WWII veteran Jody Lander recounts his intense experience parachuting into Normandy with the 82nd Airborne on D-Day, detailing courage, chaos, and sacrifice.
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World War II, Korea, Vietnam, the Gulf War, Afghanistan, and her other wars and conflicts. America’s fighting men and women strapped on their boots and picked up their guns to fight tyranny and stand for liberty. We must never forget them. Welcome to America’s veteran stories with Kim Monson these stories will touch your heart inspire you and give you courage We stand on the shoulders of Giants.
Here’s Kim Monson
Kim Monson
And welcome to America’s Veteran Stories with Kim Monson. Be sure and check out our website. That is americasveteranstories.com. The show comes to you because of a trip that I took in 2016 with a group that accompanied four D-Day veterans back to Normandy, France for the 72nd anniversary of the D-Day landings and realized that these stories need to be recorded and broadcast and archived, so hence America’s
Veteran Stories. We are so honored and pleased to present to you a rebroadcast of a show that we recorded back in May of 2020. And it is an interview with Jody Lander, a young guy. He and his best friend became paratroopers, and he jumped in behind enemy lines on D-Day, June 6, 1944.
Jody Lander
And I am thrilled to have on the line with me World War II veteran Jody Lander. I actually have interviewed him before and it is a great honor to get to talk to you again, Jody Lander. So welcome to the show. Thank you.
You have quite a story. So let’s start at the beginning. Where did you grow up, Jody Lander?
Speaker 6
In
Jody Lander
Dallas, Texas. And do you remember where you were when you heard that Pearl Harbor had been bombed?
Speaker 6
I was home I think, it was a Sunday morning, I was home and I didn’t go to church that day and I turned on the radio as soon as I heard about it and listened to it. Of course they didn’t have much detail to tell, just kind of said over and over again we’ve been bombed and that’s about all the information we had.
Jody Lander
Were you surprised that America was being pulled into war?
Speaker 6
Yes, I was. I wasn’t really up to date on things. I guess I should have known it, but I was only 18 then and I didn’t pay much attention to the national news at that time.
Jody Lander
Okay, so how then did you get into the Army Air Corps?
Speaker 6
Well, I was in the Army Airborne, not Air Corps. It was part of the Army. Well, Air Corps at that time was part of the Army too, but this was part of the regular Army, and it was the Airborne part of it. It wasn’t Air Corps, it was Airborne.
Jody Lander
How did you get from being a kid in Dallas into the 82nd Airborne? I was going A&M at the time, I was a freshman and I was drafted.
Speaker 6
And when I went to the reception center, they were asking for volunteers. So I volunteered for it. They would not put you in it unless you volunteered. I thought that would be exciting.
I wasn’t disappointed. I was not disappointed. It was exciting.
Jody Lander
That it was. You were in three of the major battles in the European theater in World War II. So you volunteered for the Airborne. What happened
Speaker 6
Well, we went through basic training, and we were just trained like the regular infantry. We were really part of the infantry, but we just had a different means of transportation. So I went to Florida, Camp McCall, Florida, and we were trained just like the regular infantry, except we had, I think, more physical training. They kind of really worked us over.
They put us in very good shape by the time we got to parachute school.
Jody Lander
And what was it like on your first jump at parachute school?
Speaker 6
Were you afraid? Oh yes, yes. I was afraid for every jump. I never got used to it.
Yeah, the first one, I was scared to death. But I just followed the other guys out the door, so I went with them. Of course, we had a lot of training before that. We jumped off.
They had these parachute towers. They pulled us up over there about 250 feet tall and released us in a parachute. Of course, the parachute was already open and we knew it was never going to open. So, we had our training there and so, yes, I was scared.
Of course, everybody after that first jump said there’s nothing to it. And the next day, you know, we made five jumps in five days when we went through the training. And so, we all thought the next day would be nothing to it, but I was just as scared the next day as I was the first day. I
Jody Lander
never did get used
Speaker 6
to jumping. I really didn’t like it. It scared me every time, but I was in it, so I was going to stay in
Jody Lander
it. Yeah, I can’t imagine, Jody Lander. I just can’t imagine you guys doing that. After basic training, what happened?
Where did you go?
Speaker 6
After basic training, we went to Fort Benning, Georgia. That’s the parachute school. We were there for about three weeks where we trained. The training started out, they just lectured to us and told us how to pack parachutes.
We had to pack our own parachutes. That made me a little nervous because we weren’t a real expert at packing them, but we packed them successfully. We would practice in the day doing different exercises from the parachute towers. And then on the final five days we jumped on Monday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday.
Made five jumps. And we had to practice our chutes for four of those days. And that was a little concerning to me because I wasn’t a really skilled parachute packer. But they opened.
Obviously they did. That’s
Jody Lander
a good thing. How old are you now, Jody Lander? Ninety-six. Ninety-six years, okay.
Well, so… An old ninety-six. What’s that? I
Speaker 6
said an old ninety-six. Very old ninety-six.
Jody Lander
I think you sound like a young 96 to me. So after parachute school, after Fort Benning, where did you go? We
Speaker 6
went to Camp McCall, North Carolina. That was right next to Fort Bragg. Fort Bragg is now the The airborne training center for the paratroopers and gliders people. That’s in North Carolina.
Jody Lander
Okay. Then, are you soon on your way to Europe or are you still in the United States for a little while? Oh, we were there.
Speaker 6
We got there in March, late March of 1943 and we left in December of 1943. We were there about eight months. Okay. And then we left to go to Europe.
We had our… We had our final training at Camp McCall.
Jody Lander
And what was the trip like across the ocean to get to England?
Speaker 6
Horrible. We all got sick. Everybody was sick. We just couldn’t do it.
We couldn’t do anything. I smoked, but I quit smoking. I couldn’t stand the cigarette for about 10 days after we landed. but everybody was sick as they could be because in the wintertime the North Atlantic is very rough and we were on a small troop carrier and it really pitched in the ICs.
But it was, I hate to say this, but vomit was running all over the floor. We were so sick. There was just a pool of vomit on the floor from us. We had to clean it up.
I don’t know how we did it, but when we had to clean it up ourselves, I don’t know how we did it, but we did it some way. I don’t remember that.
Jody Lander
Did you have an escort? Yes, it was a big escort. We had a lot of naval ships and a lot of troop
Speaker 6
carriers going over, so it was a big convoy. Where did you land? We landed in North Ireland. They didn’t have our camp ready in England yet, so we landed in North Ireland.
We were so far north that it didn’t get daylight until 9.30 in the morning. That’s when we stood reveille. And it got dark about 5.30 in the afternoon. That’s the only time I got enough sleep in the Army.
We didn’t stand reveille until 9.30 when it got light, so I got plenty of sleep there.
Jody Lander
Yeah, well you needed it with what you’d be going through in the future. So how long were you in Northern Ireland?
Speaker 6
We were there about three months, from January, about mid-January until April we moved to Nottingham, England. We had a big What was a day like when you were there in Nottingham?
Jody Lander
for the
Speaker 6
paratroops? Well, we’d get up, well, we’d get up, it got light very early there, and for four hours in the summertime, we got there around late April when we got there, and it was pretty, it was getting light around six o’clock in the morning, and finally around June, it didn’t get, it got daylight about four or five in the morning, but we got about 630. And we trained all day long.
We went on marches. We had lectures. We had a couple of practice jumps. And we just continued the training, kind of advanced training that we started in North Carolina.
We just carried that out there from April of 43 until June of 40. We were there a year. We were at Nottingham for a year before the invasion came. We had a whole year.
and we had a lot of fun in Nottingham. It was really nice. We were the only troops around and so all the young ladies, we had all the young ladies because all the British guys our age were in their army and we had, so the girls all by themselves except for us. So we had a great time there.
Jody Lander
All the pretty girls. Let’s move into June 6, 1944, which is D-Day. What started to happen as the Allies started to prepare for the liberation of Europe on June 6, 1944? We went to the airport
Speaker 6
about a week before. And you know, I don’t understand why the Germans didn’t know this. I’m sure they had agents in England because one night they told us that we were going to the airport and we were restrained from going out. We couldn’t go out anymore because they were afraid.
We knew what was coming up and they were afraid that we would, you know, We drank a lot of beer then over there and we’d get kind of a… You know, we couldn’t keep quiet. We’d brag about what we were going to do. We were restrained to quarters.
So one night in Nottingham, all over England, one night no soldiers showed up in any of the bars there or any of the pubs. So the Germans should have known that, but they didn’t. Some way we kept it secret, I don’t know how, because every night the English pub was just full of American soldiers, but one night they weren’t. For about a week they didn’t show up.
So something was up, you know. But they didn’t. They were completely surprised.
Jody Lander
What time did you then get on the airplane to head over to Normandy?
Speaker 6
We got on about 9 o’clock, about 10 o’clock now. It was still daylight at 10 there because we were so far north. England was on double daylight saving time. The time up two hours.
So at 10 o’clock, it was really 8 o’clock, but it didn’t get dark there until, in the summertime it gets dark at about 10 o’clock in London, I mean in England, in Sweden, in southern England. And so at daylight saving it was about 12 o’clock at night, so it got really dark. So we were and on the planes about ten, we flew, we took about two hours of rendezvous. There’s ten thousand planes in the air that night.
And we had the rendezvous because to get together because the, all the paratroopers were at different airfields. Before we took off, there was a 101st, there was a, there was a 82nd, there was two American and Avalon divisions and one English division. and we all flew over together so we had to fly for about two hours to rendezvous before we could get together because we took off from all over England. And about 12 o’clock, about midnight, we headed for the continent.
Jody Lander
How long did it take you to get there?
Speaker 6
Well, I don’t know, not very long. We, we, we, we, I guess the Corso 347 don’t fly very fast, about 90 miles an hour. The top speed is about 120, but we cruise about 90 miles an hour, so we’re running very fast. So it took us about two hours, I guess, after we started.
We jumped about 2.30 in the morning when we released it, and I come out of the plane about 2.30 in the morning on D-Day. But when we hit the coast of France, We came in over by the Sherbrooke Peninsula and it was a stormy night. If you recall, the invasion had been put off 24 hours because of the storm on the North Sea. And so it was still cloudy and windy and stormy.
So the clouds, the Germans couldn’t see us. And it’s good they couldn’t because we only fly about 1,000 feet. The first planes come in about 1,000, I mean the first planes come in about 400 feet and the last ones are about 1,200 feet. And the reason for that is that each echelon is a little bit higher than the one in front of them so the planes won’t shoot us when they jump.
So we were flying quite low and the crowd cover was so dense they couldn’t see us even though they did try to shine the big flashlights on us or the big searchlights on us. But they shot at us, they could hear us, so they put everything they had and aimed it at us and we could hear the shots, the shrapnel hitting the plane. None of us got shot down in our plane, but we could hear the shrapnel hitting the wings and the body. Nobody got hurt in our plane, but you could hear it hitting the planes.
Some planes do get shot down, but we didn’t. That’s the only time I was ready to jump out of a plane because I knew I was going to be shot down because the aircraft fire was so heavy that we just couldn’t miss it. But we made it. We didn’t.
But that’s the only time I wasn’t afraid to jump. I was really anxious to get out of that thing.
Jody Lander
get out of that airplane, huh? So, well, hey, Jody Lander, let’s go to break and continue then on with your story. This is Kim Monson. I am talking with World War II veteran paratrooper with the 82nd Airborne, Jody Lander.
Stay tuned. We’ll be right back.
Speaker 5
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Jody Lander
Welcome back to America’s Veteran Stories with Kim Monson. Be sure and check out our website americasveteranstories.com. We have the show recaps there and a lot of great information. On the line with me today is Jody Lander, World War II veteran.
Jumped into Normandy on D-Day, June 6, 1944. He’s part of the 82nd Airborne. Jody Lander, this is such a fascinating story. Let’s continue on.
You said that as you were coming into the coast I guess it was wild.
Speaker 6
We were okay until we hit the coast of Normandy. And then that’s when all the heck started because of the anti-aircraft fire. And we were fired at, it seemed like for hours, but it was a short flight because we hit We were coming across the Sherbrooke Peninsula, and it’s not very wide, you know, it’s just a small place, but it seemed like we were in that plane for hours while we were being held.
But we finally got the red light, I mean the green light, they have lights in the plane, and when the red light, when we stand up, they turn the red light on, and we stand up and hook up, and then when the green light goes on, the jumpmaster jumps out and we follow him. And so it seemed like between the red and the green, we were there for two hours, but it was really about 15 minutes, I think. And so when the green light came on, we went out, and I said a little prayer.
I don’t remember what I said, but I remember I said a prayer, and I said, here I go, dear Lord, take care of me. And He did. He was very good to me.
Jody Lander
Wow. So you were coming in low though as well. Were you in one of the planes at 400 feet or what was your altitude that you jumped from? I don’t know.
What happened
Speaker 6
when we hit the aircraft fire, the pilots could see the places coming up so they had to fly around it. When we did, we got way off course and we missed the drop zone. We missed it. We didn’t miss it far, but we missed it.
Of course, the pilots had no recourse but to try to dodge the bullets because if they flew into them, we would all go down. So they did that, and when they did, we got off course and we missed the drop zone. So when we dropped, we were all by ourselves for the first day. All our planes got together.
Everybody in our plane except two. We had three. Two of them were captured by the Germans. He landed there with a bunch of Germans.
He landed and crawled into one of the hedgerows and stayed there for about 24 hours until the Germans left. Then he was able to get out and he came home and joined us. There were about 18 in the plane and all 15 of us got together. Now the two that were captured, they took them to Cherbourg and when Cherbourg fell, we released them and they came back and joined us.
They were okay, they were just a little shook up from being captured.
Jody Lander
Wow, that’s amazing out of the 18 guys that you eventually all got together. So now you have the 15 and of course the other guy that just joined you after 24 hours because he was in the hedgerow. What happens after that, Jody Lander?
Speaker 6
When we landed, I was shaking like a leaf. and I couldn’t, we had quick release to get a parachute harness and I was shaking so I couldn’t release it. We had a big sharp knife strapped to our, a dagger type knife strapped to our boots. So I took that and cut myself out, you know, cut the straps on the chute.
The chute was not going to be recovered. They were gone. I mean, they were not going to be recovered. And you know, afterwards I talked to some of the other troopers and almost everybody cut themselves out rather than releasing themselves because they were, I think they were shaken too.
Yeah.
Jody Lander
So is it really dark at that time then, Jody? Pardon? Was it really dark at that time?
Speaker 6
Oh yeah, it was very dark. You couldn’t see a thing because of the… there’s no lights on and the cloud cover covered all the light that came from the moon. I think we had a full moon that night, I’m not mistaken.
But it was so cloudy, the moon didn’t make any difference. We couldn’t see it. So it was real dark and you couldn’t see your hand in front of your face.
Jody Lander
So how did you guys find each other?
Speaker 6
We just, when you walk, you know, we had so much equipment on that we kind of rattled and you could hear each other. So I ran into, the first one I ran into was a fellow who was one of a German He was a German Jew and his daddy smuggled him out of Germany to the United States through some friends that his father had over in the United States. And he joined us just before we left to go overseas. And he’s the first one I ran into, and I gave him the password, which was lightning.
And the counter sign that the person would give, gave back, was thunder. And thunder was selected because Germans can’t say T-H. They say thunder. They can’t say it.
They just haven’t been taught. There’s no T-H in their language, so they haven’t learned to say it. So I heard this rattle of somebody walking. I said, lightning and came back thunder.
Well, that just scared me to death because I was a German there. Well, I thought I couldn’t possibly be equal to Germans. We didn’t get our passwords and a camera sign until we just got on the plane and they couldn’t no way could they know it well I thought well that must be old Harry Kennedy his name was Hans Kahn originally and they changed his name to Harry Kennedy and put that on his his dog tag so if he got captured they would think he was a Irishman not a German But he spoke English very well, but he had a great accent.
He had a terrible accent, or an accent, but the Germans couldn’t pick that up. And even, he, well, what they’re afraid of is he got captured. He’d be shot for it. as a traitor for leaving the country and coming and fighting for us.
So they had to protect him by pasting his name and putting his name on Harry Kennedy on his dog tags. I’ve got an interesting story. If you give me your address, I’ll send you a story. I’ve got it written up about him.
He was an unusual young man.
Jody Lander
Well, I will be happy to do that. So when we get off the air, we’ll go ahead and do that. Let’s continue on though. It’s the first night and so you are finding all the guys.
What happens after you all get together? What do you do? Well, we finally,
Speaker 6
we kept, after I met Harry, we kept walking around until we found 15. I mean, we found the other 13 of the 18. So that made 15 of us. And so we didn’t know where we were.
So we found a road. We landed in a big field, a big vacant field. And we found this road and we got on the road and started walking in the direction we thought we should go. We didn’t know which direction to go really, but we started out in a direction.
And we finally came to a little town called St. McCove. and when we found that town and it was on our maps we had, we knew where we were and then we could head for the drop zone where we would meet the rest of our division. And
Jody Lander
what was your mission that night?
Speaker 6
Our mission was to capture the bridge and prevent, my mission was to keep the reinforcements from coming up and attacking the landing craft that were coming in to go land in the morning around 6.30 in the morning when they were to land. So that was our mission. We were to stop the, we would see the bridge, hold the bridges, and we had to, we were to blow them. If we couldn’t hold them, we were to blow them to keep the reinforcing Germans from coming up and meeting our landing craft.
Jody Lander
Did you encounter any reinforcements?
Speaker 6
No, we didn’t run into any Germans at all. I don’t know where they were. They were real confused. See, they were more confused than we were.
We didn’t know where we were, and they didn’t know how many we were, where we were. Because of the aircraft fire, the pilots had to dodge the bullets. We were successful in that regard because we were confused and the Germans were more confused than we were. They didn’t know where we were, they didn’t know where to go, and they didn’t know which direction we were in.
We didn’t know where we were either. So it was a confusing night. But we were successful because the Germans did not get up to attack the landing force except at Omaha Beach. They were already there at Omaha Beach.
That was the bad one for the landing craft. We were to protect Utah Beach, and Utah Beach didn’t have near the fortification that Omaha had.
Jody Lander
Right. It was really rough for the guys over there on Omaha Beach, but you were near Utah Beach. So now that you’ve all gotten together, and then what happens?
Speaker 6
Well, we walked all day and we could see Germans in the distance, but there’s just one or two or three or four, no big congregation of German troops. We didn’t run into any resistance until nightfall. We came to a big farmhouse around when it was getting dark that night, and so we Thought that would be a good place to spend the night. We were dead by the end.
We’d been up for 48 hours about. We hadn’t been to sleep. We had so much ammunition on us and so much equipment that we were awfully tired. And so we decided we’d stop there for the night.
It had a big concrete, a big stone wall around the whole compound. So that was a good place to to defend ourselves if we were attacked. And sure enough, as soon as the sun went down, we were attacked. And we had to stay up all night.
We shot back and forth at each other. We don’t know where we hit anybody. There was one fellow in my group that was killed, but he had found some cognac and gotten drunk and did something silly. I don’t know what he did, but he did something silly and he was killed.
He was not in our outfit. He was in 102nd. But we had a big firefight all night long and then about, since about daybreak, the Germans left. And we didn’t know why, but the reason they did, the landing people, our troops that landed at Utah Beach were coming through that morning and they ran the Germans off.
So we were very proud and we were very glad to see the success of the landing because that saved us. One of the fellows I was manning the wall with, we tried to take turns at manning the wall because we were so tired. I kept falling asleep. I mean, even with all the gunfire going on, I’d fall asleep.
So we took little naps, take turns out to take a little nap. in US English Monson And I was manning this wall with this fella, and he was a corporal in the high outfit. And the Germans got close enough, they threw one of their hand grenades at us. Now, we call them potato mashers, because it looked like a great big old potato masher.
It had a wooden handle, and it had a big blob on it like the end of a potato masher. and they threw it at us and he picked it up and threw it back at them. We don’t know where he hit them with that, but anyway, we knew that they had about a 7 second fuse on them. After they pulled the plug, the fuse would take about 7 seconds before it would explode.
Ours went off in about 3 seconds, but theirs was 7. So we knew that, we’d been trained that they had that 7 second and I am talking with World War II veteran Jody Lander with the 82nd Airborne about going in
Jody Lander
on June 6, 1944, to stand up against Hitler’s regime. And so let’s go to break. We’ll be right back.
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Speaker 9
God bless America Land that
Jody Lander
I love Welcome back to American Veteran Stories with Kim Monson. I am so honored to have on the line with me World War II veteran Jody Lander. He was with the 82nd Airborne in about his jump with the other paratroopers into Normandy, France on June 6, 1944. And Jody has made the jump.
16 of the 18 guys have gotten together and they have been in a farmhouse with the firefights with German soldiers. and they were near Utah Beach, which was the beach that they were trying to get to and protect, and our guys were coming in. They’d had a successful landing at Utah Beach, and you guys meet up. What happens then, Jodi Lander?
Speaker 6
One thing I skipped over, I forgot it for the time being, but when we downed this road, we started down this road in the direction where we thought the guns were, and that’s where the rest of our troops would be there, but they weren’t, because they were strewn like we were all over the peninsula. Well, we’d gone about 100 yards down this road, and it’s just getting daylight. And we ran into the first horrors of war, I’d say.
We had a family, a French family, trying to escape the bombardment. We were real close to the landing zone for our seaborne troops, and so we came under the fire of our own gunships. And we had to get down in the ditches beside the road to be protected from it because we were really being bombarded for about 30 minutes from the battleships. And the reason we were, we were real near a gun emplacement, a German gun emplacement.
It was a 9-inch gun that was trained on Omaha Beach. I mean, Utah Beach. And they were trying to knock that gun out, our naval forces were. Well, we were real close to it.
We didn’t know where we were, but we were real close to it. So we came under this terrible bombardment, and this family, this French family, a mother, Two children, a father and a grandfather, we think, because looking at their ages, that’s what we guess, they were a family. and they’d all been killed except the grandfather but they took a direct hit from one of our 16-inch guns and there was a little girl about 10 or 12 little boy about the same age the mother and the father they were all dead in the center of the road with this shell hit and the grandfather was there with his he was in shock he had been hit and his foot was split wide open and he was he was lucid But he was in shock.
So we stopped, we gave him some cigarettes and gave him a shot of morphine to, you know, because that would knock him out and make him feel, knock him out and relieve the pain for a while. We hoped that maybe some of our landing troops could come and take him and, you know, get him some medical help. We couldn’t do it. We didn’t have anything except a first aid kit with morphine in it.
We gave him that, and he was, what he was so happy about, we gave him a package of Lucky Strike cigarettes. And he hadn’t had an American cigarette since the Germans had invaded France. And he was so happy with those cigarettes that he was just elated. I thought that was kind of amusing.
Anyway, that was the first Horace O’Rourke we saw, and I’ll never have forgotten that. I think about it all the time.
Jody Lander
I’m sure, I’m sure that is the horrors of war. And of course, as you mentioned, we were trying to soften up the beaches and to take out some of those gun emplacements to hopefully help protect our guys to have a fighting chance to get onto the beaches. So, were they ever successful in taking that gun out, or do you know, Jody? Well,
Speaker 6
I don’t know. I never did hear it. I think they must have hid it. I’ve got a picture of it.
I’ll send you that picture if you’d like to see one of them. But it was a big, it was a 9-inch gun, and apparently they were successful because we never did hear fire. We were real close to it, but we didn’t know it. And I’ve been over there several times and I’ve seen that gun that they were trying to take out, and I guess they did.
Of course, it’s not there anymore anyway, it’s been removed, but I guess they must have neutralized it some way because we never did hear fire.
Jody Lander
Okay. Well then, what happens after that? You said you mentioned the story about your very first seeing the Whore of the War. What happened after that?
Speaker 6
Well after that night, after when the landing forces came through and relieved us from the Germans, we asked them where they had come from. They said they came from Utah Beach and we wanted to go out there to try to find the rest of our outfits so we could join them. So they told us how to get to there and we went out there and we spent the day there and the night and the next morning we caught a truck that had found, that had taken some, some other troops and had taken some supplies in to our headquarters around Saint Mary Glees.
That’s a little town in France. And so we got a ride on that truck and we joined our regimental headquarters, which was the headquarters company of the whole regiment. We found them and then over a period of about two or three weeks, all the extractors came in and we were a division again.
Jody Lander
Did you just kind of hang out until you became a division again for the two
Speaker 6
or three weeks? Yes, we did. We didn’t do much until we got to everybody. It took about a week for all the extractors to come in and then we started the war.
I guess we started moving forward and we had a number of battles and I don’t remember much about that. I just remember that first night and things like that and the flight over in the first night but what happened after that I don’t remember much. Now we were in a, I was in an S2 section, Regimental Headquarters S2, that’s the intelligence section. And my section was responsible for, for, for, oh I can’t, for, well, I’ve lost the word.
Anyway, what we did, what our mission was, was at night when we were in a stable position, no unit drivers, infiltrate the German lines and go get behind their lines and find out what was back there. What kind of, how many people they had, if we could count them, we couldn’t. What kind of ornaments they had, what kind of big guns they had, how many tanks they had, such things as that. We were not successful in doing it, ever doing much, but we were successful in one regard.
We made one time we went out and we We got through and got through the German lines and spent the day behind the German lines. French farmhouse that had a young boy in it, and he had been, you know, the Germans let them, let the French roam all they wanted to. They didn’t control them very much. And he knew where all the guns were, all the big guns, where the machine guns were, and where the tanks were.
So he gave us that information and we took it back. Well, the problem was when we came back, we didn’t know we were going to spend the night. We thought we’d come back before daybreak, but we were out so far, and we didn’t have time to get back before the sun came up, and you don’t want to be walking in German territory when there’s daylight. So anyway, we had to hide, and that’s when we found we hid in this house, this French house, with this young boy who had all this information.
So we got all of his information and we started back and we captured it. The next night we captured the two Germans. But we started back and we got back but when we got to our line we realized we didn’t have the password for the next day. See we came back, we were 24 hours late getting back because we were supposed to go back the same night but we couldn’t.
So we had the password for the first night but the second night we didn’t. So when we got near our lines we started singing All the American songs. We started yelling, don’t shoot, don’t shoot. We don’t have the password.
We’ve been out for two days. We started singing that and singing all the war songs, over there, over there. The Yanks are coming. The Yanks are coming.
Anyway, we were successful. We got through our lines without the help of a goddamn shooter gander. So when we got in, we reported to the and some shrapnel. And we were about an artillery fire going back and forth all day long and all night long.
Speaker 1
He’d been hit,
Speaker 6
he’d been out in the field and he got hit by the shrapnel and he was in bad shape. So he didn’t have any more information to give us. And, but we spent the night again. We came back and this time we captured two Germans that were in the house and brought them back and we had in our Our interpreters interrogated them and got some more information.
And that was pretty good information we got because we were just, at this time, we were getting ready for the breakout. And we were going to go right in the direction of where we’d been patrolling. So we had some information about where the big guns and tanks were. And our regimental commander was quite happy with that, so we were in good graces with him.
And from then on, we… I don’t remember much about what happened after that. We were there from home until mid-July. We were there about six weeks.
Mid-July, we went back home. I mean, we went back to England to get ready for the next invasion, which was in Holland.
Jody Lander
Okay, well Jody Lander, yeah we are just about out of time for this show so let’s schedule a time, we talked about it, to record for the next week. This is absolutely fascinating and before we get to break, Jody, in your 96 years, what would you say to Americans today with all that we’re facing today? What’s the words of wisdom that you would give them today?
Speaker 6
Well, I’d say war is hell, but that one we had to fight. We had to fight that one. There’s no choice, because if not, Hitler would have conquered the world, I think, if we hadn’t gotten into it. So, all I can say is that don’t do it unless you have to.
If you have to, go in there to win it. Don’t go in to try to contain, just go in to try to win it if you can. That’s my philosophy now. Well, I
Jody Lander
can
Speaker 6
say, you know, we, like in Afghanistan and that, we didn’t go in to win, we just went in to hold, I think. And if we didn’t win, of course, what happens, you have to, if you win, you’re going to kill a lot of civilians, innocent civilians. Of course, the Germans, we didn’t care about them then because we were so mad because they attacked us, the Japanese and the Germans did. And we had to stop Hitler, so we had to kill a lot of the civilians to do it, but we did it.
And that was a little bit different from going into Afghanistan and the Mideast and Vietnam because we tried to limit our damage and the killing of civilians. And when you do that, you just can’t fight a good war.
Jody Lander
Well, yes, we can see that from history that it makes it much more difficult when we don’t have the determination to win it. But World War II veterans, it’s such an honor to get to talk with you, Jody Lander. So we will continue the conversation next week. I greatly appreciate it.
And so Jody, we’ll talk to you next week.
Speaker 6
Okay, and if you, when you, we’ll get through, let me, give me your address, I’ll send you this copy of the Harry Kennedy story, of the Hans Kahn story. Very interesting.
Jody Lander
I will do that. So this is Kim Monson with American Veterans Story signing off. God bless you, Jody Lander. God bless you, and God bless America.
Announcer
Thank you for listening to America’s Veteran Stories with Kim Monson. Be sure to tune in again next Sunday, 3 to 4 p.m. here on KLZ 560 and KLZ 100.7.
Speaker 2
The views and opinions expressed on KLZ 560 are those of the speaker, commentators, hosts, their guests, and callers. They are not necessarily the views and opinions of Crawford Broadcasting or KLZ Management, employees, associates, or advertisers. KLZ 560 is a Crawford Broadcasting God and country station.
