Something Unreal, You Can't Believe

And that's where we went, from Dieppe to Caen, and from there to, to, to Falaise Gap. Now there, there was heavy, terrible fighting all over there. It was something unreal, you won't believe. There's no way I could tell you, and there's no way that... it's just something unreal that you can't even believe. I often... I often, when I watch a, a football game, and they all hunch down, and they're all ready to go, and then when the ball's... and they all bang into each other and they all start falling on top of one another... Well when the infantry goes in and sometimes a machine gun opens up on them, that's exactly the way the poor soldiers go. Somewhat, just as you look at that. If somebody, they had a soldier's uniform and a machine gun opened up, that's what I, that's the way I see it. And there was all that, all the way through, from one time to the other, and from this and that and you were scared. I... I never went a day that I wasn't scared. I was really scared, yes. Now, how do I define "scared"? I don't know. It's... it's... I really wanted to go home. But you couldn't go home. You had to go forward.

Interviewer: Is there one time that you got scared more than another?

Oh, when you heard the... yeah. First, when you heard the bombing and that in England, it wasn't, we weren't that scared. But after, when the shellfire, and 88's off the tanks, off the Tiger tanks and the stationary, and the moaning minnies, when you, they started whistling, yes. You prayed, you incidentally had to change your drawers and that quite often. In other words, you, you, you, you peed your pants more times than enough, and then you had a hard time finding a place to wash them or what to do.

There's many a time I prayed, and cried, hugging a hunk of cement or what you could hug. Yes, yes. You were scared. Real scared. When the, when the moaning minnies come in, boy, when they blew up and the 88's and... Yeah, you were scared.