Just one of many heroes from that day.
http://www.tulsaworld.com/news/article.aspx?articleID=20080606_12_A11_hDDAYR436833Harry Hoots lost his fingers as a paratrooper but can't lose the memories of the 1944 assault.
CHANDLER Not a day goes by that Harry Hoots doesn't think about D-Day, which is June 6.
Simple things trigger his memories of that day in 1944, when he was a 21-year-old Army corporal.
It could be something as innocent as driving along a country road near his ranch and spotting a stand of trees, wondering how many Germans are lurking there.
Or scanning an open field, wondering whether he can make it across safely before the enemy draws a bead on him.
On that day 64 years ago, Hoots was in the vanguard of the Normandy onslaught, one of thousands of Allied paratroopers dropping into France in the early morning darkness before the invasion began.
Back then, Hoots was a member of the 377th Parachute Field Artillery Brigade of the 101st Airborne Division, the legendary Screaming Eagles.
His mission, like every other paratrooper that night, was to disrupt the enemy's lines of communication and secure vital roads and bridges to prevent the Germans from reinforcing their defenses.
Hoots landed on French soil at 1:10 a.m., about five hours before the largest amphibious invasion in history was to begin.
Trouble was, he was in the wrong place.
It wasn't uncommon; thousands of troops were dropped in wrong locations.
"The pilot of our C-47 he was from Shawnee dropped us at Cherbourg, when we were supposed to be 25 miles away at Valognes," Hoots said.
Hoots was joined by two other paratroopers on the airplane, which was carrying an array of machine guns, bazookas and other weaponry in support of combat troops.
So there they were, the three of them on the ground, in the darkness, lost and surrounded by Germans.
Hoots said he and the others eventually split up, and it wasn't too long before he found himself in firefights against the Germans.
During one of those skirmishes, a German lobbed a grenade in his direction. Hoots scooped it up with both hands and tried to throw it back.
But it exploded in his hands, taking off several fingers and badly injuring several others.
Bloodied and in great pain, Hoots said he made his way to a French farmhouse, where he was hidden for two days.
But apparently his French hosts got scared and turned him over to the dreaded Nazi SS the Schutzstaffel.
Hoot will never forget his exposure to an SS major.
"He spoke really good English, and I told him that," Hoots said.
"He told me he graduated from Columbia University and that he would be home before I am."
Hoots spent a few days in a German stockade before being taken to a hospital at Valognes, the intended target of his parachute drop.
Once at the hospital, two of his badly infected fingers on his left hand were amputated.
As a result of the grenade blast and amputation, Hoots was left with just a pinky finger on his left hand. The grenade had left his right hand with just the pinky and the finger next to it.
Hoots noted that trouble seemed to follow him wherever he went.
While he was at that hospital, in a second-floor ward, American planes bombed the building, "killing all the Germans on the first floor."
From there, the Germans took Hoots and other prisoners to a stockade at Cherbourg.
That stockade was eventually overrun by American forces, and Hoots and the other prisoners were liberated after slightly more than three weeks of captivity.
Hoots was shipped back to England, where he was hospitalized for a few months before he was sent to an Army hospital in Temple, Texas.
"They wanted to fix me up with a set of hooks," he said, "but I told him I would have none of it."
So Hoots decided to return to Oklahoma, where he finished high school and went on to college, receiving an animal husbandry degree from Oklahoma State University.
Hoots said he had a great opportunity to buy a 600-acre ranch about seven miles south of Chandler, so he jumped at it.
It was the well-named "Jumping H" ranch where Hoots settled, running cattle and raising three sons and a daughter.
Hoots was awarded all sorts of medals and honors for his war service, and he remains active in veterans organizations today.
In 2006, he was inducted into the Oklahoma Military Hall of Fame.
And in 2004, he visited the Normandy area and flew in a C-47 over much of the same terrain where his most vivid memories were ingrained in his consciousness.
"Yeah," Hoots said as he reflected on D-Day, "I think about it all day. Every day."
