We Who Are Alive and Remain (16 page)

Everybody had some time to get prepared, so you sharpened weapons or wrote letters home. I was usually hungry and thought I might want to take some extra supplies with me, so I sewed a couple of pockets on the left sleeve of my jump jacket and on the back of a coattail. We got K rations and candy bars from home or from the PX. You could carry as many as you had space for, so I put food in my extra pockets. I was known as a chow hound, but it’s just because I was hungry. I also carried extra ammunition.

Other guys sewed similar extra pockets. We found out in Normandy that if these pockets were not reinforced (and many weren’t), then the pockets would rip and stuff would fly out. My pockets worked out okay and didn’t tear.

The days and hours before the D-day invasion were filled with tension and nervousness. We knew this was it. We pored over maps and sand tables, studying the area. I think we knew every road and bridge in Normandy.

I missed the jump on D-day. I was in the hospital with an infection on my neck. It was a cyst, a big lump. I don’t know how I got it, but it just grew and grew. It felt disappointing to miss the jump after all the training we had had.

Upottery Airfield was circled with barbed wire. We knew we were going to invade Europe. On June 4 they gave us great food, wonderful food, ice cream, food we had never seen all the time we had been in England. We knew this was it.

We boarded the planes on June 4 in preparation for a June 5 jump. But Eisenhower decided the weather was too bad, so we disembarked and went the next night, June 6, instead. I felt like we were ready. I was totally confident in the men we had and in the training we had received. We were as good as we would ever be. I don’t think anybody was particularly afraid.

The flight over the Channel was exactly how it was shown in the miniseries. Everything was calm, then the antiaircraft fire started up. It was violent and intense, beyond what we had imagined. Planes ran into a fogbank and started to break formation. The pilot of my plane went down low. Instead of slowing down, needed for a good jump, he gunned that damn plane as fast as it would go, then pushed the green light to get rid of us. We landed about nine kilometers away from our drop zone. We found out later this was fortunate, because the Germans had the area we were supposed to drop in well covered with machine-gun fire. We could have been badly cut up if we had dropped there.

When we went over the Channel, I looked out and saw all these ships. I was just amazed at the number. When we got over the Normandy coast, the flak was heavy. You didn’t pay attention to ships anymore, you just wanted to get out of the plane.

So much has already been said about D-day, I’ll put it like this: D-day was a bad day for a lot of young men.

I think I slept most of the way over in the plane. I don’t remember being nervous. I was aggravated because the last thing before I got on the plane they handed me one of those leg bags to wear. I never knew what was in that leg bag. They didn’t tell me—a truck came alongside of the plane, they dumped out a half dozen bags, and somebody said to put it on. It felt like a brick. They had to help you get in the plane because you couldn’t walk, you were so heavy.

That leg bag almost cost me my life. I was one of the very few who actually landed with the damn thing. Most of them came off in flight, but mine stayed on. There’s no way to know for sure how high we were when we jumped, but I know it wasn’t very high because it was such a quick trip down. I could see tracers. Every one of them felt like it was coming right toward me.

When I landed I was in water over my head. I couldn’t get the leg bag off me. It was like wearing an anchor. I’ve never been a swimmer. When I was seven years old my uncle was teaching me to swim and ducked me. That didn’t make me fond of water. I’m still not fond of water today. (I like a good soak in the tub, but I always know where the bank is there.) So I tried to stay above the water but couldn’t. There was too much weight. I was able to get my trench knife out. I got a breath of air, then went down and tried to saw the damn leg bag loose. When I came up for air, people were running past me. I hollered for someone to give me a hand. They just kept going. As soon as I got loose I found I was standing in a big ditch. The water was only about eighteen inches deep on the edges, but I had landed in the middle, over my head.

When I landed, I was still clutching my rifle but dropped it while trying to free myself. I wasn’t able to find it in the water. I climbed out of the ditch. All I had left was my trench knife and a canteen. My pack was soaking wet, heavier than hell. I dumped all the contents out on the ground and walked away, everything except a silver flask full of brandy. It held about a half a pint. I kept that.

After I landed, I didn’t know where I was. I don’t think anybody did. Formations had broken up. We were all scattered about. When I finally got going, I met up with some guys from the 82nd Division. I stayed with them for just a little over three days. During that time the only people I saw who I knew were Pat Christenson and Colonel Sink. I gave Colonel Sink a shot of brandy. He says, “Well, a soldier who knows what equipment to carry.”

Fighting in Normandy

It’s all a nightmare.

After the drop, I didn’t hit the ground. I hit a tree and hung there. It was a big old tree with big leaves on it and I could see two machine guns in each corner of a field shooting at me. Those bullets just whizzed past me through those leaves and branches. It sounded like they were firing at a barn. I could see the tracers coming right at me.

My buddies took care of the machine guns. I must have been near a farmhouse or something because after that a big old Rottweiler came up and had me bayed up in that tree. Some lady came out in her nightgown and took the dog away.

I cut my ammo off my leg and let it drop, let my machine gun drop, then got myself out of the harness, and that’s the way I came down. It was quite a distance from the drop zone and we had to get back to the unit.

When it comes to the war, that’s all I talk about. The only person I ever talked to about what happened was my wife. She was the only person who needed to know.

I haven’t revealed my first action to anybody, and I don’t know if I really care to. I don’t think of it as hidden. It’s not very easy to kill a man. After you’ve done it, and after you’ve been shot at a few times, it becomes pretty easy. The first time I killed a man was out of desperation. The column that I fell in with was moving up this causeway, and somebody said, “Three men: out there.” I went with a couple of other guys up this hill, more like a little rise. We saw some enemy soldiers and ducked down. Amazingly, these three Germans came within fifteen feet of us and started to set up a machine gun. I decided that I had to do something. The other two guys who were with me had rifles. I was hoping they’d shoot. They didn’t. So I killed the first guy with the knife I had. I went up behind him and ran it right into his kidneys. He had a rifle in his hands. As I hit him, he went down shooting, wounding one of his companions and killing the other. One of the other guys who was with me shot the wounded German in the head. It couldn’t have happened more than an hour after we jumped. That was when I got a rifle. I got it from the guy who shot the German in the head. It made him sick and he threw down his rifle. I picked it up. I never learned the names of the guys I was with. I don’t know if I ever saw them again. Then we went down the hill.

I had sewn a knife into the top of my boot. On the jump, the leg bag drove the knife’s tip into my ankle and it dug in. By the time the Battle of Carentan happened, I was back at Utah Beach with my foot all swelled up. About half an inch of the knife’s tip had broken off in my ankle, stayed there, and festered. I had made the mistake of taking my boot off, and I couldn’t put it back on.

On the beach I looked up and saw a German pilot strafing the beach. Two of our P-38s came out of nowhere and took him out. Bang. I saw where he landed in his parachute. He was dead. I took some pictures off him that were in his pocket and a scarf. I have those pictures in my scrap-book today.

When I jumped I landed in the town square of Ste. Mère Église, about thirteen miles from where I was supposed to be. Flak was coming at us when we jumped. It was horrific. It looked like everything was coming right between your eyes. There were Germans all around. Machine gun rounds, small arms, tracers. I landed on the roof of a little shed behind the church. Underneath was water. There was a Nativity scene out in front of it. I’m not a religious man, I was baptized Catholic, but that’s about it—so there was no significance to me landing next to the scene.

It was dark when I landed, no moonlight, dark. Some of the guys say there was moonlight, but not where I jumped. I found out later that was the case along the coast: that clouds come and go, so it could have been dark or not dark depending on when you jumped. As I came down, there were two Germans running down a walkway toward me, shooting at my parachute. It was no contest. I always jumped with my rifle in my hands, ready to go. The church was behind them, and I could see their silhouettes against the church, but they couldn’t see me. I was only five feet from them when I shot them.

Bullets were coming from all around. The way the bullets were flying, I knew I had to get the hell out of town. So I crawled about two blocks to the edge of town. They had a cemetery there. I crawled out through the gravestones and got out in the woods. Did I think I would survive the war? Maybe you get those thoughts later, that you’re going to die. But right then I thought I was invincible. I didn’t think I could be killed. Probably when we got to Bastogne I started changing my mind about that. Sometimes hoping I would get killed [laughs].

In the woods, I ran into a guy from the 502nd. We stayed there until daylight. Then he got shot in the ankle the next day, so I went looking for medics for him. I ran into some guys from the 82nd, so I turned him over to them. They said they had some more guys from our outfit with them. So I went up to 82nd, and that’s when I got with Paul Rogers and Jim Alley.

With the 82nd, about thirty of us tried to take Ste. Mère Église. We tried three times over the next several days. I slept during the days a little. At night was patrolling. I got to know that graveyard well because I crawled out of it three times over six days. We’d charge into town, but the firing would get so heavy. They’d start opening up on us with 88s, so we’d have to get the hell out of there. No one was leading the 82nd that I knew of. We were more or less on our own. We had a 101st officer lying face down in a trench hollering at us. I never did see him get out of the damn thing. But we weren’t paying any attention to him anyway.

On my last patrol into Ste. Mère Église, I went around the town and came in from the back. I found nine tanks. I came back and told them they were crazy to think we’d ever take the town—there were a lot more Germans in it than we ever imagined. When I counted the nine tanks I got the hell out of there. A rifle doesn’t do much good against tanks. Later we found out there were about three thousand Germans.

Somewhere around there is when I got my nickname. I had been on patrol all night and I came back and was lying there asleep and some second lieutenant came up and asked Alley and Rogers who the machine gunner was. They both pointed at me. I was sound asleep. So he just put the machine gun by me. I wasn’t very happy about being made a machine gunner. As far as I know, that machine gun is still there. When I woke up there were some strong adjectives being thrown around. So Rogers wrote a poem about it with a line that went,

Paul Rogers wrote a lot of poems. Both he and Walter Gordon wrote a lot of them. They had some good ones. I got a big kick out of them.

It’s been rumored that I could smell Germans and that this came in handy in Normandy because I could smell them before I could see them. Well, that’s true in a way. I seemed to have an uncanny sense of smell when it came to finding German soldiers. In later years I’ve had German people ask me if I could actually smell Germans. Well, that just sounds wrong—there’s no implication that the German people have a particular odor. The German soldiers wore a lot of leather—all their webbing, their boots—much more than we did. Where we had plastic webbing, they had leather. When they were damp and the wind was right, I could smell the wet leather. If you’ve ever walked into a tack room with wet saddles hanging in there, you know that smell. I don’t remember if there was a specific time that it came in handy, it’s been so long ago. But I would imagine that when I was out on patrol I’d stop and sniff. If I could smell Germans, it got us in a better way than not.

After Ste. Mère Église we found out where E Company was, so we took off cross-country and joined our outfit. I don’t know what happened after we left, but apparently the Germans moved out and the 505th was able to take the town.

Out of the plane, the opening shock was so great it ripped my musette bag off. I went down almost immediately. I went right through a tree and landed unhurt. I had my rifle in three pieces in my pack and was holding my bazooka—I don’t know how I was able to hold on to it, but I did. I had my weapons but very little ammo.

Here’s the result of being well trained: a small battery in the stock of my bazooka provided a charge to ignite the rocket when the trigger was pulled. Immediately upon landing I checked the bazooka by pulling the trigger. The light was supposed to light up but didn’t. The opening shock had snapped open the battery latch, pulled the batteries out, then snapped it back together. Fortunately, I had checked before I had tried to fire at any of the enemy. I tossed the bazooka away.