D-DAY

BAUMGARTEN: I drew this big Star of David on my field jacket, with the “Bronx, New York,” underneath it. It was my act of defiance. I didn’t expect to live through it. I wrote home to my sister, Ethel, who lived in a two-family house with my folks, that when the telegram comes, run down and get the telegram first and break the news gently. I had made up my mind I wasn’t coming back.

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HAL BAUMGARTEN, D-DAY VETERAN: I was playing in a football game, age 16, on Pearl Harbor day in George Washington High School stadium in New York. After the game, we found out about Pearl Harbor, and all these fellows that were much older than me went right down and enlisted that day.

THOMAS: At 16, Hal Baumgarten was too young to join up and too focused on college plans. It would be a year before he would get his papers.

BAUMGARTEN: I got a notice in the mail, “Greetings, you are going to be part of the United States Army.” I was happy about it. I could have asked for an exemption, because on my draft board was my college professor from NYU. And they said, “Why don’t you put in for exemption? We’ll exempt you. You can keep going to college.” It was time to go in. It was time to do my job.

THOMAS (voice over): Monday morning, June 5, in the nervous hours before moving out, each soldier in his own way tried to make his peace and prepare for war.

BAUMGARTEN: I drew this big Star of David on my field jacket, with the “Bronx, New York,” underneath it. It was my act of defiance. I didn’t expect to live through it. I wrote home to my sister, Ethel, who lived in a two-family house with my folks, that when the telegram comes, run down and get the telegram first and break the news gently. I had made up my mind I wasn’t coming back. Everybody is getting his equipment ready. Some guys are playing cards. They’re gambling.

BAUMGARTEN: When the boats hit the water, they were thrown around like matchsticks. The waves were 10 to 20 feet high. Every man was immediately soaked with the icy cold English Channel water.

THOMAS (voice over): While the Rangers scaled the cliff at Pointe du Hoc, another brutal assault was playing out just a few kilometers to the east. Omaha Beach was a key allied objective. But with overwhelming German defenses, to land in the first wave at Omaha was to step into hell.

BAUMGARTEN: The first thing that we noted, the boat on our left blew up. We were covered with wood, metal and body parts and blood.

When our ramp went down, Clarius Riggs (ph) was in front of me from Tennessee, 6 foot 2, dying to get off and fight Germany. He got machine gunned on the ramp and went face down into the water. I dove behind him. Only my helmet was creased by a bullet. There I was standing in neck-deep bloody water.

It was mostly a fight for survival. Most guys never fired a shot. I fired one shot. Most guys never did. In fact, they were killed in the water, or they were hiding behind the tanks. They were hiding behind dead bodies in the water. They were hiding behind smashed pieces of wood from the assault boats. And they were trying to take cover in the water.

But going across the beach, machine gun spray came from right to left from the bluff. I heard a loud thud on my right front and my rifle vibrated. I turned it over. It was a clean hole in its receiver, which is right in front of the trigger. My seven bullets in the magazine section saved my life, because there was another loud thud behind me on the left, and that soldier was gone.

I looked over to my left and staggering by me without his helmet was Sergeant Clarence Robison (ph) from my boat, a gaping hole in the left side of his forehead. His blonde hair was streaked with blood. He was out of it. Anyway, he staggered all the way behind me to the left, knelt down facing the wall, took out his rosary beads and started praying. And the machine gun up on the bluff to our right cut him in half.

A shell went off in front of me, and I’m about 110 yards from the sea wall. It went off in front of me, shrapnel caught me here, ripped this cheek off, ripped the roof of my mouth out. I had teeth and gums laying on my tongue.

THOMAS: Hal Baumgarten made it to the sea wall at the end of Omaha Beach. His run lasted 20 minutes and covered the length of six football fields. While pulling another wounded soldier to the sea wall’s relative safety, a second shell fragment gashed the young private’s head. Shortly after a medic bandaged his wounds, Baumgarten stumbled across his best friend’s lifeless body.

BAUMGARTEN: I started to cry when I saw my buddy. I used to tell my officers, ‘I’ll never be able to kill anybody. I never went hunting. I never killed an animal. I would never be able to kill a human.’ The officers used to tell me, “Don’t worry, when you get into combat, you’ll kill.” And they were right. You get — I was crying mad, I call it; mad, meaning really you get to the point where you go psycho more or less. You want to kill.

I got together with 11 other guys, all wounded. I call them now ‘the walking wounded.’ We went up the bluff, and we hit up finally with some Germans behind a — in a little low-walled farm yard. And they were firing at us. The fight ended with a hand grenade that we threw. And when we moved on, there were only eight of us left.

THOMAS: As nightfall set in, a landmine badly injured Baumgarten’s foot. It was his third wound. As he struggled to keep pace with his comrades, a German machine gun ambushed the group. Baumgarten was hit yet again in the face. Blood concealed his Star of David as he slumped over his dying cohorts.

BAUMGARTEN: I’m laying there on top of these guys, because when I came over, I fell on top of them. You know, I had just got wounded. And there was moaning, groaning, “Help me, Jesus,” and then all of a sudden silence.

So it gets close to 1:00 in the morning, and I look up. I thought I was hallucinating. I thought I heard, “Don’t worry, Yankee boy, you’re going to be all right.” But in later years I found out it was a German patrol coming down the road looking for cigarettes, and they saw the one guy alive, and they didn’t kill me.

THOMAS: In Baumgarten’s dark hour, hope was not far away.

BAUMGARTEN: At 3:00 in the morning I’m looking up at this big moon, and it was a tremendous moon. I saw the silver lead of an army ambulance. I took the submachine gun, never fired in my life, aimed over the ambulance, and I fired a burst. They stopped, came out with their hands up. They looked down. They saw it was one of their own.

THOMAS: On the morning after D-Day, Hal Baumgarten lay on the beach awaiting evacuation from Normandy. Medics were tending his wounds, but even then the soldier wasn’t out of danger.

BAUMGARTEN: A sniper or snipers opened up on us from the bluff of Saint Larurent Sur-Mer. They also put a bullet through the Red Cross and the aid man that was taking care of us. They started bumping off the wounded GIs. When they came to me, they put a bullet through my right knee.

At 3:00 in the afternoon, I was evacuated off Omaha Beach by four Navy men, who picked up my stretcher, put me out on an assault boat, put me out on the deck, and I looked up and I saw this huge U.S. flag. Then I realized that we hadn’t lost.

BAUMGARTEN: I got discharged February 12, 1945. And February 14 I was back in the classroom at New York University taking, of all things, German. I was taking chemistry and biology. I got all A’s.