We Who Are Alive and Remain (24 page)

I always figured that Captain Speirs had the right outlook on life:
Don’t worry about it, you’re dead already. You just keep on moving. If it’s your time, it’s your time.
One time I was really shaky and one of the chaplains talked to me. He said, “What’s the matter?”

“I’m afraid of getting killed,” I said.

He said, “Do you believe in Jesus?”

I said, “Yes, I do.”

He said, “Clancy, that’s what’s important. You don’t need to worry about dying. You may go home and sit in a chair and die that way. We all die. But everybody has something to do before being taken. You do that.” That stuck with me. Ron Speirs was the same way. I liked him better than Winters, to tell you the truth.

When the war was all over, I stayed in the service, this time with B Company, 508th, because E Company, 506th, had been disbanded by then. I took my wife with me back to Frankfurt, Germany. The army sent us there for three years, 1947 to 1949. We were the only airborne combat unit left there. Our specific job was to counteract the Russians. If you gave them an inch of territory they’d always claim a foot.

When I got to Germany, my wife and I had a nice two-bedroom apartment. We were also allotted a driver and a maid. So I went and found an old German paratrooper from the 6th German Airborne to work for us. He and his wife were living in a bombed-out building with just a sheet stretched across the opening of the building. Their children had been killed. I got them out of there, got them ID cards and new clothes, and they came to live with us. All their belongings fit into one paper sack. We had two bedrooms and only needed one.

They were a very nice family. The man’s name was George Stinz. He and I swapped a lot of stories back and forth. After the war, everybody was friends. Hell, why not? We were both paratroopers. The only thing different between us was the language. He had God and country, he was drafted, he had his job to do. (Not the SS, mind you; that’s different. I’d shoot an SS man in the head if I had a chance.) George had worked as a stamper in a boot factory before the war; then he got drafted, and away he went.

George had been a sergeant in the German Army. He was at Bastogne, fighting against us. I had long talks with him and asked him once why they didn’t just roll over us at Bastogne—they had eight divisions around us. He said, “We never knew what you had. Every time we attacked, a whole bunch of artillery came on us.”

Just after the attack on Foy, Lieutenant Winters told me to go on patrol. I was about three hundred to four hundred feet away from the company, walking by myself on patrol, still in full sight of the guys at all times. If there was any of the enemy spotted, my job was to immediately give them the slug. Shelling started. It wasn’t a massive amount of shells or anything right then, just one at a time. I never even expected to get hit. It was usual to get shelled randomly—every now and again a shell would come in. It just happened that two landed close to me.

I was hit with shrapnel and got two wounds: one on the right shin-bone, the other on my left knee. A medic had a little bit of sulfa powder and dumped that on. He only had one piece of cloth, so he wrapped that around my right leg. A couple months later I talked with the medic after I got out of the hospital. He said, “Joe, I’m sorry I couldn’t give you any more than I did—that was the last that I had.” It wasn’t Gene Roe, it was another medic. Can’t remember the name.

Even though I was hit, I was still walking. The injury didn’t seem that bad. No pain, really. So I just kept going and stayed with the company. They didn’t take me to the hospital then. Several weeks later, on March 3, I noticed something bad was going on. We had moved to Hagenau by then. The wounds on my legs were festering, scabs were forming from my ankle to my knee, on both legs. An infection soon set in, and it spread from the bottom of my legs up to my knees. You’ve got to realize that for three months none of us had any change of clothes that whole time. We would relieve ourselves—it sounds funny to talk about it—but there was nothing to help you clean yourself up. The odor from your body was terrible. Everything was so filthy. Dirt was just caked to your body.

So when my legs got so bad I talked to the medic and he sent me to a holding area. I was there for about two weeks with nobody coming around to look at me or anything. Finally I nailed down another medic and said, “Hey, I gotta get this taken care of.” This is when they sent me to Germany; still nothing was happening. This is when I blew my top. I showed the guys my wounds and they couldn’t believe how bad everything looked. The doctors wanted to amputate my legs. I got hold of one of the captains and showed him my legs. He said, “O my God, that’s horrible.” He made arrangements for me to go to Liège, Belgium, to a field hospital, which was a bunch of long tents filled with wounded, but quite good medical care. When they brought me in, the nurses took a look at me and couldn’t believe what they were seeing. They wanted to know how long this had been going on like this. One of the doctors there got the idea that my legs were so bad they should amputate. There was a Major Myers from the 101st in the area. He took a look at me, then said to the doctors, “The next time I come over here I better see those legs still on him—nobody’s going to touch him.”

My legs were so bad—can you picture a lot of loose hamburger? Put it on your legs in the place where the skin is—that’s what my legs looked like. It was pus and scabs from my ankles to my knees. Nurses and doctors at the field hospital were really good, like angels from heaven. They gave me three shots of penicillin per day, five hundred thousand units. So they were really pumping me full of penicillin. Altogether, I was in the hospital eighty-eight days. Gradually I healed up.

When I was in the hospital in Belgium, Captain Speirs sent mail home to my parents marked, “killed in action.” Speirs was company commander at the time. I was a bit of a loner, often put on patrols by myself. It’s feasible that he heard I was wounded and didn’t see me, so he assumed I had been killed. The mail came home to my mother, but my sister intercepted it and held on to it without telling them anything. I continued to write letters to my folks, so that’s how my sister eventually knew I was still alive. She never told them.

Around the middle of January, the sun finally came out and we were able to get supplies flown in to us. General Patton’s tanks could move toward us, so we were up and on the move, no longer in defense around Bastogne. We pushed out in all directions, making the circle around us bigger. We took Foy and Noville and kept chasing the Germans. They were on the run.

During the short time we were occupying Foy I attended a service by a warrant officer at a small church right in the town of Foy. The church had a blown-out wall, so we just stood outside that wall for the service. The warrant officer asked us to join hands and bow our heads for prayer. He thanked the Lord for bringing us this far and asked Him to help us continue to defeat the evil still ahead of us on our way into Germany. He prayed for the men we had lost in battle and for those who were injured and had to be sent back home.

In December 2007 my wife, Renee, and I came back and visited the small town of Foy. We found the same little church. It had been rebuilt after the war. There, I spoke to a Belgian man, Joel Robert. His father was nine years old when Easy Company was in Foy in 1944. One of the GIs had asked his father if he wanted some chocolate. It was the first time his father had ever tasted chocolate. It’s very possible that I could have been that man, because I have always loved children and have always not liked chocolate.

In the middle of January 1944, we went through the city of Bastogne, now secured. We were traveling in trucks and on foot. There wasn’t much left of Bastogne, just piles of bricks and rubble where buildings used to be. There was extensive damage to the town, fallen buildings, wrecked tanks, tipped-over trucks, but it was very quiet, no sounds of artillery or explosions. There wasn’t much snow now, just mud and water.

As our group walked, Lieutenant Ron Speirs hollered at me, “How many men are in your group?”

“About thirteen,” I answered. “Why?”

“I’ve got a political duty to take care of,” Speirs said. “Round them up and follow me.”

The thirteen of us went to what used to be Bastogne’s town square. The citizens of Bastogne had made a platform with steps up to it. A Belgian officer, a Dutch officer, and a French officer, all in uniform, and a couple of city officials waited on the platform. They marched us up the steps one at a time. The Belgian officer kissed each one of us on both cheeks and placed the Belgian Fouragere on one of our shoulders. The Dutch officer presented each of us with the Dutch Order of William. The French officer awarded us the Croix de Guerre with Palm. They had a box of brass plaques and presented each of us with a commemorative plaque.

We thirteen paratroopers were given these honors and awards as representatives of the 101st Airborne. I couldn’t understand a word said during the presentations, but we had no trouble knowing what they meant. It was a highly emotional time. The people were just so appreciative for what we had done. They wanted to celebrate our victory and their freedom with us before we left the area. I still have the braids on the jacket of my old uniform and have the brass plaque hanging on the wall of my home. I have always been proud to have them as a gift from the people of Bastogne.

When I returned to Bastogne in 2007, we found the people of Bastogne have a huge memorial celebration every year. They are still so grateful to American veterans, and pass on their gratefulness to each successive generation by teaching their young people to never forget the price of freedom. In 1956 the city of Bastogne built a huge memorial on a hilltop in the form of a star. It has five points, and along the top of each point are the names of all of our states. In the center of the star, on large walls, the story of the Battle of the Bulge is engraved in large letters. Across from the memorial they built a museum dedicated to the battle.

The whole city of Bastogne is a living memorial to their liberation by the United States. Every year during the three-day celebration, hundreds of reenactors dress in vintage American uniforms. They live in tents all over town and drive American jeeps, tanks, and trucks just as they were in 1945. In the town square, which is now named McAuliffe Square, they have a large American tank and a statue of General McAuliffe. A couple of blocks away they have a large statue of General Patton. When you are there they make you aware, wherever you go, that they haven’t forgotten, and they can’t do enough for you. If you are a World War II veteran who fought in Bastogne and return in later years to visit, the people in Bastogne will plant a new tree with your name next to it on a brass plate in the Peace Woods.

On that same trip in 2007 we visited the Bois Jacques Woods with Herb Suerth and Ed Shames. Herb and I had our picture taken together standing in our old foxhole. As I stood in the woods, an eerie feeling came over me and I started to become misty-eyed. As I looked through the replanted trees I thought I heard the sounds of tanks approaching and the outline of them in the mist. I couldn’t wait to leave.

But what strikes me most strongly about that visit was how the people there are so filled with gratitude. We often hear about how America should stay out of wars in other countries. But people who live under oppression are thankful to be freed.

The whole time I was in Belgium, I never did see the actual town of Bastogne. Right when we got there, they turned us loose on the outskirts. We walked from there to the road south of Foy and dug in along the woods that ran along the road. We got our ammunition from the guys coming down the road as we were going in. I never did get an overcoat. We set up in this bunch of woods along this road south of Foy.

The real bad shelling—night of hell—that’s what I called it, was when Guarnere and Toye lost their legs. Muck and Penkala just disappeared—the shell came in and you couldn’t even find any piece of them. We were a sad-looking outfit, but we kept on going. I was on outpost that night, so I lucked out like a bandit.

Around the end of January 1944, we were sent to Alsace to take up position along the Moder River. We were put in boxcars for the trip. There was straw in the cars, but it was still very cold. Paul Rogers was platoon sergeant then, and we pulled into a little French town or someplace. He says, “We got to have some heat. We’ve been freezing to death for two months.” There was a guy sitting around a potbellied stove in the middle of this station. I don’t know what he was doing; he was part of the train outfit. So I turned to another guy and says, “You got leather gloves, put them on.” The train was going pretty slow, so we jumped out, walked up, and got the stove still going full blast with the coal in it, and put it in the boxcar. The guy just sat there looking, like “What the hell you guys doing?” But we got Rogers his heat, anyway. That warmed us up. Paul always says, “We were the only boxcar in that whole damn train with a potbellied stove.”

A little later we stopped in a railroad yard. I shot the lock off a railway car. There were 10-1 rations in it—new stuff. So we ate good from there to Hagenau. They had bacon in there, lots of good stuff, ground coffee, a lot of food. After two months we finally had a good meal.

Enemy Across the River

After Bastogne we went to Hagenau, about seventy-five to eighty miles down the river. We went there by truck and set up in this little town. The enemy was right across the river from us. Sometimes we shelled them. Sometimes they shelled us.

After Hagenau there were about twenty-one original E Company guys left. They put the names in a helmet to draw a thirty-day furlough back to the States. They had done this a few times already. This time I was the lucky one. All the guys were happy for me. I came back on a hospital ship, a nice, clean ride back. So I returned to the States. I promised a few guys I would see their families. I saw families of Carwood Lipton and Bob Mann. It was a particular treat to see the families of these guys. Lipton was married and had a boy. I informed his family of what was going on.