Private Bernard Sterno's Jump on D-Day, June 6, 1944

Bernard Sterno enlisted in the United States Army on February 3, 1942.  Originally from Georgia, he had moved to New York in search of work.  New York was not what he thought it would be, so when the war started, he volunteered.  His objective was to get into the paratroopers.  He was 19 years old.  This is his story of D-Day, June 6, 1944.

 

 

     Just before D-Day, they sent us to a marshaling area.  We were held behind barbed wire, kind of like a prison camp, almost. They had guards outside. You weren't allowed to communicate with anybody.  You weren't even allowed to talk with the cooks.  When you'd go through the mess line, when they'd put the food in your tray, there was no conversation.  You'd say thank you, or talk about the food, or something like that. They were very careful.  The NCOs and officers were always there.  There were armed guards on the fence area.  They didn't want you to go out of there.  There was no chance to talk to anybody.
     They took us in for a briefing before we made our jump.  They had a sand table made just like the area we were going to jump into.  They gave us large scale maps of where we were going to jump.  We were a couple of days getting briefed, where we were going to jump, what we were going to do.  The plan was that we were to jump near St. Martin-De-Varreville.  We were supposed to attack some barracks that were there, and round up all the Germans.  After that, we were to head down the causeway and keep it open so when the ground troops got there, it would be a little easier for them.  Earlier we were told we had four gun installations to destroy, gun installations that could fire on people on the beach.  But, the next day when they briefed us on it, they said there were only two of them there.  The air corps knocked out a bunch of them the day before.
     They postponed D-Day one day because the weather was too rough.  Then the next day, it was it.  They had a meeting before dark and General Eisenhower came out and walked right among us.  It was very informal.  Usually, when a general comes up they have you at attention. But as soon as Eisenhower walked up, the company commander was briefed.  He said, "At rest."  That meant you could stand around.   Eisenhower came browsing through us, talking to us, joking with us, asking questions, where we were from, what did we do in civilian life, and things like that.
     After he left, they took us, and all our heavy equipment, down to the C-47s, and we loaded up.  We took off before dark on the fifth of June.  I don't know how long it took us to get into formation.  I was sitting next to one guy and we got tired and fell asleep.  It was dark then, we were still flying.  When I woke up and looked down, I could see a light flashing up at us.  We were over the English Channel.  It must have been a submarine or something like that that was flashing.

The next thing I knew, I could hear what sounded like a bunch of gravel on the plane.  I could see streaks of tracer bullets coming up from the ground.  I said, "Look there.  It looks like tracer bullet fire or something."  The guy next to me said, "It's just fire from the exhaust of the engines."

     Then we started rocking.  They told us to stand up and hook up and we parachuted into Normandy at night.
We were scattered all over and mixed in with the 82nd Airborne.  It was just all mixed up that first night.  Every time another plane would come over the Germans would start shooting.  We got as close to them as we could and threw some hand grenades at them.  That quieted some of them down.  When it got daylight and we started seeing some of our own people.  We stayed together and when we ran into groups of Germans, we'd get rid of them.  Some of them would run and roll.  It was nip and tuck.
     When we came to a village, we hit it along with other companies.  We were all mixed up with the 82nd Airborne.  We were just disorganized.  After a couple of days we all got together as people wandered in.  Some of the men landed further away from our objective than we did.  One plane load landed in the channel and were never seen again.  They were from Company A, First Battalion, 502 Parachute Regiment.  Their company commander was on the plane that went down.
I don't know how many days we were there.  After the 10th, we were supposed to go and take Carentan.  The whole company slept in a barn that night.  The next morning we started out toward the open causeway.  We had to rush in bunches and hit the ground and roll because the Germans were shooting at us and it was all in the open.  We'd go across one of those bridges, hit the shoulder of the road, and lay down low.  Some of the bridges were blown out.  We strung ropes across them and pulled ourselves across the water on the ropes.  We were all day long there. 
     When it got night, a dog-gone German dive bomber came over and was firing bullets.  He was hitting the paved road and everybody there.  He knocked several people of G Company out.  He just got them.  A British night fighter came in behind him and knocked him down.  The dive bomber looked like a torch in the air.  I could see it going over and hit the ground over on the other side of Carentan.  You could see it burning all night long.

     When it got daylight, we were out on the end of the bridge. They sent Company H up ahead because the other companies had already taken a beating.  There was a big steel gate there and they pulled the gate open.  They needed somebody to go so they said Company H, that was our company.  Our commander says, "Come on Company H, let's do it."
     The battalion commander, who was Colonel Cole, Robert Cole, from Texas, was standing there in the bald open with a .45 pistol on him.  Our company commander was talking in a little whisper, and Colonel Cole said, "Damn it, Simmons, those Heinies know you're here.  There's no sense whispering."
     Our company commander, Cecil L. Simmons, was from Grand Rapids, Michigan.  He was a captain.  After the war, he became the head of the Michigan National Guard and made brigadier general.  I've seen him twice since then.  I saw him at the Orlando reunion about 15 or 20 years ago and again when we were in Holland in 1989, at the celebration they had in memory of the liberation of Eindhoven.  That's the place where we jumped in Holland.  I knew the Germans were sitting there waiting, because all day long we had been trying to get to them.  When we started to cross over a hedge, all hell broke loose.  I mean, they just opened up.
     We sent one patrol out across an open field to a farm house. No sooner had they gone out, I was just getting ready to go over the hedge, and, man, the bullets and crap started flying.  We laid down in a ditch.  The rest of the battalion was up and down the ditch too, just pinned down.
     It was just starting to get daylight when I noticed artillery shells started going into them, our artillery.  I said, "The next artillery man I meet I want to shake his hand."  Those heavy aerial bursts would burst over the foxholes and trenches the Germans were in.  They would explode and hit them even though there were in slit trenches.  They kept pouring that on them.
     Finally the Colonel said, "When the smoke gets here," we would fire smoke shells which would hinder the Germans' visibility, "I want you to fix bayonets and charge."  I couldn't believe it.  But, sure enough, why, I looked over and saw Colonel Cole leading the dog-gone battalion.  He was the one that gave the order.  And then the rest of us, we jumped up and started going.  I went about a hundred or a hundred and fifty feet and I was looking for an German to shoot at.  One had his head right up there in the slit trench, I could see his helmet.  I aimed at it and got him.  He had a P-38 pistol and I wanted that son-of-a-gun.  I was laying on my stomach so I wouldn't get hit.  I reached up and got my trench knife out of my boot to cut the pistol loose.  I went to cut it, and my hand just jolted like that, and blood started to come out both sides of my finger.  A bullet had gone through my finger just as neat as anything.  I cut the pistol loose and crawled over to a more secure spot.
     A medic happened to come by, Land, was his name, a guy from Tampa, Florida.  Zephyr Hills, I think.  He saw my hand bleeding and he said, "Let me bandage that."  I said, "Aw, it's not bothering me at all.  It's just throbs a little."
He said, "Yeah, I want to bandage it."

     He bandaged it up okay.  He had my whole hand just wrapped with the darn thing.  Then we moved on forward to where the Germans were.  Colonel Cole looked over at me.  He remembered me, and he said, "Sterno, get back there and get some more medical attention.  You can't sit up here with that."
     I said, "It don't bother me."
     He said, "Get back," and I said, "Yes, sir."
I went back and found a friend of mine, who was a sergeant. We used to go into London together.  He was on his back holding his stomach.  I crawled over to him, and I don't know whether it was a shell, or a bullet, or what hit him, but some of his intestines were showing.  I heard somebody grunting and groaning and looked over and it was our medic.  He got one in his back.  He died right there. I got his first aid kit and started putting sulfathilamide powder and sulfa on the sergeant's wound with big, heavy pieces of gauze.  I gave him some morphine shots, from the little tubes of morphine they issued us.  I squirted that into him and he felt better.
     Vehicles started coming up because they patched up the bridge.  One weapons carrier came driving in with more ammunition for us and they used that to pick up wounded.  There were a couple of medics on it.  They came over to where we were and got the wounded.  I told them, "There's one over here,” and they got the sergeant on a stretcher and got him out of there.  Another guy there was on his back.  His name was Reiley, and he was shot.  A bullet went completely through his chest.
     He said, "I can't breath, I can't breathe."  He was begging me to shoot him.  I thought he must be in pretty bad shape.  I said, "No, I can't do that."  A couple of medics came up and set him against a tree.  They saw there was not much they could do with him.  Later on, after a little more excitement, we found him on his back, dead.
     A lieutenant who was there said, "Get back.  You're wounded. We've got enough people here."  My hand didn't bother me.  It was just because the darned hand was bandaged all the way, but I went back.  I really wasn't hurt bad.
I got back to the trench we started from, and there were three or four wounded people in there.  One guy, I'll never forget, had a handlebar mustache.  When Eisenhower was walking among us before we jumped that night, he said, "What did you do in civilian life?"  He said he was a waiter or something.  Eisenhower said, "I think he was a pirate, the way he looks."  He was joking humorously.  But he was there.  He apparently had been wounded, he had his arm in a sling leaning back smoking a cigarette.
     I kept hearing these mortar shells.  I thought they were 88s at first.  I figured they were mortar shells, because you could hear pumph, pumph, and a short while thereafter, you'd hear the things whiz over.  They started hitting close to us.  I crawled into a little trench that was there.  It sounded like one hit real close to us and it felt like a board hitting my butt, tore my groin up a little bit.  My ears were ringing and when everything cleared, I could hear this one guy saying, "My eye, my eye."  His right eye was completely torn out.  I said, "Just be thankful you have the other one."  I put a piece of gauze and bandage on it for him.  Another guy, he had a submachine gun, was sitting there, his head lolling back and forth, blood coming our of both his nose and ears.  I don't know how he turned out.  But the guy who had the handlebar mustache, I wouldn't have recognized him if it hadn't been for that.  All that was left of his face was from the nose down.  The rest of it, it had shaved his head completely off, in two.
     I was hurt then, really hurt.  I could hardly stand.  I could get up and limp.  I didn't know how bad I was hurt.  I had blood all over me, and my hip was aching.  I had shrapnel in my groin, my butt.  So I crawled on back to the iron gate.  I got back across the bridge and saw this little foxhole and got down in it.
There were other people back there who were wounded, and some who hadn't got up to the front yet.  The lieutenant from our company was there in a little foxhole about 10 feet from me.  All of a sudden, boom, it was a small caliber shell, I think a 55-mm mortar that the Germans had, that hit right between us.  It grazed my neck enough to make it bleed.  That didn't hurt bad, but it also go me in the chest.  There's still a little piece shrapnel in there now.  The lieutenant caught most of it in his arm.  I heard him over there moaning.
     Finally, they had a truce.  They told all walking wounded, “If you can walk, get up and get to the rear."  We couldn't have any weapons or anything.  Our supply sergeant was there and he said, "I'll take care of that P-38 for you."  I said, "Okay."  I asked him later on back in England what happened to it.  "Well, I went across a river and lost it," he said.  I don't know what he did with it.  So they sent me back to England.
     Carentan was taken on June 11, 1944.

The Gun Is Civilization

"The Gun Is Civilization"  

            By  Maj. L. Caudill USMC (Ret)
     Human beings only have two ways to deal with one another: reason and force.

If you want me to do something for you, you have a choice of either convincing me via argument, or force me to do your bidding under threat of force. Every human interaction falls into one of those two categories, without exception. Reason or force, that's it .
     
In a truly moral and civilized society, people exclusively interact through persuasion. Force has no place as a valid method of social interaction, and the only thing  that removes force from the menu is the personal firearm, as paradoxical as it may sound to some.
     
When I carry a gun, you cannot deal with me by force. You have  to use reason and try to persuade me, because I have a way to negate  your threat or employment of force. The gun is the only personal weapon that puts a 100-pound  woman on equal footing with a 220-pound mugger, a 75-year old retiree on equal footing with a 19-year old gang banger, and a single guy on equal footing with a carload of drunk guys with baseball bats. The gun removes the disparity in  physical strength, size, or numbers between a potential attacker and a  defender.
     
There are plenty of people who consider the gun as the source of bad force equations. These are the people who think that we'd be more civilized if all guns were removed from society,  because a firearm  makes it easier for a [armed] mugger to do his job. That, of course, is only true if the mugger's potential victims are mostly disarmed either by choice or by legislative fiat - it has no validity when most of a mugger's potential  marks are armed.
    
People who argue for the banning of arms ask for automatic rule by the young, the strong, and the many, and that's the exact opposite of  a civilized society. A mugger, even an armed one, can only make a successful living in a society where the state has granted him a force monopoly .
  
Then there's the argument that the gun makes confrontations lethal that otherwise would only result in injury. This argument is fallacious in several ways. Without guns involved, confrontations are won by the physically superior party inflicting overwhelming injury on the loser.
     
People who think that fists, bats, sticks, or stones don't constitute lethal force, watch too much TV , where people take beatings and come out of it with a bloody lip at worst. The fact that the gun makes lethal force easier, works solely in favor of the weaker defender, not the stronger attacker. If both are armed, the field is level.
     
The gun is the only weapon that's as lethal in the hands of an octogenarian as it is in the hands of a weight lifter. It simply would not work as well as a force equalizer if it wasn't both lethal and easily  employable.
     
When I carry a gun, I don't do so because I am looking for a fight, but because I'm looking to be left alone. The gun at my side means that I cannot be forced, only persuaded . I don't carry it because I'm  afraid, but because it enables me to be unafraid. It doesn't limit the actions of those who would interact with me through reason, only the actions of those who would do so by force. It removes force from the equation.. And  that's why carrying a gun is a civilized act!!
          
So the greatest civilization is one where all citizens are equally armed and can only be persuaded, never forced !!

New Philadelphia, Ohio, Fiscal Irresponsibility Grows

Politics goes on.  It has always been biased, its objectives to bring power, influence, financial gain to those who participate but only if done on the right side.  Integrity, honesty, responsibility to country, state, city, and the citizens who reside there is a thing of the past.  Good stewardship to citizens is dead. 

On the national scene we are governed by a president who is of doubtful citizenship, Barack Obama, who is unfit to serve in that office because of his inability, or refusal, to prove his citizenship, has disregarded the United States Constitution and Declaration of Independence, has openly declared his preference of Communism over a republican type of government, and is supported by Congress which follows his lead without question. 

New Philadelphia has watched the debacle in Washington and learned its lesson well.  The present circumstances could be the basis for an Orwellian book titled “The Day the Idiots Took the Asylum”.  Consider the recent past.   New Philadelphia is in serious financial trouble.  The mayor, Michael Taylor, for whatever reason, we’re not privy to what, resigned half way through his second term effective the end of December last year.  That, of course left the city with no mayor, a situation that could only be remedied by the Tuscarawas Democratic Central Committee meeting and appointing a replacement to fill out the last two years of Taylor’s unfinished term.  Meet they did and on January 9, by a vote of nine of the 16 eligible committee members, the Democratic Central Committee elected David Johnson Mayor of the City of New Philadelphia, a remarkable choice.

Johnson has had experience in city positions in the past, City Council President and City Treasurer, both jobs as the result of successful election bids.  As city treasurer Johnson did not finish his four-year term but resigned after a state audit of the city’s books.  His experience as treasurer was marred by a lack of presenting to city council monthly reports on the state of the city’s finances, as required by law, and difficulty in balancing the city’s books with statements from banks in which city funds are deposited.  This is spooky as a major part of the mayor’s job is administering the city budget.

One of the first decisions made by Johnson as mayor of New Philadelphia, was to express opposition to retaining Regional Income Tax Agency (RITA) to administer, and enforce, New Philadelphia’s income taxes.  RITA is an agency established by the state under the Ohio Revised Code, Chapter 167, to provide assistance to cities in Ohio with their tax collection.  RITA does it all.  It calculates taxes due, checks to make sure full payment is made, goes after delinquent tax payers, or non-payers as the case may be.  RITA will represent the city in actions which require going to court to collect taxes not paid. 

This assistance does not come for free.  RITA charges two-and-a-half percent of the total amount of taxes collected, for an estimated cost of $151,000 a year in comparison to the income tax office current operating budget of $240,000 per annum, an annual saving in excess of $90,000.

Mayor Johnson doesn’t like this for a couple of reasons.

He says that it could cost jobs, and the city should be hiring people instead of laying them off.  Currently there are four people working in the tax office, an administrator who was hired as a temporary employee and knows it, two full time clerks and a part-timer.  One full-time clerk is retiring, the part-timer will probably be let go no matter what happens. 

Johnson’s second complaint is that there aren’t many cities getting involved with RITA.  I don’t know where he got his figures.  Since 2008, 92 municipalities have signed on with RITA.  To name a few there are Willoughby, Kent, Gahanna, Loveland, Cleveland Heights, North Ridgeville, and Painesville.  Conversations with communities using RITA over a number of years give RITA excellent ratings including the cities of Freemont, Lyndhurst, Middlesburg Heights, Streetsboro, Tallmadge, and Broadview Heights.

It has been rumored that there are taxpayers in New Philadelphia, some of whom are major businesses within the city, who are not paying their taxes at all, and the money is being lost to the city because the city does not actively pursue and prosecute them.  RITA will seek these people out, prosecute them if necessary to collect back taxes, increase New Philadelphia’s revenue, and do it with a $90,000 savings to city expenses.

And Mayor Johnson doesn’t seem to get it.

What’s coming next?  Executive orders from Mayor Johnson?

 

Obama And The Muslim Heritage In The United States

 


 Barack Obama, during a speech in Cairo, said: "I know, too, that Islam has always been a part of America's history."

AN AMERICAN CITIZEN'S RESPONSE.

Dear Mr. Obama:

Have you ever seen a Muslim hospital?

Have you heard a Muslim orchestra?

Have you seen a Muslim band march in a parade?

Have you witnessed a Muslim act of charity?

Have you seen Muslims shake hands with a Muslim Girl Scout?

Have you seen a Muslim do anything that contributes positively to the American way of life.

The answer is no, you have not. Just ask yourself why?

Were those Muslims that were in America when the Pilgrims first landed?  No, they were Native American Indians.

Were those Muslims that celebrated the first Thanksgiving day?  No yet again.  Those were Pilgrims and Native American Indians.

Can you show me one Muslim signature on the: United States Constitution, the Declaration of Independence, of the Bill of Rights?  No, you cannot.

Did Muslims fight for this country's freedom from England?  No.

Did Muslims fight during the Civil War to free the slaves in America?  No, they did not.  In fact, Muslims remain the largest traffickers In human slavery to this day.  Your own half-brother, a devoutly radical extremist Muslim, still advocates slavery himself, even though Muslims of Arabic descent refer to black Muslims as "pug nosed slaves."

Says a lot of what the Muslim world really thinks of-your family's "rich Islamic heritage," doesn't it, Mr. Obama?

Where were Muslims during the Civil Rights era of this country? Not present.

There are no pictures or media accounts of Muslims walking side by side with Martin Luther King, Jr., or helping to advance the cause of Civil Rights.

Where were Muslims during this country's Woman's Suffrage era?  Again, not present.  In fact, devout Muslims demand that women are subservient to men in Islamic culture.  In fact, women are often beaten for not wearing the 'hajib' or for talking to a man who is not a direct family- member of their husband. Yep, Muslims are all for women's rights, aren't they?

Where were Muslims during World War II?  They were aligned with Adolf Hitler and Mussolini, and were murdering and looting our stranded and wounded aviators and soldiers in the deserts of North Africa.  The Muslim grand mufti himself met with Adolf Hitler, reviewed the troops, and accepted support from the Nazi's in killing Jews.

Finally, Mr. Obama, where were Muslims on Sept 11, 2001?  If they weren't flying planes full of innocent people into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, or a field in Pennsylvania, killing nearly 3,000 people on our own soil, they were rejoicing, not only in the Middle East, but in US streets as well as many other western democracies which have allowed them to enter illegally.

No one can dispute the pictures shown from all parts of the Muslim world revealing Muslims celebrating, on CNN, Fox News, MSNBC and other cable news networks on that infamous day.  Strangely, the very "moderate" Muslims who's arses you bent over backwards to kiss in Cairo, Egypt on June 4th were stone cold silent post 9-11  To many Americans, their silence has meant approval for the acts of that day.

Oh, I'm sorry, I forgot to mention the Barbary Pirates,  They were Muslims too.

And remember November 5, 2009 and the slaughter of American soldiers at Fort Hood by a Muslim major who, as a doctor and a psychiatrist, was supposed to be counseling soldiers returning from battle in Iraq and Afghanistan..

We must also add the Boston Marathon bombings and the killing and beheading of a soldier on the street in London.

That, Mr. Obama is the "Muslim heritage" in America.