Preserving The Oral HistorIES of Combat Veterans
9:06 | He landed alone and had lost his compass. Paratrooper Dan McBride was moving slowly in the dark through the hedgerows. He encountered a cow, then a German soldier and then finally someone else from his unit. After joining a small group from another unit and commandeering a car, they finally found a road sign which got them back on track and headed for the intended drop zone.
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Dan McBride came to the Army fully ready. He'd been shooting since the age of three and he attended the Citizens Military Training Camp during his high school summers. At age sixteen, he was qualified on every weapon he would be exposed to later in Basic training. He was scared of heights, so, naturally, he volunteered for Airborne.
When the Airborne volunteers got to Fort Benning, they were told by the sergeants, "We are here to make you quit." That didn't faze Dan McBride, who was in real good shape. They lost seven men just on the double time run from the buses to the barracks.
Dan McBride recalls his first jump. Once he managed to get through the door, he started enjoying it. After he got his wings, he chose the 101st over the 82nd because he liked the patch better. When the unit headed for South Carolina for more jumps, every chimney in the area was in peril.
While on maneuvers after jump school, Dan McBride had a real close call when his chute did not open. He had a new platoon leader who made a great first impression with the men. This is the kind of officer we like!
It was an old tub, the ship that Dan McBride boarded to cross the Atlantic. They turned back and docked in Newfoundland because of technical problems and that began a bizarre turn of events that wound up causing them to take longer to cross than did Christopher Columbus. Once they got to England, they discovered a great new hobby, fighting with the Brits.
Dan McBride and his buddy were dating a couple of English girls and were lucky enough to be invited over for Christmas dinner. They were sitting around afterwards and he began to feel a rumbling in his belly. His Army diet of beans and Brussels sprouts was about to betray him.
His sniper rifle was too long to jump with so the plan was to carry it in a bundle. Dan McBride had successful test jumps in England, so he was confident that it would work on D-Day. As the paratroopers were leaving, they got a surprise visit from General Eisenhower, who spoke to each of them. They took off and as soon as the planes got to the French coast, Murphy's Law began to take over.
It was constant attacking. Hit and run battles with Germans between the drop on June 6th to around the 12th. Dan McBride was in the thick of it, including a bayonet charge at Carentan. Later, in an encounter with a German soldier, he faced a moment of truth when they both raised their weapons and fired point blank.
He was shot in the arm so they gave him some German prisoners to take to the beach. When Dan McBride got down there, the prisoners saw the great armada that had crossed the channel. Definitely disheartening. After a short recovery, when his unit had returned to England, they were given what was called a short, easy mission jumping into Holland. It didn't work out that way.
It wasn't the short, easy mission they were promised. It was continuous combat for weeks. Paratrooper Dan McBride had jumped into Operation Market Garden in Holland and right away nearly got killed by a mortar round. During the attack on Best, he got pinned down during a German ambush and had another narrow escape.
Paratrooper Dan McBride's account of Operation Market Garden is colorful and exciting. He relates several tales, including the fate of an ill tempered sergeant, the improbable capture of a German unit four times the size of his, the reason you should not stop for tea and how he was injured by his own weapon.
Dan McBride couldn't stand the Brits and he was stuck in a British Army hospital in Brussels. He had a broken ankle, but when he was told they were going to ship him to a replacement depot, he and some more GI's hatched a plan to get back to their own unit. They finally made that happen and were reunited just in time to react to the news about a German breakthrough.
It was an M-1 rifle that he grabbed out of supply. Dan McBride found out he grabbed the wrong one, later on in a firefight. His Airborne outfit had just marched through an unknown town, dug in and were waiting for the Germans they were told were coming. What's the name of this place? Bastogne.
Dan McBride was dug in at Bastogne, but he was lucky enough to be on the relatively quiet side of town. It was mostly small probes but there was one big final assault. He describes how the fierce battle seemed in slow motion to his perception, the altered state of combat. After the Germans withdrew, the GI's moved to counter attack. He stood up to move after a tank round burst overhead and he fell flat on his face, unable to walk. "Mac? You hit again?"
After Bastogne, it was a different war for Dan McBride. He finally got a shower, brief and cold though it was. His airborne unit moved around on various brief assignments and found itself in Austria at Berchtesgaden, Hitler's mountain retreat. It was there where they got some big news.
Occupation duty in the mountains of Austria was a great chance for some deer hunting. Dan McBride and his friends were hunting when they heard sounds coming from a barn and discovered an Austrian family hiding there. They gave them some gifts and told them to go back to town. When the points system came around, he had more than enough to head home.
The battle hardened men of the 82nd and 101st Airborne, who had enough points to go home, were transferred into the 17th Airborne temporarily. This stuck in their craw and they refused to wear the patch and caused some ruckus on the way home. Dan McBride had a hand in that.
When Dan McBride returned from the war, he had some long talks with his dad and they reminisced over talks years ago, when knowledge about the Army was first passed on. He was grateful for the advice he received when he got to boot camp, specifically, what to do when the instructor dropped the dummy hand grenade.
If you really try, you can do anything. Dan McBride was scared of heights, but he managed to jump from an airplane many times. Having survived some of the biggest battles in Europe, he settled into a normal life back home.
Dwight D. Eisenhower was one of the greatest men he's ever known. Dan McBride met him on the eve of the D-Day jump and, many years later at a ceremony in Normandy, he met another Eisenhower.
When Dan McBride was fighting his way across France, he thought the French civilians did not like Americans and didn't want them there. Decades later, at a ceremony in Normandy, he found out how wrong he'd been.
