Raymond Burchell was a sergeant in the 82nd Airborne Division when he finished his service. On his way down south, he was asked if he wanted to be a paratrooper. He signed his name on the paper. Then he got on a troop train to go south. The troop train hit a tractor-trailer that was trying to cross the tracks. The tractor-trailer was hauling fuel. The train flipped and Burchell flew through the air in his train car. He was fortunate not to have been badly hurt. Then they moved on to South Carolina. There was red clay and it always rained there. He did not hear about the airborne while he was there. When he finished his training he was sent to Pennsylvania for more training. Then he boarded a boat in New York and was hooked up with the 82nd Airborne. They headed to North Africa and that is where he began his airborne training. Training over the Sahara Desert was difficult. There were air pockets and the sand was bad. They knew they would be invading Sicily [Annotator’s Note: Sicily, Italy]. They had to train on LCIs [Annotator’s Note: Landing Craft Infantry]. Sometimes they would get hung up on the sandbars. It was not a great way to train. They did not go in on the initial invasion because the United States Navy shot down the 82nd Airborne planes. They beat the Italians and the Germans in September. They heard that Mussolini [Annotator's Note: Italian fascist dictator Benito Amilcare Andrea Mussolini; also known as il Duce] had surrendered. They invaded Italy. Italy is all mountains. They fought up and down the mountains. The Italians would send sheep in their direction for distractions. They thought a German was trying to get in their position but it turned out to be a sheep. They cooked the sheep the next day. They policed Naples [Annotator’s Note: Naples, Italy] for about a month. Then they went to Ireland and England. While in England, they did extensive training to prepare for Normandy [Annotator's Note: D-Day; the Allied invasion of Normandy, France on 6 June 1944].

Raymond Burchell remembers that in April 1944, the bazookas [Annotator's Note: man-portable recoilless anti-tank rocket launcher weapon] first came out. Burchell shot one at a tree and knocked it down. They continued their training for Normandy [Annotator's Note: D-Day; the Allied invasion of Normandy, France on 6 June 1944]. They mixed rubbing alcohol with orange soda and got drunk. They stayed at the airfield for about a week before taking off. They had pork chops for breakfast on the day of the invasion. When they got airborne, many of the guys got sick from the greasy pork chops. When they crossed the Channel [Annotator’s Note: the English Channel separating England and France] they experienced a lot of anti-aircraft and machine gun fire. The anti-aircraft fire was thick. Burchell’s glider came down and they landed an eighth of a mile from Sainte-Mère-Église [Annotator’s Note: Sainte-Mère-Église, France]. The glider bounced as they landed. Another man had a broken collarbone due to the rough landing. Their glider pilot was missing a leg. Burchell stuffed his pant leg into his leg socket. He asked the pilot if he had his weapon. Burchell loaded his weapon and cocked it for him. They could hear the machine gun fire in the distance. Burchell and another ran in the direction of the sound. As they entered Sainte-Mère-Église they saw a man hanging from the bell tower of the church by his parachute. They thought he was dead, hanging there motionless.

Raymond Burchell was in Sainte-Mère-Église [Annotatror’s Note: Sainte-Mère-Église, France] with about six or seven other guys. They had to eliminate the Germans. They ran into machine gun fire and an intense concentration of Germans. The Germans started to give up because they were getting killed. Burchell and the others took the Germans, prisoner. They were scattered all over the town fighting in small groups. The Germans thought there was a large invasion happening. Burchell only saw one plane get shot down. Everywhere they looked they saw the black smoke from the anti-aircraft fire. They were supposed to land at Sainte-Mère-Église. When they went into Normandy [Annotator's Note: D-Day; the Allied invasion of Normandy, France on 6 June 1944] they were supposed to be 30 miles inland. The pilot of the glider lost his leg all the way up to the socket. Burchell took his pant leg and put it in the socket to try and stop the bleeding. Burchell was knocked out upon landing, but he was not wounded. There were some guys from the 505th [Annotator’s Note: 505th Parachute Infantry Regiment]. Within three hours, they had put up the American flag in Sainte-Mère-Église. There were two Germans on the steeple of the church where John Steele [Annotator’s Note: Private John Marvin Steele was the American paratrooper who landed on the pinnacle of the church tower in Sainte-Mère-Église, the first village to be liberated by the United States Army during Operation Overlord on June 6, 1944] was hanging. Burchell was there until they moved out in the middle of the night to find their company. They forgot the password to get in with their company. Luckily, the guard knew them and let them in. The next day they started fighting again.

Raymond Burchell ran out of water on a hot day. He asked a Frenchman for some water, but he did not understand. The Frenchman told Burchell that the Germans would run him out. After a while, they found a stream. They fought all day. They did not have too many casualties. This was on 8 June [Annotator’s Note: 1944]. They were told they would be going on a night attack. As they went up the road, there was water in the ditches. Burchell was in charge of transporting the radio. He was always in front and therefore an exposed target. They went into a field and they walked right into a German bivouac area [Annotator's Note: a bivouac is a temporary campsite]. They walked in on 1,500 Germans and there were only about 75 of them. Most of the company got shot up. The radio antenna was shot off and they could not communicate. The fighting went on until daylight. The BAR man [Annotator's Note: M1918A2 Browning Automatic Rifle; also known as the BAR] was blazing away with his BAR on the roadway. The Germans were concentrating on knocking him down. Burchell was crawling on the ground. When they crossed the road they were in a wheat field. The Germans could not get their machine guns to fire at them. The gunfire was mowing the wheat down. Burchell remembers the wheat falling down his neck. Only about 30 men made it out of the trap.

Raymond Burchell remembers 10 June [Annotator’s Note: 1944]. The commander asked Burchell if he remembered where they were in the trap. He was told to take members of Graves Registration [Annotator’s Note: Mortuary Affairs is a service within the United States Army Quartermaster Corps tasked with the recovery, identification, transportation, and preparation for burial of deceased American and American-allied military personnel] back there. The Graves Registration guys went through the dead men’s pockets and collected their personal belongings and put them into little potato sacks. The 507th [Annotator’s Note: 507th Parachute Infantry Regiment] saved their lives. On the 18th or 19th of June [Annotator’s Note: 1944], a German had them pinned down with a burp gun [Annotator's Note: German MP-40, or Maschinenpistole 40, 9mm submachine gun]. Burchell saw a man get shot in the head and his brains were oozing out and looked like spaghetti. They stayed in Normandy for 33 days and then went back to England.

Raymond Burchell and his unit [Annotator’s Note: 325th Glider Infantry Regiment, 82nd Airborne Division] were in combat all the time. After 33 days, there were only a few men left in his company. When they were headed to the boat, the 8th Division [Annotator’s Note: 8th Infantry Division] passed them on the road. On the 8th or 9th of June [Annotator’s Note: 1944], the Germans started firing the 88mm [Annotator's Note: German 88mm multi-purpose artillery] artillery shells at them. They were fighting in hedgerows. In one area the Germans were firing wooden-tipped bullets at them. When the wooden bullets would explode, they sounded like firecrackers. They used wooden bullets because if they hit someone in the body, it would explode and they would have wooden fragments inside them. It was raining most days. Burchell saw an 88mm shell land near him. It started to spin and shot right into Burchell’s friend’s stomach. He was split in half. They hit paratroopers and SS members [Annotator's Note: Schutzstaffel; German paramilitary organization; abbreviated SS] depending on where they were. They were able to advance and eliminate some of the Germans. Sometimes they would fight all day and not advance more than 100 yards.

Raymond Burchell returned to England [Annotator’s Note: from combat in France]. They were brought to an airfield and put on alert. The fighting in France had gone into Belgium. They did airborne training in C-47s [Annotator’s Note: The Douglas C-47 Skytrain or Dakota]. They were going to jump from C-47s into Belgium and the planes would return to England. The planes would bank close to the ground. They were set to go the next day until the Americans broke through the pocket in Belgium. Next, they were training to go to Nijmegen, Holland [Annotator’s Note: Operation Market Garden, 17 to 27 September 1944; the Netherlands]. It was a three-hour flight to Holland. They were constantly being shot at. It was foggy, and they were advancing on the Germans’ position. When the sun came up the fog lifted and they were in open fields. There were no trees. The sun was hitting off the captain's bars on his helmet. He had to cover them with mud. They were attached to a British outfit. Burchell hated being attached to them because they would stop for a cup of tea in the mid-morning while fighting was still happening. However, they gave the men some rum. They were in Holland for several months. They were served a Thanksgiving dinner off the front lines. They came upon Canadian troops and gained a thousand yards. They had to walk from Holland back to France.

Raymond Burchell walked from Holland back to France. They came upon a British motor pool who transported the men back. Some of the trucks tipped over because they were top-heavy. Some men were killed and they began to walk again. In Belgium, they ran into an American motor pool who gave them a ride the rest of the way back to France. Burchell was put on ammunition duty. The Germans broke through and they had to move on. They were in the Battle of the Bulge [Annotator's Note: Battle of the Bulge or German Ardennes Counter Offensive, 16 December 1944 to 25 January 1945]. They put the men in tractor-trailers. They were packed in like sardines. They fought in the snow for two days. It was 50 degrees below zero in Belgium. In some places, they had snow up to their armpits. Everything froze. They used the snow to quench their thirst. The ground was too frozen to dig a foxhole. They could only sleep for 20 minutes at a time to prevent freezing to death. Burchell does not know how he survived the Battle of the Bulge. He froze his fingertips. They would start peeling and splitting. Their rifles would freeze up and they would pee on them to get the bolt to move. In the Bulge, they ran into the SS [Annotator's Note: Schutzstaffel; German paramilitary organization; abbreviated SS], panzers [Annotator's Note: panzer is the German term for armored and typically refers to tanks], paratroopers, and elite troops. Burchell and his men got as many American troops out of the pocket as they could. On the 2 May [Annotator’s Note: 1945] in Germany, they crossed the Elbe River. They had the same uniforms on from December. Burchell was the only radio operator his company had ever had. He was a walking target.

Raymond Burchell started smelling flesh. He thought maybe an air raid was happening. They could not see smoke. As they continued, the smell got stronger. They came up to an enclosure made of logs with barbed wire at the top. It was a concentration camp [Annotator’s Note: Wöbbelin concentration camp, a subcamp of Neuengamme near Ludwigslust, Germany]. The people were so thin. They were staying in long huts with no windows, no water, and only dirt floors. They had bunk beds with no bedding. The people ate the bark of the logs. It looked like they were wearing pajamas. They looked like they had horse teeth. They had bad diarrhea. Burchell gave some of the people crackers. One had convulsions from eating and dropped dead in front of him. There were dead bodies everywhere. There was a pile of glasses frames being melted down and a pile of gold teeth the Germans had knocked out. At the bottom of the hill were the ovens. The bodies were stacked eight to ten feet high. The ovens had thick walls. They threw the bodies in there to burn them. The mayor of the town did not want to know what happened in the camp. The people were tattooed to show they were Jewish. Their heads were shaved. When the mayor returned home, he killed his family and then committed suicide. Burchell’s troops moved on. They ran into German soldiers who were surrendering. Over 150,000 men surrendered to the 82nd Airborne Division. They could not take care of all the POWs [Annotator's Note: prisoners of war]. They had the Germans policing other Germans. They were throwing down their weapons. On 6 May [Annotator’s Note: of 1945], they ran into Russian soldiers. The Russians were celebrating with vodka and burning houses down because they thought the war was over when they ran into the Americans.

Raymond Burchell used grenades to fight the tanks. [Annotator's Note: Burchell is referring to the Battle of the Bulge or German Ardennes Counter Offensive, 16 December 1944 to 25 January 1945]. They would try to hit the tracks on the tanks. Burchell was a radio operator. Some of the guys used bazookas [Annotator's Note: man-portable recoilless anti-tank rocket launcher weapon]. Burchell was in the front leading the company. He was one of the walking targets. In combat, it was either kill or be killed. They could be fighting for days before the Germans would pull back. They had to have heavy casualties inflicted on the enemies. They were so close to the Germans that the artillery shells were flying right over their heads. The snow was up to their armpits. He saw a general in the thick of the battle. The original destination was Bastogne [Annotator’s Note: Bastogne, Belgium]. It was hard fighting in the snow. The Germans were using the 88mms [Annotator's Note: German 88mm multi-purpose artillery] all the time. One guy who got hit had the information for all the German holdouts. Some of the men in the outfit could speak and write German.

Raymond Burchell remembers seeing many young men in the German Army. Hitler [Annotator's Note: German dictator Adolf Hitler] was low on men and putting whoever he could into the Army. When they were in Sainte-Mère-Église [Annotator’s Note: Sainte-Mère-Église, France] they had German artillery coming in at them and the Air Corps. They were getting hit by friendly fire and bombs on the way to the causeway [Annotator’s Note: possibly the La Fière Causeway over the Merderet River in Normandy, France]. They had to run to the rear to get away from the shelling. They had to make the choice between getting shot in the back by Colonel Lewis [Annotator’s Note: Colonel Harry L. Lewis] or taking the causeway. The causeway was a disaster because the Germans were dug in. They were trying to fight tanks with rifles. They had a few guys with bazookas [Annotator's Note: man-portable recoilless anti-tank rocket launcher weapon]. They were fighting Tiger tanks [Annotator's Note: German Mark VI battle tank, known as the Tiger]. As they crossed the river, they had their rifles over their heads. They were stepping on the dead or wounded because they were all being cut down. There were a lot of disabled tanks.