By BOB BRUCE Assistant Regional Editor
BROWNWOOD - Combat veteran W.D. Townsley still vividly remembers the German machine-gun slug that struck his hip on D-Day, 54 years after the fact. "When I got out of the boat, they had not been shooting yet," Townsley said. "I thought, 'This won't take long.' All of a sudden, I made somebody mad and they started shooting and that's when I got hit."
Until now, however, memories of Omaha Beach were all Townsley had. He never got a Purple Heart medal for being wounded in combat. That's due to change at 2:30 p.m. today when the 74-year-old Bangs native receives his D-Day Purple Heart from U.S. Rep. Charles Stenholm at the offices of the Brownwood Bulletin. "I've been turned down three times," the retired clock and watch repairman said.
Stenholm's office said Townsley's first requests for the Purple Heart were denied because of the hectic pace of World War II and because of the reduction of fighting forces after the war. Townsley did not request the medal when he was discharged Dec. 5, 1945, in Tyler because he did not want to slow up the process of becoming a civilian. "I didn't want to fool with it," he said. Stenholm and Albert Day, the Brown County veterans service officer, were credited with helping Townsley obtain the medal.
On June 6, 1944, Townsley was a corporal in the 146th Combat Engineers, part of the Third Army that rolled all the way to Czechoslovakia by the end of the war in Europe, 11 months later. Townsley went ashore carrying demolitions and banagalore torpedoes - explosive charges. "My job was to cut the barbed wire and blow up the hedgehogs so the trucks and half-tracks could come in," he said. "Hedgehogs" were pieces of angle iron, intended to stop vehicles and Allied landing craft. "They (the Germans) were up on a hill, shooting down on us," he said. "We were like sitting ducks. I don't see how a man got through it."
Townsley was hit in the right hip, an injury he described as a "bad flesh wound." With no first-aid stations available, he kept fighting. "We were on the beach," he said. "We put a field dressing on it. It didn't get infected. Later, it healed." Townsley fought the rest of the war in Europe, amassing five battle stars as he crossed Europe with the Third Army.
Before leaving the United States, he visited a fortune teller in San Angelo. Knowing he was going overseas, he expected her to tell him he would lose his life. " 'You're going to have a close call but you're going to survive,' " he quoted her as saying. "I never did make it back to see her. I always wanted to but I didn't."
Bob Bruce can be reached at 676-6764 or bruceb@abinews.com