A Company of Heroes (11 page)

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Authors: Marcus Brotherton

BOOK: A Company of Heroes
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“Pat became a paratrooper because he wanted to be the best,” Chris said. “He didn’t just want to be the average ground-pounding grunt, not to take away from that, but he wanted to be in a special unit.” Pat held the physical fitness record at Toccoa. That’s stiff competition—to be the toughest man at Toccoa. The family has a letter from Dick Winters verifying this. In
Band of Brothers
, the series shows Pat being the goat of training, drinking water on a run when he wasn’t supposed to and having to run up and down Mount Currahee again. “We’ve asked the men who were there if that ever happened,” Gary noted. “They said, ‘Not to Christenson.’”
His young nephew kept a close watch on Pat’s experiences from basic training onward. When Pat was in jump school, he taped his nephew’s picture inside his helmet while making his five qualifying jumps, then commandeered an extra set of jump wings, which he sent home to Gary. “He told me I was a qualified jumper,” Gary said. “With those wings I was the envy of my school. In those days, everybody was well into the war effort. The armed forces were honored by teachers and students alike.”
In spite of the rigorous training, Pat kept a rueful sense of humor. After the unit was sent to Alderbourne, England, for further training, he wrote, “Our training revolved around how to fight every conceivable way, and often, large groups of men gathered at the local pub.” He described the food they ate in England—Brussels sprouts, turnips, and “I think they slipped some horse meat to us from time to time.”
Headquarters staff expected an enemy invasion on England’s airfields, so Lieutenant Winters picked three E Company men to teach unarmed combat to nearby defense units. Pat and the others selected were only privates, so Winters told them to borrow shirts from fellow sergeants in case they were challenged by the trainees. The three E Company men traveled to a nearby air base and taught the defense unit hand-to-hand combat techniques for several days. It was a rough-and-tumble crew, but Pat didn’t back down. He wrote:
After a period of time, a group came to me and exclaimed, ‘Sergeant, no one can get out of this guy’s hold. If this stuff works show us how you’d get away from him.’ There, standing in the middle of the group, was a great big 300-pounder with a smile from ear to ear.
I deliberately paused, directed a cold stare at him, then approached quickly and said, ‘Make your move.’
As soon as I felt his arms around me I immediately collapsed my legs and threw my arms over my head. I slipped out of his grasp and found the back of his neck with my hands. His body was now bent over my back. I jerked hard on the back of his neck. His body, off balance, came flying over my shoulder and struck the ground with a violent thud. Swiftly, I drove my knee into his neck. I had never executed that move as well before or since.
The crowd roared with approval. Then and there, to that group, I was untouchable.
Time to Fight
The company moved to a marshalling area near Exeter, England, then to Uppottery Airfield in preparation for the D-day invasion. Pat describes flying over to Normandy on the night of June 5, 1944. “The aircraft moved along at a smooth pace. The only noise heard was the drone of the engines.”
He was in the same plane as Lieutenant Winters, who stood in the door, watching the approaching coast of France get larger. Pat was second in line to go out the door behind Winters. Everything was quiet for some time, then a few miles into the peninsula, Winters pointed to the aircraft ahead and said, “Look, Chris, they’re catching hell up ahead of us.” Pat wrote:
The red and orange tracers were reaching for the forward aircraft. Tension began to mount, nerves became taut. A burst of flak to our right aroused those still mesmerized by the long flight. [We were] conscious now that our drop zone couldn’t be too far away.
The flak grew heavier. We stood now, ready to get the hell out of that bobbing and weaving C-47, the pilot doing his damndest to elude the fire. Antiaircraft now hammered incessantly.
It was time to go. On went the green light. Go-go-go!
As Winters left the plane, a heavy burst of 20 mm hit the tail of the plane. I thought for certain he had gone right into it. I was out the door behind him in another second.
The shock of the opening blast tore much of the gear from Pat, as it did with many of the men that night. The pilots were flying too fast and too low. Pat was a machine gunner and carried a machine gun tripod, which he lost, along with his carbine, his ammunition and musette bag.
During the decent, a machine gun traversed the 18 men in my stick with long bursts of fire. Adrenaline pumped through my body. Explosions filled the air. A C-47’s engine was on fire, about 150 feet off to my right. [The plane] seemed to be disintegrating.
A bell was ringing in a town off to my left. I thought, ‘Keep your composure, assess your situation, plan your moves quickly. Christ, I’m headed for that line of trees. I’m descending too rapidly. Concentrate on your landing.’
I could see an orchard beyond the trees. As I passed over the trees I drew my legs up to avoid hitting them. A moment of terror seized me: 70 feet below and 20 feet to my left was a German quad-mounted 20 mm antiaircraft gun. That moment it opened up, firing at the C-47s passing above.
The Germans were concentrating on shooting someone else and didn’t look and see him. “It was really fortunate,” Pat told his nephew later, “because they would have given me a burst, and that would have been it.”
It wasn’t until years later when Pat watched the movie
The Longest Day
that he understood what the ringing bell he had heard was all about. He was near the town of Ste. Mère-Église when he jumped, and had always speculated the Germans were ringing the bell as an alarm. Actually, it was the townspeople ringing the bell because their church was on fire.
Pat landed high in an apple tree and crashed down the trunk. He found himself in an apple orchard, his only weapon a .45 revolver he had bought from a British paratrooper for fifty bucks. He carried that .45 throughout the rest of the war. He jumped into a hedgerow for cover and stepped on a dead American pathfinder, a large blond man. “It scared the hell out of him,” Gary noted, “because the dead guy let out a grunt as the air escaped from his diaphragm.” It was a gruesome start to the war. The night’s adventures were just beginning. Pat wrote:
I remained quiet and still, moving only my head. Suddenly my eyes caught movement 40 feet in front of me. A silhouette of a helmeted man approached me on all fours. I reached for my cricket and clicked it once, click-clack, the sign of a friend. The figure stopped. I waited for the counter sign. There was no response.
The silhouetted figure began to move toward me again. My handgun pointed in the center of his chest. I again gave him the click-clack. He immediately responded with a hand raised: ‘For Christ-sake, don’t shoot.’
Immediately I knew it wasn’t a German. It was my assistant gunner, Woodrow Robbins.
‘What the hell’s wrong with you?’ I asked. ‘Why didn’t you use your cricket?’
‘I lost the cricket part of the cricket,’ came his stammering reply, (the sound producing part of the device).
It was then about 1:50 a.m.
Pat soon picked up a German Mauser, model 98, a bolt action rifle, which he used for the first few days of the Normandy campaign, then picked up a Springfield rifle with a grenade launcher attached. The guy he got it from also had a pack full of rifle grenades, so Pat spent the rest of the Normandy campaign as a grenadier. He described the rest of the Normandy invasion to Gary simply as “one small skirmish after another.” Pat turned from description to philosophy in his journal and wrote:
Of course there is fear in combat.
Some men think too heavily about their chances of getting hit, maimed or killed, and their fear turns into terror, so torturous that they become unable to function as combat soldiers.
Others fear personal guilt and public shame from [the possibility of] fleeing during a battle. The mind working too heavily and too often on these thoughts has broken some good men. Once you have disgraced yourself, the agony of this disgrace is never completely bearable.
Once you get a reputation as a good man in battle, you do your damndest not to tarnish it. Personal honor is valued. Fear of scorn is something you guard against. You have seen others fail and disgrace themselves. You want no part of it, but you realize it could happen to you, so you work at being good at your job and suppressing any thoughts that could hinder your effort.
You tell yourself you’re young, strong, aggressive, and that getting hit or wounded will happen to others, not to you.
In his art journal, Pat described the interrogation methods used against captured prisoners, most likely first encountered during the Normandy invasion. Along with the description of interrogation he included a darkened pencil sketch of two men with a single candle between them. He wrote:
Many methods were used to gain the necessary information from the prisoners we captured without torturing them. A little theatrical setting [was used] to create tension and terrifying thoughts in the P.O.W. The apprehension, just waiting to be interrogated, not being allowed to relieve their bowels or urinate, was torturous in itself. But these were our orders when we captured a German. Lewis Nixon, one of the original officers of E-Company, was an S-2 in the regiment during combat. If anyone could gain intelligence from a P.O.W., I’m certain [Nixon] ranked with the best.
The Pit of Your Gut
On September 17, 1944, Pat jumped with Easy Company into Holland for Operation Market-Garden. He noted that although they drew sporadic enemy fire, the jump was made on a Sunday afternoon in daylight, a “parade ground jump,” easy and straightforward, and nothing like the nighttime Normandy jump.
Still, the jump wasn’t without its fears. Pat had become a squad leader, and replacements had come into the unit. He turned introspective and commented on leadership styles:
You are committed to make this jump. Your composure in the eyes of the new men will show. Let them see the efficiency of a leader emerge from that force if you’re going to command the respect of your men. Above all, don’t embarrass yourself by showing the least sign of fear, even though it’s there in the pit of your gut.
Easy Company liberated the town of Eindhoven and continued on toward the town of Nuenen. Pat first carried a Thompson submachine gun in Holland, which he didn’t like because of the extensive amount of ammunition one needed to carry along with it.
Of all his war experiences, he wrote most extensively about those near Nuenen:
Company E boarded the top of the tanks and headed toward Nuenan. E Company’s first platoon was in the lead. First squad of that platoon loaded on the lead tank. I made sure my squad was all aboard, then I boarded. The men left an open spot for me in front right, next to the 75 mm cannon. My pals.
We moved out toward our objective. When we reached the outskirts of town, a man spotted a German half-track moving across a field on our right flank. He shouted his discovery to the tank commander. Our tank halted. The tank commander traversed his 75 mm and quickly knocked out the German vehicle. The great noise and vibration created by the cannon cleared the tank of men in seconds.
Because we were so close to entering the building area of the town, we decided to disperse into skirmish lines. There was a house on each side of the street, [each having] a front yard and back yard area, like typical American tract homes. Each property line had a hedge to separate the back yard area from one another. Bull Randleman’s first squad was assigned to the right hand side of the street. The second and third squads to the left side. Bull said he would take the front yard area with the machine gun crew, and I would take the riflemen and sweep through the back yard area toward the heart of town. Tactically, this sounded right. The left side of the street was covered in the same manner by Martin’s and Rader’s squads.
We moved in unison slowly toward the heart of Neunan, suspiciously eyeing anything that could hide a kraut. Suddenly two Germans came out of a second story window. Quickly, they began to move across a roof. In a second, my Thompson was pointed their direction. I pulled the trigger. They were within 35 yards of me, but the gun did not fire.
There, in the heat of battle, Pat quickly remembered that there was one part in the Thompson easy to get in backwards. The part would fit in two ways, but the weapon would only fire if the part was in the correct position. He had taken the Thompson apart fifty times before he got in the plane, but recounted to Gary later that he obviously had got the part in backward. So Pat field-stripped his submachine gun right there and fixed the problem. He continued:
This little incident strung the nerves a little tighter. We were moving at a hasty clip—this is what made the two Germans bolt from their concealment rather than fire at us: they knew we would be on them in seconds.
And then a squad leader’s worst fears were realized:
The last house had an open field next to it. I parted the foliage of the hedge that separated the field from the house. I must have been spotted by a German machine gunner. Before he could fire, I pushed through the hedge and dropped into a ditch just on the other side. Robert Van Klinken, one of my riflemen, was following me closely. [Van Klinken] peered through the same opening as I had, just as the German machine gunner depressed the trigger. Van Klinken was hit with three bullets.
Pat later speculated to Gary that the Germans must have zeroed their sights on him in the hedgerow when he went through, then fired at the next man, Van Klinken. Pat grabbed Van Klinken and pulled him through. Van Klinken was still groaning, but dying. The machine gun must have climbed slightly while firing—as they’re prone to do, Pat told Gary—and Van Klinken had been hit in the groin, with two in the chest. The men were still under heavy fire.

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