We Who Are Alive and Remain (12 page)

I noticed in boot camp that a lot of guys appeared like they didn’t want to be there. They weren’t serious about learning how to be good soldiers or watching another guy’s back in combat. All they were interested in was drinking, smoking, barroom fighting, and women. I grew nervous with the idea of being sent to fight with a bunch of chicken-shit soldiers and figured I was taking a bigger chance of getting killed if sent to combat with them.

So the first time I saw a poster wanting men to sign up to be paratroopers and heard how hard it would be to make it in, I knew that was for me. I wanted an elite group of soldiers around me.

I was sent to Fort Benning, Georgia, for paratrooper training. We never walked anywhere. It was run all the time without stopping. I never smoked or drank, and I was in good shape, so what they were showing us to do wasn’t beyond my abilities. It was something to be proud of.

From there, I was sent to Fort Bragg, North Carolina, for training in heavy equipment operation and demolition school.

After Fort Bragg we were sent to Fort Meade, Maryland, for assembly. That’s the first time I got to go home, but not on a furlough, just a seven-day delay en route. I visited my family and went right from there to Camp Shanks, New York.

They sent us to Camp Croft in South Carolina for basic training. One day they came around and wanted volunteers for the paratroopers. I was always one for excitement, so I said, “Yeah, I’ll go.” I had never flown in a plane before, but it sounded good.

They sent us to Fort Benning to train as paratroopers. The physical training was pretty rough. But I did ’em. I had to run ten miles every morning. For practice jumps we had to jump from the top of two-hundred-foot towers with chutes that guided us to the ground. After that it was the real thing from a plane.

I was a little leery about jumping out on the first jump. But when the guy ahead of me went I said to myself, Well, if he can go, I can go. I went out right after him. And I got to like it. I enjoyed it.

I went through twelve weeks of basic training at Fort Belvoir, Virginia, in May 1943. It was a real mix of guys there. Half the guys were from the Tex-Mex border, and many didn’t speak English. The guy bunking next to me had a bullet hole healing right next to the heart—he had been shot in a barroom brawl. The rest of us had a semester of college. It was quite an interesting group. Fort Belvoir was a good post. It wasn’t out in the middle of nowhere, only thirty miles out of Washington, D.C., so we were able to get there a few times.

When I finished basic training, they separated all the guys into two groups mostly. A lot of us went into the Army Specialized Training Program, which was basically going back to school. The rest went into advanced training and soon made the invasion of North Africa. I was sent to the University of Pennsylvania. At the end of my first semester they closed that program, and we went back to basic training in the Corps of Engineers because they had lengthened the program by then by another four weeks to emphasize more infantry training. When I finished that, they pulled a lot of guys out and we went to electricians’ school in New York. I was stationed in downtown New York City for three months. Boy, that was tough duty [laughs].

Right after Pearl Harbor I quit working at GE and volunteered for the army. They put me in the air force instead. They sent me from Pennsylvania to California. I was in seven different camps in six weeks. I was bounced around from Mather Field, to McClellan Air Force Base, to San Bruno, California, to two camps in Stockton, then to an interment camp at Tanforan. I was upset about this.

Living conditions were terrible at Tanforan. It was a Japanese interment camp, though there were no Japanese there at the time with us that I knew of. They supplied us with a cot, a blanket, a pillow with straw in it, then another blanket to cover us, and a pair of galoshes.

Why the galoshes? The foundation of the barracks was built level with the ground. We got a lot of rain in the San Francisco area, and the water washed right into our cabins. So it was hell if you went to sleep and you took your galoshes off before you got to bed. Up to three inches of water would be on the floor. A lot of our men got sick—it was so damn cold in there. A couple men caught pneumonia. I knew a couple who died from it.

As long as I stayed in California, we had no kind of training whatsoever. We weren’t doing anything—just sitting around looking at the sky. It was six weeks of doing absolutely nothing. This was happening all over. They were sending so many people to the military camps that they couldn’t handle it. There were so many people enlisting it was overwhelming.

I went to Camp Stockton and volunteered for the camp’s boxing team; that’s when things started to turn around for me. I had boxed in Erie when I was a kid. We used to fool around every couple of weeks; we had oversized gloves and nobody would get hurt. We used to work out that way, nothing else to do, you know. Sometimes it would be at the Boys’ Club, but other times we boxed right in the neighborhood. When we did, everybody was warned to not get mad or hurt anyone. It was just about learning how to box. Some older guys would train us. We got pretty good.

Boxing came easily to me. I hardly ever drank or smoked, and I was in good shape. What did I look like as a young man? To tell the truth—very handsome. Did you ever see Paul Newman? You send me your address and I’ll send you a picture of me looking like Paul Newman. You think I’m kidding you?

The boxing team was part of the Diamond Belt Tournament. You fought four rounds of two minutes each. On the East Coast it was three rounds of three minutes each, so it was a bit different on the West Coast than what I knew back home. In the tournament were both military men and civilians. A couple of the guys I fought were civilians. The rest were military. I joined as a representative of the military.

The man who trained us was Max Baer, a former world heavyweight champion. If you ever saw the old TV show
Beverly Hillbillies
, the part of Jethro Bodine was played by his son, Max Baer Jr. Everybody who boxed wanted to win. I didn’t get to the top, but I did beat the hell out of a lot of guys. I fought in featherweight division. I weighed about 112 to 114 pounds back then. I got much bigger after that.

Boxing was fun, but I wanted to go somewhere where I could learn something in the military besides boxing. So I asked for a transfer from California to Chanute Field, Illinois. There, they taught us how to repair planes that had been shot down or crippled up. I was there about a month, maybe longer.

Then I talked to the captain and asked him about cadet training to be able to fly a plane. I took a test and ended up with the highest mark of anybody at Chanute Field. With my score on that exam, it meant they were going to send me to Nashville, Tennessee, to learn how to fly a P-51 Mustang, the American long-range single-seat fighter aircraft. These were the fast, highly durable fighter planes that soon helped America achieve air superiority in World War II. I had first seen that plane in 1941—as soon as I saw them I knew that’s what I wanted to do.

I couldn’t wait to begin flying. But the military lost my exam records. I hung around another month while they tried to find them. They couldn’t. So they sent me to Detroit to the U.S. Rubber Company and taught me how to repair self-sealing fuel tanks. This wasn’t what I had in mind at all. I wanted to learn how to fly or at least be around planes, so I asked for a transfer—any airfield except in California. They sent me to Hunter Field at Savannah, Georgia, where I lay around for about a month. They had us stationed at an airfield with big planes coming in and out, very dusty all the time. We were in big tents that held about twelve guys. Every day we had to go to an area and wash our clothes to get all the dust off. I was upset about that, so one day I went down to the captain’s office and volunteered for paratroopers.

“When do you want to leave?” he said.

“Right away,” I said.

That’s how I got into the airborne. Incidentally, they found my records to be a pilot about seven months later, but by that time I was in the airborne, ready to go overseas. I still have those records today.

For basic training they sent me down to Camp Walters in Texas. Nobody I knew had heard of the base. It was mostly older guys there. Most of them couldn’t speak English or write their own names. Whenever they got mail from home they asked me to read it for them. I didn’t know what the hell the service was going to do with them. I couldn’t wait to get out of there. I wanted to be there, but not
there
—it was just me and all these older guys who couldn’t write their names.

One guy at Walters was nice, an officer. He found out I wanted to go to the paratroopers, and he wanted to go, too. A real nice guy, can’t remember his name. We weren’t at Walters very long. He got shipped someplace else. Then I remet him at Fort Bragg, where we got fitted up to go overseas. Then I saw him again at Camp Shanks in New York when we shipped out. I checked up on him after D-day. They told me he had died in Normandy. It kind of shook me up. He was a real nice guy.

From Walters I went to Fort Benning for paratrooper training and did my five jumps. I enjoyed jumping out of an airplane. I liked seeing the sky and the landscapes. Course, when they start putting all that equipment on you, that changes. And when the bullets start flying, it’s not too nice then. Every day at Benning we went out and ran and ran and ran. It was a lot of physical training, cleaning weapons, learning how to do things, we were all young kids—none of us knew much of anything.

I joined Easy Company when they were at Camp Mackall. I was put in the 2nd Platoon. It was a bit hard to break in at first. I wasn’t at Toccoa, where they had formed up. But I didn’t have no trouble with the guys. Some of the Toccoa guys are hard—they still are—but they’re good men. I don’t want to say nothing bad about them.

In my battery in the 10th, there was a kid named Peterson from Kansas, a cross-country and track man, who kept saying we ought to stop going on maneuvers and go fight a war. So when a man came around looking for volunteers for the paratroopers, we signed up. You made extra money for jumping out of an airplane. That sounded pretty good to me. Peterson and I both signed up.

A-stage at Fort Benning was all physical. They ran you until you couldn’t run anymore. If I was lagging, Peterson would put his arm under mine and keep me going. He did great on the running part. But in the end he flunked out. After five jumps you had to jump another two jumps on your own, a day jump and a night jump. Whenever Peterson got pushed out of the plane he did okay, but couldn’t muster the guts to jump if forced to step out by himself, so he wasn’t able to do the last two jumps. I never knew what happened to him.

Jumping came easily to me. My adventuresome father had run a flying circus in Atlanta where they did wing walking. I never wing-walked but I had been in airplanes quite a bit as a kid. Some of these poor kids at Benning had never even been in an airplane, much less jump out of one. Jumping felt like swimming underwater to me—once your chute opened it was a very calm situation. Of course, with the chutes today you land like a feather. In those days if it was a windy day you could oscillate quite a bit if you weren’t in the right position and hit the ground pretty hard.

Here’s a story about jumping. When we came back to France from Germany we had to make one jump to stay on pay status. Ed Shames, my platoon leader, was a high points man, and just before he left to go home to the States he called me over and told me about a sergeant who sweat his jumps pretty badly. Out of concern for the guy, Shames told me to make a bet with the guy so he wouldn’t worry—you know, just to take his mind off the jump. So I bet the guy he couldn’t tackle me while going out the door of the plane. That was a bad move.

It turns out that yes, you can. I went out first. The sergeant was right behind me. He won the bet. We tangled up and started to come down like a bullet, passing other jumpers who had jumped before us. It could have been worse—we could have had a streamer, where the chute doesn’t inflate at all. But we came down on about a half a panel, about one quarter of one of our chutes had inflated.

I don’t remember exactly what we yelled to each other. He was pretty panicky. We had jumped from about fourteen hundred feet, a higher jump, so we had some time. We started to unwind from each other, but he fought it and we got more tangled. I was calmer, I was involved in trying to get him to take it easy and help us unwind that I didn’t even think. Luckily it was a windy day, and right before we landed the wind popped us away from each other. Then we hit. Boy, we plowed up some ground. Good thing it was a freshly dug field. We dug it a lot deeper.

Afterward we had a few beers together to calm our nerves.

I signed up in March 1944 during my senior year of high school and went into the service in May 1944, just before D-day. I had two weeks to go before high school graduation, but I left school early. Some friends and I signed up together. I was eighteen.

A few weeks before I enlisted, one of my best friends had enlisted and ended up at Fort Hood in Texas for basic. Next month I was down there and wound up in a row of barracks, with my bunk next to his.

We went through thirteen weeks of basic training. We learned discipline and how to fight. When we graduated from basic we all had decisions to make as far as any special services to go into.

The thought of jumping out of airplanes didn’t bother me all that much. You’re always a little concerned when you jump, but it sounded exciting. I had done a fair amount of flying with the Civil Air Patrol before I went into the service.

I went to Fort Benning for airborne school. This was more advanced training than basic, a lot of PT [physical training], very grueling courses. Sometimes you wondered if you wanted to stay in this thing. But it turned out I made the right decision. After five jumps I got my wings. I was very proud.