Major Dick Winters: Recounts Easy Company D-Day Actions - June 6, 1944

thank you very much mr colby we now turn to on d-day lieutenant record winners of the company of the 506th parachute infantry regiment of the 101st airborne division who had quite a d-day himself and i now turn over to major winners [Applause] thank you steve uh i'll uh be talking about company 507 parachute infantry 101st airborne on on the evening of june the 5th if you'll refer to the the flight plan we had that night on exactly on schedule 11 10 pm the c-47 i was in started down the runway for normandy 30 miles over the channel you can see we passed a checkpoint and uh then we continued on to gallup down to gallup bethel fine and at that point we made a sharp left turn about 90 degrees heading for the coastline of normandy they're passing over between the islands of jersey and guernsey the 506 parachute uh pathfinders had passed over this island about one hour earlier and at that point they had been shot down at this time when we're passing over it's time for us to have the men to stand up hook up check equipment because we're 20 minutes out the pallets are flying in the formation of vmvs 100 feet from wing tip to wingtip with no lights except the little blue dots on the plane tail as we approached the coastline we ran into a cloud bank and the pallets lost all visibility of the plane ahead now instinctively they separated some going to the right and others to the left to avoid a mid-air collision it was only seconds that we were in this cloud bank some at the most it was a minute or two and then they were out of the cloud bank and the visibility is perfect as we crossed the coastline of normandy i could see clearly the drop design that i could see clearly the lights for a drop zone the plane i was in was number 67 and i could see any aircraft fire start to come up from the planes ahead of me the fire started to increase intensity as we went inland and the gun emplacement germans were reaching their gun in places the first fire was wild but as the gunners settled down the fire came closer and you could hear it crack as it would go by the plane under a normal jump condition you jump at a speed of about 100 to 110 miles an hour at that speed if your harness is fastened correctly you'll have no problems with a shock you'll lose no equipment as the anti-aircraft fire came closer the pilot in my plane naturally opened up the throttle he was also taking evasive action to avoid the fire the men in the plane they had trouble standing up the fire hit the tail of my plane the foul pallet immediately threw me the green light we were doing at least 150 to 180 miles from our and we were no higher than 250 feet we were supposed to be jumping from 700 feet i threw out the equipment bundle i had and immediately jumped the opening shock was the hardest i ever received in my life i had bruises in my legs and arms for several weeks later the shock also tore loose the british leg bag i was using to carry my equipment this is the first time we ever carried a british leg bag and the idea is it's fastened to your right leg and after the opening shock you open a pin it's and releases the leg bag and you have a rope then from your harness to the leg bag the idea is that the bag will hit the ground first and then i'll hit the ground about a second later but the landing will be much softer and i can tumble and roll with the shock of the landing when the lake back to our looth with the opening shock all my weapons my ammunition hand grenades food clothing went with it so when i hit the ground and get out of my harness the only weapon i had was a trench knife that was strapped in my boot and a few maps i had in my pockets and last night when steve was talking to us and he mentioned that eisenhower talking to the 101st airborne boys were saying man you have nothing to worry about you have good leadership you have good weapons the fourth division is coming in at this point with a with a trench knife standing in an orchard in normandy i guess i needed a little bit of that encouragement to go after that leg bag was not a good idea at this point because the there was a german machine gun fire in a plane still passing overhead uh right where that leg bag landed and it would also mean going straight for a town and i could see this large fire and hear a church bell at the town so i started south to cross a road that hit the road i had a i was challenged with a cricket snap so i answered with two snaps and it was carwood lipton our company's third platoon sergeant who you met last night he had landed on the outskirts of this town and as he came down the same road i was on he noticed a stone marker carved in the marker with saint mary glees with the help of the map i had i soon found saint mir glease and i had landed northwest of town the drop zone i had seen shortly before the green light was drop zone 0. this is an 82nd airborne drop zone we were supposed to drop and dropped zone c that's at st marie dumont the pallet he had been thrown off course with the evasive action from the cloud bank and then from avoiding any aircraft fire i want you to note the scattered patterns of those that have dropped in drop zone c and a drop zone d is relatively good now captain shettle who is with us today he dropped down and dropped zone d they had a lot of tough luck they lost their battalion commander their executive officer all their company commanders and first sergeants uh captain shuttle is s3 and battalion plans and training officer how to take control of about 29 men to accomplish the third battalion's missions captain shuttle are you here with us today please stand up it was about time for us to start to get together and at this point i had about 15 men and i had a hike ahead of me to get to my objective of about seven miles so i had to move around north west to get around st eric leash to start my hike for saint marie de mont about a mile into that march we met lieutenant colonel cole 3rd battalion commanding officer of the 502 he took charge of the march for the next couple hours to the beach his objective was to reach the german battery at the head of causeway number four my objective as i mentioned was causeway number two the rest of the night was actually uneventful for except for pulling an ambush on four german horse-drawn wagons that came down the road that we were on we knocked off two and the other two got away as the storm was coming about six o'clock in the morning i ran into captain jerry gross of d company who had about 40 men and a little later lieutenant colonel strayer battalion headquarters and he had another 40 men the second battalion of the 506 had left england the night before with 650 men it now had 95. company my company had started the night with 139 men and we now had 11 men and two officers we did not know it at this time but our company headquarters plane with the company commander lieutenant meehan and all company headquarters personnel had been shot down and all men had been killed a little later that morning i found a gi who had been killed i took his rifle i took his ammunition canteen whatever i needed so i was armed again we continued down the road as marked on our transparency and about toward saint mary de mont and about 7 30 in the morning the head of the column was fired on from a right flank the columns stopped d company with 40 men was sent out to neutralize that that fire but in a few minutes they were back they were stopped cold the word came back to me to come forward battalion s3 captain hester showed me from the edge of the road where the hedgerow where the fire was coming from and told me to take company and knock it out i'm sure he didn't realize at that time that i had 11 men and one other officer what i did was drop everything i had except that him wanted some ammunition crawl out along a hedgerow to do a scouting mission and figure out how to attack this position came back to the men and told them the story briefly i wanted to make a flanking attack i went had two machine guns and seven riflemen and i wanted to put all my fire power on their flank and by doing this i could overcome the fact that they were outnumberedness that they were in a dug-in uh trench system so while the two machine guns laid down the bank of the blanket of fire i had lieutenant compton and two men crawl out under that fire to get close enough to throw hand grenades into the trench as soon as they threw the grenades the three riflemen and herself charged the position our machine guns continue to give covering fire the timing was perfect the grenades went off and a second later we were jumping into the german trench the three germans that remain in that first 105 millimeter artillery piece took off on the run and we killed all three we had captured the first gun there are three other 105 guns in this battery and basically using exactly the same tactics we knocked them off one at a time the key to this flanking action and rolling up their trench line by concentrating all our firepower in one position at a time was the key and this is a point that steve made last night the lessons we had learned in how to conduct an attack using a tank using fire power moving under fire a cover affair and attacking the position this is the lesson we have been taught and this is the action we were using exactly in combat we were very lucky we had caught the germans early in the morning they seemed unorganized they never organized a counter-attack we had them off balance and we kept driving attacked and we took all four positions i want to mention at this point a german battery of 4105 is made up of three officers 28 non-commissioned officers and 104 enlisted men and we found out years later talking to the french family who lived in the farm where this action took place that this battery was at about one half the strength of they had another roughly 60 to 65 men we had killed we know 15 and captured 12. we paid a price for that action those four charges we lost four men i had six wounded we found out later that these guns in the field belonged to a minor house called brake cooler and most important they were lined up perfectly to fire on utah beach and causeway number two and due to the fallout of the landings at the various causeways along the utah beach indie day as you heard yesterday the troops landed about 300 yards off base they had drifted out of position so the causeway number two became the most important causeway for bringing in troops and equipment on d-day and by eliminating eliminating this battery at the head of the causeway that was firing on the beach we know the company's contribution was quite significant on d-day morning i just have one point in closing and that is the fact that the 101st airborne jumped in to normandy on d-day night with six thousand six hundred men and by the end of the campaign the normandy campaign we had issued 3171 purple hearts thank you [Applause] so you

Channel: Joseph Hewes

Views: 75,366

Rating: 4.9523144 out of 5

Keywords: Band of Brothers, D-Day, World War II, World War 2, 101st Airborne Division, 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment, Damian Lewis, Lewis Nixon, Stephen E. Ambrose

Id: 9K4MzCs1qE0

Length: 15min 38sec (938 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 25 2021