A Company of Heroes (30 page)

Dad had healed up enough to jump with the company into Holland for Operation Market-Garden.

During the battle of Bastogne, Dad basically became the unofficial leader of Easy Company when it was under the command of first lieutenant Norman Dike, widely considered by the men to lack strong leadership qualities.

In Hagenau, Dad was wounded again, this time in his neck and cheek by a mortar shell. He went to the aid station, got patched up, and rejoined his unit the same day. A day after that, Winters awarded him a battlefield commission to second lieutenant. Dad talked to us about that. Of his whole life, I know that that was his proudest moment.

Dad continued on to the end of the war with Easy Company. In Berchtesgaden, Dad became acquainted with Ferdinand Porsche, the famed Austro-Hungarian automotive engineer who created the Volkswagen Beetle and many of the Porsche automobiles as well as having designed several of the German tanks. He was in a POW camp nearby. Porsche could speak English, and they sometimes ate meals together.

We met a bunch of the guys over the years, Winters, Guth, Walter Gordon, the machine gunner—he was my dad’s best friend.

I think my father adjusted to life after the war okay. It didn’t seem to bother him much. He saw his life as being more than a paratrooper. He had a lot of drive.

Dad attended Huntington College in West Virginia on the GI Bill, majoring in physics and minoring in industrial engineering. He started college before the war, stopped, then finished afterward, stopping for a while for financial reasons when my brother Cliff was born. Three sons were eventually born: Cliff in ’46, Tom in ’48, and me, born in 1950. I think my oldest brother was born nine months to the day after my father returned from overseas. Dad was the first in his family to finish university. He remained a great believer in higher education, and instilled in my brothers and me the importance of a good education.

Dad’s first career job was as an industrial engineer with Owens Illinois, a Fortune 500 company that makes glass container products. He stayed there for thirty years, maybe thirty-five, and rose to the rank of vice president of the International division, back when a title like that actually meant something.

Even though he was really busy with his job, he took the time to be a family man. He was my baseball coach for a couple of years. We played golf together, Dad and I and my brother Tom. Dad went to work early in the morning, then came home from work; we ate dinner as a family, then he spread out his work on the table and worked well into the night, reading reports and doing homework for the company. This instilled a good work ethic into us as kids.

He had both a wood shop and a metal shop in his basement. His hobbies were myriad, but he loved to do metal finishing and woodworking. He made furniture and machine parts. He liked anything mechanical. When he was in his early eighties, he rebuilt a player piano just for fun. The dining room furniture that’s still in the family today was my great-grandparents’ furniture that my father refinished. It’s gorgeous stuff.

My father’s job took us a lot of places. The family moved to Spain in ’66. Cliff was already out of the house by then. Tom had just graduated from high school, so he spent just a summer there, then went back to the States to go to college. I had two years of high school to go. My parents spent seven years there, then moved to London for several years, then to South Africa for several months on loan to a company down there, then to Geneva, and spent the last twelve years of his career living there in Switzer-land. Essentially, his job was to sell American glass-container technical assistance to European companies. So he travelled all over Europe and North Africa visiting companies that Owens Illinois had contracts with.

My mother was a housewife, raised us boys, and volunteered with the Red Cross. Sadly, she died in 1975, very young, at age fifty, of a heart attack. My mom kept everyone together. My parents were living in Switzer-land when my mom died, and my brothers and I were living in various places in the States. Keeping everyone together after that was not my dad’s forte.

Dad remarried in 1976. His second wife’s name was Marie Hope Mahoney. When Dad retired in 1983, they settled in Toledo, Ohio, and later in Southern Pines, North Carolina.

We knew Dad had a lung ailment and had studied up on it. I think, in his case, it came from the environment he worked in all those years. He had spent a lot of time around the glass bottle machines where there are particles of hot molten glass in the air. I think that damaged his lungs.

I had blown my ACL out from playing softball and had surgery to repair it. I was well on my way to recovery, but then I was carrying something downstairs to the basement, missed the bottom step, fell and broke my kneecap in half. That happened two weeks before Dad died of pulmonary fibrosis in 2001. I was laid out and unfortunately wasn’t able to attend his funeral. I really missed being able to do that, but it couldn’t be avoided.

What are some of my favorite memories of my dad?

Sure, he ran the household like he ran a platoon. As a kid you definitely wanted to stay in line. If my brothers or I got called out on the carpet for anything, and if we replied to any question, “Yes, Dad,” he would correct us with, “Yes, Dad, sir.” He was definitely the boss.

But he definitely could be a lot of fun, too. He told us stories about cowboys, about a horse named “Old Paint,” from back in his cowboy days, and another story he made up called “The Little Boy Who Didn’t Like Ice Cream.” This story always included the world’s smartest elephant, who traveled around the jungle with a huge typewriter carried around by “coolies.” (Obviously the term “coolies” is not politically correct now, but things were different back then, and that’s the word Dad always used to refer to manual laborers from Asia.) People continually came up to this elephant and asked him yes or no questions. The bearers sprung into action and assembled a huge typewriter, and the elephant would type out his one word reply. Y-E-S or N-O. Then they disassembled the typewriter and continued their wild trek through the jungle. The story went on and on. We absolutely loved it. I should mention that the typewriter was a complete keyboard, despite that every question could be answered yes or no. We used to point out that this elephant did not even need a typewriter, he could just stomp a foot once for yes and twice for no, for instance. But then the whole story would have lost its appeal, Dad said with a grin.

That’s how I’d want people to remember my father, C. Carwood Lipton: A strong, capable leader who had a great sense of humor. He could really keep us all in stitches. I wish he was still with us today.

 

 

 

My stepfather, Lieutenant Ronald Speirs, was the stuff of legends. His nicknames included “Sparky,” “Bloody,” and “Killer.” The stories abound: he shot one of his own sergeants between the eyes for getting drunk; he peaceably handed out cigarettes to twenty German prisoners, then mowed them down with his submachine gun; he sprinted crosstown through a veritable shooting gallery at Foy—the Germans didn’t even shoot at him at first because they couldn’t believe what they were seeing. The really astounding story at Foy is that after he hooked up with I Company on the other side of town, now under heavy fire, he sprinted back.

Are the legends true?

The facts that have emerged in later years hopefully speak louder than the rumors. Ron led the attack and destroyed the fourth and final German artillery piece at Brécourt Manor during the Normandy invasion. Later, with Easy Company wrongly positioned and staying put as sitting ducks behind a haystack during the attack on Foy, Lieutenant Speirs was ordered to relieve Lieutenant Norman Dike of his command. Speirs, then the commander of Dog Company, ran to Dike, blurted out, “I’m taking over,” and Easy Company surged into Foy and took the town. Ron continued as the leader of Easy Company through the end of the war and ended up being company commander longer than any of his predecessors, including Dick Winters.