They woke to the thunder of the guns behind them. It was 0530 on July 4, 1944 and this was their first attack. In small groups they listened to the continuous pounding roar of the preparation. To them it seemed that no enemy could endure more than a minute or two of such concentrated hell; and this kept on and on. It cheered them and made them feel that with such might supporting them the attack ahead could not fail. They went to breakfast and talked excitedly about the barrage and wondered how soon they might be ordered to move forward.
The first man who said it was reprimanded for spreading rumors. But then the report came from many sources and they were stunned and uncertain. Colonel Barndollar dead! What was happening? And every man coming from the front was pumped for information. As the day wore on and the reports came in as to the fierceness of the fight they began to ask : "What can we do?" They were too new at the real thing to know that there was nothing they could do. Nothing but the job they were already doing; which now seemed so little and so ineffective.
The days wore on. Terrible days that brought no relief, only more and more casualties. Days and nights when even the fear of the shelling could not dispel the gnawing thoughts of failure. Can it be that we are not good soldiers? Is it possible that the enemy is too strong to be beaten back? When will we get relieved? Where are the replacements they said we would get?
Then about the fifth day, the replacements came. Several hundred of them. Men who had been seared almost to the breaking point. Scared, not by what they knew or were experiencing, but by the false stories they had been told by the "Big Shots" in the rear. We tried to give them confidence. Fed them, showed them the handful of prisoners we had. Told them we had advanced two miles. Tried to tell them the few facts that we had learned in the past few days. And all the time we had that sinking feeling in our insides, knowing that all too soon many of these would be among the casualties and the missing.
Then when the St. Eny fell we moved again to within about a mile and a half of it. And we heard how Tec 5 Donald W. Ford, Chaplain Clarkson's assistant had, even though seriously wounded, assisted in the removal of the wounded from the 2nd. Bn. C.P. How he had driven some of them in his jeep to the collecting station and there been evacuated himself. We heard how S/Sgt. Arthur T. Barnes had volunteered to deliver ammunition to C. Company who were all but cut off across a grass covered swamp. How he had delivered the sorely needed ammunition and found the courage to assist in the evacuation of wounded under a withering barrage of mortar fire.
We began to know the hidden qualities of our fellow soldiers that had thus far been submerged. These men who worked all night to bring up supplies; moving over roads and fields that could at any minute spell disaster from ambush. When the noise of their work or trucks brought on the dreaded mortar and artillery fire.
Then came July 25th. And we watched the swarms of bombers fly over and heard the rolling thunder of their bombs. It was a wonderful sight and from it came fresh strength to continue. And the enemy line finally broke and we moved not a few yards but hundreds of yards. And then miles and we found that the main line of resistance was overrun and we were to get a few days respite. And if you did not look at the mountain of personal effects and possessions you might almost forget some of the price of winning.
But what had we done toward winning? True, we had delivered the rations, ammunition, gas, weapons, and hundreds of smaller items. The clerks had tried to make order out of the reports that reached them. In the early days, there had been the gauntlet that the Ammo trucks ran across the Carentan bridge. The bridge seemed always under fire and they tried to dash across between bursts. There was the first enemy plane that came over and had straffed behind the lines. And Tec 5 John Luttenberger coming in with the comment, "This should be the best damn water you ever drank". The straffing plane had hit everywhere around him but had missed him and his truck.
And while we rested, the men got showers and learned how skillfully the enemy can mine. Three trucks wrecked at almost the same spot. Men killed and wounded when they were officially resting from victorious struggle. We never got very far from the war those days.
As August came in and we heard of the successes resulting from the breakthrough we began to hope that from now on there would be no hedgerows and that we could keep the enemy always moving backward. We had morale and we had the know how tested by experience to make that morale a formidable fighting force.
We hoped we had learned a few things. Especially how to avoid some of the duplication of effort and the expenditure of needless effort. Like the time we sent 16 trucks over 15 miles for replacements only to learn that they had been sent to us a day earlier. Or the many times we got emergency calls for supplies only to learn later that they were not needed or were the wrong items. The list was long but next time we hoped to make it shorter.