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First hand account of WW2 battle, really graphic (wow)
Veteran's first hand account of Omaha beach. It's graphic as hell and I doubt anyone here will read the whole thing, but if you do, be warned, Some nasty shit that is really hard to forget.
Saddest part is these guys died for global bankers (and you know who) while they thought they were dying for freedom. War is hell, the descriptions below are pretty terrifying ngl.
"There are no heroes in war, not even victims. Only villains.
There are things you see in wartime that are not meant for flesh-and-blood creatures to witness, impossible things; acts of propulsion and physics only made manifest by the cruelty of Satan and the sheer white hot hatred of man, things that I can describe beyond words but are still somehow left undescribed, a grotesque carnival of horror and brutal gore on steroids.
Omaha beach.
When the landing craft were approaching the Normandy coast the shells began hitting the boats at 1000 yards, some of them 150 pounds or more. Earlier in the morning as an ironic act of mercy the Army command had granted us a feast of epic proportions for breakfast: second and third helpings of every food available, and as a mortal error of greed 8 out of 10 of us ate more than we ever did in our lives.
When the transports hit the water running, it was an unusually cloudy and windy day, and some waves were nearly 10 feet high. The resulting eternity towards the beach was worse than the most tumultuous roller coaster you could imagine. Multiply a bloated stomach to maximum capacity with 100 pounds of gear and ammo and waves that nearly capsized you and the result was a horrifying foreshadowing of what was to come. You may have seen cinema depictions of the ride towards the beach, with stalwart young bravados coolly standing packed on the boats facing their judgement, but being there was something you just can't describe and a thing I wouldn't wish on Hitler himself.
With some shells weighing as much as individual men crashing into the waves at breakneck speed all around you for half an hour coupled with the rocking pendulum of death, multitudes of soldiers vomited to the point of suffocation and a large amount simply passed out. Because the waves were often 3 or 4 feet higher than the walls of the boats, many were overwhelmed with water and capsized hundreds of yards before hitting the surf, something most history books won't mention but really happened.
Things would just get irreparably worse.
The seismic boom and shocking thud of a heavy shell hitting a swell near your boat was enough to shake your heart off of it's ligament supports and cause permanent chest damage. Shins were fractured under the right circumstances, our eyeballs felt like they were going to burst and if your helmet was strapped it was enough to give you a concussion. In addition to that, the actual sound of an incoming heavy artillery round is something that could have only been synthesized by a monstrous leviathan from hell. You could feel the static in the air bending while it was still yet hundreds of yards away, and the descending crescendo was like a demonic freight train slamming towards you full force manned by shrieking Valkyries.
It is an experience that won't be felt until you are there, and even afterwards, you feel it for the rest of your life. It becomes embedded into your ancestral DNA and every other earthly experience in the future is deadened and dulled to the point of lead. I can't give the words justice. The sentences I write are brutal, but we hadn't even reached the surf yet.
Because of the swelling waves, the boats would rock up and down once every few seconds, temporarily dropping the shield of the front metal ramp in that ill-fated window of time and exposing all of the soldiers within.
500 yards offshore we began receiving concentrated MG-42 rounds. The fastest machine gun in the world, the MG had the gentle privilege of gifting the front ramp of your transport 20 or so white-hot rounds per second, and because there were about 5 MGs on our sector of Omaha, that meant more than 6,000 bullets could potentially hit your landing craft per minute. Each individual round had the ability to divide your body cleanly in two and vaporize your flesh in a torrent of steel. Most bullets disintegrated against the metal barrier of the transports, but some ascended in their purpose and deleted the shocked faces of the foremost standing instead.
In a deadly viper's hiss some single bullets shredded the unlucky heads of two in a row, and a sadistic game of connect-four commenced. The gruesome algebra would only further multiply the closer to shore they got. In an ironic twist of fate many bullets would shatter upon impact in a bright burst of spark as their heads exploded, like a lightbulb: as if the victims had one final idea - absolutely nothing. Darkness.
Most men in the first waves of the landing craft were slightly crouched like absurd praying mantises while angry white flies zipped overhead. Those fortunate enough to opt out of life earlier stayed faceless and a few remained standing - stuck upright by the hopelessly crowded congregation of terror. As blood flew backwards from their sprouting veins it would drop like a gale force on the person behind them, completely blinding the soldier in the process. With the foremost now fallen, the slick waves of death bounced rapidly towards the back of the craft: some, unable to see from the brains and viscera lodged in their cornea, caught bullets in the eyes, and when they screamed, bullets flew in their mouths.
With teeth cracking like powdered dominoes they were blinded and unable to gasp for air. Because of the grim succession of steel advancing towards those rearmost the bullets would lose force from impact, slow, and only cause maiming damage. The result was a twisted mass of dancing corpses building on the platform, and as rounds ricocheted in tandem the tops of the metal barriers around the men became more spongelike. But instead of soaking up the voluminous blood and water, more just simply sprayed from the insides and outsides. As the metallic jacuzzi of death became heavier, water rushed in from the pierced gates faster, multiplying the sequence of terror until the craft was lost beneath the waves.
With the grotesque pandemonium literally bending the metal platform under your feet, your genitals had far and away completely retruded into your stomach and your anus puckered in like an unfortunate mouth after sipping battery acid. This experience continued in some cases more than 30 minutes after most of the landing craft had drifted spectacularly off of their intended targets, sometimes nearly a mile or more to the east. In addition to many soldiers already dying from being capsized, most suffered seasickness to the point of a zombified stupor.
The majority of boats were still intact and about 100 yards away from the beach before they hit a wall of sand and were forced to engage.
The front ramp of the first craft to land flung open in a heavy metallic SWOOSH.
Three machine guns immediately focused on the opening of the lone boat and Satan made his initial statement of the day.
With 50+ supersonic MG rounds honing in on your chest each second at 2,000 MPH, many bodies just simply vanished. Again, the cinema offers a toddler friendly sanitized picnic version for bored and happy movie-goers, but the gruesome reality was far beyond the point of being able to witness. The only reassurance you had before being shattered into loose atoms was glimpsing the laser-like streams of lightning slicing into your body three times the speed of sound.
With faces, eyeballs, heads, throats, hands, intestines, and legs being splattered mercilessly into the air like the Grim Reaper's lawn mower exhibition, you were lucky to be able to choke to death on blood and vomit before your boots hit the water.
Others were not so fortunate. Because of the phenomenal force of steel and fire shrieking through the front entrance of Hell soldiers had no chance but to knock kindly on the side door.
Weighed down by an incredible amount of soaking wet gear and ammo, many of us were forced to jump over the sides and into the freezing depths below. How we managed to lift ourselves over the walls after experiencing the appetizer of the squalls is a story for another day, but we may have been boosted in the air by the titanic thuds and paralyzing booms of the 150 pound shells that rained on us like a British storm. After successfully hurling ourselves into the steel-colored waves many who had not had the foresight to loosen their gear before the gate opened sank like bowling balls to the bottom, never to be seen again.
The only mercy God seemed to grant us was the legacy of Newton himself, which dictated that no bullet would penetrate your body if stopped by more than a yard of water. Regardless of that little ray of sunshine, we instantly found ourselves dancing a horrified waltz on the very bottom at the gray depths of 10 feet or more. Because our boots were made with a thick and heavy rubber platform with polished leather tops they became particularly cumbersome when dry, and absolutely impossible when damp. It wasn't exactly a lucky day to play our numbers anyways, but nobody told the fortified Germans as they continued to methodically send traced reminders of themselves at the thrashing blobs 400 yards away.
At the bottom our feet became glued to the mud and our fractured shinbones began to scream under the steadily increasing weight of our rifles, packs and ammo. Most immediately gave up and died peacefully this way like dark green gargoyles frozen in place, swaying eerily with the continuing volcanic booms of thunder above. If you were stupid or brave enough to fight back, then you had might as well have already signed your death warrant and been transported to the front of the funeral procession at the speed of light.
The stark reality is that even a superhuman freak of nature would find it against the odds to somehow propel himself back to the surface, and in many cases there was still 200+ yards of 6 feet of water or more. Only a few landing craft had made it relatively close to shore without major complications.
Watching Saving Private Ryan both fascinates and saddens me. What truly transpired in those moments after the gates of hell opened is too bizarre and freakish for even the most willing veteran to sketch properly in his canvas of memory. Most have simply forgotten.
The shared reality of modern mechanized warfare does not co-exist with the aspirations and charity of good men or women, but simply devours them in a frenzied maw of otherworldly death and dismemberment.
If my words seem enraged and pitiful, then please note that I have not even scratched the surface of the images that transpired in those 8 hours of Satan's eternity. War is blackness incarnate: those who aspire to be heroic in the chaos of battle are atomized and shattered in ways that seem to create a complex mockery of them. Those who instinctively hide and flee may often survive.
War is the ultimate equalizer. It is eternal pandemonium in reverse, where right is wrong and wrong is rewarded, and the only reward is a prolonged existence of utter horror beyond imagery or eloquence. The only beauty in my words is masochistic and sadistic, a painterly scene where the entire color scheme is red and black and gray and red even more. Because of the unique attributes of heavy artillery fire, you begin to hallucinate, seeing angels in the air weeping, being banished by bullets; huge demons in the form of mangled mountains of flesh, and shadowy figures clouded behind every vaporized youth.
When they say war is hell it's almost like a compliment: as if hell is heaven after the unique sadism of the higher laws of physics. Atomic warfare is simply a bigger macrocosm of our third dimensional realm - in which smaller neutrons and ghost particles zip towards each other in frenzied array, competing with themselves to manifest into larger and larger weapons of mass destruction. Earth is truly Satan's world. All beauty is corrupted and all corruption is beautiful, and the only perfect thing is the guarantee of how quickly beauty will decay.
I would go further to describe what actually happened to those cowardly enough to hide behind floating bodies and heads in the surf, or to simply lay down and play dead in the tide. I must rescind myself in this moment: we were all heroes that day, even if none of us were. The grim irony is that we were all cowards, but the weakest cowards died the fastest.
We somehow made it to the first few yards of the beach, drenched to the bone and moving in a stunned, robotic slow motion. Those who were physically strong enough to be exceptionally gutless were rapidly forming pathetic piles of writhing shit stained mangled trousers while bathing in a hilarious rotating fountain of puke and vomit. Painted head to toe with entrails and bits of blasted genitals, we looked like oversized squirrels or undersized walruses, twisting deliriously and desperately trying to hide behind one another while white laser beams of MG rounds sent us flying in increasingly abstract patterns of creative gore.
If these descriptions have shocked you beyond fury and comprehension, then let me remind you that it is my sadistic pleasure and God-given duty to paint this scene in it's most far-fetched realism possible. I soberly repeat that war is the king supreme of paradox: men who are valiant and boastful in the enlisting lines are transformed into blubbering dematerializing ghouls under rapid machine gun fire, and those who are casually disaffected while in boot camp and brave in the thick of violence are usually turned into wet clouds of ruby mist before the fight even begins.
The pulsating ramparts of men on the first section of the beach swelled to insanely dark proportions. Bullets exploded in flashes of brilliant light off of metal blockades and wooden pikes, and the occasional perfectly timed land mine or shell would send the entire structure of suffering termites spiraling in a twisted cone of genius asymmetry. God was already dead, evaporated; evident in the paranormal torrents of flame and fury that pockmarked the beach like the populous acne on the unidentifiable piles of dismembered faces.
Some GIs, usually the tallest and strongest, were punished by being chosen as the wielders of flamethrowers and in purposefully ironic glee Lucifer had decided to experiment in the pursuit of varying displays of tremendous and catastrophic explosions. The spirals of fire that engulfed dozens of men looked like an invisible dragon had breathed some new and unexplored layer of hell from the sky, and the tendrils of exploding gasoline melted the eyeballs of the decapitated heads watching the scene in a circled ring of frozen shock, creating pink and yellow puddles of syrupy, smoking mush.
I will again refer to the portrayal of this scene in Steven Spielberg's acclaimed war drama. In the depiction, the soldiers who are unlucky enough to not suffocate in the water hop off of the ramps like rabbits, some falling like sacks of potatoes; but this was simply not the case. The ghastly violent vibrations and seismic slams from all mathematical angles of the beach gave the splattered legions of gore a frighteningly amoeba-like appearance. It all turned alive, gyrating and morphing to new and impossible forms, exploding like gargantuan pimples: splashing the ever growing landscape preposterous shades of red.
The persistent shells transformed into the reincarnated, mechanized fingers of the once-youths that littered the beach like trash in a third world country. They began to disintegrate the gelatinous valleys and hills in slowly increasing anger and defiance.
The smells were in an olympic tournament of decay, and evolved into grotesque and monstrous heights. The frenzied water near the open ramps of the smouldering boats was red, almost black, but everything else was increasingly becoming orange and beige and brown. As a final display of dominance and cruelty Satan had made it rain all manner of half-digested food and feces.
Rain was an understatement. It was a tornado, a hurricane of smoke and glops of what mostly looked like blood and diarrhea and oatmeal, not too hot, not too cold; just wrong. With each new explosion more of the intestinal juices, sand and bodily fluids would come back down over our heads like a demonic waterfall - for eight hours straight.
If any of the individually pulped heads in the new French Grand Canyon had once had golden locks, they were all mutually brunette at this stage. At the end of this perfect fairytale chapter everything would be various degrees of black: Satan's favorite color. Only the rare glimpses of sky in between the smoke was white, signifying a dull and uninterested heaven, totally desensitized: completely drained of vital fluid, devoid of Creation.
As the bombs and blood and shit rained down relentlessly, those of us who had survived the first 15 yards of the quaking beach began to once again survey the scenery. We couldn't make a noise if we tried; our vocal chords were shot and we were ghostly quivering husks of our former selves. We couldn't even move. We simply crouched like terrified cats and stared at our exploding surroundings while the entrenched MGs and artillery continued to blast us into new dimensions of consciousness.
The ground shook with the impossible rage of a 9.5 earthquake. The sound was indescribable - reality unraveled.
The mountain ranges of jellied bodies and viscera threatened to burst spectacularly with every new explosion. Severed heads glared at us in numb shock, some with nightmarish big eyes that seemed determined to follow your gaze or beat you in a deathly staring contest. It didn't matter: they had already won; they probably just didn't know it yet.
Spools of intestines, still somehow connected to detached mangled legs and torsos, were wrapped ponderously around metal barricades like hellish Christmas decorations for deranged and violent children. The nearly seperated legs dangled morbidly, and would dance faster and faster with every new explosion. After several minutes the limbs would fall off, leaving behind smouldering metallic X-shaped bushes stained with feces and innards and blood. If Moses himself had witnessed this intensely bizarre new prophecy, he would have tossed his stone tablets like divine frisbees and dived headfirst under the next rapidly incoming shell.
The haunted torrents of flames, far brighter yet somehow darker than normal fire, gave off smoke as black and soulless as towers of coal. The red and brown rain fell at an alarming pace.
The seismic slams and appalling explosions continued to fracture our legs, yet we remained crouched and swirling like shit-stained green ballerinas ungracefully twirling in front of the hot spotlights of MG-42 lasers and the thunderous applause of land mines and howitzers.
---------------------
In all of time the cycle of Creation reigned supreme and on the precipice of the surf on Omaha 30 minutes in, the tradition stood strong as ever.
First came the primordial soup - the dark red bubbling waves that splashed and rocketed around the swaying corpses on the beach, festering with the very juices of life and death itself.
Then came the proto-typical newborn life forms: the stupid green lizards that crawled pathetically out of the primordial glop, braying and yawing for dear life while angry death swooped from above.
Then came the formation of the hills, valleys, and mountains: not of stone and mud this time, but of broken bodies and cratered black sand.
Then came the meteors: giant flaming infernos that soared across the sky while the green crawling behemoths, impressively muscular but very small from a higher vantage point, gazed on below.
The meteors hit the clusters of cowering dino-soldiers again and again but instead of wiping them out completely, they seemed to multiply on the blasted shore and came feebly stumbling forward, blinded by smoke and sand and blood.
The only reminder of the 20th century was everything else. The MG laser beams continued splitting praying soldiers in half, many of them Catholic. Some were still numbly counting beads while disconnected from their lower bodies and staring blankly at the sky.
One helmet-less GI had no arms left and only a single leg, and was on his back repeatedly bending the solitary knee as if pleasantly shocked that he still had something to move. Nearby explosions would send him flying back and forth like a ragdoll and eventually a sniper ended his demonstration. His head was now gone; the knee remained twitching. His leg would not stop.
Some desperate soldiers tried carrying rifles with arms that had no hands. One rifle slipped from a GI's fingerless grasp, hit the ground and discharged into his face. The bullet flew directly into his forehead and the force of the impact caused his head to swell up like a balloon for less than a millisecond.
In a POP his eyes flew out on red cords and even though most of his brain splattered onto the sand he was somehow still conscious on his knees for nearly a minute, slowly clawing at his split face and deflated skull as a muffled moaning sound escaped his windpipe. No, no, no it seemed to cry out in agony, as if the proceeding half hour was only a nightmare that would not end no matter how hard he tried to wake. Eventually his arms slumped and stayed perpendicular to his torso like a limp scarecrow yet the body stayed on its knees, upright and seemingly immune from the quaking ground.
Many of the shaking heaps of dying were crying for their mothers. Momma, Mom I'm dying please help me, Mommy I need you all transformed into a single huge infantile wail under the vexing lullaby of incoming artillery. Most adopted their new roles as toddlers particularly well and continued to vomit and shit themselves before falling into slumber.
Some others were sleeping in craters, too exhausted to go on.
One injured soldier, clutching his jawbone in his bloody hand, mysteriously raised it up to a passing unharmed GI, who mindlessly accepted the gift and advanced into a thick wall of vibrating smoke.
Some had taken several bullets through the face yet remained crawling miraculously like caterpillars towards the distant and entrenched Germans. Why their heads didn't explode remains a mystery of physics, but perhaps they were just made of sturdier fodder.
Some were unscathed completely but were glued behind metal barricades or the initial wall of shingle. Untouched by peak adrenaline and too tired to move, they tried lighting wet cigarettes unsuccessfully as shells and bullets continued to mutate the surf around them.
Others in the vicinity who were unable to stand began to roll around and curiously inspect the petting zoo of gore that laid waste around their immobile bodies as landmines, bombs and bullets rotated the vast menagerie of body parts. The various specimens were of extraordinary difference, and no two artifacts appeared the same as they continually flew and landed around the beach like gigantic bloody Cretaceous insects. The jungle was alive: flying creatures, strange screaming howls, and torrents of rain that looked like mud but smelled much worse. Thousands of angry metal mosquitos thirsty for blood zipped around furiously.
The thunder would sometimes seem to slowly cease, only to rapidly and sadistically increase in succession and volume. The earthquake continued.
At the shoreline a brave group of 7 army engineers were ducking and weaving while dodging potential bullets. Tasked with the cruel job of clearing obstacles with powerful explosives, they splashed in from the surf as the third wave of landing craft came destructively towards shore. Carrying a huge set of charges that were tangled in a rubber raft the drenched group bent low and made a sluggish beeline towards a large metal X formation flanked by wooden anti-tank pikes. With a big syrupy splash they gathered around the barricade and bent over the bombs while breathing heavily. Nobody noticed the two dry flamethrowers that lay 10 feet away on an elevated patch of blasted shingle, discarded earlier by exhausted giants.
A vibrating whir in the sky began to angrily shake their wet helmets, subtly at first but in increasing fury and persistence. The engineers stopped and looked up. A high whistling and rotating shriek grew louder and louder as a mammoth shell honed in towards the ill-fated group. None dared to dive away from the barricade. All they could do was pray and hope the shell would hit some further spot on the surf.
It all happened in a matter of seconds. In a bone-rattling sweep a white comet descended on them, bending the air around it as the huge shell collided with the metal structure. Time seemed to freeze for one moment. The engineers were vaporized before the bomb they carried instantly burst as well, and the biggest explosion of the day transpired on that particular sector of Omaha. The roar that seemed to come up from under the earth destroyed eardrums as every soldier on the sand turned to look towards the growing black mushroom cloud, as large as a small skyscraper. It was truly awe-inspiring as dozens of bodies, some still flailing, began to rain down - many of them 100 yards away from their initial point of propulsion. The sound was heard for at least 10 miles or more.
At the same time the shell landed the two flame throwers detonated and in a 30 yard radius every human body alive or dead was engulfed in speeding flames that seemed as if they were shot out of cannons.
Huge mountains of flesh were now on fire, regardless of how damp they were mere moments ago. As the seconds of eternity ticked on the melting warped faces of the dead bodies began to fuse together as the tangled masses became less and less recognizable. With eyeballs disintegrating it looked like yellow tears were streaming down their blackened faces as their cheek flesh slowly crackled and vanished into wisps, giving the illusion of a dead horde of garish African clowns that were simultaneously weeping and laughing hysterically."
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