A group of American veterans visited a D-Day museum as they travel to France to commemorate eighty years since the Normandy Landings.
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00:00My name is Steve Malnikov and I'm an American. We're here, we just came over to Queen Mary and we're down here in Hortsmouth to spend a day and we'll be going over to France tomorrow.
00:13Oh amazing, so you're going to France. And what's your connection to D-Day?
00:16My connection was I was, I'm a D-Day veteran and I was there on June 6th and my division was the 29th Division and we were on a beer barrel draw on Omaha Beach and to our left was the 1st Division.
00:35They were the two combat infantry divisions that attacked Omaha Beach.
00:41And what's it like being here, 80 years on, what's it like being back?
00:45I started coming back here for the 6th year and I've been every 5 years since.
00:52And how old were you during D-Day?
00:56On D-Day I was 23 years old and I was the later one because I worked in a shipyard on naval vessels and so I was granted a number of deferments because they needed those vessels so badly.
01:08But eventually in 1943 on June 26th I was drafted and deported to D-Day.
01:18And obviously it was a very difficult time but what are your memories of that day?
01:24Well that day was cloudy and they talk about so much about the 5th or the 6th.
01:31It wasn't any different than a 6th or a 5th or a 7th.
01:34They were all stormy days, wind coming from the west to the east and it was a miserable day but yeah they wished us to go in and so that's what happened.
01:49And what's your connection to D-Day?
01:53I was on a USS Destroyer, a USS Murphy D-Day 603 and we came into Omaha Beach at 5.30 in the morning last night.
02:09And so what's it like being here 80 years on?
02:13It's ... I was a little emotional but it's been a long time.
02:21Yeah, yeah.
02:22I enjoyed being there.
02:24Yeah.
02:26They were very warm and nice to us.
02:29Yeah, and how old were you during D-Day?
02:3219.
02:3319.
02:34And I knew Harold.
02:35Right.
02:36My name is Harold Radish, R-A-D-I-S-H.
02:40I'm from New York.
02:42I'm a young man that's 99 years old.
02:47I came to the beaches a month or two after D-Day and I fought with General Patton.
02:57I was in the Third Army.
02:59Got up to ... we went along in France.
03:02I got up to the Siegfried Line, the border between Germany and France.
03:07And I got locked into a concrete establishment and I got locked in.
03:15I couldn't get out.
03:16That was myself and about ten others.
03:19I was there for a few days.
03:21We had to give up.
03:22We became prisoners.
03:24I was a guest of the Germans for about four months.
03:28Four months.
03:29And luckily I lived through it.
03:32And as almost a coincidence, the British came through and saved us.
03:41And I was in the British Army for a week because I had to stay with uniform, etc.
03:47Then afterwards they turned me back into the American.
03:52I had a British uniform.
03:54I took it home and all.
03:56That's my souvenir.
03:58Amazing.
04:00And what's it like being here?
04:02Or even looking back, kind of, 80 years.
04:04It's been such a long time.
04:06It's a long time.
04:08And you realize that you've done a lot of work in the 80 years.
04:14I wasn't a military person.
04:17So as soon as I got out, I was able to leave after three years or four years.
04:23I went back to school.
04:25Got a college education.
04:27I became a teacher.
04:29And that was a different war.
04:34And I lived through that.
04:36And seeing all this, it brings back memories.
04:41But not as hard as I thought it would be.
04:45Because there are people around.
04:47And there's some movement.
04:49There's some smiling.
04:51I don't hear bullets flying.
04:53I don't hear bombs.
04:55You know, that kind of thing.
04:57It's different than I'm here with the number of people that I know.
05:01And we like it.
05:03We like the travel.
05:05It's very nice.
05:07As you say, it's always difficult to know what to ask.
05:10It was such a traumatic time.
05:12What were your memories of that period?
05:14The memories?
05:16Things come back.
05:18But never as sharp and as harsh as it really was.
05:22And I never felt that I was going to die.
05:32And I did do a lot of praying.
05:36I prayed in Hebrew.
05:40And I prayed in English.
05:42I prayed to Jesus.
05:44I prayed to Abraham.
05:47You're laying in that foxhole and things are going all over you.
05:51You do a little bit of praying.
05:54And then you hear people yelling,
05:58medic, medic, they want help.
06:02Plus, then you also hear grown men yell,
06:05mama, mama.
06:07And that's what hits you.
06:10I mean, again, probably another silly question,
06:12but what was the difference between what you expected before you came to Europe
06:16and what it was actually like?
06:18Was it a huge contrast, or were you expecting it to be as bad?
06:21I didn't know.
06:22There was a little anxiety as to what I would see and how I would feel.
06:29But being with a group of men and women that had been to Vietnam,
06:37which I thought was a much harder war to fight,
06:41it made it a little easier.
06:43The anxiety just passed over after a while.
06:57These are telegram poles.
06:59And on the ends, there's a line.
07:03Right on the end, if a stroke hit it, it would explode on them.
07:08So you go by this, then you go more lines.
07:11Now, this is one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight.
07:15We haven't come to the land yet.
07:17They would get these triangles.
07:19This would tear up the bottom of those single peaks.
07:22And once you had high tide, you wouldn't even see them.
07:26This is the sand.
07:28Yeah.
07:29And you saw the water down here.
07:31And this is up here, and this is finally. . .
07:34Did you have to go over the seawall?
07:36Well, yeah.
07:38There wasn't a shitty seawall.
07:40Yeah.
07:41Then the concertina wire.
07:43Right.
07:45It's still not on land.
07:46And this is the hill.
07:49Finally. . .
07:51And there were no houses here.
07:52They were all torn down.
07:53This is what it looked like.
07:55This is where the water comes.
07:58The road is here now.
08:01It wasn't how the thing was on Omaha Beach.
08:04Okay?
08:05They had three, what do you call them, concrete and steel.
08:15All the places around it, there were gun holes.
08:19Where they had the machine guns.
08:21There's also 20 and 40 millimeter guns on that beach.
08:26And even rockets.
08:28And so they would have periodicals across there.
08:31They would have. . .
08:32They were numbered on the maps.
08:34It might be. . .
08:35I can remember some were not the size 40.
08:37They were all over that beach.
08:39Now, the other thing that they had. . .
08:42Then across here, they had. . .
08:46There was one at the Vailville Grove.
08:49You see that?
08:5188.
08:52So you could fire this way on the beach.
08:55So you had no place to hide.
08:57This is not helping anyone to fire from east to west.
09:03This is west to east.
09:05You could fire this way and the other gun could fire that way.
09:09So there was no place to hide.