Always makes me tear up to think of those incredible brave individuals.

he and only a hand full of other guys survived.

He had seen the movie Saving Private Ryan, and that seen where the soldiers are off loading from the Higgins boat and they all get mowed down by German machine gun fire, that is what he said happened to his Platoon.

"murder holes."

"Murder holes" or "meurtrière" are covered points from which a defender can fire. In Medieval times, they were slits in castle walls and turrets from which archers would be able to shoot arrows at invading forces with relative impunity of cover (it's very easy to fire out of a narrow slit, but it's very difficult to fire into one from the outside). They were generally designed to allow a broad range of fire (left-to-right as well as up and down), so most of them will have a "cut out" to allow an archer to rotate about 90° left-to-right to fire:


Outside:
[IMG][/IMG]

Inside:
[IMG][/IMG]


In more modern warfare, these were fortifications from which one could defend a fixed position with effectively complete cover from any enemy action other than close-quarters contact. In the Pacific, what the Japanese built to serve this purpose were usually called "pillboxes:"

[IMG][/IMG]

The only real way to neutralize a pillbox on the Pacific islands was for someone to run up to it and toss in either a grenade or a "satchel charge," which is basically a small mailbag with a couple or three sticks of TNT in it. and then the ensuring explosion would be basically contained in the pillbox, usually killing everyone inside. Of course, the tricky part was managing to not get cut in two by machine gun fire on your way to the pillbox to throw in the explosive. Obviously, it took balls of titanium for a Marine to do this, and a whole lot died trying.




On Rommel's "Atlantic Wall," he had poured phenomenal amounts of steel-reinforced concrete to create much of the same, although what protruded north from the Norman coast was not just machine gun nests, but virtually every kind of weapon in the German arsenal, from MG-42 machine guns spewing rounds at a rate so fast that the barrels actually had to be changed out regularly because they would get red hot and warp, to the dreaded 88mm, which fired everything, to very large cannon designed to obliterate ships that were miles out at sea.

Unfortunately for the invading Allies, because it had been pouring down rain for days on end prior to and including the morning of June 6, 1944, the concrete and the surrounding rock were all soaking wet and basically the same color, making it difficult to distinguish one from the other at any sort of distance. Invading troops had been trained to watch not so much for the color of the concrete, but for openings that were obviously man-made rather than some effect of erosion. Hence, when one sees Tom Hanks' character in Saving Private Ryan giving those last-second pre-invasion instructions, and he says "watch those murder holes," he's actually referring to embrasures from which the defending Nazi troops could fire at the invading Allies while they had no cover whatsoever on the beach (remember, those tetrahedrons were supposed to have been blown up by the See-Bees before the invaders got there, but since virtually no one landed in the right place that morning due to the very rough seas, most of the demolition along Omaha beach was not completed until days later).


While I don't know it for certain, I would suspect that the etymology of "murder hole" came from the same as many other military terms that Americans used, before, during, and after WWII: a complete bastardization of the foreign language origin. I'm guessing that GIs, the vast majority of whom had never heard a word of spoken French before they crossed the Atlantic for the first time in their lives, probably just completely mangled the word "meurtrière" into "murder hole."




As for the ramps on Higgins Boats, those were just the last hope for any cover before hitting the beach, or, as it actually happened for most of the invading Allies, plunging into the water and slogging a few hundred yards to the beach.

I think you get like 50,000 bonus points and some hall of fame award or something

"and CLEAR those murder holes."

I suspect your point remains accurate: he is giving them their objective for when they get on the beach.

But I can also see how somebody would mistake the language. He says "...and clear those murder holes."

That's what I get for writing "on the fly" and not double-checking the exact quote.

Indeed, though, the point remains the same.



And regardless of any terminology, what those young men were knowingly throwing themselves into is a prospect almost too terrifying to contemplate.

has exactly that. director Sam Fuller received a Silver star for his participation on D-Day.
-
some background on this film:

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Film/TheBigRedOne

NUMBER EIGHT!

New book out exclusively about the First Division on Omaha Beach. Quite a book.

because of his height, 6'5", he was ordered off the boat first to gauge the depth of the water.

he landed at Anzio beach in Italy on January 22nd, 1944. He was indeed the first off the transport and was later severely wounded.

Thanks for the update.

for landing day in all amphibious landings in Europe and the Pacific. As "H-Hour" was the designated time. So yeah, the Anzio landing happened at H-Hour on D-Day for that operation. As did Guadalcanal, Tarawa, Sicily, etc.

It's just that June 6 was the biggest, except for maybe Okinawa and perhaps most significant. It is the one best publicized, so the term mistakenly gets applied to that one as if it was the only one. Obviously, those operations take weeks and even months of planning, so D-Day and H-Hour are the targets to set the operation in motion. In actuality, the Normandy landings were postponed at least once due to weather, so it could have happened on June 5th.

thanks for that tidbit of history.

Here's a great site that lists the Hollywood actors that served during WWII.

http://wonderfulworldofimages.com/wwii-movie-stars/wwii-movie-stars.html

There were several in there that really surprised me, this one in particular.

It was a really moving experience.

killed one week after D-Day. He was a PFC.

After D Day he lost a couple of toes from frostbite in the Battle of the Bulge.

I still have the flag from his military funeral.

By that I mean that as badly as I may have wanted to, I never ran when Charles or his big brothers in the NVA were shooting at me. But I'm pretty sure that after sitting in one of those landing craft and listening to the sound of machine gun and rifle fire plinking off of the ramp, someone might have had to shove a bayonet up my ass to induce me to go forward when that ramp splashed down into the surf.

Having to get out of that Higgins Boat, and KNOWING that I was going to have to get out of that boat, with ZERO cover, or getting all the way to the beach without getting blown to smithereens and getting behind one of those tetrahedrons, and then having to try to run out between the bullets and mortar blasts to get to some sort of defilade, where you could at least hope that maybe someone wasn't going to drop a shell on your head.

I go back and forth on it, but I think it would actually be harder to make myself leave the cover of those bits of metal, seeing everyone and everything around me not behind an I-beam getting blown to pieces.