We Who Are Alive and Remain (22 page)

Our officers had a place picked out to set up. So they told us to “dig fast and dig deep.” We had time to dig our holes. There were three of us in the foxhole I was in, about 2½ feet deep, maybe 3 feet wide, maybe 5½ feet long. We cut down some of the trees and put logs over the foxholes, then cut a slit between two parts of a tree so you could see through if any enemy came in our direction. Then everything started. First it started to snow. It didn’t seem so bad. It snowed all day December 17, 18, 19; we ended up with 2 to 4 feet of snow. Kept coming down, coming down, coming down. It was like seeing a movie; you can’t believe that something like that was happening, but it was happening to us.

The cold was there from the beginning to the end. It started out not too bad, but as the days and nights kept coming, it got colder and colder. It started out about five degrees above zero [Fahrenheit]. As time went by, the temperature dropped to ten degrees below zero, Belgium’s coldest winter in thirty years. Can you picture yourself there? We were a bunch of comedians, the airborne, the things that we laughed about to each other—how cold it was, how dirty we were.

Alex Penkala and Skip Muck were great guys. They had taken me under their wing when I first got to the company. We played guitar together. They were good friends. They were hit directly by mortar fire while in their foxhole. They just disintegrated. You couldn’t even find flesh or blood, that’s how badly hit they got. Out in Bastogne, there was no use sitting down and crying, because there were other guys that you needed to worry about. You knew death was going to happen along the way. That’s how I felt: I couldn’t help those guys anymore. But I still pray for them. I’m a Catholic and go to church every Sunday. I keep in touch with Alex’s family to this day. I still pray for Alex and Skip; that’s about the closest thing I can do.

Believe it or not, I didn’t think much about praying when I was in a foxhole. After Normandy, when I went back to England, I went to church every Sunday until we went into combat. I had a friend who went with me and we’d pray. Outside of that, you really didn’t have any time to sit down with a rosary and pray out of a prayer book; everything you did was in your mind. You can pray without moving your lips. I don’t recall if any of the guys had Bibles with them. I kept a small rosary and I’d pray off of that once in a while. But things were so hectic. You had your mind, so that’s what you used to pray.

I felt prepared to die. I never worried about it to this day. If I’m going to die, I’m going to die. Whether I get blasted out of a plane or a car runs me over or I die of old age, it’s never bothered me. I felt that God takes care of you one way or another. If something’s going to happen, then Somebody is going to take care of you.

Bastogne. You wouldn’t believe it. If we didn’t hold them there, the Germans could have won the war. Hitler was close to having the atomic bomb then, and if he’d-a got it, he’d-a used it. We were stubborn—we weren’t going to give in to him.

Bastogne was very, very cold, the coldest winter I’ve ever spent. Snow up around our rumps. Two or three guys in a foxhole. It’s a wonder we didn’t freeze to death. You’d hug one another just to try and stay warm. Some of the guys lost their feet because they got completely frozen. I have problems with my feet even today because of that. Thankfully, I had grabbed an overcoat when I was back in Mourmelon. I didn’t know where we were going, so I just grabbed it.

One of my closest friends in the company was Frank Mellett—he was from Brooklyn. I saw Mellett get killed. We were fighting near Foy. When I saw that, I was crying. I had a lot of tears in my eyes. He and I were very good buddies. It’s hard when you’re fighting and you lose a good friend. We prayed a lot. Believe me, we did. We prayed for a safe return home.

Popeye Wynn was another good friend. And Walter Hendricks—he and I used to sing together. The Germans were always shelling us. During the shelling we harmonized as loud as we could. Both of us sang at the top of our voices to let them know they weren’t getting to us:

 

 

That’s the way it went. You made a joke wherever you could, just to let the Germans not get to you. Once, on the way into Berchtesgaden, we came up on a house where there was women’s clothing. Hendricks put this dress on and acted like a woman to make a joke. He was an Indian and had a really smooth complexion. I don’t think he had any whiskers. But I don’t think he fooled any of the guys. We all had a good laugh.

You always tried to keep your morale up. There are many events from the war that took place that I cannot and probably never will get out of my mind.

Once in Bastogne, Buck Taylor and I came across the body of a dead German soldier. He appeared to be about twelve or thirteen years old. Buck and I buried the boy.

I was one of the lucky ones because I had a hooded sweatshirt that my parents had sent to me back in Holland. I put the hood over my head with the drawstring pulled tight around my face with my helmet on top and, boy, that made a big difference against the cold.

Walter Gordon, a good friend of mine, was the 3rd Platoon machine gunner. He had a bigger foxhole than most because he had his machine gun with him. At one point we were on the forward edge of a lightly wooded area facing across an open field. A country road ran across our front. The road was elevated just enough so the Germans on the far side could come right up to the road and look over without being seen. We didn’t realize this at first, but that was how Gordon got shot. Gordon was just getting back into his foxhole when somebody saw a head across the other side of the road. Only one shot rang out and caught him in the shoulder and spine. He was paralyzed. It happened on the twenty-fourth of December, Christmas Eve. That shot marked the beginning of an attack the Germans made on us. It proved to be their mistake. The next day somebody counted twenty-three German bodies on the other side of the road. I took a Luger from one. I still have it today. I just gave it to my oldest son about a month ago.

We made our defensive perimeter in the Bois Jacques woods. The next day we woke up and snow was coming down like you never saw. I was wearing my same old green jumpsuit—it wasn’t designed to keep out the cold. I had an M-1 and a bandolier, a few K rations, a field jacket, and a towel around my neck. After a while I was able to find an overcoat. I took one from a dead GI, one of ours, an infantry guy.

To stay warm you got close to each other. You can’t make fires. If you’re lucky enough to have a blanket, it gets wet so it doesn’t do much good. You never take your boots off and leave them off. If you do, your feet freeze up. In the nighttime we went on patrols, so those help you stay warm. You never really sleep, you get two, three cat winks then hear a round and that wakes you up. You got used to going without sleep. After a while you can walk sleeping.

For shelter, we found tree limbs to put over our foxholes. I knew guys who put frozen German corpses over the top of their holes to insulate against the cold. I never did. Your hands got so cold, guys urinated on their hands to warm them up. You did the same thing with your M-1. If your bolt was stuck, it wouldn’t fire. What the hell are you going to have it for then? So guys pissed on their rifles, jacked the bolt back a couple times, and it was all right.

You couldn’t shower. You were so dirty you smelled a guy from twenty yards away. But everybody smelled the same, so what the hell. There was only one time in my life I smelled worse. Years later, in Korea, I jumped and landed in a rice paddy. They had put human feces in there and I landed in that sonuvabitch. I bathed and I bathed but it took me months to get rid of the smell. It was like a skunk had sprayed me.

One day in Bastogne I got hit. I had no place to go. It was just a graze across my forehead. Maybe a little bit better than a graze—it put a line across my skull. They bandaged me up at an aid station. I got a cup of hot coffee and spent the night. The next day I was back in my foxhole.

Things got a bit shaky around that time. I have to say something at this point: airborne outfits that go into combat are supposed to be relieved within three to five days. But it never happened; not with us, anyway. Normandy was thirty-four days combat. Holland was seventy-four days combat. When we got to Mourmelon, it was right into battle again. By the time we got into Bastogne, we were all flaky to start with. Then we were forty days combat in Bastogne. If it wasn’t for each other, I’m sure a lot of us would have gone crazy. That’s where the cohesion comes in. We were brothers.

Me and Mike Massaconi were in a hole in the Bois Jacques woods. Snow was all around, and I saw a goddam bird stick his head out the side of my hole. I told Mike to look at it, but there was no bird there really. Mike gave me a hug and brought me down. That’s what I’m talking about. You’re flaky after all that combat. Crazy. One little thing sets you off. I swear to Christ I saw that bird. He opened his beak and all. The Germans were shelling the living crap out of us at the time. I’m scared like everybody else. If it wasn’t for Mike I would have charged the light brigade or something. But he calmed me down. After that I was fine—actually, I wasn’t fine, I carried that with me for many years. I got to a point after the war where I started drinking a lot. When you drink you forget your nightmares. But then you wake up and you have to go worship Mother Hopper and you’ve got a damn headache and you still remember it. So it took me a long time to get out of that. I’m telling you—in Bastogne I got so calloused I could sit on a frozen corpse and eat a K ration. But after the war I used to have these dreams—I was afraid I’d roll over in bed and strangle my wife. The dream I remember most is of the bayonet attacks. Running headway at the enemy, rifles out, and they’re running at you. I can see their faces. I remember the blade going into a man. I had nightmares about the concentration camps we saw in Germany, too. There was the stench of it, the skeletons walking around—they come up to you and hug you, I’ll never forget the reality of those experiences as long as I live.

I was this side of Bastogne, just outside of Foy. That’s where I got shot. The bullet hit me in the thigh and just missed my pecker by a couple inches and went out my butt. It was my left leg. Everybody says Perconte got shot in the ass, but that’s not true. When I got to the hospital the doctor [confirmed the point of entry for the bullet]. I was fortunate.

I came back and rejoined the company about two weeks before the end of the war.

We were sent out to take a machine gun position. It was just before the Battle of Foy ended. I was running up a hill and got hit by shrapnel in my right arm. I went flying up in the air; I didn’t know at first what hit me. Somebody hollered for a medic. They put me on a stretcher and took me to a field hospital. They couldn’t do nothing with it there, so they took me back and put me in a hospital in Paris. A medic said, “You can go home now, soldier, you ain’t going to fight no more.” But twenty days later I hitchhiked back to Company E to find them. They were just getting ready to go to Germany, to Berchtesgaden.

What made me want to go back and fight? I don’t know. They thought I was nuts. But as a young kid, you’re not scared. They were my outfit, my friends. They asked me at the hospital why I wanted to go back. I said, “It’s my outfit up there.” I know it sounds crazy, it’s just like jumping out of a plane. I don’t know how many times people have said to me, “Boy you must have been scared to death to jump out of an airplane.” But jumping out of a plane is like recreation, it’s nothing—it’s the stuff they put on you and the people shooting at you that’s the problem.

When I came back to my unit, half of the guys were gone. I don’t think there was a guy in my squad or platoon who was the same. It had changed a lot. It was different guys, but it was just another day. Some guys had been saying that if they could last through Normandy, they could live through the whole war. But I don’t think none of them were saying that then.

Just back from the hospital in Brussels, I pulled into Mourmelon 1½ days before we piled on trucks for Bastogne. We drove for quite a while, we only got off that truck for piss call—I think we only did that twice. I didn’t have hardly any of my equipment. When our guys were coming south when we were coming north, I never hesitated saying, “Hey, I need that.” So I got to Bastogne with a couple good coats and a rifle, borrowed from the guys who were retreating.

After some time I had to go to the infirmary for my feet because they were frozen. They were shelling the infirmary while I was there. But I was never shot. I was one of the few. Did I ever think I was going to die? I can only remember a couple of times thinking “this might be it.” But I do not remember any time that I felt like hunkering down in a foxhole and covering up my head in fear. Understand this: I’m not a religious person. I believe in God. I’ll say more than that—I
know
there’s a God. And I know that there’s got to be several occasions that I displeased God, whatever form He’s in. But I never felt the need to get down on my knees and pray that I wouldn’t die. I don’t think it ever crossed my mind that I wasn’t going to go home—not while I was in a foxhole, not while sitting on the line somewhere. I always figured tomorrow was coming and I was going to be there. I never had a doubt that I wouldn’t go home.

Early on in our training, it could have been Sink, or Sobel, or Winters, somebody said, “Determination is the answer.” I took that to heart. At Bastogne we were cold. We were hungry. But we had to get the job done. A job ought to be done right if you’re going to do it at all.

Bastogne was the coldest place I’ve ever been in my life. My wife and I have a cabin up in Wisconsin today where we often spend some time in winters, and even now, sitting in the warmth of that cabin, I’ll look out at the snow-covered pine trees and shiver. It’s just a reaction.