By BILL McKINNEY
Morning News staff reporter
Amid the
acrid smoke and fire, the chaos and horrors of World War II, Bill McClintock of McKean managed to find a lifetime treasure, a person with whom he'll celebrate 48 years of marriage in January.
Prodded by letters from a
friend back home, McClintock began writing to Beverly Casto of Millcreek during his second stay in a military hospital in England in 1944.
Since the Albion native's right hand and arm were crippled by shrapnel wounds,
the letters were actually written by nurses' aides but he dictated them.
Casto replied, sending along a picture of herself.
To her chagrin, McClintock still carries that picture in his wallet today, proudly showing
off the stunning beauty he was lucky enough to marry a couple of years after returning home.
Coming home at all was something of a miracle in his case.
""Someone up there was watching over me,'' he
said. ""I don't have any doubt about that at all.''
Trained first as a forward observer for field artillery, McClintock had begun Army Ranger training at Fort Bragg, N.C. when he was plucked from his
lessons and shipped to England to take part in the great D-Day invasion.
His official unit was the 224th Field Artillery Bn. and that was attached to the 175th Infantry Regiment of the 29th Infantry Division.
For invasion purposes, though, the unit was attached to the 116th Regt.
That regiment was part of the first wave of American soldiers to scramble ashore at bloody, smoke-shrouded Omaha Beach that horrifying morning.
""It was just daylight and we went over the side of the mother ship, down rope ladders and into our landing crafts,'' he remembers. ""The channel (English Channel) was really rough and all of
us were seasick. We couldn't wait to get off.''
That was before he knew the terrors waiting for him in the sand.
Daylight brought an incredible sight. Looking out over the seas, McClintock saw ships
everywhere, ""dots that looked like a bunch of ants crawling all over an ant hill.''
In the sky above, wave after wave of aircraft passed almost wingtip to wingtip, all sporting white stripes that marked
them as invasion planes.
Every ship with a cannon pounded the beaches of Normandy in hopes of softening it up to ease the landing.
It wasn't to be.
The Germans, as McClintock and the remnants of his unit learned
later, were dug in too deep, some hidden in tunnels 10 to 15 feet deep, others in concrete bunkers three to four feet thick.
Every spot on Omaha Beach had long ago been zeroed in by enemy gunners.
""We
started taking fire on the way in but they didn't really start opening up on us until we started dropping the ramps on our landing craft,'' McClintock said.
""I was six feet two at the time and when I came
off that craft I was up to my chin in water. The boats couldn't get any closer because of all the obstacles.''
Like many other soldiers in the invasion, McClintock never learned how to swim. He blamed the
Army for the oversight at the time but later realized it wouldn't have done much good.
""I weighed about 170 pounds and felt like I was carrying 300 pounds of supplies and ammo on me. If I'd had to
swim I'd have drowned.''
A good number of the invasion force did drown. Others died before they could get out of their landing crafts.
There was an explosion to their rear and McClintock turned to see that a
direct hit had been scored on the landing craft carrying his unit's four howitzers. For the next few days they would be strictly infantry.
Waiting on the survivors who made it to the beach, in addition to the
long established German defensive positions, were an elite Panzer tank outfit and a veteran Nazi infantry regiment just back from a rest area.
""We had to go 100 to 200 feet to get to dry sand. I
landed on that damned beach as an 18-year-old kid. By that night I was an 18-year-old man. You aged in a hurry.''
Once ashore, he said, soldiers found there was virtually noplace they could go. They
laid in the sand, some behind German obstacles, others behind the bodies of dead GIs, anywhere they could find to escape the withering fire from the German army above.
One officer, a general at that, saved the day as
far as McClintock and many other surviving veterans are concerned.
""Everytime I'd look up, it seemed, I'd see Gen. Norman Cota walking along that beach urging people to move. I thought he was a damned
fool.''
Cota is credited with finally moving the troops forward by telling them that there were only two kinds of people on Omaha Beach, those already dead and those who were going to be dead soon.
""I
remember him coming up to this little buck sergeant and telling him, "Sergeant, we've got to move.' When nothing happened, Cota said, "Sergeant, you see this big, size 11 boot? You know where it's
going to be if you don't move?'
""The poor sergeant moved but he didn't get far. He was killed quick.''
Stopped next by barbed wire, McClintock said, Cota asked a sergeant in an engineering unit
where his officers were. Told they had all been killed, Cota asked the sergeant if he and the half dozen engineers left in his unit could blow the wire with Bangalore torpedoes.
""When the sergeant
said he could do it, the general said, "That's good, lieutenant. You're now an officer.'
""Most of them died in the effort but the sergeant got the charges placed and was coming down to tie them
into a plunger. A burst from above killed him. One of the other guys ran up and grabbed it, took it back and hooked it up and blew it.''
Soldiers scrambled for the hills, fighting every step of the way,
climbing hand over hand toward the deadly machine gun nests and individual foxholes, and blowing them apart with hand grenades.
""It was plain hell on earth.
""I was a corporal on the
beach. By the time we got up to the barbed wire I was a sergeant. By the time we made the top, up to what I think was an apple orchard, I'd been made a Tech Sergeant.''
Three days later, after a little
difference of opinion with an officer, McClintock was knocked back down to private. That lasted all of one day and he got his corporal stripes back, stripes he'd carry the rest of the war.
Gen. Cota went on to
command Pennsylvania's 28th Division which was chewed to pieces during the nightmarish Battle of the Hurtgen Forest and, not long after, bloodied again at the Battle of the Bulge.
McClintock was wounded the first
time on June 24, five days before his 19th birthday, as he helped direct artillery fire on German position in St. Lo, France.
Hearing an incoming artillery round he dived for a shallow, two-man trench he'd help dig
nearby for protection. Normally, he said, procedure called for going in feet first. Judging by the sound he heard, there wasn't time to go any way but head first.
The shell came in almost on top of him,
blowing a gaping hole in the hedgerow next to the trench and peppering his side and foot with shrapnel. Had he gone in feet first, the shrapnel would have caught him in the forehead, not the foot, and he likely
would have died.
""June 29th was my birthday and I was in a hospital in England. I remember the radio was on and this politician was saying how none of his boys would go overseas until they were 21.
""An English nurse came over with a cupcake and a candle in it and gave me a big hug. She knew I just turned 19 and she said, "Aren't you glad you're 21?'''
He returned to his outfit towards the
end of July or first part of August and, not long after, was hit again, this time while trying to find a mortar that had been causing a lot of infantry casualties.
""A couple of us went out looking for
it. We were told there was one mortar but I thought there were about four of them. Trouble was, we had no idea where they were but one of them found us.
""When a mortar shell hits it hits at an
angle. I got a hunk of shrapnel through the arm but we'd found it. We'd seen it. I called in on the radio to the captain and gave the location.
""I wouldn't let them take me out of there
until I'd seen them fire a couple rounds to zero in on the emplacement and then start firing for effect. They fired a barrage of three rounds from each of 24 howitzers. It did the job.''
Later, he said, he
asked what was found. He said the captain told him the infantry found six mortars that had been hidden on a small mountain near a cave, someplace they could be taken and hidden after being fired. Our barrage
wiped out all six.
It was during this hospital stay that McClintock began his long distance friendship, which later turned into romance, with Beverly Casto.
By sometime in late October he was ready to return to his
unit, to take more risks.
Among his souvenirs is a photograph of a German fighter he downed while it was strafing American positions. Grabbing dual .50 caliber machine guns on a ground mount McClintock blew a
huge hole through the body of the fighter.
The plane landed safely and the pilot was captured.
Another German plane was a little luckier. ""It was a little German Piper-like plane that was so loud
you could hear it coming miles away. It came over every day about the same time and we'd shoot up towards it but not at.
""No one really wanted to hit the thing. We kind of looked forward to
seeing him. He'd fly around up there, observing, then drop a wrench or something heavy with a note attached, saying, "Ha, you missed again!' I think he knew we weren't trying.''
McClintock and his
unit was about 30 miles away from the Battle of the Bulge and most of their heavy equipment had been pressed into service at the Bulge but they were ordered to hold their positions.
Cooks, clerks, everyone able to
carry a rifle. They all dug foxholes distanced about 100 feet apart and waited.
After the last-ditch German effort failed, he said, especially after the first month or two of 1945, everyone knew it was
over. German soldiers surrendered by the hundreds, including two who caught him unaware and without his rifle.
He said the two armed Germans came up to him, laid their weapons at their feet, and said,
""Kamerad.'' To which McClintock breathed a sigh of relief and vowed never to part with his weapon again.
The end of the war in Europe found his unit in Nordenham, Germany. There was little cause
for celebration at the time because they had just been told they were designated to participate in the attack on Japan.
Only the atom bomb saved them from that particular horror and McClintock, understandably, was not
upset about President Harry Truman's decision to use the weapon.
""It was a courageous decision on his part,'' McClintock said.
After the war, McClintock continued his military career with Erie's 112th
Regt. of Cota's 28th Division National Guard Division. McClintock, who eventually retired as a First Sergeant, helped train soldiers bound for Korea during that war.
More importantly, in January of 1947,
McClintock and his pen pal, Beverly, were married.
