The Allied invasion of Southern France, dubbed Operation Dragoon, caused Adolf Hitler to declare that August 15, 1944, D-Day for Dragoon, was the "worst day of my life." My grandfather jumped in the early morning hours of the 15th, part of the initial force tasked with disrupting German defenses before the amphibious landings. The ground that morning was covered with a thick fog and as he drifted towards it, my grandfather feared he was about to splash into the Mediterranean. He readied to slip out of his chute and boots, but thankfully found that solid ground lay underneath the mists. His captain was not so lucky, landing on a garden stake. He and my grandfather would soon meet in the army hospital near Naples.
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On D-Day Plus 2 (August 17), my grandfather's company was ordered to retrieve a small force led by Major William Boyle trapped in Les Arcs. The town was heavily defended and at some point my grandfather was hit by German artillery, the shrapnel slicing through his hip. He somehow made his way to a farmhouse owned by a family who spoke Italian. He spent a few days hiding in the family's attic. At one point, through the crevices in the floorboards, he could see German soldiers interrogating his hosts. The family stood firm and within a few days friendly soldiers made it to the farmhouse and evacuated my grandfather to a military hospital.
When he was evacuated, they took him by jeep to the temporary medical tent. He told me he kept praying he'd go unconscious from the pain, but that he never lost consciousness. He also took shrapnel in the chest, thankfully just missing his heart. At that tent on the beach, they determined they needed to do surgery then, that he wouldn't last. So they did the best they could, wrapped him up and put him on a boat to a hospital in Naples.
ReplyDeleteHe remembered being carried off the boat on a stretcher, too weak to speak, and he remembers some old Italian women there saying (in Italian) "look at this boy. He looks like one of us!" My father said he wanted to reply to them in Italian so bad, but couldn't.
Truly, The Greatest Generation.