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 The Invasion
Interactive feature of the most complex attack ever conceived
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E-mail your letter to the editor
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Edward Jeziorski, paratrooper in the D-Day invasion, Glasgow, Scotland on furlough in July 1944.
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IN HIS OWN WORDS: EDWARD JEZIORSKI
Posted Sunday, May 23, 2004
A paratrooper with the 507th Parachute Infantry Regiment, Jeziorski, 23, was dropped into the inferno over Normandy
Out the door we went. Just as I peeled out, it seemed that the whole world lit up right underneath me. A tremendous ball of fire. And a bunch of black smoke mixed in with the red fire, just a great fireball. And I said to myself, The bastards are waiting for us. I tried to slip away from the thing, and tracers were coming up and through the silk. They were coming up just in strings. I can remember them being so close that I actually pulled my legs up as far as I could, my knee into my stomach, to get away from a stream of tracers. I slammed into the ground, and I was immediately pinned down by machine-gun fire. There was no way to raise up. Every time I tried to turn, the machine gun would open up. Every time I tried to move, there would be a burst. Apparently the great big ball of fire was a C-47 that had been shot down, and I was silhouetted between this guy's gun and the ship, and I couldn't move. I finally was able to bring my right leg up close enough to where I could get my jump knife out of my boot. I cut the harness loose.
In the meantime, this guy is still shooting. When I cut loose, I rolled over in a little depression; fortunately, it was deep enough. I had my hand on my rifle, and I was able to squeeze off a couple of rounds where the fire was coming from, and that eased it up real quick. He stopped. I'm sure I didn't hit him, but at any rate, by golly, it got his attention that I was now in a position to start working on him.
Just a little bit after that, there was a good deal of thrashing going on on the other side of the hedgerow. It [turned out to be] my assistant gunner, Grover Boyce. There were two of us together now. It seemed like a better world all of a sudden. [Soon] we located a parapack, and believe me, we were fortunate. One of the packs we opened had a machine gun. We really felt pretty good having that thing in our hands. We didn't know where we were, but we knew that we weren't anywhere near where we were supposed to be. We were getting ready to go ahead and set up some sort of a decent roadblock in both directions when somebody yelled, "Here come the Krauts!" A little stone fence or hedge was leading on into the end of the town. A squad of Germans was following the hedge toward us. Guys popped their rifles at them, and they fired back at us. By then I was ready with my light machine gun, and I turned loose a couple of bursts, and they gave it back with an MG42, and we just traded for a couple of bursts back and forth. I took the Jerry out of there. There wasn't any more noise from him. We moved on after that.
We backed off about 200 yds. and, son of a gun, here came another group of Germans. All of D-day, we just moved, moved, moved, and we never seemed to get away from activity by the Germans. It was one fire fight after another. Getting up into the afternoon, pretty late, we went back inland a couple of hundred yards. We picked out a pair of good and decent spots, and we were going to take a break. I remember lying down and lighting a cigarette, and that's all I recall until I felt something nudging me and a real soft voice, kind of a questioning voice, was saying, "De lait, de lait, de lait." It was an old man who had just finished milking his cow and was offering me some of the warm milk. I took it, against all regulations, by golly. By gosh, I drank it. Not since being a kid did anything taste so good as that did.
That's the way D-day went for us. I don't believe any group anywhere in Normandy tied up any more of the enemy, proportionately, than this little gang did. And not a scratch on anyone. But I lost my best buddy. We found him and cut him down where he had been shot in an apple tree where he had gotten entangled.
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