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June 2, 2019 - The Ben Shapiro Show
01:05:52
The 75th Anniversary Of D-Day - The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special Ep. 53
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When I saw what was happening on that beach, I saw bodies floating, and then my mind was flashing through.
There's a son, a father, that will be coming home.
This week's episode of the Sunday Special is going to be a little bit different.
In just a few days, June 6th, it'll be the 75th anniversary of D-Day, the Allied invasion in Normandy, the beginning of the end of Nazi domination in Europe.
In today's episode, I'll be interviewing four very special veterans who fought in World War II, some in Normandy itself.
Jack Gutman, George Ciampa, Mike Levere, and Tom Rice.
I'm honored to have been able to spend time with these men, and I hope that you enjoy hearing their stories.
Well, I'm eager to welcome to the program Tom Rice.
He's a member of the 101st Airborne Division during D-Day.
Mr. Rice, thank you so much for joining the show.
So, what was it like to jump into the middle of the firestorm on D-Day?
Well, there's a lot of answers to that question, but mainly it was chaos.
Chaos, chaos.
And so everything that is chaotic probably occurs en route.
We were stationed at Merrifield Airport.
501 Battalion 1 was there, 506 Battalion 3, and 326th Airborne Engineers all boarding 45 aircraft in Section 14.
We headed down the runway, and in one aircraft, there was a fellow who was injured on one of the practice jumps.
And he was in the hospital.
He broke loose from the hospital and wasn't going to miss this escapade.
And he got to the airport, but without proper equipment.
But the kids scravenged up some stuff for him.
And he got in the plane and took the one spot open in Lieutenant Hamilton's aircraft.
And a rifle and whatever else he was supposed to have.
And as the plane was taking off, a rifle shot fired in the aircraft.
And Lieutenant Hamilton walked up and down the center aisle between the A-team guys and wanted to know who did it.
Of course, nobody's going to tell.
But he finally found out and he picked up this guy by the shoulder straps and Lifted him up and banged his head against the bulkhead took him down to the door and threw him out and Court of inquiry came into being and exonerated lieutenant Hamilton said he had all right to do that and the guy could have been shot for doing that but that was one the answer so we took off and
And I was jump number one, and I could see all that was going on, and I was looking down at 750 feet was the jump altitude, and above the door there's three lights, a white light, a green light, and a red light.
As we touch the coast, the white light goes out, and the red light goes on.
It gives us about eight minutes of time to get ready.
So what was happening in the aircraft was that Lieutenant Jansen was jumpmaster and he got everybody by verbal signals and hand signals because we did not have a door on the aircraft.
It just wasn't there.
Took it off and it wasn't there.
So the hand signals was stand up and hook up.
We hooked up to a steel cable that was about three-eighths of an inch in diameter and ran from the pilot's cabin to the aft of a little compartment there, and we snap fastened on that.
Lieutenant Jansen went to number 18 man, or he was 18 man, and he checked the equipment on number 17 man.
And it sounded off.
Everything's okay.
17 checked, 16 and on up to me, and I'm in the door.
And we were traveling 176 miles an hour, and that's too fast.
We were jumping too low.
How low?
I'm not sure.
I got no proof, but it was low.
Somewhere around 500 feet, I guess.
And my left foot was in the doorway.
Jansen announced, is everybody ready?
So we filled the air with sulfuric fumes of acid words.
And, yeah, we'll get the hell out of here as fast as we can.
We could unload that aircraft in between 10 and 18 seconds, I guess.
And everybody's pushing from the rear.
So his last words, for the most part, stand in the door.
And so here I am, repositioning in the door.
And with that speed, when I went out, the plane went up about 50 feet, I think, because the six parapacts were dropped.
All simultaneously.
And so that made it a much lighter load.
And so that kind of glued me to the floor, my hands on the outside of the door.
And as I stepped out, the prop blast caught me and slammed me up against the outside of the aircraft.
My left arm got caught in the lower left-hand corner of the door.
So I swung out, came back in body upside down, reserve parachute up to my face and musette bag halfway up there also.
I hit the side of the aircraft and bounced back out again.
I came back and hit the side of it and the rest of the guys in the stick were going out under me.
And as I came in the second time, I just was able to turn a little bit, and I released my arm from the side of the door.
And I had a $250 Waltham wristwatch on with a face toward the palm, and that scraped that off, and I lost that one.
I hope some good Frenchman got it.
So I fell free and I was down with a stretch out of the risers and the parachute canopy and the A vent pecked collar at the top of the parachute for the most part wasn't large enough to take care of all the flow of the air.
So I started to oscillate to right and dump it out and swing to the left and dump it out and within a matter of five or six seconds I was on the ground.
And with all that padding in front of me, I made a right forearm parachute landing fall and didn't get injured.
So, here I am.
Well, once you had landed, what was the next move?
To meet up with the rest of the people in your company?
Well, the next thing was to get out of that harness.
And everything was so tight that I couldn't.
And I had a double zipper here on my jumpsuit with a switchblade knife in it.
And so I reached for that and opened it up, got the switchblade knife, pushed the button, now it flips the blade and I start sawing the webbing, trying to get loose from that.
And number two and three man came up.
They had the mortar.
So we had to jump a little canal, so we did, and we recognized each other.
Five or six of us got together there on the roadside, and one of them said to me, I have a hand grenade with a pin pulled.
I said, all right, give it to me, but you can't put a pin back in a hand grenade.
It's got a little bent end on it, and that's it.
He might have pulled it and didn't know what to do with it.
Okay, give me the hand grenade.
Everybody down.
I took it and I put a death grip on that thing so that the spoon wouldn't slip out of my hand.
If it did, I got five seconds.
So I rolled over to the side of the road and dropped in the canal.
Rolled back in the center of the road and it exploded and sent shrapnel around us and water and mud splattered us.
So we got up and for the most part we began to break up and about six of us went down the road to a... I saw a small house on the side of the road.
Well, we got more hand grenades than we got Germans, so let's investigate.
So another fellow and I, Floyd Martin, and I went to the front door, and I said, Floyd, don't bang on the door like an ugly American.
Just knock on it, you know, and we'll see what happens.
And the rest of the guys, I sent them around to the back in case there were Germans in there.
So the Frenchman finally came to the door, and he had a white nightgown from shoulder all the way to the floor.
He had a white tousled cap with a puffball on the end of it.
Same white.
And I pictured him as Scrooge.
And so I started to laugh.
And I knew I was getting in danger when I came back to my senses, because once you get your mind taken out of the danger into something that is, for the most part, could happen in a city, you've got a problem.
So I quickly came back to senses that I was in danger.
So we pushed him aside, he was blasé because he'd been occupied by Germans for four or five years and put the map on the floor and pointed in three different directions and sounded off with the name Tarantino and he pointed in the right direction.
And in the meantime his wife came in dressed the same way and he excused himself and he came back in about five seconds, five to twenty seconds and he had some ammunition, gave us six and he kept two.
When you first jumped out, I mean, it sounds like it was, you mentioned that it was chaos.
You came in and it was silent, correct?
I mean, was there fire?
Were you under fire when the planes were dropping you?
Well, there's so much noise you really don't know.
But I could see the burst of flame and a hurricane of fire came up in the form of a rectangle.
And I knew we were heading toward that rectangle.
And luckily, the pilot swung way to the right.
And that took us away from Drop Zone B toward Drop Zone D. And I just ended up on the southern end of Drop Zone D. So what was your first interaction like with the enemy when you did hit the ground?
The 6th German Parachute Infantry Regiment was having a party one night, June 5th.
One of the platoons, or rather, one of the platoons was at the beach, Causeway 4.
And our mission was to hold Causeway 2, 3, and 4 so the beach forces coming in could go through us and continue on into the hedgerows and chase the Germans out.
We ended up there at a place called Hell's Corner.
All of this was going on, and we spotted the Germans coming in toward us from Causeway 4.
For the most part, having fun, smoking, and a rifle slung on their shoulder and not thinking there's any enemy around.
We were also observed from Clarenton.
by the first or second German regiment and they were pretty myopic because they saw Germans and they saw Americans milling around down there and didn't know what to do.
So we set up a defense and the Germans walked right into it.
We fired on them.
They had machine guns and mortars on both the ends of the defense line and the regimental colonel Howard Johnson I took two German-speaking GIs and went out and tried to get a hold of the regimental colonel of the German contingency.
And he did, and he said, you guys are ready to surrender?
He said, no, it's too early to surrender.
We don't surrender under these conditions.
So they turned around, walked back in, and they got fired on.
Then half an hour later they went out and tried it again and they told the regimental colonel, German regimental colonel, that to have the men that are wounded put bayonets on their rifles, jab them in the ground, put their rifle butt or their helmet on their rifle butt and we'll come out and pick them up and we'll have a truce for a half an hour.
So for the most part that was what was going on.
Now back at Hill's Corner, I was right next to a lieutenant who had jumped with us, and he had communications with the United States naval ship Quincy.
And he was trying to communicate with them because Colonel Johnson wanted fire.
Put on the rear end of our column because the Germans were coming down from Cherbourg on N13 and were going to invade the area and get in behind us.
We were surrounded.
Every time we went in, we were surrounded.
But we didn't want that to happen.
So he was making contact, and they used the baseball lingo, and for LeMars, who won this game and who won that, who's national champion, et cetera.
So they made good communication.
And there were three rounds fired.
I think they were 18-inch guns.
I'm not sure, but they were big, heavy ones.
And I heard one of the first rounds whistle over my head.
And boy, what a racket it made.
It was long.
The second one was short.
The third one was right on.
And from there, I was given the detail to take two men and go to La Barquette Lock and outpost it.
So we went over to La Barquette Lock and I set up a defensive system.
The locks were closed, the poulders were flooded, and for the most part, the ones that were not flooded had rommel asparagus stuck in the ground.
They were poles, trees that were stripped of bark and branches, pointed and jammed in the ground, and then wires strung from treetop to treetop.
And on some of them they had mines.
It was an anti-glider activity that took place and anti-parachute.
And they told us before we jumped, make sure your legs are crossed when you come down, relax your ankles and hope for the best.
So, crossing the Lauberkette Lock, decided not to go into the house.
Because if any one patrol came through, they could surround us, set it on fire, drive us out, and do us in real quick.
So we set up in the orchard right next to the house, the right-hand side of the house.
And we were about 10 yards apart, and we had a pretty good idea we were being observed, because the Germans at Carentan were above sea level.
And we were to stay there until called back.
On the 6th,
As the daybreak was coming into being, I set up a series of steel stakes, and strung wire between the steel stakes, and hung tin cans full of bolts and nuts and rocks from the wires, and stretched it across the areas that the German patrol might approach from the left,
Absolutely no talking whatsoever from this point on until the next morning.
If anything happens, if any rattling occurs, just start shooting.
And so, at two in the morning, we started shooting.
And we got one.
He laid out there for quite some time, moaning and groaning.
And the gurgling sound of a dying man stops all conversation, as you know.
So, one of the guys had some mortuary experience.
He went out with his trench knife and finished him off, and in the morning we pulled the guy in and dug a trench for him under an apple tree.
And I took a couple branches and broke them and made a Christian cross and put it at the head of it, and I cut off his wings.
I still have the wings on the book I wrote.
And never get caught with a German souvenir in your pants or your pocket or anywhere, because they'll do you in.
Especially us guys in baggy pants, as we called the Germans, Green Devils.
Fallschirmjagers, Green Devils.
So we stayed there until June 7th, and then were called back and put in reserve, because the 1st and 4th Infantry Divisions had already moved through us.
Well, more on that in just one second.
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So you're going back now on the 75th anniversary of D-Day and you're actually jumping out of a plane again.
You're 97 years old.
On a C-47.
One of them that took place in the invasion.
How do you feel about that?
That's going to be great because I'm going to jump tandem this time and go for the ride.
So I think there'll be more than one in the aircraft.
They're going to jump a static line, maybe 1,200 feet, and then I've got to go to 13,000.
And we're going to have an American flag, a French flag, and a 101st Airborne Division flag.
I think we're going to tether it from weights.
and attached to the harness and we come in and we're supposed to be spectacular.
We did it before at Montpellier the year before and it worked out very nice.
- So how old were you when you jumped out the first time? - First combat jump, 20, almost 21. - What was your kind of training when you first jumped out?
How much training did you have to go through to become a paratrooper?
Two years plus we had, for the most part.
And we did anything and everything, and anything and everything was experimental, because airborne activities were so new that it was experimental all the way.
What was your most difficult jump?
Most difficult one?
Was that first one in Normandy.
All of my jumps were great, except that Normandy one.
And those were things that I thought that they had thought of, but nobody ever thought about.
A plane going up maybe 30, 40, or 50 feet when the para packs were dumped.
And I thought machine gun bullets was going to come up through the bottom of the aircraft and strike me and hit me in the vital spots and change my plumbing.
Well, thank you so much for everything that you've done.
And congratulations on the upcoming jump.
We'll certainly be watching.
So good luck with that, obviously.
Thank you so much for stopping by.
but I really appreciate it.
So we're here with First Lieutenant Michael Levere, who's a B-24 navigator in the European theater.
Thank you so much for your time.
I really do appreciate it.
I'll begin with this.
Where was your first mission as a flyer?
My first mission was to test what they called Azon bombings.
We were chosen to take this new device out where the bombs had fins on them that were radio controlled.
And we dropped these bombs, and we could actually move them to correct its course.
Couldn't move them anyway this way.
The rate was not movable, but the course was.
And we flew two missions like that, and they were off the coast of Denmark, some target off the coast.
It was an oil refinery, actually, that we were supposed to hit.
And I found that to be a rather easy mission.
They usually gave you an easy one to get you used to flying, you know, to learn the ropes, so to speak.
Now, they call it a milk run, but I never liked the term milk run, because even on a milk run, somebody is shooting flak at you, shooting 88s at you, and if one piece hits you and kills you, it wasn't a milk run.
And I remembered it was a lot of flak.
Well, you've got flak on every city.
They were very well defended.
But we did mostly daylight bombing, so we could see these guns firing at us, you know, and it was black.
When a shell, an 88mm shell, explodes in your airplane, all you see is a big puff of black smoke and a flash.
And you don't hear anything, really.
It's not that close to you, because if it gets any closer, you're gone.
I mean, just shrapnel.
Every mission we went on, we came home with holes in the airplanes.
Little, because, you know, when a shell goes off, it just splatters a whole area with flak, what they call flak, which is just fragments of metal.
And we had a lot of holes.
Fortunately, none of the holes were critical.
So we always got back on our mission.
The second mission I flew was a rather difficult one.
I think we went to Magdeburg, which is deep in Germany.
And that's when I really saw people getting knocked out of the sky and things like that.
It was quite a sight to see a plane get hit and spiral down and see parachutes coming out of them and falling to the ground.
Unless you actually see the real thing, you can't imagine how frightening that is, you know, that it could have been you and you wind up in Germany in a prisoner of war camp.
But I've seen quite a few of that.
I was very lucky that we never got seriously hit to where we had to abort the mission because we were struck by German fire.
We actually aborted the mission because something went wrong with the airplane and we had to come home.
But the way you, you know, you got credit for every mission that you dropped your bombs over enemy territory to a certain target.
They gave you certain targets of opportunity, which meant that if you had to abort, you could pick one of these targets of opportunity, bomb it, make a record of it, and they would give you credit for a mission.
So how many missions did you actually end up flying?
So, I did a total of 36 combat missions.
That did not include several other missions, which included bringing gasoline supplies to General Patton, who was running up, at that time, by the time I had to do that, he was moving up the French into Belgium.
And he had run out of gasoline, or was running short on gasoline, and what they did to our B-24s and our squadron was take the bomb racks out and put two 500-gallon gasoline tanks in there to carry automobile gasoline, because that's what his tanks used.
These were called gas-hauled missions, and since they were administrative-type missions, they were not counted as a regular mission.
But in my opinion, they were more dangerous than a regular mission, because of the amount of gasoline that was actually in and around the airplane from slight leaks in the tanks, and the fumes, you couldn't smoke or get anywhere near fire, the airplane would blow up.
We had four tanks in the wings.
We had two Tokyo tanks and two main tanks.
And so we just flew with the Tokyo tanks with aviation gas, and the first place we landed was Clostres, France, where on landing, the Germans had just left that area about three days prior to us landing there, and there was quite a few bomb holes in the runway.
And so when I finally got there, I asked the pilot, he says, do you think we could land on that shorter runway?
He says, we've got to, we've got to get rid of this gasoline.
So we flew very low over the runway to look at it, and I said, there's a lot of holes in that runway.
He says, well, we're going to land anyway.
Unfortunately, at that point, my pilot had overshot the end of the runway too far in, and we wound up going off the end of the runway into a meadow of mud.
And the plane sank right down in the bomb bays, and we were so afraid of the plane exploding, we all just got out of it and ran like heck to get out of the way.
And the only other missions that I did that I did not get credit for was at the end of the war, many of the ground people that serviced the airplanes at the airbase during the war We're now able to get in the airplane.
We took 10 of them at a time and flew them over Germany, over the rooftops, to show them the amount of damage in Germany.
And I'm telling you, there wasn't a rooftop left in Germany when we got through with it.
I mean, it was really destroyed.
So, in a second, I'm going to ask you what it was like both dropping the bombs and also being on the other end of receiving flak.
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So, what was the mission that scared you the most?
I mean, we've talked about a couple of the gas haul missions.
You've talked about seeing the other airplanes, you know, explode in front of you.
The most dangerous mission, I think, was Sosun and Berlin.
Because the fortifications around Berlin, the amount of guns that they had down there defending the city was incredible.
I mean, the sky was just black with flak.
And Zosen was similar to Camp David.
It was their headquarters where all of the German high mucky mucks, the generals and all that, would meet to plan out maneuvers or whatever to enhance their position in the war.
And we found out through intelligence that there was going to be a big German meeting of very important generals and high people in the German army that were going to meet there.
And this was close to the end of the war already, you know.
They were losing the war pretty bad by that time.
And we bombed Zosen.
I have never seen so much flak.
I mean, the sky was black with it.
So on D-Day, what was your involvement with the invasion?
I was in the 2nd Air Division of the 8th Air Force, the 96th Combat Wing, which consisted of three groups.
One of mine was the 458th Bomb Group, and I was involved in the D-Day landings, flying one mission that day to bomb airfields somewhere behind the lines where they were going to invade Normandy.
We weren't really aware of what was going on.
It was very secretive before the invasion.
And we were just assigned a mission, and it happened to be the D-Day landings.
And we knew there was a lot of ships in the channel at the time.
We wondered, what's going on?
This is a big thing.
And we did our mission, bombed this airfield, and came home.
How exact could you be with the bombing, given the technology and the constraints?
The bombing, the Norton bomb site that we used at the time was fairly accurate.
However, only the lead plane actually aimed the bombs.
The rest of the planes in this formation, there could be as many as 50 or 100, maybe as high as 400 planes in a formation.
They would drop on smoke markers that the lead planes would drop.
They would locate the target, and the bombardier in that plane would aim the bombs, and then the rest of the formation would just drop on his smoke markers.
And the accuracy was as good as the guy that did the initial aiming.
If he missed, everybody missed.
And that was the case most of the time, believe it or not.
As good as the bomb site was, there was so much bad weather.
During the winters, when we were bombing, that we never saw the ground half the time, you know.
We'd get a little break in the clouds and drop these bombs and everybody would drop their bombs on the smoke.
And if he missed, everybody missed.
And once you joined, what was the training regimen like to become a flyer?
Well, they picked us up, we got on a train, we wound up at Keesler Field, Mississippi, where we initially took our basic training for flight duties, you know.
And you still, you were classified for all three, but you hadn't been determined whether you would be a pilot, a bombardier, or a navigator.
It depended on what the Air Force needed at the time, the Air Corps needed at the time.
It was not the Air Force that it was called, the Army Air Corps, so we were part of the Army.
I had trouble passing through the high altitude oxygen chamber test.
That's a test where they put you into this chamber and they simulate, well they don't simulate it, but they actually decompress the chamber until you reach what is the equivalent of about 35,000 feet.
And you spend about an hour in there and at that altitude you take your mask off, your oxygen mask, so you can feel what anoxia, which is a lack of oxygen, Would feel like if it happened up in the air.
They'd ask you to try to write or talk and speak like that and so you would learn what it felt like if you didn't have oxygen.
At any rate, I couldn't pass that test because previous to my entrance into the army, I had an accident where I broke both my kneecaps and apparently when I got At that altitude, I got a lot of pain in my knees from bubbles or something.
I don't know what it was.
Anyway, I had to be decompressed and taken out of the chamber.
And then they rescheduled me to try it again.
Because I never told them about the accident.
Had I told them, they would have washed out right away.
Because you can't have broken bones and become an Air Corps man.
I was rescheduled for this test.
Meanwhile, the other people that were in the chamber with me, and these were all these people that were L's, K's, L's and M's, you know, their last name, had shipped out to Kingman, Arizona for night gunnery training.
And while they were at Kingman, Arizona, these people were on a bus going to night gunnery practice, and that bus was hit by a Southern Pacific freight train going 60 or 70 miles an hour and killed them all.
These are all the guys, and they were all killed.
One day I was coming out of school at the university, and this news kid was hacking, hey, there's 27 air cadets killed in Arizona, blah, blah, blah.
So I bought a newspaper, and I was astonished at what I read.
Had I have passed that test, I would have been on that bus.
So what was the rest of your crew like?
So you served with the same crew for the entire?
No, I did not fly with the same crew.
I flew about, I'd say, around 18 missions with my initial crew.
At the end of the war, I was assigned to take a—they were going to send me back by ship, and I didn't want to do that.
I wanted to come back with an airplane.
So they said, well, if you could get a spot from some guy that needed a navigator, you would get home.
Because the crew that I was flying with, they dispersed and they were broken up.
I don't know where they all went.
But what I did is I got a hold of a friend of mine that knew a pilot that needed a navigator.
And I got on that crew and flew a B-24 back from my airbase back to Boston.
At that time, the Japanese were still fighting in the Pacific, and so they reassigned us to go into B-29 training, and during that time, the atom bomb was dropped, and of course, there was no need to do anything further, so that was all canceled, and we were sent up to Fort Dix, New Jersey for, well, they gave you a choice.
Did you want to stay in, or did you want to get out?
If you had enough combat points, you could get out, which I did.
So, went up to Fort Dix and was discharged at Fort Dix.
Wow.
Mike Levere, thank you so much for your time.
I really appreciate you stopping by.
- Bye. - Thank you very much. - Joining us is Jack Gutman, Navy corpsman, who served on the beaches of Normandy and Okinawa.
Mr. Gutman, thanks so much for joining us.
So what was it like to be serving on D-Day?
What was your experience like? - Well, we hit that beach, There was no deal where you could land right on the sand or anything.
There were barriers.
And it turned out as... What I did later on was to find out after 66 years of post-traumatic stress, what the heck happened.
because when I came on their 18-year-old mind, I saw bodies floating.
I saw bodies all on the beach.
Body parts all over.
And it was so tough.
I mean, be confronted.
I've seen blood and so forth and other things, but I tell people, have you seen Saving Private Ryan?
Well, I says, just kind of double that a little bit, because the one thing Private Ryan didn't show was all the body parts laying around.
And in my mind was flashing through, there's a son, a father, that won't be coming home.
And you're in a I was scared as hell.
I just was scared.
Seeing wounded people and what was going on, and there was firing on the beach when we arrived.
Even at that time, there was firing.
I don't know where it was from, but there was explosions.
There were mines all over the beaches and all.
And what I had to find out, which I found out later, why in the heck did this happen?
Why did we lose 9,000 men, you know, for that battle?
Then, when I read about it, the big problem was...
They shelled the beaches, and then they were supposed to send over, there was actually 5,000 ships, 11,000 planes, there was 4,500 LCVPs, landing craft of various types, and then there was 150,000 troops, English and Americans and all.
It was a massive force.
It was something you figured, this is beyond comprehension.
And then I found out why we lost so many men.
It turned out that the planes that were supposed to hit the bunkers, there was cloud cover.
And they said, we can't see the beach, so they said, well, think when it is, drop the bombs.
So they dropped the bombs a mile at least past there.
And the bunkers were not hit at all.
And they had some machine guns, which I found out could shoot off 150 bullets a minute or more, and just mowed these poor guys in the first, second, third wave, whatever it is.
It was just, and one of the problems that would happen, that's why we saw so many bodies in the water and all, is that guys were jumping off, which I found out even from some of the wounded there, I was asking, what happened?
And these guys were scared.
And when they dropped the ramp and machine guns were mowing the guys down, they jumped off the side of the boat.
Now, when that happened, all of a sudden these heavy packs that they have on them, which is at least 50 pounds or more, and they went right down.
If they couldn't get the packs off, they drowned.
So some guys never even got a shot off or anything like that.
And it was just one heck of a mess on that whole thing, on that beach.
What would you do from there with the wounded?
My job was to assist the medical group that was already there.
There were guys that had been patched up and all, and there was other guys that are not.
And I tell people, no matter what they're doing, and when I speak at different places, when you're on a team and you're doing things, never think you are a lone man on the totem pole.
Because when I was going in, I was a corpsman, first class, really one of the lowest men on the totem pole.
I was a medic to do something.
But I found one interesting thing.
When you come upon the wounded, and the guy is pleading, Doc help me?
Or am I going to make it?
And you look at him gushing blood and you're putting packs on him and giving him a shot of morphine with the syrettes, you know.
All of a sudden I realized, now I think about it, that to that man I was the most important thing in his life.
And then, and I try to tell people, no matter where you are on the totem pole, you do your job and do it right.
We went from one to the other.
Some guys, it was the strangest thing to watch how some people die.
Like one guy was talking to me, and he says, Doc, I finally, I got wounded, but I'm going to go home.
And he says, I'll make it, right, Doc?
And I said, yeah, you're going to make it.
And then he dies.
It was strange, you know.
And then I've seen other deaths where people just wind up, almost sit up and talk to you a little bit, and then they go back and die.
Time just flies by.
You go from one to the other, and then there's some people you have to redress because when the first medics go through, they leave them there to be evacuated, and that was going to be part of our job.
The blood gushing so much that you have to redress it.
Now you can't take the old, the one that's on, you don't take it off.
You just put a new one on.
I have to admit, myself, I was really scared.
I mean, it was, when you see what I saw there, and this is an 18-year-old mind, and there was guys that I saw dead there, and I thought of the guys on the ship earlier that day, laughing and kidding around and all this.
It was just a horrible thing.
And so we evacuated these people back onto, I think it's like those flat things, you could put a lot of wounded on there.
So, we did that.
We loaded them on.
And then finally, I think, then we went back with the wounded, taking care of whatever wound we had, back to the hospital, which was in Nettley, England.
Now, there was a guy there I took care of.
He became almost like friends with me, this officer.
He was a young lieutenant.
And he was telling me about his wife and kid.
And I just felt for him.
But he was losing spinal fluid.
And when you lose spinal fluid, I asked the doctor, is he going to make it?
And the doctor said, no, he won't.
And he was talking to me and he says, "You know, I'm looking forward to getting home to my wife." And he's saying, "Thanks for helping me.
I know you're doing the best for me, and I'm looking forward, and I'll remember you.
And I know he's going to die.
And when he died, he went into delirium, because when you lose spinal fluid, all kinds of things happen.
And then, if a man dies on your watch when you're in a hospital with him, not on the beach or anything, but there, you have to pack every cavity in his body So he won't leak before rigor mortis sets in.
And I had to do this four times here in Okinawa and everything else.
And I'll tell you, Ben, it becomes very personal, Ben.
It's obviously harrowing stuff.
And you had some experiences in the Pacific theater as well.
Well, for instance, I was at the English hospital.
I was there for over a month, taken care of.
Then they gave me a 30-day leave.
15 day leave.
And then I figured I'm going to go to a stateside hospital, you know, duty.
I've already served my deal.
I went through this hell.
And all of a sudden, they needed medics because they were knocking off the medics.
See, in Normandy, we landed with a red cross and a patch on his arm.
And that was fine.
But in Okinawa, They did it in the beginning, and then the Japanese, it was a target, so they were killing the medics off.
And so therefore there was a big rush to have a bunch of medics over there, so I guess whether I had Normandy invasion or whatever, they needed medics.
And I wound up there, so next thing I was on a ship called the buoy, and we went on to Okinawa, and they made the invasion there.
And we lost 14,000 men in Okinawa by that finish.
62,000 wounded.
I tell you, and these are all young people.
And you see so much death and everything like that.
I think the picture Hacksaw Ridge brought out a very good thing on that thing.
And I realized that at that time there, I was probably taking care of a lot of that wounded.
I didn't know about Hacksaw Ridge or anything like that.
But the other thing in Okinawa that was horrible was the kamikaze planes.
The kamikaze planes of these young guys that get in, they got a bomb on the ship and they fly over and they just go right into the ship.
Well, I was just finishing taking care of some patients on my ship, the buoy, and I'm up on deck having a cigarette.
I smoke two packs a day then.
I don't smoke anymore.
And what happened then is that All of a sudden, a big gun went off right near me, and that caused me to lose half my hearing on that.
And I'm in here battle station, so I'm running, and all these kamikaze planes are coming in.
And then I see them, some are hitting some of the ships.
Well, I'm running to the sickbay deal down the deck there.
I kid you not, there's a picture I had in my file and all, it's in my book too, in this book here.
And that there was, I saw this kamikaze plane coming in low, And he veered, you could see by that look, because it was between, we were like a football field, a little over a football field, between me and the battleship New Mexico.
And I see him coming in low, and he veers and goes right into the bridge of the battleship New Mexico.
The explosion was horrendous.
And I stood there just, I could not believe it, because see, my job is to heal people, or try to help them.
And I'll see a man giving up his life for the first time, purposely.
He was alive there, and then he's dead.
I tell you, Ben, that stayed with me, plus all the other things, and I wound up.
Finally, when I got home, I said, I made it.
Thank God for that.
But I was a different type person.
Well, in your book, you actually talk a fair bit about your struggles with PTSD.
I was wondering if maybe you could talk a little bit about that.
We called it Battle Fatigue and You'll Get Over It.
It didn't get over, it was getting worse.
In my book, I didn't have it in there, then my daughter made me put it in my book, my daughter Paula, and she said, you've got to Tell people what your flashbacks were like.
I said, well, they were just horrible.
And then finally she said, well, I think maybe they'd like to know.
Well, all the flashbacks from different guys are all different.
But my flashbacks were, I keep seeing, and they happen quickly, or when I'm sleeping especially, I see the invasion over and over again.
I see the body parts.
I see the guy screaming, "Mama, mama." It's all magnified.
And it's just a horrible feeling.
And it kept getting worse.
Well, when I came out of the Navy, I didn't talk about being in the service.
I didn't want to talk about the war.
Because I figured they'd throw me in an insane asylum.
I'm very honest with you.
I'm telling the truth.
I felt I would wind up in a mental institution, and what happened in my training, I spent a few weeks or so in a mental institution taking care of patients, and it scared the heck out of me.
So I didn't want that, so I never told anyone.
So finally I was at the Veterans, and finally he says, you ever wounded?
And I said, I'm going to finally tell you.
At 66 years, and I was doing the craziest things, Ben.
I was self-medicating myself with alcohol.
I was doing the craziest things.
Let's say if you were talking to me and you said, Jack, I got this problem and so forth.
You got a financial problem.
I would write a check for 200 and say, here's a gift.
And I was draining my bank account with not being refilled.
And I was draining and causing problems for my wife.
I was telling bosses off.
I was doing the craziest things that I couldn't understand.
And I justified what I did.
Well, it just turned out that I wound up finally telling this guy all these things that are happening to me.
And he said, You've got post-traumatic stress.
And I said, never heard of it, because we did not know the word post-traumatic stress.
So I wound up, he set me up with a therapist, a psychiatrist first, and he gave me a bunch of tests.
Then he says, you've got some serious problems.
Then he set me up with a veteran, and a guy named Dylan Bender.
Great, great man.
Very compassionate.
Well, the first session I had with him, and I was reluctant about going, but my first session with him, he took me back to Normandy.
And it was so traumatic for me.
I was crying.
And then he said, Jack, What we're going to do is we're going to melt those cubes that are memory in your head and then we're going to wind up.
You will be able to talk about it and get back to normal.
He says, I will see you next week.
And in my mind, I looked at him and I thought and I said, the hell you will.
I'm not coming back because I didn't want to go through that again.
And then he said, I want you to think about it.
So I left and I figured 66 years of doing the craziest things.
If you invited me to your house, I would not bring one glass of a bottle of wine.
I would bring a magnum of champagne or a gallon of wine so I would not run out.
And I was with my family on Thanksgiving at my son's house and we are Playing, I'm playing, I'm drinking all the wine I brought and everything.
And when they set the table on Thanksgiving, and I sat down at the table, they brought the meal, my face fell right into the plate in front of them.
My family was the most embarrassing thing, and they were going to have an intervention with me.
Then my daughter Paula, who was like a therapist, she got me to go to a grief recovery program she was in.
She's very good at it.
And she got me to finally cut back on the liquor.
And from cutting back on the liquor, I finally wound up going to the therapist.
And I went three and a half years with this therapist.
And he finally, little by little, Cured me of it, and then I was able to talk about it, and then finally write a book.
And this is just kind of a short book and all.
I kept it very honest, and I kept the book cheap, you know, just so I won people.
I give away a lot of my books because I want people to know you don't have to Be in a war, to go through post-traumatic stress disorder.
If you've got any kind of stress or any problem, and I tell people when I speak at different places, to get help.
And if you know a veteran, and I plead with veterans, if you're a veteran and you're going through this thing where you're thinking of suicide, for God's sakes, don't do it.
Please.
Endo.
I say this because what I went through, and now I'm able to just be free to talk about it.
I go to schools and everything else, and it makes a big difference.
It's made a whole change in my whole life now.
I'm sorry I had to talk so much.
I didn't mean to.
No, please.
I mean, it does raise the question, I think, that a lot of people would ask, which is there are thousands of people, thousands of men who I'm sure have experienced the same thing that you have in terms of PTSD, particularly in the aftermath of the things that you've seen.
Was it worth it?
I mean, what made it worth it for America to do this?
You mean to go to war?
Oh, absolutely, because I know and I've seen so many things and talked to so many people, you know, in various countries and whatever it may be too.
We are not perfect, but we have the most wonderful country in the world.
I just got through.
I came back from Washington just this last Sunday.
And it was my first time back there in many, many, many years when I was a kid there.
And I went to the memorials.
To see the memorials touches my heart.
And when I saw Arlington, I always cry.
And what was so interesting is that they had a police escort for the two buses of, you know, 60-some people.
It was so exciting.
And the thing that touched our heart is that they gave us, like, V-mails.
You used to get V-mails and the letters from different people from our family.
They were in personal envelopes.
They gave it to us on the plane while we were going to Washington.
And we read them.
There wasn't a dry eye of those veterans.
Hearing from school kids and family, I got them and I was crying too.
The other thing that was very emotional for me was when I got to Baltimore.
Those people coming from restaurants and standing out and applauding just touched your heart.
You just could not believe it.
And then when we got back to Los Angeles, they had a huge A group upstairs and then one downstairs, and somebody, a young cadet, comes up with my name on it and says, Welcome home, Jack Gutman.
And all the people applauding.
I mean, you talk about tears.
That was a lot of tears, because all of a sudden you realize they remember, you know?
And it touches a lot of veterans' hearts.
Well, thank you for coming, and God bless you.
I mean, you're the one who's done the service.
I just sit here and talk for a living.
So, again, thank you so much.
It's really an honor to have you here, and I really appreciate your time, sir.
Thank you, Ben.
Well, it's an honor and a pleasure to welcome to set George Chompa.
He was a Private First Class during Normandy and actually served in the U.S.
Army Graves Registration.
I was wondering, can you tell me what your experiences of landing on the beaches of Normandy, what was that like?
Well, when we got to the shores of Normandy...
They say there are 4,000 or 5,000 ships out there, and I believe it.
Ships all around you, and a shelling above us, 88s.
You could hear them screaming.
We call them Screaming Mimis.
But we saw ships getting hit, and I remember a tanker blowing up, and there's bodies in the water, and there's debris in the water.
I was 18 years old, 112 pounds.
I was a skinny kid.
I finally got down the rope ladder.
And with all the gear on.
And I get into an LCI landing craft.
That's the smaller Higgins boats.
And we're heading in.
I could hear the 88s screaming over us.
And I remember we started heading in and we came back out.
And we started heading in and we came back out.
And I thought it was because of the shelling, thinking we were going to get hit any time.
But I found out years later that the guy that's driving that thing, he's looking for a place to land because the Germans had obstacles in the water to keep us from getting all the way in, so we had to wade in.
You've probably seen pictures of that.
And so I was so frightened.
I mean, I was blacked out.
Momentarily.
I don't remember getting off the LCI.
And I talked to a buddy of mine years later, and I said, Hey, Gus, tell me, what happened?
Did we really wade in the water?
He said, Don't you remember that?
I said, No.
He said, Well, we did.
We waded in, held our rifles over our heads and everything.
So our job was to gather the dead.
They didn't want any dead on the beaches, morale of other troops coming in.
And so we picked up paratroopers that had landed in the channel erroneously because, I don't know what happened, but they dropped them in the wrong place and the parachutes came down over them.
These paratroopers are loaded with gear and they drown.
And so we wrapped them in their parachutes and buried them.
We were attached to the 1st Brigade Combat Engineers for provisions.
And the 4th Division landed on that beach, on Utah Beach.
Half of our guys, two platoons landed at Omaha and two at Utah.
And I was at Utah.
So can you talk a little bit about how you ended up in graves registration?
What was that like?
And what were you doing in the lead up to D-Day?
Well, you've got to go back to when I was a kid, because when I was five years old, and again at seven years old, a few situations in the family with deaths.
And so I had a big fear of death as a little boy.
They put me in a Catholic school, and you had to attend funeral masses, and so I dropped out of school.
I just couldn't handle it.
Anyway, when I turned 18, I tried to get in the Air Corps.
I went down to take the exam, and my eyes were 20-22, and so I flunked.
So then I got drafted and got sent to Cheyenne, Wyoming, and got put in a graves registration company.
I said, what the hell is that?
Graves?
And when I heard what I was going to have to do, I thought, I've got to get out of this.
Well, luckily, at least temporarily, there was an air base next to us, Fort Warren, and they were looking for pilots.
This is in March of 44, like three months before the invasion.
My brother was in the Air Corps.
He was a pilot, and my brother-in-law also.
And it looked like a glorious thing to be a part of.
They walked with a swagger, hats tipped, you know, the girls loved them.
Anyway, nobody knows this except me.
They lowered the eye requirements to 20-30 with no glasses, so I could pass that.
So I took the test.
It was great.
They notified my company commander, and, you know, he hit the roof.
And he was very upset.
I didn't go to him, first of all.
I just, guys were recruiting, and I said, hey, here I am, let's go.
So anyway, there was a company going overseas right away.
They needed one man.
So I was the replacement.
The guys were all older than I was.
They were all kidding me on the ship on the way overseas.
Don't worry, Champa, they're going to turn the ship around and take you home.
Roosevelt, our president, said no 18-year-old will set foot on foreign soil.
Nobody knows that either.
So we shipped out.
On the way over there, in the middle of the night, we're sleeping down in a hold, and all of a sudden there's a big explosion, and the ship was rocking, everybody's scurried up on a deck, and then found out that there was a torpedo plane that was dropping a torpedo, and the Navy gunner shot him down.
That was a big explosion.
And the Navy gunner, I had met the day before, he was my age, and he showed me his quarters, and we got acquainted.
His name was Dennis Reed from Cicinatti, Ohio.
I never did get in touch with him after that and I wish I had because he really saved our lives.
Can you tell us a little bit about your experiences digging graves for your fellow soldiers?
I saw bodies, I remember I had that fear of death as a kid, I saw bodies in all shapes and forms for 11 months every day we did that.
Battle of Bulge, the end of Germany, initiating 17 temporary cemeteries over 11 months.
Somebody in headquarters figured 75,000, roughly, bodies that we picked up.
That's in German and American, because they didn't pick up their dead.
And we put them in mattress covers, buried them six feet down.
During the Battle of the Bulge, the ground was frozen.
We had German prisoners digging the graves.
I wanted to tell you this about gathering the dead.
The stench.
You're not changing clothes every day, and you're sleeping in your clothes with stench.
You're spitting.
You're dry.
Some of the guys chewed tobacco, whatever.
We didn't have gloves that often.
Once in a while, we did.
So it was pretty tough with a stench for quite a while.
And this was my job.
I broke down one day after a couple of weeks of that.
I'm surprised I didn't before that.
Lieutenant pulled out his .45 and says, you get your ass out there and suck it up.
And so I worked like a robot around these bodies.
It was tough looking at faces of guys my age or a little older.
And looking at, it was grotesque.
I mean, some of the bodies were natural looking, but most of them weren't.
A lot of them missing limbs or shot up, bleeding badly.
Well, for example, let me give you an example.
Imagine a tanker getting out of the turret and he's on fire and he drops down on the ground and burns up a ball of charcoal.
That's about as far as I'm going to go tell you that.
Have you actually made it back to Normandy since D-Day?
I didn't want to go.
I turned on a—he was a lieutenant colonel that landed on Utah Beach and started a tour agency called Galaxy Tours in Pennsylvania.
He said, look, John, I'll take you over there free.
I'll take you and your fiancé and your two kids.
So we got that freebie trip and we went over there.
Before we did anything, we were on the tour bus.
Everybody had a talk about what they did.
And my son looks at me after that, and he says, Dad, you never told us anything about this.
And I said, yeah, I know.
Excuse me.
Anyway, we walked through the cemetery there, Normandy, Omaha Beach, Colville, Sur Mer, Skoll, and I walked alone for a while.
And I wondered what bodies I handled, because that's the job we had, handling bodies.
And walking through the graves and looking at the marble crosses and stars of David, I noticed that there's no date of birth on the crosses or stars of David.
Only the date of death.
And that struck me and it really bothers me a lot.
Because when people walk through the cemetery, they have no idea how old these guys are.
So I looked at my kids and I said, you know what?
You're 21, 22 now.
And a lot of these guys were younger than what you are now.
now, 18, 19, 20.
18, 19, 20.
We know the high price of freedom.
They're just words to a lot of people, and I can understand that.
But if you've seen it, you know the high price of freedom.
So that's what I've been doing since 2006.
I've spoken to thousands of kids in high schools, not only here, but in France and Belgium.
And I stress that.
Well, thank you for doing that, and thank you for coming on the show and doing that, because education really is, I think, the beginning of reestablishing the sort of patriotism you're talking about.
George Champa, thanks so much for joining the show.
Thank you.
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The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday special is produced by Jonathan Hay.
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