A Company of Heroes (2 page)

Second, if you’re already a fan, this book adds insight to understanding the overall profile of the company. Read this book, then watch the HBO series again. Your increased knowledge of each man prompts a deeper sense of identification. For instance, watch the scene in Episode 7 (“
The Breaking Point”
) where Joe Toye loses a leg during heavy shelling at Bastogne. This is the same Joe Toye you’ve now come to know as the toughest man in Easy Company. This is the same Joe Toye who, if he had been offered better opportunities before joining the army, undoubtedly could have become a professional athlete. This is the same Joe Toye who, after the war, spent his last years caring for the daily needs of a severely handicapped son. After reading this book, you’ll never watch the series the same way again.

I’ve spoken with the family members who knew the men closely, as well as relied on firsthand accounts from writings, journals, and letters. My hope is that you will benefit from the intrigue and poignancy that comes from reading the stories of each man featured.

Please enjoy.

 

Marcus Brotherton
Bellingham, Washington,
September 2009

July-November 1942:
506th PIR activated at Camp Toccoa, GA. Basic Training. Hike from Toccoa to Atlanta in late November.

 

December 1942:
Parachute training at Fort Benning, GA. Additional training at Benning through February ’43.

 

February-May 1943:
Additional training exercises at Camp Mackall, NC. More training jumps.

 

June-August 1943:
Additional training in Kentucky and Tennessee, then to Fort Bragg, NC.

 

September 1943:
Regiment moves to Camp Shanks, NY, boards SS
Samaria
for England. Arrives in Swindon and moved to Aldbourne.

 

September 1943-May 1944:
Additional training in Aldbourne. In May regiment moves to marshalling area near Exeter, England, then to Upottery Airfield.

 

June 6, 1944:
Jump into France.

 

June 7-8, 1944:
Various battles in Normandy.

 

June 8-16, 1944:
Battle for Carentan.

 

June 29, 1944:
Company is relieved and returns to Aldbourne.

 

September 17, 1944:
Company jumps at Zon, Holland, and advances into Eindhoven, heading for Arnhem. Series of intense battles along “Hell’s Highway” throughout September.

October 3, 1944:
Company is relieved from duty around Eindhoven and transported by truck to the Island, the area between the Waal and the Neder Rhine. Patrols and battles until November when the Company is relieved and sent to Mourmelon, France.

 

December 17, 1944:
Company sent to Bastogne, Belgium, to fight in Bois Jacques woods.

 

January 13-16, 1944:
Fighting around Foy, Noville, and Rachamps.

 

January 19-February 25, 1944:
Company is relieved and moved to Haguenau. Fights along the Moder River.

 

March 1945:
Now back at Mourmelon, the entire 101st Airborne Division receives the Presidential Unit Citation. This is the first time an entire division has been honored in this way.

 

April 1945:
Company heads into Germany. Finds concentration camps. Occupies Berchtesgaden.

 

May 8, 1945:
Victory in Europe day.

 

April 6-10, 1945:
Company moves to Kaprun, Austria. Begins occupation duties.

 

May-November 1945:
High-points men are rotated home.

 

 

 

Band of Brothers
came down on me like an atom bomb. I had never heard of the book, never even heard of it on TV, until a friend of mine, a WWII buff, came over to my house one day. I had all this WWII memorabilia from my dad around the house, which my friend knew about. He asked, “Was your dad in Easy Company in WWII?”

“I don’t know what company he was in,” I said. “All I know is that he was with the 506th PIR, 101st Airborne.”

“So far, so good,” he said. “Was your dad’s name Albert?”

“Yeah.”

“Was he born in Philadelphia?”

“Yeah.”

“Buddy, you better come over to my house and watch this thing on HBO,” he said. “I think it’s about your dad.”

So I went over, and things started to click. There was this character named Albert Blithe, played by the actor Marc Warren. I didn’t recognize the specific stories because my dad had never talked about the war, so that didn’t mean anything to me. Then, in one episode that featured him, I saw his RA [Regular Army] number. That’s when I realized this was about my dad.

There were two mistakes with the series when it came to Albert Blithe—one little, one big. The first issue was not as important to me. It showed that my father had been wounded in the neck. Well, it wasn’t actually the neck. It was his upper right shoulder. Growing up, I had seen the scar hundreds of times. He received a partial wartime disability because of the injury. When he came home from WWII he was on disability payment for one year, then he waived it and went back into the army. A man from Texas got in touch with me who had known my dad, and said that my dad had a permanent profile where he didn’t have to salute anymore because his shoulder was so messed up.

But the second mistake, the bigger one, I knew I had to have it corrected. The series said that Albert Blithe never recovered from his wounds and died in 1948. That simply wasn’t true.

I became obsessed about finding out more and setting the record straight. For five days straight I left messages on Internet sites. I got a lot of e-mails in reply, then a woman in Maryland, Linda Switzer, came to my aid in a big way. She helped me get word out even more, and soon I actually received e-mails from Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg apologizing for the oversight.

It seems that Bill Guarnere and Babe Heffron had sworn up and down that they attended my dad’s funeral in 1948. I have the utmost respect for those guys and I can see how that made sense to them. The last thing they knew about Albert Blithe was that he had been seriously wounded, somewhere near the face, head, or neck area, near Carentan. They never saw him alive again. But it must have been another Albert Blithe’s funeral they went to (there are a few of them out there—for instance, I have a cousin named Albert Blithe), or else they were simply relying on their memories when the book was being researched and had been to so many funerals over the years that they were thinking about somebody else. I have documents (they’re now posted at the 506th Infantry Web site)
¹
that show my dad at Fort Bliss, Texas, in 1948, so he couldn’t have died then.

At first the task of convincing people that Albert Blithe had lived beyond 1948 was a bit of a hard sell. I got some pretty nasty e-mails from people who couldn’t believe that Stephen Ambrose and HBO had actually made a mistake. They felt simply that because my last name was Blithe I was jumping on the Band of Brothers bandwagon and wanted attention for myself. One person, who had done a lot of research into Easy Company and has a pretty well-known name in these circles, basically called me a liar. “Send me your dad’s DD-214s [military records],” he said. I did that. But even then he wasn’t convinced. He had a picture of Albert Blithe’s grave in Philadelphia.

That didn’t matter to me. I knew it wasn’t my father’s grave. I was there when my dad died. My mother was there. We buried him. My dad died December 17, 1967, and is buried at Arlington National Cemetery.
²
I have a picture of the gravestone, which I sent to this man.
³

My dad and Gordy Carson were close friends during the war. His son, Gary Carson, lives in Seattle. Gary showed me a wartime diary his dad had written that said, “I don’t know what I’d do without Al Blithe.” I had a sack of documents and Gary and I went through them. One of the documents is a signed and stamped military affidavit showing that my dad jumped with E Company during WWII, then went on to jump with the 82nd Airborne in the 1950s—so he couldn’t have died in 1948, according to this affidavit. I’ll tell you, Gary Carson is a prince of a gentleman. When we met, we hit it right off. He gave me Bill Guarnere’s phone number, but I didn’t have the courage to phone Mr. Guarnere up and tell him he went to the wrong Al Blithe’s funeral. So I just let it lie. Evidently Mr. Guarnere was convinced in the end because he and Babe Heffron mentioned in their book that although they never saw my dad again, they later heard he ended up back in combat in Korea.
⁴

For some time I did whatever I could to prove that my dad wasn’t dead [in 1948]. For instance, I interviewed with the 506th Infantry’s web-master for about three hours and showed him all the documents I had. In the end, all the people who needed to be convinced were convinced. The error in the book and the miniseries were never corrected, but I guess it’s hard to correct something when it’s been that widely distributed. But the new Blu-ray version of
Band of Brothers
has an interactive guide called “In the Field with the Men of Easy Company,” stating correctly that Albert Blithe died in 1967. So that’s good. In Dick Winters’s memoirs, he sets the record straight as well.
⁵
That was good for me to see. I felt I had done my job.

Albert Blithe was born June 25, 1923, in Philadelphia. His mother worked in the garment district. His father worked for the United Parcel Service as a deliveryman.

Now, it’s hard to say this, and I don’t know how you’re quite going to put this in a book, but my dad was a thug. There’s no other way to say it. He was raised on the rough side of the tracks and was always in trouble, even though he came from a very religious extended family. Most of them on his mother’s side were missionaries. I can’t say any of that faith ever rubbed off on my dad. He always said that their religion was forced on him as a kid. Later, he became an agnostic. He didn’t know one way or another if there was a God. My mother told me that when he was a kid my grandmother used to give him money to put in the offering plate. My dad would skip out on church and gamble the money away in the alley-ways of the city.

Dad graduated from high school and worked at the Westinghouse plant after he graduated. As a young man he got in so much trouble that he finally concluded he had to get out of Philadelphia, away from his old friends and influences, and the only way to do that was to join the Army. The war was going on by then, so he enlisted, and the rest is history. I’ll tell you all I know about his wartime experiences in a minute.

My dad was married twice. His first wife’s name was Flora Mae, from West Virginia. When Dad was wounded and sent back to the states, he was in a veteran’s hospital in Ashland, West Virginia. I assume he and Flora Mae met there. When he went back into the Army he was sent to Fort Bliss, Texas. That’s where my half-sister Barbara was born, in 1948, at Fort Bliss. I know the family went to Germany about that time, then came back. My dad and his first wife divorced around 1951.

My parents—his second marriage—were married in 1957. My mother’s name is Sadie, but she went by Kay. She had two daughters from a previous marriage, Sandra and Pinky. My mom and dad met on a blind date at the USO in Fayetteville, NC, where my dad was stationed with the 82nd Airborne out at Fort Bragg. The date was set up by my oldest half sister, Pinky. I was born in 1959.

Fayetteville is mostly where I grew up. In many ways it was a lot of fun to grow up with my dad. He was a chronic alcoholic, probably due to the war, but he was a Good Time Charlie, too. He was always fun to be with. We went to the beach and to carnivals. In many ways we were a happy, small, army family. Mom and Dad loved to go out dancing. In her later years, my mom says the happiest she had ever been was when she was with my dad. Those years encompass my best memories of him, too. It’s good that I have some good memories, because the rest of my father’s life became pretty ugly.

My dad died when I was just eight years old. He never talked about the war to me, but my mom told me several times, “You just don’t know how badly the war messed up your dad’s mind.”

When I was maybe seven, I asked my dad two questions straight-out. The first was: “Did you kill anybody?”

He nodded his head slowly, but didn’t say anything more.

“Were you scared?” I asked. That was the second question.

“Yeah, of course I was scared,” he said.

I’m pretty sure he told my mom a lot more about what happened during the war, but those were the only two questions I ever asked him about it.

We know now from other sources that Dad was one of the original Toccoa men who trained under Captain Sobel.

We know that my dad liked to gamble. Apparently, they had a little business going on that Dad was in the midst of, running a dice game back in the barracks in England.

The big story of Dad in the war is when he became temporarily blind [hysterical blindness], after the battle of Carentan. I asked Mom about it in later years and she never doubted that it happened to Dad. The men all went through so much and saw so much. Carentan was a fierce battle. Dick Winters wrote about it as fact in his memoirs. He also states that Dad immediately returned to duty as soon as he regained his vision, which speaks about the guts and determination it took to keep going.
⁶
Dad evidently was brave, despite the incident with the blindness, because later he fought in Korea and earned both a Silver Star and a Bronze Star. He was a private in World War II, but he achieved the rank of master sergeant in Korea. He was proud of his military career. It meant the world to him. I don’t think I ever saw my dad out of uniform. The uniform was always a part of who he was.