My mom's cousin was in a glider on D-Day. It crashed. He was pinned (impaled actually on one of those anti-glider stakes) in the wreckage for a matter of days. He was found by GI as the only survivor on scene and rescued. His whole WWII was that flight across the channel, the crash, those terrible days, and a year or two in the hospital recovering. It was way more than I have ever done for this country sadly. He lived to a ripe old age.
One of my father's more senior co-workers was a welder in the Army Engineers presumably. He was, so the story goes, more or less standing right there when they came up with the idea of cutting up those beach obstacles and welding them onto the tanks so that they would push through the hedge rows instead of going up and over where they were vulnerable to anti-tank weapons. With a couple of tons of hedgerow piled up in front of them a lot of those tanks survived the intial hit of the same weapons and pressed forward. So that gentleman fought the war with a welding torch...maybe a rifle too I don't know. He passed away back in the 60's or 70's.
My father and his older brother came into the war after D-day. My father never left the states. My uncle fought in France and Austria and was there for the Bulge. He sailed straight from the USA to France and landed at LaHavre I believe he said. As hard as it seems to imagine, his sector down south was largely unaffected by the Battle of the Bulge although he was certainly on high alert but no southern counter attack ever came (or was ever planned). He made it through and just had his 88th birthday,
