Harold Baumgarten's combat career in World War II started at 6:40 a.m. on Omaha Beach and lasted a bit more than a day.

What happened to him in 27 hours might seem darkly funny, except that this was real flesh and blood. Today [late May 1994] he is Dr. Harold Baumgarten, 69, of Jacksonville, Fla., and reconstructive surgery has left little hint of what he went through. Fifty years ago [in 1944], he was either the most or the least fortunate man to survive the invasion.

His boots had hardly touched the shore when a German machine gun swept the beach. The man to his left was hit; the man to his right was hit. Baumgarten's rifle, clutched to his chest, was shattered by the shell meant for him.

He ran on, right into the blast of an exploding artillery round. "It hit the left side of my face like a baseball bat. For a 19-year-old, this is a bad experience. If you're shot in the face, you think you've had it."

Baumgarten reached cover along a wall at the top of the beach, and a medic wrapped up his shattered jaw.

Two hours later, as he rested, he saw movement among the fallen soldiers on the beach --- a sergeant from his own company, still alive. Baumgarten rushed out to help him. "Right where I left the wall, a mortar shell hit. Three fragments hit the left side of my head through my helmet." His second wound was more bloody than serious, and he was still able to pull his sergeant to safety.

Baumgarten says he was offered a chance to be evacuated that morning, but sad, angry and still afraid that his facial wound might already be mortal, he decided to stay and fight.

"I couldn't say it was any special courage," he says. "You just get crying mad. You see these guys dying. …

"I told some officers before the landing, 'I don't know if I can kill somebody.' I was going to be a doctor. But you just get crying mad, and you kill."

And so, with about a dozen other men, he set off to do just that --- engage the enemy and move toward his unit's intended first target, the inland town of Isigny.

By late afternoon, half his group was dead or injured, and Baumgarten was crawling with the survivors along a hedgerow. A mine armed with a small shell had been set there, and it blew a hole through Baumgarten's foot, his third wound in less than 12 hours.

He tried to bandage his foot, but artillery began to blast the road nearby, so he hobbled away with his fleeing comrades straight into a German ambush. They all were hit, Baumgarten by a grazing bullet that took off half his upper lip.

Eventually rescued, he was taken by ambulance to the evacuation site he had passed up before. And there, incredibly, a German sniper began firing on the wounded. Baumgarten was struck in the right knee, his fifth wound. "He could have shot me in the head," he [Baumgarten] says. "He could have shot me in the heart. I think he was just being nasty."

It was 10 a.m. June 7. Wounded in the jaw, head, lip, foot and knee, Baumgarten's war was over.

Source(s): In the run-up to the fiftieth anniversary of the D-Day Invasion, personal accounts and stories were being widely published in syndication throughout the United States of America. The story of Harold “Hal” Baumgarten, as transcribed here, was one of those accounts to have been so widely published.