8th Air Force, 834 Aviation Engineers, Batallion Company B
Omaha Beach
"There were Germans . . . not very far from us, so I jumped in a foxhole. And I nudged this fellow in there and looked over and he rolled over and he was dead--he was stiff. He had a bullet right between the eyelids. His gun had jammed, and he had a knife in his hand, but the Germans were such crack shots, they'd shoot you right in the head. They did not miss . . . .
That night the tanks were coming in and they were blind. You could hear those things creaking all around you. So I tried to get as close as I could to the hedgerow to dig a foxhole to stay away from them . . . . I was in there with another fellow, and in the middle of the night everything broke loose. There was heavy artillery, and the sound was amazing . . . the ground would shake, and we thought 'This is it.' I thought that the next one was going to be us, and that went on all night long. The ground was trembling and dirt--I was almost covered up with dirt. So when it calmed down, we thought we were probably the only survivors, after everything that had gone on all that night, hearing all that close and we couldn't understand why we were not hit. So he said 'You look out' and I said 'No, you look out,' and we had to dig our way out of the dirt. And we saw that the anti-aircraft people had come in during the night and they couldn't see us, so they set up a 90 millimeter anti-aircraft gun right over our foxhole!"
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From an interview with Crawford Communications, Inc., September, 1993.
Used with the permission of Mitchell Wright and Crawford Communications, Inc.
