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Three Unlikely Wounds
- University Press of New England
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38 D-Day, June 6, 1944 Omaha Beach. 5:30 a.m. peering south through the darkness of mist and clouds, waiting patiently for the first sights and sounds, the twenty of us lining the rails of our little LCT (Landing Craft Tank) were suddenly rewarded. The whole horizon, three miles away, began to pulse with bright flashes like heat lightning. Seconds later we heard the thunder: battleships like the old USS Texas, and B-17 bombers, were pulverizing Rommel’s wall. Soon engineers would land in the surf to blow up his mined obstacles. Our LCT was loaded with four ammunition trucks, so we’d blow up too if we were hit just right. I was an advance scout for B Battery of the 110th Antiaircraft Artillery Battalion; as a first lieutenant, my mission was to stake out our position near the beachside town of Vierville—and then lead the battery to it on D-Day afternoon. With three other lieutenants, from Batteries Three Unlikely Wounds • Clinton Gardner U.S. Army Clint, by one of his 90 mm guns, Spa, Belgium, October 1944 Three Unlikely Wounds: Clinton Gardner 39 A, C, and D, I was landing in Normandy with infantry from the 116th Regiment of the First Army’s 29th Division. 9:00 a.m. Now it was our turn. Only a half-mile away, the 100-foot cliff above the beach suddenly emerged from mist of low clouds and smoke of gunfire. Machine-gun bullets splashed the water around us and clanked on our ship’s metal sides. We maneuvered between two stillmined obstacles, then grated to a halt on the sand. Our commander shouted, “The ramp is down!” and we jumped off into two feet of water, lowered our heads, and waded 40 feet to shore, with the ammo trucks unloading behind us. The beach was strewn with hundreds of bodies. With its camouflage net still neatly in place, that pillbox, which we knew would be to the right of the beach exit road, was spitting fire on us, and the huge concrete barrier that stretched across the exit road was equally untouched . What we’d been told would be “the most concentrated air bombardment in history” had completely missed its target! I dashed across 30 feet of sand to take cover in tall beach grass on an embankment where infantry soldiers were busy digging foxholes, then dug my own fast. It looked like the 116th hadn’t captured any part of that cliff, just 200 yards away. I soon realized that our Dog Green sector of Omaha Beach was turning into a disaster. Nothing was going as planned. You couldn’t have made a movie out of this; nobody would believe it. There must have been a thousand soldiers in our sector, but no one was in charge, no one knew what was going on. For hours we watched mortars blow up our boats just as they touched shore, and saw high-velocity shells tear apart our armored cars. By late afternoon, we’d been trapped on the beach for almost 11 hours. Up and down the beach, a quarter mile each way, I could see hundreds of foxholes, with helmeted heads of soldiers popping out of them, like curious prairie dogs. The fire from that German pillbox on the exit road was now only sporadic. Still, it was instant and deadly whenever we presented a target. 5:00 p.m. As I started to enlarge my foxhole, I heard a thundering blast andrealizedthattheengineersmightfinallyhaveblownupthatconcrete [52.90.40.84] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 22:46 GMT) 40 World War II Remembered barrier which blocked the exit road. Crouching above my foxhole, I looked through the rising dust and saw that they’d succeeded. The barrier was gone! We might soon be off Omaha Dog Green. Suddenly I heard a sharp explosion just in front of me. My head snapped back as if hit by a sledgehammer, and a curtain of warm blood poured over my forehead, closing my eyes. My whole body shivered into shock. My God, I thought, what’s happened? There was a loud ringing sound in my head, and I felt unsteady. Not knowing whether I’d last another minute, I found myself standing up. Then, ever so slowly, like an automaton, raising my right arm, my right hand found a gaping hole in my helmet. Feeling past sharp metal curls, my fingers continued downward, through sticky remnants of hair, to touch the...