On the 20th anniversary of D-Day the Chapel Hill Weekly published the following piece in which they spoke to four Chapel Hillians who had participated in the historic D-DAY invasion that set up the defeat of Hitler’s Germany and the Allied Victory in Europe on May 8, 1945.

Twenty years ago early yesterday morning Allied troops landed on the beaches of Normandy in the biggest offensive invasion in military history. The sky was overcast and the English Channel was rough. The Germans were solidly entrenched and Allied losses were heavy.

For many men, D-Day was the biggest event of a lifetime. The men who survived it thought they would never forget it. Some were right. But the martial drums beat softly now in the memories of most of the men who invaded France. Some men remember the absurdity of military life. Some men find D-Day dull in retrospect. For others, days of combat that once stood out singly have blended into stretches of daylight and darkness punctuated by gunfire, artillery barrages, foxhole digging, and death.

2499 Americans were killed on D-Day

A great many Chapel Hillians fought in the Pacific and China-Burma-India, and in North Africa, Italy, or Europe. But survivors of D-Day are hard to find. These four men remember the invasion:

Dr. Michael Berkut, now an assistant professor of biochemistry in the University School of Medicine and a full colonel in the Army Reserve, was a captain in the 82nd Airborne Division and landed behind the lines at dawn on D-Day. He tells about it in a cool, gently, almost (but not quite) dispassionate voice.

“For about a week before the invasion our troops had been ‘sealed in’ at various bases all over England, but I had been going around from base to base in a Cub distributing invasion maps. I was an intelligence officer, in command of the command and reconnaissance platoons of the 325th Glider Infantry.

“We loaded up and took off at about midnight, June fifth. I was in command of five gliders. I had Dutch commandos and French underground men with me, and airborne infantrymen. We rendezvoused in the air over England and took our places in the train – I don’t know how many miles long the train was, but there were a great many gliders. We flew around over England for about five hours, and then went into France about dawn. There was just a purplish haze when we went in. The ports in the glider were very small, and all you could see was this purplish grey haze, and the coast of France. We couldn’t see anything on the beaches.

“Our air speed was about 250 miles per hour, and when the tug cut us loose about seven miles inland, we came in ‘hot.’ Usually, when you’re cut loose, you glide for two or three more miles and then come in, but for some reason our pilot came right straight in. We were going about 170 miles an hour when we hit. The glider weighed 3800 pounds and we were loaded with 4200 pounds. We couldn’t have rolled more than 200 yards, and then we crashed into the roof of a barn. The fabric underneath the glider was torn away, and we could see a horse running around in the barnyard. The pilot and co-pilot screamed, and it turned out that the nose of the glider had hit a tree and was pinned. They were pretty badly hurt.

“I had my jeep driver and a radio operator with me, and six infantrymen, and the trailer with all the regimental maps in it. My jeep was in another glider. We had to chop our way out of the glider. We got the trailer out, and we had to lift the pilot and co-pilot out very carefully. We left them with rations and blankets. We couldn’t do anything else. There wasn’t any time to play around, because this was all under fire, small arms and mortar fire. We landed right in the middle of 91st German Infantry’s maneuver area.

“We had to get to the assembly area and get together, because unless we could do that we wouldn’t be a fighting group. We were afraid of the trailer being captured with all the maps in it, but we found the jeep and got to the assembly area and formed a perimeter defense, and started making our way toward Ste. Mere Eglise. That afternoon we captured 42 Germans, eight motorcycles, and tracked reconnaissance vehicles and German equipment. Some other members of the 82nd captured Ste. Mere Eglise, and we went across the Merderet River.”

Captain Burkut spent 33 days in combat, then was relieved and returned to England.

“We weren’t hit in mid-air, which happened to several other gliders. We were lucky when we hit, because the trailer was tied down very well. In some gliders, if the lashings on a jeep weren’t very good, the jeep would break loose on impact and just go running over men and everything. My order of battle officer, a young captain, he was in another glider and for some reason, curiosity I guess, he was standing up when the glider hit, holding on the the tubing, and he broke both shoulder blades.

“I don’t know what I was thinking or feeling. I didn’t pay much attention to the small arms fire, there was so much to do. It was a pretty busy time. I was scared, sure.”

His curtain of composure parted for the first time, and he gave a little nervous laugh.

“I was scared. But I had made up my mind that I wasn’t coming back, and that made it easier.”

John Young, now the director of WUNC-TV, was an ensign on the LST on D-Day.
 

7109 North Carolina troops were killed in World War II

“For weeks before the invasion we had been up in the Fal River,” he said. “the Fal is in southwest England. It’s the river at the mouth of which Falmouth is. It’s a good 50 feet wide, and they dredged it, and it’s covered over with trees. They put umpteen LST’s up in there, and we hid there.

“We actually saw more action on April 28 than we did on D-Day. We were on a training exercise, landing troops on the south coast of England, and all the warships were out in the middle of the Channel. We were about three or four miles off the coast, and German U-boats and E-boats, which is the equivalent of our PT boat, they attacked.

“At the time, we were officers, but actually we thought our skipper was pretty much of an s.o.b. His name was Yacevitch. Polish. He was a mustang, and he’d been a quartermaster on old Bull Halsey’s ship in the Pacific, and they needed somebody to command these LST’s green ninety-day wonders, of which I was one, somebody who had been in the Navy, who know an anchor from something. The sad part about him was that he had finished the seventh or eighth grade or something. He used to say, ‘Youse officers think you’re so damn smart,’ he said that all the time. Anyway, during the attack he suddenly started screaming orders down the tube, starboard engine back full, port ahead flank, full right rudder, and so on, and for about fifteen or twenty seconds – an eternity, you know, - in a situation like that – nobody realized that there was a torpedo headed for us and he was the only man who saw it. It passed about six feet off the bow. After that our opinion of Yacevitch changed a little.

“We went up to Portsmouth, I’ve forgotten when, but I think it was about the second of June that the ship was sealed: nobody allowed on or off. I remember the mail ship came alongside and Yacevitch waved it off. This caused a great deal of consternation among the crew. What harm could there be in receiving mail sent from the States weeks before: But anyway. And then I think it was June third, I was sent ashore to get provisions. An officer had to go with the men because the ship had been sealed, and when we got ashore, you know the British were so touchy about these things, they saw us coming and sent word through channels, ‘One of your ships is sending a party ashore.’ We were met by Americans, and we said we’d come for the supplies we’d ordered the day before, but they said no supplies. Back. So we went back without the supplies.

“Then I guess it was June third a boat came alongside and three seabags, ordinary duffel bags, were taken on board and they contained instructions for Operation Overload. I remember, they were filled with books. The first one I pulled out was about six inches thick. We took these things down to the wardroom, and the skipper took them into his cabin to look at them, and one by one they’d come out to us. We had instructions to familiarize ourselves with these things thoroughly, which was an almost impossible task. It wasn’t until the second day of reading that we found the first, even the slightest mention of any invasion. We were the flagship for the flotilla of LST’s, and there was a flotilla of LCT’s on both sides of us, and we had an escort of gunboats –British trawlers with guns mounted on them. We had the flotilla commander on board, a Navy Captain. We never did find out if the other ships got those instructions, but it’s possible they didn’t.

“Well, we went into Portsmouth to get the soldiers. An LST’s complement is 130, and we had 30 extra, hospital corpsmen and 270 soldiers came on board. It was an Army communications unit, with vehicles. The Army people offered us their cooking facilities, but our cooks allowed as how they’d just as soon do it all themselves. The Army people didn’t know where anything was – in fact, they thought it was a kitchen when it was a galley. We had store rooms and store rooms full of the traditional Spam, but we never ate that stuff. The officers ate from the general mess, and we had fresh meat all the time, fresh vegetables a lot of the time. But we didn’t have enough of that to feed the soldiers, so the cooks reluctantly broke out the Spam. I must say they tried their best, they doctored it up with pineapple, or brown sugar, or Spanish sauce, but the crew took one look at it and went back below. They wouldn’t eat that stuff. But the Army went around saying that was the best damn chow they’d had since they went in the service.

“We had a baker on board named Warchocki. He was a baker, naturally, because he had been a motor machinist as a civilian. He stayed up all night one night, and nobody could figure out why until it turned out that Warchocki was soft-hearted, and he thought it would be nice if the soldiers had fresh bread. He baked bread all night, and the soldiers said that was the first fresh bread they’d had since they went in the Army and why hadn’t they been told about this Navy business long ago?

“You know there were two D-Days, June fifth, and then the real one. On D-minus one, about eight-thirty or nine in the morning we raised anchor and lined up, the whole flotilla, and started moving down the coast. We moved east, three or four miles off the south coast of England very slowly, about five knots. We were supposed to go to a Buoy Zebra, then turn and zip across to France. We hadn’t gotten to Buoy Zebra, and the man on duty in the radio shack was relieved temporarily, to go to the head or something, and a radioman striker took over for a few minutes. When the regular radio man came back the striker said, ‘You know, I got the strangest message,’ ‘Oh, really, what was that?’ ‘Well, it wasn’t addressed to anybody, and I couldn’t make any sense out of it. It said Post Mike One.’

“Well, the radioman about went through the roof. Post Mike One was a code message that meant postpone the invasion by 24 hours. Post Mike Two was postpone by 48 hours. This was June fourth, remember. We hadn’t gotten to Buoy Zebra, so it wasn’t anything too dramatic, but it was interesting.

“I was OD that watch, and the con was about eight feet long. I remember Johanneson, the four-striper in command of the flotilla, he paced up and down in that little confined space for a long time, and finally he said, ‘Dammit, Young, I’ve got this whole thing figured out, but I can’t figure out how to turn around and go back.’ All these LST’s and LCT’s could have turned around, each ship in its own radius, but it takes experienced seamen to do that and some of these boys weren’t so hot. What Johanneson finally did was order a left flank turn, and then he let everybody go on for a while until they got straightened out and then ordered another left flank. But by then we were dangerously near the beach, because we had only been three or four miles off. That put us at the back of the line, and gave us a chance to do some hotrodding. Our top speed was a breakneck eleven knots, about thirteen miles an hour. So Johanneson said, ‘Take her up front,’ and we pulled out of line and went passing everybody at eleven knots to the front.

“To make a long story short, we went back the next night, got to Buoy Zebra at about eleven, and we were supposed to land at seven in the morning. It took six or seven hours to cross the Channel. When we got to the beach – this was Omaha Red, that was the hot one – you remember they met unexpected resistance. We were told to stand off for a while. Well, we stayed there over two nights without unloading. The Army commander put his communications unit into operation on board the ship, and it turned out that he was a vital link in communications. But the original instructions were that communications would be run by the Navy until the troops landed, and then it would be Army communications. There was a whole lot of confusion, and the Army commander wouldn’t get off the ship. He said it would be just – well, deadly, the worst thing that could happen, to break communications. We kept asking the invasion flagship for instructions about this. I remember encoding those messages, and everybody was talking in plain language by now, I don’t know why we encoded messages. The invasion commander had no time to decode messages at that point.

“At one point we went to within a half a mile of the beach and the shells landed near us, but we didn’t get hit. Then the Texas was too near us, and they were lobbing these great big sixteen-inch shells trying to knock out the big guns on shore, and those shells seemed to go over about five feet off our deck. After a while the skipper moved about five miles down the beach. The spectacular thing I remember was watching the destroyers. They’d head right in at the beach at flank speed, then reverse their engines as hard as they could, which would send spray up as high as the mast of the ship, and fire everything they had, and get out fast. What they were trying to do was knock out the pillboxes on shore. Then they’d go out and come in again from another angle.”

Mr. Young said the anti-aircraft fire that night was so intense, “you could read a newspaper by the light of the tracer bullets.” Wounded were taken aboard the next day, despite the original plan to discharge troops and then take on wounded. The Army communications unit refused to land for fear of breaking the communications link it formed, but the Army commander, Mr. Young said, was bitter about the adverse morale factor created by bringing wounded onto a ship still carrying fresh troops.

A total of 48,231,700 people were killed in World War II

“Finally, the skipper said he was going in, and the door of the ship would remain open half an hour. If the Army wasn’t off by then, he said, he was going back to England and so was the Army. They got off.”

Mr. Young’s LST subsequently made 104 trips across the Channel, 52 round trips, before returning to this country in 1945. For three weeks after the invasion the crew remained at General Quarters – four hours on, four hours off – making 15 round trips to carry over the troops that had backed up in England.

“I never saw any of the real horror, except some of the wounded Marines brought on board. There wasn’t any feeling of invasion tenseness. It was a sort of numbness. We had all been though so many exercises, and we’d had more action on April 28 than any time, that nobody really cared. I do remember that when we saw newspaper accounts of the invasion, they didn’t sound like exactly what we had been through.”

W. D. Locke retired in Chapel Hill in 1962 after 20 years in the Air Force. He was a major and a member of the University AFROTC unit faculty when he retired.

On D-Day, Mr. Locke (he has not retained his rank in retirement), then a captain, flew three missions over Omaha Beach. He was a P-47 fighter-bomber pilot in the 50th Fighter Group. His plane was named Ronda Belle, the Ronda after his wife, to whom he was only engaged. “I don’t know where I got the Belle. I just got the idea one day and threw it on the plane.” Mrs. Locke was named after the town of Ronda in western North Carolina. Mr. Locke is a native of Enfield, in Halifax County.

“We were briefed at about eight or nine o’clock the night of June fifth,” he said. “We had known the invasion, or something like it, was coming for some time. During that briefing they told us the invasion would be the next day.

“Takeoff time was at three in the morning. We got up about one-thirty, ate breakfast, and had another briefing.”

In briefings the squadron commander would inform his pilots what the mission would be, and then the squadron intelligence officer would take over and describe the actual target, point out dangerous concentrations of flak and any other peculiarities of the target, assign call signs and signals, and give the pilots escape and evasion advice – places to try to land near in order to be taken in by the French underground should they have to bail out.

“Everything was all planned by wing headquarters in advance. Engine start time, taxi time, takeoff time, which squadron took off first, time over target. They gave us maps with the courses all drawn on them. All we had to do was listen to what was said, take a few notes, and fly the airplane. We all had pads of paper with all this information on them, but a lot of the men used to write the information on the palm of their hand, or the back of their arm, so if they had to get rid of it they could just spit on it and rub it off. They wrote it in pen and ink. Regular fountain pen. It meant they didn’t have to carry the piece of paper.

“We took off and flew over. We only had to go about 35 or 40 miles, about fifteen minutes. At that time of the year over there it begins to get light about four o’clock. We were – whatever three times sixteen is – three squadrons. Forty-eight planes. As you probably know, General Eisenhower had a big decision to make, whether to have the invasion or not. The weather was very bad, but the weather people told him there was going to be enough of a letup to go ahead and do it. Our mission was to keep the German planes away from the beaches. Most of the German Air Force had been pulled back into Germany anyway, as air defense. We were given a sector to cover, about fifteen or twenty miles square starting from three or four miles inland from the beach. Omaha Beach. We were supposed to fly at fifteen thousand, twelve thousand, and nine thousand feet, one squadron at each, stepping down, but when we got over there the ceiling over the beach was about a thousand or eleven hundred feet.

“So we flew down the beach and turned left and flew inland for fifteen or twenty miles, and turned left again, flying more or less in a square. We were flying at seven or eight hundred feet, and I could see the beaches. I had a brief bird’s eye view of everything. I saw shells exploding, and there were shells exploding inland too, from the Navy out in the Channel, and wrecked equipment, burning equipment, the troops on the beaches, everything there was to see.

“We flew around for about three hours and then went home. But there were a lot of fighter groups flying that day, in relays, so when we left another group took over. Then about ten or eleven o’clock we flew back on another mission. Nothing happened on the first mission, but on the second mission a few German fighters sneaked in from somewhere. Our squadron let down to join the bottom squadron when they started screaming about these planes, but by then the action was over, and two of the four to six planes had been shot down and the rest were chased off. I guess we all wanted a chance to shoot down an enemy plane.”

(In September, 1944, Capt. Locke shot down a Fockewulf 190 over Cologne. “My crew chief had a swastika painted on my plane before the engine was cool.)

“Then we went home and later that afternoon, about four or five o’clock, we went back on another mission and flew around for another three hours. They were on double daylight savings time then, so it didn’t get dark until about ten-thirty. We could see everything.

“Nothing happened during any of those three missions except the German planes on the second one. Nobody shot at us. The Germans knew why we were there, to keep the German Air force away, and as I said most of their planes had been pulled back. At a thousand feet you can’t get a good strafing run set up, you can’t dive bomb. You could skip-bomb if you had bombs with delayed action fuses, but we had already been beating the hell out of that area for weeks beforehand anyway. We weren’t expending any ammunition ourselves, though for months before that we had been going over into France, and even into Germany, to bomb bridges, and trains, cut lines of communication – anything that moved was fair game. I’m sure there were some Frenchmen who got some attention they didn’t deserve. We had been getting ready for this. But nothing happened.”

The 50th Fighter Group was transferred to France about two weeks after D-Day, to a freshly bulldozed landing strip near Ste. Mere Eglise. As Capt. Locke stepped out of his plane after landing in France for the first time a shell burst at the end of the runway. Not long after that his squadron began to suffer losses, until eventually its operational strength was reduced to eight planes.

“There was one point when you could stand on the landing strip and watch the planes take off, go to their targets, dive bomb and come back, and never lose sight of the planes.”

But that was during St. Lo and the weeks that followed.

“D-Day was just milk runs,” he said. “Nothing but milk runs.”

His telephone rang and he answered it, “Major Locke speaking,” which was odd because ordinarily he refers to himself as Mr. Locke. When he hung up he said, “That’s funny, I don’t use ‘Major Locke,’ but just talking about World War Two, it all felt so natural to me I thought I was back at my desk at Langley Field, or something.”

Samuel Eugene Hundley of Chapel Hill landed on Utah Beach on D-Day plus two, June 8, 1944. Mr. Hundley was born in Carrboro and now works at the Chapel Hill Post Office.

“There was a time when I thought I’d never forget even the minutest detail,” he said. “It was the biggest thing that had ever happened to me. I remembered it for three or four years, but then it began to fade. I was a rifleman in the infantry – ‘the Queen of Battle.’ I was a scout.”

PFC Hundley was 20 years old when he reached England on May 15, 1944. He had been training for the previous 14 months with the 87th Infantry in Mississippi. The 87th had been broken up when sent overseas, and its men were assigned to different units as overstrength – calculated reserves.

“They knew they were going to lose a lot of men, so they had us ready in reserves, instead of waiting until they needed reserves and then bringing them over.”

He was assigned to the 4th Infantry in England, stationed in Bournemouth (“a beautiful town. They say it’s the Atlantic City of England”).

“I didn’t know anybody over there. I only remember two names. One was Al Morrison. He and I decided we’d ‘buddy-buddy’, only he wanted to be some kind of hero, and every time there was a patrol or something, he’d volunteer. He was a BAR man, and I was his ammunition bearer, so every time he volunteered, he’d turn around to me and say, ‘Should we volunteer, Hundley?’ and I’d have to go along. But after a while I stopped going with him every time.

Samuel Eugene Hundley of Chapel Hill -- April 19, 1924 – July 28, 1967

“The other guy I remember was Pop Sheehan, he was about 45 years old and I don’t know how he ever got overseas, he must have really pulled some strings. He didn’t have any family and everybody called him Pop. I don’t know whether he got killed or not, but the last time I saw him a piece of shrapnel had torn his neck away. I guess he was killed.

“The morning of D-Day they roused us out of bed about two in the morning. They issued us rifles – all our equipment had been left back in the States when they shipped us over. The rifles were all filled with cosmoline and it took two or three hours to get ‘em in shooting condition. They didn’t tell us what was happening, but we all figured out what it was when we saw the planes flying over. The sky was just filled with planes, and we knew it was something big. They took us down to a staging area and issued the gas mask, and gas-repellent clothing. The thing that worried me was they didn’t give us any entrenching tool. I’d had that drummed into me from here to eternity in training, when you stop moving, go to digging. They paid us ten dollars in invasion francs.

“Then we went to I think it was Southampton and got on some kind of Limey ship. I don’t know what kind of ship it was, just some ship. We spent the night in the harbor.

“The next morning early, about eight-thirty or nine, we left the harbor and went out into the Channel. We spent that night on the Channel, and that night I learned to play cribbage. I sat up all night playing cribbage with this young lieutenant, he was 19, younger than I was.

“The next morning they brought up LCI’s and we got on board them. The swells were very rough, twelve or fifteen-foot swells as I remember. They put cargo nets over the side and we climbed down, and when the LCI went down in one of those swells we waited, and when it came up we jumped in. I remember one guy, I felt sorry for him at the time, but later I wished it had been me, he was a little shy about jumping. He just put one foot on the edge of the LCI when it came up on a swell, and wham, the side of LCI crushed his leg against the side of the ship. I was down on the LCI and I looked up and saw it. They caught him and got him back up.

“We went in, and it didn’t look bad. There were shell holes, and you could see where there had been underwater obstacles. When we waded in sometimes you hit water over your head, but mostly it was chest high. There were shells falling, but not too close. The guns were in range, but there was nothing close. There was a general on the beach urging us on. Somebody said if was General Bradley, but I don’t know. He was saying, ‘Come on boys, let’s get on in, let’s get in there,’ and waving us on.

“We started inland. There were about twenty of us, we had two officers with us, two lieutenants. I guess somebody knew where we were going, but I didn’t. It was just a case of following the man in front of you. There weren’t any bluffs at Utah, not like Omaha. It was flat, marshy ground. We were supposed to go up and join our company, but nine of us never got there. I never saw the company commander. He had been killed by the time we got there. The company was near Monteburg, which was on a hill. Hill 618, or something like that, but I don’t remember. That was our objective.

“We went about a mile, I guess. Maybe not that far. I can’t remember. About a mile. Then I saw my first dead. There was a paratrooper, and two Germans, lying within a few yards of each other, in a triangle. The paratrooper only had a hatchet for an entrenching tool, and the two Germans didn’t have entrenching tools, so I took the hatchet. It looked like they’d been killed by a hand grenade, because they had little punctures all over them.”

Beyond that point, time has become a disconnected series of incidents in Mr. Hundley’s memory. There was the apple orchard:

“It was just a little orchard, with hedgerows around it, but we got into an artillery barrage. We were all bunched up, six or eight feet apart, when we should have been that many yards apart. I was down on one knee leaning on my rifle, and when the shells started landing I flipped over on my belly. That put the guy behind me in front of me. I heard him scream, and I turned around and said, ‘What’s the matter, Red?’ I don’t remember his name. Everybody called him Red. He was a self-professed hobo, so I don’t know what ever became of him. He said, ‘They blew my leg off.’ They had, right below the knee. I said, ‘Red, there isn’t a thing in this world I can do,’ but I called the medic, and he answered, but he said he wasn’t coming – it was his first combat too. I called him again and he came. Then the guy in front of me, I heard him go ‘Uh’ and he fell forward. A piece of shrapnel caught him right between the shoulder blades and killed him deader’n heck. He never knew what hit him……..”

After they left the orchard they came to a paved road about half as wide as Franklin Street, “maybe not even that wide. There was some officer down there, and he said, ‘Boys, I want you to cross this road singly, because there’s a machine gun crew’s got it zeroed in.’ Well, I got over all right, but one of the lieutenants, when he started across a shell landed close by and knocked him down. I had jumped into a foxhole somebody else had dug and left behind. He got across all right, and came over to my foxhole and grinned down at me with his face all covered with blood –he hadn’t been hit, but the concussion of the shell had just opened up his skin – he grinned at me and he said, ‘Hundley, are you as scared as you thought you’d be?’ and I said, ‘Lieutenant, I’m not near as scared as you’re going to be dead if you don’t get down in this foxhole.’ The Germans were just sewing the ground with machine gun fire all around, and that Lieutenant, he didn’t even realize it. He was so shocked. And grinning, a kind of nervous, tense grin. I grabbed him by the ankle and jerked him down with me……”

When PFC Hundley’s group reached its company, only 11 of the original 20 were alive, and all who hadn’t been wounded were either carrying a corner of a stretcher or supporting walking wounded. The company itself had lost 100 of its original 186 men, including its commander.

Mr. Hundley’s memory of the sequence of events after he joined his company is even more hazy. He recalls not having eaten anything for two days after he landed, and his consuming three K-rations and a D-bar at one sitting when he finally did eat. He remembers another artillery barrage when a man ran unscratched through thick machine gun fire and back with a medic to help his buddy – who had been killed. He remembers the railroad track incident:

“We were in this little field and a railroad track run beside it. A German machine gun position was nearby. The lieutenant said he was going to step out on the railroad track to see what he could see. One of the men who had already been in combat a few days, he said, ‘Don’t do that, they’ll kill you, lieutenant.’ But the lieutenant had had all his training in the States, and he hadn’t been in combat before. ‘They won’t expose a machine gun position for just one man,’ he said, and stepped over the hedge and about the time he set foot on the first tie and turned to face down the track they cut him in two. That was the same lieutenant I had played cribbage with all night on the ship…..”

PFC Hundley was scared, and admits it. But his fear varied. “On the ship before we went in I was scared, but it wasn’t fear that I’d be killed or anything. It was fear that I wouldn’t measure up. There was also a feeling of guilt, because I went in on D-two, and by the time I got there an awful lot of war had been fought. But I’d been training all those months, and then I didn’t get to do what I’d been trained for. I had a feeling of, you know, like I should have been there. But after I got there, in that apple orchard, that was just stark fear.

“You know, they say there aren’t any atheists in foxholes. Who was it said that, Ernie Pyle? I think it was. Anyway, I don’t know, there may be somebody who could say he was an atheist and he was in a foxhole, but there was this one Jewish kid with us when we got to Monteburg, and he had a fatalist attitude – if it’s going to be it’s going to be. He didn’t dig his foxhole very deep. Every time I got a chance, I dug mine deeper, but he didn’t dig too deep. They started shelling, and a shell hit a tree and a piece of the shrapnel went right through his helmet and killed him. But if he really believed that about if it’s going to be it’s going to be, why did he dig at all? Digging is hard work. I think everybody prays in a foxhole. I did a right smart of praying myself.”

After about a month of combat, Mr. Hundley was hospitalized with battle fatigue and later was transferred to an ordnance unit. Some of his hospitalization was spent in the Fifth Army Hospital in Ste. Mere Eglis, not far from where Capt. W. D. Locke’s 50th Fighter Group was based, and near where Capt. Burkut’s glider landed. 

D-Day occured on June 6, 1994. This piece appeared in The Chapel Hill Weekly on Sunday June 7th, 1964. It was written by J.A.C. Dunn.

This article was submitted by Ruth Hundley Vickers, reader, gardner, and yard boy. She is the sister of Samuel Eugene Hundley, who is the last of the four veterans to give their account of D-Day in this article.