 It's D-Day plus 12, 1944, a sudden channel storm whips the coast of Normandy. Off Omaha Beach lies the convoy carrying the 83rd. Ships break up and run aground. The shore, the heavy steel landing piers are twisted and ripped apart, and for three days and three nights the division rides out the storm, waiting. On D-Day plus 15, the storm subsides. Another three days and three nights pass before men and equipment of the 83rd Infantry Division finally get ashore and into their assembly area. 24 hours later, the division moves up to relieve the 101st Airborne southwest of Carintham. They say Normandy is beautiful, but you couldn't prove it by me. I don't think any of our guys or even the ones that came in before us noticed it. And the civilians, all I remember is they seemed happy to see us, especially the kids. The one thing I remember about Normandy was the hedge roads, and they were the biggest damned hedges I ever saw. They were everywhere, around the fields, along the roads. Anywhere you turned you bumped into one. We took over the positions of the 101st Airborne on the other side of Carintham around the end of June. Then we attacked. I can remember the day it started. It was the 4th of July. Funny they picked that day. That's one 4th of July, none of us will forget. Those hedgerows came in handy for holding ground. The only problem was the Germans were using them too. I said those hedges were the biggest damned hedges I'd ever seen. And the toughest too. Worse than barbed wire. They were more like a stone wall, only worse. You could go over a stone wall, but you had to go through these hedges. Even our tanks had trouble doing that. We'd go through one, we'd move ahead about 50 yards or so, and there'd be another. It got us. We were fighting a couple of days for a piece of ground the size of a football field. We'd finally take it, move on a few yards, and then start all over it. All the time you had this feeling of being hemmed in. It was like being in a blind alley. You couldn't move, you couldn't see. Those German snipers could see all right. They were usually behind us. I don't know how many guys we lost in those hedgerows. It started raining. That ended our help from the air. That mud gave us almost as much trouble as the Germans. Our tanks and trucks were bogging down in the field. Those little country roads we had to use weren't much better. We were just beginning to get used to it. Then on July 25th, our planes began coming over. They came in waves. It looked like they were using every plane they had. The sky was filled with them. After they finished with the Germans, the going wasn't so tough. We started moving again and we didn't stop until we were in Brittany. It took us 23 days to get out of Normandy. That was 23 days and nights of steady fighting. They gave us a few days' rest and we started again. We were heading for St. Melo. In Normandy, it was the foot soldiers. They did most of the work. Now it was up to the artillery. The division's objective was St. Melo and Denard. Our job was to knock out the fortified lines that stood in its way. Chattanooga was the first town and kept right on moving. We were still moving through Chattanooga to fan out across the peninsula. We were already hitting the next fortified line. We flattened it and kept on moving. It took us three days to reach the outskirts of St. Melo. By that time the Air Force was already calling the Citadel. We set up our guns and pitched in. The next day our troops started moving into the city. We got into St. Melo all right, but that was only the beginning. There were still plenty of Germans in St. Melo and they had orders to hold it. How to be cleared house by house, street by street. It took us almost a week. We were still fighting in the streets. When elements of the division began moving on Denard on the other side of the estuary. Our patrols were already in the city. They cleared the way. Denard put us within striking distance of the Citadel. Most of St. Melo was ours, but the Citadel still held out. The old medieval fortress with its thick walls had resisted repeated aerial attacks and the constant shelling of our biggest guns. The situation called for desperate measures. We fired into the outages of the fortress. That did it. With St. Melo and Denard out of the way we began working on the island of Sazamba. Only our big guns could reach that heavily fortified little island. The Air Force joined in. General Makin himself went out to accept the surrender. Even before the fall of Sazamba the division was on the move again. The battalion combat team was fighting its way west to help take the important port of Brest. The rest of the division headed inland. It was in the middle of August when we left Brittany and moved into the Loire Valley to protect the right flank of the Third Army. That gave us a line stretching along the Loire River from Nantours Air. That's quite a stretch for a division anyway. In the signal company we had about 800 miles of open wire to maintain. We had so many circuits we had trouble keeping track of them. You see the area the division had to watch reach from Brittany to the middle of France. That's close to 300 miles. The way it could be covered was by splitting up into small patrols and scattering them all over hell. We had to see that they had communications. Maybe you think that's easy. We spent half our time trying to find them. Our motor messengers got a workout. They were making 80 mile runs two or three times a day. What we really needed for the job were L5s. We had a few that we could have used to flee to them. For the rest of the guys in the outfit, the Loire was a picnic. It was the first real rest they had since we left England and they earned it. Funny thing about the Loire, there was almost no action there but the division made a record bag of prisoners. About 20,000 of them, all armed and fully equipped. And we took them without firing a shot. It took a lot of tricky negotiating but they finally surrendered to Beaujean Sea around the middle of September. They put on quite a show. The Germans weren't too unhappy about it. They were mostly service troops and most of them were glad to be out of it. It was a job collecting their guns and equipment. The horses and wagons got me. You never saw so many. A few weeks after the surrender at Beaujean Sea, the division got orders to move again. We moved east out of France and into Luxembourg. We finished clearing it and stayed there. A couple of months later, we headed toward Germany to relieve the 4th Infantry Division. It was around the beginning of December when the division moved into the Hurt Camp. Most of our guys had never even heard of the place. I was with the engineers the 83rd. We were moving slow. Guess we were kind of nervous. You couldn't see anything, but we had heard stories. We didn't know what to expect. We found out soon enough. The whole forest was covered with mines and booby traps. You got so you were even afraid to move. It was just as bad as a hedge rose. Half the time you couldn't see what you were shooting at. It was different when you hit the open spots. You still had to fight, but at least you had a chance. But there weren't many of those in the Hurt Camp. And then there was always the snow and cold. Most of the time we were crawling along, hoping and feeling our way. Even when the snow melted, we still had trouble. You never saw so much mud. We had to cover the roads with logs so that we could move our trucks and equipment. When we weren't ducking snipers, it seemed like we spent most of our time cutting down trees. We of the engineers used to say that we chopped our way through the Hurt Camp and we weren't kidding. We weren't cutting down trees for roads. We were building shelters and CPs. When we first came into the Hurt Camp, it was early December. The day before Christmas, we went after the last strong point between us and the river. We fought all day Christmas and then it was over. That night they loaded us into trucks and we began moving back into Belgium fast. Someone said we were heading for the Ardennes. I was an operations officer. According to the books, it couldn't be done. And the Germans certainly didn't think we could do it, but we did. Twenty-four hours after leaving the Rohr, elements of the division were in the Ardennes and had made contact with the Germans. The rest of the division was right behind us. We met the enemy spearhead at Rochefort. Hell finally pushed them back. In the Ardennes, we were fighting two battles, one against the Germans, the other against the weather. It's hard to say which was the worst. We had just as many casualties from the cold and snow. Certainly it gave us more trouble. We stole our armored units, disrupted supply and communications, and froze our weapons. There was little we could do to fight it. But in spite of the snow and cold, we kept after them. We kept after the enemy and we beat him. It had taken almost a month of steady fighting to do it. At the end of January, the division retired to an area north of Liège for re-equipping and training. A month later, the 83rd again received orders to attack. The objective was noice on the Rhine. I joined the 83rd in Belgium, along with a couple of thousand other replacements. It seemed like the whole outfit was made up of replacements. I guess there weren't too many of the old guys left. We met the Germans east of the Rohr, and from there on it was steady fighting until we reached the Rhine. Maybe it wasn't anything like the Hedgel, or the Hercule, but it was plenty hot enough for me. I was sure glad when we got to Noice. We were all set to cross the Rhine and keep going. We didn't have a chance. The Germans blew up the bridges in our faces. Instead, we pulled back into Holland. I guess it was around the end of March when we packed up and started for the Rhine again. We headed at Basel, this time we crossed. After we crossed the Rhine, the general impression was that we were headed for Berlin. That was all right with us guys in supply. We had plenty of stuff stockpiled in the rear. All we had to do was go back and get it. It would have been a cinch, too, if the division had moved along the way we expected. But they didn't. During the Second Armored and Cleaning Up, as we were supposed to, we were ordered to strike out on our own. It wasn't so bad at first. We'd bring up a load of supplies, pick up a load of prisoners and go back. But when they started rolling, that's when we had trouble keeping up with that. We had to do two miles for every mile they gained. One up and one back. They crossed the Basel. They were really tearing along. The Germans were breaking out and it was becoming a chase instead of a fight. By now the division was using anything that moved to carry troops. That's when everyone began calling us the rag tag circus. We looked at it. Half the time we were alongside or ahead of the Second Armored and it got to be a race. We were making supply runs of 200 miles and better. By the time the 83rd reached the Elbe, it had covered something like 200 miles in less than 10 days. We crossed the Elbe in assault boats and set up a bridgehead on the other side. While we were fighting to hold it, our engineers got a bridge across. Reinforcements began coming. We held and pushed ahead. We got as far as Zerps. Then they told us to stop. And we stopped. It was tough. Berlin was only 40 miles away. It took a year to come over 2,500 miles across Europe. We could have gone on but the 83rd hadn't done its job. Four days later the European war ended.