The words of the great French anthem rang out over the town square, sung for the first time by liberated Frenchmen in the free capital of Normandy an… - Larry LeSueur

People always died in the most hidden places. They'd bleed to death, I guess. By the time their bodies were brought in, they're bloated, and they'd dig out the identification tags on some corpse's chest, maggots all over the place. And those aren't scenes which you want to report to your people back home. I mean, everybody would think it was their own son. I didn't have his name.

I watched the living soldiers pass by the dead at the roadside without a glance, and the dead scarcely looked human. They resembled wax mannequins thrown from a show window, lying about in grotesque, inhuman postures, arms pointing toward the sky, legs frozen as though they were running. Their faces were bloodless, waxy white.

We were huddled in the prow of our assault craft. German shells landed in the water, but you didn't hear any noise -- just white geysers of water going up alongside. Other small ships were swamped, and several of the tanks that accompanied us foundered. There were quite a few helmets floating around in the water nearby, which increased our apprehension. The Germans were firing from the ridge. I saw the first Americans killed by rifle fire crossing the inundated area. We knew Americans could get wounded, but we didn't know that they could actually expire. We thought that was only going to happen to the enemy. It was rather a sobering sight.