The G.I. slumped into a chair, stunned. Pvt. Hack Hansen from Grant’s 2d platoon, and close buddy, came running in. He whipped out his pistol. “You son of a bitch,” he cursed. “I’ve killed better men than you.” He put the pistol right in the man’s face. Four men grabbed Hansen from behind and tried to pull him away, shouting that death was too good for such a coward, but he pulled the trigger. The pistol misfired.
“You ought to have seen the look of that guy,” Gordon Carson remarked.
They beat him unconscious, then carried him to the regimental guardhouse and turned him over to the provost sergeant. When he revived, the provost sergeant beat him until the blood ran.
Sink came to company HQ. He strode in and asked Sergeant Carson, “Where’s Speirs?”
“Up on the second floor, sir.”
Sink went up and got the facts from Speirs. It took the better part of an hour. Sink left, and Speirs came down.
“How’d it go?” Carson asked.
“Pretty rough.”
“Well, what did he say?”
“He said I should have shot the son of a bitch.”
That he did not is remarkable. One explanation I got from a number of men was that Speirs must have had some doubt that the arrested man was the right man. When I asked Speirs about this, he replied, “As to the Sergeant Grant shooting you have it right. There must have been doubt in my mind, because summary action never troubled me.”
But I wonder if there was not another factor at work. Speirs was not the only man who had a chance to shoot the coward. Grant had an opportunity in the initial encounter. The man who found the I Company drunk could have shot him on the spot, and nearly every man in the company interviewed by me said he wished it had been done. But many of them were at company HQ when he was brought in, wearing pistols, but only one of them actually tried to kill the man, and he was being held back by four others.
Almost every man in that room had killed. Their blood was up. Their anger was deep and cold. But what stands out in the incident is not the pistol whipping and beatings, but the restraint.
They had had enough of killing.
· · ·
Shortly after the incident, Captain Speirs wrote a long letter to Sgt. Forrest Guth, who was in hospital in England and who had written Speirs expressing a fear that he would be transferred to another division. Speirs liked Guth, thought he was a good soldier, and was appreciative of his ability to keep all his weapons in prime condition. He especially appreciated the way Guth could take a file and work on the tripper housing of an M-1 and make it fully automatic. (Winters got one of those Guth specials. He kept it and, when he set off for the Korean War, took it with him. Unfortunately, Guth cannot remember today how he did it.)
In his reply, Speirs expressed another side of himself. It was a long chatty letter about the doings of E Company since Guth went to the hospital, full of the kind of information Guth most wanted to hear: “Luz fell off a motorcycle and hurt his arm — not seriously, tho. Sgt. Talbert didn’t like being 1st Sergeant so I gave him the 2nd Platoon and Sgt. Lynch (2nd Plat.) is 1st Sgt. now. Sgt. Alley got drunk again and we had to bust him. Lt. Lipton is on furlough in Scotland and is very happy. I’m sweating out a furlough to England to see my wife and baby. Sgt. Powers was on his way home and the truck overturned and he fractured his skull and he is hospitalized. Sgt. Strohl (3nd Plat.) is on his way home to the States. Chuck Grant got in the way of a bullet from a drunk American and his head is not too good — he is in a German hospital near here and is getting better. Sgt. Malarkey just came back from a long stretch in the hospital. Sgt. Rhinehard just came from the Riviera. McGrath won’t take a furlough — he is saving his money.”
Speirs gave Guth the details on the Bronze Star he was entitled to for participation in Normandy, Holland, and Belgium, and promised to inform him as soon as it came through. He added a postscript: “Clark is Armorer Artificer just now — sent Burlingame back to his platoon — he couldn’t keep your Kraut generator going! We have regular electricity and hot water here in Austria.
“By the way, you can wear your ‘Presidential Unit Citation’ ribbon and an Oak Leaf Cluster on it no matter what outfit you are in — you earned it with the 101 A/B.”
· · ·
The company was breaking up. General Taylor ordered all high-point men who had not yet been rotated home to be transferred to the 501st, stationed in Berchtesgaden. The 501st was being inactivated and was to serve as a vehicle to transport all high-point men from the division back to the United States for discharge. Others from the old company were in hospital or already discharged. Recruits who had joined up in Mourmelon or Haguenau were now regarded as veterans.
General Taylor made a trip to the States; when he returned toward the end of June, he announced that the 101st was to be redeployed to the Pacific, after a winter furlough in the States. Meanwhile the War Department insisted that the division undergo a full training regime, a critical process if it was to go into combat again, as more than three-quarters of the division was made up of recruits.
So close-order drill and calisthenics became the order of the day again, along with nomenclature of the M-1, nomenclature and functioning of the BAR, and nomenclature and functioning of the carbine. A road march. Arm and hand signals. Squad tactics. Barracks inspection. Mess kit inspection. Military courtesy and discipline. First aid and sanitation. Clothing check. Map reading. Dry run with the rifle. One solid week of triangulation. Firing on the range. “Thus it went,” Webster wrote, “and I with it, in mounting disgust.”
Lieutenant Peacock returned, more chickenshit than ever. “We suffered his excesses of training to such a degree,” Webster wrote, “that the men who had known him in Holland and Bastogne hated even to look at him. I was so mad and exasperated that, if I had possessed fewer than 85 points, I would have volunteered to go straight to Japan and fight, rather than put up with another day’s basic under Peacock.”
· · ·
By the middle of July every veteran of Normandy was gone, except the long-suffering Webster, who still could not get the adjutant to accept his point total. Colonel Sink had given the high-point men a farewell speech: “It is with mingled feelings that your regimental commander observes the departure of you fine officers and men. He is happy for each of you. You have worked and fought and won the right to return to your homes and to your friends.
“I am sorry to see you go because you are friends and comrades-at-arms.
“Most of you have caught hell at one time or another from me. I hope you considered it just hell and fair. It was never intended to be otherwise.
“I told you people to get those Presidential Citations and you did it. It will forever be to your credit and honor.
“Then God speed you on your way: May the same Fellow who led you by the hand in Normandy, Holland, Bastogne, and Germany look kindly upon you and guard you until the last great jump!”
At the end of July, the division was transferred by 40-and-8s to France. E Company went into barracks in Joigny, a small town south of Paris. Winters, Speirs, Foley and others took furloughs in England. On August 6 the atomic bomb was dripped on Hiroshima, laying to rest the fears of another campaign in the Pacific. After that, everything in the airborne was in flux, with low-point men being transferred into the 17th Airborne, others into the 82d. The 101st magazine, the
Screaming Eagle,
complained, “The outfit seems more like a repple-depple than a combat division.”
1
On August 11, Colonel Sink was promoted to assistant division commander. On August 22 General Taylor left the 101st, or what was left of it, to become superintendent at West Point. Shortly thereafter, the 506th packed up and moved out, to join the 82d Airborne in Berlin. It was said that Colonel Sink cried when his boys marched to the Joigny depot for shipment to the 82d. Webster thought it fitting that he do so, as he was “the heart and soul of our regiment.” Writing in 1946, Webster went on: “Our beautiful dark-blue silk regimental flag with Mount Curahee, the bolt of lightning, and the six parachutes embroidered on it is rolled in its case, gathering dust in the National Archives in Washington.”
On November 30, 1945, the 101st was inactivated. Easy Company no longer existed.
· · ·
The company had been born in July 1942 at Toccoa. Its existence essentially came to an end almost exactly three years later in Zell am See, Austria. In those three years the men had seen more, endured more, and contributed more than most men can see, endure, or contribute in a lifetime.
They thought the Army was boring, unfeeling, and chicken, and hated it. They found combat to be ugliness, destruction, and death, and hated it. Anything was better than the blood and carnage, the grime and filth, the impossible demands made on the body — anything, that is, except letting down their buddies.
They also found in combat the closest brotherhood they ever knew. They found selflessness. They found they could love the other guy in their foxhole more than themselves. They found that in war, men who loved life would give their lives for them.
They had had three remarkable men as company commanders, Herbert Sobel, Richard Winters, and Ronald Speirs. Each had made his own impact but Winters, who had been associated with the company from Day 1 to Day 1,095, had made the deepest impression. In the view of those who served in Easy Company, it was Dick Winters’s company.
The noncoms especially felt that way. The ones who served as corporals and sergeants in combat had been privates in Toccoa. They had spent their entire three years in E Company. Officers, except Winters, came and went. Many of the officers continued their association with E Company as members of the battalion or regimental staff, but only Winters and the noncoms were present and accounted for (or in hospital) every day of the company’s existence. They held it together, most of all in those awful shellings in the woods of Bastogne and at that critical moment in the attack on Foy before Speirs replaced Dike. The acknowledged leaders of the noncoms, on paper and in fact, were the 1st sergeants, William Evans, James Diel, Carwood Lipton, and Floyd Talbert.
· · ·
Sergeant Talbert was in the hospital at Fort Benjamin Harrison, Indiana, on September 30, 1945. He wrote a letter to Winters. He was no Webster as a writer, but he wrote from the heart and he spoke for every man who ever served in Easy Company.
He said he wished they could get together to talk, as there were a lot of things he wanted to tell Winters. “The first thing I will try to explain … Dick, you are loved and will never be forgotten by any soldier that ever served under you or I should say with you because that is the way you led. You are to me the greatest soldier I could ever hope to meet.
“A man can get something from war that is impossible to acquire anyplace else. I always seemed to strengthen my self-confidence or something. I don’t know why I’m telling you this. You know all that.
“Well I will cut this off for now. You are the best friend I ever had and I only wish we could have been on a different basis. You were my ideal, and motor in combat. The little Major we both knew summed you up in two words, ‘the most brave and courageous soldier he ever knew.’ And I respected his judgment very much. He was a great soldier too, and I informed him you were the greatest. Well you know why I would follow you into hell. When I was with you I knew everything was absolutely under control.”
· · ·
Winters felt as strongly about the men as they did about him. In 1991 he summed up his company’s history and its meaning: “The 101st Airborne was made up of hundreds of good, solid companies. However, E Co., 506 P.I.R. stand out among all of them through that very special bond that brings men together.
“That extra special, elite, close feeling started under the stress Capt. Sobel created at Camp Toccoa. Under that stress, the only way the men could survive was to bond together. Eventually, the noncoms had to bond together in a mutiny.
“The stress in training was followed by the stress in Normandy of drawing the key combat mission for gaining control of Utah Beach. In combat your reward for a good job done is that you get the next tough mission. E Company kept right on getting the job done through Holland — Bastogne — Germany.
“The result of sharing all that stress throughout training and combat has created a bond between the men of E Company that will last forever.”
1. Rapport and Northwood,
Rendezvous with Destiny,
775.
F
ORTY-EIGHT MEMBERS
of Easy Company had given their lives for their country. More than 100 had been wounded, many of them severely, some twice, a few three times, one four times. Most had suffered stress, often severe. All had given what they regarded as the best years of their lives to the war. They were trained killers, accustomed to carnage and quick, violent reactions. Few of them had any college education before the war; the only skill most of them possessed was that of combat infantryman.
They came out determined to make up for the lost time. They rushed to college, using the G.I. Bill of Rights, universally praised by the veterans as the best piece of legislation the United States Government ever conceived. They got married and had kids as quickly as possible. Then they set out to build a life for themselves.
They were remarkably successful, primarily because of their own determination, ambition, and hard work, partly thanks to what they had taken from their Army experience that was positive. In the Army they had learned self-confidence, self-discipline, and obedience, that they could endure more than they had ever thought possible, that they could work with other people as part of a team. They had volunteered for the paratroopers because they had wanted to be with the best and to be the best that they could be. They had succeeded. They wanted nothing less from civilian life, and there too they succeeded.
They had a character like a rock, these members of the generation born between 1910 and 1928. They were the children of the Depression, fighters in the greatest war in history, builders of and participants in the postwar boom. They accepted a hand-up in the G.I. Bill, but they never took a handout. They made their own way. A few of them became rich, a few became powerful, almost all of them built their houses and did their jobs and raised their families and lived good lives, taking full advantage of the freedom they had helped to preserve.
· · ·
It seems appropriate to start with the severely wounded. Cpl. Walter Gordon had been shot in the back at Bastogne and paralyzed. After six weeks in hospital in England, lying helplessly in his Crutchfield tongs, he began to have some feelings in his extremities. He had been helped by Dr. Stadium, who would stand at the foot of his bed and provoke him: “You’re nothing but a damned goldbrick, Gordon.” Gordon would stiffen, snap back, get angry. Because Stadium would not give up on him, Gordon says, “It never occurred to me that I could be a hopeless cripple.”
When the tongs came off, Stadium got him to walking, or at least shuffling. In the spring of 1945, Gordon was listed as “walking wounded” and sent by hospital ship back to the States, where he slowly recuperated in Lawson General Hospital in Atlanta. He was there when the war in Europe ended. He walked with pain in the back, he sat with pain in the back, he slept with it. Any physical work was far beyond his capabilities; he was obviously of no further use to the Army. By the middle of June, his father was demanding to know when he would be discharged. “I don’t know,” was all Gordon could reply.
On June 16, Gordon had an examination. The young doctor then told him he was being transferred to Fort Benning, listed as fit for limited duty. So far as Gordon could make out, his reason was: “Nerve wounds are slow to heal, and to discharge a veteran with my degree of disability would justify a substantial award of compensation. By retaining me for additional months, my condition would no doubt improve.”
Gordon called his father to give him the news. His father went into a tirade. “He pointed out to me that I had been wounded twice, and was now, in his words, a cripple. He felt that I had done my fair share and the time had come for me to return home.” Then he gave his son an order to pass along a message to the Army doctor.
Gordon did as told, although with some embarrassment. He began by running on about how this was a message from his father and that he disavowed any connection with it.
“Get on with it!” the doctor barked, indicating how busy he was.
“My father says to tell you that if I am sent to any location other than home, he will come fetch me and fly me to Washington, D.C., and, if necessary, strip me to the waist on the floor of the Senate.”
The doc’s face fell. Gordon thought it read, “Oh my God, that’s all I need is a Mississippi Senator on my case. That’s a ticket to the Pacific. Get him out of here.”
Aloud he said, “O.K., immediate discharge with full disability.” He saw to it that Gordon got a new uniform, took him to the dentist to have his teeth filled, and got him paid off.
Gordon went to law school at Cumberland University, Lebanon, Tennessee. With his 100 percent disability bringing in $200 a month, plus his G.I. Bill benefits, “I was a rich student.” A good one, too. He passed the Mississippi Bar even before finishing his law degree, “so I was a licensed attorney still going to school.” After graduation, he worked for several major companies in the oil business in south Louisiana. In 1951 he met Betty Ludeau in Acapulco, Mexico, on a vacation. They married a year later, moved to Lafayette, Louisiana, and began what became a family of five children, four of them girls. “I realized that I did not have sufficient salary to support Betty in the manner in which she required,” Gordon relates, “so I became an independent.”
He went into a high-risk business, buying and selling oil leases, speculating on futures. He was successful at it. The Gordons today have a home in Lafayette and apartments in Pass Christian, Mississippi, New Orleans, and Acapulco. He still has pain, walks with some difficulty, but the Gordons are blessed with wonderful children and grandchildren, they are still in love, they love to tell jokes on themselves. It’s been a good life.
“And so what did the Army mean to you?” I asked at the end of our three days of interviewing.
“The most significant three years of my life,” Gordon replied. “It had the most awesome effect. I developed friendships which to this day are the most significant that I have. I’m most incredibly lucky that I got through it and even more fortunate that I was with this group of outstanding men.”
In December, 1991, Gordon saw a story in the Gulfport
Sun Herald.
It related that Mayor Jan Ritsema of Eindhoven, Holland, had refused to meet General H. Norman Schwarzkopf, because the commander of the UN forces in the Gulf War had “too much blood on his hands.” Ritsema said of Schwarzkopf, “He is the person who devised the most efficient way possible to kill as many people as possible.”
Gordon wrote to Mayor Ritsema: “On September 17, 1944 I participated in the large airborne operation which was conducted to liberate your country. As a member of company E, 506th PIR, I landed near the small town of Son. The following day we moved south and liberated Eindhoven. While carrying out our assignment, we suffered casualties. That is war talk for bleeding. We occupied various defense positions for over two months. Like animals, we lived in holes, barns, and as best we could. The weather was cold and wet. In spite of the adverse conditions, we held the ground we had fought so hard to capture.
“The citizens of Holland at that time did not share your aversion to bloodshed when the blood being shed was that of the German occupiers of your city. How soon we forget. History has proven more than once that Holland could again be conquered if your neighbor, the Germans, are having a dull weekend and the golf links are crowded.
“Please don’t allow your country to be swallowed up by Liechtenstein or the Vatican as I don’t plan to return. As of now, you are on your own.”
· · ·
Sgt. Joe Toye describes his experiences: “After being hit (my fourth Purple Heart) at Bastogne, I went through a series of operations. The main operation being the amputation of my right leg above the knee. Then, later, I had two more operations, these were to remove shrapnel from my upper chest cavity — to remove them the surgeon went in through my back.
“I was married Dec. 15, 1945, while still in the hospital at Atlantic City. I was discharged from the Army Feb. 8, 1946.”
He was given an 80 percent disability. Before the war he had been a molder in a foundry, but with a wooden leg he couldn’t do the work. He found employment in a textile mill in Reading, Pennsylvania, then worked twenty years for Bethlehem Steel as a bit grinder.
He has three sons and a daughter. “I used to take the boys hunting, fishing, but I never carried a gun — I was worried about tripping. This artificial leg, if something stops it, you’re gone, you know. So I never carried a gun. But I took them out deer hunting and fishing. Every year I went camping in Canada with them.”
There have been big improvements in artificial legs since 1946. Toye feels the doctors at the VA hospitals have treated him well and kept him up to date with the latest equipment. He does have one complaint. He wants two legs, one slightly larger where it joins the stump. But because the docs say one is enough, “I don’t dare gain or lose any weight, else the darn thing won’t fit.”
· · ·
Sgt. Bill Guarnere also lost his leg, above the knee, in Bastogne. After discharge in the summer of 1945, he was given an 80 percent disability. He married, had a child, and went to work as a printer, salesman, VA clerk, and carpenter, all with an artificial leg. There were some mix-ups in his records, which cost him money and led to much dispute with the VA. In 1967 he finally got full disability and was able to retire. He threw away his artificial leg, and for the past twenty-four years he has moved on crutches. He moves faster than most younger men with two good legs. He lives in South Philly, where he grew up, with his wife, Fran. They have five children; the oldest son was an Airborne trooper in Vietnam. He is very active in the 101st Association and in getting E Company men together.
· · ·
Sgt. Chuck Grant, shot in the brain by the drunken G.I. in Austria after the war, had his life saved by a German doctor. He recovered, slowly, although he had some difficulty in speaking and was partly paralyzed in his left arm. After his medical discharge with full disability, he lived in San Francisco, where he ran a small cigar store. Over the years he regularly attended E Company reunions and was active in the 101st Association. Mike Ranney nominated him to be the 506th representative on the Board of the 101st Association; he was elected and served with great pride. He died in 1984.
· · ·
Lt. Fred “Moose” Heyliger, shot twice by his own men in Holland, was flown to a hospital in Glasgow, then shipped on the
Queen Elizabeth
to New York. Over the next two-and-a-half years he was moved three more times. He underwent skin and nerve grafts before discharge in February 1947. Taking advantage of the G.I. Bill, he went to the University of Massachusetts, where he graduated in 1950 with a degree in ornamental horticulture. For the next forty years he worked for various landscape companies and on golf courses as a consultant and supplier. He has two sons and a daughter and continues his hobbies, arrowhead hunting, bird watching, and camping.
· · ·
Sgt. Leo Boyle was discharged on June 22, 1945, after nine months in hospitals in Belgium, England, and the States. He was given a 30 percent disability. He got a job as a railroad brakeman, but his legs could not stand up to the strain. Then he worked in the post office, sorting mail, but again his legs gave out. “By that time I was so ill and confused that I checked into the VA hospital. After several days, a team of three medical doctors declared that I was 50 percent disabled and released me with no career guidance.”
Boyle used his G.I. Bill benefits to go to the University of Oregon, where he majored in political science and earned an M.A. degree, with honors. He went into high school teaching and eventually into working with the educationally handicapped. “It was a career that was exceptionally rewarding. There is always a warm and good feeling between the handicapped and their teacher.” When he retired in 1979, he was awarded the Phi Delta Kappa Service Key for Leadership and Research in Education for the Handicapped.
· · ·
Two other members of the company, the last 1st sergeant and the original company commander, were also victims of the war.
Sgt. Floyd Talbert had wounds and scars, which he handled without difficulty, and memories, which overwhelmed him. He became a drifter and a drinker. He made a living of sorts as a fisherman, hunter, trapper, and guide in northern California. He had a series of heart attacks.
Talbert was one of the few members of he company who just dropped out of sight. In 1980 Gordon enlisted the aid of his Congressman and of George Luz’s son Steve, to locate Talbert. Sgt. Mike Ranney joined the search. Eventually they located him in Redding, California, and persuaded him to attend the 1981 company reunion in San Diego.
Ranney passed around his address. Winters and others wrote him. In his three-page handwritten reply to Winters, Talbert reminisced about their experiences. “Do you remember the time you were leading us into Carentan? Seeing you in the middle of that road wanting to move was too much!… Do you recall when we were pulling back in Holland? Lt. Peacock threw his carbine onto the road. He would not move. Honest to God I told him to retrieve the carbine and move or I would shoot him. He did as I directed. I liked him, he was a sincere and by the book officer, but not a soldier. As long as he let me handle the men he and I got along alright.