Warriors In Their Own Words | First Person War Stories · Evergreen Podcasts | The Honor Project

Airborne Assault On D-Day: From the Archive

·1 hr 5 min·2 clips

"You regress. You begin to think like an animal. And if you think like one, pretty soon, you're going to act like one."

1. Warriors In Their Own Words presents "Airborne Assault On D-Day: From the Archive," built on first-person accounts from two U.S. Army Pathfinders. 2. Sergeant Tom McCarthy of the 82nd Airborne narrates most of the episode, and Francis Lamoureux, another Pathfinder, tells his D-Day story in the final segment. 3. The central thread is the Pathfinder job of jumping first to light the drop zone and set up radar so the main body could land, often with too few men to secure the area. 4. McCarthy explains how he enlisted after his parents refused to sign at 18, was rejected twice for being under the 5'6" minimum, and ended up in the 82nd at Fort Benning. 5. He describes the Sicily jump, when friendly anti-aircraft fire hit the C-47s and he did not rejoin his unit for two days, then recalls carrying a wounded paratrooper named Boris for two days. 6. He tells how he traded places with Pappy Fogarty to avoid mule-skinning school, then fought four days on Hill 409 at Salerno, where men bet on how much water they could bring back in a helmet. 7. At Normandy, his plane carried 24 men, and the full moon exposed him to half-tracks as he landed beside a farmhouse. He later took mortar fragments while with Cates, and he hid in the grass and killed two searching Germans with a grenade. 8. In Holland he jumped last over steep canals, commandeered rowboats to cross the Nomegin River, and lost four men taking a bridge, then confronted a captain who left his squad out of a correspondent's account. 9. McCarthy says that over time "it got easy," that fighting seven major engagements made him "callous," and that Kipling's lines capture the shared life of combat soldiers. 10. Suited to military history listeners who want unpolished, first-person paratrooper testimony.

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