A Company of Heroes (31 page)

Of all the accounts and explanations surrounding the stories, one thing is clear about Ron: he took his responsibilities very seriously and cared deeply about the welfare of the men with whom he served. This is evidenced in the well-documented and eyewitness reports of his service during WWII.

Personally, we know there was more to Ron’s life than what we read about in Stephen Ambrose’s book or see in the HBO miniseries. What follows is the story of the real Ronald Speirs as we knew him.

After my biological father died in 1984, my mother, Elsie, met Ron Speirs at a singles’ square dance. I lived in Montana at the time, and Mom lived in California. Mom and Ron were married in November 1987 and stayed together until he died in 2007, so they had twenty good years together.

I didn’t meet Ron until the wedding. Mom said she didn’t even know he had been in the military until they had been dating for several weeks—Ron just didn’t talk about it much.

After they were married, we did not live geographically close, so I didn’t get much of a chance to know Ron until several years later when he and Mom started spending more time here in Montana. I’ve got a brother and sister and they all have kids. I’m remarried, and my wife and I have six kids between us, so there was always a bunch of children running around. I can’t overemphasize what a fantastic grandfather and great-grandfather Ron became to all our children. They’d tug on him, wanting him to take them on walks, and he was always patient and went out of his way to do whatever he could for them. Ron became grandpa to the whole crew, and he lived that role very well. It’s funny how having grandkids can really bring out the best in people.

Although our family was aware that Ron had received some medals and had quite an extensive military career, we had little knowledge of the details. We accepted his explanation of a failing memory. Throughout his extensive career in the military, he had spent time in Korea, Spandau prison, Southeast Asia, and the Pentagon, and his memories tended to blend together toward the end. For some time, we understood and honored the possibility that many of his experiences during WWII were buried forever in his subconscious.

Although aware of the book
Band of Brothers
, our family did not pay much attention to the HBO production until Ron and Mom travelled to France for the premiere in June 2001. I had read parts of the book previously and remember being concerned about how Ron was portrayed and about how some of his alleged actions would be interpreted and portrayed in the series. When asked how he felt about this concern, Ron replied, “I’m eighty-one years old, what can they do to me now?”

He wouldn’t have gone to that big shindig in France, except that Mom told him she was going to go whether he went or not. A tremendous photograph is often seen on WWII forums online of him and Dick Winters embracing with their yellow jackets on—that’s the first time they had seen each other in more than fifty-five years since the war. The shot was captured at this event in France.

After the HBO premiere, Ron seemed to be more open to sharing some of his recollections. Shortly after Mom and Ron returned, our oldest daughter’s wedding was held, and her new brother-in-law was soon heading out to West Point as a new cadet. The brother-in-law was very interested in meeting Ron, so Ron agreed to visit with him. I asked if I could tape the discussion, and Ron hesitantly agreed. During this one-hour conversation, I learned more about Ron’s career than I had in the previous fourteen years. He seemed willing to share with this young man, about to embark on a military career, some of the details of his experiences, even ones we previously thought were lost to a failing memory.

That said, we don’t know much about his earlier years. We know he was born in Scotland on April 20, 1920, the same birth date as Hitler, which he joked about. His father was a Scottish engineer who immigrated to the US with his family during the Great Depression in search of employment. Ron grew up in Boston and took close order drill during high school, attended Citizens Military Training Camps during summer vacations, and graduated from high school in 1938.

He was initially drafted, but deferred involvement for two months to finish extension courses, then went into active duty at Camp Shelby, Mississippi. He volunteered for the Airborne and was sent to Camp Toccoa and soon became a platoon leader for D Company.

While the regiment was stationed in England just prior to the Normandy invasion, Ron was sent to Winchester to set up a camp for an infantry division coming from Africa. There, he met an English widow, a member of the Auxiliary Territorial Service, the women’s branch of the British army. They married and had a son together, or perhaps vice versa. Several places in the miniseries he’s shown looting German silverware and valuables to send back for his wife and baby.

The woman’s husband had been reported dead. Actually, he had been in a POW camp and showed up alive toward the end of the war. That obviously put everybody in a very difficult situation. The decision was made for the woman to stay with her first husband. We don’t know who made the decision—the woman, Ron, or all of them in conjunction. Ron never talked much about that, though he recognized the boy as his son and kept in contact with him from then onward. We have a letter from Ron to Dick Winters in the early 1990s where he wrote:

Ron was married several more times throughout his life, although I’m not quite sure how many times before he married my mother. She was his last wife.

We’ve asked him about the wartime valuables he looted, if his first wife kept them or what exactly was the arrangement, and Ron said, “Well, I don’t know where any of that stuff is, because I certainly didn’t bring home any of it with me.” Yes, he came home with a few smaller souvenirs—a Luger, a few coins, or whatever—but certainly no booty. No one knows what happened to that.

Ron had jumped into Normandy with D Company, where his platoon suffered high causalities. He was wounded in the face and knee by a German potato masher hand grenade, evacuated to a hospital, then rejoined his unit in England just prior to the Holland jump.

In Holland, Ron was the battalion S-2 Intelligence officer for Colonel Robert Strayer. While on reconnaissance, Ron paddled across the Neder Rhine alone at night. The enemy opened fire on him and he dove into the water with a German bullet in his butt. He finished recrossing the river by swimming and was found bleeding and exhausted on the south shore. In spite of his wound, he brought back critical information and later received the Silver Star for that adventure. He was evacuated by hospital train to England for recovery. I remember him talking about that. “Of all the places to get wounded, that was the best place to get shot,” he said.

He rejoined the 506th in France just prior to the Battle of the Bulge. He wrote Ambrose a letter about the experience in Bastogne, pragmatically describing being in foxholes with German corpses nearby:

A letter Ron wrote to Dick Winters in 1998 discussed the same incident:

He wrote Ambrose about a poignant incident that happened in Belgium:

After the war, Ron stayed in the service. He joined the 187th Airborne Regimental Combat Team in Korea where he commanded a rifle company for the combat parachute jump at Pyongyang, the capital of North Korea.

Later, at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, he served as military secretary to the 18th Airborne Corps Commander Major General Joseph Cleland.

In 1956, Ron attended a Russian language course in Monterey, California, and was assigned to Potsdam, East Germany, as a liaison officer with the Soviet Army. He became the U.S. governor of Spandau Prison in Berlin in 1958. The prison housed Nazi war criminals including Rudolf Hess, Hitler’s deputy in the Nazi party.

In 1962, Ron served as a training officer in Laos, Southeast Asia, on a U.S. mission with the Royal Lao Army.

His final assignment in the Army was as a plans officer in the Pentagon. He retired as a lieutenant colonel in 1964.

Ron didn’t talk about his experiences in Korea at all. About Berlin, he said very little. He mentioned how he met with Hess almost daily. It sounded to me like they had a mutual respect for each other, enemies of some regard. Other than that, numerous questions remain about his career. What assignments did he carry out in his position of liaison officer to the Russians? What missions was he involved in during his time in Laos? What other assignments was he involved in during his other days of service?

The explanation for why Ron hesitated to discuss these experiences is also now lost, although my guess is that it had to do with a combination of several factors: many of his experiences were quite unpleasant and painful to recall; his strict adherence to orders of confidentiality, even long after his service was completed; and certainly in his later days his memory was fading. He also didn’t understand what all the attention was about. As he said many times, he was only doing his job.

Knowing Ron’s personality, it wouldn’t surprise me if he wasn’t liked much by the men who served under him. The veterans have told me he was certainly respected and feared, and a very strong leader. But he could be a real stickler for discipline and following orders, and I think his men probably didn’t like him much because of that.

I’ve mulled over what I know about Ron’s personality and put it through the grid of what’s known about his wartime experiences. He was tremendously conscientious about doing the right thing. That character trait guided his life more than courage. Ron has been described in battle as fearless, but I have a feeling that, although his actions proved fearless in the end, Ron might have been simply too conscientious to not follow orders. Like the incident of running across Foy and back—I believe his attitude was, “Well, somebody had to do it.” Ron couldn’t ask anybody else to do it, so he did it himself.

I believe the other trait that drove his wartime experiences was his acceptance that he was going to be killed. He understood he wasn’t going to make it out alive, but he was going to go down fighting. He recognized that, for whatever reason, God was watching out for him, and there was no way he was going to make it through unless God was protecting him. I wouldn’t say he was a Bible-thumper, but I’m quite sure he considered himself to be a Christian. Mom and Ron went to church.

In the miniseries, it shows Ron (played by Matthew Settle) talking to Albert Blithe, who had hid in a ditch because of fear. Ron says the now infamous quote about how everyone is scared, and that Blithe only hid because he still had hope. He tells Blithe that he needs to function as if he was already dead—the sooner he does, the sooner he can be an effective soldier. We don’t know if that was Ron’s actual outlook or not, but in a letter he wrote in 1992 to Winters when drafts of the original book were going back and forth, Ron wrote, “Yes, I have the book and have just finished reading it. The memories came flooding back. How did we ever make it through the war? I did not expect to survive.”

Regarding the story of Ron shooting his own man for being drunk: we have a copy of a letter Winters wrote to Ambrose in 1993 saying, “The story tellers have glamorized that tale for years.” Winters described how the sergeant in question was shot because he twice ignored a command given by Ron to halt an advance toward Ste. Côme-du-Mont. The incident took place under heavy fighting when the men were extremely exhausted. Regimental headquarters had ordered the men to halt because they were planning an extensive artillery attack on the city. The artillery attack was to be gradually adjusted in increments of one hundred yards every four minutes. They wanted the men to follow the attack in. Continuing forward would undoubtedly have endangered many lives. After Ron shot the sergeant, he immediately reported the incident to his company commander, Jerre S. Gross, who was unfortunately killed the next day in the assault on Ste. Côme-du-Mont. Winters wrote: