We Who Are Alive and Remain (2 page)

An Elite, Experimental Fighting Unit

Someone had driven a bulldozer up the side of Mount Currahee, the three-and-a-half-mile-long incline at Camp Toccoa, Georgia. In the bulldozer’s wake lay a jagged swath of gulley. Rocks and furrows pressed up into the cut. Whenever rain fell, which wasn’t often in the summer heat, a creek gushed down Camp Toccoa’s newest running track.

One company of soldiers—about 140 men—grunted up the path early one morning in August 1942, led by Captain Herbert Sobel, Easy Company’s commander. The men jogged in formation, one behind another, equidistant from each other side to side. If a rock reared up in a man’s path, he was not allowed to swerve. He leaped over the obstacle, muscles taut, hoping he didn’t roll his ankle or bloody his shin.

Private Ed Tipper, a young Irishman from Detroit, ran Currahee that morning. He gasped with the other recruits, sides aching, legs pounding, wondering if he had the necessary stuff to make it into the paratroopers. Ahead of him ran one of the senior citizens of the bunch, Jack Ginn, already an old man at twenty-five. Ginn had been out drinking the night before and stank, Tipper reported. As the sweet, ugly smell wafted back, Tipper felt a strange sense of determination. Ginn continued to run, hangover and all, and Tipper figured that if Ginn could make it to the top, boozy as he was, then certainly he would be able to make it, too.

In that same pack ran a Virginia coal kid named Shifty Powers. A fabulous rifle shot since his days in the Clincho backwoods, he dreamed of making it into the Airborne. The paratroopers were simply the best. It was an all-volunteer program. A man could quit any time he wanted. The majority of men didn’t withstand the arduous training and washed out into other military branches. Sixty-six years later Powers described the hope: “At the time the army didn’t have specialist units like they have now. The paratroopers were the best-trained soldiers America had. We were the equivalent of today’s Green Berets or Navy SEALs. All the training we had—you got so you knew what the guy next to you was going to do—and he knew what you were going to do.”

Powers noted that the army was trying something new at Toccoa. Until then, men went to basic training first, then were sent to various units. But the army decided to lump the 101st’s basic training and paratrooper training into one place and time, and train the entire division together. The end result, so army officials hoped, would be to produce a group of men unparalleled in their cohesiveness. The paratroopers of the 101st would be deadly, efficient, unmatched on the battlefield. “So that’s what we did,” Powers said. “We started together in Toccoa, and went all the way through the war together. And at the end, those of us who were left, we were still together.”

In that same pack ran Rod Bain, the son of a World War I veteran. Ask Bain to describe Easy Company today and he thinks for a moment: “Average age, probably twenty. Very young, very eager to do well in combat. We trained constantly in the Deep South, then in England, always training to be one of the army’s first-class units. We trained from August 1942 until we jumped into France twenty-two months later. We received far more training than the average soldier. As a unit we were together almost two years before entering combat via parachute.”

Running up Currahee at Toccoa was just the start of Easy Company’s adventures. In the years to come, they would sweat and struggle and live and bleed together. Some men’s war ended on June 6, 1944, during the jump into Normandy. Others met their fate in Operation Market Garden, September to November 1944, the Allies’ failed attempt to liberate Holland and force an early end to the war. The men huddled together in foxholes in Belgium, December 1944 to January 1945, during one of the coldest winters on record. They lobbed shells at the enemy across the river in Hagenau, fought their way through France and Germany, liberated concentration camps, and drank a toast to victory in April 1945 at Berchtesgaden, Hitler’s posh hideout in the Alps.

The group developed its cohesiveness in stages. Not all Easy Company men were present at Toccoa in early 1942. Replacements and transfers joined the company throughout the war. A Pennsylvania wildcat named Ed Joint joined the company at Camp Mackall, North Carolina. Joint caught the vision for being a paratrooper right away and carried it fearlessly through the war. “Our job was to jump out of a plane and hit the ground ready to fight,” Joint says. “We were used to being surrounded by the enemy. That didn’t bother us none.”

An engineering student from Marquette University named Herb Suerth Jr. joined the unit at Bastogne. He had initially signed on with a company of engineers but soon applied to the paratroopers, completed training, and joined Easy Company. Bastogne is where he saw firsthand the result of his decision to transfer to the 101st: “On my first day going up to the line at Bastogne,” Suerth says, “we got out of the truck, it was just getting light. As we climbed out, all of a sudden everyone fell into combat intervals, columns of two by the side of the road. Guys went out in the woods to scout. All this happened with no commands—it just happened automatically. The men very suddenly turned themselves into combat machines. I saw this and said to myself, ‘Whoa, this is a real combat outfit. They know what they’re doing.’ That’s when I knew why I wanted to be with Easy Company and not with a bunch of deadbeats who wanted to shoot themselves in the foot.”

It’s been noted that soldiers in premodern eras sometimes went unnamed. A man was more efficient, so it was thought, if he was simply known as
soldier
—one of the many. But modern soldiers have names. Although the men of Easy Company functioned as a group during the war, all were individuals. They grew up in various places all over America. They had brothers and sisters, fathers and mothers. They had jobs, loved women, and dreamed of careers if and when they returned from battle. To help us start to get to know these men, two chapters near the beginning of the book are devoted to the individual histories of the men of Easy Company.

The action picks up again starting with Pearl Harbor—the day when everything changed. Then it’s nonstop throttle forward to the end of the war. By the end of the book, as readers, we will feel we know these men, the survivors, on a deeper level. It’s in tribute that we read about the lives they led after combat, how difficult it was for many to sort through the horror they had seen, and how few emerged from combat unscathed despite being victors. That’s all to come.

But at the start of the book, simply envision the men of Easy Company wrestling their way up Mount Currahee one humid morning in July 1942. Surviving the mountain was their first test. One after another they took the challenge with resolution, each man developing the seed of an unconquerable spirit that followed him through the challenges to come.

In the words of Dewitt Lowrey, who ran Currahee that morning in 1942, “We were all young, carefree, ten feet tall, and bulletproof.”

5,800
men volunteered to become paratroopers with the original 2d Battalion of the 506th PIR at Camp Toccoa, Georgia, 1942, an elite experimental fighting unit of World War II.

 

1,948
of the 5,800 made the cut. The rest washed out of training and were sent to other branches of the military.

 

140
men from the 1,948 formed the original Easy Company in Toccoa. Easy Company, along with Dog, Fox, and Battalion companies, comprised the 2d Battalion.

 

366
men are listed as belonging to Easy Company, 506th PIR, by war’s end due to transfers and (mostly) replacements. Their names are listed in tribute in the appendix section of this book.

 

49
Easy Company men were killed in action. Their names are listed in tribute in the appendix section of this book. The majority of Easy Company men were wounded, many more than once. The company took some 150 percent casualties.

 

40
of the 366 Easy Company veterans were known to be alive at the beginning of the research and writing of this book, fall 2007, according to the Men of Easy Company Association roster. Other survivors may be alive today but are not accounted for.

 

3
of the 40 died before research on the book was completed in spring 2008. Men of valor, they are listed here in tribute: Jim Alley, Max Clark, Roy Pickel Sr.

 

5
Easy Company veterans were not approached for this book due to previously published memoirs. Men of valor, they are listed here in tribute: Buck Compton, Babe Heffron, Bill Guarnere, Don Malarkey, Dick Winters.

 

12
of the 32 remaining men declined to participate in this book, some due to health reasons, some because of a desire to remain out of the public eye, some for reasons unspoken, a few could not be contacted, some because they are contributing to another project solely about the 3rd Platoon. Men of valor, they are listed here in tribute: James Benton, Ed Bernat, James Coombs, Jack Foley, Bradford Freeman, Father Leo Matz, Bill Maynard, Philip Perugini, Paul Rogers, Ed Shames, J. B. Stokes, Rod Strohl.

 

20
of the 32 remaining men of Easy Company agreed to participate in this book. These are their stories.

 

 

Sources:
Stephen Ambrose,
Band of Brothers.
Dick Winters and Cole Kingseed,
Beyond Band of Brothers,
(Toccoa statistics compiled by Major General Salve Matheson), the Men of Easy Company Association.

Always let the men speak for themselves.

—Stephen Ambrose

A Future That Nobody Could Prepare Us For

The first time I killed a man was out of desperation.

After I jumped in Normandy, I tried for some time to get back to my unit. I saw some horrible things along the way. It was typical to see a man lying on the ground with his chest split open. In one place there was one dead American paratrooper surrounded by nineteen dead Germans. In another place an American was found—the SS had hung him upside down, cut his throat, and stuck his testicles in his mouth. You sort of blank those things out.

As we rushed around with the grenades, I ran around a corner in Carentan 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.

Under heavy fire you don’t know whether you’re mad or scared. You can’t fight artillery. Small-arms fire—it doesn’t bother you at all, you can fight back. But when you get in an artillery barrage, you can’t. Me, I get more angry than scared. I can’t do anything about it. There’s nothing to fight.

I went out of the plane, checked my chute, and heard somebody hollering above me. I looked up and there’s old Blaine knee-deep in my silk. He was looking down at me through the apex of my chute, screaming and hollering. I told him to get the hell off me. He had jumped and came down right on top of my chute. When he did that, his chute collapsed because there was no weight on it anymore. I knew we couldn’t land like that. Even if all went fine, Blaine would fall the length of my chute, about thirty feet, as soon as I hit the ground. I kept hollering for him to step off.

A crossroads 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 was standing in the doorway when this blast hit me. It knocked me back. I didn’t feel any pain, though my right eye had been destroyed by the concussion and both my legs had been broken. Strangely enough, I was still standing and didn’t drop my weapon. Joe Leibgott ran across the street. “You’ve just been hit by a mortar shell,” he said. “Sit down.” I reached up. My helmet had been blown off. My head felt like a watermelon, swollen and mushy, and blood was everywhere. I was in shock and my muscles had all tensed—that’s the reason I was still able to stand and control everything. I sat. Several of the guys had seen the hit and thought I was dead. Eight or ten months later I visited Floyd Talbert’s parents back in the States. They wrote to Floyd and said that Ed Tipper had come by to visit them. He wrote back, saying, “That’s impossible. He was killed. I saw it. Whoever’s claiming to be Tipper is someone else.” He couldn’t believe I was still alive.

There’d be about six or seven of us sitting around in one of those old barns in Mourmelon, playing poker. Now, when you’re playing poker, you’ve got to concentrate. One of the guys took a hand grenade, screwed the top off, and poured the powder out. He put the grenade back together and loosened the pin. While we were playing poker, the guy came in and worked the pin so the grenade popped off his vest and fell on the floor. “Live grenade!” he hollered. Everybody in there dove anywhere he could. Money and cards flew everywhere. The guy who dropped the grenade ran off. It was all a big joke.

Heading up to Bastogne in the middle of the coldest winter in thirty years, I didn’t have any boots. The old shoes I had wouldn’t work—I couldn’t run in those. I took them off and threw them away. I had some heavy wool socks, so I put them on, then wrapped some burlap sacks around my feet with some leather shoelaces I had. That’s what I wore in Bastogne.

Buck Taylor and I came across the body of a dead German soldier in the snow. He appeared to be about twelve or thirteen years old. Buck and I buried the boy.