Word: sergeanting
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Collins had discovered a secret weapon to get his tanks by Normandy's dense hedgerows. A sergeant in the 2nd Armored Division devised a way to attach to the front of a tank a pair of saw-toothed tusks, made from the steel barricades that once obstructed the landing beaches. These tusks could hack through a hedgerow in a few minutes...
...cross the Channel, then they dropped to 700 ft. to make their landing run. Suddenly they plunged into the turbulence of a thick bank of clouds. The pilots reflexively separated to avoid collision. As they emerged from the blinding clouds, sheets of flak began exploding all around them. Sergeant Louis Truax saw his plane's left wing hit, and then the paratroopers went sprawling. "One man dived out the door headfirst," he said. "I grabbed the ammo belt ... of the man I thought next and gave him a heave out nose first. The next man made it crawling . .. Then...
Sometimes a single man could overcome absurd odds. Staff Sergeant Harrison Summers of the 101st was ordered to take 15 men and attack a German artillery barracks known only as WXYZ, actually a cluster of stone farm buildings. When the 15 showed signs of reluctance, Summers somewhat recklessly decided to goad them by leading the charge himself. He kicked in a door and sprayed the room with his submachine gun. Four Germans fell dead, and the rest ran out a back door. None of Summers' men had followed him, so he alone charged the second building; the Germans fled...
...hedgerow or some other now inconspicuous landmark that is burned in their memories. Two Canadians found the precise corner of a pasture they remembered near Arromanches. No trace of war remained. But digging into the soft earth, the two men finally uncovered a rusted Canadian helmet. A former U.S. sergeant spent an entire day looking for the house where he had knocked out a German machine gun. When he found it, he cried, "That is why I came, that is why I came." William K. Van Hoy, 62, a retired postman from Milwaukee, Ore., wanted to show...
...past 40 years, Theodore Liska, now a hotel manager in Mons, Belgium, has returned to Normandy for the anniversary of Dday. Liska, a native of Chicago, was a sergeant in the 4th Infantry. As a survivor he feels a debt to "the men who won the war, those who gave their lives. The rest of us didn't." Compared with Omaha, the landing at Utah was easy, but a mile or two inland Liska's unit began to take heavy casualties. The Germans had flooded a swath of fields nearly a mile wide. Liska and his men kept their...