Sidney J. Montz was a lieutenant in Co. D, 8th Regiment, of the 4th Infantry Division, US Army. The 4th Division was one of five U.S. divisions that assaulted Utah and Omaha Beaches on June 6, 1944—D-Day. Sidney was born in Louisiana in 1914, served as an ROTC corporal at Louisiana State University, and became a lieutenant in the United States Army when he enlisted in August 1942. On D-Day he was 29 years old. It would be his first combat.
Sidney kept a diary on a small pad of paper from May 15, 1944 and July 31, 1944. He may have kept diaries during other periods of the war, but this small pad was the only diary found in a trunk of personal possessions donated by his son to The National WWII Museum in New Orleans.
This diary is one story of 175,000 that could be told about D-Day. But from a total of 59 short entries (only 25 are shown here), an alert researcher can discover a lot of information about D-Day, a soldier’s life in the European Theater during WWII, and Montz’s feelings about this turning point in the war and in his life.
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