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- for Cornelius Ryan 2 -
Your name Noel A Dube

[*Letters*]
Did you by any chance keep a diary of what happened to you that day? No. I didn't
keep a diary but I did after the first four days or less manage to
write my future wife every day.

Were any of your friends killed or wounded either during the landing or
during the day? Capt. Holmstrup our Co. Commander was killed as the ramp
went down and he fell face down in the water. I did not actually see
this action he was on another landing craft. I did see my platoon
leader Lt. Pope of Vernal Utah get hit in the elbow as he was walking
back from looking at beach obstacles he was spun completely around.

Do you remember any conversations you had with them before they became
casualties? No.

Were you wounded? Not on D-Day but later in Germany on the Roer River.

*Do you remember what it was like—that is, do you remember whether you
you felt any pain or were so surprised that you felt nothing? I set off a Shu-mine
while picking them up moving along on my hands and knees. When the mine
went off I never lost conciousnous. I remember clearly being tossed
into the air and landing just above the water in a bomb crater half filled
with water. The pain that I felt was like a bad sprained ankle where
my foot was. However I could not feel my left arm and I thought that

** Do you remember seeing or hearing anything that seems funny now, even
though it may not have seemed funny at the time? Yes. I mentioned earlier that
the landing craft that I was on when it came in the second time let
the ramp down right on the pebble beach and I didn't get as much as the
sole of my shoes wet, this is what prayers does for you, a man in my
squad by the name of Bossetti, we called him Bow Wow because he always
seemed to talk with a mouth full and was hard to understand, Bossetti
was to land with two bangolor topedoes to blow the barb wire fence that
was in front of the wall and near the anti tank ditch in front of the
wall. Well, just as the ramp lowered on the pebbled beach where Boseseti
could have made it easily, he turns and throws both of them overboard.
When we get to the wall we have nothing to blow the wire with so we had
to do it with wire cutters. That night Bossetti is on outpost and of
the four put around the area where we stayed the first night his out-
post was the only one not captured, however somewhere during the night
he found a German P38 pistol and from that day on for the next week
he went around like a one man army shouting his P38 until one day, we
were behind this farm house and we spotted about four German nearly 200
yds away and Bossetti is trying to hit them with his Pistol, I threaten -

*** Do you recall any incident, sad or heroic or simply memorable, which struck
you more than anything else?
[*?*] On D Day when we reach D Draw we were looking right up into cave like
emplacement where snipers were hiding. This is where the shot came
from that got Lt. Pope in the elbow. Carl Autry from Texas took it
upon himself to climb the hillside which was heavily mined, how he
managed to avoid hitting them I don’t know, he finally made it to the
top of the hill and approached the cave from behind, threw a couple of
grenades in the cave and went in after them, he came out with two
prisoners, both turned out to be mongolians. This had me puzzled at
first I thought we had landed some place other than France.

That first night I was talking with a French farmer and his wife. The y
must of been in their 70's also with them was their god-child about
7 or 8 yrs old. Naturally they had been terrified by the sudden change
of events around their homestead, I recall talking to them just out-
side of a bomb shelter they had built in the ground with logs and
tree limbs for coverage. I was assuring them that they had seen their
last Germans, and that they were now safe in the hands of Americans.
He was surprised to hear me speak french, and said he hoped I was
right. I no sooner got the words out of my mouth, when all hell broke
loose over the beach less than a half mile away. I never saw so many
tracers in the air at one time. All the ships in the landings were
firing at two German planes strafing and dropping bombs over the beach
area. I remember the old man and his wife pulling the little boy down