Every Man a Hero

by Ray Lambert

  I’ll just cite the actions of one of my men, Stanley Appleby, as an example of what many did. Stanley, a T-4, was a polite, short, light-haired soldier, the sort who took any job I gave him without complaint. He never gave me a moment of trouble.

  This is his citation:

  The President of the United States takes pleasure in presenting the Distinguished Service Cross to Stanley P. Appleby, Technician Fourth Grade, U.S. Army, for extraordinary heroism in connection with military operations against an armed enemy while serving as a Medical Aidman with the 16th Infantry Regiment, 1st Infantry Division, in action against enemy forces on 6 June 1944, in France. Technician Fourth Grade Appleby disembarked from his craft some fifty yards from the beach under a hail of artillery shells and machine gun fire. A large number of casualties were sustained and, but for Technician Fourth Grade Appleby’s prompt and courageous action, would have perished in the surf. With complete disregard for his own safety, he on numerous occasions waded into the surf to lead them ashore and immediately administered first aid. Despite the intense enemy fire, Technician Fourth Grade Appleby never slackened in his efforts to assist and render aid to the wounded on the beach. His intrepid actions, personal bravery and zealous devotion to duty exemplify the highest traditions of the military forces of the United States and reflect great credit upon himself, the 1st Infantry Division, and the United States Army.

  It doesn’t take anything away from Stanley to say that the actions of every other company aid man, every medic that I saw, could have been described with the same words.

  Or with these, which describe George Bowen, a company aid man from Kentucky who was with one of our battalions:

  The President of the United States takes pleasure in presenting the Distinguished Service Cross to George H. Bowen, Private First Class, U.S. Army, for extraordinary heroism in connection with military operations against an armed enemy while serving as a Medical Aidman with the 16th Infantry Regiment, 1st Infantry Division, in action against enemy forces on 6 June 1944, in France. As the men in the initial assault on the coast of France waded through the waist-deep water, a number were wounded and were in grave danger of drowning. Private First Class Bowen, disregarding his own safety, stopped in his efforts to reach the shore, waded through the mined and fire-swept water to go to a wounded man who was drowning and dragged the man to shore. He then proceeded to the fire-swept areas to administer to the numerous casualties. During the attack men were wounded in an assault on an enemy machine gun nest high on the slopes of a cliff. Private First Class Bowen, to reach these men, crossed an uncharted minefield and moved through vicious enemy fire to within fifteen yards of the enemy’s machine gun nest to render first aid to the stricken men. Private First Class Bowen’s intrepid actions, personal bravery and zealous devotion to duty exemplify the highest traditions of the military forces of the United States and reflect great credit upon himself, the 1st Infantry Division, and the United States Army.

  Among the many lives medics saved that day was mine.

  Taken Out

  At some point around midday I found myself floating in and out of a haze.

  The sun shone on my face, bursting through the clouds and smoke.

  I’m alive?

  I barely knew. I opened my eyes and realized I was on the top deck of an LCT, one of the larger landing craft being used now as a seagoing stretcher bearer, taking casualties off the beaches.

  It was warmer than it had been earlier, well into the 50s. The air smelled like diesel and the sea, spent explosive, and spent men. My back had been braced, but I could move my head enough to see around me.

  I gradually regained enough of my wits to realize there were many men with me, lined up in the well where maybe an hour or so before, vehicles had been parked on their way in. Now we were heading back to England. The waves were still up, though nothing like they had been earlier.

  A doctor bent over me. He must have asked some questions; maybe I answered. He bent down and looked at my dog tags and said something.

  “Lambert? . . . We have another Lambert here.”

  The words cleared the fuzz from my head instantly. It had to be my brother; Bill and I were the only Lamberts in the 16th at the time, maybe the only ones in the whole division.

  “How is he?” I asked.

  There was the slightest pause before he spoke, the sort of delay that lets you know that what’s coming next won’t be easy to take.

  “He’s hurt real bad,” said the doc. “We may have to amputate his arm and leg.”

  “Don’t,” I said. “Please. Don’t amputate.”

  I was speaking for him, knowing he wouldn’t want to live that way. If our positions had been reversed, he would have done the same.

  The doctor didn’t reply. I tried to move, grab him, do anything. I wanted my brother to be alive, but also to be whole, intact.

  “Please,” I begged. “Please.”

  The energy I’d mustered slipped out with the words. I sank back on the deck, exhausted and hurt, somehow feeling worse than I had those last moments on the beach when I’d lost consciousness.

  Eleven

  Breakout

  Bill

  They took me off the beach at Weymouth, carrying my stretcher onto the dock. I must have been one of the first off, because for a moment I was completely alone. I could see and hear and think.

  The stretcher bearers came and put another fellow next to me. I looked at him and saw just a pile of battered clothes and a messed-up body. He was covered with blood, and the small bit of skin I could see was pale white.

  It was my brother. I barely recognized him. He was unconscious, maybe close to death.

  Men carried more bodies off the boat. Finally, I was lifted again and slowly walked to an ambulance. They put my brother alongside me and closed the doors.

  Bill’s arm had been sliced clear to the bone. That makes it sound neater than it was. To get the picture, you have to imagine something like a chain saw ripping at the skin, or maybe a lion raking its jaws across the arm. Even bandaged it was a raw pulp, his uniform a bloody rag.

  We went to a nearby hospital—likely the 50th Field Hospital at Weymouth, not that far away. As I was carried out, I realized there was a crowd of people packed around the entrance.

  What does a shot-up soldier look like?

  Ah, I see.

  Thinking back, I know that must not have been what they were thinking. It must have been something more like, These are the brave lads who are freeing France.

  What can we do to ease their pain? To save them?

  But at that moment I wasn’t thinking clearly. I was confused, and hurting. I didn’t think I was going to die—somehow I knew I wasn’t going to die. But I didn’t know much beyond that, and I was worried for my brother.

  I was carried to an operating room tent. The doctors went to work. They cleaned me up pretty well and changed my bandages. The doctor or one of the nurses said something about my back being crushed.

  Got that right.

  They gave me more morphine, took care of my wounds. My back was immobilized; I would need further surgery in the future.

  When they were done working on me, I was taken out to a ward tent. I was conscious by then; the walk seemed to take forever, my body hanging heavy against the stretcher.

  They brought another man in and set him down.

  It was Bill, still white as a ghost though cleaned up quite a bit. He looked more dead than alive. But he was alive, there was that. And at least so far, they hadn’t amputated.

  Home Front

  That night back in America, my wife, her family, and people all across the country tuned their radios to hear President Roosevelt give a special speech. It began simply enough, with Roosevelt’s familiar voice telling them that our troops had crossed the English Channel and invaded France.

  And then, Roosevelt began to pray.

  “Almighty God: Our sons, pride of our Nation, this day have set upon a mighty endeavor, a struggle t
o preserve our Republic, our religion, and our civilization, and to set free a suffering humanity,” said the president. “Lead them straight and true; give strength to their arms, stoutness to their hearts, steadfastness in their faith.”

  Though he didn’t mention casualties or even talk about how far we’d gotten, Roosevelt didn’t sugarcoat the reality. The war had a long way to go.

  He asked everyone to keep praying that day, and for all the days that would follow until the war had actually been won.

  The headlines in the papers the next day screamed the news:

  INVASION

  ALLIES LAND IN FRANCE, SMASH AHEAD; FLEET,

  PLANES, CHUTISTS BATTLING NAZIS

  INVASION IS ON

  BEACHHEADS ESTABLISHED

  And so on. Pretty much every paper in the country pulled out their biggest type—they called them “wood” because they were too big to be made of the usual lead—and filled their front pages and several more with what they knew of the battles.

  It wasn’t much; the stories were heavily censored so that our actual positions or plans would not be given to the Nazis. There were maps, though many of them were wildly inaccurate. Even so, by piecing together the different stories over the next few days, a reader could at least get a rough idea of where we were.

  Spontaneous celebrations broke out across the country. In blue-collar Washington Heights in New York City, a serviceman home on leave ran into a candy store and grabbed a small American flag. He danced outside with it, leading the neighborhood kids in an impromptu parade. On the other side of the city, in Astoria, Queens, a family began measuring the troops’ progress each day by the maps that showed how close they were to Germany.

  Americans did the same all across the country. For us, the war was now nearly three years old. It had been a very hard three years. Landing in northern France meant the end must be in sight.

  Looking back now, most of us think of the war years as a time when everyone was working together and people were happy to make sacrifices for “our boys.”

  That’s certainly true. But things were more complicated than that. There are parts of the picture that generally we don’t see or notice. Like the strikes during the war years, which affected transport and various industries.

  I don’t know whether workers were justified or not in any of these cases; I haven’t studied it. But I do know that a lot of us fighting on the front lines got mad when we heard about the strikes. We thought it was a hell of a thing for people to be holding out for more money when we were putting our lives on the line. The strikes may not even have been about money, but details were scant.

  Rumors and emotions weren’t. An artillery unit ran out of ammunition on the battlefront; rumors followed that their shortage had been caused by a strike back in the States. It wasn’t true, but there were enough dark feelings around that it was easy to believe.

  Why wasn’t everyone back home pitching in like we were? We didn’t want our parents and families and others back home to experience the horrors we were experiencing, but we did want to feel that they were doing as much as they possibly could to help us end those horrors. There were times we didn’t get that feeling.

  People supported the war. They loved and supported the soldiers and sailors fighting it. At the same time, they had other things to worry about, especially with their husbands or sons away.

  Priorities were complicated. Not everyone wanted to fight, let alone risk death. There were manpower shortages in the army, and difficulty getting enough replacements. That could always be fixed with the draft, but the point is that looking back, a lot of times things seem simpler and maybe even better than they actually were.

  I’m not complaining, but I’m a straight shooter, and that’s how it was. It wasn’t a nirvana of people all pulling together 100 percent of the time with never a hint of complaint. The war brought out the good in many, but it didn’t make them or anyone any less human.

  The soldiers knew the sacrifices that we made. We saw our friends die, sometimes next to us, sometimes in our arms.

  What’s Mother Going to Think?

  The next morning, Bill and I woke up around the same time. He looked over from his bed and realized I was there with him.

  “What are you doing here?” he asked.

  “Same thing as you.”

  “What’s Mother going to think?” he asked.

  It was a good question. She’d been notified that we’d both been wounded in Africa and Sicily. I can’t imagine what she would have thought seeing the telegram about our injuries at D-Day.

  His arm and his leg had been very badly damaged. A fourteen-inch slice of skin, muscle, and other tissue was missing from his leg, the bone barely intact. Shrapnel or fragments, whatever had hit him, had torn him from knee to hip. His right arm was gouged from his shoulder down to his elbow. The doctors were debating whether he would keep those limbs or not. But for now they were still there, heavily bandaged.

  * * *

  There’s a brief account in John C. McManus’s book about the 1st Division in Normandy, The Dead and Those About to Die, describing what had happened to Bill on the beach. As first sergeant, he’d come in with the last members of the company. He was right in the water, barely out of the landing craft. The men with him got him to shore, and there, still under fire, a medic or medics took care of him as best they could. They cleaned and wrapped his wounds, shot him with morphine. Whoever was working on him knew he was in bad shape. I doubt they knew it was my brother; I doubt they knew he was anyone but a soldier they needed to help.

  At that moment, the machine guns were still firing from the bluff. They were ripping across the nearby rocks, splintering bits of stone everywhere.

  There was no cover on that splinter of beachhead. To save this man, he had to be protected.

  The medic or medics working on him decided to make use of the only cover available at that moment on the beach—dead bodies.

  Bill’s battered comrades, likely including soldiers he had saved earlier in the war, formed a barrier around him: one last service, one last sacrifice for a comrade.

  I’m not sure who worked on him. It might have been my aid man Charles Shay. He was assigned to that company. On the beach, though, at that moment, it could have been any of a half dozen guys, even someone from the 29th Division or a later wave.

  Whoever it was, they took great care of him. But then, they did that for everyone.

  * * *

  Bill and I talked a little bit that morning until the hospital staff came and gave us some food. Later, they sent us north by train to Cheltenham and the 110th General Hospital, a large facility set up around an older English hospital and manned by the American army.

  I remember that train ride. It jerked and bumped and rocked and shuddered every few seconds, the tracks barely in line. The springs on the cars did more to amplify the shocks than absorb them.

  Every time we hit the slightest bump, Bill would cry out in pain.

  Our wounds were different and so were our prognoses. We were separated, with Bill put into a ward where he could get more intensive care. It took a few days, but when I was feeling more myself, I asked the staff if I could see him. They pushed me down in a wheelchair to his bed.

  “Sending me home,” he told me.

  “Good.”

  My true thoughts were more complicated than that. Sending him home meant they were sending him somewhere to get more care. It was good that he was stable enough to move; bad that he needed that level of care.

  The doctors were still debating about his arm and leg. But for now they were there, tucked tight in bandages.

  “We’ll be okay,” he said.

  “I know we will.”

  Battling On

  Young people sometimes think that the war ended when the sun set on D-Day, or that things were all easy from there.

  Not true.

  The first-day objectives—in other words, how far the Allied units were supposed to go—were ent
irely too optimistic; very few units got even close. The Germans recovered from their initial confusion and began organizing counterattacks and better defenses. Rommel arrived on the scene. Though they were outnumbered, the Germans were still extremely able fighters. They were able to prevent the British from taking Caen, and continued to do so for weeks.

  The two American sectors inland from Omaha and Utah (the technical term is “lodgment”) remained just that—two separate sectors—for several days. They weren’t joined solidly together for another week, until the 175th Regiment from the 29th Division on one side and the 101st Airborne on the other repelled German counterattacks around Carentan. In the meantime, the bulk of the units in each section advanced against different targets.

  Following their landings, the troops surging from Utah started for Cherbourg. They encountered heavy resistance. Flooded fields, narrow, unimproved roads, and fierce German fighting slowed the advance to a crawl.

  The generals changed our strategy. The troops would still take the port, but first we’d cut off the Cotentin Peninsula, moving across to the west coast of France. This, too, proved difficult, but by June 17 a firm line had been drawn and Cherbourg was cut off from further help.

  The German defenders there held out until June 26. When American troops finally reached the docks, they found them destroyed. It would take over a month before they could be used.

  At Omaha, the 16th Infantry’s 3rd Battalion joined with a battalion from the 26th Regiment to strike southeastward and take the high ground west and southwest of Port-en-Bessin on D-Day+1, while the 1st and 2d Battalions of the 16th cleaned up the resistance inside the captured area. We took a stab at trapping Germans between us and the British, but the Germans were too strong and our units were not yet organized and rested enough to pull it off.

  Regrouping, the 18th and 26th were part of an attack intended to reach Saint-Lô, a crossroads city ten miles from the shore. The offensive reached Couvains, about a ten-minute motorcycle ride from Saint-Lô, but went no farther.