I'm Ken Harbaugh, host of Warriors in Their Own Words. In partnership with the

Honor Project, we've brought this podcast back at a time when our nation needs

these stories more than ever. Warriors, in their own words, is our attempt to present an

unvarnished, unsanitized truth of what we have asked of those who defend this nation.

Thank you for listening, and by doing so honoring those who have served.

Today, we'll hear from technician fifth grade Clement Alessando.

Alessando served in World War II as a tank gunner and deployed to France just days after the invasion of Normandy.

In this interview, Alessando describes the difficulties of tank warfare, narrowly escaping enemy capture and the camaraderie amongst a tank's crew.

After landing, which was five or six days after the initial invasion,

I can remember going down the gangplank and I was in a gunner seat and I, to the right of the gangplank, about 15 feet ahead and to the right, was the back end of a Sherman tank sticking out of the water about three feet.

And I said on the radio to my, who was standing behind me,

I said, tell Henry to watch that we don't get into a hole, because evidently that was a bomb crater,

and these guys had gotten into it, and they were probably still in there because the hatches

and everything were all closed, and you can't open those up with that water

and anyway seeing that sort of made me realize initially that whoa this is another world

and what I expected I had no idea I was in a new world that I wasn't scared because I didn't know what to be

scared about. Sure, war, but so that was about it for as far as I didn't really expect anything.

I was playing it day by day, I guess. I never doubted that the tank was okay but I knew I found out soon

that the German tank was better. You know I didn't really dwell on it. It was just a matter of

who got the first shot I guess guess, and where you hit them.

And we were probably, without the velocity in our shell,

we were limited more on where we hit the German.

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