Every Man a Hero

by Ray Lambert

  The Battle for Normandy had reached a new phase. The question was no longer whether we could get into France, or even off the beaches. The question was, how would we get enough momentum to break the German army down and liberate the rest of the country?

  * * *

  As my evacuation demonstrated, the Medical Department followed the plan that had been set up in the months before. By D-Day+3, the military term for the third day after the landings, planes took over most of the transport of the wounded back to England, greatly shortening the amount of time it took. The next day, the first evacuation hospital was set up in France; patients were being operated on there within two hours. Not only were doctors now taking care of wounded GIs close to the front, but army nurses were there to help as well.

  It was later estimated that the medical department handled 76,000 cases in two months during the battle for Normandy. About 3 percent died, a large improvement over World War I.

  One last grim statistic: it’s said that in the first hour on the beach, 30 percent of the men in the Big Red One were either killed or wounded.

  * * *

  As the American army built up in France, it found itself bottled into a small area of Normandy. As the days passed, many of the war planners worried that the battle would become static, horribly similar to the trench warfare of World War I, a back-and-forth slaughterfest.

  Our guys tried to break through the German lines several times.

  We had a lot of things going for us. Air superiority was one. Our planes were often overhead, dropping bombs or using their machine guns on German targets. Nazi planes that tried to attack ground units usually were intercepted and often shot down. We had a top-secret intelligence system that broke the German encryptions; this allowed the commanders to know many of the German movements. And while we didn’t have nearly the amount of supplies and equipment we wanted, more was arriving each day.

  But there were advantages to being on the defensive, and the Germans played them well. The biggest was the geography. Called the bocage, the area was broken into many small squares of fields separated from each other by hedgerows.

  An American hearing the word “hedge” may think of a neat row of shrubs about knee high that need clipping every month or so to make the front lawn look pretty. The hedgerows in Normandy were masses of dirt topped by thick brush and sometimes trees. They provided perfect cover. A handful of German soldiers could set up a pair of machine guns in one and hold off a platoon for hours before quietly slipping away.

  Once we took one field, we’d have to fight our way through the next. And then the next. And the next. Normandy wasn’t a checkerboard of hedgerows; it was a universe of them.

  It took a while to figure out the solution: rather than coming in the front door, bulldoze your way through the side.

  With a tank.

  Some enterprising GI—there are different contenders for the honor of having come up with the idea—welded a pair of metal prongs to the front of an M4, making the tank look like a rhinoceros. The crew then went for a spin around the nearest Nazi-held field.

  Not so much around as through. The rhino charged bulldozer-like into the side of a hedgerow, cutting an entrance that the troops supporting the tank could rush through. Once inside the field, the tank used big guns and heavy machine guns against the German machine guns. It was an unfair fight, something most soldiers like.

  The idea quickly caught on, and rhinos became the rage throughout Normandy. Unit after unit improvised with what they had, adapting their tactics to suit the situation.

  It was still slow work. Saint-Lô, which had been only a few miles from our front line for a month, didn’t fall until July 19. Even with the city taken, our troops were still bottled up.

  The breakthrough finally came on July 26, when after an immense, tactical attack by heavy bombers and a massive push by the armies in the area, the 1st Division threw itself against the German defenders north of Le Mesnil-Hermanses. The Germans resisted fiercely, but in the morning, they were gone, mostly dead; our guys cleared the mines they’d laid and cut a strategic hole in the defenses.

  Other units did the same throughout the area. Suddenly northern France was wide open. Their line punctured, the Germans found themselves so vulnerable that they had to retreat, and had to move so quickly that they couldn’t regroup.

  Troops from what was now the First Army raced after them. Others poured in from England and the U.S. Among these newcomers was the Third Army under George Patton. The general was back in Eisenhower’s good graces, though he and his army were now under Bradley as part of the 12th Army Group, rather than vice versa.

  Over the next several weeks, Patton would lead his army in a superb drive to Germany and the Rhine. But unit pride forces me to say that the Big Red One got there first.

  Rome, Russia, and Japan

  France was not the only place we were fighting.

  Three days before we landed at Normandy, American troops entered Rome.

  The Allies had been working their way up the “boot” of Italy since landing there in September 1943, shortly after Sicily was occupied. The Italians had tried arresting Mussolini and surrendering to us; Hitler squashed that by sending special operations troops to rescue Mussolini from prison. He installed Il Duce as his puppet while German troops took over defense of the country.

  The rugged hills and mountains made it extremely hard for the Americans trying to advance there. Big advances were few. The slow progress may have influenced public opinion, which never seemed to give the troops in Italy as much attention as we got. After the war, and even during it, a lot of fellows complained that they were overlooked.

  There were over a half million troops in Italy at the beginning of June 1944. Driving out the Germans would eventually cost 40,455 lives, including those killed on Sicily. Those men weren’t a sideshow, and they certainly deserve our respect and thanks today.

  Out in the Pacific theater, marines and army soldiers landed on Saipan the week after we hit the beaches. Located north of Guam in the Philippine Sea, the island’s location was strategic not only for the navy, but for the army air corps, which was getting ready to introduce a new weapon into the fight against Japan—the B-29.

  The four-engine, high-altitude bomber would use the island as a base for launching long-range attacks on Japan some fifteen hundred miles away. Those attacks would eventually include fire-bombing Tokyo and the two atomic weapons that ended the war over a year later.

  On June 22, more than two million Soviet Union soldiers launched a massive attack against the German troops still occupying their country. The location of the attack, in the center of the German line, took the German forces by surprise; they were expecting an offensive farther north.

  By August, the Russians would be deep inside of Poland. The Axis was running out of time.

  Hostages of War

  Reducing war to victories and defeats, talking about armies moving back and forth—at times we might think this is all happening on an open plain, a vast empty space like a chessboard.

  But most of these battles took place where people lived. Some had fled before the armies came, often escaping with nothing more than a few clothes, cast out to wander as strangers in a country that was no longer their own.

  Those were the lucky ones.

  Others stayed, hiding in basements during the fighting, coming out only when necessary to find water or food. What followed when the guns stopped shooting could be worse.

  In France, families who survived the German invasion in 1940 and lived through the Occupation were always one phone call away from being arrested. A jealous neighbor could easily make up a pretext for the Gestapo to investigate. Even the slightest inquiry could lead to torture or a death camp.

  Betrayal wasn’t a necessary prelude to death. In many of the towns and villages throughout France, the occupiers designated prominent citizens as, in effect, hostages. If there was trouble, reprisals would be taken; these people would be killed.


  The more popular—the kinder, the more valuable, the more important—a person was, the better a hostage he or she made.

  Random monuments to these people dot the Normandy countryside. Buildings and squares remember their sacrifices simply and eloquently. A rebuilt church has the names of soldiers on one side of a monument, murdered citizens’ names on another. An obelisk at a farm crossroads declares, He died for his duty.

  As the Allies broke into France, much of what was in our way was turned to rubble. We broke the German defense at Cobra by obliterating not only the defenders and their weapons, but the buildings and everything else. It was an unfortunate necessity.

  That is the worst of the many terrible parts of war. Things that we do not want to do become the things we must do to survive.

  * * *

  And then there are the things some do that can never be excused.

  I had been in recuperation for only a short time when the so-called Vengeance weapons began falling in southern England. These were the V-1 and V-2 rockets. Not only did they inflict serious damage and kill many civilians, but they reminded people of the terrible air raids earlier in the war, the Blitz.

  I was on a rare visit to London when air raid sirens sounded. We descended into the city’s subway system, the Tube. The descent seemed endless, especially as I was still having trouble walking.

  As the crowd moved steadily downward, I wondered if we were ever going to reach the bottom. The people around me didn’t panic; there was no pushing or shoving, just steady walking. A few detoured around me, but mostly we moved as one.

  We stayed belowground for what seemed like hours, though it was probably not much more than twenty minutes. Occasionally someone might make a joke, but for the most part it was silent, and grim.

  If there was any damage from the raid, I didn’t see it. What I noticed was a grim determination mixed with resignation. How long must we go through this?

  And maybe sidelong glances, wondering why soldiers weren’t doing more to end it.

  Shipped Out

  They flew Bill home after only a few days at the hospital. He was still in serious condition and would undergo a number of operations, including plastic and reconstructive surgery, but by then I gathered that the doctors thought they could save his leg and arm.

  Nothing I said could assure him, though. And I understood. Having been a medic, he must have known that keeping his limbs and even his life might not be possible. Assuming he made it—not an easy assumption—he faced many operations.

  One thing definitely helped him: his wife happened to be a nurse at the hospital in Massachusetts where they were sending him.

  That turned out to be the best therapy possible. She made sure he got great care. You can’t do better than having your wife as your patient advocate, especially when she’s a nurse on staff.

  * * *

  My time at the 110th General Hospital was just beginning. The wounds in my leg and arm and the other little nicks and cuts were washed and sewn up. The doctors fused my backbone in the area of the fourth and fifth vertebrae and did some related work there.

  It was the state of the art for dealing with broken backs at the time, and the prognosis was decent. Fusing my back like that meant I wouldn’t be able to bend over quite as far as I had before—I couldn’t tie my shoelaces—but it was far better than not being able to walk at all, or, worse, having been paralyzed and unable to feel anything in my extremities.

  My leg would turn out to be the bigger complication. The outer skin and layers healed, but the wound below those levels got infected. Dealing with the infection would take several months.

  Long term, the fusion caused arthritis, which I feel today, especially on certain days. But otherwise, the lasting effects of my injuries are lines and marks on my skin. Knife wounds heal better than fragment wounds; they’re straight and clean compared to jagged and usually dirty. Because of that, the bayonet’s mark is now a very faint scar; the one at my elbow is more prominent. They are my mementos of the war, reminders that will never leave me.

  I’d lost most of my other mementos, including a very sweet German pearl-handled pistol I’d picked up from a dead German officer. I’d made the mistake of putting them and a lot of my clothes with our Jeep, thinking this way I would have my things very soon after we landed.

  That would have worked had the ship with our Jeep not been sunk. Some other items that had been stored in a barracks bag—a large duffle bag typically shipped well after an invasion—showed up a very long time later. Among them was the bayonet that had sliced my hand.

  I did have two things besides my scars that would remind me always of the war—the pipe the German observation pilot had given me as he died, and the photo of the man who tried to kill me.

  Both had been in my medical bag, which was still with me when I passed out on the beach.

  * * *

  As I got stronger, I was moved to a rehabilitation ward. Soon they organized the ward into a company and put me in charge, making me the acting first sergeant of the 110th Rehabilitation Company. We were a group of men recovering from various injuries that left us, in layman’s terms, walking wounded, but too weak to pull regular duty.

  I tried to lift spirits when I could. A lot of the guys were pretty shot up; just paying attention to them seemed to help, but I know it wasn’t a miracle cure.

  I said I was “acting” first sergeant. To make the position permanent, I would have needed to extend my service and reenlist. I thought about it—there’d be a raise and a promotion.

  A recent change had made it possible for non-doctors to hold officer rank in the medical department—did I want to apply?

  I should apply, said some of the officers, who even went to the trouble of writing recommendations, hoping to persuade me to use them.

  My leg healed much more slowly than either I or the doctors wanted because of the infection. My back was even more complicated. It hurt when I walked; it hurt when I rested. It hurt all the time. I refused to use a cane, though. It was going to hurt one way or the other, so why make things worse with a cane? I thought that if I kept going, slowly building back my strength, eventually I’d get better.

  Some days, “eventually” seemed far away.

  * * *

  In early July, I received a letter from Major Tegtmeyer, who was head of our regiment’s Medical Detachment. Tegtmeyer told me the unit had been awarded the Presidential Unit Citation—a high honor—for our work on the beach. He added a personal, handwritten note at the bottom: “You are also entitled to the Bronze Star.”

  Not too long after that, an officer pinned a Silver Star on my uniform.

  Ordinarily, you get a citation or other paperwork that formally records the reason for the medal. In this case, I didn’t get any paperwork; without the commendation, it’s not really official. When I felt better, I wrote to our division to try and track it down.

  Five months later, a four-page handwritten note from the major arrived.

  “You have a Silver Star coming,” he assured me, apparently referring to the paperwork. I had been nominated for it by Colonel Herbert Hicks, our 2nd Battalion commander. Hicks had been on the beach with us, and had been awarded the DSC for bravery there. “I’ll take care of it,” said Major Tegtmeyer.

  I don’t know what happened after that, but the paperwork I was supposed to get never arrived. Decades later, when I finally thought of looking for it, no record could be found—nor could they find the details of the one I received in Sicily. Of course, by that time, Hicks and Tegtmeyer had passed on. My enlistment record lists only the first Silver Star I earned in Africa.

  So the official commendations and their whereabouts are a mystery, and will always be. One more thing I have in common with many of the men who were on Omaha Beach that day.

  * * *

  If the clerk who should have forwarded me a copy of the paperwork for 1st Division got distracted right after Tegtmeyer wrote, it’s understandable. On December 16, t
wo days after the major wrote that letter, the Germans launched a massive offensive in the Ardennes. We remember it as the Battle of the Bulge.

  The Big Red One had been worn down after taking Aachen on the border in Germany and then slugging its way through the Hürtgen Forest to the Ruhr River. Exhausted from months of combat, the division was cycled off the line for rest and regrouping on December 7—only to be called back barely a week later as the Germans advanced.

  The surprise attack caught the U.S. off guard. At first the Germans made impressive gains in what had been a quiet, weakly defended sector. But resistance quickly stiffened, and as reinforcements poured in, the Germans found themselves in danger of being trapped. They gave up ground slowly but surely. Our guys beat them back to the Rhine, then crossed at Remagen, beating Patton again and setting the stage for the endgame in Germany.

  * * *

  The Regiment Medical Detachment had held my position open since I got hurt, but by then it was obvious to me that I wouldn’t be able to join them, or any combat unit, in the near future. I still couldn’t walk very well, and I’d lost a lot of weight and strength.

  That was my reality. And if I wasn’t going back to my men at the Big Red One, I wasn’t staying on here, either. The offers of promotion and the recommendations were all very flattering, but I wanted to go home.

  I hadn’t seen my wife in three years. I had never met my son.

  I’d done a lot in the war. It was time to let others take over.

  “Daddy”

  I boarded the Queen Mary in January, around the time when the 1st Division was rolling the Germans back to close the Bulge.

  Before the war, the Queen Mary had been one of the most famous luxury cruise ships in the world. There were two swimming pools and a grand ballroom. Gentlemen in first class couldn’t enter the dining room unless they were wearing their evening clothes, which weren’t pajamas but bow ties and jackets.