Brothers in Battle, Best of Friends Read online

  I watched the higher-ups, too. I didn’t actually meet Colonel Sink. Nobody did. Only the officers met Sink. But I knew he was a good man. Everybody liked him. Honest, fair. We called him Bourbon Bob. He had the regiment from the beginning to the end. He turned down several offers to become a general. If he got promoted to general he’d have to leave the regiment, so he stayed with the 506th till the end. We called the regiment the Five-0-Sink. That tells you something about his dedication.

  Maj. Robert Strayer, our battalion commander, was a smart man, because in order to be a good leader of a full battalion, you had to have good men under you. He had a knack for picking the best officers there, so it made his job much easier. All the best officers came to Easy Company, and most of the men in HQ company were former E Company men. We admired Strayer, because he got all the credit, while all the officers underneath him had all the brains. I could have done his job if I had men underneath me like Salve Matheson, Lewis Nixon, Dick Winters, Clarence Hester, Fred “Moose” Heyliger, all the best. So we respected Strayer for that. He didn’t pick Captain Sobel. Now you’re getting the ins and outs!

  The two people that struck me most were Lieutenant Winters and Sobel. Winters was a good guy, led by example, you respected him, he took good care of the guys. But I was skeptical of his background. I went around calling him a Quaker—maybe with stronger language attached! He’s not a Quaker, he’s a Mennonite, but it was all the same to me because they’re all against violence and war. I knew this because I came from Pennsylvania, where a lot of them live. So I didn’t know what Winters was going to do when he got to combat, but I respected him in training, and we got along well.

  Toccoa was about physical conditioning and combat basics. Most of the day, every day for five months, was physical conditioning. The rest of the time we learned how to use M1 rifles, bayonets, pistols, knives, grenades, machine guns, mortars, bazookas. It didn’t matter if you planned to be using it, you learned about it. You had to be ready for anything. The rifles we had to know inside out; we took them apart and put them back together over and over.

  We learned hand signals for combat, how to use phones and radios and wire up the communications in the field, how to read compasses and maps. We dug foxholes, trenches, learned to navigate the ground in all kinds of terrain—muddy, dry, flat, hilly, in the daylight, in the dark. We had night and overnight exercises to test us on the training. We got the basics on the Germans, too—their soldiers, guns, ammo, artillery, tanks. We didn’t know all about what they were doing, just that they overran Europe, France, Belgium, Holland, Luxembourg, Austria, Poland, Russia, and they were going after England. That’s all we knew. They were fighting for years. We know they were a little smarter than us. They had a much bigger army. We learned their army was advanced, their weapons were advanced, and everything they had would be superior to ours. So it was kill or be killed. The Army was training us to be killers. If you didn’t like the training, hit the pike. We didn’t want any goldbricks or sissies next to us in combat.

  We trained harder than any other company. You already got the hardest training in the Army, you’re a paratrooper, but Sobel doubled it. Everyone in Toccoa knew about Sobel and Easy Company. We got a reputation real fast. When the other companies were marching, Sobel took us running by. We didn’t march by, we ran by. E Company did double-time by. If night marches were ten to twelve miles, Sobel added six more miles to that. All the other companies would be done, and we’d be out there running with gas masks on our heads. He found any way he could to make us more miserable. Heavier gear on our backs, no water. We would be doing a long forced march, and we’d be past the point of exhaustion, no water allowed, and after about two or three miles, guys would fall asleep walking, be out for maybe thirty to forty seconds, and that was like ten hours of sleep to us. Your body is done. If the guy in front of you fell asleep, he would drop his rifle, so you just poked him to wake him up. It happened all the time, we were so fatigued.

  Instead of Thanksgiving dinner with the rest of the 506th, we were outside crawling on our bellies under barbed wire through pig guts, and being shot at with live ammo. Other companies crawled through mud, we crawled through pig innards, blood, guts, everything. What a sloppy mess. We were cursing, making all kinds of noise. If you stuck your head up, you got killed. Happy Thanksgiving. Holidays meant nothing.

  The other companies all knew what we were dealing with. Sobel toughened us up, though. You never thought you could do it, but you did it. We wanted to kill him, but we just wanted our wings. You did exactly what he told you if you wanted the wings. If you wanted to be a paratrooper, you couldn’t stand the thought of being put in an ordinary infantry unit. Hell no.

  My leadership abilities came through right away. You can tell the leaders, they’re at the front, they’re observers, they’re always looking out for the guys. The kids who are leaders make good choices, think quickly, have good instincts, figure things out for themselves; they don’t wait to be told. They can read people and situations. If you lived on the streets, you done these things to survive. I got promoted to corporal pretty quick. It was just a promotion in stripes. I had two: one for private first class, and then corporal. The stripes went on both arms and showed your rank. Later at Camp Mackall, I was promoted to squad sergeant, leading the mortar squad. I never wanted to become a sergeant, it was just the way I was. Most of the men did not want to accept that kind of responsibility. They’re smart. They know what it entails and they don’t want no part of it.

  It took time for the guys to get used to each other. We were eighteen-year-olds, we had to get out our aggressions. I got into a lot of fights. You called a kid from the South a rebel or a ridge runner. He called you a Yankee son of a bitch, and bing-bang-boom, you’re cursing each other out. We were still fighting the Civil War. I called Liebgott “son of Abraham.” So he was Jewish, so what? It was something to call him. If you were Italian, you got called a dago. It was kid stuff, that’s all. Why certainly! Liebgott was a good friend of mine, but when I called him that, he got mad. He couldn’t touch me. You couldn’t touch anybody of higher rank. But nobody stayed mad for long. We had a boxing team, and me and Liebgott got into the ring with gloves on. There were boxing matches once or twice a month. I got the shit beat out of me, but I kicked some butts, too. I was like Rocky Marciano. You can be like a killer in the ring and like a pussycat outside the ring, you understand? But I thought, This ain’t for me, I’ll get killed before I get into combat. So I quit. We also had basketball, baseball, football teams, so you could be very physical. Made us tough. Brought out the best in us. We played against other companies. It was always E Company versus the whole damn world. We tried to be the best of the best, and we were good. We got beat sometimes. But while we were competing, we were bonding, too.

  We all got real close; how could you not? At night we sat on our cots and talked, we cursed out Sobel, antagonized each other, sang songs, played craps and dice, talked about home. You got to know the next guy’s mother, father, sister, brother, wife, sweetheart. That’s how Frannie’s sister got married. One of her brothers who was in the service took a fella home from New York with him on pass and met Frannie’s sister. In Easy Company, only two guys were married—Frank Perconte and Johnny Martin. Most of the troopers were single. I had Frannie at home. She was seventeen. I was writing to her all the time, why certainly! I carried that picture of her in the Hawaiian skirt, the kind if you put a match to it, it will burn right up. Carried it all through the war, right in my musette bag, in my shirt, all over. I’m looking at it right now. All wrinkled up and bent. Johnny Martin used to say, “Look at that broad with the Hawaiian skirt.” Everyone liked to look at her in the Hawaiian skirt.

  We listened to the Andrews Sisters, Glenn Miller, all the big bands on the radio. Some kids had the radios on all night. The rest of us told them to shut up, put the lights out. There was noise all night. Sometimes we gambled all night. You learned who were the con men and cheaters. When you went broke
, you learned real fast. We were so young, so hyped up, we didn’t get too much sleep.

  We trained hard all week and got passes on the weekends. But Sobel would find someone to make a fool out of and not give them a pass. Your tie wasn’t tucked in right. It was. Your shoes weren’t shined right. They were. Your sleeve wasn’t buttoned. If he had it in for you, you were done. We had no control. He was devious. He kept me back a few times. When you got out, it was lucky. He got Tom Burgess one time. When you went out, you had to wear the uniform at all times. So Tom went dancing and took his jacket off, and Sobel walked in. He wouldn’t let Tom take the jacket off for a month. Made him sleep with it, take a shower with it, everything. Day and night, Tom wore that jacket.

  We went to tap rooms in Toccoa and drank beer. Half the kids didn’t know what beer was. That was my first beer. That’s right. Pop only gave me hard liquor! My first skidonies, too—I’m not touching that one with a ten-foot pole. I’ll just say we grew up real fast at Toccoa. Sobel would be waiting for us back at the barracks, if you were one-half second late, you’d have latrine duty, be up all night digging thirty foxholes, and lose your next weekend pass.

  Toward the end of our training, right before jump school, we did mock jumps off a thirty-five-foot tower, like jumping off a three-story building. We put on a parachute harness and jumped with pulleys and cables attached to us. It wasn’t anything like a real jump, but it gave you some idea.

  When we got done at Toccoa, they had the best of the best. Out of five thousand or so enlisted men, about fifteen hundred from the 506th qualified for jump school. There were good men who couldn’t take this training, so you knew you done something good. We couldn’t wait to get to Fort Benning because that’s where you got your wings. Just before we left Toccoa, Colonel Sink read about the Japanese army establishing a record march—eighty-eight miles—and he wanted to beat it. He knew if anyone could do it, Sobel’s company could. He knew we were trained well above the rest. So he chose 2nd Battalion to do the march, 118 miles from Toccoa, Georgia, to Atlanta, on our way to Benning. The 1st and 3rd Battalions took trains or trucks over. It was the beginning of December, cold, damp, and rainy. We marched for three days. Walked in the mud down side roads, through neighborhoods. We carried everything we owned on our backs—rifles, machine guns, mortars, all our equipment, everything on our backs. The guns were heavy, so we passed them back and forth, took turns carrying them so no one had all the burden. After we marched all day, we set up our pup tents, ate slop, slept on the wet ground, and we were freezing. Looking back, it was awful. We wanted to take our boots off, just to wiggle our toes after walking all day, but we didn’t realize our feet swelled, and some of the guys couldn’t get their boots back on. We learned everything the hard way. A lot of guys cut their boots to get their feet back in them, and left the laces loose. Everybody was in pain, our backs were killing us, our feet were killing us. We were exhausted, but we made it. When we got to the center of town, and walked down Peachtree Street, there was a big parade and a band. Suddenly your aches and pains left you. We were so proud. The march was historic, we made newspaper headlines, and it became known all over the world. We learned we could persevere through anything.

  Fort Benning was straight jump training, and it was tougher than Toccoa. It’s supposed to be a four-week course—A, B, C, D stages—but we were in such good shape, we skipped A phase, the physical training. It was the first time an entire regiment, three battalions and battalion headquarters, thousands of men, trained together and went on to jump training together to create nine parachute companies. We were a force to be reckoned with. Each man was like a heavyweight champ of the world boxer. We were way beyond the physical training Fort Benning offered. They asked us to run two miles, we went twenty miles. We outran everybody. Their training was nothing to us. They called us the walkie-talkie 506, as in “get walking,” because we already knew our stuff, probably, too, because we walked there from Toccoa.

  We had three phases—packing the parachutes, mock jumps from two-hundred-fifty-foot towers, and five jumps from a real aircraft. After that you qualified and got your wings. When we got to the last phase, jumping out of a plane, I had no idea what to expect. I’d never been on a plane before. You had to trust the pilot and not think. The guys were all joking and having a good time while we waited for the planes. I wasn’t scared at all. Not until after I jumped. There were about two dozen of us in the plane, we got to fifteen-hundred feet, the green light came on, I was next in the stick, and I flung myself out the door. Then all my training went out the window. You’re falling full speed and you have the urge to slow yourself down. You look down and see the ground coming at you at a hundred miles an hour and you’re going two hundred miles an hour. I started running in the air. They’re hollering at me from the ground, “Stop running! Stop running!” I’m running and flailing my arms, I almost broke my neck. It looks easy until you try it yourself. After that first jump, the second jump scared the hell out of me. I panicked again coming down, thought the chute wasn’t going to open; I pulled the reserve chute. But instead of following the manual—you’re supposed to pull the cord, hold it, and then throw it outward—I didn’t throw it away from me, and it went down and opened between my legs. I had one chute over my shoulder and one chute between my legs. They both opened and were pulling me in different directions. I came down face forward, and they were watching all this from the ground, and I caught holy hell. I wasn’t thinking. But I wanted those wings, I didn’t care what I had to do to get them. I ignored the fear, just ignored it, never had a problem again. Courage isn’t about fear, kid, it’s about overcoming it. Everybody has fear.

  Christmas Eve was our final jump, and we finally got those wings. December 26, 1942, we got our wings. Colonel Sink pinned them on us; it was the greatest day of my life. Every day for six months, all we wanted was to get those silver parachute wings. You put your wings on and you bloused your boots up. That was it. Everyone knew you were the best of the best. You were different from any other soldier. Those wings made you different, and you never took them off.

  We all got a ten-day furlough, and before we left Colonel Sink told us to act like gentlemen. “You got your wings, you’re Airborne men now, you’re due back on such-and-such day.” About a dozen guys didn’t come back in time. They may have only been an hour late. There were a lot of transportation problems during the war. It didn’t matter. Sink called an assembly that night and drummed those men right out of the paratroopers. After all that work, just sent them out. We were angry. But we learned real quick, no excuses. Whether they were real or not, no excuses. One kid who got bumped out was a good friend of mine, Gregory Rotella, from North Carolina. Wakes you up, you’re only a kid. It separates reality from fantasy right there. When you learned lessons so harshly, you became a man real fast.

  Spring 1943 we moved to Camp Mackall. It was a fort, and the military was actively working on all the forts, so it was much nicer than Toccoa. Nice barracks. We had more jump and weapons training there, but most of the training was on maneuvers. We jumped with more and more weight on us—weapons, supplies, ammo. We simulated combat jumps and practiced troop movements, offensive and defensive tactics. Training got harder and more complicated, more combat-oriented.

  The platoons were broken down into three twelve-man rifle squads, with a machine gunner and assistant machine gunner, plus a six-man mortar squad to operate the platoon’s 60mm mortar. I was promoted to sergeant of the mortar squad, and had Don Malarkey, Brad Freeman, Warren “Skip” Muck, Alex Penkala, and Ed Sabo in my squad. All good guys. Malarkey was a nice kid, very sentimental. He was from Oregon. Planned to go to college after the war. He could’ve paid for it with the money he won off me at craps. Muck and Penkala were real quiet, nice kids. Same with Freeman. Sabo was older than us, and he wasn’t quiet at all. We had a good squad. Everyone dependable, smart, and good.

  We got real good on the mortar. The mortar is a long tube, one person sets it down, then a shell
goes down the tube, with increments—they’re about the size of a fingernail, they cause the explosion and the thrust. The sergeant is key. He’s watching the enemy and does fast reconnaissance. He tells you how to set it, what to use, how many increments to use. One increment will send it, say, twenty yards, two will send it forty yards—just examples. You can put four total. The sergeant gives range, tells you right, left. As the mortar squad sergeant, I had to be good at reconnaissance, because if it’s not right, the minute you start shooting the mortar, shells will be on top of your head. You shoot the shells, hit the target, get the hell out of there.

  Me and Malarkey were the best on the mortar. I could knock a fly out of the air. Malarkey was a great marksman. He was the best. When it came to being a good shot, you either had it or you didn’t. In training we had competitions between the three platoons, and that’s when we found out how good we were. Our platoon was the best. Third Platoon’s mortar squad was second best. First Platoon wasn’t up to the standard the company wanted. Before we went into combat, to even things out a little, Muck and Penkala were sent to 1st Platoon.

  Johnny Martin became a sergeant in 1st Platoon, leading 1st Squad. Some of us had leadership abilities. They knew by who set examples through character and dependability. Sometimes they were wrong, but most of the time they were right. Some men were leaders, some followers. Some don’t want responsibility. Jimmy Diel was promoted to 2nd platoon sergeant. Leo Boyle, who was in Johnny Martin’s platoon, was promoted to sergeant. Boyle was the gas noncom in charge of all our gas training. We gave him the nickname Fearless Phosgene. You know what mustard gas is? Well, phosgene is just as bad as mustard gas. The Germans were planning to use it on the Allies, so we had a lot of training on it.