Today is D-Day, June 6, a day to remember. A tribute to Steve Gilliard, who would have reminded us of this today.
Hal Baumgarten was 18 when he was drafted and left his home in the Bronx to fight the Germans in Normandy. An NYU student, he had a chance for a college deferment, but he turned it down.
On the night before the invasion, 63 years ago today, on the troop ship he wrote his last letter home before boarding the landing craft.
I drew this big Star of David on my field jacket, with the "Bronx, New York," underneath it. It was my act of defiance. I didn't expect to live through it. I wrote home to my sister, Ethel, who lived in a two-family house with my folks, that when the telegram comes, run down and get the telegram first and break the news gently. I had made up my mind I wasn't coming back.
His mission was to storm Omaha Beach.
Baumgarten and his comrades were eager to fight the German fascists, but had no idea what they were getting into.
The first thing that we noted, the boat on our left blew up. We were covered with wood, metal and body parts and blood.
When our ramp went down, Clarius Riggs (ph) was in front of me from Tennessee, 6 foot 2, dying to get off and fight Germany. He got machine gunned on the ramp and went face down into the water. I dove behind him. Only my helmet was creased by a bullet. There I was standing in neck-deep bloody water.
It was mostly a fight for survival. Most guys never fired a shot. I fired one shot. Most guys never did. In fact, they were killed in the water, or they were hiding behind the tanks. They were hiding behind dead bodies in the water. They were hiding behind smashed pieces of wood from the assault boats. And they were trying to take cover in the water.
But going across the beach, machine gun spray came from right to left from the bluff. I heard a loud thud on my right front and my rifle vibrated. I turned it over. It was a clean hole in its receiver, which is right in front of the trigger. My seven bullets in the magazine section saved my life, because there was another loud thud behind me on the left, and that soldier was gone.
I looked over to my left and staggering by me without his helmet was Sergeant Clarence Robison (ph) from my boat, a gaping hole in the left side of his forehead. His blonde hair was streaked with blood. He was out of it. Anyway, he staggered all the way behind me to the left, knelt down facing the wall, took out his rosary beads and started praying. And the machine gun up on the bluff to our right cut him in half.
A shell went off in front of me, and I'm about 110 yards from the sea wall. It went off in front of me, shrapnel caught me here, ripped this cheek off, ripped the roof of my mouth out. I had teeth and gums laying on my tongue.
Baumgarten, badly wounded, survived the 20-minute run to the sea wall, then was wounded in the head by another shell. A medic tried to patch him up somewhat. Then he found his best friend's body.
I started to cry when I saw my buddy. I used to tell my officers, 'I'll never be able to kill anybody. I never went hunting. I never killed an animal. I would never be able to kill a human.' The officers used to tell me, "Don't worry, when you get into combat, you'll kill." And they were right. You get -- I was crying mad, I call it; mad, meaning really you get to the point where you go psycho more or less. You want to kill.
I got together with 11 other guys, all wounded. I call them now 'the walking wounded.' We went up the bluff, and we hit up finally with some Germans behind a -- in a little low-walled farm yard. And they were firing at us. The fight ended with a hand grenade that we threw. And when we moved on, there were only eight of us left.
Then he stepped on a land mine, badly wounding his foot. He was trailing behind when a German machine gunner shot the rest of his group, then him. He fell on top of them, his blood soaking his jacket and concealing the Star of David.
I'm laying there on top of these guys, because when I came over, I fell on top of them. You know, I had just got wounded. And there was moaning, groaning, "Help me, Jesus," and then all of a sudden silence.
So it gets close to 1:00 in the morning, and I look up. I thought I was hallucinating. I thought I heard, "Don't worry, Yankee boy, you're going to be all right." But in later years I found out it was a German patrol coming down the road looking for cigarettes, and they saw the one guy alive, and they didn't kill me.
He fired a shot at a passing ambulance, which picked up him up and took him back to the beach for evacuation on a ship.
A sniper or snipers opened up on us from the bluff of Saint Larurent Sur-Mer. They also put a bullet through the Red Cross and the aid man that was taking care of us. They started bumping off the wounded GIs. When they came to me, they put a bullet through my right knee.
At 3:00 in the afternoon, I was evacuated off Omaha Beach by four Navy men, who picked up my stretcher, put me out on an assault boat, put me out on the deck, and I looked up and I saw this huge U.S. flag. Then I realized that we hadn't lost.
Hal Baumgarten eventually returned to NYU and became an MD. He now lives in Florida.
Private Baumgarten was a New Yorker who fought back. So, in a much more modest way, was Steve Gilliard, an NYU journalism graduate. This diary is a thank you to everyone who has ever served our country, including Steve Gilliard, Sr., USMC, who lost his son this week.
UPDATE: Please consider donating at the Paypal link to help defray the family's expenses for Steve's funeral, which kos will be attending tomorrow.