Chuck, the last time I came up to shoot at Hummelstown F&G, I took the Major Dick Winters (Band of Brothers) Expressway and made a detour to find the cemetery to visit his grave. So humble yet so gallant that he is remembered in this way. We can never really repay them for what they did for us.
If it wasn't for them, my uncle, shot down in a B-24 over Germany in September 1944, would have died in a German prison camp (Stalag Luft 4) in eastern Poland before the war ended. I saw Bill Guarnere (aka "Gonorrhea" in Band of Brothers) a couple of times at the Allentown Gun Show over the years. I always made a point of going to his table and thanking him for what he and the other members of the 506th PIR did on the fight from the night before D-Day in Normandy to the end of the war in May 1945. His response was always the same; "We did what we knew we had to do."
The matter-of-fact practicality of their very existence and survival is eloquently reflected in the epitaph selected by Sgt. Joe Toy of Providence RI for his tombstone: all he wanted inscribed read, "Joe Toy, Sargeant, 506 PIR, 101st Airborne."
|