Participating veterans were Thomas Randazzo, 86, of Franklin, who served with the U.S. Army in Europe; Leroy Burgess, 86, of Charenton, who served with the U.S. Marine Corps in the South Pacific; Gerald Braud, 84, of Franklin, who served with the United States Army in Europe and George Beaugh, 85, of Morgan City, who served in the U.S. Army Air Corp with the “Mighty Eighth” ” the largest Air Force ever assembled, in Europe.
Thomas Randazzo
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He participated in the battle of St. Lo and the battle of Hurtgen Forest. He said the worst was Dec. 16, 1944 when the Battle of the Bulge started. His eight-man gun-crew had been put on an 80-mile front that was supposed to be quiet for a long rest.
“After two or three days there, me being an old country boy, I noticed it was so quiet in those woods,” Randazzo said. “There were no birds. I said (to his crew) ‘I’m gonna dig myself a foxhole, and I suggest you do the same.’”
That morning shelling started, and the guard woke him up at 2 a.m. to tell him the shells were getting closer and closer. Randazzo knocked the light in the tent out with his gunstock, woke up the other men and ran to the trench.
Around 8:30 a.m., he said, “it just rained shells.”
When he emerged from his trench, almost nothing above ground was left. The tent was cut into shreds. Three men died, including one good friend.
“I cradled his head in my arms. We just all cried like babies,” he said.
Soon after that, the shelling began again, and the men scattered.
A shell hit his gun in the breech, but luckily, it was made of metal and didn’t explode. He threw it away, went back to the truck to get another and crawled back to the big gun.
Randazzo gave each one of his men a hand grenade and told them to destroy their guns if they were captured.
When Germans were hiding behind a haystack, Randazzo’s crew pointed the gun at it and killed all four of them.
“I can still see it,” he said.
The first sergeant then drove up and told them to hook up and move on because the Germans were getting too close.
“Luckily the truck wasn’t hit a bit,” he said. “I guess that was God’s will. It had 75 gallons of gas in it.”
They passed clumps of trees behind which enemy soldiers were firing, keeping the gun going until they reached safety about a mile and a half away.
Then, he said, “the war kept on.”
He got hit in the leg at the Voges Mountains in France, staying in the snow for about two hours until he was brought to a M.A.S.H. unit. From there he was taken on “the roughest ride I ever had in my life” to Paris, then to various other places, making his way to a New Orleans hospital where he stayed until the war ended in August 1945.
Randazzo received a Purple Heart and is now missing a piece of bone from his leg.
Laying the wreath at the tomb of the unknown soldier during the recent HonorAir trip was “a thrill.”
“It gives you some sort of gut feeling some kinda way,” he said. “You feel so honored that you got your hand on it.”
Leroy Burgess
Burgess served in the Marines in the South Pacific in the 2nd Marine Division from 1942-1945.
In one battle, he and another soldier were running into new positions. Both of them got hit and went down, the other soldier in the shoulder, Burgess in the heel. Burgess was able to get to safety, but the other man was not. Burgess and another soldier ran back to get him.
“We probably saved his life,” he said. “But we couldn’t leave him to die.”
Later, Burgess had to cut off a piece of his shoe so that he could walk. He still has an indentation in his heel.
“It was enough to knock me a rollin’,” he said.
Another time, a bullet cut all the way through his helmet, “scratching” his head.
“I couldn’t see it,” he said. “I had to take their word for it.”
He also got malaria and yellow jaundice.
Of taking islands, “I guess the rubbish part is making the initial landing,” Burgess said.
In Tarawa, when the crashboat stopped 100 yards out when it hit a reef, a gunner on a 37-mm weapon had to drag the gun through water as bullets flew all around. He said they were lucky that the Navy kept the enemy “pretty well occupied.”
“It was a small island but well fortified,” Burgess said. “It was one of the worst ones we had.”
Once on the island, the Japanese were “dug in pretty well.”
“Some of them committed suicide. Only very few surrendered,” he said. “I don’t know how many people we took alive. Not many.”
Kimberly Walden, Burgess’ granddaughter and the cultural director of the Chitamacha, said Burgess found where the Japanese were hiding by watching their fire in the night. He used the anti-tank gun to destroy the bunker. It changed the course of the battle, she said.
Burgess received the silver star for valor and two purple hearts.
Gerald Braud
Braud served with the 29th Division of the Army in England.
“I was in the first wave that hit bloody Omaha Beach,” he said.
When the ramp from the boat went into the water, Braud went down, but his life preserver wasn’t working and he couldn’t swim.
“The full pack was holding me down, so I took it off under the water,” he said. “The captain had told us to guard it with our lives, but it was drowning me.”
As a medic, Braud was not allowed to carry a gun and had a red cross on his arm. That didn’t stop him from getting shot in his left leg by a machine gun 15 minutes into the invasion.
“I was scared,” he said. “I didn’t know if I would come back home to the good old U.S.”
He went into the hospital in England, returning to duty to fight alongside the Russians on Thanksgiving day.
“I had a rosary around my neck all during the war,” he said.
“My mother put it in my pocket before I left for training. Somebody was watching over me.”
Braud served from 1943 to 1946 and received a Bronze Star and an Arrowhead for D-Day, as well as a gold leaf with a citation and three stars.
Of laying the wreath in front of the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, Braud said “I felt proud as a peacock. It was kinda sad, but it was an honor doing it.”
George Beaugh
Before Beaugh left on any of his combat flights with “The Mighty Eighth,” two officers sat down with the men, all volunteers, and told them “I know you’re anxious to go in there and kick ‘em where it hurts, but the Germans are well-defended.”
The officers said the average plane-loss per mission was 10 percent. All the men were scheduled to fly 25 missions.
Beaugh was the flight engineer on a B-17 in the 384th bomb group. He was the only one on his crew of 10, he said, never grounded or hospitalized.
Although they originally were scheduled to fly only 25 missions, Beaugh flew 31. Out of those, on 26 they came home with battle damage, and once, the plane had to be salvaged, he said.
April 24, 1944 is a day he calls “the longest day of my life.”
He and his crew had been assigned to bomb an airplane manufacturing plant northeast of Munich ” “one of those targets that had to be destroyed” in the battle of Oba Flughafen Hoffen.
They had fighter escorts for part of the way, and when they got there they were attacked very heavily by enemy fighter planes and anti-aircraft.
One shot hit the front of the plane, killing the navigator. One exploded in the cockpit and blew out the instrument panel. One hit the turret, where Beaugh was, but it was so heavily reinforced, it blew off the turret bubble and Beaugh wasn’t injured.
They were flying at 27,000 feet, wearing electric heated suits because the temperature was 48 degrees below zero.
The cabin wasn’t pressurized, and they were out of oxygen, so they had to leave the formation ” but when they did, three enemy fighters came after them. The pilot, who was injured but never stopped flying, put the plane into a nose dive, and they were able to reach the safety of the tree tops.
They made their way back to England by flying in an eastern direction with no instrument panels. The crew’s radio was out, so when they reached the British Channel and saw the two British Air Force fighters on patrol, Beaugh shot flares from the top of the plane, and they were guided to an emergency landing field.
Beaugh was awarded a Distinguished Flying Cross and a cluster, a well as an air medal and five clusters.
“Sometimes war is necessary,” he said. “War is hell but it is necessary.”
Of the HonorAir trip and presenting the wreath at the tomb of the unknown soldier, he said “it was very emotional. The whole trip was emotional. I never in my life experienced such patriotism. I said ‘wow, I didn’t know we had people left in the country that were that patriotic.’ It gave me goosebumps. It even brought a few tears.”
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