Transcripts For CSPAN3 Oral Histories Clinton Gardner Interv

CSPAN3 Oral Histories Clinton Gardner Interview On D-Day Battle Of The Bulge ... July 13, 2024

World war ii museum. The date is may 23, 2012 and i am here today in norwich, vermont. State your full name. Clinton i am clint gardner, clinton gardner. I was born in new york city, 1922. What was life like growing up . Clinton my family moved to larchmont, new york when i was a baby. I was raised their, went to the town north of larchmont for junior high. After ninthgrade, went down to exeter and had three years there. After that i entered dartmouth in the fall of 1940 and once my freshman year was behind me, it was apparent by that time that we were not yet in the war, we might be drawn into it because the germans were sinking ships in the atlantic including american ships. Britain was in bad shape. Looked like if we did not get in, the nazis would take over europe and south america. So i was unsure whether i wanted to volunteer or wait to be drafted. I decided i would volunteer, which amusingly enough give you a slightly Different Army serial number than if you were drafted. The west point officers, recent graduates from training but they were training us in officer candidate school. They tended to look with favor they didnt say that but it was apparent. I became a second lieutenant. I was a corporal in basic training. I had the amusing experience in my first my iq was perfectly normal, adequate to become an officer but not unusual. But the colonel came into my barracks a day or two after the test and said private gardner, the Commanding Officer would like to see you. I followed him and the commanding generals office. He said you have just had the highest mechanical aptitude score on a test we have ever had at fort bevans. What did you do before i came you came into the army . I had been working on farms in vermont. He said you should think about trying to you might be able to get into ocs with this good score. So it is amusing i never turned out according to my wife to be remarkably mechanically aptitude, but at that point i made history. After ocs i was assigned as an aircraft outfit on cape cod. It was cap edwards. Dashcam camp edwards. There was a huge installation where i dont know how many thousands were in training, but there were many thousands there. Many battalions were training. The battalion was in the range of 1500 men. There were four batteries and 90 the leader guns, 90 millimeters roughly over three inches. It was a very interesting shell. The shell had a special views in it called a proximity fuse only the americans had develops. We did not want germans and japanese to find out about how to make one. It enabled the aircraft outfit to send a shell within 60 feet of a plane and it would still explode. It give you gave you a higher chance of shooting down a plane. You had to have fairly bright people to run the radar and these guns because there was a lot of technical stuff involved. I taught antiaircraft i talked aircraft identification. I became a First Lieutenant rather early. It is amusing. In order to teach antiaircraft vinification, identification, i realized the manuals were six months to a year out of date because they got around to putting it magazines that came out monthly in the aircraft field had information on german and japanese planes. Feel free to continue. Clinton the amusing story about antiaircraft identification was i went out and bought a number of these and built a projecting box, called a magic lantern. You put a magazine in the bottom of the box and you have a year above that of at an angle and the divine glass at the and magnifying glass at the front. I was able to project pictures from the magazine, screen to teach antiaircraft identification so you could recognize be 50 once and what b51s and whatnot and identify from the german planes. That was one of the reasons i became a First Lieutenant ahead of people older than me, much to their chagrin. In any case, one tidbit out of six months we were in training for a year from january to december. And then we were going, when we went overseas on the queen mary, 15,000 men approximately. It was crowded. Over half the men were very seasick. I recall being seasick. I was prone to that. Fortunately the officers had a specific responsibility. We were supposed to go up in the rigging of the ship and other precarious positions to be lookouts for submarines or anything in the water. They had some degree of surveillance but that was not highly developed. I never understood why the germans were not able to torpedo one of these ships. I thought a submarine could get out ahead of them and change its course and it cannot be that do that as rapidly as a huge ship like the queen mary. We went across the northern atlantic and landed in scotland and went by plane down to henley where the regattas are held not 30 minutes out of london. We could see the flashes. We couldnt see the details of the bombing of london but periodically we could see flashes in the sky. We went through regular training, as you get more familiar with as the equipment got better, radar would be updated. We were preparing for dday but did not know where it would be. Finally in the middle of may of 1944i learned i and 1944, i learned i and the other officers would be spent to it sent to a special camp to learn about the details of the land along the plan. These were special camps for people who were going to be leaving the leading the invasion. What beaches it would be on, what the strategy and tactics were. This camp was surrounded by barge wire. The tap armed surrounded by barbed wire. They could shoot anybody who attempted to get out. The obvious reason, such a person would be drunk and on his way to a bar and say, i know when the day is going to be. Dday is going to be, normandy, the beaches the whole thing would have gone down the drain. Dont know how many thousands but very few. Our security clients was called big it bigot. When we prepared to go across, it was actually june 5 they were proposing to land. We were almost halfway across the channel in preparation for that when we turned around because the weather was too bad. We would not do it until the next day. It was only slightly better but we had to go. We went back and then out again. That experience has not always been rent reported adequately. On the morning of june 6, i dont recall i slept much. Not very much. I may have taken sleeping pills. We were told to take one but not too much or we would be foggy landing. On the morning of june 6, engineers were going to go in 4 30 with all the shooting and try to blow up obstacles in the water which were like jacks, crisscrossed metal beams, six feet time high. They had mines on them. If a ship came near them, they would explode and very likely damage the ship. There were maybe thousands in the water. The engineers had to try to get rid of them. Anyone seeing the film saving private ryan has seen a reconstruction of what it was like. The beach was called omaha dog green which is rather amusing because the big green d was the code used for our beach. We had been told there would be a huge banner to help books land. Boats land. We have been told the b17 planes would have bombed the beach defenses. So the pillboxes would be destroyed and easy to get off the beach. We were told the bombing would be the heaviest bombardment in the future in history, the most intense in one place to take place. We landed around 9 00 that morning. First were engineers, then infantry and general troops like ourselves. When our boat came in around 9 00 and we looked at the beach, it was strewn with hundreds of bodies. We looked up to see where the pillbox was that was supposed to have been destroyed and it was actively shooting on them. There were bursts of flyer fire. The camouflage have not been disturbed. There was a huge barrier preventing you from getting off of the beach, a concrete barrier about 300 feet wide, six feet thick. It was supposed to have been pulverized by the bombing and its own camouflage net was still on it. The bombing which was supposed to be the most intense in history had missed its target. We later learned the bombs had hit Apple Orchard half a mile inland. I often wondered why they had not been able to send they later claimed they could not see the beach, it was foggy, but they should have been able to drop flares and to send in lowflying planes before the bombing was to begin. Flares that would remain lit. You cant have flares that will stay several minutes, 15 or a half hour. If they had done that and dropped, they could have sent those in and determined the flares were in the right place. I have often speculated there was inadequate planning for what to do about making sure the bombs dropped in the right place. In any case, many of us were killed getting in. Not i nor any other officers from the 310th, lieutenant norman, phillips, and i forget the third, but we four officers were all executive officers of the battery, went in and doug foxholes dug foxholes near each other but not far from the beach, 50 beach in. 50 feet in. They were shooting at us all morning and afternoon. There were a cap perhaps 1000 soldiers visible. This organization, people did not know where the commanding sergeants or officers were. Officers did not know where the men were. People were all over the place and they were in foxholes trying to figure out what to do next. Late in the day these got organized. I dont know. History tells of certain officers. One general, maybe roosevelt, forget whether it was a roosevelt, but he and other got others got things together, engineers got their act together and brought torpedoes which were used to blow up the huge concrete barrier. At about 5 00 on dday afternoon this huge explosion occurred and the concrete was blown up. I lifted my head out of my foxhole and heard a huge noise and felt a shock and realized i had been hit. There was a ringing in my head. I thought, what has happened . I could not see. My eyes were covered by a sheet of blood. Blood was soaking uniform. A head wound as a huge amount of bleeding but i felt no pain. I never felt any pain or pain on dday or d plus one. Shock prevented me from feeling pain. I was in severe shock and at first i could not talk. I tried to talk to another officer from my battalion, 20 or 30 feet from me and words would not come out of my mouth. I have lost my ability to speak. And within only a few minutes i was able to talk, but words came out like that come along pause that, long pause, and i didnt speak normally until the next day. I put my hands to my helmet to see what had happened. I put one hand through the helmet and felt what i was sure must have been my brains because it was mushy. I felt half an inch of mush and i felt this must be the surface of my brains. Why is my brain functionally functioning . I put my other hand through the helmet hole, and both hands fitted through it. It was seven or eight inches wide. This helmet was almost split in half. I looked at the other officers nearby and i could see them looking at me. It looked to me as if i would not last very long and i did not think i would either. After half an hour, i continued i managed to stop the bleeding by taking the first aid bandage off of my belt and we had sulfur powder which we had been trained to poor into a wound. I forwarded it in poured it in, and after half an hour the bleeding let up. That was a big improvement and i thought i would live. It was less than half an hour i was sure i would die. I did not know why i could live with my brain exposed. I just seemed to be here. There was no medical help. A small british outfit landed with radar to coordinate with our own radar. But each was the british landed on a different set of beaches a few miles from us. But this british outfit had a captain who realized we wounded were lying there while mortars continued to pound us and had the good sense to move us to the base of the cliff where the water trajectory could not reach us mortar trajectory could not reach us. At the base, the mortars could not reach you. He moved 20 or 30 of us there and probably saved our lives. In a book i wrote i said god bless the british. They are better soldiers than we are. They Work Together about doing something. So i spent the night bday night dday night half awake. I remember one german plane flew over us. The wings were distinguishable by a sharp angle rather than a smooth shape. It dropped a bomb a quarter of a mile from where i was. I dont know if it did much damage. It may have killed some people. The night was not very eventful. The next morning the beach had changed entirely. During the night although the men had not captured the pillbox at the top of the beach access road, they must have cleaned the germans off of most of the area. I later learned they had gotten a few hundred yards, maybe a quarter of a mile inland. They had not captured the little town. They were in the process of it. Some of the medics arrived and told me as soon as a Field Hospital was set up, they would move me up there. Not until 5 00 in the afternoon did i get any real medical attention. And then medics put me in a jeep which took some of the rest of the guys near me who were wounded, drove us to a Field Hospital in the outskirts of the little town at the top of the cliff. The Field Hospital was so close to the front there were bullets whizzing through the top of the tent. It took three men to pull the helmet off of my head. It had been jammed into my scalp. There were two captains and a major. One of them said this is quite a bit different from my practice in miami. I asked them what had happened. They said that wasnt your brains you were feeling. That is half an inch of flesh you have above the skull. You have above the skull. Most of us feel something very tough and assume it is bone. It is not. It is a membrane our hair grows out of. Below that membrane of skin is flesh between the top of your skin and bone. That was not flesh i had been feeling. The top of my skull had scars on it and my head was full of fragments of metal. It still has tiny fragments in it to this day. They are so small they dont set off metal detectors. But they are there. In an xray, 14 little bits are left. Pieces of my helmet liner, made of cardboard, came out when i count my care for at least i combed my hair for at least a year. At dartmouth, i would be combing my hair and dark green helmet came out. So that night they got me on a boat back to england. I went to a Field Hospital not southhampton. Maybe i will get the name later. And i had an operation there. They took skin from my leg and closed up the wound on my head. I thought to myself, i have been wounded, i assume the army sends you back to the states. Took only a week or two for me to be disabused. They have given you all this training, they will not suddenly send you home. I found myself back in action a month later. He was to my surprise but that was the way it was done. I was able to rejoin my outfit by hitchhiking around and finding them. The u. S. Army had been then and when i think is still about policy of not trying to put you back with your outfit. The french and british had a policy of sending you back to your old outfit. That was important for your morale, and it was. To have to meet a bunch of officers you have not trained with would be unattractive. I found the 110th maybe five or 10 miles inland. They had a slot for an officer. A couple of officers were out of action. I went into another battery. I had been in b battery. I went to a battery as the executive officer. The executive officer was in charge of 90 millimeter guns while others had jobs of being in terms of the 15 millimeter machine gun. We had they were very devastating in firepower for lowflying planes. Within a quarter of a mile of where you were based. So i rejoined our outfit and was with it when we entered paris. I probably will not get the exact date but i think it was in early august. After paris we went on to belgium. We were in two cities. In liege we were under fire from b2 rockets, which are not very frightening. They seldom hit a target. The germans could not name them at anything specific, not at the building or even without half a mile of anything they want to because the rockets were not that controllable. They went into the upper the germans could not name them at anything specific. Building or even within half a mile of anything they want to do it because the rackets were not that controllable. They went into the upper atmosphere and then down. We would see four or five of aem landing in a day, hitting field or roadside, making a big hole. It was sort of frightening to be underneath them. If you were in a city like london they could do damage , because buildings were so close together. They were very frightening for the british but not any more open town like liege. In spa, we were there in october and november and we were close to the german boarder. I think spa was 30 miles from the german border. The front was on the german border. We were in and out of germany that fall. We were in aachen which was a big city to the north of us. It looked like we would be in germany and the war would be over within the matter of a month or two because we did not see much hope gradually crossing the border from the south up to the north where the british were. All of a sudden, on december 16, the germans had a massive counterattack with huge numbers of tanks and over 20 or 30 divisions. Ss troops led this attack. They were highly trained and motivated troops because they were loyal to the nazis. They pushed through our lines like butter partly because we had relatively untrained troops at the front. They landed a month before. They were barely used to the area they were defending. The germans knew the area pretty well because they attacked through it in world war i and even in world war ii they had come through that area on the way into france. It was an area you would not expect people to attack. There were woods and a little town, it was sort of hard to drive through. Was called belgium the hertkin forest. It was a big forest and high and cold. Remembers freezing their toes and fingers and it was pretty miserable situation. We moved from spa where we were in antiaircraft defense down to being antitank weapons. We had not been well trained to be antitank. , but we hadto do it sites designed for tanks. Was related to tanks, but we had to figure out how to do it because our guns were among the best in terms of firepower to destroy even a tiger tank. The tiger had a gun as heavy as ours. They had an 88. We were deployed in antitank positions around normandy which was at the top of the bulge. The germans came in and made a shape like that which is why it was called the battle of the bulge. It was not called that at the time. Normandy was up here at the corner. We were critical to preventing the germans from getting on the road to antwerp, which was their goal. Everybody figured they were hoping to split the american and british armies by capturing antwerp. Uswas critical to supplying and they might get some sort of truce with us and be able to stop the war there. I dont think they expected to get any troops from the russians. Fortunately, i forget how deep the bulge was but it was not more than 50 or 60 miles. It was over 50 miles. At the far ends, may ha

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