|
 His mother died in 1934 when he was 11, leaving
his father to raise nine children on a hired hand’s salary. But
nothing Andy experienced prepared him for what he saw when he landed
in the second wave on Omaha Beach on D-Day, June 6, 1944.
Andy was a member of the fabled 1st Infantry Division – the Big Red
One. He joined the unit in Sicily and was quickly assigned to the
Ammunition Pioneer Platoon in Headquarters Company, 2nd Battalion of
the 16th Infantry Regiment. His job consisted of laying mine fields
and the even more delicate job of finding and removing enemy mines.
He had received no training in those skills prior to arriving in
Sicily, but that was where his unit needed him.
Several months later, on June 6, Andy was in a Higgins boat riding
the choppy waters toward Omaha Beach. He wrote down his memories of
that day many years later: “The ramp finally was lowered and we
began to evacuate as quickly as possible into waist-deep water.
Almost immediately we began to suffer casualties from the severe
small arms fire. We had at least a hundred yards to go before
getting to the sandy beach area and at least two hundred yards of
sand to reach the cover of the rock and shelf bank.”
That trip seemed to take an eternity, weighed down as he was with
equipment that included several pack charges [explosives] and the
rod assembly to his squad’s mine detector. When the soldiers
carrying the mine detector’s base plate and battery pack did not
reach the relative safety of the sea wall, “some of us went back
down on the beach and that’s when we found the two guys in my squad
that didn’t make it,” he explained during a recent interview with
the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum’s oral
historian. “The box that had the battery in it had been exposed to
salt water, so the battery wouldn’t work.”
The Americans eventually fought their way off Omaha beach, but only
after staggering losses. Nearly another year of combat lay ahead for
Anderson and the men of the Big Red One. Next up came the struggle
through the hedgerow country of Normandy, then the Falaise pocket, a
quick advance across northern France, followed by brutal street
fighting in Aachen, the first Germany city the Allies reached. It
was during that fight when Anderson was injured by shrapnel from a
German hand grenade while he was laying a mine field.
“They were close enough you could see them,” he recalled. “They must
have heard us when we were out there. And all of a sudden, they’re
right among us!”
[to top of second column] |
 He was evacuated to a hospital in England but
returned to his unit in time for the division’s courageous fight
during the Battle of the Bulge, when the division stubbornly held
the northern shoulder of the bulge despite repeated attacks from
German armored units.
All through Andy’s fight across Europe there was
one constant in his life, a treasured photo he carried of Josephine
Hillman, a young woman he had met only twice while on pass in
Pennsylvania before shipping out. They had struck up a lively
correspondence while Andy was in Europe and she attended nursing
school in Chicago. One letter included Jo’s photo.
“I kept this picture all that time,” he said. “I used every method I
could to keep it close to me wherever I was. I had pulled out the
lining of a carbine cartridge case that I carried on my web belt;
sometimes I had it in there. Sometimes I had it in my boot.
Sometimes I had it my helmet liner.”
After the war, when Andy arrived in Chicago while en route to Fort
Sheridan to be discharged, Jo was waiting for him at one of
Chicago’s elevated train stations. “I couldn’t believe it,” he said.
She was the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen. I knew that my
thoughts about her all those twenty-eight months was not
unwarranted.”
Andy lost the love of his life in 1996 after 47 years of marriage,
but the photo he carried throughout the war is never far from his
sight.
Mark DePue is the Director of Oral History at the Abraham Lincoln
Presidential Library and Museum. You can hear Andy Anderson’s entire
story, as well as hundreds of other veterans, at the program’s web
site at
www.oralhistory. illinois.gov.
[Text from file received from
] |
Veteran's
Day Special Feature
