Former medic recalls his luck during WWII’s Operation Overlord
SAN ANTONIO — By the time Bill Scott set foot on French soil the Allies had taken a sliver of Normandy, just enough of a foothold to allow thousands of reinforcements to pour in.
Aweek had passed since 156,000 American, British and Canadian troops landed on five beaches on June 6, 1944. That number soon would double, with many more following over the final year of war in Europe. All along the way, Scott would respond repeatedly to the cries of “Medic!” from wounded GIs.
Tending those hit in France, Belgium and Germany, he was a cool-headed soldier who often worked out of a muddy foxhole and once set up shop at the edge of a minefield. He’d hug the earth as artillery and mortar rounds fell on his comrades with amazing accuracy, but survived each time.
“All I did was hope. All I had was hope,” said Scott, 89, of San Antonio. “People were getting killed and severely wounded all around me and so there was no reason why I should be any different. So I was lucky, extremely lucky.”
Overlord stumbles
“All I did was hope. All I had was hope. People were getting killed and severely wounded all around me and so there was no reason why I should be any different. So I was lucky, extremely lucky.” WWII veteran Bill Scott, 89, of San Antonio
Seventy-one years after D-Day, Scott likes to say he lives in the here and now, but Operation Overlord still stands out as one of the biggest events of his life. His war was a trial by fire that helped shaped his destiny and led him to befriend an old foe.
D-Day began in the early morning hours of June 6, 1944, with a massive airborne assault by more than 13,000 paratroopers from three U.S. and British divisions, and the 1st Canadian Parachute Battalion. A country boy from Lone Oak, a small town near Greenville, Scott was a replacement soldier with the 9th Infantry Division’s 1st Battalion, 47th Infantry Regiment fighting in hedgerow country eight days after D-Day. Here, too, the going was slow, thanks to the topography and tough opposition.
Scott hugged the hedgerows and dug in, but the Germans shells landed with chilling precision.
“They were very good at it,” he said. “They would land in the field where my foxhole was and they would land pretty close. … I did get a little slight wound. It wasn’t very serious, but it was enough to get a Purple Heart, which I didn’t want.”
Hit by shrapnel in his right leg, Scott was back to A Company, his unit, after a few days. Later, a regimental commander who knew he had majored in business as a freshman at East Texas State College asked if he could take shorthand.
“I said, ‘No, sir. It’s been so long since I took shorthand, I probably couldn’t do it very well.’ ”
Behind a dead soldier
Instead of a cushy job in the rear, Scott faced an almost daily onslaught of combat. He was part of a critical assault on Cherbourg, a key port, and St. Lo, where the allied advance was stopped cold until a bombing raid that shook the ground like an earthquake. He followed the breakout from Normandy, the liberation of most of France, and that winter was in the Battle of the Bulge.
St. Lo was the toughest fight and, perhaps, Scott’s closest brush with death.
“We got into the town of St. Lo — almost — we were taking St. Lo, and I was in somebody’s garden, and there was a sniper up in a tree firing and then it dawned on me that he was shooting at me,” he said.
“So I crawled up behind a dead GI that was laying there, and I just stayed there, and he quit shooting, and when he quit shooting I jumped up and ran and jumped across the hedgerow.”
Asked what was on his mind, Scott said, “I have no idea. It was all so quick.” Finding balance These many years past, he displays no bitter aftertaste of war, no anger or anxiety. He chuckles occasionally to describe it.
Pulling open a dresser drawer in his one-bedroom apartment, Scott produced a yellow button that nearly sums up his life — and attitude.
“I’ve survived damned near everything,” it says.
“I certainly don’t think about the war. I don’t dwell on it anymore. That’s 70-something years ago I guess, so why would I think about that?”
Scott came home in October 1945. Back in Texas, he earned a master’s degree on the GI Bill, started a family and spent 40 years as an elementary school principal.
In retirement, Scott met for coffee daily with a neighbor who had served the Nazi cause as a pilot. There was no animosity and little talk of the war or their roles on opposing sides.
“He told me that he was drafted into the Luftwaffe on his 16th birthday,” recalled Scott, a former resident of Fredericksburg. “I said, ‘Well, Heinz, wasn’t that a bad birthday present?’ He said, ‘Ah, it wasn’t too bad. It’s all for the Fuhrer.’ ”