[Music]
"Would you care to hear about D-Day? Well I was always as afraid of heights, and in 1941,
I was a senior in high school and I took a girl to the movies. They had a Movietone
news that showed him experimenting with paratroops, and my girl says 'Oh they
gotta be so brave,' and I say 'They gotta be so stupid.' But the idea fascinated me."
Daniel McBride Jr., enlisted and successfully made ranks with the Elite Paratroopers of the
101st Airborne Division. Once deployed overseas, his first mission would be a
crucial part of the Allied invasion of nazi-occupied Europe. In June of 1944,
the paratroopers were to make a daring jump behind enemy lines as part of Operation Overlord
D-Day. Dan and the US Airborne Division's were to clear a vast area of German opposition and heavy
artillery, allowing the invading Allied forces to effectively take the beaches and move inland.
"We was adjusting our chutes and had our faces all blackened. I asked lieutenant,
'Is this another dry run?' and I looked up and saw Eisenhower and his staff coming. He says,
'What do you think?' Well, Eisenhower come down and he talked to each one of us. He asked me,
'Where are you from, soldier?' I says, 'Ohio.' He said, 'Are you afraid?' And I said 'No.'
We've been training for this for two years and were ready to get it over with, you know?
We took off about 10:30 in the evening. Then we headed out over the channels. We
flew directly over the invasion fleet. It looked like the whole
channel was moving. I didn't think it was that many ships in the world."
But the paratroopers confidence would be a distant memory once they entered
the skies over Normandy and all hell broke loose.
"My jump was very bad, but soon as we got over the coast we ran into a fog bank and Murphy's Law took
over. The pilots are all young guys like we were and they panicked. There are streams of tracer
bullets and anti-aircraft fire coming up to the the pilot. Instead of slowing up for us to jump,
he speeded up and started trying to dodge these streams of tracers, and he was going too
low and too fast. But he turned a green light on. Lieutenant went, the sergeant went and I was going
... just reaching for that switch. And he rolled the plane sideways and my shins hit the bottom of
the door and that somersaulted me. Well, I got an awful opening shock when that thing opened.
And the first thing you do, is you look up and check your chute make sure it's
all there. I looked up and there was a ground and I looked down and there was my chute. Now,
I'd never been to France before but it didn't look right to me. My left foot was hung up in
the suspension lines. I bent over. I gonna try to crawl up my leg see if I get it out
of there. Just as I bent over, I slammed into the ground and the lights went out. Now I don't
know if I laid there for 10 seconds, 10 minutes or an hour, I have no idea,
but I became aware of the fact that I was laying in knee-deep wet grass and everything
hurt. Everything hurt. Even my hair hurt. And I didn't know which way was north because there
was a complete overcast. So I figure, well I'll judge what I think is north and start moving."
Accomplishing his missions objective would have to wait. For now,
Dan's main concern was finding a friendly platoon before the Germans found him.
"I was most lonesome one you ever seen your life, you know? And I come through this one hedge,
and there was a limb hanging down. So instead of walking out around it,
I picked it up and I was gonna duck under it,
and when I moved that limb it was a burst of machine-gun fire that went through that limb.
And I dropped down. I thought I was one of our guys. So I pulled out the clicker and
I clicked it, and that bought another burst. Then I knew it wasn't one of our guys. But I
could tell where he was. He was lying alongside the hedge and he was on the other side. So I
backtracked until I got about where I figured he was, pulled out a grenade and pulled out the pin,
let the handle fly off through (counting) '1000, 2000, 3000' then slammed it up over the hedge.
The way it went off, I got over there and I think that the grenade must have been right
alongside of his head the way it went off because ... Jesus ... he was a hell of a looking mess,
you know. I start moving off and I hadn't gone 20 yards and I caught a movement in the brush,
and so I pulled up. I was gonna shoot but then I wasn't sure, so I go 'click click' and hear
'click click click click click click.' It was my buddy Grinedger. We almost kissed each other!"
Dan was delighted to see a familiar face,
but the two were still hopelessly lost with enemy activity around every corner.
"He looked up the road, there's a 36 Ford in camouflage paint gift them slowly down the road,
and then it got up to about 35 40 yards. It was light enough we could see the silhouette
to the windshield of a German helmet. Under no conditions are you to take prisoners until
for the first 24 hours or until we make contact with the beach troops,
because we had missions to accomplish. So we didn't actually shoot prisoners,
we just didn't let them become prisoners, you know what I mean? So Grinedger pulled up his
rifle and he popped the guy. The back door popped open, some crowd got out reaching for a pistol,
and I pulled up. When I pulled the trigger, it went off four times and he went down."
The firefight had attracted the attention of a nearby lieutenant and three soldiers
of the 82nd Airborne Division. Dan was relieved.
Surely an officer would be able to point him in the right direction.
"And I said, 'Lieutenant, where in the hell are we?' He said, 'Well,
after looking at my maps and studying the country around here, I think but I'm not sure ... but I
think we're someplace in Europe.' None of us had the slightest idea where we were. We found
a village sign that says 'Bootville' and we said, 'Where the hell is Bootville?' So we spread our
maps out to look at, and we were way up here and should be way down here, but we knew which
way to go then. By the time it was starting to get dark on D-Day, I got back to where I should
have been on the jump. But it had been enough guys land close enough that he accomplished
the mission. They knocked the guns out and they secured the cause ways coming up off the beach.
I didn't contribute much to that invasion on D-Day, but I managed to survive anyway."
[Music]
"For the next six days, everything is all, all blurred. Two guys say, 'Well we're to take this
town Saint Calm Demotte.' Then another guy says, 'I thought we took that yesterday.' And he says,
'No, that was Saint Marie Demotte.' We was always attacking a town they had a 'Saint' in it."
Next, Dan and the 101st were off to the Netherlands to join the British in an
attempt to take a series of enemy-held bridges that would open a quick road to
Germany. The doomed operation, Market Garden, was the toughest combat that Dan had seen yet.
"We're getting the hell shot out of us, you know. I had a machine gun shot out of my hands while I
was shooting it. The bullet went through my pocket to a carton of cigarettes and hit my canteen. My
best buddy got hit in the chest and fell across my legs, and him and I had been together ever
since we went through basic training together. But he died right there. I heard the shell coming. I
knew it's gonna be close. So I start running, you know. I had a 42 pound machine gun on my shoulder,
showing over me and decimated the guy behind me. Blew me off the Dyke,
then I went down. That machine gun comes spinning down, landed first right on top of this ankle
barrel first. Broke all the bones in the ankle and a piece of shrapnel in the back of my leg."
Dan spent more than two months recuperating from his wounds all the while eager to rejoin his
brothers on the front lines. Little did he know, that when he finally reunited with the 101st,
the largest German offensive in years would be waiting right around the corner.
"They took the cast off my leg the tenth of December. The Germans broke through on the
16th and they stuck us in a Bastogne. It was colder than hell and none of us had any winter
clothes whatsoever. One specially big battle, on the third of January, we lost 45 men that day
from our company. A guy by the name of Carberry, the tank went over his foxhole. He jumped on the
back of it, got up on top and took a grenade, and pulled the pin. He wrapped on the lid of the
tank. The guy opened the top and he dropped the grenade in and sat on the lid. When it went off,
he jumped back and run out and got in the hole. The next morning he got killed by a sniper.
I got be sergeant by process of elimination. The platoon consisted of me, Willy Robinson,
the guy by the name of Brooks, and another guy ... I think his name was Johnson. He was a
replacement. That was a whole third platoon to F Company. This new lieutenant come up there,
a nice shiny bar and clean clothes. He said, 'I'm looking for Third platoon of F Company.' I says,
'Right here.' He says. 'Where are the rest of your men?' I said, 'There ain't
no rest.' He came in there with 60 men, two light machineguns, one heavy machine-gun,
a 37 millimeter anti-tank gun, and sixty men to relieve four of us. And
they're all nice and clean. We hadn't had our clothes off for over a month."
Ineptly dressed, scantily supplied and completely surrounded, the 101st held their lines in
Bastogne. By the end of January, the Battle of the Bulge had come to an end and the Allies were
permanently on the offensive until May of 1945 when Germany unconditionally surrendered. More
than seven decades have passed since Daniel McBride jr. crossed the English Channel and
landed on the French coast. It was his first trip to Europe but it would hardly be his last.
On a regular basis dan returns to Normandy for the annual celebration of the D-Day invasion.
"Yeah, about four years ago I was over in Normandy for the D-Day celebrations. This one guy come up
to me and started speaking to me in German, and I couldn't make him out. But he could speak French
and so call my buddy. So we communicated that way, and he said that he was in with German
Six Parachute Division. He had been wounded on June 12th in Normandy by Karentan by a guy from
101st airborne. Well, I was 101st airborne, and I was wounded on June 12th outside of Karentan by
a guy from the Germans Six Parachute Division. So we ended up with our arms round each other,
bought each other a beer and since that time, every time I go back to Normandy,
he brings his family in Germany and we all meet up and we're all friends from way back. He can't
speak English I can't speak German but we're all buddies, you know. Just shows you wars over.
[Music]
Hey everyone, I'm Josh from Memoirs of WWII, and I just want to say thank you so much for watching
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