06/05/2024
OMAHA Beach – June 6, 1944
Company C of the Sixteenth Infantry started ashore. Platoon Sergeant Royal Kleinhardt’s LCVP grounded 60 yards offshore. The Coast Guard Coxswain tried to back off, failed, said he could go no further, and dropped the ramp. Lieutenant Scott, who was 6 feet 4 inches tall, stepped off, and immediately found himself swimming. The other twenty-eight men got off, and then Sergeant Kleinhardt, who was 5 feet 6 inches tall. It soon enough became apparent that if he did not get rid of that rifle he was going to drown. Down went one M-1 rifle into the sea. Like most of the other GIs, Sergeant Kleinhardt had cursed the gas mask carrier that higher authority had thrust upon the troops. Now he came to bless it, for its buoyancy saved his life. The equipment he was carrying was so heavy that the life vest was not enough.
He floundered ashore, breathless, and lay down on the beach oblivious to the firing. He turned. An unfamiliar dogface lay 2 feet from him.
“Help me,” cried the stranger.
Kleinhardt saw that one of the GI’s legs looked strange. He got up and hooked one arm under the soldier.
“Now shove with your good leg.”
The GI said nothing. Kleinhardt looked at him. The man seemed to be in shock. The sergeant let go of the man and ran up the beach to a 3-foot stone seawall. He made it, and ducked down with the others who had made it.
Twenty men were crouched there. He had never seen any of them before. Scores, hundreds of others came up. He crawled along, looking for men of his company. Slowly he began to find them. The corporal of his mortar squad said he had lost his mortars. More men had lost their M-1s. Kleinhardt stopped to administer morphine to a GI who lay with a wound in the groin.
Someone shouted.
“Lieutenant Scott wants Sergeant Kleinhardt.”
Kleinhardt started in that direction. He found Lieutenant Scott, who grinned at him wanly. The lieutenant was holding his bloody field jacket at the shoulder.
“It’s all your now, Sergeant. I’ve got a million-dollar wound.”
It wasn’t the first time. One of the company jokes was the lieutenant’s luck. He had gotten hit early on in Africa, and thus had missed most of the heavy fighting.
“I haven’t even got a rifle,” said Sergeant Kleinhardt.
The lieutenant gave him his carbine. Kleinhardt went off to find more men of the company. That was the last he saw of Lieutenant Scott.
From The GI’s War by Edwin P. Hoyt
