Omaha Beach Survivors

Elwood has many contacts from WWII. He spends a lot of effort and money to find these people and learn their stories. He had 3 stories of survivors from Omaha Beach. These are touching stories, so if you are bothered by this type of insight, you may want to skip this posting.

Story 1:
One survivor was the pilot of one of the landing craft from the first wave. This was the assault wave where 85% of the members were killed.

His boat was hit by a large shell…perhaps 4 inch diameter. The shell pierced the boat, but did not explode. It did however go through the stomachs of 6 soldiers. Everyone on the ship was covered in blood and shrapnel from the shattered bones. The young, 18-year old, pilot let the men off, then needed to drive his boat back for another load.

The boat stalled out. The problem was that there is a sump pump that pumps water from the bottom of the boat or from the sea to cool the engine. It stopped working. The reason was that its intake was clogged with human entrails. The young boy had to scoop out the entrails in order to clear the pump so that it worked again.

Story 2:
As I said in the prior posting, they brought the wrong type of tanks given how far out at sea they got off of the landing craft. One survivor was a tank driver. When the tank in front of his drove off the boat, it sank immediately, drowning the crew. He said that, given this, he obviously could not drive his tank off the ship. The boat driver said that he had to take the boat back empty to get another load, so there was no option…the tanks had to get off.

The tank drivers were equipped with a breathing mask for underwater. Most of the tank drivers had only practiced with the masks once because the masked had a horrible odor. This person was a good swimmer and had forced himself to swim with the mask many times in order to learn to tolerate the smell. So he put on the mask, and when his tank sank, he was able to escape and survive.

Story 3:
Elwood was told to “look out for” one visitor who was a survivor of Omaha Beach. The survivor had returned 5 years ago for the 60th anniversary of D-day. It was the first time he had been back since the war.

At first he did not want to talk with Elwood, but later did. He had been in the brutal 1st wave of the landing.

He had managed to get to shore…across the beach and up against the vertical wall of the bluff. He was pinned against the wall. If he moved his head out a foot or so, the Germans would shoot down at him. He was helplessly pinned against this wall.

However, many of the soldiers from his landing craft had been hit by the machine gun fire and lay in the surf badly wounded and bleeding to death. They screamed out for help. The man could do nothing about it. This went on for some time until the wounded men died from bleeding to death of from drowning in the rising tide.

The survivor said that there had not been a day during the past 60 years where he had gone to bed at night or awakened in the morning without hearing the screams in his head.

Elwood kept in periodic contact with this survivor. On a recent phone call Elwood got the man’s wife. She informed him that the survivor had finally succumbed to the screams in his head and committed suicide.

Elwood said that he has read that unpleasant memories do not fade with time, but become more intense.
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These stories are all of 18-year old boys! This recalibrates one’s mind about “problems” that we sometime think we have, and on the degree of sacrifice some others have made to our standard of life.

I find it difficult to think of these stories without my eyes starting to get a bit wet.