Brothers in Battle, Best of Friends Read online

  Once I got promoted I was able to con old Sobel. I got along with him very well, but I lied a lot, and he believed me. When he was giving out punishments, I would tell him his punishment wasn’t bad enough. I’d say, “Give so-and-so to me and I’ll do something worse.” So he did. Then I’d go to the trooper and say, “Come here, you son of a bitch,” and I would start cursing, saying “I’ll fix you. You think Sobel’s bad.” And Sobel liked that. Then I would take the trooper aside and say, “Get friggin’ lost, don’t tell nobody. If Sobel asks, tell him I made you dig sixteen foxholes, instead of fourteen, or march twenty miles instead of ten.” Sobel thought I was worse than him. He was nuts and I knew it and they knew it. I got away with a lot of stuff with Sobel.

  In Toccoa Sobel told us, “You’re gonna sleep with your gun. Twenty-four hours a day, your gun will be with you; you’ll sleep with it, eat with it, make it your wife. Leave your gun for a minute and you’re gonna be sorry.” You even had to know the number on your gun by heart. So in Mackall, one night we were out doing maneuvers, sleeping in the woods, and he snuck around with the 1st sergeant, William Evans. At night, you post guards to watch the guns all night. Every two hours, someone else goes on watch duty so someone is watching all night while the rest of you are sleeping. Sobel snuck around one night and stole all the guns from the sleeping guys, like a thief in the night. Next morning, we fall out for formation, and we all have our guns. He says, “What the hell’s going on?” He started hollering at us. We all gave our numbers and they were right, and he couldn’t figure out what the hell was going on. Turns out he’d gone out and grabbed F Company’s guns, and ooh, were they mad. But their men caught holy hell. Really Sobel done good, because if F Company did that in combat the guys would all be dead. Understand? The method was right, but the people he did it to was wrong.

  Outside of physical training, when it came to field maneuvers, we saw that Sobel didn’t know what to do under any circumstances. He had no clue. No common sense. I don’t think he had the mentality for actual combat. He made all kinds of mistakes, stupid mistakes, that were so big you can’t keep them a secret. He relied on Evans to tell him what to do. Everybody knew. In combat simulations, he would make noise and holler when we were supposed to be hiding; he was nervous and jumpy, he would overreact. He’d get lost, get disoriented, couldn’t read a map. We saw this, and we thought, You can’t make those mistakes in combat. And this ain’t just one of the men, which would be bad, too—this guy’s commanding a whole company. He makes one mistake, we’re all dead. Nobody could say or do anything about it—officers will never, ever down each other—but everyone from Sink down to Winters knew about Sobel. There were about a hundred-forty-eight of us, and a hundred-forty-seven talked about “accidentally” killing Sobel as soon as we got into combat.

  We started playing tricks on him. In training maneuvers, we had a mock battle. I was an umpire. The umpire declares people dead or winners in the battle. The idea is to get together afterward and see what mistakes are made and fix them. I made Sobel a casualty in our mock battle. Put him in the wrong place where he gets shot or killed. The medics were practicing, doing mock surgery, bandaging, moving people out. But we said give him a real incision—they had to practice, right? They gave him an anesthetic, put him to sleep, made a real incision like they were really operating, and bandaged him up. He was mad as hell, but nobody would confess.

  Maneuvers got more intense. The entire 506th moved out to live outside for a month all over Kentucky and Tennessee for mock battles. They were big ones, very authentic. They never used live ammo. The only time they did was with the pig guts mess at Toccoa. They divided us, the Red Team versus the Blue Team, to simulate fighting the enemy. We were always on the move. We lived in foxholes and tents, dug trenches for latrines, fought in forests, rivers, mountains. You’re out in the country. When we dug trenches for latrines, I was thinking, What the hell am I doing here? I should be home playing craps on the street with my buddies. What we ate on maneuvers made you want to go home, too. Beef with gravy—“shit on a shingle” we called it, or Spam. Echhh. Can’t eat either one of them now. Makes me ill to even think about it. Echhh!

  The maneuvers were more for the officers and higher echelon—the lieutenants, captains, majors, generals—to see what they were doing under combat conditions, how they were moving troops, reacting, whether they used the right tactics or not. When it’s over, everyone meets up to talk about what was done right and wrong. We did it over and over and over again, rectifying mistakes, doing things better. We kept on doing it and discussing it, until we knew instinctively what the next guy’s moves would be, and we worked as a team. By the time we were done, we knew it in our sleep.

  In June, we got attached to the 101st Airborne Division, the Screaming Eagles. They were formed August 1942. They had the 502nd as their only parachute regiment. Then they added the 506th and the 501st. We didn’t know what the 101st was about. We were hoping to go to the 82nd because they were going overseas real fast. The 82nd Airborne was well established. They were a damn good outfit. They were in Africa, and they fought on D-day and up in Holland and Bastogne, too.

  When we became part of the Screaming Eagles, we put on our eagle patches, and we were so proud. Our division general was Maj. Gen. Bill Lee. He’s the one who said, “We have no history, but we have a rendezvous with destiny.” He never made it to combat. He had a heart attack before we left.

  We got ten-day furloughs home, so we knew it was almost time to go overseas. I hitchhiked home and hitchhiked back. Back then, if you were in uniform, you could get anywhere you needed to go. When we got back, we took trains to Camp Shanks, on the Hudson River outside New York City. The night before we left for England, the whiskey was flowing and everybody got drunk. Some of the boys weren’t used to whiskey and got sick. In the morning, they were hung-over. I was used to the stuff; I was fine.

  The Donut Dollies were there to see us off with coffee and donuts. That’s what we called them. They were the Red Cross girls, wore a white uniform with a red cross on their shoulder. Every time we had maneuvers, every time we moved, we saw them at the depot. One of the prettiest and nicest was Helen Briggsy. She was a little older than us; she was from Washington, D.C., and after the war, she came to all our reunions.

  When we were boarding our ship, the SS Samaria—this was a limey ship, we called it the Spindly Scowl—at the dock right next to us, the big French ship Normandy was capsized in the harbor. This big monster ship, the size of the Queen Mary, turned over on its side at the pier! We looked at that ship, and looked at our tiny little ship, and thought, Jesus Christ, what a trip this is going to be! Nobody was ever on a boat before in their life, let alone getting on a ship like that and going on the ocean. That woke us up real fast. We got on the boat single file, and this was the entire division, thousands of men crowded onto this little ship. I raced over by the dock where you could buy stuff before you got on the boat and bought boxes of butternut candies. They were chocolate and caramel, like a Milky Way without the nougat. I bought about two or three hundred of them. There’s no method to what you do at a time like that. You’re like crazy. But I could have made money with those candies. I was giving them out like I was Santa Claus.

  When you boarded, you gave them your name, they gave you a serial number. You could barely move; we were packed in like sardines. I think everyone was scared. We were going into the unknown. We looked out at the Statue of Liberty and saluted her as we went past. I remember thinking, This is it, I’m leaving America, going off to war. I hoped we got over there, got it over with, got out alive, and got home.

  The Navy escorted us over to watch for submarines. Thank God for the Navy. It was scary going over, being out there on the ocean with nothing around for thousands of miles. When we got to the ocean, the boat started going up and down, everyone turned green and started puking. I thought, What the hell am I doing out here on this ocean? Jesus Christ! I was cursing everybody, everybody was cursing. It was so
bad, I tied my bag and everything else to the deck of the ship and never went down below. Sobel got us doing calisthenics every day. We gambled, too. It got our mind off the rancid boat. The boat stunk, we stunk, the food stunk. Limey food. We weren’t used to it. I could puke just thinking about it. Ecccchh. But ten days later, we made it to Liverpool, England.

  When we got off the boat, they told us not to wear anything that would identify us as Airborne so the Germans wouldn’t be alerted. We had to take the eagles off our shoulders, take off our boots. After all that, the Germans still welcomed us. Over German radio, they said, “Welcome, the 101st Airborne.” They knew we were coming, but they didn’t know our plans.

  We set up camp in Aldbourne. We were right in the middle of a little village, living among the civilians in horse stables. We had to have lectures in English etiquette; they told us we better behave ourselves.

  We got right into training six days a week. It was September, and it rained almost every day; you never saw the sun in England. It was gray and wet, and we did field training and forced marches in the mud. We concentrated on training for combat conditions. We made jumps with all our gear, we slept in foxholes, ate K rations, attacked in woods, fields, attacked bunkers. We created a made-up village and launched an offensive. Just like in combat, sometimes everyone got separated and you were out there two or three days by yourself. When we got back, we went over what we did, the mistakes we made, and worked on fixing them.

  When we were settled in, one of first things we did was find the two pubs in town—the Blue Boar and the Crown. They had hot beer. No cold beer. They filled a big barrel of beer and put a red-hot poker in it. It would sizzle and smoke as the poker went in, and heat up the beer. We thought they were nuts, but that was all they had. Johnny Martin got a whole bucket of hot beer and drank it. He got drunk as a skunk. Puked his guts up. It took us a month to get used to that hot beer. But I wouldn’t drink it now—hell no!

  We ate fish and chips and we got used to it. We had no choice. If it wasn’t fish and chips, then it was powdered, dehydrated, or pickled. Even the eggs were pickled.

  There was a little joint, a nice little corner bakery, and First Sergeant Evans used to drive up there with his three-wheel motorcycle. We all used to go there for lardy cakes; they were very popular. Flat cakes made of pig lard, dough, sugar, and fruit, and they were dripping with grease. I wouldn’t eat one now. They would kill you. But we were in peasant country, lots of pig farms, so we ate lardy cake.

  Combat was getting closer, and I took it upon myself to learn every gun that I could get my hands on. Taking initiative is part of what makes a person a little better. No one tells you to do it, but you do it. I studied the guns, took them apart, put them together, fired them, made a lot of mistakes, did what I could to get to know them intimately. I found out how they loaded, how they sounded, what kind of glitches they had. I did this everywhere I was. If I saw a new gun, I grabbed it and figured out what made it tick. I was very nosy. I wanted to know everything I might encounter. I could drive a tank. I knew how because I was building tanks in Chester, Pennsylvania, before the war. Thank Christ I never had to do it. I could fire artillery pieces—not perfectly, but I knew in case I had to use them I could do it. I drove trucks. I drove Jeeps. I tried to be versatile. I didn’t say a word to nobody. I just did it. If I told them, they’d have me all over the damn place. So I played dumb like a fox. Keep your mouth shut, never volunteer. You got to learn that real fast. When you first come in everybody volunteers. Once you volunteer, you think, What the hell did I do that for? I said to myself, Keep your mouth shut, you dummy. You don’t know what the hell they’re going to throw at you. It’s usually the worst thing in the world. Never volunteer. Turn your back and run the other way. Say you didn’t hear it.

  I was ready for anything—ready for the broads, too. I did a lot of practicing over there. I had broads all over the place, in the haystacks, in the pup tents. Sometimes I had them in the barracks where the sergeants stayed. In the morning, I would hide them in the storage area—it was like an attic—and tell them to be quiet until after the inspections. The guys called me Hanky Panky Louie.

  Me and Chuck Grant would get into trouble a lot. We would drink and get mischievous. One time we stole bicycles, and the bobbies (policemen) chased us. We threw the bikes away and took off, and the bobbies caught us and made us pay for them. I got thrown in jail a couple times, too. They’d throw me in one door, and I’d go out the other. A whole mob would follow me out the door. I sprang everybody! Oh man, I was a devil.

  The stables in Aldbourne were good hiding places. Guys would hide in them to get out of night training. Some of us were more devilish than others. You’re doing things you done 4,999 times. Repetitious and a pain in the neck. When it came time to do something we didn’t want to, some of the guys, myself included, we’d get lost on purpose to miss something. We’d lie. Say we got lost. You had to be careful. We couldn’t all do it at the same time. One day I was in talking to Sobel, and Popeye Wynn came in. He just showed up after being lost for a day or two. He went out on night problems and said he couldn’t see—he got lost in the dark. So Sobel screamed, “You got to learn to see at night!” Popeye said, “How the hell can you learn to see? It’s pitch black!” And Sobel ranted and raved. Poor Popeye. I knew what he done. He goofed off. I said to Sobel, “I’ll take care of Popeye.” Of course, I let him go. Everybody done their share of goldbricking. You take your gun apart nine thousand times, twenty-thousand times, you understand? Then the sergeant comes along and says, “Take it apart again.” You think, Oh Christ. Repetition. Repetition. It gets old. But after all that, when the bullets start flying, it comes to you automatically. You don’t have to think for a second. You just do it. That’s good training. You don’t stop and think, Wait, what do I have to do again? What was that they taught me? No, you know it instinctively. Without that repetition, you’re dead.

  The biggest morale lifter was mail call; we got letters and packages from home. We got mail about every two weeks. I wrote as often as I could to my parents, Frannie, and my brother Henry, who was also in the Army. I didn’t write to Earnest in the Navy because he didn’t know how to read or write.

  We listened to all the great shows and music on the radio. If Glenn Miller was playing, Shhhhh! Nobody talk. Malarkey would kill you. He loved Glenn Miller. Malark got to see him in person on a pass to London during the war. Even without the radio, someone always started singing, and everyone chimed in.

  We played a lot of sports, too. While we were in Aldbourne, Buck Compton came into Easy Company as 2nd lieutenant under Winters. He played baseball and football for UCLA. He had a hell of a throwing arm. The guys loved Compton; he would sit down and talk to us, play cards with us. Officers never mixed with enlisted men. Most of the time, he was segregated from the officers, didn’t eat with them, didn’t do anything but salute them. The officers didn’t like it, but he never changed. Took care of the guys. He was a soldier’s soldier. Very compassionate, a good man.

  We got weekend passes to London here and there. In America, you read about what was going on in London, but you didn’t realize, because you felt like it had nothing to do with you. When you got to London, then you saw. Hitler hadn’t invaded England yet, but they were getting the shit bombed out of them for years, and it was still going on when we were there. Buildings were bombed out, fires smoldering all over. Thousands of people killed. The place was blacked out. They lived through hell and then some. They tried to get the children out, sent them to Scotland, America, anywhere. The air raid sirens were wailing all the time, scared the hell out of us. When the sirens went off, people ran down into the tube, the underground subway. The V-1 buzz bombs would fly over, and we’d chase them. You hoped one didn’t land on you. You got used to it; you heard the sirens and all you worried about was the girls you were chasing.

  When we were overseas, getting married was taboo. Lots of roadblocks to keep you from getting married in wartime. In the fi
nal analysis, most men didn’t get married. We had no idea why they had that rule. The limey broads, they were no dummies, they got married thinking their husbands were going to get killed in the war and they would get insurance. It didn’t become a racket but it became common among a group of people. We had no idea.

  Leo Boyle—Fearless Phosgene—met a girl named Winn, a limey girl, a nice girl, and he wanted to get married in Aldbourne in May. He got through all the Army’s roadblocks. They got the church and we were all ready to go to the ceremony. But I was always making trouble. I grabbed a Jeep and got a bunch of smoke grenades—yellow, green, red, purple. Leo was waiting inside the church for his girl, and I pulled up in the Jeep, and as soon as Winn got dropped off, I threw the smoke bombs in her direction, and the air was so smoky, nobody could see. Lots of confusion. I grabbed Winn, threw her in the Jeep—I had a mask on my face—and I drove her about ten miles away and dumped her off, then I went back. I acted completely innocent, went around blaming everybody else. “That dirty rat. Who done that?!” I blamed Smitty—Burr Smith—I always blamed Smitty. I blamed everybody, I acted like the innocent bystander. Winn eventually found her way back and they got married that day. I have no idea how she got back. Leo and Winn stayed married for a long time. I told Leo many years later, and we laughed like hell.

  The reason I always blamed Smitty was when he came to Toccoa, we found out he was from around Hollywood, and his girlfriend was a movie starlet, and his parents owned stock at Kodak film. He came from good stock, went to military school. He was trained in garrison training, and he could do all kinds of things with the rifle. He was a nice boy, so you blamed him for the devilment, because nobody believed it.