The lieutenant made Burgess the lead scout. At first light, he came to a corner of the hedgerow he was following.
A German soldier hiding in the junction of hedgerows rose up. Burgess didn’t see him. The German fired, downward. The bullet hit Burgess’s cheekbone, went through the right cheek, fractured it, tore away the hinge of the jaw, and came out the back of his neck. Blood squirted out his cheek, from the back of his neck, and from his ear. He nearly choked to death.
“I wanted to live,” Burgess recalled forty-five years later. “They had hammered into us that the main thing if you get hit is don’t get excited, the worst thing you can do is go nuts.” So he did his best to stay calm. The guys with him patched him up as best they could, got bandages over the wounds, and helped him into a nearby barn, where he collapsed into the hay. He passed out.
At midnight, a French farmer “came out to the barn and sat there and held my hand. He even kissed my hand.” He brought a bottle of wine. On the morning of June 7, the farmer fetched two medics and lent them a horse-drawn cart, which they used to take Burgess down to the beach. He was evacuated to England, then back to the States. He arrived in Boston on New Year’s Eve, 1944. He was on a strictly liquid diet until March 1945, when he took his first bite of solid food since his last meal at Uppottery, June 5, 1944.
Private Gordon hit hard. He had no idea where he was, but he had a definite idea of what he was determined to do first—assemble his machine-gun. He tucked himself into a hedgerow and did the job. As he finished, “I noticed this figure coming, and I realized it was John Eubanks from the way he walked.” Shortly thereafter Forrest Guth joined them.
Another figure loomed in the dark. “Challenge him,” Gordon to Eubanks. Before Eubanks could do so, the man called out,
“Flash.” Eubanks forgot the countersign (“Thunder”) and forgot that the clicker was an alternative identification option, and instead said, “Lightning.” The man lobbed a grenade in on the three E Company men. They scattered, it went off, fortunately no one was hurt, the soldier disappeared, which was probably good for the group, as he was clearly much too nervous to trust.
Gordon, Eubanks, and Guth started moving down a hedgerow toward the beach. They saw an American paratrooper running through the field, crouch, and jump into a drainage ditch (there was a three-quarters moon that night, and few clouds over the land, so visibility was fair). Gordon told the others to stay still, he would check it out. He crept to the ditch, where “I encountered these two eyeballs looking up at me and the muzzle of a pistol right in my face.”
“Gordon, is that you?” It was Sgt. Floyd Talbert. Now there were four. Together they continued creeping, crawling, moving toward the beach. A half-hour or so before first light, Guth heard what he was certain was the howling and whining of a convoy of 2’/2 ton G.I. trucks going past. How could that be? The seaborne invasion hadn’t even started,
much less put truck convoys ashore. Some tremendous bursts coming from inland answered the question: the noise Guth heard came from the shells passing overhead, shells from the 16-inch naval guns on the battleships offshore.
The E Company foursome joined up with a group from the 502nd that had just captured a German strong point in a large farm complex that dominated the crossroads north of the beach at Ravenoville. They spent the day defending the fortress from counterattacks. In the morning of D-Day plus one, they set out southward in search of their company.
Jim Alley crashed into a wall behind a house, one of those French walls with broken glass imbedded in the top.
He was cut and bleeding in several places. He backed into the corner of a garden and was in the process of cutting himself out of the harness when someone grabbed his arm. It was a young woman, standing in the bushes.