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Description
Landing on the beach at 5:20 a.m., on August 19, 1942, Mr. Gorman oversees the set-up of radio communication equipment. The heavy rain from mortar fire results in a serious injury to his arm.
Donald Gorman
M. Gorman est né le 23 juin 1921. Son père était mécanicien de machines fixes dans une école secondaire de Windsor et était un ancien combattant de la guerre des Boers et de la Première Guerre mondiale. M. Gorman a quitté l'école après avoir obtenu son immatriculation junior et a travaillé dans une boulangerie, une poissonnerie et comme apprenti mécanicien à l'usine de machines à écrire Remington-Rand, à Windsor. Après s'être enrôlé le 16 septembre 1939, il a reçu son instruction élémentaire à Windsor, avant d'être envoyé en juin 1940 à Borden afin de recevoir son instruction avancée. M. Gorman s'est rendu outre-mer avec le Royal Hamilton Light Infantry Regiment et a participé au raid sur Dieppe.
Transcription
This runner met us, and he took us to where the major, Major Green was and there was a depression in the ground and I said to Bradley, he had the radio, I said, “Lay in there” because we had no cover and I had his rifle and he was carrying this big radio set and anyway, I gave him his rifle and I went down into what they call the prone position and as I went down, I went flying through the air and that chunk of shrapnel their on that dog tag hit me. And I must have been about ten, fifteen feet away from where I was originally anyway and I didn’t know what the hell had happened and I sat up and I seemed to be alright and then I couldn’t find my right arm. Then a stretcher bearer came up and I said, “I’ve lost my arm.” “No,” he says, “you’ve still got it.” It was pointing the other way. And he swung it around and we had these bandages that we carried with the safety packs that we had, first aid packs, and he put my arm in a sling and well I had to keep my other hand on it to keep my arm from going all over the place. Well then I started back to Bradley or crawled back to Bradley and he had set up communications, but communications were terrible. We had this really great big antenna sticking up in the air and I think the snipers were trying to take pieces out of it and that and we had communication with battalion headquarters. And the rest, the battalion headquarters couldn’t get in touch with anybody but us. It got pretty hairy there. There was bombs and mortar shells bouncing all over the place and every time I went bouncing up in the air, this thing would hurt, and then I got hit in the knee and finally Bradley said, “All I can get is battalion headquarters.” And I said, “What do they want? ” He said, “They want us to relay messages out to the Calpe,” which was the command ship.