We Who Are Alive and Remain (14 page)

What Salty had spotted in the water is a standard navy device—there’s a name for it, but I can’t remember what. When weather conditions in a convoy were like that they put this device on a line behind the ship so that the ship behind it could keep a safe distance from the one ahead of it. What Salty spotted was a signal that we were bearing down on the ship ahead. None of the crew on the
Samaria
had spotted it. I think there were only a couple hundred feet between our ship and the next before they got things squared away and we altered course. I would say that Salty saved the day.

The
Samaria
was dirty, hot, and uncomfortable. We had some escorts with us and never traveled in a straight line—you had to continually zigzag so the German subs couldn’t zero in. I remember eating fish chowder for breakfast. We did some calisthenics on board and worked a bit. Guys gambled and made and lost money. We had bunks down in the ship, but it was hot and miserable down below. I took blankets upstairs and slept on the deck.

I joined Easy Company at Fort Bragg, so I rode over on the
Samaria
with them. The ride wasn’t too bad. It wasn’t as bad as the one coming back. On the way over I didn’t get sick, but I did coming back.

Going over, I was up on the deck. They had a hold down below but the smell was too bad for me. So I grabbed a blanket and lay on the deck. Down below, guys were sick. I went below to take showers but then got the heck out of there. It wasn’t cold up on the deck. You leaned up against the bulkheads to stay warm. We ate some kind of “sausages,” they called them. I think they were made of sawdust.

Back at Camp Shanks while we had been getting ready to leave the United States, we were ordered to remove all parachute insignia the day before we left. We cut off our shoulder patches with razor blades and pulled our pants out over our boots so we looked like regular soldiers. When we landed in Liverpool, England, and left the ship, we were put on railway cars with windows boarded up so we couldn’t see out. We went directly to our billets in Wiltshire, England.

When we got to our billets somebody said, “Lord Haw Haw’s on the radio.” So we all gathered around. Lord Haw Haw was the nickname given to an English-speaking traitor on German radio. It was a propaganda show meant to demoralize the Allies. We heard Lord Haw Haw say, “To the 101st Airborne, welcome to England. We were watching you at Camp Shanks when you cut off your insignia. We were watching you as you landed in Liverpool. And we were watching you when you boarded the blacked-out trains. And when you come to Europe, we will be waiting for you.”

Now, that was unsettling. Someone said, “How in the hell did they know that—they must have spies everywhere.” We weren’t afraid, but it made us mad to think that people were spying on us. Our thought was, We’ll show them.

Four or five years after the war I found out what had happened. Unknownst to the Nazis, every German agent who entered England during World War II had been caught by English Intelligence and offered the choice between cooperation or execution. Plenty of German spies agreed to cooperate. Throughout the rest of the war, English Intelligence controlled and transmitted harmless bits of information to the Germans, such as the arrival of the 101st. It wasn’t vital news, but it gave the impression the German spies were still in control. So that’s what we had heard from Lord Haw Haw that day—something that had been leaked on purpose. It was all part of the Allied strategy.

Atlantic Crossings, Replacements

We headed across the Atlantic in a naval convoy—the ships stretched as far as the eye could see. Conditions on our ship were pretty good. Whoever the captain was made sure we were treated right and that we had plenty of food, clean quarters, and good showers. I don’t know of any other ships that were like that. My bunk was first deck below the top, not down below, in the hold. Those boats didn’t have windows, or if they did, they were painted over. I wasn’t seasick at all—hey, I was born on the Great Lakes. Being on the water didn’t bother me whatsoever.

We had gone about a third of the way across the ocean when we got word from the boat captain to “hit the top” because there were U-boats in the area. So all the guys got up on deck. There were about three thousand people on our boat, it was a smaller civilian vessel, part of the Cunard-White Star line, not the
Queen E
. From the deck we saw a sight that I never forgot—we saw a flash of light from a ship about five miles away. On the ocean, it’s not hard to see that distance. Two of our boats were being torpedoed. One sunk in three minutes; we heard we lost a lot of people on that one. The other was hit in the stern and didn’t sink right away. It took about two hours, we heard, so our guys were able to save everybody who didn’t get killed by the blast. The first one, I don’t think they were able to save more than ten lives. Our boat was too far to be involved in the rescue operation. There were other ships in the area that were closer. The boats were carrying troopers. We heard that one of the boats had a lot of ladies on it, nurses, but that’s just a rumor.

After we crossed the Atlantic, we landed in Northern Ireland. One of the officers came to the billets, asking if anyone could speak Polish. I could, along with five other guys. They sent the five of us to London—we wondered what for.

We were taken to No. 10 Downing Street, the residence of Prime Minister Churchill and the headquarters of Britain’s government. They introduced us to General Vladislovas Anders, head of the Polish Armed Forces. Anders had been imprisoned when the Soviets invaded Poland in 1939. But when Germany declared war on Russia, Anders had been freed and told to re-create the Polish Army, whose initial task was to fight alongside the Red Army.

We met General Anders and talked with him. He was pleased with our command of the Polish language, so we were sent about thirty miles away from London, to a training area. We were there for three weeks for specialized training. In one exercise, they blindfolded us and taught us to take apart and reassemble German and Russian machine guns. We did it over and over again. Our stated mission was to train the Polish underground to fight the enemy, yet exactly
which
enemy became clear over time: it was the Russians.

The Russians were trying to get as much territory as possible. At the same time they were pursuing the Germans, they were trying to kill as many Americans as possible. You need to know that even though Stalin was our ally, he was never in love with us. Stalin had raped Poland. He hated the Americans. You don’t hear too much about that nowadays.

For this mission, the five of us were made members of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the wartime intelligence agency that eventually became the CIA. All the time we were in training, we were told we were going to make a jump into Poland to help the Polish resistance. Then General Anders told us he was canceling the operation. The Russians had overrun our jump area, so we were sent back to Northern Ireland.

We must have done something right, because one of the officers asked the five of us where we wanted to be stationed. We were given the opportunity to go anywhere in the world. I had heard about the 506th Regiment of the 101st Airborne. They had a very solid reputation. I told the captain that there was an outfit I’d like to join. He said no problem. So after a couple days I joined Company E.

We were assembled with more troops and loaded to be shipped overseas on the
Queen Mary
to England. When we sailed out of the harbor, all the lights of New York were out for a total blackout, including the Statue of Liberty. All we saw was her silhouette.

What a hellish trip that was. The majority of the men figured they wouldn’t be coming back, so they smoked, drank, played poker, and shot dice around the clock. It was rough all the way over, and everybody got seasick. I couldn’t stand the sloshing of vomit on the floor in the sleeping quarters down below, so I found an empty covered lifeboat on deck. That’s where I camped out for the rest of the trip.

It took the
Queen Mary
seven days to get to England. She shut down every time we spotted a submarine. After the war was over, we were brought back home on the
Queen Mary
from Le Havre, France, and the trip only took three days because there were no submarines to stop for. On the way back we had German prisoners cooking and serving us. They couldn’t do enough for us. We had steaks, ice cream, almost anything we wanted.

We were at the POE [point of embarkation] to get on a victory ship to cross the Atlantic. I was escorting a platoon of rejects, guys who had been in the guardhouse. They were being sent overseas as regular infantry. A fellow second lieutenant says to me, “Boy, you’re really going to have some trip with these guys on the way across.” Well, they hadn’t fed these kids for about twenty-four hours after letting them out of the guardhouse. They were all hungry. As we lined up to get on the ship I saw a Red Cross wagon where the ladies were giving out doughnuts. I thought, I’ll make friends with these guys by getting them something to eat. So I jumped over a rope and asked the lady about the doughnuts, but she said no, that she couldn’t give them to prisoners. So we got in an argument, and in the end I guess I won because I was able to get doughnuts for the guys. This made me a hero down in the belly of the ship. I didn’t have any trouble with the guys the whole trip.

We landed at Le Havre, France, got packed up in trucks, and wound up in Mourmelon, in a replacement depot. Once there, I delivered the men I was escorting over. They went one way, I went another.

I was sent overseas the last part of June 1944. D-day had already happened. We went over on the
Queen Mary
. My bunk was just below water-line in the bow of the boat. It was a section cut off by a destroyer in the early 1940s. We could see the weld marks in the hull. We landed in Greenock, Scotland, then got on a train and rode the full length of Scotland in daylight. It was a beautiful summer day. We were sent to a replacement depot in southern England. Thousands of guys were at the depot, to be processed and shipped out every day. But for some time we just sat there and sat there. I was an engineer replacement in the Corps of Engineers, probably slated for a service company, where we would do light electrical work, such as wiring up barracks or hospitals. At that point I had no idea I’d see combat.

The replacement depot was a base camp. While we were there, guys who had been wounded were coming back and in the barracks with us. A good friend of mine was also with me at the depot, Elly Chase. We had hooked up in the second basic training and went all the way through electrical training in New York together. Elly and I were with a lot of older guys, tradesmen, draftees. The older guys talked about how if they ever got into combat they would get out by shooting their toe off or trying to get pneumonia. Elly and I were nineteen and thinking, Holy man alive, we don’t want to be with these guys. So one day Elly said to me, “Herb, if we go to combat with these guys we’re going to be the only ones fighting. I saw where the 101st and 82nd are looking for replacements.” And I said, “Let’s do it.” The next day we went to the commanding officer to see if we could transfer. He told us we couldn’t transfer because as engineers we were part of the service forces, similar to the medical corps, and we couldn’t transfer from service forces to ground forces. So we hunched our shoulders and figured the regular army had stopped our way.

It couldn’t have been more than ten days later, a colonel or a major got up at this big formation with a couple thousand guys, I don’t remember who it was. He said, “Congratulations, guys, you are all now all in the infantry.” So Elly and I went back to our captain and asked about a transfer again. This time he said, “Yep, go and good luck.” Elly went to the 82nd as a combat engineer and went to Berlin. He never got a scratch. I went to the 101st and began training under the famous Captain Sobel, then in charge of the 506th jump school.

I had a pretty good idea of what it meant to join the paratroopers. One of my mother’s friends had a son who was a paratrooper who had talked about it quite a bit. He was later killed in Holland. He was standing next to an ammunition truck when it blew up. They were lucky if they found his dog tags.

Transferring to the 101st meant I was joining one of the best divisions around. I’d do it all over again today—to have been where I was and serve with the outfit I was with. I lucked out.

I went through parachute training in England, the same type of training the company received back at Fort Benning, Georgia. I knew nothing about Captain Sobel at the time. I saw him only once, in parachute school. He had been relieved of his command of Easy Company by then and was in command of the parachute school. His reputation had been buried. I never heard any of that stuff until early reunions after the war.

We were between our third and fourth jumps in parachute school when Easy Company was sent to Holland on September 17. We finished our jump training the next week and got our wings and 101st patch, but just sat there waiting until the company was relieved in Holland and sent to Mourmelon, France, at the end of November.

As soon as we got off the plane, we dragged our bags to battalion headquarters and lined up. The officers were all there sizing us up like they were picking players for a baseball team. We reported our name, rank, and serial number. One platoon leader says, “I’ll take this one.” Another, “I’ll take that one.” Lieutenant Ed Shames walked up to me and said, “I’ll take this one. Your name is Junior from now on.” That’s the way it went. So I went to 3rd Platoon, where Ed was the leader. Ed had received the first battlefield commission in the 506th at the end of Normandy. He was an excellent map reader; it had been a hobby of his since he was a kid. He had been an operations sergeant in the 3rd Platoon and built all the sand tables for the regiment for D-day before he got his commission. He’s still in the service today.