We Who Are Alive and Remain (8 page)

I said, “If I don’t make it, I want to get back out and join the air force as a bombardier.”

He said, “I think that can be arranged.”

I joined up right there. I think it was after dinner. They carried me out to the country for Mama to sign my papers so I could get in. Then they shipped me out that night. I went to Fort McPherson, then over to Toccoa.

As it turned out, I made the paratroopers all right, and everything went smooth from then on.

Why did I volunteer for the paratroopers? Well, I had never done anything like that before, and it sounded like fun. In fact, it
was
fun—until they sent us overseas.

Fortunately, I didn’t get the same test for color-blindness that I had in the navy. With the navy, they gave me a page full of colored dots and I had to say which number was on it. I got one of those wrong, so that was it for the navy. Now, I don’t think I’m even color-blind. I can tell all the different blues and greens and yellows. But that particular number I couldn’t pick out of those dots. They didn’t give me that test for the paratroopers. I never had any trouble with the paratroopers.

I was a sophomore in high school. It was a Sunday, a nice, sunny afternoon. I was home studying and heard about it on radio. We were just shocked. None of us knew where Pearl Harbor was. After that, we learned quickly. When we came back to school on Monday they had the radio on at school. President Roosevelt gave his declaration of war. We thought it was terrible that somebody would do that to our country. Everybody about my age group or just a little older volunteered for the service right away. I was fifteen, so I waited a bit.

My mother and father were from Austria and Poland, and in the months before Pearl Harbor we heard in the news how the egomaniacs in Europe had gobbled up country after country. That intensified the situation for us. On December 7, 1941, we had the radio on at home and heard the news that Japan had bombed Pearl Harbor. I knew right then that I wanted to join the army. I had almost completed the enlistment process when the recruiter demanded to see my birth certificate. Earlier I had told him I was eighteen, but I was only sixteen. When I couldn’t produce a birth certificate, he told me to go home and grow up. That ended my army career for the time being.

I had so much I wanted to do in life, and with the war on I felt like I was wasting my time in high school, so I quit. (Later in life I regretted not graduating, even though after the war I took classes and got my GED.) Early in 1942 I and two friends of mine took a bus to the Twin Cities in Minnesota to try to get a job in a defense plant. We wanted to do something to help the war effort. They wouldn’t hire us in a defense plant; underage again. But the Armours meat-packing plant in South St. Paul was desperate for help, so we got hired there. That’s where I got well acquainted with blood and guts. When summer 1942 came I decided to try something different so I hopped a freight train to Tulsa, Oklahoma, and got hired to drive a truck hauling beans during the harvest. With the harvest over I heard the railroad was hiring men, so I signed on there. We rode a day coach to Needles, California, where the workers were needed.

I was awestruck at what I saw in California. You could just reach up to a tree and eat your fill of oranges and grapefruit, or sleep outside and be comfortable. But after working for the railroad for a while the heat became unbearable, so I hitchhiked to the ocean and looked for another type of work. I found a refrigerator box under a roller coaster in Long Beach and camped out. That was my home for a while.

One day I stopped by a movie set where they were filming a Western. Being used to horses, I asked if they needed someone to ride them. They said they could use me as an extra, so I signed on. I was a good-looking kid, blond, blue-eyed, well built. They asked for my phone number so they could call me in again. Unfortunately I didn’t have a phone at the refrigerator box, so that ended my movie career. Whenever I see a John Wayne movie, I think he probably got my job.

I had always dreamed of flying a plane, so I hitchhiked to San Diego to enroll in a vocational school that taught flying. I had seen P-38s at a military airport and decided I wanted to fly one in the service of my country. I attended classes so I’d be ready when the air force was ready for me, and got a job as a soda jerk in a Waffle House on Market Street to feed myself. I could eat all the waffles, banana split sundaes, malts, and sodas I wanted. With all the free fruit off the trees, I was well fed. I found a small house to rent in Ocean Beach that I shared with three other men who worked in a defense plant. I commuted to school on a bus for ten cents each way.

Five or six months after enrolling in the vo-tech school they tested my eyes and found that I was partially color-blind and had poor depth perception. They told me then that I would never be able to be a pilot. That took the wind out of my sails, so I decided to head home to see my folks. I stuck out my thumb and made it back.

In International Falls I worked on the farm, logged, hunted, and fished until I turned eighteen. On my birthday I hightailed it down to the recruiting office and signed up for the army. This time they took me right in. 1t was 1943. I rode a bus to Fort Snelling for induction and right on to Fort McClellan, Alabama, for basic training.

A football buddy and I were out at Dearborn Village, a museum featuring the life and accomplishments of Henry Ford. We were riding a bus from one location to another when somebody stopped the bus and said the United States had just been attacked. The bus driver turned on the radio news, where we heard the details. A few women started crying. I didn’t know where Pearl Harbor was; I thought it might have been some remote U.S. military installation, but started joking with my buddy that if we lost the war we’d all be eating fish heads and rice soon.

Here’s a story that relates to Pearl Harbor—back when I was about 6, just before the Depression hit, I had what they called a wild tooth. My father took me to the dentist, who said I needed braces. My father said, “Pull the tooth.” The dentist argued, saying that pulling that tooth would be the worst thing for me and that my teeth would be crooked my whole life unless I got braces. Dad said, “You pull that tooth out or I’ll take him home and yank it out myself with a pair of pliers.” That was the way he was. The dentist pulled it. I didn’t know it then, but that small act would affect my whole life.

When Pearl Harbor happened, thousands of American kids my age immediately joined the military. I was the same way. Now, when it came to enlisting, the important thing for me was the quality of the soldiers I was going to be with. I wanted to be in the absolute highest-quality group where I would not hesitate to have my life depend on others’ performance. I signed up for the marines because I thought they were the best, but the doctor there said they couldn’t pass me because my teeth wouldn’t bite together. He said, “Come back and enlist in a couple of weeks. They’re going to relax the standards then.”

I was furious. It was just my teeth; the rest of me was in great shape. I said, “I’m not coming back, then—or ever! I’ll find something better than the damn marines. I don’t know what, but I’ll find it.”

Here’s the twist: if I had joined the marines then, I would have been in one of the very earliest groups to go overseas and invade the Pacific islands. My chances of survival would have been very slim.

When the marines wouldn’t take me I checked around. The rangers and the paratroopers were two other high-quality groups. I liked the idea of the paratroopers more, so I enlisted there. I ended up going to Toccoa with one of the first groups of paratroopers—all thanks to a wild tooth.

A bunch of friends used to hang out and eat ice cream in a little coffee shop on Ridge Avenue. That’s where we were when we heard the Japanese had attacked Pearl Harbor. We thought, Hoo boy, what a mistake they made. The Japanese—we can just walk right over there. That was our first impression, anyway. Boy, were we ever wrong. Back then we thought Japan was not much of a country to be reckoned with. It was so small. The truth is that they were better prepared to face war than we were at the time.

It didn’t matter who you talked to—pretty soon all my friends knew we were going to be drafted. None of us doubted it. So I put on my thinking cap and figured out what would be the best thing to do. In school we had studied the history of World War I. It was all trench warfare, guys getting shot as they went over the top, and I thought, Boy, that’s not for me. But the paratroopers—you jump out of a plane and you’re on your own. If you survive, it’s to your own initiative. Fine, then; the paratroopers it would be.

In July 1942 I signed up. At the swearing-in ceremony I met four guys who would all become part of Easy Company: Forrest Guth, Rod Strohl, Carl Fenstermaker, and Walter Gordon, who was from Mississippi but for some reason had enlisted in Philadelphia. The four of us were eventually put in 3rd Platoon, so we were able to stay close through the war. We joined in Philadelphia, then went to Indiantown Gap for a couple of days where we got our group together. Then they put us on a train down to Toccoa.

Cutting Teeth at Toccoa

In July and August 1942, young men from all parts of the United States gathered at Camp Toccoa, Georgia, where the 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment was activated.

I was surprised at the intensity of physical training at Toccoa. There was a reason to the intensity, and it didn’t take long to figure it out: they wanted the best. If a guy couldn’t do something, he was gone. Just like that.

I played high school football and considered myself in great shape. Boy, was I in for a surprise. The first day at Toccoa I suited up in the assigned trunks, T-shirt and boots, looked up, and saw Mount Currahee—3½ miles up, 3½ miles back. I thought, Well, we’re going to be here for four months of training; probably by the end of that time we’ll climb to the top of that mountain. The same afternoon somebody blew a whistle and they ran us up to the top and back. A lot of guys dropped out right then.

The reason I made it that first day? Ahead of me was a guy I considered very old. He was probably twenty-five or twenty-six. He’d been out drinking the night before, and the alcohol fumes were coming off him. I thought, Well, if that old guy can make it, I can, too. He went all the way to the top and back. I did, too. That was Jack Ginn, from Oklahoma.

After the first day, running Currahee became an everyday thing for us. Captain Herbert Sobel, our company commander, led the group in the runs. People always talk about Sobel’s incompetence, but he could run with the best of them. The guys all complained about Currahee, but it soon began to stand for something. Currahee separated the troops. Sometimes the guys would have a couple of beers at night and someone would say, “Let’s go and run the mountain.” So guys ran Currahee just for the hell of it. We wanted to be the best.

You have to realize that most guys who tried out for the paratroopers were all highly motivated, physically fit young guys to begin with. Being a paratrooper was voluntary. At Toccoa you could drop out anytime. If a guy dropped out he usually went to a regular infantry outfit. Guys regularly came in for a day or two, tried the training, and were gone by day two or three.

When I initially joined, I wondered if I could make it. But soon I knew I would. It was an issue of pride. I looked around and knew I was as good as any of the guys there. I knew I could do this. It came back to that persistence thing I learned as a kid.

Everything at Toccoa was extremely physical. One time we had a bunch of telephone poles. Ten or twelve guys lay on their backs and worked together to do bench presses with the poles. These were huge logs, mind you—it’s a wonder one of them didn’t slip and crush a man.

I think I was fairly immature at this stage of my life. At Toccoa we had a no-nonsense drill sergeant named Harvey Moorehead. He was tough as nails and played a strong role in having me grow up. One time we were standing at attention and I made some comment to the guy next to me. Sergeant Moorehead barked out a command: “You men are at attention. There is no talking in ranks. And Private Tipper”—he spoke the next phrase very deliberately—“one more word from you and you are out!” I knew he meant it. I chose to shape up right then.

At the end of our time at Toccoa we went to Atlanta, where we boarded a train for Fort Benning, Georgia. At Benning we made our five jumps and became qualified paratroopers. How did we get from Toccoa to Atlanta? We marched—all 118 miles. I don’t think that will ever be equaled. It started out as a rumor that went around camp. Colonel Sink read a magazine article where the Japanese Army had marched 88 miles in three days, so he wanted to outdo that. He said, “My men can do a hell of a lot better than that.”

When we heard we were actually going to make the hike, the reaction from the guys was pretty good. “Hell, we can do that,” someone said. We believed we could do anything. So we marched the distance in three days, carrying full equipment. You think of Georgia as having good weather all the time, but when we marched it was in freezing rain. The temperatures dipped so low that our boots froze at night. We toughed it out. My feet are still not the same today; I’ve got one foot where I can’t walk on concrete for long thanks to that hike. It was difficult, but I’m glad we had that experience.

When we finally arrived in Atlanta the next day, we had a fifteen-mile parade in Class A uniforms from Oglethorpe University to the train station. We were in a foul mood when we started the parade but got into the spirit of it as we went along.

Here’s a story about the hike: Company E had a sergeant, Sherman Irish, sort of a golden boy who smiled all the time. He was a favorite of Captain Sobel’s, or certainly didn’t have a conflict with him, like others did. Irish was competent; everybody loved the guy.