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211784 Pfc. Abe Milkis United States Air Force 101st Airborne from:Wynwood, PA Abe Milkis was drafted and put into infantry training. He hoped to get into the Air Corps. On bivouac one day, an officer told the group: "Get your stuff out of here, you're going." After a train ride with the others, Milkis found himself at a strange base in Florida among men wearing caps with glider and parachute emblems and eagle patches on their shoulders. Milkis asked if he was in the Air Corps. "They said, 'No, your're in the 101st Airborne.'"
When he asked if he could decline, he was told: "If you don't sign, you'll be in the front lines tomorrow." The first 10 days at Normandy weren't too bad, The 327th Glider Infantry kept probing inland. The troops walked past pastures dotted with dead cows, their legs sticking up eerily in the air. It was near Ste.-Mere-Eglise that the unit met resistance pushing through the thick hedgerows. "Somebody was shooting at me. It was hitting the dirt right in front of me.". He hit the ground. Then "the captain says: 'Where the hell do you think you're at? Milkis, you're holding up the whole company.'" So he stood and was promptly shot in an arm by a sniper. That was it for him at Normandy.
Shipped back to England for medical treatment, he didn't return to the unit until after the Battle of the Bulge, in early 1945. He was a loader on a bazooka team, which primarily blew up pillboxes, or concrete gun emplacements. Some of the Germansm, he recalled, "were glad to get caught. They got three squares a day."
His unit wound up at Berchtesgaden, Hitler's lair in the Bavarian Alps, guarding Nazi commanders' wives who were being held there. He remembered that many of the women were attractive, but the American officers "wouldn't let us go anywhere near them."
It was D-Day, and he found himself up to his neck in the war right away. When the boat ramp was dropped off Utah Beach, the 101st Airborne troopers piled outwith all their combat gear.
The boat crews didn't want to get too close, so the soldiers disembarked far from shore. "We had some little guys, we had to carry them. I only went in up to my neck,". Abe was 5 feet, 11 1/2 inches tall. Everybody was very nervous.
The famed 101st Airborne is best known for its audacious nighttime parachute attack at Normandy before the seaborne invasion. But, as Milkis explained, he was supposed to go in by glider, but there weren't enough to go around. So Milkis and the rest of the 327th Glider Infantry Regiment rode in to Utah Beach at night on June 6, after the initial landings that morning.
That was just fine with Pfc. Milkis. The steel and canvas gliders, pulled by C-47 transports, were dubbed "flying coffins" by the troops.
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