"" XENIA, Ohio -- On a winding road, past a
stand of sycamores outside his Ohio home,
CBS News found Jim Martin, 70 years after
his first trip to France.
Jim was one of the first Americans in
combat in Europe.
"They called us the tip of the spear," he
says.
Jim was a private in the 101st Airborne,
one of the paratroopers dropped behind
German lines in the hours before the D-
Day landings.
"We wanted to get out of the plane
quickly, because it was hitting the plane,"
he says. "Planes were blowing up, and we
wanted to get the hell out of there."
They were inviting targets as they drifted
toward the ground and the enemy.
Asked what was going through his mind
as he slowly descended through the clouds
into hostile territory, Jim says,
"Fascination, because of all of this fire
coming up towards us."
"It was absolutely fascinating to see all
these various colored tracers coming up
there," he says.
Their mission was to keep the Germans
from reinforcing their troops on the
dunes. Jim and his comrades landed right
in the middle of those German
reinforcements.
"That was a slaughter house," he recalls.
"There was SS all over the place, and they
just slaughtered us. My colonel was lost.
My company commander was lost."
But what was supposed to be three days of
fighting in Normandy went on for a
month.
"That's the way we were trained, we
accepted that," Jim says. "And no matter
how many people are there against you,
what the odds are doesn't matter. We're
going to win."
Jim went from Normandy to fight in
Holland, where he was wounded; from
Holland to the Battle of the Bulge in
Belgium; and from Belgium to
Berchtesgaden, Germany -- Adolf Hitler's
retreat in the Bavarian Alps.
Jim says he thought he was going to die
"every day."
"You just have to accept it," he says. "If
you're going to worry about dying all the
time, you can't fight."
Jim is 93 now, one of the few left who can
talk firsthand of a time when he says
right was right and wrong was wrong,
and everyone knew the difference.
And here's the best part: This week, he's
going back to Normandy, where he
intends to parachute -- yes parachute --
onto the same soil he touched seven
decades ago.
"I'm not usually looking for records or
anything, but that would give me a great
deal of satisfaction," he says.
Bon voyage, Jim.""
Link.

Real men and true Americans.......God bless em....my true heroes. Aint lookin for replies....just my own lil personal tribute to the heroes of Normandy....Anniversary is in a few hours.

Btw...when the worlds oceans levels drain by 20 ft...its because they filled the indentions this bad ass mofos balls left when he parachutes in AGAIN.

That is awesome.... He's a true American hero!

A very interest aspect of the Normandy invasion.....Gen George Pattons Ghost Army....

"" In the final years of World War II, both the
Allied and Axis Powers knew that there was
no chance of defeating Hitler without
cracking his grasp on Western Europe, and
both sides knew that Northern France was
the obvious target for an amphibious
assault. The German high command
assumed the Allies would cross from
England to France at the narrowest part of
the channel and land at Pas-de-Calais. The
Allies instead set their sights some 200
miles to the west. The beaches of
Normandy could be taken as they were, but
if the Germans added to their defense by
moving their reserve infantry and panzers to
Normandy from their garrison in the Pas-
de-Calais region, the invasion would be a
disaster.
Success, the Allies decided, would rest on
distracting German forces and spreading
them too thin across multiple invasion
sites. They needed a way to credibly
threaten Pas-de-Calais, scaring the
Germans into keeping the reserves there
and away from the actual battle. The
resulting plan, Operation Fortitude, is one of
the greatest lies ever told.
George and His Imaginary Friends
The Allied intelligence services created two
fake armies to keep the Germans on their
toes. One would be based in Scotland for a
supposed invasion of Norway and the other
headquartered in southeast England to
threaten the Pas-de-Calais. The northern
operation relied mainly on fake radio traffic
and the feeding of false information to
double agents to create the impression of a
substantial army. Fortitude South, though,
was well within the range of prying German
ears and eyes, so fake chatter alone would
be uncovered too quickly. The Allies would
have to make it look and sound like a
substantial army was building up in
southeast England. They needed boots on
the ground there, without actually using too
much of their precious manpower.
When intelligence officers learned that the
First U.S. Army Group (FUSAG) was to be
redesignated the 12th Army Group, they
knew they had their Pas-de-Calais
invaders. The FUSAG was kept alive on
paper, and the phantom army was given a
few real soldiers and placed under the
command of one of the era’s great military
leaders.
General George S. Patton, nicknamed Old
Blood and Guts, was feared and respected
by Germans, more so than any other Allied
commander. Today, he’s an American
legend and a military icon, but in early
1944 he was almost out of a job. During
the invasion of Sicily the previous summer,
Patton had been visiting wounded troops at
a field hospital when he came across
Private Charles H. Kuhl slouched on a stool
and suffering from battle fatigue. When
Patton asked him where he was injured,
Kuhl explained that he wasn’t wounded, but
just couldn’t take it.
Patton didn’t like the answer, so he pulled
out his gloves, slapped Kuhl across the
face with them, and literally kicked him out
of the hospital tent with an order to return
to the front line. A media firestorm
followed, and Patton was deemed a public
relations liability and relieved of his
command. He spent the rest of the year
hopping around the Mediterranean making
speeches, inspecting facilities and having
his picture taken with troops.
When the phantom FUSAG got its marching
orders, General Dwight Eisenhower, Supreme
Commander of the Allied forces, struck a
deal with Patton. The general would take
command of the fictional army and stay
out of trouble, and when the U.S. Third
Army actually invaded France, he’d be
given the reins.
Tricks of the Trade
Patton’s ghost army was based out of
Dover, East Anglia and other areas of
southeast England. The choice of location
made it look like the Allies were going to
push across the English Channel straight
into the port of Calais, but also left the
operation vulnerable to German snooping.
To leave no doubt in Hitler’s mind that
FUSAG was a formidable threat and that an
attack on Calais was imminent, Allied
intelligence launched a multi-pronged
campaign of deception against the
Germans.
Throughout most of the war, the German
intelligence service and military brass
believed that the Allied command in Europe
was crawling with German spies. In reality,
the British had quickly rounded up most of
the Nazi agents as they arrived in the UK
and turned them into double agents. Two of
these spies were instrumental during
Fortitude. Roman Garby-Czerniawski
(codename Brutus) was a former Polish
military officer who pretended to spy for the
Germans and convinced his Nazi handlers
that he was a liaison between Free Polish
forces and Patton’s FUSAG headquarters.
Juan Pujol (codename Garbo) was a
Spaniard who’d previously trolled the
Germans on his own before being recruited
by the Allies and put to work feeding fake
info to the Nazis on FUSAG’s manpower,
maneuvers and battle readiness. British
intelligence also passed fake info off to
Germany through civilian channels. For
example, letters were printed in the local
newspapers near FUSAG’s supposed base
voicing complaints from citizens about
noise and the behavior of the troops.
On the ground in southeast England,
something also had to be done about the
Germans’ reconnaissance planes. There
were a few real American and British units
in the area, temporarily assigned to FUSAG
before actually heading to Normandy, but
the view from above was not impressive.
The fake intelligence and chatter was
creating the impression that FUSAG was
larger than any other Allied army operating
in Europe, so now it had to look real and
like it meant business.
To bring FUSAG off of paper and into the
real world, the Allies built a cleverly
conceived, sort-of-real-but-mostly-fake
base for the army. Mess tents, hospital
tents, ammo caches, toilets, fuel depots and
parking areas were built all over the
southeast. The parking lots were filled with
fake jeeps, trucks and tanks built from cloth
and plywood. Inflatable rubber vehicles
were also deployed (but frequently fell
victim to curious cows from the local
farms). Every night a group of soldiers was
responsible for picking up and moving the
fake vehicles around the bases for the sake
of realism, one of them using a custom-
made rolling tool to make “tire tracks” in
the dirt.
The harbors of the area likewise had to be
populated by a false Navy, and British
movie industry pros were brought in to
“dress the set.” They constructed landing
craft, support boats and even an oil dock
from wood and fabric and floated them on
oil drums.
Waiting for the End of the World
As D-Day loomed, the Allies wondered if
their ruse was working. The interception
and decryption of German radio traffic
(aided by the well-timed arrival of a
captured German code machine) gave them
a resounding “yes.” The Germans were
buying FUSAG and the Pas-de-Calais
invasion hook, line and sinker, but the lie
could not unravel just yet.
On June 6, the Allies landed at Normandy.
As the battle raged there and the Germans
considered sending reinforcements, the
Allies kept spinning the story, lest the
panzers in Calais roll up behind the real
Allied armies as they moved up and off the
beaches. The waters around southern
England were jammed with fake boats and
even a few real battleships, the scripted
radio traffic went silent, smokescreens were
laid, and boats swept the Channel for
mines, all to give the impression that
another attack was imminent. Brutus and
Garbo continued to mislead their German
superiors, telling them that Normandy was
just a distraction and Patton’s army was
going to embark in just a few days for the
real invasion.
On June 9, Garbo radioed in to his German
contacts and transmitted for a full two
hours with false troop movement reports,
descriptions of the landing forces, and a
reassurance that FUSAG’s true target was
the Pas-de-Calais.
The message went all the way up the chain
to Hitler, who not only cancelled an order to
send the Calais forces to Normandy, but
actually rerouted reinforcements coming
from other areas away from Normandy and
to Calais. During the D-Day landings and
for weeks after, as the Allies - including
Patton and the US Third Army - moved
deeper and deeper into France, the Germans
continued to hold onto Calais for dear life.
It wasn’t until Patton’s real army began to
prod them from the south that the panzers
and infantry moved out, after they’d spent
almost the whole the summer waiting for
an assault that never came from an army
that didn’t exist.""
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