D-Day and Beyond: Volume V: The Things Our Fathers Saw, #5

By Matthew Rozell

From the bloody beach at Omaha through the hedgerow country of Normandy and beyond, American veterans of World War II—Army engineers and infantrymen, Coast Guardsmen and Navy sailors, tank gunners and glider pilots—sit down with you across the kitchen table and talk about what they saw and experienced, tales they may have never told anyone before.

363 PAGES.

Volume 5 in this series is really the book I had in mind to write as I began to collect and process WWII interviews after being inspired at our veterans' return to Normandy for the 40th anniversary of D-Day.

— "I had a vision, if you want to call it that. At my home, the mailman would walk up towards the front porch, and I saw it just as clear as if he's standing beside me—I see his blue jacket and the blue cap and the leather mailbag. Here he goes up to the house, but he doesn't turn. He goes right up the front steps.

This happened so fast, probably a matter of seconds, but the first thing that came to mind, that's the way my folks would find out what happened to me.
The next thing I know, I kind of come to, and I'm in the push-up mode. I'm half up out of the underwater depression, and I'm trying to figure out what the hell happened to those prone figures on the beach, and all of a sudden, I realized I'm in amongst those bodies!" —Army demolition engineer, Omaha Beach, D-Day

 

— "My last mission was the Bastogne mission. We were being towed, we're approaching Bastogne, and I see a cloud of flak, anti-aircraft fire. I said to myself, 'I'm not going to make it.' There were a couple of groups ahead of us, so now the anti-aircraft batteries are zeroing in. Every time a new group came over, they kept zeroing in. My outfit had, I think, 95% casualties." —Glider pilot, D-Day and Beyond

 

— "I was fighting in the hedgerows for five days; it was murder. But psychologically, we were the best troops in the world. There was nobody like us; I had all the training that they could give us, but nothing prepares you for some things.

You know, in my platoon, the assistant platoon leader got shot right through the head, right through the helmet, dead, right there in front of me. That affects you, doesn't it?"
" —Paratrooper, D-Day and Beyond

 

— "Somebody asked me once, what was the hardest part for you in the war? And I thought about a young boy who came in as a replacement; the first thing he said was, 'How long will it be before I'm a veteran?'

I said, 'If I'm talking to you the day after you're in combat, you're a veteran.'

He replaced one of the gunners who had been killed on the back of the half-track. Now, all of a sudden, the Germans were pouring this fire in on us. He was working on the track and when he jumped off, he went down, called my name. I ran over to him and he was bleeding in the mouth…

From my experience before, all I could do was hold that kid's hand and tell him it's going to be all right. 'You'll be all right.' I knew he wasn't going to last, and he was gone the minute that he squeezed my hand…" —Armored sergeant, D-Day and Beyond

• Language: English
• Publisher: Matthew Rozell
• Release date: Jul 23, 2020
• ISBN: 9781948155113

Book preview

THE THINGS

OUR

FATHERS SAW

The UNTOLD STORIES OF THE

WORLD WAR II GENERATION

FROM HOMETOWN, USA

Volume V:

D-DAY AND BEYOND

Matthew A. Rozell

Woodchuck Hollow Press

Hartford · New York

Copyright © 2019, 2020 by Matthew A. Rozell. 7.23.20 MRB EB. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher. Grateful acknowledgement is made for the credited use of various short quotations also appearing in other previously published sources. Please see author notes.

Information at [e-mail].

Maps by Susan Winchell.

Front Cover: Into the Jaws of Death - U.S. Troops wading through water and Nazi gunfire (WWII: Europe: France) Franklin D. Roosevelt Library, Public Domain Photographs, National Archives Number 195515, Unrestricted.

Back Cover: General Dwight D. Eisenhower addresses American paratroopers prior to D-Day. Unknown photographer, United States Army. National Archives, public domain.

Any additional photographs and descriptions sourced at Wikimedia Commons within terms of use, unless otherwise noted.

Publisher's Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Rozell, Matthew A., 1961- author.

Title: D-Day and beyond : the things our fathers saw : the untold stories of the World War II generation, volume V / Matthew A. Rozell.

Description: Hartford, NY : Matthew A. Rozell, 2019. | Series: The things our fathers saw, vol. 5. | Also available in audiobook format.

Identifiers: LCCN 2019914755 | ISBN 978-1-948155-10-6 (hardcover) | ISBN 978-0-9964800-8-6 (paperback) | ISBN 978-1-948155-11-3 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: World War, 1939-1945—Campaigns—France—Normandy. | World War, 1939-1945—Campaigns—France—Normandy—Personal narratives, American. | World War, 1939-1945—Personal narratives, American. | Veterans—United States—Biography. | Military history, Modern—20th century. | BISAC: HISTORY / Military / World War II. | HISTORY / Military / Veterans. | BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Military.

Classification: LCC D755.6 R69 2010 (print) | LCC D755.6 (ebook) | DDC 940.54/8173—dc23.

matthewrozellbooks.com

Created in the United States of America

~To the memory of

The World War II Generation~

‘They will be sore tried, by night and by day, without rest—until the victory is won. The darkness will be rent by noise and flame.

Men's souls will be shaken with the violences of war.’

― President Franklin D. Roosevelt, Address to the nation,

June 6, 1944

THE THINGS OUR FATHERS SAW V:

D-DAY AND BEYOND

The Storytellers (in order of appearance):

James A. Calascione

Paul F. Hillman

Frederic G. Sheppard

Ellsworth J. Jones

Meyer Sheff

Harry Rosenthal

John O. Webster

James E. Knight

William Gast, Jr.

Anthony F.J. Leone

Joseph S. Dominelli

Jacob N. Cutler

Frederick G. Harris

Frank W. Towers

William C. Butz

John H. ‘Jack’ Vier

THE THINGS OUR FATHERS SAW V:

D-DAY AND BEYOND

Table of Contents

Author’s Note

The Great Crusade

The Gyro Man

Electrical School

The Gyro Machine

Two Men Gone

Salerno

‘Normandy Was a Horror’

Meeting Ernie Pyle

‘I’ll Tear that Ship Apart’

The Master Mechanic

‘Soldiers are Not Repair People’

Waterproofing School

Wheeling and Dealing

The Concentration Camp Boy

The Driver

Guard Duty

The Pathfinder

The Disaster

Normandy

Airborne

The Paratrooper

The Jump

Wounded at Carentan

Hospitals

‘He Shouldn’t Have Been There’

The Glider Pilot

Overseas

The Last Mission

Prisoner of War

Liberation

The ‘Great Wall of Hitler’

The Cryptographer

Crossing the Atlantic

Omaha Beach

The Flagship

The Combat Engineer

The 20th Combat Engineers

H-Hour

The Tankers

The Demolition Man

Demolition Training

Loading Up for the ‘Real McCoy’

Starting In

The Belgian Gates

The Vision

Omaha Beach

The Tanker

The Medics

The First Night

The Second Night

‘This was a Suicide Mission’

The Tanker

The Landing

‘Throwing Marbles at a Car’

The Coast Guardsman

‘The Shadow’

The ‘Blast Furnace’

The ‘Suicide Navy’

The Infantryman

‘Move, Move, Move!’

‘Bodies Floating in the Ocean’

The Military Policeman

The Landing

The ‘Vengeance’ Rockets

The Navy Signalman

‘A Unique Situation’

Hundreds of Bodies

The Mulberry Harbors

The Great Storm

The End of the War

Fighting Inland

Hedgerow Country

Cobra/Mortain

Showdown at Mortain

Assault on Brest

Prisoners

‘Keep You There Until You Get Killed’

‘Got No Job Here For You’

The Armored Sergeant

The Foxhole

Overseas

Brest

The ‘Sunday School Picnic’

Silver Star

The Hürtgen Forest

The Battle of Schmidt

‘People Cannot Make the Same Mistakes Again’

The Forward Observer

Tough Guys

Convoy

British Commandos

Landing in Normandy

German Tanks

The Hedgerows

The Hürtgen Forest

Flashbacks and Nightmares

The Common Bond

The Battle of the Bulge

The Military Policeman

The Bulge Breaks

Into Germany

Buchenwald

The Russians

The Armored Sergeant

Battle of the Bulge

Wounded

Buchenwald

The Hardest Part

‘When the Shooting Stops’

‘You Don't Owe Me a Thing’

The High Price Tag

About this Book/

Acknowledgements

NOTES

A picture containing tree, outdoor, sky, fence Description automatically generated

Normandy American Cemetery.

Credit: Bjarki Sigursveinsson, Public Domain

Author’s Note

"W e know we don’t have much time left, so I tell my story so people know it was because of that generation, because of those guys in this cemetery. All these generals with all this brass, that don’t mean nothing. These guys in the cemetery, they are the heroes."

-99-year-old Steve Melnikoff, World War II veteran, standing at the Normandy American Cemetery, June 6, 2019.[1]

Two days after the beginning of the greatest land-air-sea invasion in the history of the world, years in the planning, the first American dead were laid to rest on the bluffs overlooking Omaha Beach at what would become the American Cemetery at Colleville-sur-Mer. Today, nearly 9400 Americans lay at rest on over 170 acres of sanctified ground meticulously maintained by the American Battle Monuments Commission, watched over by the 22-foot-tall bronze statue, ‘Spirit of American Youth Rising from the Waves.’ Thirty-eight sets of brothers lie here, and on the Walls of the Missing, over 1500 names are inscribed. And shortly before the first men killed were buried, President Roosevelt informed the nation of the long-anticipated invasion by beginning a prayer broadcast over the radio to the families back home:

Almighty God: Our sons, pride of our nation, this day have set upon a mighty endeavor, a struggle to preserve our Republic, our religion, and our civilization, and to set free a suffering humanity.

Lead them straight and true; give strength to their arms, stoutness to their hearts, steadfastness in their faith.

They will need Thy blessings. Their road will be long and hard. For the enemy is strong. He may hurl back our forces. Success may not come with rushing speed, but we shall return again and again; and we know that by Thy grace, and by the righteousness of our cause, our sons will triumph.

They will be sore tried, by night and by day, without rest—until the victory is won. The darkness will be rent by noise and flame. Men's souls will be shaken with the violences of war.

For these men are lately drawn from the ways of peace. They fight not for the lust of conquest. They fight to end conquest. They fight to liberate. They fight to let justice arise, and tolerance and goodwill among all Thy people. They yearn but for the end of battle, for their return to the haven of home.

Some will never return. Embrace these, Father, and receive them, Thy heroic servants, into Thy kingdom.[2]

On June 6, 2019, surviving D-Day veterans gathered, many probably for the last time, to honor the fallen from the nations engaged in storming ‘Fortress Europe’ and liberating the continent on the 75th anniversary of D-Day.[3]

Today, the ocean laps at the lateral five-mile advance of sand littered with relics of a different time, the hulking remnants of the tide of battle. The surf rolls in and kisses the beach as the last participants mix on the hallowed bluff above with the politicians who have gathered from all over the world.

Thirty-five years ago, I watched as the American president honored the fallen, and the living, at the cemetery for the fortieth anniversary. Just out of college, something stirred inside me. Something was awoken.

Those thirty-five years have passed. I began by writing letters to the newspaper. I began to interview D-Day veterans and others. I began to collect stories—not relics, prizes, or artifacts. I really had little interest in captured Nazi flags or samurai swords.

I wanted to talk to the men who were there.

The fiftieth anniversary came next with great pomp and more reflection. It graced the covers of the major newsweeklies. ‘Saving Private Ryan’ would soon stir the consciousness of a new generation, and the reflections of the old. And I learned so much more of the war beyond the beachhead. That there were so many beachheads.

The sixtieth anniversary came around. Students on their annual trips to France would bring me back their photographs and the requisite grains of white sand from Omaha Beach. Teenagers had their emotions a bit tempered, I think. I would go on to introduce them to so many who were there, when they themselves were teenagers.

SOME TIME HAS PASSED since I sat with the veterans I interviewed, but my memory of the smiles, the laughs, the emotion and the tears have not faded, though the day is approaching when no one with firsthand memory of World War II (and then, even people like you and me who may have heard these stories directly) will be alive. According to the National World War II Museum, citing statistics published at the end of every fiscal year by the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, fewer than half a million of the 16 million Americans who served in World War II are still alive, with nearly 350 passing each day in 2018.[4] Most veterans have gone the way of the World War I and Civil War generation without ever having told the tale outside of their own brothers and sisters who experienced it with them. So, thank you for your interest in this book series; it’s the culmination of a mission that for me, as a history teacher and oral historian, turns out to have been lifelong. In reading it, you will have done something important—you will have remembered a person who may be now long dead, a veteran who may have lived out his or her final days wondering if it was all worth it. You will witness with me the extraordinary achievements of the participants and survivors of the most catastrophic period in the annals of history, which brought out the best—and the worst—of mankind. And these people were our everyday neighbors, our teachers and coaches, shopkeepers and carpenters, millworkers and mechanics, nurses and stenographers, lawyers and loggers, draftsmen and doctors, people from every walk of life, high school dropouts and college graduates. They were the World War II generation, and there was a time after the war when we just simply took them for granted.

I happened to come of age, as a young history teacher in training, those thirty-five years ago, nodding silently at the black-and-white television screen in my college bedroom, the American president asking a question that I would go on to ask, over and over again:

"Why? Why did you do it? What impelled you to put aside the instinct for self-preservation and risk your lives to take these cliffs? What inspired all the men of the armies that met here?

WE STAND ON A LONELY, windswept point on the northern shore of France. The air is soft, but 40 years ago at this moment, the air was dense with smoke and the cries of men, and the air was filled with the crack of rifle fire and the roar of cannon. At dawn, on the morning of the 6th of June, 1944, 225 Rangers jumped off the British landing craft and ran to the bottom of these cliffs. Their mission was one of the most difficult and daring of the invasion: to climb these sheer and desolate cliffs and take out the enemy guns. The Allies had been told that some of the mightiest of these guns were here and they would be trained on the beaches to stop the Allied advance.

The Rangers looked up and saw the enemy soldiers [at] the edge of the cliffs shooting down at them with machineguns and throwing grenades. And the American Rangers began to climb. They shot rope ladders over the face of these cliffs and began to pull themselves up. When one Ranger fell, another would take his place. When one rope was cut, a Ranger would grab another and begin his climb again. They climbed, shot back, and held their footing. Soon, one by one, the Rangers pulled themselves over the top, and in seizing the firm land at the top of these cliffs, they began to seize back the continent of Europe. Two hundred and twenty-five came here. After two days of fighting, only 90 could still bear arms...

These are the boys of Pointe du Hoc. These are the men who took the cliffs. These are the champions who helped free a continent. These are the heroes who helped end a war...

We look at you, and somehow, we know the answer. It was faith and belief; it was loyalty and love."[5]

And as you will read, it was more.

So back to this book, Volume 5. When I began ‘The Things Our Fathers Saw’ series, I began in the Pacific Theater and worked my way through the stories of that arena of the war, from Pearl Harbor to Tokyo Bay. Most of the veterans hailed from an area where I grew up and taught surrounding Glens Falls, New York, a small city that Look Magazine renamed ‘Hometown, USA’ in 1944 and devoted six wartime issues to, illustrating patriotic life on the home front.[6] That book was well received, and a nationwide readership clamored for more veterans’ stories in the vein I wrote in. The second and third volumes highlighted the men who fought in the skies over Europe, and the fourth tackled the war in North Africa and Italy, a campaign so brutal that news of it was downplayed at home. In this book I set out to have our veterans guide you through their experiences on ‘D-Day and Beyond.’

A FINAL TRIBUTE, AND thought, if I may, before you go on. On the 65th anniversary of the June 6, 1944 landings, 87-year-old Marion ‘Buster’ Simmonds returned with nine other Battle of Normandy veterans matched with American college students in a trip financed by the Greatest Generation Foundation. Buster, a former combat medic with the 30th Infantry Division and friend, was paired with a student named Ben Doss. Twenty-year-old Ben remarked, ‘When I'm standing on the beaches of Normandy, I just want to remember that men died here, men with families and men with dreams.’ Ben, who was nearly the same age that Buster was on D-Day, continued, ‘It's something that I've been thinking about a lot lately. If people my age today were put in the same situation...’

Finishing Ben’s thought, Buster raised a finger, and slowly leveled it at Ben. ‘If you were placed in the same situation that we were then, you and your comrades would rise to the occasion. You're an American!’[7]

Buster delivered that statement with confidence, not a trace of doubt in his mind, or a need for hope in his heart. Ten years later on the 75th anniversary, I recall Buster’s smile, the Southern drawl and the twinkle in his eye when he ribbed his comrades. I remember the way he greeted my ten-year-old son at the reunions we attended with the 30th Infantry Division Veterans of World War II Association, rubbing his head and letting him draw the raffle names from the big tub at the annual final banquets where he served as the colorful fundraising auctioneer. Buster also served as the chaplain, and opened each reunion by reading the names of those fellow soldiers who had passed away in the past year, with president Frank Towers tolling the bell for each man who had gone forth; my son and I, and the Holocaust survivors I helped to reunite with the men of the 30th, were privileged to witness this moving ceremony several times.

His health fading, Buster passed away in 2013. Later, I was told that he died alone. I know he was very lonely after his wife passed, and this was followed by the death of his son Sandy, a Vietnam vet who would accompany Buster to the reunions. With ranks thinning, the 30th Infantry Division Veterans of World War II (which had met annually since 1946, sometimes taking over more than one downtown city hotel) folded its reunion tent in April 2015 in Nashville, Tennessee, on the 70th anniversary of the 1945 Nazi death train liberation. And I think Buster, who had lost his brother Bill in the air over Europe, died wondering if they would be forgotten. In working through the narratives in this book, remember to pause with me for a moment, maybe after you finish a section, to think about what they did, for us and generations not even born yet, those 75-plus years ago. Here are the stories that a special generation of Americans told us for the future when we took the time to be still, and to listen. Did they wonder, at the end, was it all worthwhile?

Matthew Rozell, June 6, 2019

Washington County, NY

A picture containing text, map Description automatically generated

The Invasion of Normandy. Map by Susan Winchell.

Part One

D-Day in Context

OUR LANDINGS IN THE Cherbourg-Havre area have failed to gain a satisfactory foothold and I have withdrawn the troops. My decision to attack at this time and place was based upon the best information available. The troops, the air and the Navy did all that bravery and devotion to duty could do. If any blame or fault attaches to the attempt it is mine alone.

—Press release drafted on the eve of the invasion, June 5, 1944, by Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower for a statement to deliver in the event that the D-Day invasion failed[8]

A group of people in uniform posing for a photo Description automatically generated

Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower speaks with men of Company E of the 502nd Parachute Infantry Regiment, 101st Airborne Division in England on the evening of June 5, 1944, as they prepare for the Battle of Normandy.

Credit: U.S. Army photograph, Public Domain.

Chapter One

The Great Crusade

SUPREME HEADQUARTERS

ALLIED EXPEDITIONARY FORCE

Soldiers, Sailors, and Airmen of the Allied Expeditionary Force!

You are about to embark upon the Great Crusade, toward which we have striven these many months. The eyes of the world are upon you. The hope and prayers of liberty-loving people everywhere march with you. In company with our brave Allies and brothers-in-arms on other Fronts, you will bring about the destruction of the German war machine, the elimination of Nazi tyranny over the oppressed peoples of Europe, and security for ourselves in a free world.

Your task will not be an easy one. Your enemy is well trained, well equipped and battle-hardened. He will fight savagely.

But this is the year 1944! Much has happened since the Nazi triumphs of 1940-41. The United Nations have inflicted upon the Germans great defeats, in open battle, man-to-man. Our air offensive has seriously reduced their strength in the air and their capacity to wage war on the ground. Our Home Fronts have given us an overwhelming superiority in weapons and munitions of war, and placed at our disposal great reserves of trained fighting men. The tide has turned! The free men of the world are marching together to Victory!

I have full confidence in your courage, devotion to duty and skill in battle. We will accept nothing less than full Victory!

Good luck! And let us beseech the blessing of Almighty God upon this great and noble undertaking.

—General Dwight D. Eisenhower's Order of the Day (1944)

On Sunday, June 4, 1944, battle weary soldiers of the United States Fifth Army under General Mark Clark shuffled along Rome’s cobblestones, the first Allied soldiers to enter the first Axis capital to fall. Five months after landing in Italy, the Allies had sustained over 100,000 casualties slogging it out ‘up the bloody boot’ to now walk over flowers tossed to them in the Eternal City, which was hastily abandoned by retreating German forces only hours before. The prize was more symbolic than significantly strategic, more an honor the general was determined to snatch for himself after nearly five years of world war. Flashbulbs popped and Clark and the fall of Rome did indeed dominate the newspaper headlines—for all of about 24 hours. Eight hundred miles to the northwest, a greater drama was about to unfold.

The multi-year top-secret planning for the ‘Operation Overlord’ and the liberation of German-occupied France and Europe was coming to fruition in a rapid full-scale frenzy of last-minute preparations. By the spring of 1944, a million-plus men and supporting matériel from the United States had settled in Britain, so much that a wit remarked that if not for the barrage of balloons tethered to the ground, the island would have sunk.[1] The previous year and a half of waging war on the German Luftwaffe by Allied airpower had been largely successful, and now, part of the grand strategy depended on a steady supply of replacement bodies for those killed or wounded in the Normandy landings, the largest combined land-sea-air assault in the history of the world. By midnight on June 6, 175,000 men would be landed on the beaches or dropped behind German lines, with over 6000 ships in the cross-channel armada and thousands of aircraft taking to the nighttime skies to provide invasion cover and deliver men, vehicles, and heavy weapons near strategic crossroads and towns. By the time the first inland towns fell, massive artificial harbors built in England had been towed across the English Channel and more than 100,000 vehicles and multi-ton support supplies were landed. All of this required meticulous, down-to-the-minute planning and coordination, yet the flexibility to flow with the forces of nature and the factors of the unknown.

By early June 1944, the Axis empire in Europe and the Pacific had already experienced its imperial multicontinental apex but was by no means finished. After the fall of Rome that June, another year of fighting in Italy alone raised the Allied killed, missing, or wounded list to 320,000 names. By war’s end, Germany had raised 315 infantry divisions, a monumental achievement when compared to the United States’ sixty-six Army infantry divisions, with one quarter of those, along with six Marine Corps divisions, committed to the Pacific. And few persons today realize that on the eve of World War II, the United States lagged behind Bulgaria as the 18th placeholder for the largest army in the world.[2] Incredibly, by that spring of 1944, 11,000 men were being inducted into the armed forces every day; yet of the men who landed in Normandy in those coming weeks, less than fifteen percent had seen combat before.[3]

That summer of 1944 in the Central Pacific brought joint Army-Navy thrusts to within air striking distance of the imperial Japanese homeland with attacks on the Marianas at Guam, Saipan and Tinian, but the horrific battles for the reconquest of the Philippines, Iwo Jima, and Okinawa, as well as the planning for the bloodletting in the event of the invasion of Japan itself, all lay in the immediate future. It is hard for Americans today to grasp the fact that the United States, and Great Britain, were essentially fighting two full-blown wars at the same time; we also tend to view our history as if the way things turned out was somehow preordained, as if it was a foregone conclusion that Americans and their allies were destined to win the war from the outset. The Allied invasion of Normandy stands as an epic testament to the planning, innovation and execution of the ordinary men and women who made it happen—the soldiers, sailors, airmen, medics, doctors and nurses whose stories capture the spirit of the time, the triumphs and the tragedies of the greatest drama of our age. Eisenhower began the ‘Great Crusade’ with his ‘Order of the Day’; privately, he penned his press release at the same time, and quietly slipped it into his wallet:

The troops, the air, and the Navy did all that bravery and devotion to duty could do. If any blame or fault attaches to the attempt, it is mine alone.

Chapter Two

The Gyro Man

Like many World War II Navy veterans, James Calascione seemed to move everywhere during the course of the war. His narrative begins as a boy in the 1920s and moves through the height of the Great Depression, setting the stage for the larger context of the war as the D-Day Normandy landings began to come into focus by military planners. His combat experience begins with war for North Africa and Sicily and Italy, paralleling the United States’ entry into the European conflict. Mr. Calascione was in the thick of it in many campaigns throughout World War II, an appropriate person to begin our ‘D-Day and Beyond’ journey.

A soft-spoken man, Mr. Castiglione relates his story from the heart, bringing to life once more the things our fathers saw that they could never forget, and perhaps needed to share to ease a silent burden for time, carried by so many for so many years.

I ALWAYS GOT CALLS, ‘Sparky, I need a hand,’ especially out on the outer deck. They'd bring the landing craft up to the main deck, leveled with the main deck. With the canvas stretchers, they'd pass the wounded in over the gunnel of the boat. We'd take the stretcher, lay it on the deck. We'd have to transfer those men that were on the canvas stretchers, that were bleeding on the stretchers. I helped many of the wounded men. Up to very recently, I dreamt of it, I always dreamt of it. A lot of my friends tell me, ‘Jim, look, that was the war. Forget about it. You don't want to remember things like that.

‘I can't forget it. It's indubitably marked up here in my brain. Do you know how many boys I helped there?’

James A. Calascione

I was born in Brooklyn, New York, back in 1916—December 6, 1916. South Brooklyn, we used to call that neighborhood Red Hook; now they call it Cobble Hill. They changed the name of it, but it was mostly Italian and Irish. The Irish were a few blocks up from us, but we more or less intermingled. A lot of brotherliness there, very close people, very close. I grew up and went through PS 29. When I got out of there, I went to the Brooklyn Technical High School for electrical engineering. I was there two terms, and we had five different annexes other than the main building. We had to change periods and go from one building to the other.

In about this time of the year, it's very cold. We weren't allowed to carry our overcoats with us. We had to keep them locked up in the locker, but I used to wear a sweater, probably two sweaters, so that I could make my trip three, four, five blocks away to the other annex. But I caught a dose of rheumatic fever from it. I woke up one morning, I was stiff in bed—so stiff I couldn't get out of bed for nine weeks. After nine weeks, I started to move around a little bit, but I couldn't walk. Then I had a friend of mine who used to come over every day, pick me up, take me out, and put me in the sun, so I could sun myself. He's dead now. He was a little overweight; at the age of 12, he was 291 pounds, but he was a model of a boy. Well, I continued with my education. I got to the point where I couldn't hack it anymore. The seventh term, I got out.

I STARTED TO LOOK FOR work in the electrical business. I wasn't too lucky. In those days, in 1929, '28, '29, it was bad, very bad. The stock crash came, and everything dropped out. I kept getting little odd jobs here. Electrical work, I couldn't get electrical work, no way, no how. In those days, the electrical union would only take on a member if his father was in the union. It was a father and son deal. That's the only thing I hold against local trade in the electrical union.

So, I started working my way up. A friend of mine said to me, ‘I know you wasn't too interested in it. Why don't you try for the police force?’ It's an idea. So, I tried. I went to Delehanty [High School], went through the course there, took the exam, got a pretty high mark, but it wasn't good enough. In the meantime, Europe starts rumbling. I had been working in a department store, in Brooklyn; I was in protection there.

They asked me if I would do any undercover work for them. I said, ‘Well, if it pays, I'll take a crack at it.’ So, they took me up into the personnel office, and there was the personnel manager there. A man from the protection department interviewed me, and he said, ‘Look, this is no baby job. This is a tough job.’

He said, ‘We're losing over $3000 a month in one department alone, stolen dresses. We want to get these guys, and we want to hang them. Do you think you could do it?’

I said, ‘I think so.’

He says, ‘What are you good at?’

I said, ‘I'm good at painting.’

‘Very good, very good. It's just what I want, somebody that can work at night.’

I said, ‘Okay, I'll take it.’ I said, ‘I'll come to the bottom of it.’ So, I did. I worked at it for eight weeks. Six of them went to jail. The next thing I know, I got a call from the draft. I was Navy-minded. I wouldn't make a good soldier. If I was going to die, I was going to die clean. I talked to my father and my mother.

I said, ‘Look.’ I said, ‘I'm going to go into the service. I'm going to pick what I want.’

My father said, ‘Well, why not?’

I said, ‘Well, maybe you don't like the idea that I go back in the Navy like Uncle Frankie.’ I had an uncle who had been in about 22 years so far.

So he says, ‘Look. You do what you want. You want the Navy, go.’ So, I went down to the recruiting station to enlist.

‘What can I do for you?’

I said, ‘I want to enlist.’

‘How come?’

I said, ‘I just got this call from selective services. I don't want to go in the Army. I want to go in the Navy.’

‘Oh, that's good.’ He says, ‘All right, come on, sit down here. Let's talk