A Company of Heroes (33 page)

On D-day, Stanton flew to Normandy in a plane with the rest of the company headquarters men, including Thomas Meehan, then the Easy Company commander. It was the lead plane. Winters notes that the plane was hit with antiaircraft fire near the drop zone. Bullets came up through the plane’s undersides and threw sparks out the top. After being hit, the plane’s landing lights came on, as if it was going to land, then it did a slow wingover to the right as it approached the ground. It appeared they were going to make it, but then the plane hit a hedgerow and exploded, killing everybody on board.
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Easy Company member Pat Christenson wrote about the experience in his journal:

Family members don’t remember the specifics of when or how the family was notified about the plane crash, but the news came as a shock. My grandmother, Melba, Stanton’s sister-in-law, was pregnant at the time, and when they heard the news, it was so upsetting that she went into labor prematurely. Fortunately, the contractions stopped, and her baby, my dad, was born a few months later. He was the one named in honor of his uncle. Records show that the family was notified that Stanton was missing in action soon after D-day, and a telegram confirming his death arrived on November 11, 1944.

Margie said that, of the three Evans sons in the service, their mother feared the most for Stanton, in part because being a paratrooper was so new back then. Margie said her father took his son’s death hard, but that his mother took it really bad. His mother kept thinking her son was still alive someplace and would turn up again one day. It took her years to accept his death.

I received Stanton’s Army Individual Deceased Personnel File and it mentioned only that his personal effects were returned. His effects consisted of an envelope with letters, photographs, and a billfold. The rest of the file consisted of dental records and numerous correspondences back and forth between Stanton’s father and the Army about the return of his remains. Apparently, Army regulations stipulated that all bodies involved in group burials be returned to the U.S. and buried in whichever National Cemetery was most central to all the families involved. Since the plane held soldiers from all over the country, the bodies from Plane 66 were buried in St. Louis, considered a central location of the United States.

How would I want people to remember him?

I asked this question of my grandmother and Stanton’s sister. Melba said simply that he was a good guy and was always willing to help anybody.

Margie, his sister, said she would want people to know that she loved him very much, and that he was someone who really wanted to serve his country and do the right thing. She said he was probably mean as hell, but was that way only to help his men.

Sergeant William Stanton Evans was my great-uncle, a cherished part of our family. I wish I had known him. I thank him for his role in preserving our freedom.

 

 

 

I never met my uncle. Growing up, we always knew that my mom, Annette Harris Turner, had a brother in WWII, that he was a paratrooper, and that he was killed in Normandy. For years, that’s about all I ever knew about Terrence “Salty” Harris.

After my mom passed away, I thought, “Well shoot, it’s a shame if I never find out more information about my uncle.” So I started to search for his name. It’s about all I had to go on at first. His name led me to information about the Colville American Cemetery and Memorial in Normandy. It listed his unit. I sent an e-mail to Tom Potter, son of George Potter, one of the original Band of Brothers, and information started pouring in. It was jaw-dropping. Letters and e-mails and notes came back, parts of journals and diaries. I live in Alaska and traveled down to California to poke around in my parents’ old cedar chest. My uncle had also grown up in Santa Monica. I found this old photo album I had never seen before. It had pictures of Mom at UC-Berkeley, where she attended in the war years, of her brother in a paratrooper uniform, and of him in Europe. There were letters, too, which provided a wealth of information. I ended up flying out to the Atlanta Easy Company reunion. A few of the vets brought photos of Salty Harris that they passed around.

This is what I found out about my uncle’s life:

My uncle had been in Annapolis, the United States Naval Academy, prior to the Army, but resigned from Annapolis under the pressure of accumulated demerits. Starting off as a Navy man is how he got the nickname Salty.

After the Naval Academy, he was refused admission to the Air Force and flight training because of his Annapolis record. He made several trips to Australia as a merchant seaman before enlisting in the army and volunteering for parachute duty.

As a paratrooper, he was one of the original Toccoa men. When they were first putting Easy Company together, my uncle was a private, then quickly became one of their earliest staff sergeants. He was a noncom in the 3rd Platoon and was known as a good sergeant.

He ran his platoon in the army on naval terms—he told his men to go “starboard” instead of right, or to “swab the deck” instead of “mop the floors.” Apparently he was quite a character. Shifty Powers told me that they used to ship these guys by railroad to a training area, and Salty got incredible joy out of tormenting his men by repeatedly singing Navy songs. I’m not sure what the songs were, but apparently he sung them over and over until the men were all sick of them.

The big story about Salty is how he was one of the instigators in leading the mutiny against company commander Captain Herbert Sobel. Mike Ranney was one of Salty’s closest friends and also involved in the mutiny. In his journal, Ranney describes Salty as “a broad-faced delightful Irishman with whom I had many adventures.” Ranney also writes extensively about the mutiny:

Ranney explains how, after the transfer, he was recruited by Lieutenant Walter Moore for special assignment. Lieutenant Moore had been the men’s platoon commander right at the start of training in Toccoa. Ranney agreed to the assignment and was shipped to special duty to an airbase near Nottingham, where he reconnected with my uncle. There, Moore explained the assignment more fully. Ranney continues:

Ranney was later able to transfer back into Easy Company before the Normandy jump, but my uncle stayed with the pathfinders for D-day. Being a pathfinder was not an easy job. It meant being out in front of the pack and facing most of the German army head-on and alone, thus being in a dangerous and costly position. When he jumped as a pathfinder, it wasn’t just security detail either, or setting up lights on the ground. Along with Holophane lights and brightly colored panels to help guide in the vast armadas of C-47s carrying paratroopers and gliders to their drop zones, one pathfinder in each stick also carried radar transmitters called Eureka beacons, top-secret technology back then, that were to be guarded at all cost. A radio receiver in the aircraft honed in on the beacon on the ground. Only one guy in each stick jumped with a beacon, and in his stick, that was entrusted to Salty Harris. So he was an important guy. I got that information from the Ranney family, and it’s also listed in a book by George Koskimaki.

My uncle’s gravestone in Europe reads that he was killed June 18, 1944. But that is probably a little late. The battle for Carentan happened between the tenth and fourteenth of June. Burr Smith and Mike Ranney both indicate in letters that my uncle was killed in the same action in which he was wounded, which would have placed his death slightly earlier than recorded.

Ranney writes to my mother on July 25, 1944:

Ranney writes my mom again, a short time later, apparently after receiving a letter back from her:

Burr Smith writes to my mother on September 7, 1944, from a field hospital in England. This is one of the letters I found in my parents’ trunk. Burr’s letter is written on that really thin paper they used back then.

There’s a picture that’s circulated on the Internet that shows fellow E Company veteran Forrest Guth visiting my uncle’s grave over in Europe. Paul Woodage, who runs a company called Battlebus that tours the D-day beaches and battlefields of Normandy, accompanied fellow E/506th veteran Paul Rogers to Salty’s grave in 2007 and notes that both Rogers and Guth shed a few tears over their lost friend. For me, to see the emotional effect of visiting a friend killed six decades earlier is moving beyond words. These men truly were a Band of Brothers.