T
HE
Samaria
was an old India mail liner and passenger ship converted to a troop transport. Originally built for 1,000 passengers, she carried 5,000 men from the 506th. The overcrowding created really dreadful conditions. Fresh water was severely rationed; the men could drink only at stipulated fifteen-minute intervals for a grand total of an hour and a half a day. The showers ran salt water, cold. The men had to wear their life jackets at all times, and their cartridge belts with canteens attached, which meant they were constantly bumping into one another. They slept in their clothes. One bunk was assigned to two men, which meant they alternated, sleeping every other night on the deck or in a hallway or wherever space to lie down could be found. The stench was simply awful.
There were two meals a day. Christenson described his first breakfast: “I didn’t think we would ever stop going down stairs to the mess hall on the lowest deck, stairs that were slippery with grease and when we finally reached the bottom, the stench was almost overpowering. They fed us from large pots, containing boiled fish and tomatoes. The cooks wore stained white clothing, stains on stains showing they hadn’t changed for days.” The men ate the slop because they were hungry; to Webster, the mess hall had “the air of a floating madhouse.”
At least the meals were a break from the routine, which consisted of walking the decks, leaning on the rail watching the convoy, or gambling. The gambling was continuous: poker, blackjack, and craps. Large amounts of money changed hands. Carson won $125 one night, lost it all the next day. Men tried to read, but they had precious few books. Captain Sobel tried to lead the men in calisthenics, but the space was insufficient and it became another Sobel joke.
On September 15, the
Samaria
docked in Liverpool. The next day a train took the men south. Trucks picked them up at the station at Ogbourne St. George and carried them on to their new home. They marched the last mile and a half, after dark, with only flashlights to show the way; the wartime blackout impressed upon the men that they were in a combat zone. They got to their barracks, which were Nissen huts heated by twin pot-bellied stoves, were given mattress covers and shown the straw they could stuff into them, along with heavy wool blankets that itched, and went to bed.
Webster wrote that when he woke the next morning, “I thought I’d passed out on a Hollywood movie set. All around the area were fairy-book cottages with thatched roofs and rose vines on their sides. Vast horses shaking long manes stomped down narrow winding cobblestone lanes. A soft village green set off a weathered old grey eleventh century Norman church whose clock chimed the hours just like Big Ben, and five ancient public houses, their signboards swinging in the breeze, bade us welcome to the land of mild and bitter beer.” They were in Aldbourne, in Wiltshire, near Hungerford, not far from Swindon, 80 miles due west of London. It would be home for Company E for almost nine months, by far the longest period it stayed in one place.
Aldbourne was vastly different from Toccoa, Benning, or Bragg. There the men of Easy had been in self-contained, isolated posts, completely military. In Aldbourne, they were in the midst of a small English village, where the people were conservative, set in their ways, apprehensive about all these young Yanks in their midst. The danger of friction was great, but the Army put together an excellent orientation program that worked well. Beginning that first morning and continuing most of the week, the men were briefed in detail on English customs, manners, habits. Well-disciplined as they were, the men quickly caught on to the basic idea that they should save their hell-raising for Swindon, Birmingham, or London; in Aldbourne, they were to drink their beer quietly in the pubs, in the British manner.
They also learned to eat what the British were eating: powdered milk, powdered eggs, dehydrated apricots, dehydrated potatoes, horse meat, Brussels sprouts, turnips, and cabbage. The PX goods were rationed: seven packs of cigarettes per week, plus three candy bars, one pack of gum, one cake of soap, one box of matches, one package of razor blades.
Sobel didn’t change. At the end of the first week, the men got passes to go to Swindon for a Saturday night dance. Sobel put out a regulation: no man would take his blouse off while dancing. Pvt. Thomas Burgess, a farm boy from central Illinois, got to sweating while dancing in a wool shirt with a wool blouse over it, so he took off the blouse.
Monday morning, Sobel called Burgess into his office. “Burgess, I understand you were in town Saturday night with your blouse off at a dance.”
“That’s right, Captain Sobel,” Burgess replied, “but I checked Army regulations and it’s very plainly written that you can take your blouse off if you’ve got a wool shirt on and you are moving about or dancing or whatever.”
Sobel looked him up and down. “I’ll tell you what I’m going to do, Burgess. You’re gonna wear your blouse over your fatigues all week, you’re gonna sleep with it on every night.”
Burgess wore his blouse during the day, but he figured Sobel would not be checking on him at night, so he hung it on the edge of the bed. The following Saturday he went to Sobel’s office to get a pass to go to the dance. Sobel looked him over. “Burgess,” he said, “that blouse don’t look to me like you slept in it all night.” No pass.
· · ·
They were in England to prepare for the invasion of Europe, not to dance, and the training schedule was intense. Malarkey thought he was back in Toccoa. Six days a week, eight to ten hours a day, they were in the field. They made 15-, 18- 21-, and 25-mile hikes, went on night operations, spent an hour daily in close combat exercises, did some street fighting, and got training in map reading, first aid, chemical warfare, and the use and characteristics of German weapons. They made a 25-mile hike with full field equipment in twenty-four hours, then a few days later a 25-mile hike with combat pack in twelve hours. There were specialized courses on booby traps, removal of mines, communications, and the like.
Once a week or so they went out on a two- or three-day exercise. The problems were designed not only to give them a working knowledge of the mechanics of combat but to teach the most basic thing an infantryman has to know: how to love the ground, how to use it to advantage, how the terrain dictates tactics, above all how to live on it and in it for days at a time without impairment of physical efficiency. Their officers stressed the importance of such things, that it would make the difference between life and death, that the men must do it instinctively right the first time, as there would not be a second.
So the men of Easy got to know the English countryside. They attacked towns, hills, and woods. They dug countless foxholes, and slept in them, learning how to do it despite rain and cold and hunger.
In early December, back in the field again, the company dug in around a high, barren, windswept hill. The platoon leaders told them to dig their foxholes deep, difficult in the rocky soil. Soon an armored combat team of Sherman tanks attacked. “They roared up the hill at us like primeval monsters,” Webster wrote in his diary, “stopped, turned, and passed broadside. One charged at me. My hole wasn’t deep enough for a single tread to pass safely over me, so I yelled frantically, ‘Straddle me! Straddle me,’ which he did.” Carson’s entry read: “It was the first time a tank ran over me in a foxhole, scary.”
There was a lot of night work, Gordon recalled. “We would cut across country and crawl over fences and through gaps and go through woods and wade creeks.” In the process, the members of the squads and platoons, already familiar with each other, grew intimate. “I could see a silhouette at night,” Gordon said, “and tell you who it was. I could tell you by the way he wore his hat, how the helmet sat on his head, how he slung his rifle.” Most of what they learned in the training proved to be valuable in combat, but it was that intimacy, that total trust, that comradeship that developed on those long, cold, wet English nights that proved to be invaluable.
They were jumping on a regular basis, in full gear, learning how to use their risers to guide themselves to open, plowed fields rather than come down on a hedgerow, road, telephone pole, stone wall, or woods. In the C-47s in the cold, damp English air, their feet were numb by the time the green light went on, so that when they hit the ground the feet stung and burned from the shock. A major purpose of the jumps was to learn to assemble quickly after landing, not so easy to do for the 2d pla- toon of Easy on the first jump, as the platoon came down twenty-five miles from the drop zone (DZ).
· · ·
There was tension. Members of the 82d Airborne, stationed nearby, would tell the troopers from the 101st what combat in North Africa, Sicily, and Italy had been like. The officers especially felt the pressure of combat coming on, none more so than Sobel. “It showed up in his disposition,” Winters said. “He was becoming more sour and sadistic. It was reaching the point that it was unbearable.”
Sgt. Earl Hale recalled that “There was a lottery going on about whoever gets Sobel.” Sobel had picked up an Air Force sheepskin jacket, of which he was proud and which he wore in the field, making him highly conspicuous. Tipper remembered that when the company was going through a combat range with live ammunition fired at pop-up targets, “Sobel experienced some near misses. More than one shot was aimed from the rear and side to crack by close to Sobel’s head. He’d flop down, kind of bounce around and shout something, and jump up again. There was much laughing and gesturing from the men. I can’t believe that Sobel thought what was happening was accidental, but maybe he did. Anyway, he kept jumping up and down and running around as if everything were normal.”
The men continued to play tricks on Sobel. Pvt. George Luz could imitate voices. One night E Company was leading the battalion on a cross-country march. The barbed-wire fences kept slowing the progress. Sobel was in front.
“Captain Sobel,” a voice called out, “what’s the holdup?”
“The barbed wire,” Sobel replied, thinking he was addressing Maj. Oliver Horton, the battalion executive officer.
“Cut those fences,” Luz called out, continuing to imitate Horton’s voice. “Yes, sir!” Sobel replied, and he ordered wire cutters to the front.
The next morning a contingent of Wiltshire farmers confronted Colonel Strayer. They complained mightily about the cut fences. Their cows were wandering all over the landscape. Strayer called in Sobel. “Why did you cut those fences?”
“I was ordered to cut them, sir!”
“By whom?”
“Major Horton.”
“Can’t be. Horton’s on leave in London.” Sobel caught hell, but he was never able to learn who had fooled him and was therefore unable to retaliate.
It was his jumping around, his “Hi-ho, Silver!” nonsense, his bull-in-the-china-shop approach to tactical problems, that bothered the officers, N.C.O.s, and enlisted men of the company more than his chickenshit. Dissatisfaction grew daily, especially with the N.C.O.s. Sgts. Myron “Mike” Ranney, a twenty-one-year-old from North Dakota, of 1st platoon, and “Salty” Harris of 3d platoon, led the mumble-mumble of the potential disaster of Sobel leading the company into combat. The N.C.O.s were fully aware that they were confronted by a delicate and extremely dangerous situation. To act would open them to charges of insubordination or mutiny in time of war; to fail to act could get the whole company killed.
Ranney, Harris, and the other N.C.O.s hoped that the platoon leaders would bring the problem to Colonel Sink, or that Sink would become aware of the situation on his own and that Sink would then quietly remove Sobel. But that seemed naive. How could young officers whose responsibility was to back up their C.O. go to the colonel to complain about the C.O.? And what would they complain about? Company E continued to lead the way in the regiment, in the field, in barracks, in athletic contests. How could the N.C.O.s expect Colonel Sink to do other than support his company commander in the face of dissension and pressure from a group of sergeants and corporals? These guys were getting ready to go into combat against the most-feared army in the world, not to play a game or have a debate.
So the mumble-mumble continued, and Sobel and 1st Sergeant Evans remained isolated, but still very much in command.
· · ·
Weekend passes and the excellent British rail service gave the men a break from the tension. England in the late fall and early winter of 1943 was a wonderland for the boys from the States. Most of the British boys their age were off in Italy or in training camps far from their homes, so there were lonely, bored, unattached young women everywhere. The American soldiers were well-paid, much better than the British, and the paratroopers had that extra $50 per month. Beer was cheap and plentiful, once out of Aldbourne all restraints were removed, they were getting ready to kill or be killed, they were for the most part twenty or twenty-one years old.
Webster described the result in an October 23 diary entry: “Although I do not enjoy the army, most of the men in this outfit find it a vacation. Boys who had been working steadily at home enter the army and are relieved of all responsibilities. It is unanimously agreed that they never pitched such glorious drunks back home.”