Jimmy Johnson War Memories

At 17, James "Jimmie" Johnson saw enough horror on the Normandy beachheads to haunt him for the rest of his life. A coxswain in the Navy, he enlisted in 1942 in Brooklyn, N.Y., and served on the LST-209 for three years during World War II.
The trauma he underwent after D-Day left him so psychologically wounded that he spent seven months in a military hospital. To this day, though his rich sense of humor often belies his hurt, he still shudders at the many gory memories. Johnson now lives in Sarasota with his wife, Louise.
'I enlisted right after Pearl Harbor. Everybody was signing up then. I went on the amphibious force, the LSTs. I drove one of the small boats that brought the troops in on different invasions in North Africa, then Sicily, then Italy. It was a couple of days after D-Day that we landed in Normandy.
We got there at night, about dawn, and I remember the bombardments. They had a circle of planes, bombers, from England all the way to France and back.
They would drop their bombs, go back to England and pick up more bombs, and then go back. I sat there and I watched that. I was bringing troops in on the British beachhead and on Omaha beachhead. There was a 55-mile-an-hour gale going on while that was happening.
When I first went in, I think it was one or two days after the initial invasion and the fighting was going on, I was in my boat and there was a British LST over to my left. It got hit by a bomb, and it blew up.
Before it really exploded, there was a British sailor standing up on the bridge. The bomb hit, and he saw the ship was going to go down. He thought he was just going to dive into the water and get away, but he hit the deck below.
He ripped his head and his stomach open, and he was dead before he hit the water.
The next morning, they told me to go down and get him out of the water. I went down to the water's edge, and he had bloated up and turned all blue. I went to grab him and my finger went through his cheek. I can still see that man.
We really never went to sleep out there. I remember sitting in the boat watching those bombers come over.
One of the guys had been sitting up looking at the sky. The next morning, when we woke up (we had a piece of canvas on top of us to keep us dry), there on the canvas right over his head, about three inches away, was a piece of shrapnel coming at him.
His hair turned completely white on the spot. One minute it was black and the next minute it was white, right in front of us. I'd never seen anything like that. I shake just thinking about it.
I went down to my nephew's house not long ago, and he kept telling me he wanted me to see this "Saving Private Ryan" picture.
And I said, 'No. I don't want to see that garbage anymore.' But he had already set the TV set up with the video. He turned it on right to the spot where they were going on the beach, and I saw some guy get his arm blown off. I got so scared that I ran into the next room.
I think I was in Normandy for close to a month. They took me off the beachhead, and I don't know why they took me off. I don't remember it or anything. I went from there to the Navy hospital in Long Island, with shell shock.'

Sailor's war memories still vivid