We Who Are Alive and Remain (17 page)

When I landed, I heard another guy shout over to me. We had these passwords, “welcome,” “flash,” and “thunder,” but instead of using the password, he yelled “Tipper!” How he knew it was me, I wasn’t sure, it was dark. It was Frank Mellett (he was later killed in Bastogne). Mellett and I started walking. We met some troopers, probably five or six more. I didn’t know any of the guys we were with. We eventually wound up with about eighteen men. I didn’t know any of them except Mellett, but we had a sergeant in charge. We met one German patrol and had a short firefight. They had too much firepower for us, so we backed off. We didn’t have any automatic weapons, just rifles. They did. They didn’t pursue us.

When I landed, who do I find on the ground next to me but Joe Lesniewski, my friend from Erie, Pennsylvania? There was no one else around. It was quiet—you wouldn’t think a war was going on. We took our chutes off and needed to decide where we should go.

We followed a ditch. Then we met some guys from 82nd Airborne, six or seven of them. They had ammo and everything, so I said, “I’m going with them.” I figured we weren’t going no place the way we were headed.

In Normandy I got a little concussion. They were lobbing those shells over five, six, seven miles into France. Me and three others were walking across a field, and boy, something hit me. It knocked me out. The guys thought I was dead. One guy says, “He’s dead, let’s get the hell out of here.” Another guys says, “No, I’m not leaving without him.” So they waited a little bit and I came to. It was a concussion. It scared them, and it scared me, too, but I was okay. That was during the first day, first hours, after jumping.

When I jumped in Normandy it was with the 2nd Battalion, 506th, Headquarters, heavy weapons. I landed about eighteen miles from our drop zone, close to the town of Ste. Mère Église. I had my M-1, trench knife, and about four clips of ammo with me when I landed—that was it. My musette bag and bandoliers were blown off from the speed of the jump. I got some ammo off a dead trooper pretty soon after that, so I was okay.

The Germans had flooded the lower lands. I landed in a swampy area, water up to my waist. I got out of my chute and picked up my buddy John Campbell right away. Neither of us knew where the hell we were. We heard Germans coming, so we hid under a little footbridge until they passed, then kept going.

We moved toward the sound of firing because we figured paratroopers would be there. Soon we hooked up with some guys from B Company, 508th. We stayed with them for two days and fought as they were taking Ste. Mère Église. Some guys from Easy Company, Battalion headquarters, came past us, so from there we went back over to Headquarters and joined the rest of Easy Company just before the Battle of Carentan.

Ste. Mère Église—that was pretty bad. The Germans opened up on us with artillery and small-arms fire while we were still in the sky. The flak was so thick you could walk down on it. Most of the 508th landed right on top of the town. Quite a few Germans were there when they landed. I remember seeing a couple of our guys hanging in trees, all shot up.

While I was fighting in Ste. Mère Église, a German popped out from behind his cover across the street. He looked pretty young. I aimed at his knees and hit the lower part of his leg. A couple of his guys came over and helped him away. That was fine as far as I was concerned, just as long as they weren’t shooting at me. Truthfully, I never wanted to kill anybody. I know I did—don’t get me wrong. But I was never bloodthirsty or anything. Anytime I could, I would shoot to wound, not kill.

Being second-in-command, I was the pusher, the last one out of the plane. It was dark when I landed and very quiet. I was in this little hedgerow field. I rounded up Rod Strohl, Shifty Powers, and Bill Kiehn. We tried to figure out where we were exactly. There were no streets or roads around that we could see to get our bearings. We decided to head east. One of our objectives was to get to a landing area in the east and lend a hand to stop German reinforcements believed to be there.

We soon came across a little dirt road and began following it. I still hadn’t fired a shot or seen any Germans. Dawn was just breaking when we came across an officer from the 502nd who had been dropped in the wrong place. He had half a dozen fellows from his platoon with him. We talked for a few minutes. It was daylight then. Suddenly we heard a truck coming down the road. We could hear it before we could see it, and knew by the sound that it wasn’t one of ours. The truck came into view. It was filled with Germans. This officer from the 502nd barked some orders. He was really on the ball. One of his guys had a bazooka, and as soon as the truck was in range he blasted it. We headed toward the truck. Dead and wounded Germans were scattered all over the place. That’s when I decided we should move on. The officer outranked me and I knew he would have us standing guard over the prisoners and wounded for the rest of the Normandy campaign. So I said, “Excuse us, we’re going to try to find our unit,” and we kept moving.

On D-day I landed near Ste. Mère du Mont. There was a river there, I remember. You’ve got to think, the plane’s going 150 miles per hour. There are twenty guys in the plane. So from the first guy out the plane to the last guy who jumped, you were at least five miles apart when you landed. But we got together and kept going. I was with Lipton, Boyle, Luz, and Christenson. Later on we met up with Winters.

I landed in a meadow with cows all around. Luckily I didn’t land on one. Walter Gordon was with me. We found John Eubanks. Floyd Talbert came along a little later. The four of us went on together. We were way off target, about 2½ miles away from where we were supposed to be—near Ravenoville. All we knew was that we were supposed to head to the shore, so we headed west to get to the Channel.

We didn’t encounter much hostility that first night. We were supposed to avoid fighting that first night if we could. So if you saw any enemy, you tried to circumvent them. You could get pretty good hiding places in the hedgerows.

It gets light quite early that time of year. The next morning we kept going. Lieutenant Tom Meehan had become our company commander after he replaced Captain Sobel. His plane, with twenty-one men aboard, was loaded with torpedoes and blew up when hit by enemy fire in the first hours of D-day. The remains crashed to the ground near Ste. Mère Église. Everyone on board, including the entire company headquarters, was killed.

That’s what we found the next morning, the four of us, although we didn’t realize at first whose plane it was. The plane was out in a field beyond where we had landed. It was all torn up, burned, pieces of aluminum, dead bodies, so we didn’t spend much time there. This kind of thing happened and you didn’t dwell on it, you just got back to business. I had a camera and took a number of pictures. When we got back to England I got the film developed. They decided it must have been Meehan’s plane by the description of the area it had landed in. I guess if we had known it was Meehan’s plane we would have had a tougher time with it.

When you were fighting you never had time to dwell on things. But when we got back to England, that’s where it affected you more. You saw guys who were missing. You wondered what happened to them. You got that feeling like, what am I doing here? You had more time to reflect. But I never had any second guesses about enlisting. I don’t know what it was, but when you were with this group of men, you became brothers. You never wanted to be away from them, you wanted to help them. In fact, I never got the feeling like we might not make it. The only time I was close to that was in Bastogne, when things really got rough. Other than that, we thought we were invincible.

We kept walking after we saw the plane. After a while we came across a group of the 82nd in a barn and fought alongside the 82nd for a few days. There were probably fifty guys from the 82nd. It was good in the sense that the Germans were just as confused as we were.

We were dropped much lower and faster than anticipated. On the way down I remember seeing burn holes in my parachute from the bullets going through. I came in backward and landed in the middle of a field. I didn’t have enough time to pull up on my risers and alleviate the shock of landing. The back of my helmet hit the back of my head. I didn’t know it at the time but I had cracked three vertebrae and received a concussion. All I knew was that I kept blacking out and coming to. That blacking in and out happened all the time I was there. I have a lot of blank spots in my memory of Normandy. I can remember only about half the time I was there. It comes in bits and pieces.

When I landed, I had nothing except a knife. As a medic I never carried a rifle anyway, but the speed of the jump and the opening shock had ripped all my medical equipment off me. That was very frustrating. It had taken weeks to pack the equipment, but the frustrating part was that I had nothing to work with. You can imagine, a lot of the wounds seen were catastrophic.

As medics, our job was to do whatever we could do. On the first day I was on my way to join the guys and was called into a building being used as an aid station. We had no evac at the time. A guy had a big sucking chest wound, a wound they had only told us about but never seen firsthand. The only thing I could do was close the wound up as best I could. I couldn’t stay there to see that he was evacuated. I don’t know if the man lived or not. That was the way it was. Time after time we saw guys lose legs and arms, chest wounds, guys all shot up and bloody. A man can bleed to death in a couple of minutes. If it hadn’t been for the wonderful doctors we had—the guys who had some serious medical experience—we would have lost so many more men.

You have to realize that a medic is no doctor. Our job was to reach a wounded man as quickly as possible out on the field, get him stabilized by bandaging and giving him morphine, then get him back to a doctor—if you could. But if you don’t have any bandages or morphine, what can you do? You scrounge around and find whatever you can. When you come across catastrophic wounds—what can a medic ever do about those? It’s not like I had a first-aid book with me or could call up a doctor on the phone.

That same day, the first day, I went to a church in Angoville au Plein that was being used as an aid station. One of our guys had found an abandoned German jeep somewhere and was bringing in as many casualties as he could. I helped him out for quite a while. The people in that church have never taken the blood stains off those pews. They contacted me a few years back to ask me if I wanted my name put on a memorial there. I said, “Heck, no. All I did was bring people in.”

Outside of Beaumont, there was a lot of fire going on. Lieutenant Colonel Billy Turner, 1st Battalion’s commanding officer, stood on top of a tank turret and directed fire at a .75. He was hit in the head by a sniper’s bullet and collapsed. Since he was at the front of a six-tank column, the whole advance halted, exposing the column to enemy fire. I ran over and leaned headfirst into the tank’s turret where he had fallen. With the help of the tank’s crew I pulled the battalion commander out just before he died. It was an agonizing moment. Lieutenant Colonel Turner was a good man and much revered. At least the tank column could keep moving again.

I never did get back to my unit. The last thing I remember was being in Carentan with three others, walking headlong through town in an attempt to reach E Company. All I knew was that they were meeting fierce resistance and needed medics. The next thing I knew, I was in the hospital with a cast on my leg from ankle to hip. I have no idea why. I have no recollection of how I got wounded. There was no record of anybody picking me up. One moment I was trying to get back to my unit. The next minute I was in the hospital in a cast.

In the hospital I got the Purple Heart, the Bronze Star for my actions trying to save Lieutenant Colonel Turner (I never knew who recommended me for it), and the Croix de Guerre. Somebody stole my uniform, all my equipment, my medals, and everything I had.

They wouldn’t send me back to my unit because of my condition. They figured that because I was still in and out I either had a concussion or was a victim of combat fatigue. They ran me through all these tests. A doctor determined I had a severe concussion and had cracked three vertebrae in my neck. Those were causing the blackouts.

That was all I needed to know. Five of us decided to go AWOL, left the hospital, and went back to the 506th. I was with the unit for fifty-one days trying to get set up to go to Holland. It’s funny—for those fifty-one days I am still counted AWOL, even though I was back with my unit. After that time they sent me to the general hospital in England to serve in the seriously wounded ward. I was still blacking out occasionally.

Working in the ward turned out to be one of my favorite experiences. Sometimes we worked two to three days straight on the guys, if a convoy came in, but it felt like we could actually do some good for the men. The doctors and nurses took me under their wing. I got so I could give penicillin shots without waking a guy up. That felt important. It was an honor to serve in that ward.

It’s true, we saw some horrific things in the ward. Some guys were in really bad shape. The Germans had a land mine called the castrator. It was a long bullet about eight inches long. They stuck it in the soil, and all that could be seen was the tip of the bullet. Guys stepped on it, and the blast went up the leg. One night we had thirty-four men wounded in this manner. Some lost legs, some had their lower legs shattered. You can imagine it.

I stayed with the general hospital in England until I was transferred to another general hospital, in France. There, I helped the chaplain. When I was a kid, I had found out that I was immune to almost all the common diseases. So the chaplain had me go into the communicable-disease ward to talk to the guys.