This is probably a very long shot, probably in the wrong area of the forum too, but has this man at the fore of the photo ever been identified? I’m sure you will all have seen him, this clip appears in just about every documentary I ever watch here about D-Day. You know when you watch something and wonder what happened to them? Well, for me, it’s this bloke, I’ve always wondered who he is, did he make it etc… I tried putting the image on a the Google image recognition thingy, but all it did was recognise the uniform and bring up loads of pictures of British soldiers. Probably the quality of my photo, literally a screenshot from the telly, didn’t help. As I say, a long shot! Apologies if this has ever been covered here before.
Brilliant Cee, thank you, it’s been doing my swede in for years and now I know! The forum prevails again. Just checked CWGC and he’s not there, he made it. I saw too that No.4CommandoBairn was going to meet his daughter. Not only do I now know who this man is, I also got to read a most interesting thread, so double thanks mate. I’d never have thought to do a search for “men in landing craft”, I’d rather optimistically tried “d-day” and “unknown soldier” but you can imagine how many results such vagueness brings. Now, there’s this German soldier in every film about the Battle of the Bulge…
The Battle of the Bulge soldier , wass generally believed to be Walter Armsbrusch, a member of the 2nd Company, 1st SS Panzergrenadier Regiment, 1. SS-Pz. Div. LSSAH, fighting in Kampfgruppe Hansen but it was disputed. It was then suggested that this may be Hans Tragarsky who passed away on January 07, 2011 but I think that too was disputed/disproved Kyle
Thanks very much Kyle. Now, I’m not sure, but is this the same guy as the man I mean? Here are some stills I found on YouTube today, you probably know it, he glances to his left at the camera before moving off. Not sure I’d have liked to come across him!
On a Polish forum some time ago the name of the `other` SS soldier in Wobblers post was suggested to be a Wernera Körtzer ? I think it was again disputed as it was based on a facial comparison taken from an earlier image in France ? Noticed in Clives images that he is referred to as `Schütze W` Just posting what I read elsewhere ,do not know enough about the topics to present any argument for or against . Just for info . Cheers Kyle
Cheers Clive, old chap. That book popped up when I did my search around for an image of this guy to show here, but I don’t actually have it. At first I thought the “disfigured” man the author refers to was the one in the background, but if you watch the video that lump on his face was just where he was chewing something. The author must be referring to that scar on “my” man’s mouth.
I can see why they’d think that Kyle, yes - similar bottom lip, quite thick, and the nose is very alike. Not sure the chin matches though. Fascinating stuff though. Cheers again, Martin
