(7 of 14)
It was actually a relief for me when the invasion finally happened. I was having trouble keeping my crews in a state of readiness. I knew it was coming off when a young man from the chateau where we were staying brought me a tract to translate that had been dropped from an Allied plane. It ordered him and his family to get out of the chateau into the surrounding fields because they were going to start bombing it. I told him instead to take all the civilians to the deepest cellar, where they'd have a better chance of surviving. That was good advice, since I learned later that they all survived.
We left at around 5 a.m. for Caen. The whole way up, we were never fired at. But when we got to Caen, the Allies were bombing the bridge over the River Orne. I noticed the cadence of the bombs, and I sent my tanks over one by one between the bombs and didn't lose any of them. We were the first of the tanks over that bridge, and we continued north. The town seemed completely untouched by war at that time.
None of the German tank companies were communicating with the others. We'd been told to keep radio silence so the Allies couldn't pick us up. We were like an orchestra without a conductor, and there I was playing flute. I continued all the way up to the coast, and when I got there, I saw an armada like a plague of locusts. The number of ships was uncountable, and the Allies' superior firepower was obvious. But in war, what you lose first is reason. I wanted to attack. I wanted to vanquish them.
We were fired at, and one tank took a direct hit--I never knew whether from the enemy or our own tanks--and the whole crew was killed. After we took another hit, we found a little wood and dug in. The order to all tank units, maybe from the Fuhrer, was not to yield a single meter. Before I slept that night under my tank, I wrote an angry letter home. As a young officer, I thought we could have broken the invasion if we'd been better led.
"I PULLED MY LEGS UP AS FAR AS I COULD TO GET AWAY FROM A STREAM OF TRACERS." --Edward Jeziorski A paratrooper with the 507th Parachute Infantry Regiment, Jeziorski, 23, was dropped into the inferno over Normandy
Out the door we went. Just as I peeled out, it seemed that the whole world lit up right underneath me. A tremendous ball of fire. And a bunch of black smoke mixed in with the red fire, just a great fireball. And I said to myself, The bastards are waiting for us. I tried to slip away from the thing, and tracers were coming up and through the silk. They were coming up just in strings. I can remember them being so close that I actually pulled my legs up as far as I could, my knee into my stomach, to get away from a stream of tracers. I slammed into the ground, and I was immediately pinned down by machine-gun fire. There was no way to raise up. Every time I tried to turn, the machine gun would open up. Every time I tried to move, there would be a burst. Apparently the great big ball of fire was a C-47 that had been shot down, and I was silhouetted between this guy's gun and the ship, and I couldn't move. I finally was able to bring my right leg up close enough to where I could get my jump knife out of my boot. I cut the harness loose.