Free The Bedford Boys: One American Town's Ultimate D-day Sacrifice by Alex Kershaw Page B

men clustered—burnt out landing craft and immobilized vehicles—knowing entire platoons could be huddled behind them, frozen with shock and panic. The ammunition in the tank started to explode. Overstreet ran for cover. “I took off, started running, criss-crossing,” he recalled. “That was when I got hit.” 2
    Machine gun bullets wounded Overstreet in the stomach and leg but he finally made it to the sea wall running along the top of the Dog Green sector assigned to the 1st Battalion. “I called for first aid,” Overstreet remembered. “I finally got a guy to come to me. He was so nervous he couldn’t open the first aid kit. I had to do that for myself.” 3 Overstreet would lie beside the sea wall until 4:30 A.M. on June 7, when he would finally be taken to a hospital ship and then to England, where he would spend six weeks recovering from multiple bullet wounds. “He wouldn’t talk about the war with me when he came home,” recalled his sister Beu-lah Witt. “He suffered from stomach problems for the rest of his life.” 4
    Boatmate Gil Murdock had plunged into nine feet of water in one of the many tidal runnels on Omaha, and had then fought to get back to the surface, weighed down by his kit, punching the CO-2 tubes on his Mae West and even filling his gas mask casing with air to help him get buoyant. Finally, he had surfaced and gasped for air. Murdock had then made it to the shallows and was now crawling up the beach. Two men lay wounded, unable to fire a mortar. A sergeant ordered Murdock to operate it instead. Murdock got to the mortar and fired a couple of rounds but they didn’t explode.
    “Murdock, you dumb bastard,” shouted the sergeant, “you’re not pulling the firing pins!”
    Murdock managed to get off several more rounds, which actually exploded, then began to crawl towards the sea wall. He tried to fire his rifle but it was jammed with wet sand. Then he came across a soldier with a gaping wound in his arm. The soldier asked for a shot of morphine. Mur-dock gave it, wished him luck, and kept crawling, this time towards an antitank obstacle. Murdock found two men already cowering behind the obstacle. To advance seemed suicidal but to stay where they were only marginally less fatal: Men were now being picked off by a score of snipers along the bluffs.
    Murdock suddenly spotted George Roach crawling towards them.
    “What happened?” 5 said Roach.
    It looked like all A Company’s officers were dead, and every sergeant either dead or wounded.
    They tried to catch their breath. Suddenly, tracer fire sputtered towards them: A German machine gunner had spotted them. Fortunately, the tracers crackled above their heads. Every few seconds, another burst went high by just a few feet. Murdock couldn’t understand why the German wasn’t lowering his aim. Then he looked up and saw the German’s target—an antitank mine strapped to the obstacle. A direct hit would blow anything within several yards to pieces.
    They had better get the hell away, thought Murdock, before that German finds his mark. As the group left the obstacle, Murdock noticed that one soldier’s left leg was soaked in blood. “You’re hit!” he shouted.
    “You damn fool,” the soldier replied. “So are you.” 6
    Murdock looked down. Two machine-gun bullets had pierced his leg and ended up in his right ankle.
    “Look, I’m a good swimmer and you’re not that badly hurt,” said Roach. “Let me swim you out to that knocked-out tank in the water out there.”
    Murdock kept a photograph of his fiancée in the liner of his helmet. He looked at it. Roach grabbed the helmet and threw it away angrily.
    “Let’s get going.”
    Roach propped up Murdock as they swam out to sea. They finally got to the knocked-out tank. A few yards away, three men’s heads bobbed up and down. They looked closer. It was the tank’s crew, their faces disfigured by powder burns.
    The tank commander sat behind the turret. His left leg was missing