“Because I can’t see in the dark,” Wynn replied.
“You had better learn to see in the dark,” Sobel rejoined, and sent Wynn back to his squad, replacing him with Ed Tipper as runner. “With my help,” Tipper recounted, “Sobel was able to mislay his maps, compass, and other items when he most needed them. He was getting similar ‘assistance’ from others and was disoriented and lost even more than usual. We were all hoping that he’d screw up so badly that he’d be replaced and we wouldn’t have to go into combat under his command.”
“Your rifle is your right arm!” Sobel would tell his men. “It should be in your possession every moment.” On one night exercise he decided to teach his men a lesson. He and Sergeant Evans went sneaking through the company position to steal rifles from sleeping men. The mission was successful; by daylight Sobel and Evans had nearly fifty rifles. With great fanfare, Evans called the company together and Sobel began to tell the men what miserable soldiers they were.
As he was yelling, the C.O. of Fox Company, accompanied by some forty-five of his men, came up. To Sobel’s great embarrassment, it turned out that he and Evans had been lost, strayed into Fox Company’s bivouac area, and stolen their rifles.
A couple of weeks later, Sobel hurt his feet on a jump. He and Sergeant Evans returned to barracks while the company stayed in the field. The captain and the first sergeant conducted a private inspection. They searched through all the footlockers, clothing, and personal possessions of the men of E Company. They went through pockets, broke open boxes, rifled letters from girlfriends and family, and confiscated all items they considered contraband. “I don’t know what the hell they were looking for,” Gordon Carson commented. “Those were the days before drugs.”
Sobel posted a list identifying the contraband, the offender, and the punishment. The men returned from the field exercise, exhausted and filthy, to find that everything they thought of as personal property was in disarray, underwear, socks, toothpaste and toothbrushes, all piled up on top of the bunks. Many items were missing.
Nearly every soldier had something confiscated. Generally it was unauthorized ammunition, nonregulation clothing, or pornography. Cans of fruit cocktail and sliced peaches, stolen from the kitchen, were gone, along with expensive shirts, none of it ever returned. One soldier had been collecting prophylactic kits. A few condoms were evidently acceptable, but 200 constituted contraband; they were posted on Sobel’s list of confiscated items.
“That marked a turning point for me,” Tipper recalled. “Before Sobel’s raid I had disliked him but had not really hated the man. Afterward I decided Sobel was my personal enemy and I did not owe him loyalty or anything else. Everyone was incensed.”
There was talk about who was going to shoot Sobel when the company got into combat. Tipper thought it was just talk, but “on the other hand I was aware of a couple of guys in Company E who said little but who in my judgment were fully capable of killing Sobel if they got the chance.”
On the next field exercise, E Company was told that a number of its men would be designated as simulated casualties so the medics could practice bandaging wounds, improvising casts and splints, evacuating men on litters and so forth. Sobel was told that he was a simulated casualty. The medics put him under a real anesthetic, pulled down his pants, and made a real incision simulating an appendectomy. They sewed up the incision and bound it up with bandages and surgical tape, then disappeared.
Sobel was furious, naturally enough, but he got nowhere in pressing for an investigation. Not a man in E Company could be found who could identify the guilty medics.
· · ·
How fit the men of Easy were was determined at Mackall when the Department of the Army had Strayer’s 2d Battalion — already famous for the march to Atlanta — take a standard physical fitness test. The battalion scored 97 percent. As this was the highest score ever recorded for a battalion in the Army, a Colonel Jablonski from Washington thought Strayer had rigged the score. Winters recalled, “They had us run it a second time, officers, men, service personnel, cooks, everybody — and we scored 98 percent.”
· · ·
Promotions were coming Easy’s way. All three staff sergeants, James Diel, Salty Harris, and Mike Ranney, were original members of the
company who had started out as privates. So too with the ergeants, Leo Boyle, Bill Guarnere, Carwood Lipton, John Martin, Elmer Murray, Bob Rader, Bob Smith, Buck Taylor, and Murray Roberts. Carson made corporal. Lieutenant Matheson moved up to regimental staff, while Lieutenants Nixon, Hester, and George Lavenson moved on to the battalion staff. (Through to the end of the war, every vacancy on the 2d Battalion staff was filled with an officer from Easy. Companies D, F, and HQ did not send a single officer up to battalion. Winters commented, “This is why communications between battalion, regiment HQ, and Company E were always excellent. It is also why Company E always seemed to be called upon for key assignments.”)
In early May, Winters’s 1st platoon got a new second lieutenant, Harry Welsh. He was a reluctant officer. In April 1942, he had volunteered for the paratroopers and been assigned to the 504th PIR of the 82d Airborne. After jump school, he made sergeant. Three times. He kept getting busted back to private for fighting. But he was a tough little Irishman with obvious leadership potential. His company commander noticed and recommended Welsh for OCS.
Welsh was assigned to Easy Company, 2d Battalion, 506th PIR. He had wanted to return to the 504th, but Army doctrine was to send OCS graduates to new units, because it feared that if they went back to their old outfit, they would be too familiar with their enlisted friends. Sobel put Welsh in Winters’s platoon. They immediately became the closest of friends. The relationship was based on mutual respect brought about by an identical view of leadership. “Officers go first,” as Welsh put it.
· · ·
At the end of May, the men of Easy packed up their barracks bags and joined the other companies of the 506th for a stop-and-go train ride to Sturgis, Kentucky. At the depot Red Cross girls had coffee and doughnuts for them, the last bit of comfort they would know for a month. They marched out into the countryside and pitched pup tents, dug straggle trenches for latrines, and ate the Army’s favorite meal for troops in the field, creamed chipped beef on toast, universally known as SOS, or Shit on a Shingle.
This was not combat, but it was as close as the Army could make it. The maneuvers held in Kentucky, Tennessee, and Indiana from June 5 to July 15, 1943, combined paratroopers and gliderborne troops in the largest airborne exercise to date.
On June 10, the 506th PIR officially joined the 101st Airborne Division, thus making that date the greatest day the 101st ever had. Adding the 506th noticeably raised the morale of the 101st, at least according to the men of E Company.
The maneuvers, pitting the Red Army against the Blue Army, ranged over a wide area of backwoods hills and mountains. Easy made three jumps. Christenson remembered one of them vividly. It was hot, stifling inside the C-47, and the heated air rising in currents from the hills cause the plane to bob and weave. Cpl. Denver “Bull” Randleman, at the back of the stick and thus farthest from the open door, began vomiting into his helmet. The man in front of him took one look and lost his lunch. The process worked right up the line. Not everyone managed to vomit into his helmet; the floor was awash in vomit, the plane stank. Christenson, at the front, was hanging on, but barely. “My stomach was on the verge of rebellion.… ‘Why don’t they turn on the green light? There it is!’ From behind, shouts of ‘Go!’ ‘Go! Goddamn it, Go!’ Out I went into the clean fresh air. I felt as if someone had passed a magic wand over my head and said, ‘Christenson, you feel great.’ And I did.”
The maneuvers featured extended night marches, wading through streams, climbing the far bank, making 3 feet only to slide back 2, stumbling over rocks, stumps, and roots, cutting a swath through matted underbrush and occasionally enjoying fried chicken prepared by Tennessee hill people. The men were tired, filthy, itching all over.
In late July, the maneuvers completed, the 2d Battalion of the 506th received a commendation from Maj. Gen. William C. Lee, commander of the 101st, for “splendid aggressive action, sound tactical doctrine, and obviously well trained individuals.” General Lee expressed his confi-dence that “future tests will reveal further indications of excellent training and leadership.”
Easy moved from Sturgis to Camp Beckinridge, Kentucky, where there were barracks, hot showers, and other luxuries. But the camp was overflowing, and once again it was the little pup tents for sleeping quarters, the ground for a mattress. It did not last long, as most of the men got ten-day furloughs, and shortly after they reported back, the entire division took trains to Fort Bragg, North Carolina.
It was immediately obvious that Bragg was a staging area, as the division prepared to ship overseas. The food was better; there were beds in barracks with hot showers and other improvements. But the real giveaway was a total reoutfitting. The men got new clothes, new weapons, new gear. They spent their days on the firing range, sighting in the rifles and machine-guns.
Where were they going, east or west, the European, Mediterranean, or the Pacific theater? No one knew, rumors flew from platoon to platoon, bets were made.
On weekends, the men went into Fayetteville to “prime the Pump,” at the Town Pump, one of the local bars. Brawls were frequent. Most were started by the paratroopers, who would pitch into the regular soldiers stationed at Bragg. They also goaded the glider troops who were part of the 101st.
The glider troops were regular soldiers assigned to the glider regiment. Although they were airborne, they were not volunteers and were treated by the Army as second-class men. They did not receive the $50 per month bonus, they had no special badges, they did not wear boots and bloused trousers. Some of them made up posters showing photographs of crashed and burned gliders, with a caption that read: “Join the glider troops! No flight pay. No jump pay. But never a dull moment!”
A few members of Easy went down to the airfield at Bragg to take a ride on a glider. The experience of landing in one of those plywood crates convinced them jumping with a chute was a better way to land. When General Lee made a glider flight, the landing fractured several of his ribs. “Next time I’ll take a parachute,” he remarked. “We told you so!” the glider troops shouted. (In July 1944, the glidermen finally got the hazardous duty bonus of $50 per month and a special insignia.)
· · ·
In mid-August, the division assembled in regimental formation. A band played “Over There” and the Red Cross girls cried as the men marched to the twenty trains waiting to take them off to war. Once aboard and somewhat settled down, the betting began over which way the trains would head, north toward New York and then Europe or the Mediterranean, or west toward California and then the Pacific.
The trains headed north, toward Camp Shanks, 30 miles up the Hudson River from New York City. Promises were made about passes into the city, promises that were not kept. Instead it was more inspections, followed by inoculations. “Shot followed shot,” Christenson remembered, “until our arms hung from our bodies like limp ropes.” Officers and noncoms got to know the
Preparation for Overseas Movement
manual by heart.
Sobel wrote up a form letter to send to the mothers of his troopers. “Dear Madam,” it began. “Soon your son, Pfc. Paul C. Rogers [each name was typed in] will drop from the sky to engage and defeat the enemy. He will have the best of weapons, and equipment, and have had months of hard, and strenuous training to prepare him for success on the battlefield.
“Your frequent letters of love, and encouragement will arm him with a fighting heart. With that, he cannot fail, but will win glory for himself, make you proud of him, and his country ever grateful for his service in its hour of need.” He signed each letter with a flourish, “Herbert M. Sobel, Capt., Commanding.”
· · ·
The enlisted men got hold of some whiskey. They were accustomed to beer, so the whiskey hit them hard. Christenson got so drunk he was “making out with the toilet,” a condition common to young men who have just been introduced to whiskey. Corporal Randleman found him and gently carried him to bed. The next morning, the air filled with the moans and groans of the hungover men, the company marched down to the docks. A ferry carried the men to a pier, where hot coffee and doughnuts from the Red Cross girls helped revive the near-dead.
There was a great deal of cursing, partly because the men had hoped to march through New York City on their way to war and did not, also because they were not allowed to wear their jump boots. The reason: enemy spies might see them and would know that an airborne division was shipping out. They had to take the patch of the 101st, the Screaming Eagle, off their shoulders.
Winters remembered only one case of Gangplank Fever. A medical officer was “just smart enough to know what to take to be assigned to sick call and miss the voyage.” All the others lined up in single file to walk up the gangplank, lugging their barracks bags and weapons. As they stepped onto the liner converted into a troop transport and called out their names, a checker marked them present. It took almost a full day to get the 5,000 men aboard a transport built to carry 1,000 passengers. Finally tugs towed the ship from her berth, and she started steaming out to sea. The men of Easy Company lined the rails to see the Statue of Liberty slip astern. For nearly every one of them, it was his first trip outside the United States. A certain homesickness set in, coupled with a realization, as the regimental scrapbook
Currahee
put it, of “how wonderful the last year had been.”