We Who Are Alive and Remain (19 page)

Over the years my father was torpedoed a total of three times. They lost a lot of people on those shipping runs, but Dad made it through the war. He became a captain later on and lived until 1956. Meeting up with him in the hospital in England was one of my best experiences ever.

From the hospital, I went back to Aldbourne, to the 2nd Battalion. Easy Company had lost two machine gunners, so they sent me and another gunner to take their place. I was assigned to the 1st Platoon, where I became a machine gunner in the 3rd Squad. Mike Massaconi was the other one.

Carentan was a tough battle. We ran into Germans as we got into town. A tough tank outfit was in there. They had tanks. We didn’t. We didn’t have any antitank weapons. We had bazookas, but one bazooka wouldn’t stop the Mark IV; it wouldn’t even slow it down.

It was a battle right from the start to the finish. We took it house by house. You come up to a house, throw a grenade in, and when it explodes, you follow it in. If there’s anybody in there they either run or you have a shoot-out. It’s a slow process. It took us a couple days to get through the town. Were there civilians in the houses? Not too many. We found a few in basements, but most of them had got out of there when the fighting started.

Then the Germans counterattacked through the north. That’s when our tanks came in. We took a couple of bridges north of Carentan. We ended up being in Normandy over a month. Then we went back to Aldbourne for replacements and supplies. Going back to England from Normandy—it was a fairly triumphant feeling, but we had that also before we went.

Carentan was my last battle. Everything felt by the book. We didn’t have everybody there, but maybe a hundred men from E Company. We had weapons and ammunition by that time. It felt like we were in good shape. I had a functioning bazooka by that time to make up for the one I discarded upon landing.

We attacked the city. I was involved in clearing out houses. I didn’t get far with that. At the first house we cleared I was standing in the doorway when a mortar shell landed at my feet and exploded. Everything was finished.

When you clear houses, you do it with two guys. You throw a grenade in a door or window, then go in and take control of the situation. I didn’t have a grenade in this first house we came to, so I just kicked the door in and went in. Nobody was in the house, so I went out onto the back porch. There was a small structure in back, probably an outhouse. I called out in German to come out with hands up. Nobody answered, so I put three shots into the outhouse. The backyard had a stone wall all around it, fairly high, probably five feet or so. There were no Germans anywhere, nobody at all. So I came back out through the front door. Joe Liebgott was covering me on the other side of the street. I told Joe that the house was clear.

All this time the Germans had been retreating and had planned this. They apparently knew the exact distance to this location and to where our guys were. They waited until we occupied the location and then sent mortar shells in. Eight or ten of our men were wounded all at once at this place.

I was standing in the doorway when this blast hit me. It knocked me back. I didn’t feel any pain, though my right eye had been destroyed by the concussion and both my legs had been broken. Strangely enough, I was still standing and I didn’t drop my weapon. I turned around and looked at the house. I didn’t realize what had happened. I thought there was a German somewhere back in the house I had missed who had thrown a grenade in. I thought, I’ll be ready for him. After ten or fifteen seconds the German didn’t come my way. But Liebgott did. He ran across the street. “You’ve just been hit by a mortar shell,” he said. “Sit down.” I reached up. My helmet had been blown off. My head felt like a watermelon, swollen and mushy, and blood was everywhere. I was in shock, and my muscles had all tensed—that’s the reason I was still able to stand and control everything. I sat. Several of the guys had seen the hit and thought I was dead. Eight or ten months later I visited Floyd Talbert’s parents back in the States. They wrote to Floyd and said that Ed Tipper had come by to visit them. He wrote back, saying, “That’s impossible. He was killed. I saw it. Whoever’s claiming to be Tipper is someone else.” He couldn’t believe I was still alive.

Large pieces of shrapnel had flown into my left knee, right hip, and left elbow. The shrapnel in my knee and elbow had both gone through the joints. My tibia was broken in my right leg. My fibula was broken in my left leg. Small pieces of shrapnel had hit my legs below my knees. I thought I had lost my eye, but it actually wasn’t gone. Shrapnel had split my upper eyelid in half and created a ridge in my eyebrow. I could see nothing out of the eye.

Lieutenant Harry Welsh was the second man who ran up to me. Liebgott and Welsh both risked their lives to help me. Mortar fire was still pounding the street. As shells went off they both ducked down to flatten out. Welsh had some morphine and gave me an injection. I couldn’t walk by myself, so they helped me get up. I hobbled on the leg that was not so badly injured. Still under fire, they got me down the street a block and a half to where an aid station had been set up. I was fortunate I was so close to the aid station.

Somehow they got a jeep to the aid station. It had stretchers on each side and on the back. They evacuated me and two other wounded men back to the beach. The Germans shot at the jeep as it was going down the road, even though the jeep had Red Cross markings on it. The jeep driver went like mad. He sped up and braked hard, avoiding getting hit. I was on the stretcher on the rear of the jeep.

I was pretty sure I was going to survive. One of the first clear memories I have was worrying about my eye. My God, I thought, I won’t be able to get a driver’s license. I won’t be able to apply for a lot of jobs. They sent me to a hospital in England, where a doctor said they might be able to save my eye. I doubted that from the first time I saw my eye in a mirror. The eye was almost all bloodshot, and necrosis [death of cells and living tissue] was setting in. I was not surprised several weeks later when they told me the eye needed to be taken out.

I have no memory of how or when exactly or where I was when I was wounded. Major Winters has sent me a copy of a ten-dollar bill that all the men signed at Carentan that has my name on it, so I know I was there.

Shrapnel hit my head and took me out of commission. I remember lying on the ground, paralyzed on my left side. I couldn’t get up or move or keep up with the fighters. I lay on the ground a long time.

Medics picked me up. We were still under fire. An ambulance carried me to some field hospital, I don’t know where. I remember a nurse on either side of me with a pair of scissors. She cut off all my clothes and I lay there on a cot like that until a doctor came by. I think it was the next day I was carried by amphibious jeep out to a boat. I was on one side, another boy was on the other. I remember seeing planes in the air. I’d come to, then black out, then come to, then black out. They took me to a hospital in England where I had one surgery, then back to the States where I had more surgery.

I had bad seizures for years, but I was blessed, I’ll tell you. I haven’t had one in a pretty good while. It’s been several years now since I’ve had one.

R&R in England

At the end of June 1944, we left Normandy and got on a boat heading back to England. There were hundreds of boats going both ways with supplies and troops. It just boggled my mind, all the boats—just hundreds and hundreds of them. The boat we were on was fairly small, maybe a hundred people. It didn’t take long to get back to England, maybe an hour or so. I just stood on the deck somewhere watching all the boats.

When we got to England, we went to base camp and got seven days’ leave. They told us go wherever you want, just make sure you’re back at the camp on the seventh day, otherwise you’ll end up in the clink.

I went to Birmingham, where I knew some people. Then I went to London. Back at home I used to work for a couple who lived across the street from our house. The lady had two sisters who lived in London and I got a chance to meet them. We had a good day together talking about life back home.

Back in Aldbourne, a lot of replacements were brought into the company. I didn’t pay much attention to replacements. Mostly I just kept together with the guys that were with me from before we went into combat.

In Aldbourne, we spent our time in more training, then getting new clothes and fixing things up. There was a lot of work to do at the time.

All the way through the army I always had a tool—a hammer, a punch, a hacksaw blade, a pair of pliers, a couple of screwdrivers, and needles and thread to repair harnesses. I was continually making modifications to things like musette bags—mostly for myself, but if anybody came along with something to be fixed, I was always happy to do it. One musette bag I remodeled so it could triple the amount of machine gun ammo you carried. That can be pretty handy on landing.

We had one guy, Johnny Martin, a sergeant in the 1st Platoon. His mother sent him a battery radio when we were in England. We didn’t have small radios then. It had flashlight batteries in it. The radio had tubes in it. Johnny took the radio out on a night problem [training exercise], and it worked great. A couple days later it wouldn’t play anymore. So I fixed it. Really, all I did was open it up, found a broken connection, and soldered it. When I ran into him at a convention in the early 1980s, me fixing his radio was the first thing he brought up to talk about.

The Fight of Our Lives in Holland

Holland. It was a summer day. A nice, warm day. Holland was flat as a pancake. That was an easy jump there. In fact, we were there just last May on a tour bus. I have some good friends who live there today.

The jump for Market Garden took place in daylight, September 17, 1944. It was an easy jump, with good weather. We landed in a field. We organized, got together, and headed out on our planned route.

The first obstacle was to take the Wilhelmina Canal. We were supposed to capture the bridge. Unfortunately, the Germans had already set the bridge with explosives and blew it up just as we arrived. We were delayed on the side of the river most of the night but got over the river the next morning and moved into Eindhoven.

As we were crossing a field on the way into Eindhoven, a replacement named Lieutenant Bob Brewer got shot by a sniper as we approached the town’s first buildings. He was a big, tall officer and really stood out of a crowd. One shot rang out; Brewer went down. I ran over to him. Rod Strohl had already been there. Brewer lay face down in the grass, bleeding profusely from the neck. I thought, Well, he’s gone, and made the mistake of saying, “Let’s get moving. Brewer’s finished.” Wouldn’t you know it, he heard me say that. Brewer lived. After the war he and I became good friends.

In 2007 I visited Holland to dedicate some memorials. Dutch war reenactors drove us around in World War II jeeps while we were there. As we approached the city of Eindhoven I told the driver of my jeep about the loss of our officer, Lieutenant Brewer. He was very elderly and said, “You mean Bob Brewer?” The driver knew him. He was able to tell what happened to Brewer after we left him in the field with our medic. Brewer was taken to a city hospital. The local doctor who treated him became a friend, and the two continued contact after the war.

As a platoon, we’ve also talked about this after the war: this sniper who shot Brewer, if he had had a machine gun with him, he could have mowed the whole 3rd Platoon down before we could have gotten out of there. The sniper was probably set up in an outpost on the edge of the town, placed there to watch for the Americans. He only fired one shot, then probably took off to CP [command post] to tell them that we were coming. But he could have really raked us if he had wanted to.

We continued on into Eindhoven. It was a great welcome. All the people were on the streets, waving, cheering, hollering. A lot of the fellows were invited to Dutch houses by the families and got a good meal that night. No C rations for once.

We moved out of the city, toward the north. The British 1st Airborne Division had been cut off in Arnhem, and nobody knew their status. So we started up what they called Hell’s Highway—the single road that goes up from Eindhoven through Nijmegen and Arnhem and up into Germany. The plan was to capture this road and protect it. Then the British would come up the road with tanks and go through Nijmegen, which the 82nd was holding, then proceed into Germany. Well, it didn’t work out that way. The British 1st Airborne Division really got clobbered. They lost most of their men, captured, wounded, or killed.

When I jumped into Holland somebody came through my chute and I free-fell for about seventy-five feet. Boy, that ground came up at me fast. When I hit the ground the other man landed on top of my chest. I’m still messed up today because of that.

My lower back was in a lot of pain, but I got up and kept going. Just before Eindhoven, Lieutenant Bob Brewer was shot through the neck. I ran out to where he lay in the field. He looked like death warmed over. I got some plasma out of my kit and got it into his vein, which had all but collapsed. I heard bullets crack. We were still under fire. In my good bedside manner I leaned over to Brewer and said, “Lieutenant—are you still alive? Because if you’re not, I’m leaving.”

Brewer was still alive. That’s when I took one just above my bootline. The bullet peeled the flesh off my leg all the way down to the bone. My lower leg looked like raw steak. A couple other guys came out to help, and they were hit, too. The bullet had cut the nerve, so I couldn’t straighten out my leg. I dumped some sulfa on it. Some Dutchmen ran out—boy, they were something else. They put Brewer on a ladder and ran toward a house. I got back to the house and started looking after Brewer. I had given myself some morphine by then and felt like I was going to throw up. I motioned for the woman in the house to bring me a pot.