Easy Company Soldier (11 page)

Bomba the Jungle Boy in a Strange Land.

I found my squad leader, Sergeant Guarnere, the guy whose brother had just been killed in Italy, in a field. I also found one of our assistant rifle-squad leaders, Joe Toye. But, initially, nobody else. Toye had jumped a leg bag, and when his chute opened, the rope that secured the bag released too soon. It was wound around his arm and forearm, then cinched down to his wrist, peeling off a thin layer of skin almost down to his hand.

“Joe, we gotta get that patched up,” I said.

“Hell, Malark, I'm fine,” he said. That was Joe Toye for you.

Paratroopers, before anything else, are riflemen. So, with our semiautomatic M1 Garands in hand, we moved toward what we thought was the coast. With so few guys to help, I chose to take only the mortar tube and leave the base plate and bipod.

Later, we'd learn that we'd been dropped several miles west of our drop zone, which might have been a blessing in disguise because our target area, we later found, was crawling with krauts. We had landed about three-quarters of a mile east of Ste.-Mère-Église, about five miles inland from Utah Beach.

We walked across the farm road I'd seen from the air and looked through a hedgerow. I could see a group of people standing in an orchard, about a hundred feet away. I pulled out my cricket to start clicking. Blasted thing wouldn't work. We were fairly certain they were our guys, so finally I just yelled at them and they responded that they were American paratroopers. Guys from the 101st, though 502nd Regiment, not 506th. We joined them; they had an officer who had taken charge.

We started down a road toward the beach, looking for a road that paralleled the coast line so we could get to Causeways One and Two. Suddenly, we heard the sound of hooves and a cart behind us. We dove into the hedgerow. Out of the darkness came three horse-drawn carts and a handful of German soldiers, apparently hauling ammo toward the beach. We jumped them, rifles aimed at their faces. The horses got jumpy. Our guys were shouting; their guys were shouting. We took fifteen German prisoners. We marched them into a group, rifles at their backs.

One of our guys spoke German fairly well, and we informed them that if we got fired upon, they were to remain standing in the road while the rest of us took cover. We hadn't gone more than a quarter mile when exactly that happened. A German machine gun started firing. We hit the ditches. The German soldiers all stood in the road, as told. Except for one. He dove in the ditch. Guarnere promptly shot him in the back. We threw him on the cart and he died later than morning. From then on, we had no problem with prisoners standing up as we took cover.

An hour before our boys in the air started the bombardment of the coastline, we reached the road that paralleled the beach, about a mile inland. We knew we weren't supposed to penetrate beyond that point until after the naval and air force bombing had ceased so we held up. Fields. Orchards. Farms. The smell of wet grass and gunpowder. That's what I remember as it started to get light.

We could hear big guns shelling the beach from the sea, bombs bursting after having been dropped. We knew our guys were coming ashore. Occasionally, you'd hear the pop of a rifle, the chatter of a machine gun. We ran into a bunch more paratroopers who were halfway assembled and told
them that a portion of the 2nd Battalion was about a half mile east of us. Guarnere, Toye, and I left the group and headed up a road where our battalion and part of our company was supposed to be. We hadn't gone more than a couple hundred yards when I saw it for the first time: death. A sickening sight. The dead bodies of a bunch of American paratroopers scattered about, along with even more Germans dead on the road. It was strange because it looked as if both had been herded up and shot execution-style. The krauts had already been looted; I wanted a Luger, if for no other reason than to prove I'd gotten some revenge from the country that had killed my two uncles. But even if someone else hadn't beat me to the punch, I don't know if I'd have gone looking. I was too sickened by the scene.

We walked on, eventually reaching our battalion, then headed up the road. A bunch of German prisoners, about twenty of them, were clumped to my right, just off the road. All standing up quite tall, as if out of respect.

“Where the hell are you guys from, Brooklyn?” asked some wise guy in our company.

“No, Portland, Oregon,” said a German master sergeant, just off my shoulder.
What?
I couldn't believe it—that the guy not only spoke perfect English, but said he was from Portland (not Eugene, as the HBO miniseries
Band of Brothers
showed him saying, for reasons beyond me).

“No kidding, Portland?” I said eagerly. “I'm from Astoria.”

The company walked on. I hung back, amazed at this coincidence.

“I worked in Portland until 1938,” he said, “and came home when Hitler called all loyal Germans to return to the fatherland.”

“So where'd you work in Portland?” I asked.

“Schmitz Steel Company.”

“You gotta be kidding,” I said. “The owners of that company were friends of my family. And I worked for Monarch Forge and Machine Works right across the street.”

By now, a few of my fellow soldiers passing by were giving me the eye.

“Well now, what do you think about that decision now to return to your homeland?” I asked, scanning his POW pals around him.

“I think I made a big mistake,” he said.

“Malark, let's go,” yelled Guarnere, peeved that I was fraternizing with the enemy.

I nodded at the soldier. “You take care,” I said, and walked on. I'd only been at war a few hours, and already I was learning stuff I hadn't been taught in training. Namely, that the guy trying to kill you—and that you're trying to kill—could be somebody who once worked in an American defense plant, across the street from where you later worked.

Strange thing, war.

Our column—about 160 men—moved on to a place called Le Grand Chemin. E Company was still scattered from here to hell's half acre after the drop. Among the missing was our commanding officer, Thomas Meehan, whose plane, we later learned, had gone down. We had pulled together only twelve men, with two officers, two light machine guns, one bazooka, and my 60 mm mortar. The good news? One of those twelve men was Lieutenant Dick Winters, a guy we'd follow anywhere. We hadn't been there long when we had that very chance.

Enemy machine-gun fire broke out up front. Word got
back to Winters through a D Company soldier, Lt. John Kelly, that a battery of 105 mm guns was hammering hell on our boys on Utah Beach, just beyond Causeways One and Two. He huddled with other officers, then came back to us. Col. Bob Strayer wanted E Company, or what we'd gathered of it, to attack the position. Some were skeptical; this Kelly was a boxer whose face was all beat up. Some wondered if he'd taken one too many blows, not the kind of guy you want telling you to go on a do-or-die mission to capture guns that were sure to be well protected by soldiers who'd been preparing for months.

The well-camouflaged German guns—four of them, it turned out—were about two hundred yards up ahead, positioned opposite a large French farmhouse that, we'd later learn, was known as Brecourt Manor, about five miles inland. The cannons were hammering our guys on Utah Beach. We get those guns, maybe the tide changes; if we don't, who knows what happens?

The farm wasn't a nice rectangular block; instead, it had half a dozen angles to it, flanked by hedgerows, thick earthen walls clustered with trees and grass. The angles were to our advantage because they gave us more options and the Germans more concerns. The German advantage? A well-thought-out trench system where we had no idea how many soldiers might be waiting, rifles ready. Later, we would learn a truth that I'm glad we didn't know at the time: Fifty to sixty men were protecting those guns. We were taking about a dozen guys, meaning the enemy had a five-to-one advantage.

But Winters was a thinker; he'd be given a situation and he could, in about the time it took the rest of us to do an equipment check, figure out a plan of attack. In this case, he
explained that he would take half a dozen guys, and Buck Compton would take another half dozen, including me.

“Just weapons and ammo,” he said. “Leave everything else here.” Along with Compton and Guarnere, I was to crawl through the open field and get as close to the first gun in the battery as possible and throw grenades into the trench. Others would flank right and put fire on the enemy position. Winters would lead the charge straight down the hedge. Ranney and John Plesha, a guy from Seattle, were to mount a machine gun and cover the open area. Some A Company soldiers joined us, too.

As we closed in on the guns, staying hidden by hedgerows, the cannons boomed, each round taking out our boys on the beach. I felt my gut tighten. Finally, it was time: Our machine guns opened fire on the right. That drew the Germans' attention. The rest of us placed some withering fire into the position, with M1s, carbines, and tommy guns.

When the firing ceased, Lieutenant Winters told me to lead the way across the open field. I took a deep breath and, carbine in front of me, started snaking my way forward on knees and elbows, rifle poised, staying low in the foot-high Normandy grass.

“Wait, Malark, get back, get back here!” He suddenly noticed I was out of ammo and all I had in my hands were grenades. He probably saved my life, which wouldn't be the last time. Instead, he sent Compton while I got more ammo. Compton snaked through the grass and dropped into the trench; a Jerry was no more than ten feet from him. The Jerry began running away and Buck turned his machine gun on him but it jammed. Buck waved us across.

Guarnere and I took off. Behind us, to our left, our guys were giving covering fire.
Hail Mary, mother of God.
The
adrenaline pumped through me. I jumped into the trench about the time Popeye Wynn took a shot in the butt. I could see two Germans down the trench, firing a machine gun. I pulled a grenade out and threw it, but meanwhile, someone—Compton, Winters, maybe both—had opened fire and the soldiers went down.

A German lobbed a grenade into the trench, where Toye was lying facedown. Winters yelled, “Joe, look out!” Toye flipped over and scrambled to run, his rifle taking the brunt of the exploding potato masher.

Then I eyed the first big gun, scrambled out of the trench, and headed toward it, spraying the area in front with automatic-weapons fire. I saw a German making a run for it. I slid under the gun, next to a dead soldier. I tucked up under the gun, firing and being fired on.

That's when I spotted a dead German soldier out in the open. I could see he had a case on his hip, which I figured was probably holding a nice German Luger. Briefly, the thought of my two uncles flashed in my mind. I needed a souvenir in their honor. Now seemed to be my chance. It made no sense, of course, running across a field in the middle of a battle, but, then, neither did dying in the Argonne Forest at nineteen or going off to war as a football hero and returning to live your life out in vets' hospitals.

I bolted for the dead German soldier. “Malarkey, you idiot!” I heard Winters yell from the trench. “Get back here.”

I couldn't turn around now. I was already nearing the German lying in the field. I slid in next to him, confirmed he was dead, and reached for what I thought was a Luger. Instead, it was some gun-sighting device.
Damn!

Across the main hedgerow, toward the farmhouse, German soldiers had four or five machine guns in place. Initially,
they must have thought I was a medic—off-limits to shoot—because they didn't fire at me. At first. But my “medic” designation apparently expired because as I turned to get back to the cover of that 105 gun, those machine guns opened fire like a late-spring hailstorm back in Oregon, kicking up dirt all around my fast-moving feet. A German machine gun sounds terrifying. Ours went
put-put-put.
Theirs sounded like the tearing of a piece of paper.
Riiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiip.

Somehow I made it back and I dove under that same gun again, which was dug into the earth and gave me about a foot or two of in-ground protection. My helmet fell off. I lay there, faceup, as bullets sprinkled the ground around me. My heart pounded, my chest pumped. The fragments of the bullets were dropping on my face, burning me. Finally, I turned over to prevent that from happening.

Guarnere, my squad leader, got alongside the hedgerow that protected him from the Germans. He was about five feet from me. “Malark, we'll time their bursts,” he said. So I started timing their bursts. “OK, next burst ends, get your ass over here.” We waited.

“Now!” he yelled. I ran for cover. And wasn't hit.

“Way to go, ya stupid mick,” said Guarnere.

I had no retort. He and Winters were right. It had been a stupid move that could have—should have—gotten me killed.

I relaxed for a split second. German weapons were far better than ours; a German machine gun could fire at a far faster rate than ours, but the high rate of fire made it tough to control the gun. That's what might have saved my life at Brecourt while trying to grab a Luger that wasn't even there.