they gave us about an hour's rest when we were there, and then we took off heading inland and we went like a bunch of blue tail flies. We really moved. We went thirteen mile and we had eleven casualties in the regiment, and that, ladies and gentlemen, is trifling. We had just caught them, and after we had made that move we had made the bridgehead. We were thirteen miles inland. We were far enough away so that their artillery, other than their heavy artillery which they did not have in there, could not hit the beach. The only thing they could reach the beach was their planes and that is considered the beachhead.

My company got as its assignment a beautiful defensive area. I had some nice high ground, and fairly wooded ground at a little town called Nuilley. I don't know the French pronunciation, but it is "New Willie" in American. It was nice high ground. We looked over a flat valley. About fifteen hundred yards at the far side of that valley there was a canal, the Vire-(something) Canal -- I don't know its last name -- and beyond that it went up into hills again and the Germans were on the far side of the canal and the hills on the other side.

It seemed to me as though we were going to have plenty of time to take care of ourselves there, relax a little bit, and after making dispositions of my men and seeing that they were well dug in, I saw to it that my orderly had dug me a very fine foxhole with room enough for me and possibly a bottle of cognac if I could locate one, and I was about to relax. We scouted out the neighborhood, and we got a good observation post. I had our regimental cannon company on call. I could call for the division artillery if anything important camp up. I had one of our 57 mm anti-tank guns covering the road that came right from the German position into ours, and things looked pretty rosy. We couldn't very well be surprised where we were because we could see everything coming from our observation post. We could see fifteen hundred yards away. We saw, for instance, one German patrol coming toward us, and we thought we would touch it up a bit. I called on the 81 mm mortars of our heavy weapon company, and they would lob an 81 mm mortar shell behind this patrol and the patrol would move in a little closer to us, and we would drop in another one behind them and they would come in a little closer towards us, and pretty soon from the observation post I called down to my sergeant via our sound power telephone. This sergeant was on outpost duty. I said, "Sergeant, if you will move our right flank about twenty feet and pick up those four Germans who are cowering in that hole we will bring them back and question them." He went over there with a rifle. Of course, he had somebody covering him and in came the four prisoners. That was that German patrol.

While we were there we had to scout out the area toward our front. As a matter of fact we spent the night in this place, and my foxhole leaked I must say. It leaked from the bottom, and got all wet, and I was uncomfortable. But anyway we had a scouting job to do that night. There were a couple of bridges that crossed this canal. One of them was supposedly a camouflaged bridge and the other an open bridge. We tested those bridges during the day with a little bit of "time" fire. Whenever we would see a kraut come out we would drop a shell over there, and he would be very unhappy, and they would forget we could do it, and pretty soon two more would come out and they would sit and talk and we thought maybe they will have some friends, and pretty soon maybe four or six would come out there talking, and we would give them another. I guess we got a couple too.

That night I had an order to sent out a patrol, to find out whether those bridges were mined or not, and to find out whether the canal was fordable if those bridges were mined. We went over there, four of us went over, and we crossed the bridge that was supposedly camouflaged and we sweat it out going across because we knew the German positions were right back on the other side. Why they didn't have somebody watching those bridges I will never know, but we got across to the other side. There were some buildings over in there, and there were Germans over in there. We stuck our faces through the windows of the buildings, and we saw their headquarters, and we saw them running around in circles in there, and we decided that they were there in about battalion strength, that they were SS troops, and that the bridges were mined. We got across those bridges, got back about four o'clock in the morning. When daylight came around at about five-thirty we looked at the bridges and they were blown.

I hadn't gotten very much sleep, but anyway that day was going to be the day we relaxed again. I found a pool, and got a shave even. The men started to get cleaned up. Most of them had had a night's sleep, and we were about to make ourselves at home. I was king you know. I ran the town of  Nuilley. I was the commanding officer of the joint. I had the pub-keeper on call, and after having had no sleep for three nights in a row I was ready for the pub-keeper, and I was about to make the most of it when I got a call from battalion headquarters to report there immediately, to get my company ready to move.

I told my second in command to get the company ready and I went to battalion headquarters immediately. I was told that we were to pull out about three miles down to our right parallel with this canal to an area where we could get across in assault boats, that we were to come back up along the canal after we got into the German territory that we were to go past the place where these two bridges were blown up over the high ground. We were to angle off to our right before there. The river took a big bend like that and we were to come here and angle up to where another bridge was that the Germans were using as their main supply line. As I understood it, I was to take this bridge and I was to told it until relieved.

I knew that it was going to be tough because the Eighty-First and the One Hundred and Fifth Airborne Divisions had been attacking down the area that I was to go through, and they had not had much success. Also two companies of our regiment had tried to get up through there by fighting their way through, and they bounced off like a rubber ball would off a wall.

Anyway, I was given one company, my company reinforced. By reinforced I mean, I was given a section of heavy machine guns, which is a pair of heavy machine guns, a section of 81 mm mortars, a pair of 81 mm mortars and I was given a detachment from our battalion medicos who were to take care of us.

My plan on the thing was that we were to cross the canal in assault boats under cover of darkness, and we would sneak through the German lines as far as we could. I didn't have enough force to fight our way through, but we would sneak through if possible, and jump this bridge, take up defensive positions and hold it through hell and high water.

My regimental commander, Colonel Paul Goode had been fighting this order slightly. I don't believe he felt that it was possible to do that, and when the order was made definite he came to me and said, "Captain, I wouldn't order anybody to go into a thing like this unless I went myself, so I am just along for the buggy ride. Just consider that I am not here, and I will go along."

We crossed this canal, and I lined up the men. I had all told about two hundred and twenty-five men. I lined them up single file, and held my breath. I knew if we got hit we would be chopped all to pieces immediately. I put out just two scouts in front. My right scout was Pfc. John Hershey who was out about seventy-five yards to my right front. My left scout was Sergeant Clyde Keene, from Baltimore incidentally, who was out about one hundred and fifty yards to my left front, and those two did a magnificent scouting job. We went through the German lines for three miles and there was not one shot fired.

But unfortunately dawn caught up with us just as we were nearing our objective. I had gotten right back to where these two bridges crossed the Vire Canal. I had gone down the three miles and come back up. Of course, there was no way back across that canal again, and just as we got there a German outpost spotted my right scout and fired a shot at him. So right away I went up and joined my left scout who was right beside where this shot had been fired. The ground was just as flat as a golf course. Although it was rolling there was no foliage or anything up there. I got up beside this scout and he was just as flat as a pancake on the ground and I got right flat beside him, and he nudged me and pointed toward a clump of bushes. He had seen where that shot had come from, and I nodded and pointed to a grenade that he had on his belt. So we wiggled our way up toward this clump and he got the grenade, pulled the pin, and let her go into the clump and over she went and went off. As soon as she went off we jumped right into the clump itself. It was sort of a hole in the ground, and we found three Germans in there and we killed two of them quick and the third one got away from us. It was still too dark to see him through rifle sights, so that we couldn't get a fair shot at him. But I knew right away that he was going to go back and tell them that he had run into some unfriendly troops who were ready to fight and willing to fight.

So I went back to the head of the column and I sent my runners back along the column telling my company and those attached to it to form for an attack. We moved on in to form for the attack so that we could get room to spread out. We moved in closer to the Germans, and I was having one rifle platoon to my right, and one to my left. The road that was leading over toward this other bridge we were after was to be the dividing line between the platoons and we were going right on up the hill. It took about ten minutes for the Company to form up, because some of them had quite some distance to come, and a lot of them were carrying a lot of heavy equipment.

I was in a ditch on the left side of this road and it went up the hill. In front of me there was a hedgerow. I was here. There was a hedgerow that came right out and beyond it there was a gate. Just as my runners had come in from both sides and told me that the company was formed up for attack, I had my carbine in my left hand I had been lying there, and I raised back on my left hand leaning on it to motion like that for them to go forward, and out of the corner of my eye there was a German standing about as far away from me as I am from that piano. He had a pistol in his hand, and the pistol was aimed at me, and I went down flat on the ground and he shot and he missed and I shot and I didn't miss. Unfortunately, he had a friend a little bit back of him behind this hedgerow who had a German potato masher grenade which he lobbed across the hedgerow and it hit the ground beside me and it went off, and part of it hit me right about here and it stung, and it hurt, and I had to get this attack off just the same. I ordered the attack started. I told my second in command to see that it got rolling well, that I would find out what had happened and join him as soon as I could. A medico came running over to me, and they put a patch on me, and gave me a little bit of morphine, and a bit of sulfa, and I went back to join the attack.

It went very nicely, but the fighting was hard as hell. There was an awful lot of fire power coming in against us, but our attack was a good attack, and we had the element of surprise in our favor. Sergeant Keene who had been my left scout, was just about as slick a fighter as I have even seen in my life. I came up to him, and he had gotten fire on some Germans who were holding us up. He stood out in the open and he shot seven of them with seven shots, right down the line. He got one shot that went through his field jacket but didn't touch him, but he killed seven of them in quick order.

We got to our intermediate objective, the high ground just before this bridge that we were to take, and I wanted to reorganize at that spot. We could see our objective by this time. We could see the bridge that we were to take. We could see the German main supply lines, and there again there was a beautiful traffic jam on the road. We were glad to see the Germans had that too. We got our heavy machine guns set up. I got my light machine guns set up. I got my mortars set up, and I had the heavy mortars set up, and we started to give that supply line a fit. I had the Divisional Artillery liaison officer with me. I called on him and said, "Now, is the time to put division artillery down there. If you can get corps artillery start observing and start combing that road." He came back to me in about five minutes. He had been assigned to me to support me in this attack on the bridge. I hadn't gotten that far yet. He came back to me in about five minutes and said, "I am sorry, sir, our artillery cannot reach that far," and I was very unhappy about it.

I checked my left platoon on this reorganization. It had started out with forty-two men and one officer. When we got to the top of the hill it had five men and a wounded officer left in it. The rest were not wounded, they were killed. I immediately ordered my support platoon to cover that space, and they moved in to cover the reorganization, and I checked my right platoon and it was in fairly good shape.

It looked to me as though we were fighting against the whole German army down in front of us. When I say heavy, I will give you a couple of ideas. I had my sound power telephone strung up from my mortars to the observation post up on top of the hill. I was with the mortar observer up there, and I had been talking back to the mortar. I started to hand the telephone back over to him. It was shot out of my hand. A German mortar shell landed somewhere me and sprinkled me a bit in the left knee and in the right hip. It stung, but it wasn't bad.

I could see that we could not only not hold that position, but that we were going to be surrounded if I didn't do something quickly. So I had to order a retiring movement, and I wanted to get to a position where I could hook my left flank against this canal, hook my right flank against this canal, in sort of a half moon, in sort of a crescent, and where on the other side of the canal were friendly troops to us, and I hoped they could get to us somehow with ammunition to continue the fight.

We got back to this position and things were going fairly well. We were beginning to get thinned out pretty well, but we still had plenty of fight left in us. Then right after we had gotten back to this position I was hit again. I got a rifle bullet that went through my right hip and that took all the movement out of me. I couldn't move anymore, although I could still think. But I was sort of lying in a hole and I could pick my head up and see what was going on, but I couldn't look over the whole position. At this point my radio operator told me that the armored attack which was to come through us had bogged down. I was to get out any way I could. Aside from that I had lost quite a bit of blood and was beginning to pass out, sort of pass out, and come to, and pass out again. So that I wasn't doing too much good for myself and I wasn't getting the men moved out of this hole. Then I called my second in command again who was still not hit, and asked him to check out the right and find out whether there was heavy pressure on our right. He came back after a while and he said, no, there is very little fighting over there. So I told him, "Well, you better thin out the men that we have fighting over around here on the left, all those who can move without any help and attack on the right enough to open up a hole, and then slip all the live men out, but no one will move who cannot move on his own. You have got to be able to move fast to get out, so there can't be anyone helping anyone else." He said, "yes," and he took off, and I didn't see him anymore.

My first sergeant came back past me when he was being thinned out of the line, and he saw me there, yelled at me, "Captain, you always said you wanted to die drunk," and he threw half a bottle of cognac toward me, and I prepared to die drunk.

Then they left. We who were left behind continued to fight until we were about out of ammunition. Colonel Goode incidentally had not been hit. I asked him to leave and he said no, he would not leave, that he had come to see it through and he was staying to see it through. But we got a great many more men killed, and then he finally called over to me and said, "Captain, they have killed enough of your men now. I am going to surrender you." "Yes sir" I said. "Wait until I tell my men to cease firing." and I gave the cease fire order, and Colonel Goode stepped out and he surrendered us, and I became prisoner of war 80504 at that point.

I left myself in the clutches of the krauts. They came around with bayonets fixed aiming at us and I was lying in a ditch. One of them said, "Raus, raus," and I could not raus. So they got a couple of them who hoisted me up. They told me to get rid of my equipment. My left arm wouldn't move very well. I couldn't unbuckle my straps. I was very anxious to get rid of my equipment. I had a very bloody trench knife in my belt and I wasn't so anxious to have them see it. Anyway, when they saw I couldn't get rid of the equipment they came around with another knife and just cut all my straps and I lost my worldly possessions right there and then. They dropped on the road. I lost all my pretty pictures of the invasion, including the camera, and what other items I had with me were left behind.

I was put in a cart, a horse drawn cart, thrown on some straw, and taken to their battalion headquarters which was in a French farmyard. There I was picked up out of the cart and placed under a tree. I saw the men that had been taken at the same time that I had. There were eighteen of them. Of the eighteen there were eighteen who were wounded, and I afterwards heard that thirty-five of my men got away. That left a total of fifty-three out of two hundred and twenty-five who made the trip. We killed slightly in excess of three hundred Germans, so although our mission possibly failed we made it an awful lot easier for somebody else. I got that from a Chaplain of the Thirtieth Division which took this area about three or four days after that. He said that it took three days for them to bury the dead.. They buried twice as many Germans as they buried of us, and I got a great deal of satisfaction out of knowing that.

At this battalion headquarters I was placed under a tree and left to my own devices. My men of course were not allowed to come near me, and then after lying there for about three hours I was taken into a barn that had some straw in it and I lay there for a while, I have no idea how long. I was pretty woozy in the head at the time. Pretty soon a German who spoke English came in and he called me by name. He said, "Captain Slingluff, I don't want to know any more than your name and your serial number. I know everything else about you." I was glad to know he did, which was more than I did. At nightfall I was put in another cart and taken back through the town of Saint Lo. I imagine it was the town of Saint Lo because I later found out that the prisoner collecting point that I eventually got to was on the other side of Saint Lo. I couldn't see much of it because I was lying down flat on this cart and it had fairly high sides. I could see what was up in the air and it was night time too. I was a little unhappy because I had had no medical attention at all at this point and I guess I had lost right much blood and I had lost my cigarettes. The bullet that went through my hip went in right over my hip pocket in which I had a package of cigarettes, and which were ruined. It came out through my right trousers pocket in which I had two packages of cigarettes and it tore them all to hell. So I had nothing to smoke, and I had very little to do either. I couldn't move very much.

Anyway, we went through this town and out the other side into a nice grove of trees, and I was placed under another tree. My men had been transported somehow or other to the same area, my eighteen men, and they were all in pretty rough shape. We saw all these Germans yelling at one another back and forth. They always yell at one another at the top of their voices. I began to think, well, hell, I might as well be dead as be like this, so I am going to start yelling too. So I started yelling and they came around. They yelled back at me for a while, and I yelled at them for a while, and I called them every name in the book, but they spoke only German. Finally they got an interpreter. Maybe it was to find out what I was calling them. I don't know. I told the interpreter, by God, I wanted some medical attention, I wanted my men to have some food. Somewhat later in the night a doctor came around. They also got some hot food for us. We were fed hot food, and this doctor came around and he patched up all the men, and I guess I was suffering from shock a bit because I was shaking all over at the time and I couldn't stop. He was human, I will say that. He got us a blanket apiece and he gave me a shot of morphine. It must have been a fairly heavy shot of morphine because I heard him say, "Zwa minuten," and I am sure it was less than "zwa minuten" before I was asleep.

We stayed there for about two days. The next day they gave us another hot bowl of food at one time or another during the day, and that was our meal for that day. The day after that I suppose they decided that something would have to be done with us. So they unloaded a truck, and under the cover of darkness -- the Germans always only moved under the cover of darkness because of our airforce -- they took us to another prisoner collecting point and we got there and this prisoner collecting point later became known to the Americans as "Starvation Manor." There were when I was there about six hundred men. There were two American doctors, two American "jump" doctors who had been captured on D-Day who were administering to the men, and they had lots of sulfa, they had bandages, and that I imagine was the extent of their equipment. I managed to get a lot of sulfa packed into my cuts here and there, and got patched up and I did not get infected. They took care of the men. One of my men died there. But our food at the time was one horse per day for the men. There were between five and six hundred men and they would bring the horse in on the hoof and he would be duly eaten before nightfall.

I was there for about four or five days I guess, and then moved out. We were heading for -- I can't remember the name of the town. Anyway, it was further in the interior of France. During the night we traveled by truck, and it was very difficult travel, particularly if you were wounded and couldn't stand up very well. But anything to get away from where we were. By dawn we got to a town by the name of Bagnoles. At Bagnoles we were put in a vacant house. There were about two hundred of us being transported, and two hundred of us went into the vacant house for the day. There was a cross road in Bagnoles, and during the course of the day some more of Mr. Martin's bombers came over, and they bombed the cross road, and there were some very unhappy Americans under them. But they did not get a direct hit on the house we were in. They broke all the windows in the house. They were dropping sticks of bombs and we wondered every time because you would hear them start coming, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, and you would think, god, one more and it's got us, and there wouldn't be one more.

We survived that. That night they came up with two trucks with big horse vans attached to the rear of them, put a hundred in each one. That was packing us pretty tight. As a matter of fact I had a very pleasant trip because I had to stand up, and I put my hand up to grab hold of a rafter across the roof, and I passed out, and I felt no more of the trip. The next I knew we were in this town. I remember the name; it was Alencon and I was stretched out in the middle of the town's square in Alencon. Somebody was pouring water in my face. We were to go to an old French barracks there, where there is a prisoner of war collecting point a little deeper in. We got there finally after a march of about seven kilos. We were a pretty fancy group if you can imagine us marching. I had a man on either side of me helping me along. They were shot in the arms, so they could walk.

When we got there, there was a British Officer who was in charge of the internal workings of the camp. He was a captive who had been told to take over the administration. We got there about six in the morning, and he had some hot stew ready for us. We ate the hot stew and we slept for an hour, and then we were put in a formation, and we were notified by the German in command that we were not to escape, even if we could, that if one man escaped we should remember that we were not registered prisoners of war, and that he would take ten out and shoot them for every one who escaped. So there wasn't much incentive to have your friends killed.

But I wasn't around there very long. I was put in a motor coach along with twenty-four others, plus one of the doctors, and we were taken further into the interior of France. We traveled by daylight, and had a very pleasant trip across France looking out of the windows, and seeing what the German defenses looked like, and how the crops were, and so forth.

That evening we got to Fontainebleau. At Fontainebleau there were more Germans. They had a garrison there, and they were typical s.o.b. German troops. They were no damn good. They took us in. The commandant of this garrison had a son who was in the Afrika Corps, and who was residing in Texas at the time behind barbed wire. He was very sympathetic toward prisoners of war. He turned his kitchen over to us and we were well fed. He took a collection amongst his officers and we were given a cigarette to smoke and a bed to sleep in. We got a night's sleep for a change.

The next day we were loaded back into our coach again, and we began to think, well, why does anybody want to be anything but a prisoner of war after all. Life is pretty good. Then we got to Chalons-sur-Marne, and we began to find out a few of the answers. We were placed in the damnedest rat hole you ever saw in your life. It was perfectly filthy, and the food was less if anything than at any other place that I have ever attended.

Then after we had been living there for a few days they were going to question us. So at the start of the questioning what they do is to toss you in solitary confinement to let you think it over, and you are in there a while and they call you out. I was questioned by a German Lieutenant from Brooklyn. He had a Brooklyn accent. They tried to tempt you by telling you, well they knew everything about you anyway. They could know all about me they could read. They could see my Twenty-Ninth Division patch on my left shoulder if they wanted to. They could get my rank, name and serial number, and if I listened patiently while he cajoled, I could occasionally reach across his desk and nip another one of his cigarettes. You had to smoke there because you never had anything to eat.

So after five days in solitary -- that was my time at it with a little bit of questioning every day and a few threats that they never carried out -- I was finally put with a group who were supposedly through the rigmarole, and were going to be transported into Germany. One God-awful rainy night we were all pulled together, and those who could march were marched to the train. I went down in the commandant's car in style. The commandant drove, and I sat in the back, and I was tossed into a box car. We lived about fifty in a box car roughly on that trip. The box cars weren't so crowded when there are only fifty in them. You had room to sit down. You never had room to lie down. It took about five or six days in this box car that we were in, during which the engine was shot out from in front of the train three times, and we got to a town called Limburg in Germany. At Limburg we were put in -- well, in getting off the train I got the only rough handling that I have got from the Germans. I couldn't walk. All the rest could, and I was put in a push cart to go from the train over to this stalag about half a mile away. They had to get a push cart over there for me, and finally I got lost from my group. Whenever you go into a German stalag you are deloused. They take your clothes off of you and they bake your clothes and they put you through a shower, and you get together at the other end, and then you are clean for the duration of your stay in that stalag. I had gotten lost from my group, and I came through the delouser late. I had the devil getting my clothes off in the first place. I hadn't had them off since June 4th or 5th, and this was around the first of July. Then when I came out the other side I couldn't take a shower. I had all these open wounds, and I couldn't get them back on again, my clothes. I couldn't lean over them. My left arm still wouldn't work very well, and I couldn't get my clothes on. There was a German captain who was sending me through who had a very unpleasant disposition, and when I kept him waiting he gave me a rap in the jaw which flattened me on the floor, and then I got a bit of going over from his shoes, and finally the debris was all picked up and I was tossed into the compound with my friends, who took care of me from then on. I got his name, and he has been reported to the War Crimes Commission.

We stayed there for a week or ten days. The food was very poor there, but we had a French friend who was sort of a trusty inside the place who would bring us biscuits at all hours of the day and night, which were consumed with gusto. We sang the Stars Spangled Banner on the Fourth of July. We traded with some of the Poles who were in another compound on the other side of the wire. We didn't trade with them. We made friendly gestures toward them. We told them we were "Americanski," and they threw us cigarettes. So we fared a little better there.

Then after a few weeks we were told we were going to a permanent camp, and we were put into box cars again. We were in these box cars for about four or five days -- very uncomfortable. We didn't know where we were going, except I might say there were a good many of us with compasses and a few of us with maps, and we managed to figure out from the maps and from the names of the railroad stations where we were and we knew we were heading toward Poland. We finally got to a town called Shubin in Poland, and there we unloaded form the box car and they came up with a pair of very fine Polish horses for me, and a snappy driver, and a German officer who sat up in the front, and I was planted in the rear seat and rode up in style again with a chauffeur and footman.

We got inside the camp. We had been kicked around pretty much up to that time. We hadn't had enough to eat ever, and we were pretty low. You hadn't gotten a shave, you had never gotten clean. We came through this gate and we saw a collection of Americans in there, and our eyes sort of popped because they were all shaved and they were wearing clean uniforms. One or two of them were even smiling. We were rushed right away from these people and into a building all by ourselves, and pretty soon they began throwing packages of Camels and Lucky Strikes and Chesterfields through the windows at us. They came up with some stuff that tasted almost like coffee.

We were searched very thoroughly in this building, meanwhile lapping up all the coffee we could possibly lap up, smoking ourselves silly. Finally they had gotten through searching us thoroughly. They never searched us too thoroughly because I managed to come back with everything I had started out with after the initial cutting away. Then we were taken into the mess hall. Each new arrival was promptly given an American Red Cross parcel. I got some food and was lugged over to the infirmary where I went into a nice big room that was nice and airy. The bed was clean. There were a couple of G.I. American attendants there. We were not crowded, and I spent four months in that infirmary getting well. During my stay in that infirmary I gained twelve pounds, so that it couldn't have been too bad.

Inside this camp, which was Oflag 64, I think you are all a little curious as to what was done there in the way of recreation. We had a library of about 10,000 books. They were pretty much up-to-date, so that there was good reading material. We had a sportplatz that had a baseball diamond on it. We had baseball gloves, softballs, bats and we had a baseball league. There was a basketball court. We had a basketball league. There was a small theater that held about three hundred at a sitting. We had a theater group, and we had a thirty piece symphony orchestra. We had a jazz orchestra. We, of course, pitched horseshoes and we had a nice walk. It took about a half mile to get around inside the wire. Those who could managed to keep exercised, and had some diversion.

When the fall term came around the Shubin University opened, and we had a complete college course in progress there. We had football in the fall, and a drum majorette who was a thing of beauty. You got quite used to seeing men playing in women's parts in the theater after you had seen it ten or twelve times in semi-serious things. You got so you didn't mind it too much, although our tongues never hung out very far. I could get up to go to the theater, and I could go to hear the music when it was played, and I could do a whole lot of reading. Unfortunately, about the middle of October the Red Cross parcels ran out, and the fare became very very thin from then on. At Christmas a few more came through, and we had a Red Cross parcel at Christmas time. We had a very poor Christmas incidentally, because that was the time of the Bastogne bulge, and we didn't like the news.

Shortly after Christmas things began getting exciting, because the Russians started to move in our direction, and as the Russians were only seventy-five miles form us we were ready. On the morning of January 21st it was a very cold morning. The temperature was about ten degrees below zero, and the sun was just as bright as could be, a beautiful clear crisp day. We were ordered to move out. We all lined up, and a great many American officers were suddenly taken sick so that the infirmary was crowded with about one hundred and fifty of them who couldn't possibly move. Normally we had about ten or twelve sick in there. I got talked out of being very sick because my friends were all traveling and they said, oh, come on, you can walk, and I said, all right, I can walk, if you are going I will go with you. About noon that day they started to move us. They began about seven in the morning, and it took until noon to get us started. Every time they would take a count they would get a different number. They couldn't keep everybody there. Everybody was disappearing in holes and every place else. Finally they got us started. They just decided to move those they could. So we went out and joined the refugees and started on down the road. Such a group you have never seen in your life. We mingled with the refugees, and a few sort of got away here and there, and later showed up in Odessa.

We left there about twelve o'clock. We didn't know where the Russians were. About two-thirty that afternoon, Shubin was taken by the Russians. If we had only known!

By that time we were about fifteen miles away. The Russians holed up for the night. We holed up for the night fifteen miles beyond them, not knowing how close they were. The next day we noticed the Germans were quite anxious to get us going. But they had guns, and we didn't, and we got going, and we never knew where the Russians were, but we knew they were somewhere behind, and we went across a bridge over a canal, the last of our column went across it, and the bridge blew up behind us. They had just been waiting to get us across to blow it.

We went into a town about two or three miles beyond that, and we sat down and panted and rested. Evidently the Russians were very close. By this time we could hear fire, and we knew by golly, they were coming close and they were going to catch us this time. We were set up on a hill on the right of this town about a mile away in a little tiny village. We holed up in the village for the night. In the morning when I woke up I was sleeping in a stable. Somebody said the guards have departed, we are free men, and word came around from our headquarters -- we had our own internal administration -- every man will stay where he is until we are retaken by the Russians. So we were free. We scoured around the town. We caught hold of a few pigs, and so forth, and we were going to have one hell of a big feed. Along in the afternoon word was passed out that we had contacted some friendly Poles, and they were going to tell the Russians where we were, and bring a patrol in to take us over. We knew there were plenty of things going on around us. We could hear the German machine guns laying down protective line fire right around us, and toward nightfall a German patrol came in, a German SS patrol with a whole lot of tommy guns and a whole lot of mean looking weapons, and they said, come on boys, we are hitting the road again. I immediately got terribly sick, the hell with it, I couldn't move, and I had two friends who immediately got terribly sick, and the column moved out, and we stayed behind in the house with one German officer who was going to take care of those who were left behind. We went out the back door of the house and looked around to see which haystack we would crawl under, thinking that the Germans would be out of there in the morning, and that the Russians would be in and that nobody would bother about our tracks going to this haystack. So we picked our haystack, and we went over there to it, and when we crawled in we tried to get warm. At night the temperature was well below zero, and you always realized you couldn't live for more than forty-eight hours at the most, you would freeze to death because our clothes were none too warm, and you just can't take it outside in a temperature of that sort.

So we went into our haystack and thought, well, hell, the Russians will be here in the morning, we will drink some vodka and everything will be lovely. Pretty soon there was a whole lot of shooting going on, and a whole lot of German voices talking and bullets began whistling through the top of the haystack and then a lot of hell at the haystack, and we generally got the idea they didn't us anymore in there, so we came out, and they took us along. They marched us, I don't know, six, seven, eight miles, and then we came to a great big Polish estate. Those of us who were sick were put up in the main house. Everybody else went out in the barns. We were the elite. We went into the living room of this house. I had a beautiful daybed there, steam heat. We got warm for the first time, God knows in how long and chucked our clothes off, and our circulation started on again, and we noticed that nobody was paying any attention to us. The Germans were sort of walking in and out and nobody paid any attention to us. We thought we would look around. The confusion was pretty great. So we scouted around. We got down in the larder of this house, found a couple of chickens in the house, had fried chicken in front of the fireplace, and things began to look so bright I began talking to a friend of mine. I said, "You know, I bet we can get away from here and nobody would ever know it." So we went out, and we scouted around. All the servants were still in this house. We went down and talked to them. They were very friendly, didn't like the Germans a bit. The Germans were in the next room lapping up all the master's champagne. So we talked to them, and I don't know how we ever talked to them, but anyway, we came to understand that the milkman came around about four o'clock in the morning, and that the milk came in with a little cart that had a tarpaulin over it, and nobody ever paid much attention to him anyway because he came in every day. We scouted around and located the milk man and we talked it over with him, and he said, why sure, two Americanski officers could get in there and nobody would ever know. He would take us a couple of miles from there and put us up. We were all set. We went back into our day bed to sleep. One of us stayed awake at all times so that we wouldn't oversleep this four o'clock hour appointment that we had.

About ten minutes of four a bunch of German ski-troopers arrived. They came in, and they looked like business men. They weren't going to stand for any monkeying around. Anyway, nobody was ordered to look out for us, so they wouldn't pay much attention if we walked in and out of doors. So we walked out the door, and there came our wagon up the road full of milk, and we were just waiting for him to unload the milk so that we could get in in place of it, and the German ski-troopers all rallied around the milk wagon and began drinking milk.

Pretty soon all the milk was gone, and they closed it up and shooed it on its way, and we went back to sleep it off.

Then we continued to march from then on, and from then on the firing became more and more distant from us. We finally got to somewhere between Stargazed and Staten and they put us in box cars again, and just like old home week it was.

(Document sent by Shirley Isbill)