Oh it’s like a sign, you belong to an organization, that’s your sign, because no one else has these.  It’s like having a, you weren’t allowed to wear them that’s all.  And we saw guys walking around with them on and we said, “Where in the hell did you get those boots at?”  They’d say, “Well, this guy sold them to me.”  I said, “Bullshit.  They didn’t sell them to you.  You probably stole them.”  But I couldn’t find them anyway, and I looked for them!

What would you do if the guy had had those boots on?

I tell you I had my .45 in my hand.  And I could recognize the boots.  Good thing I didn’t find him.  Because I wasn’t in any mood for fooling around you understand.  Here I was a snot nosed 19-year-old kid.

Wounded.

Wounded.  The guy just destroyed me when he took my boots.  I didn’t have any shoes to wear. They had to give me some infantry boots, the ones with the buckles on them you know.  Anyway I got over that.  They put us on a LST and a Sergeant Jim Borne was our platoon sergeant.  He got hurt same time I did.  And he sent us both back, and we’re on the same jeep.  Got back to the beach, put us on an LST and I’m trying, I’m able to get up a little bit and walk around.  Got out when they had the front of the LST open and I heard this roar and here comes this JU-88 right down the middle of the beach.  Didn’t drop anything, didn’t do anything, just went right down the middle of the beach about 100 feet off the ground.  And I said you got to be an idiot, here’s half the world’s army sitting on this beach and you got to be kidding me.  Anyway they load us up and take us to Southampton.  And I went from there to, got to think of the name of the town, to the hospital.  I spent the next 30 days in the hospital.  When I got released from the hospital I went back to Nottingham.  At this time we’re getting ready to make the jump into Holland, which we didn’t know at the time.

You mentioned some of the street fighting and clearing out buildings.  What was the procedure involved in that?

Well, first of all, you know everyone has a sixth sense about things.  Most of the time you can feel when there’s a problem or something there.  You don’t have to say anything, nobody does anything, you just know it is there.  Well the first thing you do is you throw a grenade through the windows, kick the doors open, throw a grenade inside, and at that point you don’t worry about who’s there or what’s there, because you know the civilians not going to be there at that point.  And you are very careful when you are walking in the room you understand.  One guy will lead the way in, he would knock the door in and throw a grenade inside, then he would go inside and he would already have gone through the building.  Did the same thing with the barns.  They were hiding all over the place.  Hiding in the hedgerow, just like we were.  We were hiding too, we’re going to hide in the same places.  But its going to be a routine, we’d have 3 or 4 guys do the house.  Happened many times, many times.

What did you think of your opponents, what was your impression of the Germans?

Well, the German soldier, the German soldier on the Cherbourg peninsula were just kind of the average, as I remember, we ran across 3 different phases of soldiers.  One was just the kind of beach troops you know, they weren’t all the greatest in the world.  Then you get into the Panzer groups with their tank organizations you understand, and they were tough individuals.  You know they were fighters, those guys were better.

Panzer grenadiers.

Yeah.  And of course you run across the SS and you got something else.  And we ran across all 3 of these.  But the general beach troops, the guys on the beaches were not that great as units.  They really weren’t. 

Did you ever encounter any Germans, as far as you were able to identify them, any German parachute groups, paratroopers?

No, not there we didn’t, no.  We did in Holland and we did in the battle of the Bulge, but they were disguised as Americans.  And these were troopers, paratroopers.  They were disguised as Americans up in the Bulge.  And a lot of that went on.  But to actually run across one, no we didn’t.  And I know they were there, I personally didn’t, we did, but I didn’t see these guys. 

What did you think of your equipment?  Did you feel that you were well equipped?

I think so.  Yeah, we had all we could carry, and all we could handle.  The only thing that I objected too, was a thing they developed called the white light for weapons.  You know a scope that you could see at night.  And they had that before we went into Normandy.  It would have been really beneficial to have that gun, that scope.  You know at 75 yards you can pick a guy out in the dark.  We already had this and we didn’t have any of them.  But otherwise we were well equipped.  The only thing we couldn’t do, you know those Germans had that Tiger tank, and it was an 88 of course, like most of their 88s.  And that was one hell of a weapon.  And it would blow our tanks all to hell.  But we had to have a 90 before we could penetrate him.  Because the best we had on the Shermans were 75s if I could remember.  Then we finally got some 90s and those finally did some damage, but that was a later time.

Was there one weapon that you feared the most?

The one I feared the most?  Well, see you can take an 88, you treat it like a rifle.  He can see you walking across a field 500 yards away and he can zero in on you.  They were built that well.  Yeah I feared that weapon, sure did.  And everyone else did.  In fact, the night of the D-Day drop after we assembled with Shanley, we went through a lot of march procedures to get to Hill 30.  I remember up on top of this hill we were standing around, its night time and we’re trying to, we didn’t even know what the hell was going on, so all we did was stop, and we sat there for a couple hours, and the next thing you know we heard this shhhwwwhump a little ways from us.  That was an 88.  Next thing you know one lands right besides us, but didn’t go off.  Bounced on the ground and just laying like 20 feet from me.  And I said, “Well…”  They would just shoot them, harassing fire you know.  That was the night, D-Day night.  Well late that night was the day we got into Hill 30.  So the next morning after midnight we got into Hill 30