From D-Day to Bastogne

WW2 Pod: We Have Ways of Making You Talk

Goalhanger Podcasts

Society & Culture, History, Education

4.8 • 4.4K Ratings

🗓️ 5 December 2019

⏱️ 57 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

James ‘Pee-wee’ Martin parachuted into Normandy on D-Day; fought on Hell’s Highway during Market Garden; and at Bastogne during the Battle of the Bulge.

He recently spent time with James Holland retelling his extraordinary story. Not to be missed.

A Goalhanger Films Production

Produced by Joey McCarthy

Exec Producer Tony Pastor

Twitter: #WeHaveWays

Email: [email protected]

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Good morning and I am sitting here in the Higgins Hotel next door to the National World
0:15.1	with two museum in New Orleans. They've just very sweetly turned down the musical,
0:19.6	though actually it was quite atmospheric really and I'm sitting next to Jim P.W. Martin,
0:25.0	legendary veteran of the 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment and I'm also sitting with his
0:31.2	good friend Doug and I'm just learning that you have the largest number of Facebook followers
0:39.6	of any living veteran. That's correct. That's due to the affiliation I have with Doug
0:48.8	Barber, the historian and social teacher. For 40 years I did help people get in touch with
0:57.5	their relatives because I have an address and phone number of everyone that went through my
1:04.1	regiment through the whole war and the survivors but that was with a telephone and a pencil.
1:12.1	Then I met Doug and of course with his putting it all on Facebook. Now where we together are able
1:21.2	to help a lot more people. Well and I think you have something like 30 over more than 31,000
1:26.7	followers. It's like something. You've got to also remember this. There are a lot of people
1:33.3	write books and give first person accounts and I'm not into that. It's not about me. It's about
1:42.8	the mission. Now we all did extraordinary things and the unit I was in, if I was the 6th Parachute
1:52.2	Regiment 101st Airborne, was a leading group going in, Normandy. That doesn't make me special.
2:02.0	We all volunteered, we all trained for it, we got paid for it. So you can't call yourself a hero.
2:11.7	You're doing what you are paid to do. I will say this. We went in to landed at Liverpool and
2:20.8	the different battalions were put in little villages. My battalion was put in a village called Ramsbury.
2:28.4	Now the 750 people in our unit was 1500 people living in the village and up on the top of the
2:35.2	hill there for just 2,000 people with a town of 1500 and 9 pugs. It took some while to get used to
2:46.0	the differences in the language and what words meant and all of that. And there was some problems.
2:53.2	Some guys did a lot of bragging, which we were told not to do. But we're all young.
	...

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