[Annotator's Note: Someone offscreen talks to the interviewer about looking at Frank Biondo's uniform.] Frank Biondo was born in September 1920 in Detroit, Michigan. He had one brother and five sisters. They fought all the time. [Annotator's Note: Biondo laughs.] His father was a core maker at Cadillac Motor Cars and worked in the foundry for 51 years. His mother was the strong arm of the family. When Biondo went to intermediate school, he played the trumpet, saxophone, and clarinet. He wound up being a sax player in a band after school. In 1942, the Army called him and made him a bugler in boot camp. He then went to engineering training. He had been making a living at music and working part time in the produce business. He will never forget that he was playing with a 16 piece band at Fairview Gardens [Annotator's Note: in in Detroit, Michigan]. Some guy came up and said that Japan had invaded Pearl Harbor [Annotator’s Note: the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Hawaii on 7 December 1941]. He thought they were crazy. In August 1942, he was inducted at Battle Creek, Michigan.

Frank Biondo went to Fort Warren, Wyoming [Annotator's Note: now Francis E. Warren Air Force Base in Cheyenne, Wyoming] for basic training. He was sick for a little while. He just could not make it for a while but he got used to it. He was made a bugler. He would be Charge of Quarters at night and blow reveille in the morning; taps at night. Each company had a bugler. He went to Indiantown Gap, Pennsylvania and went through basic training again. He started engineering with a port company for amphibious operations. They built ports and cleaned up beaches for invasions. After the infantry went through, they would lay mesh on the beach for the heavy equipment to travel over. Biondo was a crane operator. Rolls of mesh would be thrown on the beach. The jeeps had winches to roll it out. They did that in Normandy [Annotator's Note: Omaha Beach, 6 June to 12 December 1944]. In England, they used cranes to unload ship's cargo. They trained on all of that there in England. He went to Fort Hamilton in Brooklyn [Annotator's Note: Brooklyn, New York] where he started to be an engineer on the docks there. New York [Annotator's Note: New York, New York] was nice. He had a ball there going to Manhattan every night to the USO [Annotator's Note: United Service Organizations, Inc.].

Frank Biondo left New York [Annotator's Note: New York, New York] for Newport News, Virginia and shipped to Glasgow, Scotland [Annotator's Note: 1 November 1943]. He then went to Newport, Wales for more training. Then he went to Cardiff, Wales to train on the beaches. He went to Pontypridd, England where the singer Tom Jones [Annotator's Note: Sir Thomas John Woodward OBE; Welsh singer] is from. The invasion [Annotator's Note: Allied invasion of Normandy, France on 6 June 1944] was about to begin, and they lived in houses with local people. It was nice. He lived with an older couple who treated him like a king. It was a coal mining region. They would do maneuvers in the hills. The journey across the Atlantic was terrible. They were sick for 15 days. They got dysentery. There were only 20 toilets for 1,500 men. Some men used their helmets and threw it overboard. He was glad to get to Scotland. They hit a storm and he thought it [Annotator's Note: the ship] was going to tip over. He went to the marshalling area on 2 June [Annotator's Note: 2 June 1944] and found out on 3 June that the invasion would be on 5 June. It was raining and it was called off. They were on the boat from 3 to 5 June. They left the night of 5 June. They were brought steak, potatoes, and ice cream. He was on an English ship with 135 men of Company C, 5th Engineer Special Brigade out of Southampton, England. It seemed like they would never get to France. They got about a mile from the beach and just waited for daybreak. About six in the morning they were still out a couple of miles. After four or five waves of infantry went in, about 12 hours later, they hit the beach [Annotator's Note: Omaha Beach, Normandy, France]. They were bogged down and laid in that water and he was watching guys getting shot all over the place. [Annotator's Note: Biondo gets very emotional.] They laid behind the steel girders for what seemed like two days to him. Once the seawall was blown, they could get over the bluff and the troops could go through. The men were pinned down and lying all over the beach until the 5th Engineers Combat Brigade [Annotator's Note: 5th Engineer Special Brigade] blew the hole in the bluff.

[Annotator's Note: Frank Biondo and his Company C, 5th Engineer Special Brigade were sheltering behind steel girders as the American infantry stormed Omaha Beach, Normandy, France on 6 June 1944.] They started clearing the beach, helping the wounded, and clearing the obstacles so they could lay the mesh for the heavy equipment. Biondo operated the winch to pick them up and get them onto the beach. The other men would hook them up to jeeps and drag them up. They would roll them out to make the beach solid. They cleaned up the beach and helped the wounded and the dead guys. [Annotator's Note: Biondo gets very emotional.] Guys were crying. He was young and wondered what he was into. [Annotator's Note: Biondo says he is getting a headache.] His first night on the beach, he slept in a shell-hole. When the tide went out, there were bodies washing ashore. They were on the beach for a few days. The ships were coming in. They would take a duck [Annotator's Note: DUKW, six-wheel-drive amphibious truck] out and unload the ships. His company was sent with their bulldozers and jeeps to Saint-Lo [Annotator's Note: Saint-Lô, France] to clear a path. That town was leveled. It was just mountains of rubble that tanks could not get through. He was wounded there. Buzz bombs [Annotator's Note: V-1 pulse jet flying bomb, German name: Vengeance Weapon 1; Allied names: buzz bomb, doodlebug] would fly over. The antiaircraft would shoot them down. A lot of times, it would cripple the bombs and cause them to land in Biondo's company area. That is how he got wounded in his leg. He did not know he was wounded and did not want to go to the hospital. If they sent a letter home to his mother, she would have died. He said to patch it up and let him get out of there.

[Annotator's Note: Frank Biondo was wounded while clearing Saint-Lo, France of rubble in July 1944.] They were sent back to the beach [Annotator's Note: Omaha Beach, Normandy, France] to supervise the troops coming in. They went up through France and into Belgium. They wound up in Antwerp [Annotator's Note: Antwerp, Belgium] at the seaport. They rebuilt it for the cargo coming in. Then they went to Holland. They could not do much because the Germans flooded the countryside so they went into Luxembourg and built pontoon bridges and catwalks. By that time, they were into Germany. They went to Bremen and then Bremerhaven, Germany where they stayed. He was a crane operator in the seaports. They were in Antwerp when the Battle of the Bulge [Annotator's Note: Battle of the Bulge or German Ardennes Counter Offensive, 16 December 1944 to 25 January 1945] started. The Germans were only 40 miles away when they ran out of gas. The gas dump that was their objective was only 20 miles away. If they had gotten to that fuel dump, Biondo would not be here today. It would have cut the American supply line. He was in Bremerhaven on VE-Day [Annotator's Note: Victory in Europe Day, 8 May 1945] and it was quite a celebration. He had been in Antwerp on May Day [Annotator's Note: 1 May annual holiday] and he had a ball. He had some good times and some bad times but he had a job to do.

Frank Biondo was on deck crossing the English Channel for D-Day [Annotator's Note: Allied invasion of Normandy, France on 6 June 1944]. You could walk from one ship to another. There were thousands of ships. During the storm, the seawalls broke. Someone had the idea of sinking Liberty ships [Annotator's Note: a class of quickly produced cargo ship] to make a breakwater. It was beautiful. They would unload the ships using ducks [Annotator's Note: DUKW, six-wheel-drive amphibious truck]. The ducks were good. There was a colored company [Annotator's Note: African-American troops of the Army Quartermaster Corps] that drove the Red Ball Express [Annotator's Note: Allied forces truck convoy system]. Those guys were back and forth steady and were good drivers. He had his rifle, his donut [Annotator's Note: life preserver], and his full field pack on the landing. A lot of guys drowned. If you leaned back, you could not get back up. He was lucky and landed in water up to his waist. A lot of guys landed in water over their heads. With the heavy equipment, the donuts could not hold them, and they drowned. [Annotator's Note: Biondo gets emotional.] Biondo had his points to go home. He spent Thanksgiving on the boat home on a German ship, the SS Europa.

Frank Biondo was not doing much after the war was over. He took a furlough [Annotator's Note: an authorized absence for a short period of time] for a week to Paris [Annotator's Note: Paris, France]. After that he went to Copenhagen, Denmark. The guys with not enough points were working. Guys like him were just waiting got a lot of vacations. He came back to Newport News [Annotator's Note: Newport News, Virginia] and went to Camp Atterbury, Indiana for discharge. He had had enough. He had his medals and just wanted to go home. He told them he was wounded, and they told him he needed a physical. He said forget it, he was going home. His family was glad to see him. His brother had been deferred on account of his job. He got out of the Army, got married, and got a job. He played music on the side. He did not use the G.I. Bill. He had sent money home and his father had bought a house for him with it. His dad was good. He had written back and forth all the time. The V-mail [Annotator's Note: Victory Mail; postal system put into place during the war to drastically reduce the space needed to transport mail] was hard to write on. [Annotator's Note: Biondo shows his uniform and shows his patch for his amphibious work, his rank, and his medals and decorations.] He had qualified as a marksman.