We Who Are Alive and Remain (18 page)

After that I operated a switchboard for trunk lines throughout France. I don’t know how I got hooked up with that, but I took to it naturally.

We started moving toward Ravenoville. At the southern edge of a village stood a compound called Marmion Farm, which was being used by the Germans as a headquarters and supply depot. The compound consisted of three two-story buildings in a horseshoe shape. My guess is that there were sixty or seventy Germans holding this place. I think many of them were still asleep when we crept up. They had trenches dug all around the place, but I’m not sure if the trenches were manned. They didn’t seem well prepared.

Three different groups of Americans attacked the farm, virtually all at once: our eighteen men; a second group, with about seven Easy Company men; and a third group, led by Major John Stopka of the 3d Battalion of the 502nd. The men called Stopka the Mad Major. He was a total wild man, yet he was much respected and knew what he was doing. Besides Mellett and me, the other men from E Company involved were Floyd Talbert, C. T. Smith, David Morris, Daniel West, Walter Gordon, John Eubanks, and Forrest Guth. After the attack we held the place, functioning as one group.

The initial battle was very quick, maybe five or ten minutes. I don’t think there were casualties on our side. We took the buildings, and the Germans mostly disappeared or surrendered. Soon after that, the Germans started to get organized and began counterattacking the farm about once every hour. We didn’t have any automatic weapons with us. Nobody had even a tommy gun.

The location must have been on the American maps as enemy targets, because we started getting fired on by the U.S. Navy just off the beach. I don’t know what size shells they were, but the whole ground shook. I don’t know how anybody can survive continual bombardment. The three shells that hit just about finished me off—I couldn’t believe what was happening. We produced orange flags and orange smoke, which identified us as American. Thankfully the shelling of the farm quickly ended.

We stationed men on the roof of the farmhouse, which the Germans had not done when they had possession of it. Our men, yelling stuff like “About a dozen of them coming at six o’clock,” were able to spot the positions of the Germans as they counterattacked. We held the place all that day and the morning of the next.

One German machine gun stationed down the road was really giving us problems. Stopka asked for volunteers; men from his company quickly agreed. The men gathered about twenty German prisoners and marched them down the road toward the machine gun. The fire stopped. One of the Americans hollered out in German to the machine gunner, “You can surrender or leave the machine gun there and walk away. If you don’t, we’re going to kill these prisoners. Which is it going to be?” Almost immediately the machine gunner opened up into his comrades. I think all were killed, as were a few of the American volunteers. The rest made it back to safety all right.

Early the next morning one guy entered the compound, hands raised. We were all up and awake, expecting an attack. The guy yelled in perfect English, “Don’t shoot, men. I was lost, but now I’m all right.” Immediately one of our guys killed him with a single shot.

We were all astonished. “What in the hell did you do that for?” someone said.

“Look at the boots,” said the man who killed the German. It was true—this guy wore an American paratrooper jumpsuit but had German hobnail boots. He was a German who knew how to speak English. I don’t know what he was hoping to do. Probably his commander had told him to get as close as he could to us, maybe mix in with our group for a while to find out what was going on. He was as good as dead anyway. He stood on grass when our man shot him, but if he had gone in any building the sound of his boots on a stone floor would have given him away. There was no way he could have succeeded.

Close to noon we saw about 150 men on the horizon, walking toward us. It was like something out of a movie. At first we weren’t sure if they were Germans, but they turned out to be the seaborne infantry who had landed at Utah Beach. Some accounts say they arrived at Marmion Farm at dawn, but that is not true; they arrived about eleven-thirty or twelve o’clock. Regardless, it was a good thing because our ammunition had run dangerously low. I doubt if we could have held the place much longer.

Normandy was a lot of fighting, a lot of killing. But I’ll always look upon myself as fortunate that I got to jump out of a plane on D-day compared to the guys who came in on the beaches. They had it really tough.

After the jump, I landed and met up with Buck Taylor and Bill Kiehn. We didn’t know which way to go, but we had a general idea. We spent most of that night with the 82nd. The next morning we split off. As we walked down this road we saw a glider in a field. We figured somebody might be hurt or need help, so we went over to the glider to check things out. The glider had a jeep in it, reared up on its rear wheels, just about perpendicular. There wasn’t a soul around. “Let’s get that jeep,” Taylor said. “We’ll ride to the beach.”

That sounded like a good idea to us. The jeep had some braces on it; that’s the reason it was stuck. So Kiehn said, “Let’s take some C-4, put a little charge on it, and blast it out.” We were all trained in explosives. Kiehn took a little chunk of C-4 and put a cap in it. We walked off and hit the charge. We didn’t realize that the jeep had been leaking gasoline. It blew up—everything caught on fire, the jeep, the glider. Kiehn looked at me and grinned. “It’s a good thing Sobel didn’t see that,” he said.

Captain Sobel wasn’t our company commander by then. I saw him after D-day. He was standing next to a river, so I went down, saluted, and spoke to him for a while. Sobel asked, “How did it go, Shifty?”

“It went all right,” I said. “We did our part of it.” I shrugged. “Popeye got a hand grenade popped on his butt.”

“Serves him right,” Sobel said. It sounds harsh now, but I understood what he meant, even then. It wasn’t the idea that he didn’t appreciate Popeye as a soldier. It was the idea that everybody had been so well trained it was a shame anybody got hurt.

The Battle of Carentan

It was D-day plus three or four before we finally found our way to Easy Company, just as they were getting ready for the attack on Carentan. Winters said, “Where have you been?” It was a friendly comment, not critical, though he clearly expected to see us earlier. I always got along well with Winters.

A lot of fellows were still missing. We organized into our proper platoons and squads as best we could. Carwood Lipton was there, and Winters had him take over as company first sergeant. Then Winters turned to me and said, “You take over the 3rd Platoon.” So that was my first job as platoon sergeant, and I stayed in that role throughout the war. There was a great bunch of guys in the 3rd Platoon, a very close-knit group of fellows. I couldn’t say enough good about them all.

I was wounded three times in the war: the first time happened just after Carentan. A grenade came over a hedgerow and caught me lightly in a leg. It wasn’t that bad of a wound. I probably should not have been evacuated, but at the time they were trying to keep the aid stations clear, expecting a lot of casualties. So most of fellows who were as lightly wounded as I were evacuated. Carwood was, too. We were almost ready to go back to England, anyway. We just got there earlier than the rest of the guys. I spent about two weeks in a hospital in England. That’s where I lost my camera. I had a 35mm camera with me and had taken a lot of pictures in Normandy. I had it with me when I got to the hospital, but when I checked out I forgot it hanging on my bed and never got it back. I don’t remember what any of the pictures were that I had taken.

Carentan was a real hornet’s nest. This was where I really found what war was like. There were eight or nine of us going from door to door and house to house. It was horrible to hear all the shooting. There was a lot of killing going on. One guy got a blast directly in his face.

Not long after that, Winters came up and said, “I need five guys for a patrol—you, you, you, you, and you.” He pointed at me to go. Albert Blithe was one of the other guys. We were supposed to check out a house. We heard there were snipers in there. We got about twenty-five yards away from the house and all of a sudden—wham—Blithe gets hit. The bullet hit the back of his neck, and a piece of his collarbone came out. I had two T-shirts, one in my right pocket, one in my left. If I needed a clean shirt, I always had one. I took a shirt out, turned Blithe over on his front because the hole was so big in his back, and stuffed the shirt in the wound to stop the blood flow. We took turns carrying him back to the hedgerow, where the medics were ready to take him out. While we were carrying him, the Krauts were still shooting at us. We could feel the bullets go by our ears, but nobody got hit. They must have been blind. That was one hell of a bad one.

After that we didn’t do too much until we got ready to be sent back to England. Boy, when we got to that beach, there were lines and lines of supplies, food, you name it—they had it. There must have been three rows on the beach thirty feet high, about half a mile long, maybe one to two miles. They were coming in constantly with all the stuff. It was really a sight to see.

We found E Company near Ste. Mère Dumont. It was just before we went into Carentan. Carentan was really the first battle where I saw a lot of action. We had to have that town because it was on an important route to the beach. That was a pretty tough one. We went in with hand grenades and got the Germans. It wasn’t too hard, but the next night, they returned. They took back Carentan and beat up the town with all the shelling and bombing, so we took it back from them. After the Germans were driven out, we found some wine and helped ourselves to it.

There was a crossroads beyond Carentan that was identified as Dead Man’s Corner. An American tank had been disabled there. Some of the crew were climbing out, and a man was shot. He hung over the edge of the tank for days. We couldn’t get in to retrieve the body. So if someone was sent out on a scouting mission, you’d say, “Well, you go up to Dead Man’s Corner and take a left,” or whatever. I saw it. What did I think? My thoughts always go back to the parents—here’s their kid who wouldn’t be coming back. I got this feeling all the way through. It didn’t matter if I saw a dead American or German, I always figured he belonged to somebody. You knew somebody was going to miss him.

Around the end of June we headed back to the beach to get on troop carriers to head back to England. We had no idea what would come next. Just before we boarded the ship, a number of us jumped in the Channel. It was our first decent bath in weeks.

We attacked Carentan. Man, we were really fighting there. Me and a couple other guys could see around the corner of a building to a downstairs area with some Krauts in it. We decided to throw grenades at the target. As we rushed around with the grenades, I ran around the corner and was stopped flat by a German. I plowed straight into his bayonet. His weapon stuck fast in my gut. We were both frozen, still standing up—I think he was as scared as I was. I shot first. As he fell backward he pulled his bayonet out of my stomach. I put two rounds into him. I wasn’t shooting to wound then.

I crumpled next to the German, blood spurting out of my stomach, and jammed myself with a morphine syrette. About twenty minutes later, a medic ran over. He gave me another hit of morphine. They put me on a stretcher and took me back to Omaha Beach. I got two shots of morphine there. Then I got another three shots as we were heading back across the Channel. Man—I was flying like hell. Turns out, the wound in my belly was very fortunate. The bayonet had not gone that far in. If you look at your belly button, the bayonet punctured to the right of that, down about an inch. It missed all the vital organs. Just a lot of blood.

After I got across the Channel to the hospital they gave me another hit of morphine every two hours ’round the clock for four days. I had never smoked or drank before, so when I took morphine, I was very high. Coming down, it felt like my guts were ripping apart. They lowered the dosage down to one hit a day. About a week later I was off of it, but my mind still demanded more. I didn’t want to carry this with me, so I asked them to put me in a rubber room to dry me out. They did. That was the worst four days of my life. I was cramped, bent over, throwing up for the first two days solid. It started easing the third day. Late on the fourth day my body didn’t want any morphine anymore. After that whenever I got wounded I would not use morphine syrettes. Whenever I was issued syrettes I handed them over to a medic right away.

When I was hit, I went to the 92nd General Hospital in England. Two wards down from me was a big ward for the merchant marine. You’ll never guess who I saw.

I thought the world of him. I knew his voice. He was a big man, about 6 foot 2, maybe 240 pounds; nobody else sounded like him. I walked out of the ward I was in and heard this loud Scotch brogue. It knew instantly it was my father.

Dad was in the hospital for hypothermia. A first mate by then, he had been making a run to Russia on his ship, taking high octane gas over, when his ship had been torpedoed. They had to abandon ship. He had drifted on the North Sea for two days.

Dad couldn’t believe it. He saw me and gave me a big hug. We got hold of one of the orderlies and liberated a bottle of Scotch. We shared it around with the ward. (I think we were all in worse shape leaving the place than when we came in.) Dad and I talked of Mom and everything at home. It was mostly small talk. We hugged a bunch of times. I gave him a Luger I had with me in the hospital. One of the wounded troopers, I think it was George Luz, had given it to me. Dad wouldn’t put the Luger down. He thought it was a really great gift.