"I Heard You Paint Houses": Frank "The Irishman" Sheeran & Closing the Case on Jimmy Hoffa (8 page)

411 Days

“
I first heard the song “Tuxedo Junction” in 1941. I was an MP in Colorado, pulling guard duty at Lowry Field for the Army Air Corps. Most people think it was Glenn Miller who first made that song famous, but it was a black bandleader named Erskine Hawkins. He wrote the song and had the first hit with it. That song stayed with me like a theme song through the whole war. After the war I had my first date with Mary, my future wife, to see Erskine Hawkins at the old Earl Theater in Philly.

One cold night in December 1941 I won a dance contest jitterbugging to “Tuxedo Junction” at the Denver Dance Hall. The next thing I knew I was on a troop train at four in the morning heading for the West Coast to defend California. The Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor. I just turned twenty-one and I was 6'2". Four years later when the war ended I got my discharge one day before I turned twenty-five; I was 6' 4". I had grown two inches. People forget how young we were. Some of us were not full-grown yet.

I spent the war as a rifleman in Europe in the Thunderbird Division—the 45th Infantry Division. They say the average number of days of actual combat for a veteran is around eighty. By the time the war was over the Army told me I had 411 combat days, which entitled me to $20 extra pay a month. I was one of the lucky ones. The real heroes, some of them with only one combat day, are still over there. As big a target as I was and as many fire fights as I was in, I never got hit by a German bullet or shrapnel. I said a lot of foxhole prayers, especially pinned down in a dugout in Anzio. And whatever anybody wants to say about my childhood, one thing my childhood did teach me was how to take care of myself, how to survive.
”

Eliciting information from Frank Sheeran about his combat experiences was the most difficult part of the interview process. It was two years before he could accept the fact that his combat experience was even worth discussing. And then it became painstaking and stressful for both a respectful questioner and his reluctant subject, with many stops and starts.

To help me understand his combat days, Sheeran tracked down the 45th Infantry Division’s hardbound, 202-page official Combat Report, issued within months of World War II’s end. The more I learned from both this report and Frank himself, the clearer it seemed to me that it was during his prolonged and unremitting combat duty that Frank Sheeran learned to kill in cold blood.

The Combat Report states: “The 45th paid heavily for maintaining our American heritage: 21,899 battle casualties.” Considering that a fully staffed division has 15,000 members, Sheeran saw replacements march in and be carried out on a daily basis. The report asserts a record of “511 days of combat” for the division itself; that is, 511 days of shooting and being shot at on the front lines. The Thunderbird Division fought valiantly from the very first day of the war in Europe to the very last.

With time out for rest and rehabilitation along the way, Private Frank Sheeran, with 411 combat days, experienced more than 80 percent of the division’s total “days of combat.” Sheeran was conditioned for the rest of his life by the experience of killing and maiming day after day, and wondering when he would be next. Not all people are affected the same way by the same events. We are each our own fingerprints and the sum of our own life’s experiences. Other combat veterans I have interviewed drop their jaws and gasp at the thought of 411 days of combat.

“
“I ought to kick your ass,” Charlie “Diggsy” Meiers said. I was two years older than Diggsy and a foot taller. We had been pals since grade school.

“What did I do wrong? What do you want to kick my ass for, Digs?” I asked and smiled down at him.

“You had a noncombat gravy job in the MPs. You could have sat out the whole friggin’ war in the States. You must be crazy transferring over here. I always knew you had a screw loose, but this takes the cake. You think we’re having fun over here?”

“I wanted to see some action,” I said, already feeling like a jackass.

“Well, you’ll see it.”

A blast like thunder and a loud, whistling buzz shot across the sky. “What’s that?”

“That’s your action.” He handed me a shovel and said, “Here.”

“What the hell is this for?” I asked.

“Your foxhole. Start digging. Welcome to Sicily.”

After I got done digging, Charlie explained to me that an exploding shell is going to spread its shrapnel on an angle upward. You get down and stay down and let it sail over you. Otherwise it cuts you in half right across your chest. When we were kids I looked out for Diggsy, but now it was going to be the other way around.

How did I end up with a shovel in my hand in Sicily in 1943?

In August 1941 I had enlisted in the army. The rest of the world was already in the war, but we were neutral and weren’t in it yet.

Biloxi, Mississippi, was where I did my basic training. One day a Southern sergeant addressed the recruits and said he could lick any one of us and if anybody thought otherwise they should step forward now. I took a giant step forward, and he had me digging latrines for five days. It was just a trick to get us to respect his rank and rank in general. They were getting us ready for a war.

After basic training, the army took one look at me and sized me up as a perfect specimen for the military police. They didn’t ask you what you thought of your new assignment, and before the war started there was no way out of the MPs.

But after Pearl Harbor, with a war going on, they let you transfer out of the military police if you were willing to go into combat. I liked the idea of dropping out of the sky and into combat, and I signed right up for the Army Airborne and transferred to Fort Benning, Georgia, for paratroop training. I was in real good shape, so the rigid training of a paratrooper came easy for me. I liked the whole idea of finally seeing some action. When your parachute landed, you’d be on your own a lot, kind of self-reliant. I thought I was something special until I jumped from a tower during training and dislocated my right shoulder. I had landed wrong, and they gave you only one mistake. They cut me from the team. I was now going to go into the infantry as a combat foot soldier.

Meanwhile, no amount of authority or military discipline could stop me from getting into my little scrapes. I was in one scrape after another in my army career. I went into the army as a private, and I came out four years and two months later as a private. They gave me combat promotions from time to time, but then I’d have my fun and get busted back down. All in all I had fifty days lost under AWOL—absent without official leave—mostly spent drinking red wine and chasing Italian, French, and German women. However, I was never AWOL when my outfit was going back to the front lines. If you were AWOL when your company was going back into combat you might as well keep going because your own officers would blow you away, and they didn’t even have to say it was the Germans. That’s desertion in the face of the enemy.

While I was waiting to be shipped overseas they had me at Camp Patrick Henry in Virginia, and I gave some lip back to one of those Southern sergeants, so they put me on KP (kitchen patrol) peeling potatoes. First chance I got I bought some laxative at the PX and put it in the giant coffee urn. Everybody wound up with bad diarrhea, including the officers. Unfortunately, I was the only one who didn’t report in sick at the infirmary. They had that caper solved before they put in a requisition for extra toilet paper. Can you guess which brilliant criminal ended up on his knees scrubbing bathroom floors?

I set sail on July 14, 1943, for Casablanca in North Africa, assigned to the 45th Infantry Division as an infantry rifleman. While you couldn’t choose your division, you could choose a particular company in the division if they had an opening. A company is about 120 men. Our church in Philly put out a newsletter keeping tabs on where all the neighborhood boys were stationed, so I knew Diggsy was with the Thunderbird. I asked to be in his company and got it. That didn’t mean I’d end up in his platoon of about thirty-two men or end up in his eight-man squad in his platoon, but I did, and we stayed together in the same squad.
”

In the fall of 1942, while they were still being trained for combat in the States and had yet to go overseas, General George S. Patton addressed Diggsy and the men of the 45th from the stage of a theater in Fort Devens, Massachusetts. General Patton told the impressionable boys of the 45th—boys away from home for the first time, about to be sent overseas to fight and die—that he had a special role in the war for their division.

As reported by Colonel George E. Martin, chief of staff to the commanding officer of the 45th Infantry Division:

[General Patton] had much to say, all interlarded with shockingly coarse and profane language…. He was telling of occurrences when British infantry moving forward to attack would bypass enemy pockets, only to find themselves engaged by this enemy to the rear. Then when the British turned to mop-up, the German soldiers would fling down their weapons and raise their hands in surrender. If this should happen to us, said General Patton, we should not accept their surrender; instead we should kill every last one of the bastardly S.O.B.s.

We were then told that our Division probably would see more combat than any other American division, and he wanted us to be known to the Germans as the “Killer Division.”

In a follow-up speech on June 27 in Algiers, North Africa, as reported by an officer of the division who was present, Patton told the men of his “Killer Division”:

…to kill and to continue to kill and that the more we killed the less we’d have to kill later and the better off the Division would be in the long run…. He did say that the more prisoners we took the more men we would have to feed and not to fool around with prisoners. He said that there was only one good German and that was a dead one.

Another officer listening to the speech reported Patton’s position on the killing of civilians: “He said something about if the people living in the cities persisted in staying in the vicinity of the battle and were enemy, we were to ruthlessly kill them and get them out of the way.”

“
After I got my foxhole dug, Diggsy told me there were two big scandals going on. Everybody hated snipers. Both sides hated snipers, and if you captured one it was okay to kill him on the spot. They had some sniping going on outside Biscari airfield and a bunch of Americans had been hit. When about forty Italians soldiers surrendered, they couldn’t tell which ones had done the sniping so they lined them all up and shot them. Then a sergeant took about thirty prisoners back behind the line. When they got some distance he grabbed a machine gun and let them have it. That got my attention like the whistling shell that had sailed over us. It made you think twice about surrendering yourself if it ever came to that.
”

In his last speech to the 45th Infantry Division in August 1943, following their combat success in Sicily, at an outdoor address, Patton told the men and officers of the 45th: “Your division is one of the best if not the best division in the history of American arms.” By his praise Patton was reinforcing his faith in his “Killer Division.” They were doing things the way he wanted their division to do things and the way he had instructed them to do things in prior speeches.

At the time he uttered these words to the men of the 45th, two of their comrades were facing courts-martial for murder. Captain John T. Compton had ordered a firing squad to shoot approximately forty unarmed prisoners of war, two of whom were civilians, following a battle to take Biscari airfield in Sicily on July 14, 1943. In a separate incident Sergeant Horace T. West had personally machine-gunned thirty-six unarmed prisoners of war that same day following that same battle.

Patton’s personal diary for July 15, 1943, a day after these killings, reads:

[General Omar] Bradley—a most loyal man—arrived in great excitement about 0900 to report that a Captain in the 180th Regimental Combat Team, 45th Division [Sheeran’s actual regiment within the division], had taken my injunction to kill men who kept on shooting until we got within 200 yards seriously, and had shot some fifty prisoners in cold blood and in ranks, which was an even greater error. I told him that it was probably an exaggeration, but in any case to tell the officer to certify that the dead men were snipers or had attempted to escape or something, as it would make a stink in the press and also would make the civilians mad.

General Omar Bradley, Patton’s equal in rank, did no such thing. Bradley engaged in no cover-up, and his investigation led to murder charges against the captain and the sergeant.

Captain John T. Compton was tried by a military court, but he was acquitted on the grounds that he was merely following Patton’s explicit instructions to the 45th to shoot prisoners in cold blood.

Sergeant Horace T. West was also tried by a military court for murder, and he used the same defense as Captain Compton. A lieutenant testified for the sergeant that the night before the invasion of Sicily, Lieutenant Colonel William H. Schaefer went on the ship’s loudspeaker and reminded the men of Patton’s words: they “would not take any prisoners.”