Praise for Descending from the Clouds
“A distinguished airborne combat leader in the 505 PIR, Spencer Wurst has given us an inspiring memoir about how, at the platoon level, we defeated the best of the Wehrmacht. You will never read a more authentic and riveting account of airborne and combat operations at the cutting edge of our Army in WW II. Descending from the Clouds is a ‘must read’ book.”
—Lt. Gen. John Norton (Ret.), G-3, 82d Airborne Division, World War II
“Colonel Wurst (ret.) has written a straight-forward, no-frills account of his combat service. A rifleman with the 82d Airborne … he recounts in a subdued yet graphic narrative what he saw through three combat jumps into Italy, France, and Holland, followed by more intense combat in the Bulge and the Heurtgen Forest in Germany.… Wurst’s book ranks as one of the best war memoirs written by a World War II veteran. Highly recommended.”
—Library Journal, December 2004 (starred review)
“Wurst takes the reader through familiar battles—from early operations in Sicily to the Battle of the Bulge. His writing is conversational. His combat sequences are chilling, but it is the time between battles and the small details that hold the reader. For example, how he starts the Battle of the Bulge with a champagne hangover.”
—The Fayetteville Observer, October 20, 2005, review by Keven Maurer, best-selling author of No Easy Day: The Firsthand Account of the Mission that Killed Osama Bin Laden and Gentleman Bastards: On the Ground in Afghanistan with America’s Elite Special Forces
“A riveting account by an NCO in one of the most elite parachute infantry companies of World War II. A powerfully written, unvarnished memoir of close combat, with its attendant horrors, valor, and devotion to duty and comrades, Descending from the Clouds is a modern classic. I highly recommend it for anyone interested in World War II combat and America’s elite airborne forces.”
—Phil Nordyke, author of All American All the Way: The Combat History of the 82nd Division in World War II and
Four Stars of Valor: The Combat History of the 505th Parachute Infantry Regiment in World War II
“One really needs more than 5 stars to rate this book. It deserves 7 or 8 stars. I have read many accounts from veterans of the 82nd Airborne Division and this is by far the best. If one is interested in knowing what it was like to be a WWII paratrooper day by day, battle by battle, one absolutely must read this book.”
—Ellen Peters, reader review, Amazon.com
Descending from the Clouds
A Memoir of Combat in the 505 Parachute Infantry Regiment, 82d Airborne Division
Spencer F. Wurst and Gayle Wurst
Where is the Prince who can afford so to cover his country with troops for
its defense, as that ten thousand men descending from the clouds may
not in many places do an infinite deal of mischief, before a force
could be brought together to repel them?
—Benjamin Franklin, 1784
To all the Company F, 505 Parachute Infantry Regiment World War II
veterans, and especially to those among them who never had the opportunity
to grow old in our wonderful nation. And to Millie, the most devoted, kind,
and gentle wife a man could ever ask for.
Spencer F. Wurst
To the memory of my father, Vern Edward Wurst (1921–1959).
Gayle Wurst
On his way to war. Corporal Spencer Wurst, sitting for a formal portrait in Alexandria, Louisiana, in March 1942. Author
Contents
Preface
Chapter 1: Enlistment and Premobilization Training, 112th Infantry, Pennsylvania Army National Guard
Chapter 2: Mobilization, Basic, and Small Unit Training
Chapter 3: Company, Battalion, Regimental, and First Army Maneuvers, 1941
Chapter 4: Units in Turmoil: Pearl Harbor, Southern Training Camps, and War-time Expansion
Chapter 5: From the 112th Infantry to Parachute School, Fort Benning
Chapter 6: First Assignment: 507 Parachute Infantry Regiment
Chapter 7: Second Assignment: Cadre, 513 Parachute Infantry Regiment; Volunteering for Overseas Duty
Chapter 8: French Morocco: Fifth Army Mines and Demolition School
Chapter 9: Permanent Assignment: Company F, 505 Parachute Infantry Regiment; the Move to Sicily
Chapter 10: First Combat Jump: Salerno, Italy
Chapter 11: Baptism by Fire: The Battle of Arnone
Chapter 12: A City Torn by War: Duty and Bombings in Naples
Chapter 13: Cookstown and Belfast, Northern Ireland
Chapter 14: Camp Quorn, England
Chapter 15: D-Day, Normandy: Preparations for the Big Jump
Chapter 16: D-Day Jump: The Defense of Ste. Mère-Eglise
Chapter 17: Patrols and Hedgerow Battles: From Neuville-au-Plain and Le Ham to St. Sauveur-le-Vicomte
Chapter 18: Long Days in Normandy: The Battle of St. Sauveur-le-Vicomte, the Bois de Limors, and Hill 131
Chapter 19: As Close to Home as it Gets: Return to Camp Quorn
Chapter 20: Market-Garden: The Combat Jump at Groesbeek and Entry into Nijmegen
Chapter 21: Nijmegen: The Battle for Hunner Park and Control of the South End of the Highway Bridge
Chapter 22: Aftermath: Hunner Park and Bridge Security
Chapter 23: Defensive Operations: Road Blocks, Dikes, and the End of the Holland Mission
Chapter 24: The Ardennes Campaign: From Camp Suippes, France, to Trois Ponts, Belgium
Chapter 25: From the Battle of the Bulge to the Hurtgen Forest, Germany
Chapter 26: The End in Sight: Through the Siegfried Line to the Roer River
Epilogue: Homeward Bound
Image Gallery
Notes
Index
Acknowledgments
Maps
Mediterranean Theater
Italy: Theater of Operations
Italy: Salerno
Italy: Advance to the Volurno River
European Theater of Operations
Normandy: Drop Zones
The Ardennes (Battle of the Bulge)
Bulge: Trois Ponts to Salm
Bulge: Basse-Bodeux-Vielsalm
Bulge: To the Roer River
Illustrations
A photo gallery
Preface
The first time I went up in a plane I jumped out of it. It was late September 1942, and I was seventeen years old. I had lied about my age when I joined the military, so I had already served two years when I earned the right to blouse my trousers as a graduate of the Parachute School at Fort Benning. During most of World War II, I was a member of Company F, 505th Parachute Infantry Regiment, 82d Airborne Division, in which I served from July 1943 to August 1945 in the European Theater of Operations (ETO), where I made three of the regiment’s four combat jumps, dropping in Italy, Normandy, and Holland.
Unlike the 101st Airborne and all other airborne units, the 82d had to develop very quickly under the pressure of crucial training directed at its early combat operations in Sicily and Italy. The training, tactics, organization and everything else that had to do with parachute troops were completely new, and we could not afford the time to perfect procedures before heading off for combat. The United States had no doctrine about airborne warfare, and the Army had never written anything about parachute operations: we wrote the book as we went along, and we added, changed, and deleted as we matured.
From the time I was assigned to the regiment in July 1943 up to VE-Day, the Allied victory in Europe on May 8, 1945, I was a rifleman in the 1st Squad, 3d Platoon of F Company, 2d Battalion, 505, where I moved up from private to squ
ad leader, platoon sergeant, and platoon leader. Historians, biographers and generals have chronicled the proud history of the 505 and the 82d Airborne, their leaders’ lives, decisions and military strategies, and I think it’s fair to say that not many of these works have escaped me. More recently, a number of excellent books have at last begun to communicate the reality of the rank-and-file on the line, including memoirs by soldiers themselves. But to date, these memoirs have most often portrayed the experience of a single campaign. Never, to my knowledge, has anyone sat down to trace his evolution as a front-line parachute infantryman throughout the entire course of the war. This is what I have attempted to do in this memoir.
To the extent that my story is representative, it is the story of how the rapid evolution of airborne warfare during World War II shaped and was shaped by front-line parachute infantry soldiers. In showing how I fared through all the campaigns of the 505 from Sicily through the Ardennes, I’ve tried to convey the day-to-day reality, thoughts, hopes, fears, and fates of fellow paratroopers, as well as the abundant sense of irony and black humor present at the front. I felt it was especially crucial to show how we adapted and developed our fighting skills, and how we were transformed as individuals and human beings under the pressure of extensive periods of combat. On this ability to quickly adapt depended our survival, as illustrated by an epitaph in the mock cemetery at Fort Benning:
Here lie the bones of Lieutenant Jones
A graduate of this institution,
He died on the night of his very first fight,
While using the school solution.1
No matter how well we learned this lesson, facts beyond our control enormously influenced our casualty rates. Today almost nobody remembers that the practice of individual rotation did not begin until the Korean War, when the Army started developing a one-year policy that even included R&R leave. I first heard the word “rotation” in 1944, after I had been overseas for nineteen months straight, most of it on the front. For the entire 2d Battalion 505, the quota for our new so-called rotation policy was only two men. Based on statistics from November 1944, just 6 percent of all U.S. Army personnel in the ETO were riflemen, and yet we suffered most of the casualties. Think of it: there were 2,588,983 U.S. Army personnel in the ETO at the end of November 1944, but only 152,280 were in rifle platoons. We made up 68 percent of the total authorized strength of an infantry division, but our casualty rate was an incredible 95 percent. Few of us were lucky enough to survive, and every year fewer of us who did survive remain to tell the tale. This has added urgency to my desire to give another perspective, a bottom-up historical account of airborne warfare in the ETO.2
There is, of course, the problem of memory. Combat is an odd experience. Your point of view may differ from that of the person right next to you in the squad or even your fire team. One unit may have a much tougher time than another unit right next door. Experiences vary, and trying to reconstruct and articulate them so long after they occurred only complicates the problem. Rarely as a lowly private—or as a squad sergeant or even a platoon sergeant—did I have the full picture of what was going on. Our objectives were immediate: stay alive, assemble after a jump, get on with the duties at hand.
I do not pretend to recall all of my wartime experiences on a day-to-day basis. Yet I cannot get over the vividness of the experiences I do remember, and the way they remain so firmly fixed in my mind, as if they had happened only yesterday. During numerous reunions of the 505 Regimental Combat Team, I discovered friends and unit members often remembered the same events just as vividly, but very differently than I do. So where, I’ve so often asked myself, is the truth, the real definition of the experience? Surely, it is in the eyes of the beholder.
Then there is the problem of long silence. It has often been noted that most World War II veterans do not talk about their wartime experiences. This is the second reason I have undertaken this book. Immediately after the war, I was overwhelmed with a feeling of anger that probably had its roots in my first day of combat, grew until the last shot I fired, and then kept right on going. This anger, and the terrible sadness about what we had seen and done were typical of combat veterans immediately after the war. Long after we had made the transition back to civilian life, these emotions still made it stressful even to get into a discussion about the war. We all wanted to forget the experience.
Although it took me many years, I finally concluded that this inability or refusal to talk about the war amounted to a kind of collusion. My silence had deprived my children of a vital part of their heritage, and they had a right to know.
But how could I find the words to covey the unnameable? Combat veterans do not like to talk about their experiences because they mostly believe that no one who has not had to undergo combat can ever understand what it is like to be on the front line. We were different from all other soldiers; for us, killing and staying alive was not an emergency situation of limited duration, it was a full-time occupation for weeks or months on end. Among ourselves, at reunions, the talk is free and fast. Although the conversations are often humorous, they do get serious. It is when outsiders move in that combat veterans become silent.
This memoir, then, is written for our children. It is also written to honor the many soldiers who died on the line, and in the hope that other survivors might find themselves in my story.
Chapter 1
Enlistment and Premobilization Training, 112th Infantry, Pennsylvania Army National Guard
The first time I thought about joining the Army was in tenth grade chemistry class, when I spied a classmate reading a machine gun manual. I showed interest, we talked, and the outcome was that I went to the Armory and joined up. I don’t know if I talked it over with anyone, or if I just went and did it. I’d turned fifteen a few months earlier, on December 19, 1939. The legal age for enlisting was eighteen, so of course I had to lie about my age. I gave my new birthday as April 2, 1922. I figured I could remember 2/22, and hoped I’d remember April, the month of my enlistment.
I enlisted in the Pennsylvania Army National Guard on April 19, 1940, in my hometown of Erie, Pennsylvania. I discovered that eight or ten students from my school, for the most part underage, were already in the Guard. We were in Company H of the 2d Battalion of the 112th Infantry Regiment in the 28th Infantry Division. This was a heavy weapons company consisting of two platoons of water-cooled .30-caliber machine guns: the antitank platoon and the 81mm mortar platoon. The battalion antitank platoon was supposed to have .50-caliber machine guns as their antitank weapon. I mention this only because it’s so ridiculous.
I had always been interested in the military, and World War II was starting to heat up. I remember poring over books about the Civil War at my Great-aunt Myra’s in Kennedy, New York. Aunt Myra’s relatives had fought in that war, and her library was full of first-person accounts. When England and France declared war on Germany in September 1939, I spent study hall and any other free time I had reading Time, Life and Newsweek. Following the course of the war in my high school library, I thought we would soon become involved.
Because my mother and father were divorced, I guess I was seeking something to anchor my life as well as the spirit of adventure. My sister Vangie and her husband Ronnie, with whom I was living, weren’t too happy with me for enlisting. My older brother Vern wasn’t around at the time. My dad didn’t object, because the Guard was paying us a dollar for every drill. That amounted to $12.00 to $14.00 a quarter, a significant amount of money for a fifteen-year-old in 1940, when the average laborer was earning $15.00 to $20.00 a week. When my mother found out, she was very upset. She either visited the Armory or wrote a letter to the battalion commander, Lt Col Momeyer, protesting my enlistment. No one told me about this at the time; I only found out long after the fact.
The distance from my sister’s home to the Armory in Erie was at least eight miles, and I walked or hitchhiked to and from drills, which took place on Friday evenings. Guards received all their training from the instruct
ors within their parent company. My first sergeant for my first two years was Sergeant Rohaly, who looked to me like a grandfather. I think he was of Russian origin—at least we called him “the mad Russian” behind his back—and his vocabulary was very limited, except for military terms. He was quite a character, a real hard-nosed first sergeant.
We didn’t receive the best training. In addition to drilling two hours a week, we went to the Armory for unpaid range firing. We used .22-caliber rifles for marksmanship training and a sub-caliber firing device that we attached to the .30-caliber water-cooled machine gun to enable it to fire .22-caliber ammunition. This allowed us to fire on a range in the basement of the Armory. We also received instruction in close-order drill in the basement, and attended classes on basic military subjects taught by a sergeant or corporal who had probably been trained a couple of years earlier under the same conditions.
I remember parading in Erie wearing the old Class A uniform. The only part of it I ever liked was the spiffy campaign hat that looked like the hat worn by Smokey the Bear. Running around the brim was a bright blue cord, the color of the infantry, with a couple of doodads hanging from it. I shelled out $14.00 for that hat, a fortune for a kid like me, but our uniforms changed before I had the chance to wear it.
In the very beginning, we had wrapped leggings. They were nothing but ribbons about an inch and a quarter wide that you had to wrap around your legs. Next we were issued leather leggings originally designed for the cavalry, because there weren’t enough canvas leggings for the entire infantry. We did eventually get these and OD (olive drab) woolen trousers that we wore with a woolen coat or “blouse,” but the uniform was hot and uncomfortable. During parades, we’d march over to State Street, up to the stadium, over 26th to Parade, and then back down to the Armory at 6th Street. It was a matter of fifty-two long blocks, a good six miles, quite a march for part-time civilian soldiers sweating in heavy wool.
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