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- for Cornelius Ryan 2 -
Your name Bearden, Robert L.

Did you by any chance keep a diary of what happened to you that day? No

Were any of your friends killed or wounded either during the landing or
during the day? A great many were both killed and wounded.
Our 507th Prcht Regt came in from the back side of Cher. Penn.
and were therefor deepest inland -thus the casualities
Do you remember any conversations you had with them before they became
casualties?

I recall urging a PFC Beweler to keep his head below the
farm's wall as he roamed about; he finally got it in the
head later the same day. Also I became indignant because
our CO let a supply Cpl. drive a jeep obtained from a
glider, only to discover that he was bore-sighted by an
"88" and blown to pieces, jeep and all.

Were you wounded? Yes, on the 7th and 12th.

Do you remember what it was like--that is, do you remember whether you
felt any pain or were you so surprised that you felt nothing?
No pain at all, just mad as hell. On second occassion,
however, it was at night from about ten feet with an
MG 42, and I checked to see what part of my hands I had
lost -- only to discover the wounds were quite minor in
those circles.

Do you remember seeing or hearing anything that seems funny now, even
though it did not, of course, seem amusing at the time?

We spent the afternoon of D-Day scraping for a group of equipment
bundles delivered by the Army Air Force. After the fight for the
town of Ferreville (sp) our ammo was quite depleted, and the en-
gagement over the equipment bundles left us hurting even more.
When we proudly re-entered the hedgerows we were defending, the
alarming fact was discovered: instead of mortar ammo we should
have found on the particular colored parachutes we discovered
it was grapefruit juice. We wound up that night throwing the
cans over the fences at our snooping friends.

See Over

Do you recall any incident, sad or heroic, or simple memorable, which struck
you more than anything else?

There are many thoughts available in this category, but one item
which has always stuck with me was General Gavin's remark to us
a few days prior to the invasion. He said, " You will feel as though
you and God alone are making this invasion; and when the initial
shock of landing wore off, it occured to me that God must have
left the plane before take off -- cause I was in France all by
myself. 6 _ _ _ _ _

I remember a guard(non-jumper) coming up to our bus as we were
leaving for the marshaling area and advising me that a girl I had
dated wanted to talk to me in the meadow below our tent city. I
ran down and she said she wanted to tell me good bye. I pointed
out that she had never bothered to say good bye on any of our
other several "practice junmps", to which she replied, "yes but you
are going to France -which I knew too well. I spent about fifteen
minutes trying to convince her that her story was rumor, but for
her please not to repeat it. It gave one a rather apprehensive
feeling for a simple farm girl to know Ike's innermost secret,
particularly when 500,000 casualities had been forecast.