Terp152
Major
- Joined
- Sep 17, 2009
- Messages
- 6,275
The passing of another of our heros.
George Kerchner, who as an Army Ranger was decorated for bravery in leading his company up the face of a towering cliff to seize a battery of German big guns overlooking the American invasion beaches of D-Day, died on Feb. 17 in Midlothian, Va. He was 93. Lieutenant Kerchner was among more than 200 men from the Second Ranger Battalion who climbed Pointe du Hoc on a mission to seize a cliff-top outpost, kill its German defenders and knock out their 155-millimeter guns, which could have brought devastating fire on the American troops landing at the beaches code-named Omaha and Utah. When Lieutenant Kerchner left his landing craft, he stepped into water over his head and made it to shore, where he became his company’s new commander. “We were being fired on by a machine gun from the top of the cliff off to the left,” he said in an interview with the Eisenhower Center for American Studies in New Orleans. “Two men in my boat crew were immediately hit. I don’t know how they missed me because they were right next to me.” But “climbing the cliff was very easy,” he recalled. Lieutenant Kerchner was later wounded at St. Lo, France, and sent back to the United States. He retired from the Maryland National Guard as a Lt Col.
Thank you.
George Kerchner, who as an Army Ranger was decorated for bravery in leading his company up the face of a towering cliff to seize a battery of German big guns overlooking the American invasion beaches of D-Day, died on Feb. 17 in Midlothian, Va. He was 93. Lieutenant Kerchner was among more than 200 men from the Second Ranger Battalion who climbed Pointe du Hoc on a mission to seize a cliff-top outpost, kill its German defenders and knock out their 155-millimeter guns, which could have brought devastating fire on the American troops landing at the beaches code-named Omaha and Utah. When Lieutenant Kerchner left his landing craft, he stepped into water over his head and made it to shore, where he became his company’s new commander. “We were being fired on by a machine gun from the top of the cliff off to the left,” he said in an interview with the Eisenhower Center for American Studies in New Orleans. “Two men in my boat crew were immediately hit. I don’t know how they missed me because they were right next to me.” But “climbing the cliff was very easy,” he recalled. Lieutenant Kerchner was later wounded at St. Lo, France, and sent back to the United States. He retired from the Maryland National Guard as a Lt Col.
Thank you.