Verriere Ridge

I would, I would say mortar fire and artillery fire are the, are the dominant cause of wounds, but, May was killed by a, by a mine, an anti-tank mine, a shell fragment took the throat out of John Clarke, God, and ....

Interviewer: To take you back there, it's awful memories.

Well, I'm sorry, that's, that's part of the game, and a fair number were, were killed or wounded by machine gun fire in the open attacks. But they could lay down quite a heavy defensive fire pattern using all weapons and, for instance, I was initially wounded by being, by hitting a mine. My carrier hit a mine, in the attack on the village of Verriere, but then it, it was just barely light. We'd started attacking at 4 o'clock in the morning, the flash of the mortar going up attracted, they had their, they figured, someone's trying to clear a mine, so several machine guns opened up, within a couple, from within a couple of yards of us, and we could, lying there in the granary, you'd hear these damn bullets sticking through the grain so we, we crawled like hell, those of us who were still alive. I was dragging my leg behind me over about fifty feet, and all of a sudden, there, "Wham!" I'm hit on the side of the head, rolled right over on my back, and it ricocheted off of the ground and hit me right, right behind the ear and imbedded itself, a little MG-42 bullet, but thank God it was, bounced off the ground first and hit me sideways. It, it made quite a dent in my neck muscles there, which is, I can still feel it quite deeply. So, many people were wounded several, several times as they, as they, in that Verriere, Verriere thing.