Severely wounded soldier risked his life for a photo of his wife

Severely wounded soldier risked his life for a photo of his wife

This story happened 70 years ago, and the family of Lieutenant James Tate still remembers it.

James Tate told his story to a Reader’s Digest journalist.

“We walked slowly across the wet grass, looking out for the enemy. I wondered why our artillery was silent when we all knew they were hiding out there in Normandy.

Suddenly, the silence is broken by machine-gun fire. We fall to the ground and hide from the shots behind the low stonework in front of us.

Our radio operator calls the company commander to report what is happening. And I, with two other soldiers, are going to go look for where the machine gun is hiding, and knock out the machine gunner.

I kneel down, lean towards my soldiers to say something to them, but at that moment I hear an explosion and find myself on my back.

«Lieutenant! Lieutenant! You’ve been hit! I hear the cries of our radio operator.

Two medics tied me to a stretcher and took me to a medical aid station. There the doctor bandaged my wounds, stopped the bleeding, and I was taken to the nearest field hospital.

And there it turned out that dozens of wounded were lying on the ground and waiting for their turn. I was already passing out and, before everything went completely black, I noticed that the nurses were giving photographs to some of the soldiers.

I woke up on a bed without a blanket from the fact that I was harassed by a nurse. She screamed in my ear: “Wake up, lieutenant! You are being sent by plane to a hospital in England right now.”

I panicked. All my things were in a common pile of equipment. And I could say goodbye to all our junk, except for one thing — a photograph of my fiancee Ellen, which I always carried with me. I couldn’t replace her.

«I’m not going anywhere until I get a photo of my wife,» I said. “She is wearing a gas mask that was taken from me.”

I knew that the nurse could spit on my demands and still put me on the plane. But instead, she said, «Okay, I’ll see if I can find her,» and ran off to find a photograph in a huge pile of soldier’s uniforms.