Glasses N'Tea

“Today marks the 77th anniversary of D-Day and the Normandy landings.

To mark the occasion, here’s one of the most powerful items in our @/raunerlibrary Special Collections: a helmet belonging to Clinton Gardner in ‘44, which remains the most damaged helmet whose wearer survived his wounds.

On June 6, 1944, Gardner, a Lieutenant in the artillery, found himself digging a foxhole on Omaha Beach during the initial invasion. The landing area was strewn with bodies and the Germans were raking the incoming allied forces with artillery and machine gun fire.

An incoming round suddenly exploded in front of Gardner. His head snapped back and then a curtain of blood blinded him. When he reached up and felt his helmet, there was a gaping hole large enough that he could get two hands into it. Gingerly, he felt around and found that he could feel a soft, mushy surface that he assumed must be his brain. Unable to walk or speak properly, Gardner watched as his unit packed up and began to move inland. The other officers told him that they would send medics back for him.

After 23 hours wounded on the beach, a group of medics finally arrived and moved Gardner and the others to a field hospital. There, Gardner made the happy discovery that what he had felt through the gash in his helmet was not his brain, but badly lacerated scalp tissue.

Though his skull was scarred, it was not broken. Getting the helmet off was another matter. It took doctors and a fair amount of pulling and twisting as the edges had curled in and were embedded in his scalp. Eventually Gardner was sent back to England to recover, but that was not the end of the war for him.”

He bequeathed a collection of papers to the American Holocaust Museum!

AoT Flower Garden recap 🌻

Endless Blue

They'll ask us why, and what did we see? And we'll tell them the whole story.