What's on your mind?

Sweet dreams Nan 💔😢

As the droplets of misty spray speckled his face, Charles Durning snapped back to reality. He was about to disembark from his landing craft in the pre-dawn chill of June 6, 1944, onto the churning shores of Normandy.

While Charles Durning would later enjoy a prolific career in television, stage, and film, earning two Oscar nominations, he was the sole survivor of his unit to reach Omaha Beach that day, where 2,400 Americans fell.

It was while neutralizing seven German machine gunners in a bunker that he was shot twice in both legs and riddled with shrapnel, his body torn by grenade fragments, barely clinging to life.

Durning endured six grueling months in a London hospital, re-learning to walk on legs scarred by 14 bullet wounds, before defiantly escaping to rejoin his unit in Belgium's Ardennes.
There, during the Battle of the Bulge, he was among scores of Gls captured and forced to march through the snow-laden Malmedy forest when SS troops opened fire on the defenseless POWs.
Durning was one of just a handful of Americans to escape the Malmedy Massacre, crawling through frozen underbrush to evade Nazi patrols, one of the war's most heinous war crimes.

"I saw things that nobody should ever have to see," said Durning in 2010, shortly before dying at 89 in his Manhattan home. "I'll take the memory of those boys who didn't make it to the grave with me."
God bless Charles Durning, a Greatest Generation legend.