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By Al Zdon
Jim Mildenberger of Hackensack was only at Omaha Beach at D-Day because he had done his duty as a military policeman. Otherwise, Mildenberger would have been with his National Guard
unit fighting in Africa and Italy.
A native of the north side of Minneapolis, Mildenberger went to Hamilton Grade School, Jordan Junior High and North High School. His dad had been a World War I veteran, serving overseas.
In June
of 1940, he signed up with the Minnesota National Guard. "I don't know why for sure. Some of my friends were in the National Guard and they talked me into it."
In January, the 135th Infantry Regiment
of the 34th Division was called to active duty and sent to Camp Clairborne in Louisiana. After the bombing of Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941, Mildenberger and the rest of his unit were sent to New Orleans
briefly to protect the harbor from invasion.
The next move was to Ft. Dix, New Jersey, were Mildenberger was put on Military Police duty. It was the job of the MPs to check the ammo dump, power plant,
water plant and other places regularly.
By chance, he and his partner arrived at a regular stop at a bowling alley just as a fight was being quelled by another MP. One of the antagonists took off
running, but as the three MPs were talking the event over, the assailant returned with a rifle he had taken from a camp guard.
The soldier unloaded all eight rounds into the MP stationed at the
bowling alley. Mildenberger and his partner drew their sidearms and killed the attacker.
"We had been issued three rounds each, and five of the six hit this guy."
Though there was no evidence of
guilt on the part of the two MPs, it was standard operating procedure for the Army to submit them to a court martial in order to protect them from ever being tried again for the incident. It took over a
month before the court was convened, and by the time Mildenberger was found innocent, the 34th Division had sailed across the seas.
Mildenberger was transferred into the Army's V Corps headquarters
company. His training had been as a radio operator.
The V Corps was soon sent overseas on the Queen Mary, and in May 1942 it was stationed at Clifton College in Bristol, England. In March of 1943,
Mildenberger was transferred, this time to the headquarters company of the 56th Signal Battalion. The unit's duty, as the invasion of France came closer, was to supply information from Omaha Beach back
to the Corps' headquarters.
Col. Benjamin B. Talley, who had recently participated in the Aleutians invasion, was transferred into Mildenberger's unit. "He told the top brass that the biggest problem
with invasions up to that point was maintaining communications from the troops on the beach to the headquarters on the ships.
One of Talley's inventions was to place high powered radios into small
Army storage sheds and mount the whole thing on a DUKW landing craft, usually called a "Duck" by the GIs. Two DUKWs were set up this way, and other radios were mounted on two Jeeps.
A call was put out
for volunteers for a dangerous mission. "Three of us were called into an office. They described what they were going to do, sending communications back to the ships. It sounded like a piece of cake to
us. We wouldn't even have to do any fighting. It sounded like it was going to be a snap."
Mildenberger was the driver for one of the two communications DUKWs, a boat that had the capability of
operating both at sea and on land. "After we had practiced a few times, I told them that it would be better if we drove the DUKWs onto the landing craft and backed them off into the ocean. When we drove
them off front first, they had a tendency, because the engine was in front, to get swamped. But I was told it was against regulations."
On the evening of June 5, 1944, Mildenberger's DUKW was the last
to be loaded on the ship because it was scheduled to be the first one off. Again, Private Mildenberger approached the officer in charge with his plan. "He said, 'That makes sense to me. Do it the way you
want.'"
At about 4 in the morning, 12 miles off the Normandy coast, the DUKWs were dropped into the water. Mildenberger doesn't know if any of the other boats were lost while being launched, but he
does know that several of the other DUKWs, carrying artillery, never made it through the heavy seas.
"There was a guide boat that was supposed to bring us in, but there were six to eight foot waves.
In about five minutes, the guide just went out of sight and was gone. We couldn't keep up with him. I just had to steer the boat into the waves so we wouldn't capsize."
As they made their long journey
toward shore ("DUKWs don't go very fast."), Mildenberger was able to see the naval bombardment of the beach and was able to aim his boat at the light from the shelling.
The first troops hit the beach
at about 6 a.m., and the communications DUKW tried to go ashore at about 6:30. "I couldn't see any action on the beach. I didn't see any troops. When we got about a hundred yards from shore, we started
to attract a lot of machine gun fire. We backed off to about 500 yards out and radioed in our situation."
Col. Talley had decided to protect the valuable radio by taking it out of range of the machine
guns.
Omaha Beach was the most treacherous of the five landing areas along the Normandy shore. The reason Mildenberger didn't see any troops was because the few that had made it ashore were taking
whatever cover they could from the withering machine gun fire and constant Nazi shelling. Many of the troops had gone back into the sea to hide behind the obstacles the Germans had placed to prevent the
landing craft from going ashore.
Three times during the morning, the DUKW tried to bring its radio shack ashore, but each time it became a magnet for shelling and machine gun fire and the troops that
were ashore waved them off in no uncertain terms. "One time, we almost got to the beach, and an officer just told us to get the hell out of there. We had four big antennas sticking out of the top, and I
suppose that was a pretty good target for the Germans."
The American attack finally began to make some headway midway through the morning, and Mildenberger could see the Army Rangers scaling the
cliffs to silence a large German gun in a bunker.
The scene on the beach was not pretty. "There were bodies all over the place, and I presumed they were dead. There were tanks stuck near the shore.
Not very many of them made it. There was a lot of shelling."
As the battle progressed, the DUKW hovered just out of range of much of the firing and was able to report valuable information back to the
coordinators of the invasion on the ships.
Sometime after noon, the beachhead was finally secured enough to allow the DUKW to go ashore. It made its way about 50 yards onto the beach and immediately
got stuck in the millions of round rocks that covered the shoreline. "We were planning to let air out the tires, and that should have given us enough traction, but Col. Wheeler wanted to talk to the
officers on the beach."
The second DUKW also made it ashore, but was destroyed by shell fire, and the two communications jeeps had their radio equipment drowned trying to get to shore. Mildenberger's
DUKW was the only communications link between the beach and the ships.
Mildenberger and Wheeler and others hoofed it through the constant shell fire over to where the beach HQ was set up. As they were
discussing the situation, a shell exploded about 15 yards away from the party.
"Something hit me hard in the back, but I thought it was just a rock. It hurt, but it didn't hurt that bad. But when we
started to go, I stumbled, and I couldn't move my arms. I said to Lt. Degnan, 'What's wrong with me?'
"I was wearing a Navy foul weather jacket that I had swiped from the ship, and Lt. Degnan saw
there was a hole in the back. They tore the coat open and he said, 'Hell, you're full of blood back here. There's a hole in you.'"
Mildenberger had been hit by a piece of shrapnel, and he was helped
to an aid station on the beach. "The landing craft were coming in and dropping off troops, but they weren't taking many wounded back. They'd just turn around and head back out to sea. There were about 15
or 20 of us laying there. Finally someone said that was enough and he went out and stopped the next boat. They loaded us on board and took us to a hospital ship."
After care aboard the ship,
Mildenberger was taken to a hospital in England where the shrapnel was removed. "They said it had severed several major blood vessels and that's why I bled so much."
Mildenberger carried his souvenir
in his pocket with him for some time, a jagged piece of metal about an inch and a half long, but then lost it while he was awaiting transportation later in Paris.
The wound took some time to heal, but
by July he was released from the hospital and sent to a replacement depot. While there, he was notified that because he had volunteered to drive the DUKW in the first wave, he was going to receive
the Silver Star.
"They made a big deal out of it. The replacement depot was located on some rich person's estate. Lady Somebody, I never did get her name, came to pin the medal on me."
While
waiting for assignment, Mildenberger volunteered for training with the airborne. "It wasn't because I was any kind of hero. Eisenhower and all those guys were saying that we'd be home by Christmas, and I
believed them. I figured that I'd get to stay in England and do the training, and by that time the war would be over."
But the training never happened, at least not yet. Instead, Mildenberger was put
on a train, sent to southern England, and once again shipped back to France, landing again on Omaha Beach.
"They asked me if I wanted to go infantry or artillery. I didn't like either one of those
choices, and I told them I wanted to back into a signal battalion. I walked out of the depot and flagged down a truck going down the beach. I'd heard that Col. Talley was now in charge of the beach
operation, and I went to see him. He was glad to see me because he had always given me credit for saving his life. I'd been standing between him and that shell burst that day."
After a pleasant
conversation, Talley asked Mildenberger what he was doing there, and Mildenberger said he was seeking Talley's help to avoid the infantry or artillery. "Are you AWOL?" Talley asked. "You'd better get
your ass back to that depot, and I'll see what I can do."
A few days later, orders came through for Mildenberger to report to the 38th Signal Construction Battalion. "They were pretty amazed at the
replacement depot. They'd never seen special orders come in."
Mildenberger's job was to work with teams that were restoring phone line service to much of France. After about three months of this duty,
more orders arrived for Mildenberger.
"By this time I'd forgotten all about it, but after three months my orders for airborne school came through. I don't even know how they found me."
For
Mildenberger, it was back to England again. A nice break along the way, though, came when he had to wait in Paris for three days to get transportation. "We kept telling the guy, no, we don't need to go
today."
In England, he went to 82nd Airborne School and was beginning to learn how to jump out of airplanes and fold parachutes. "They had this training exercise where you would jump from a platform
on the back of a truck going about 15 miles an hour. You were supposed to land and roll. Somehow I came down on my knees and I spent two days in the hospital."
When he got out, he was told because he
had fallen behind his class, he would have to start all over again with the next group. Instead, Mildenberger decided to volunteer for the 54th Signal Battalion of the 18th Airborne Corps. His job was to
ride in gliders, and then string phone wire between the front and the headquarters.
"I loved riding in those gliders. You'd sit on the runway, and the plane pulling the glider would take off. We were
connected by nylon lines, and they'd stretch and stretch. The plane would be flying away, and we'd still be sitting there waiting for the lines to stretch to their limit. And then, zoom, away you'd go."
At one point, around the time of the Battle of the Bulge, Mildenberger and his team approached an officer at a crossroads and asked him for information about the location of a certain unit that
needed a phone line. "He didn't seem to know anything, and we went on ahead. When we came back, we saw the same guy, except this time he had been captured and they were holding a gun to his head. It
turned out he was a German wearing an American uniform."
Another incident along the way to Germany was when a warrant officer flagged them down and asked if they had any gas for two planes that were
stranded in a nearby field. "He saw that we were in Airborne, and he asked if one of us wanted to fly one of the planes back to the base. He told us that he'd give us enough directions to get the plane
off the ground, but it was up to us to land it. We passed on that offer."
Near the end, Mildenberger said Germans were surrendering in droves to the Americans —
rather than go the other direction and surrender to the Germans. One day, a lone German soldier zoomed into town on a motorcycle and asked where he could surrender. Mildenberger and the others pointed him down the road to the nearest MP station. The soldier, though, said he wanted to go the other way so he could visit his mother before he surrendered.
"I don't know why, but that really hit me the wrong way. I hadn't seen my mother in three years. Why should he see his mother? I took my rifle and smashed the spark plugs on his motorcycle. We told
him he could walk to the MP station."
Mildenberger stayed with the airborne until the end of the war. His last duty was in Schwerin, Germany, near the Elbe River.
Because of his Silver Star and
because he'd been overseas for three years, he was second in his battalion with 117 points, and he arrived back in the united States on June 12. He was discharged on June 19, having earned, in addition
to his Silver Star, a Purple Heart and five battle stars.
Mildenberger worked in Africa after the war for a time building air bases, and then worked as a Minneapolis city bus driver and later as a
tour bus driver until he retired in 1984. He moved to a lake home in Hackensack for his retirement.
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