06/11/2019
The D-Day Invasion at Normandy occurred 75 years ago on June 6. Mr. John Yount shared with me a March 2004 TIME magazine article entitled "The Greatest Day." In that article was a photo of the Normandy invasion.......the gentlemen in the lower right corner looking towards the camera is Leadwood High School Class of 1940 graduate Mr. Leonard Wilmont. He was in the first wave sent on shore to break through the obstacles so that the US soldiers could make it up the beach.
The following was taken from the book: “The Americans at D-Day: The American Experience at the Normandy Invasion”
By: John C. McManus (page 346)
"Back at the Easy Red Beach, the engineer, still under heavy fire, succeeded in blowing a gap in the obstacle belt that commanded the approach to E-1. LEONARD WILMONT, a crew leader in the Naval Combat Demolition Unit 26, helped wire up several obstacles. “Each of us had forty-two pounds of explosives on our backs. We put a three-pound block of tetratol on the concrete; we’d lay a little E-cord on the mine. We kept moving and machine-gun bullets were hitting everywhere. Eighty-eights were landing all over the beach. Finally we got our whole 100-yard gap charged.” They blew the wired obstacles, creating a yawning 100-yard gap along the beach, more than adequate to accommodate vehicles. The gap would need to be smoothed out and improved into a road of sorts by the other engineers with bulldozers, but it was a start."
I have also attached a track team photo from 1939-1940 with Mr. Wilmont in the first row, second from left, holding the shot-put.
