In this episode of America’s Veteran Stories, hear the captivating rebroadcast of Jody Lander’s experiences during World War II — from his draftsman days in Dallas to becoming a paratrooper in the European theater. Jody recounts his preparation for D-Day, strenuous training, and the challenges faced upon landing in Normandy. His narrative is a testament to the resilience and determination that defined the Greatest Generation.
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World War II, Korea, Vietnam, the Gulf War, Afghanistan, and her other wars and conflicts. America’s fighting men and women strapped on their boots and picked up their guns to fight tyranny and stand for liberty. We must never forget them. Welcome to America’s veteran stories with Kim Munson. These stories will touch your heart, inspire you and give you courage. We stand on the shoulders of giants. Here’s Kim Munson.
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And welcome to America’s Veteran Stories with Kim Munson. Be sure and check out our website. That is AmericasVeteranStories.com. The show comes to you because of a trip that I took in 2016 with a group that accompanied four D-Day veterans back to Normandy, France for the 72nd anniversary of the D-Day landings and realized that these stories need to be recorded and broadcast and archived, so hence America’s Veteran Stories. We are so honored and pleased to present to you a rebroadcast of a show that we recorded back in May of 2020. And it is an interview with Jody Lander, a young guy. He and his best friend became paratroopers, and he jumped in behind enemy lines on D-Day, June 6, 1944.
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And I am thrilled to have on the line with me World War II veteran Jody Lander. I actually have interviewed him before, and it is a great honor to get to talk to you again, Jody Lander. So welcome to the show. Thank you. You have quite a story. So let’s start at the beginning. Where did you grow up, Jody Lander? In Dallas, Texas. And do you remember where you were when you heard that Pearl Harbor had been bombed?
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I was home, I think. It was a Sunday morning. I was home, and I didn’t go to church that day, and I turned on the radio because I heard about it and listened to it. Of course, they didn’t have much detail to tell, just kind of said over and over again, we’ve been bombed, and that’s about all the information we had.
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Were you surprised that America was being pulled into war?
SPEAKER 07 :
Yes, I was. I wasn’t really up to date on things. I guess I should have known it, but I was only 18 then, and I didn’t pay much attention to the national news at that time.
SPEAKER 06 :
Okay, so how then did you get into the Army Air Corps?
SPEAKER 07 :
Well, I was in the Army Airborne, not Air Corps. It was part of the Army. Well, the Air Corps at that time was part of the Army, too, but this was part of the regular Army, and it was the Airborne part of it. It wasn’t Air Corps, it was Airborne.
SPEAKER 06 :
You know what? I did not realize that. So I’m learning something new every day. So you were part of the 82nd Airborne then, right?
SPEAKER 07 :
Yes. Yes, that’s right.
SPEAKER 06 :
Okay. Well, how did you get from being a kid in Dallas into the 82nd Airborne?
SPEAKER 07 :
Well, I was going to A&M at the time. I was a freshman, and I was drafted. And when I went to the reception center, they were asking for volunteers, so I volunteered for it. They would not put you in it unless you volunteered. I thought that would be exciting. I wasn’t disappointed. I was not disappointed. It was exciting.
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That it was. You were in three of the major battles in the European theater in World War II. So you volunteered for the Airborne. What happened? training?
SPEAKER 07 :
Well, we went to basic training, and we just trained like the regular infantry. We were really part of the infantry, but we just had a different means of transportation. So I went to Florida, Camp McCall, Florida, and we were trained just like the regular infantry, except we had, I think, more physical training. They kind of really worked us over. So they put us in very good shape by the time we got to parachute school.
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And what was it like on your first jump at Parachute School?
SPEAKER 07 :
Were you afraid? Oh, yes, yes. I was afraid for every jump. I never got used to it. Yeah, the first one, I was scared to death. But I just followed the other guys out the door, so I went with them. Because we had a lot of training before that. We jumped off of – they had these parachute towers. They pulled us up on them. They were about 250 feet tall, and they raised us in a parachute. Of course, the parachute was already open, and we knew it was never going to open. So we had a training there, and so, yes, I was scared. Of course, everybody after that first jump said there’s nothing to it. And the next day, you know, we made five jumps in five days when we went through the training. And so we all thought the next day would be nothing to it, but I was just as scared the next day as it was the first day. Wow.
SPEAKER 06 :
Well, how did you then get… Oh, go ahead.
SPEAKER 07 :
I’ll just say, I never did get used to jumping. I really didn’t like it. It scared me every time, but I was in it, so I was going to stay in it.
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Yeah, I can’t imagine, Jody Lander. I just can’t imagine you guys doing that. So after basic training, what happened? Where did you go?
SPEAKER 07 :
Well, after basic training, we went to Camp McCall. Not Camp McCall. We went to Fort Benning, Georgia. That’s the parachute school. And we were there for about three weeks where we trained. And with the training started out, they just, you know, lectured to us and taught us how to pack parachutes. We had to pack our own parachute. And that made me a little nervous because we weren’t real experts at packing them, but we packed them successfully. We would practice in the day doing different exercises from the parachute towers. And then on the final five days, we jumped on Monday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday, made five jumps. And we had to pack our chutes for four of those days. And that was a little concerning to me because I wasn’t a really skilled parachute packer. But they opened. Obviously they did.
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That’s a good thing. How old are you now, Jody Lander? Ninety-six. Ninety-six years. Okay. Well, so you’ve done… What’s that?
SPEAKER 07 :
I said an old 96. Very old 96.
SPEAKER 06 :
I think you sound like a young 96 to me. So after parachute school, after Fort Benning, where did you go?
SPEAKER 07 :
We went to Camp McCall, North Carolina. That was right next to Fort Bragg. Fort Bragg is now the… the airborne training center for the paratroopers and clouded people. Okay. That’s in North Carolina.
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Okay. Then are you soon on your way to Europe, or are you still in the United States for a little while? Oh, we were there.
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We got there in March, late March of 43, and we left in December of 43. We were there about eight months. Okay. Then we left to go to Europe. We had our… We had our final training at Camp McCall.
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And what was the trip like across the ocean to get to England?
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Horrible. We all got sick. Everybody was sick. We just couldn’t do it. We couldn’t do anything. I smoked, but I quit smoking. I couldn’t stand the cigarettes for about 10 days after we landed. But everybody was as sick as they could be because in the wintertime the North Atlantic is very rough and we’re on a small Troop carrier, and it really pitched. It really pitched in the high seas. But it was, I hate to say this, but vomit was running all over the floor. We were so sick. There was just a pool of vomit on the floor from us. We had to clean it up. I don’t know how we did it, but when we had to clean it up ourselves, I don’t know how we did it, but we did some way. I don’t remember that. wow and were you did you have an escort or were you guys did uh by itself yes we we had we had a big it was a big escort we had a lot of naval ships and a lot of troop trips troop carriers going over so it was a big convoy okay and then where did you land we landed in north ireland we were They didn’t have our camp ready in England yet, so we landed in North Island. We were so far north that it didn’t get daylight until 9.30 in the morning. That’s when we stood revelry. And it got dark about 5.30 in the afternoon. That’s the only time I got enough sleep in the army. We didn’t stand there until 9.30 when it got light, so I got plenty of sleep there.
SPEAKER 06 :
Yeah, well, you needed it with what you’d be going through in the future. So how long were you in Northern Ireland?
SPEAKER 07 :
We were there about three months from January, from about mid-January until April. We moved to Nottingham, England. We had a big… um camp a big tent camp there where we lived it was quite comfortable on the tent they had wooden floors that built and the tents were quite windproof and waterproof it was very comfortable there we had a lot of fun in north carolina i mean in nottingham that’s where old robin hood used to roam oh yeah really okay well and so what was a day like when you were there in nottingham Or the paratroops? Well, we’d get up, well, we’d get up, it got light very early there. And so far north in the summertime, we got there around late April when we got there. And it was pretty, it was getting light around 6 o’clock in the morning. And finally around June, it didn’t get, it got daylight about 4 or 5 in the morning. But we got up about 6.30. And we trained all day long. We went on marches. We had lectures. We had a couple of practice jumps. And we just continued the training, kind of our advanced training that we started in North Carolina. We just carried that out there from April of 43 until June of 44. When we made that jump and when the invasion started in Normandy. Okay. We were there a year. What’s that, Jody? I say we were at Nottingham for a year before the invasion came. We had a whole year. Oh. And we had a lot of fun in Nottingham. It was really nice. We were the only troops around. And so all the young ladies, we had all the young ladies because all the British guys our age were in their army. And we had the girls all by themselves except for us. So we had a great time there.
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All the pretty girls. Let’s move into then, moving to June 6, 1944, which is D-Day. What started to happen as the Allies started to prepare for the liberation of Europe on June 6, 1944?
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Well, we went to the airport about a week before. And, you know, I don’t understand why the Germans didn’t know this. I’m sure they had agents in England because one night they told us that we were going to the airport and we were restrained from going out. We couldn’t go out anymore because they were afraid, you know, we knew what was coming up. And they were afraid that we would, you know… We drank a lot of beer then over there, and we’d get kind of a, you know, we couldn’t keep quiet. We’d brag about what we were going to do. And we were restrained to quarters. So one night in Nottingham, all over England, one night, no soldiers showed up in any of the bars there or any of the pubs. And so the Germans should have known that, but they didn’t. Some way we kept it secret. I don’t know how, because every night above the English pub was just full of American soldiers. But one night they weren’t. For about a week they didn’t show up. So something was up, you know. Germans should have known that, but they didn’t. They were completely surprised. Wow.
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What time did you then get on the airplane to head over to Normandy?
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We got on about 9 o’clock, about 10 o’clock now. It was still daylight at 10 there because we were so far north. England was on double daylight saving time. The time up, two hours. So at 10 o’clock, it was really 8 o’clock, but it didn’t get dark there until… In the summertime, it gets dark at about 10 o’clock in London. I mean, in England. We were in southern England. And so from daylight saving, it was about 12 o’clock at night before it got really dark. So we were… On the plane, about 10, we flew. We took about two hours of rendezvous. There were 10,000 planes in the air that night. And we had the rendezvous to get together because all the paratroopers were at different airfields. So we took off. There was 101st. There was 82nd. There was two American and Avalon divisions and one English division. And we all flew over together. So we had to fly for about two hours to rendezvous before we could get together because we took off from all over England. And about 12 o’clock, about midnight, we headed for the continent.
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How long did it take you to get there?
SPEAKER 07 :
Well, I don’t know. It’s not very long. I guess the Corsos 347 don’t fly very fast, about 90 miles an hour. The top speed is about 120, but we cruise about 90 miles an hour, so it wasn’t very fast. So it took us about two hours, I guess, after we started. We jumped about 2.30 in the morning when we released enough of our planes, about 2.30 in the morning on D-Day. The flight was okay, but when we hit the coast of France, We came in over by the Cherbourg Peninsula, and it was a stormy night. If you recall, the invasion had been put off 24 hours because of the storm on the North Sea. And so it was still cloudy and windy and stormy. So the clouds, the Germans couldn’t see us. And it’s good they couldn’t because we only fly about 1,000 feet. The first planes come in about 1,000. I mean, the first planes come in about 400 feet, and the last ones are about 1,200 feet. And the reason for that is that each echelon is a little bit higher than the one in front of them, so the planes won’t hit shooters when they jump. So we were flying quite low, and the crowd cover was so dense they couldn’t see us, even though they did try to shine the big flashlights on us or the big searchlights on us. But they shot at us. They could hear us, so they put everything they had. and aimed it at us, and we could hear the shots, the shrapnel hitting the planes. None of us got shot down in our plane, but we could hear the shrapnel hitting the wings and the body. Nobody got hurt in our plane, but you could hear it hitting the planes. Some planes did get shot down, but we didn’t. okay that’s the only time i agreed to jump out of a plane because i knew it was going to be shot down because the aircraft fire was so heavy that we we just couldn’t miss us but we we made it we didn’t but that’s the only time i was wasn’t afraid to jump i was really anxious
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Get out of that airplane, huh? Well, hey, Jody Lander, let’s go to break and continue then on with your story. This is Kim Munson. I am talking with World War II veteran paratrooper with the 82nd Airborne, Jody Lander. Stay tuned. We’ll be right back.
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Welcome back to America’s Veterans Stories with Kim Munson. Be sure and check out our website, americansveteranstories.com. We have the show recaps there and a lot of great information. On the line with me today is Jody Lander, World War II veteran. Jumped into Normandy on D-Day, June 6, 1944. He’s part of the 82nd Airborne. Jody Lander, this is such a fascinating story. Let’s continue on. You said that as you were coming into the coast, In Normandy, you came over the Cherbourg Peninsula, and you were taking a lot of anti-aircraft fire, and you were ready to jump. Was it just crazy as the planes were coming in? I’m trying to think, 10,000 planes. It had to be just wild that night.
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Well, I guess it was wild. It was. We, when we hit the, we were okay until we hit the coast of Normandy. And then that’s when all the heck started because of the anti-aircraft fire. And we were fired at, it seemed like for hours, but really it was a short flight because we hit Normandy. We were coming across the Cherbourg Peninsula, and it’s not very wide, you know, it’s just a small place, but it seemed like we were in that plane for hours while we were being watched. But we finally got the red light, I mean, the green light, they have lights in the plane. And when the red light, when we stand up, they turn the red light on, and we stand up and hook up. And then when the green light goes on, the jump master jumps out, and we follow him. And so it seemed like between the red and the green, we were there for two hours. But it was really about 15 minutes, I think. And so when the green light came on, we went out. And I said a little prayer. I don’t remember what I said, but I remember I said a prayer. And I said, here I go. Dear Lord, take care of me. And he did. He was real good to me.
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Yes. Wow. So you were coming in low, though, as well. Were you in one of the planes at 400 feet, or what was your altitude that you jumped from? I don’t know.
SPEAKER 07 :
What happened when we hit the aircraft fire, the pilots could see the traces coming up, so they had to fly around it. When we did, we got way off course, and we missed a drop, though. We missed it. Of course, the pilots had no recourse but to try to dodge the bullets because if they flew into them, we’d all go down. So they did that, and when they did, we got off course and we missed the drop zone. So when we dropped, we were all by ourselves for about the first day. All our planes got together, everybody in our plane except two. One was, well except three, one was, two of them were captured by the Germans and one was, he landed there, a bunch of Germans, he landed and crawled into one of the hedgerows and stayed there for about 24 hours until the Germans left. And then he was able to get out, and he came on and joined us. But all the rest, there was about 18 in the plane, and all 50, the other 15 of us got together. Now, the two that were captured, they took them to Cherbourg, and when Cherbourg fell, we released them, and they came back and joined us. They were okay. They were just a little shook up from being captured.
SPEAKER 06 :
wow that’s amazing out of the 18 guys that you eventually all got together so now you have this the 15 and of course the the other guy that just joined you after 24 hours because he was in the hedgerow what happens after that jody lander well we when i we when we landed we were i was shaking like a leaf
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And I couldn’t, we had quick release to get a parachute harness and I was shaking so I couldn’t release it. I have to tell you, we had a big sharp knife strapped to our, a dagger type knife strapped to our boots. So I took that and cut myself out, you know, cut the straps on the chute. The chute was not going to be recovered. They were gone. I mean, they were not going to be recovered. And, you know, afterwards I talked to some of the other troopers, and almost everybody cut themselves out rather than releasing themselves because they were, I think they were shaken too. Yeah.
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So is it really dark at that time then, Jody? Yes. Pardon? Was it really dark at that time?
SPEAKER 07 :
Oh, yeah, it was very dark. You couldn’t see a thing because there were no lights on, and the cloud cover covered all the lights that came from the moon. I think we had a full moon that night, if I’m not mistaken, but it was so cloudy the moon didn’t make any difference. We couldn’t see it. So it was real dark, and you couldn’t see your hand in front of your face.
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So how did you guys find each other?
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We just, when you walked, you know, we had so much equipment on that we kind of rattled, and you could hear each other. So I ran into, the first one I ran into was a fellow who was one of a German, He was a German youth that had, he was a German Jew and he had his daddy snuck him out of Germany to the United States to some friends that his father had over in the United States. And he joined us just before we left to go overseas. And he’s the first one I ran into, and I gave his password, which was lightning, and the countersign that the person would give, gave back, was thunder. And thunder was selected because Germans can’t say T-H. They say thunder. They can’t say it. They just haven’t been taught. There’s no T-H in their language, so they haven’t learned to say it. So I heard this babble of somebody walking. I said, lightning came back thunder. Well, that just scared me to death because I was a little out of the German there. Well, I thought I couldn’t possibly be because the Germans, we didn’t get our… passwords and counter signs until we just got on the plane. And they couldn’t, no way could they know it. Well, I thought, well, that must be old Harry Kennedy. His name was Hans Kahn originally. And they changed his name to Harry Kennedy and put that on his dog tag. So if he got captured, they would think he was a irishman not a german but he spoke english very well but he had a great accent had a terrible accent or an accent but the germans couldn’t pick that up and the reason he well what they’re afraid of if he got captured they’d be shot for a as a traitor for leaving the country and coming fighting for us. So they had to protect him by changing his name and putting his name on Harry Kennedy on his dog tags. I’ve got an interesting story. If you give me your address, I’ll send you a story. I’ve got it written up about him. He was an unusual young man.
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Well, I will be happy to do that. So when we get off the air, we’ll go ahead and do that. Let’s continue on, though. It’s the first night, and so you are finding all the guys. What happens after you all get together? What do you do?
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Well, we finally, after I met Harry, we kept walking around until we found 15. I mean, we found the other 13 of the 18. So that made 15 of us. And so we didn’t know where we were. So we found the road. We landed in a big field, a big vacant field, and we found this road, and we got on the road and started walking in the direction we thought we should go. We didn’t know which direction to go, really, but we started out in a direction, and we finally came to a little town called St. Macouf. And when we found that town and it was on our maps we had, we knew where we were, and then we could head for the top zone where we would meet the rest of our division.
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And what was your mission that night?
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Our mission was to capture the bridge and prevent – my mission was to keep the reinforcers from coming up and attacking the – landing craft that were coming in to go land in the morning around 6 30 in the morning when they were to land so that was our mission we were to stop the we would see the bridge hold the bridges and we had to we were to blow them if we couldn’t hold them we were to blow them to keep the reinforcing germans and coming up and meeting our landing craft
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Did you encounter any reinforcements?
SPEAKER 07 :
No, we didn’t run into any Germans at all. I don’t know where they were. They were real confused. See, we were—they were more confused than we were. We didn’t know where we were, and they didn’t know how many we were—where we were, because we had—they were—because of the aircraft fire, I said the pilots had to dodge the bullets. dodge the fire and we everybody got no one hit the drop zone very few hit the drop zone so we were screwing all over the peninsula and so they didn’t know where we were and so we were successful in that regard because we were confused and germans were more confused than we were They didn’t know where we were. They didn’t know where to go. And they didn’t know which direction we were in. We didn’t know where we were either. So it was a confused night. But we were successful because the Germans did not get up to attack the landing force except at Omaha Beach. They were already there at Omaha Beach. That was the… That was the bad one for the landing craft. We were to protect Utah Beach, and Utah Beach didn’t have near the fortification that Omaha had.
SPEAKER 06 :
Right. It was really rough for the guys over there on Omaha Beach, but you were near Utah Beach. So now that you’ve all gotten together, then what happened?
SPEAKER 07 :
Well, we walked all day, and we could see Germans in the distance, but just one or two or three or four, no big congregation of German troops. We didn’t run into any resistance until nightfall. But we came to a big farmhouse around when it was getting dark that night, and so we thought that would be a good place to spend the night we were we were dead by the end we’d been up for 48 hours about we hadn’t been asleep we hadn’t we had over we had so much ammunition on us and so much equipment that we were awfully tired and so we decided we’d stop there for the night it had a big concrete a big stone wall around the whole compound so we that was a good place to to defend ourselves if we were attacked. And sure enough, as soon as the sun went down, we were attacked. And we had to stay up all night. We shot back and forth at each other. We don’t know where we hit anybody. There was one fellow in my group that was killed, but he had found some cognac and gotten drunk and did something silly. I don’t know what he did, but he did something silly and he was killed. He was not in our outfit. He was in 102nd. but we we had a big firefight all night long and then about since about daybreak the germans left and we didn’t know why but the reason it did the landing people the troops that landed the utah beach were coming through that morning and they ran the germans off so we were very proud i mean very glad to see the the success of the landing because that saved us One of the fellows I was manning the wall with, we tried to take turns at manning the wall because we were so tired. I kept falling asleep. I mean, even with all the gunfire going on, I’d fall asleep. So we took little naps, take turns out to take a little nap. There was a big… The rock barn we went into, they were pretty safe, so we’d go in there and try to go to sleep, and there was no problem going to sleep because we just passed out every time we stopped or laid down or relaxed. And I was manning this wall with this fellow, and he was a corporal in the high outfit. And the Germans got close enough, they threw one of their hand grenades at us. Now, we call them potato mashers because they looked like a great big old potato masher. It had a wooden handle, and it had a big blob on it like the end of a potato masher. and he they threw it at us and he picked it up and threw it back at them we we don’t know where he hit him but anyway though we knew that they had a they had about seven seven seconds uh fuse on them took it after they pulled a few to pull the plug a fuse would take about seven seconds before it explode i went off in about three seconds but there’s a seven so we knew that we’ve been trained that they had that seven second So he picked it up. He took a risk and picked it up and threw it back. And sure enough, he picked it up in time and got it back and exploded in their midst somewhere.
SPEAKER 06 :
That is quite a story, Jody Lander. So, hey, I tell you what, let’s go to break. This is Kim Munson with American Veterans Stories. And I am talking with World War II veteran Jody Lander. on June 6, 1944, to stand up against Hitler’s regime. And so let’s go to break. We’ll be right back.
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God bless America, land that I love.
SPEAKER 06 :
Welcome back to America’s Veterans Stories with Kim Munson. I am so honored to have on the line with me World War II veteran Jody Lander. He was with the 82nd Airborne in the European Theater during World War II. We’re talking about his jump with the other paratroopers into Normandy, France on June 1st. And Jody has made the jump. 16 of the 18 guys have gotten together, and they have been in a farmhouse with a firefight with German soldiers. And they were near Utah Beach, which was the beach that they were trying to get to and protect. And our guys were coming in. They’d had a successful landing at Utah Beach. And you guys meet up. What happens then, Jody Lander?
SPEAKER 07 :
Well, one thing I skipped over, I forgot it, just for the time being, but when we, down this road, we started down this road in the direction where we thought the guns were, and that’s where the rest of our troops would be there, but they weren’t, because they were strewn like we were all over the peninsula. Well, we’d gone about 100 yards down this road, and it was just getting daylight. And we ran into the first horrors of war, I’d say. We had a family, a French family, trying to escape the bombardment. We were real close to the landing zone for our seaborne troops, and so we came under the fire of our own gunships. And we had to get down in the ditches beside the road to be protected from it because we were really being bombarded for about 30 minutes from the battleships. And the reason we were, we were real near a gun emplacement, a German gun emplacement. It was a nine-inch gun that was trained on Omaha Beach. I mean, Utah Beach. And they were trying to knock that gun out, our naval forces were. Well, we were real close to it. We didn’t know where we were, but we were close to it. So we came under this terrible bombardment. And this family, this French family of a mother, Two children, a father and a grandfather, we think, because by looking at their ages, that’s what we guessed. They were a family. And they’d all been killed except the grandfather. But they took a direct hit from one of our 16-inch guns. And there was a little girl, about 10 or 12, a little boy about the same age. The mother and the father, they were all dead in the center of the road with this shell hit. And the grandfather was there with his, he was in shock. He had been hit and his foot was ripped wide open. And he was, he was lucid. But he was in shock. So we stopped. We gave him some cigarettes and gave him a shot of morphine to, you know, because that would knock him out and make him feel, knock him out and relieve the pain for a while. And we hoped that maybe some of our landing troops could come and take him and, you know, give him some medical help. We couldn’t do it. We didn’t have anything except a first aid kit with morphine in it. So we gave him that. And he was, what he was so happy about, we gave him a package of Lucky Strike cigarettes. And he hadn’t had an American cigarette since the Germans had invaded France. And he was so happy with those cigarettes that he was just elated. And I thought that was kind of amusing. Anyway, that was the first horror of the war we saw, and I’ll never have forgotten that. I think about it all the time.
SPEAKER 06 :
I’m sure. I’m sure that is the horrors of war. And, of course, as you mentioned, we were trying to soften up the beaches and to take out some of those gun emplacements to hopefully help protect our guys to have a fighting chance to get onto the beaches. So were they ever successful in taking that gun out, or do you know, Jody?
SPEAKER 07 :
Well, I don’t know. I never didn’t hear it. I think they were. They must have hid it. I’ve got a picture of it. I’ll send you that picture if you’d like to see one of them. But it was a big, it was a 9-inch gun, and apparently they were successful because we never hit a fire. We were real close to it, but we didn’t know it. And when I’ve been over there several times and I’ve seen that gun that they were trying to take out, and I guess they did. Of course, it’s not there anymore anyway. It’s been removed. But I guess they must have neutralized it some way because we never hit a fire.
SPEAKER 06 :
Okay. Well then, what happens after that? You mentioned this story about your very first seeing the hordes of war. What happened after that?
SPEAKER 07 :
Well, after that night, after when the landing forces came through and relieved us from the Germans, we asked them where they had come from. They said they came from Utah Beach, and we wanted to go out there to try to find the rest of our outfits so we could join them. So they told us how to get to there, and we went out there, and we spent the day there. And the night, and the next morning, we caught a… Truck that had found, that had taken some other troops and had taken some supplies in to our headquarters that was around St. Mary Glees. That’s a little town in France. And so we caught a ride on that truck and we joined our regimental headquarters, which was the headquarters company of the whole regiment. We found them, and then over a period of about two or three weeks, all the extractors came in. We were a division again.
SPEAKER 06 :
Okay. And once you were… Did you just kind of hang out until you became a division again for the two or three weeks?
SPEAKER 07 :
Yeah, we did. I mean… We did. We didn’t do much until we got to everybody. It took about a week for all the extractors to come in, and then we started the war. i guess we started and we started moving forward and we had a number of battles and and i don’t remember much about that i just remember that first night and things like that and the flight over in the first night but what happened after that i don’t remember much Now, we were in a – I was in an S2 section, Regimental Headquarters S2. That’s the intelligence section. And my section was responsible for – oh, I can’t – well, I’ve lost the word. It happens to me all the time. What I mentioned was one of the nights when we were in a stable position, infiltrate the German lines and get behind their lines and find out what was back there. What kind of, how many people they had, if we could count them, we couldn’t know. What kind of ornaments they had, what kind of big guns they had, how many tanks they had, such things as that. We were not successful in doing much, but we were successful in one regard. We made one, one time we went out and we We got through and got through the German lines and spent the day behind the German lines. We found a French farmhouse. It had a young boy in it, and he had been, you know, the Germans let the French roam all they wanted to. They didn’t control them very much. And he knew where all the guns were, all the big guns, where the machine guns were, and where the tanks were. So he gave us that information, and we took it back. Well, the problem was when we came back, we had, we didn’t know we were going to spend the night. We thought we’d come back, you know, before daybreak. But we were out so far and we didn’t have time to get back before the sun came up. And you don’t want to be walking in territory without daylight. So anyway, we had to hide. And that’s when we found we hid in this house, this French house, with this young boy who had all this information. So we got all of his information, and we started back, and we captured it. The next night, we captured the two Germans. So we started back, and we got back. But when we got to our line, we realized we didn’t have the password for the next day. See, we came back. We were 24 hours late getting back because we were supposed to go back the same night, but we couldn’t. So we had the password for the first night, but the second night, we didn’t. So when we got near our line, we started singing. all the American songs. We started yelling, don’t shoot, don’t shoot. We don’t have the password. We went out for two days. We started singing that and singing all the war songs over there, over there. The Yanks are coming. The Yanks are coming. Anyway, we were successful. We got through our line without shooting at us. So when we got in, we reported to the regimental commander, he said, that was great information. Would you mind going back again? And of course, you don’t say no to your regimental commander. We said, we will. We’ll go back again. So we went back the next night. And next night, we found a young man had been hit by some shrapnel. And we were about a artillery fire going back and forth all day long and all night long.
SPEAKER 01 :
He’d been hit.
SPEAKER 07 :
He’d been out in the field and he got hit by the shrapnel and he was in sad shape. So he didn’t have any more information to give us. But we spent the night again. We came back and this time we captured two Germans that were in the house and brought them back and we and our Our interpreters interrogated them and got some more information. And that was pretty good information we got because we were just at this time, we were getting ready for the breakout. And we were going to go right in the direction of where we’d been patrolling. So we had some information about where the big guns and tanks were. And our regimental commander was quite happy with that, so we were in good graces with him. And from then on, we… I don’t remember much about what happened after that. We were there until mid-July. We were there about six weeks. But mid-July, we went back home. I mean, we went back to England to get ready for the next invasion, which was in Holland.
SPEAKER 06 :
Okay. Well, Jody Lander, yeah, we are just about out of time for this show, so let’s schedule a time. We talked about it to record for the next week. This is absolutely fascinating. And before we get to break, Jody, in your 96 years, what would you say to Americans today with all that we’re facing today? What’s the words of wisdom that you would give them today?
SPEAKER 07 :
Well, I’d say war is hell, but that one we had to fight. We had to fight that one. There’s no choice because if not, Hitler would have conquered the world, I think, if we hadn’t gotten into it. So all I can say is that don’t do it unless you have to. If you have to, go in there to win it. Don’t go in to try to contain. Just go in to try to win it if you can. That’s my philosophy now. Okay.
SPEAKER 06 :
Jody Lander, go ahead.
SPEAKER 07 :
Well, I will say, you know, we, like in Afghanistan and that, we didn’t go in to win. We just went in to hold, I think. And if we didn’t win, of course, what happens, you have to, if you win, you’re going to kill a lot of civilians, innocent civilians. Of course, the Germans, we didn’t care about them then because we were so mad because they attacked us, the Japanese and the Germans did. And we had to stop Hitler, so we had to kill a lot of the civilians to do it, but we did it. And that was a really big difference from going into Afghanistan and… in the Middle East and Vietnam because we tried to limit our damage and the killing of civilians. And when you do that, you just can’t fight a good war.
SPEAKER 06 :
Well, yes, we can see that from history that it makes it much more difficult when we don’t have the determination to win it. World War II veterans, it’s such an honor to get to talk with you, Jody Lander. So we will continue the conversation next week. I greatly appreciate it. And so, Jody, we’ll talk to you next week.
SPEAKER 07 :
Okay. And if you, when you get through, let me, give me your address. I’ll send you this copy of the Harry Kennedy story, of the Hans Kahn story. Very interesting.
SPEAKER 06 :
I will do that. So this is Kim Munson with American Veterans Story signing off. God bless you, Jody Lander. God bless you, and God bless America.
SPEAKER 08 :
Thank you for listening to America’s Veteran Stories with Kim Munson. Be sure to tune in again next Sunday, 3 to 4 p.m., here on KLZ 560 and KLZ 100.7.
SPEAKER 02 :
The views and opinions expressed on KLZ 560 are those of the speaker, commentators, hosts, their guests, and callers. They are not necessarily the views and opinions of Crawford Broadcasting or KLZ management, employees, associates, or advertisers. KLZ 560 is a Crawford Broadcasting God and country station.
