B boat hit a mine and blew up and we were showered with wood, metal and body parts," he said. Of the 24 boats that were supposed to hit his sector, only seven were left as they got ready to drop their ramps onto the beach. On June 6, as Baumgarten's landing craft approached the beach about 6:30 a.m., the battle was already on and the horizon looked like it was on fire. That's when I wrote to my sister Ethel and said don't expect me home."
"Half of the beach, the beach was 300 yards deep at low tide, was covered with these diabolical obstacles. "I saw these pillboxes were up 30 feet above the beach and the trenches were up 30 feet above that - about 50 or 60 feet above the beaches - with three machine guns in those trenches," Baumgarten said. A few weeks earlier, he'd caught a glimpse of a clay model of his company's daunting objective.
Harold Baumgarten was one of the troops, a member of the the 1st Battalion, 116th Infantry Regiment, part of the famed Stonewall Brigade of the 29th Infantry Division. Immediately, the carefully choreographed plans involving hundreds of thousands of men, hundreds of ships and tens of thousands of tons of supplies lumbered into motion. They expected a break in the weather on the morning of June 6.Īt 9:45 p.m., Eisenhower unleashed his dogs of war with two simple words, "Let's go." Dwight Eisenhower's meteorologists announced their forecast. Three million men waited for the word that would unleash the fury of a fleet restrained by anchor, like a bulldog eager to break its chain.Īs a squall moved through the gray dreary towns of eastern Britain, Gen. The mightiest invasion fleet the world has ever seen sat in waters in and around England as rain and wind battered the fleet during the night of June 5, 1944. Steven Spielberg used his stories while making "Saving Private Ryan." He died in 2016. He wrote books on D-Day and appeared in documentaries. He was injured five times on D-Day and captured by Germans on June 7.
Stories have been edited for length and clarity. On the 75th anniversary of the Allied invasion to take back Europe, we revisit some of their stories to show the bravery these young men exhibited and the horror they saw. Over the last couple of decades, some of North Florida's D-Day veterans shared their memories of that momentous day with Times-Union reporters.
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