We Who Are Alive and Remain (20 page)

Meanwhile, our guys got the sniper. We got ready to leave the house so we could evacuate Brewer. As we stood outside at a crossroads, not clear about which way we should go, shots came in again. I dove into a German foxhole, a round one. The Dutchmen started running down the road with Brewer on a wheelbarrow. One Dutchman came back, pulled me out of the hole, and threw me on another wheelbarrow. By that time I was really in and out. I started throwing up over the side of the wheelbarrow. But eventually we got to an aid station. One of the first things I did when I got there was donate a pint of blood. I hadn’t lost much, relatively speaking, and they needed it desperately.

After we jumped, I was first scout and out front about a quarter of a mile. I just got across the Wilhelmina Canal and was down behind a big shade tree, and the damn bridge blew up. The way it happened was I ran across the bridge, got behind a tree, and was looking back toward them coming up the road, maybe two hundred to three hundred yards from it—that’s when the bridge blew up. The tree protected me from flying debris. So I was across already, but the rest of the guys didn’t get across until the next day. I was lucky I got behind that tree before it blew up. The timing of that explosion—if it had been just a few moments later they would have got the whole damn company; a few moments earlier, they would have got me. The way it worked out, it didn’t get anybody. It stopped us, but nobody got hurt. We could talk across the river, but there wasn’t anything anybody could do. So I just lay down behind the tree and went to sleep. There were no Germans around. By that time they were long gone.

The next morning the company got a bunch of doors from barns and wood and made a makeshift bridge to get across. The canal was about a hundred feet wide maybe. Barges could go up the river. The bridge had been made out of wood and cement.

I got hit in Holland under the knee with a piece of shrapnel. The medics bandaged it up and I limped around for three or four days, but that was it. I was never evacuated. Luck has a lot to do with it. I think only two of us went all the way through without being evacuated—Shifty Powers and myself.

A guy named Donald Moone was my second scout. I was out in front of him about a hundred yards, he was in front of the company about a hundred yards. I went into Eindhoven ahead of the company. People were cheering and hugging you; I didn’t know what to do. So I turned around and went back to where Moone was. That’s when Moone and I came up, and a truckful of German 88s showed up. Suddenly there were no civilians around; they all scattered. Moone and I knocked out the truck. That was about all the fighting we had in the town of Eindhoven. Moone had a rifle grenade, and he hit the truck in the radiator. That stopped it. We chased Germans around the buildings. Two of them were shot. I know a civilian who said, “I waited five years to see Germans die on the streets like that. Now that I’ve seen it, I don’t want to see any more.” After that, the celebrating started again. The people just mobbed you. You see pictures of that. Little kids coming around—we gave them our rations.

We started out toward Nuenen. That’s where we started hitting it. Men started getting killed. We ran into a bigger force than we were. Paul Rogers, a mortar sergeant, had two guys with him carrying ammunition. Paul got wounded. The guys on either side of him got killed. So that wiped out our mortar squad right there.

What’s it like to be under heavy fire? Well, you don’t know whether you’re mad or scared. You can’t fight artillery. Small-arms fire—it doesn’t bother you at all; you can fight back. But when you get in an artillery barrage, you can’t. Me, I get more angry than scared. I can’t do anything about it. There’s nothing to fight. You never know when the next one’s coming. Guys you know are getting killed.

Market Garden was the first daylight jump into combat that we had made. I felt very visible. If you jump at dawn or nighttime, no one can see you. But in the daytime you’re jumping from five hundred feet or so and bang, you’re on the ground in just a few seconds. In the daytime they can shoot you in the goddam door of the plane. As it turned out, there were no Germans around, and the most dangerous place to be when we landed was the drop zone because of all the helmets and equipment raining down on us.

We got into the little town of Zon. There was one German 88 there. It fired one round down the middle of the road. That was the only problem there. The next day we started getting a bit of flak. We advanced into Eindhoven. Mike Massaconi and I took my machine gun up on top of this two-story warehouse. We had no idea what kind of building it was. From up there I had a field of fire of three intersections, and if anybody came we could get them good. Suddenly the Germans fired a mortar through the skylight of the building. We heard glass breaking. I shuffled over and looked down the hole. Inside I could just make out cases and cases and cases of something and a big brown vat. I bent down to get a closer look. Goddam, it was a Heineken beer factory! We had a jump rope with us, so I shimmied down, hand over hand. I tied off two bottles at a time and Mike pulled them up and lowered them over the side of the building to the rest of the guys. Nobody drank the beer just then, as we were still in a combat zone. So we put the bottles in our jump pants pockets. But the first break we got, we all popped a bottle. Every time I go to an Easy Company reunion I have a bottle of Heineken.

After we secured Eindhoven, we took off up Hell’s Highway. We ran into a lot of Germans then. There was a flock of them—two or three panzer divisions and a lot of paratroopers. Those were the Germans that had got past the Brits and made it out of Normandy. They had gone to Holland to refit, and the Brits jumped right on top of them. There were a lot of skirmishes going up that highway. You look at the old cowboy and Indian movies with Indians shooting at covered wagons as they’re going down a road—that was exactly what was happening, except it was tanks going down the road. The Germans had their 88s set up and knocked the tanks off like ducks as they went along. It was a hell of a thing to see.

There was another sight I’ll never forget. Every day at ten, two, and four, the Brits got out of their tanks and make their bloody ass tea. It happened every day, no matter what kind of fighting was going on. If you ask me, the Brits were brave as hell but silly as shit.

At Veghel, that was a hard day for me. We were on both flanks of the British when the Germans attacked us. They came at us with all kinds of stuff—half-tracks, artillery, I don’t know where they got it all from. We ran into an apple orchard to take shelter behind trees. That proved a mistake. The Germans sent over these TOTs (time over targets) that blew up in the air right over us, hitting the trees, knocking off branches; the shrapnel rained down. Foxholes were no use. You just prayed you didn’t get hit. That went on for about six hours. I got quite shaky. After we broke through I never got under or around another tree again. Even at Bastogne. I’d go lay in a puddle before I’d lay under a damn tree.

I jumped, broke my leg, and was shipped to the hospital. That was it. Are you familiar with farming? When they’re plowing and make a turn, it creates those open furrows. That’s where I landed, in a plowed field where they had been making a turn. I landed with one leg on top of the sod and one leg in the hole. It wasn’t a bad break—I could barely walk on it—but I did anyway. It was three miles to the bridge, and I walked that far. The bridge was gone when I got there. Colonel Strayer set me up in a machine gun position and said, “You stay right here and wait.” A couple of days later a British ambulance came by. I wasn’t all alone that whole time. There were troops coming and going. I wasn’t in pain. I probably could have even gone on. They sent me to a Catholic hospital in Brussels.

My unit had come in later, so we stayed in Aldbourne, England, and waited to jump into Holland to join Operation Market Garden. I was in the 506th replacements when I did that jump.

It was a beautiful, sunny day in September when we jumped. I landed right in a big cow pie. What a grand entrance.

I’ve thought about this story hundreds of times since the war: We came up to this little town in Holland with Germans in it. We were going to take the town, but we got there real late and didn’t have time to do it before dark. We dug foxholes and stayed put overnight. Somewhere early the next morning a guy hollered, “There are two Germans with two American prisoners, and they’re walking right down the road!”

I grabbed my rifle, lay down, and spotted them. Sure enough—two Germans walked on the outside with two American prisoners in the middle. I thought, This will be easy shooting. I’ll shoot the German on the right first, then get the one on the left. Then I got to thinking—That town is full of Germans. If I can see those guys walking down the road, I’m sure the Germans can see them, too. If I shoot those Germans, the Germans in the town will open up on those two American prisoners.

I debated and debated what to do. Finally I watched them go out of sight down the road. I’ve thought about this often—maybe I should have shot those two Germans. But if I did, there would have been four dead people in the middle of that road, all for nothing. I’m glad I made the decision I did.

The next day we took the town. We took some German prisoners and got some American prisoners back, too. I never did find out for sure, but I hoped that some of the guys we got back were those two Americans they had walking down the road that day.

Coming down, I had a malfunction of my parachute. It was twisted. The chute had not been properly packed. Or maybe it had been packed in damp conditions; we hadn’t jumped high enough to be able to use the reserve. We had jumped under five hundred feet, so my main chute opened, but didn’t open completely. You try to shake out the twist if you can, but there’s so little time. I couldn’t do a lot and came down fast. I just hoped for the best. I hit with a thud. I hit on my left hip and back and was knocked out. I don’t remember much, just hitting hard and seeing stars. I was paralyzed in leg and back. I couldn’t move.

Medics came along, gave me a shot of morphine, and put me in a cattle barn. That was the extent of my fighting in Holland. I stayed for a day or two in the barn until the field hospital was moved up. When I woke up there was my old hometown doctor. Boy, was I surprised to see him. He was thirty-five or so. I thought he was too old for service, but sure enough, he was there.

They packed me up and took me back by ship to England, where I went to the hospital. I had hit the spinal cord and broke a disc in my back. They stretched me out in the hospital but didn’t operate. (I didn’t have my back operated on until about ten years later. It got to the point where I couldn’t walk or sleep or function—that disc was rubbing on my spine for quite a while.) I stayed in the hospital in England for about eight weeks, then came back to Mourmelon, France, and waited until the troops came back from Holland.

When I rejoined Easy Company, my back still hadn’t healed, but I wanted to be back with my company. They gave me medication for the pain. I insisted that I wanted to go back. Sometimes guys would go AWOL from the hospital just so they could go back to their own unit. If you didn’t, they’d send you to a replacement depot and you might get sent anywhere. So it was always good to get out on your own and get sent back to your own company. Was the injury enough to be discharged? Yes, I could have been sent home to the States to heal; I’m sure of it. But I just wanted to go back to my company. Nobody had any idea we were going to Bastogne next.

Defending the Island

Our last two months in Holland, October and November 1944, were spent defending “the Island,” the strip of land between the Rhine River on the north and the Waal River on the south. We spent most of our time there in a defensive position on the southern bank of the Rhine. The Germans had the high ground on the northern side and had the advantage. It was a bad place for us to be. We couldn’t move around much in the daytime.

The only action I have a clear memory of there, was going across the river in boats to bring back some British wounded who were hiding out. One officer had come over, a swimmer, and said they had two hundred plus British airborne troops over there, some wounded, and he wanted to get them back over. So we got these pontoon boats and brought them to the dike at night. We took the boats down to the edge of the river. It was quite a haul, as they were quite heavy. It was mostly just the 3rd Platoon involved. The action worked. No shots were fired. The only problem was that the British were so happy to be rescued that we couldn’t keep them quiet when we brought them back over the river. The Germans were right on the other side and could have started firing, but they didn’t.

I was wounded for the second time in Holland in a convoy going down Hell’s Highway back toward Eindhoven. Art Youman (one of my platoon sergeants) and I were on a motorcycle together. He was driving, I was on the back. The road was wet. Suddenly the truck ahead of us jammed on the brakes. The whole convoy was stopping. Art hit the brakes and we slid sideways under the back of the truck ahead of us. Bang! For about five minutes I was paralyzed and couldn’t move my legs. Gradually the feeling came back. They put me in the hospital in Nijmegen, where I spent a week. The company had been relieved by then and was heading back to France, so they came by and picked me up. I never knew the exact diagnosis—they never tell you these things in the military—but it turned out to be some sort of back injury, a compression fracture of the lower spine. I could walk, but it was painful for quite a while after that. It still gives me a fit today.

We went across on pontoon boats and got to the Island. There were people ahead of us who knew exactly where to put us. They put me with Ed Joint and put us in a barn along with one other fellow, I don’t remember who. Ed Joint and I got to be good friends. About a week later we were in another barn with Shifty Powers, Jim Alley, and I think Earl McClung.