The Men of World War II

by Stephen E. Ambrose

  “Women, broads, dames, beetles, girls, skirts, frails, molls, babe, frauleins, Mademoiselles: That’s what the boys wanted,” Webster wrote. He went on to describe the results: “The cooks were keeping mistresses; the platoon lovers were patronizing the barn; McCreary had a married woman in town; Reese installed his in a private house; Carson fed an educated, beautiful, sophisticated Polish blond (whom he later married); the platoon staff visited a D.P. camp nightly; and in Zell am See, home of the most beautiful women in Europe, the lads with the sunburned blondes were fulfilling their dreams—after talking about women for three years, they now had all they could want. It was the complete failure of the non-fraternization policy.”

  For those who had wanted and could afford them, there had been women in London, Paris, along the Ruhr, but, Webster observed, “in Austria, where the women were cleaner, fairer, better built, and more willing than in any other part of Europe, the G.I.s had their field day.”

  The flow of booze was never ending. On May 28, Webster wrote his parents, “Since leaving Berchtesgaden, we’ve had a bun on every night. Two days ago we hijacked a German Wehrmacht warehouse to the tune of a couple of cases of gin—forty-eight bottles all told. Your package with the orange juice powder, therefore, came in very handy.”

  Captain Speirs had only one standing order about the drinking—no drunkenness outside. This was strictly enforced by the sergeants, who wanted no incidents with drunken soldier boys on guard duty, or just wandering the streets and mountain paths. In their quarters, however, the men were free to drink all they could hold. Most of them drank more than that.

  Webster’s squad kept a pitcher of iced tea and gin full and handy. Each night, he wrote, “by eight o’clock Matthews was lisping and stuttering; Marsh was bragging about his squad and how they obeyed him; Sholty was sitting quietly on a bed, grinning; Winn was laughing and shouting and talking about Bastogne; McCreary was boasting of his courage (‘There ain’t nobody in this platoon braver than I am buddy’) with immodesty but complete truth; Gilmore was pressing clothes furiously, a peculiar and most welcome manifestation of his high spirits; Hale slobbered and poured himself another drink; Chris, who never got rowdy, sat back in cold silence; Rader had passed out in the armchair; and I, who had passed out gracefully and without a struggle, was sound asleep.”

  The lads would work off their hangovers with an afternoon swim or game of softball. Winters was a nondrinker, who neither approved nor disapproved of drinking; his two best friends, Welsh and Nixon, were heavy drinkers. He never berated anyone for getting drunk on his own time. Had he ever been tempted to do so, he got a reminder each afternoon of why these excesses were taking place. The boys would wear shorts and nothing else in the warm sun while they played softball. Nearly every one of them had at least one scar. Some men had two, three, or even four scars on their chest, back, arms, or legs. “And keep in mind,” he concluded, “that at Kaprun I was looking only at the men who were not seriously wounded.”

  There was another reminder of the price that E Company and the others had paid to get to where they were. On June 5, at 2200 hours, the men celebrated the first anniversary of their jump into Normandy. Webster was struck by the contrast. A year earlier, at 2200 hours, “My heart was beating like Gene Krupa’s drum and my stomach was tied up and very empty . . . . Now I am sitting in a cosy house in the Austrian Alps. I have a tall glass of iced tea and gin in one hand, my pen in the other. A lot of boys who took off from that Devonshire airport are dead, buried in lovely cemeteries in Ste. Mère-Eglise, Son, and in Belgium, but I’m still here and very thankful for it and tonight we shall remember them in a way they would have thought most fitting—by having a wild, noisy party.”

  The officers too were having an ongoing party. Speirs had snatched a couple of cases of fine brandy, which he enjoyed in his living quarters with a beautiful Polish D.P. and her small child. Colonel Sink gave some memorable parties at his HQ, the Hotel Zell. One night he invited all 506th officers to meet General Taylor and his staff. It was a bash. Colonel Strayer, who according to Lieutenant Foley “could put away quite a bit of liquor, got a little rambunctious.” He got into a fistfight with a general. Lieutenant Foley and a couple of others got a bright idea. They went to the parking lot and siphoned most of the gas from General Taylor’s Mercedes (it had belonged to Hitler). They thought it would be very funny when he ran out of gas on his way back to Berchtesgaden in the middle of the night.

  The next morning, Sunday, Colonel Sink ordered a special Officers Call. They assembled outside the hotel. Sink laid into them. He said their behavior was disgraceful. He touched especially on the brawling and on the practical joke. He had just gotten off the phone with General Taylor, whose car had run out of gas and who had sat there for hours while his driver searched for a jerrican. Foley, who did not confess, reported that “Sink didn’t give a damn whether enlisted men stopped and listened, he was angry and he didn’t care who heard him give everyone of us hell, spelled H-E-L-L.”

  Sink never stayed mad long. A week later he laid on a huge Fourth of July celebration. But on the Fourth it rained, and again on the fifth. Never mind: the sixth was a beautiful day and the celebration began. “Sink on the Sixth,” the men called it.

  There were athletic events of all kinds. Gliders and sail planes sailed across the lake, riding the mountain currents. Troop Carrier Command lent the regiment a C-47 for the afternoon, and there was a jump of twelve men into the lake. Food and drink was plentiful. In the park, local musicians dressed in lederhosen played all the oomp-pa-pa tunes. The G.I.s requested pop songs from America, but the Austrians needed practice. Everyone danced. All the girls wore D.P. armbands (nonfrater-nization applied only to Germans and Austrians; D.P.s were exempt; the armbands D.P.s wore to distinguish themselves were lavishly distributed to the local mountain girls) but, as Lieutenant Foley remembered it, “there wasn’t one Displaced Person at the celebration.”

  Mountain weather, unlimited sports, women and booze, easy duty, good hunting, and a hard-assed colonel whom everyone loved. Zell am See provided, in Webster’s view, “the soldier’s dream life.”

  • • •

  It should have been the most perfect summer ever for the men of E Company. In fact, after the first couple of weeks, most of them hated it. They were frustrated by the Army bureaucracy, they were bored, they were drinking far too much, and they wanted to go home.

  Getting home depended on points, which became virtually the sole topic of conversation and led to much bad feeling. The point system set up by the Army gave a man points for each active-duty service month, points for campaigns, points for medals, points for being married. The magic number was eighty-five points. Those with that many or more were eligible for immediate shipment home and discharge. Those with fewer points were doomed to stay with the division, presumably right on through to the Big Jump in China or Japan.

  So for the first time in their Army careers, the officers and men became seriously concerned with medals. A Bronze Star was worth five points. Inevitably the Army’s hierarchical and bureaucratic systems played favorites. Lieutenant Foley recalled “the regimental adjutant who picked up a Bronze Star for—according to rumor—selecting the Hotel Zell for Sink’s HQ.”

  The men of Easy felt cheated in another way: in the paratroopers it had been damn near impossible to win a medal other than the Purple Heart. “In the 101st, for example,” Webster wrote, “only two men had been awarded the Medal of Honor—a private and a lieutenant colonel from the 502—and they had both been killed in action. Major Winters, who had acquired it legitimately in a fracas with a German battery in Normandy, wore the only Distinguished Service Cross in the 2d Battalion. In E Company, Captain Speirs and two or three others had 100-proof Silver Stars and about twelve men displayed Bronze Stars. Of Purple Hearts there were aplenty, but that was not a decoration but a badge of office: Infantry.”

  Most of the men in E Company had for decorations only the four battle stars on their ETO ribbon,
no more than a personnel clerk who had never left base camp. “There was MacClung, for instance,” Webster complained. “He was quiet, lanky, and unimpressive, and nobody noticed him. But his buddies in the third platoon swore that old One Lung had killed more Germans than any other man in the Battalion. MacClung could smell Kraut; he hunted them; he pursued them in dawn attacks and on night patrols; he went out of his way to kill them; he took more chances and volunteered for more dangerous jobs than any other man in E Company. MacClung had made every day of Normandy, Holland, and Bastogne, and what did he have to show for it? An ETO ribbon and four battle stars.”

  Sgt. Shifty Powers was in the same category. As good a soldier as there was in the 101st, he had no medals, no Purple Heart, so not enough points. But the grumbling had grown to such proportions that General Taylor decided to have a drawing in each company; the winner would be rotated home. Powers did not want to attend the drawing. “Hell, Paul,” he told Sergeant Rogers, “I’ve never won anything in my life.” But Rogers persuaded him to go, and he won.

  Immediately, another soldier offered Powers $1,000 for that trip home. Powers recalled, “I thought about that for a while, $1,000 was a lot of money, but finally I said, ‘No, I think I’ll just go home.’ ”

  Powers gathered up his loot, mainly pistols, got his paperwork done, drew his back pay, and joined the ten other lucky men for a ride to Munich. Going around a curve, a G.I. truck hit their truck head on. Powers flew out and over the top of the truck, hit the pavement, broke some bones, and got a bad concussion. Another one of the “lucky” soldiers was killed. Powers went to hospital, where he lost all his back pay and souvenirs to thieves. He eventually got home via a hospital ship, months after the comrades he had left behind.

  • • •

  Adding to the frustration of seeing cooks and clerks get the same points as front-line infantry was the haphazard record keeping. All the men spent hours totaling up their points, but the trick was to convince the regimental adjutant’s office. Webster was sure he had eighty-seven points, but his records indicated he had fewer than eighty.

  General Taylor tried to help his veterans. He decreed that every man who had taken part in Normandy, Holland, and Belgium, or who had made two of those campaigns and missed a third because of wounds, would receive a Bronze Star. This was widely appreciated, of course, but temporarily caused more frustration because it took weeks after Taylor’s announcement before the medal and citation—and with them the all-important five points—actually came through.

  All this chicken stuff created intense dissatisfaction with the Army and its ways. Recruiters were circulating among the officers and men, trying to persuade them to join the Regular Army. Almost none did. Webster articulated the feelings of most of his fellow soldiers: “I hate this army with a vehemence so deep and undying I’ll never speak good of it as long as I live,” he wrote his parents. “I consider my time spent in the army as 90% wasted.” The only thing that he would concede was “I did learn how to get along with people.” When Sink offered Winters a Regular commission, Winters thought about it for a moment or two, and then said he would rather not.

  • • •

  Adding to the problems of frustration and anger caused by the point system was the combination of too much liquor, too many pistols, and too many captured vehicles. Road accidents were almost as dangerous to the 101st in Austria as the German Army had been in Belgium. In the first three weeks in Austria, there were seventy wrecks, more in the six weeks of June and July. Twenty men were killed, nearly 100 injured.

  One night Sgt. Robert Marsh was driving Pvt. John Janovec back from a roadblock by a side road. Janovec was leaning on the unreliable door of a German truck. They hit a log. He lost his balance, fell, and hit his head on the pavement. Marsh rushed him to the regimental aid station in Zell am See, but he died on the way of a fractured skull. Captain Speirs gathered up his few personal possessions, a watch, his wings, his wallet, and his parachute scarf, and mailed them to Janovec’s parents. “He had come a long way,” Webster wrote. “He had jumped in Holland and fought in Bastogne. He hated the army, and now, when the war is over and the golden prospect of home was in sight, he had died.”

  Marsh had not been drinking. Easy Company was proud of its record with regard to mounting guard duty or manning roadblocks with sober, responsible soldiers, and in not driving drunk. Others were not so careful. Private O’Keefe recalled the night he was at a roadblock with Pvt. Lloyd Guy halfway between Saalfelden and Zell am See. “An open German staff car came barreling down the road, not prepared to stop. Guy and I jumped out in front of it and made them stop. There were two men dressed in German uniforms, both drunk. ‘What the hell you stopping us for? We’re on your side.’

  “They were a couple of our paratroopers, but from some other company. We told then, ‘Damn it, you could have got your heads blown off!’

  “They finally promised to slow down on the driving. We told them the next guard post was about ten miles up the road, to keep an eye out for it, and to slow down to a crawl. They promised to take it easy.

  “But when we got back we learned that those two damn fools had barreled right through Welling’s post with Welling out yelling, ‘Halt! Halt!’ After the third “Halt!’ Welling took one shot and hit the driver.” Later Welling visited the wounded man in the hospital; he said he had no hard feelings toward Welling, that he would have done the same thing.

  Sgt. “Chuck” Grant, an original Toccoa man, was a smiling, athletic, fair-haired Californian who was universally respected—he had knocked out an 88 in Holland—and liked. One night he was driving a couple of privates to a roadblock for a changing of the guard. As they arrived, they saw a commotion.

  A drunken G.I. was standing with a pistol in his hand, two dead Germans at his feet. He had stopped them in their vehicle and demanded gasoline, as he was out. But he had no German, they had no English, he concluded they were resisting, and shot them.

  A British major from military intelligence happened to have been driving by. He and his sergeant got out of their jeep to see what was going on. The drunken G.I. pointed his pistol at them and told them to back off.

  At that moment, Grant came driving past. The drunk took a shot at him, but missed. The major made a move to disarm the man. The G.I. turned on him and shot him dead, then his sergeant. Grant came running over; the drunk shot him in the brain, then ran off.

  Speirs thought the world of Grant. When he heard of the shooting, he and Lieutenant Foley jumped in a jeep, drove to the site, got Grant on a stretcher, and roared off for the regimental aid station. The doctor there was a disgrace, unshaven, unkempt, wearing a badly stained shirt. He took a quick look at Grant and said there was “no hope.”

  “Bull shit,” said Speirs, who put Grant back on the stretcher and roared off again, this time for Saalfelden. Speirs had heard there were some German specialists there. One of them was a brain specialist from Berlin. He operated immediately and saved Grant’s life.

  Word of the shooting flashed through the billets. E Company went out en masse to find the culprit. He was found trying to rape an Austrian girl in Zell am See. He was a recent replacement in Company I. To the expressed disgust of many of the men, he was brought back to company HQ alive.

  He almost wished he hadn’t been. Half the company was milling around him, threatening, kicking, swearing vengeance. Before anything more serious happened, Captain Speirs came rushing in, straight from the hospital.

  “Where’s the weapon?” Speirs shouted at the prisoner.

  “What weapon?”

  Speirs pulled his pistol, reversed his grip to hold it by the barrel, and hit the man right in the temple with the butt. He started screaming. “When you talk to an officer, you say ‘Sir,’ ” and hit him again.

  The G.I. slumped into a chair, stunned. Pvt. Hack Hansen from Grant’s 2d platoon, and close buddy, came running in. He whipped out his pistol. “You son of a bitch,” he cursed. “I’ve killed better men than you.�
� He put the pistol right in the man’s face. Four men grabbed Hansen from behind and tried to pull him away, shouting that death was too good for such a coward, but he pulled the trigger. The pistol misfired.

  “You ought to have seen the look of that guy,” Gordon Carson remarked.

  They beat him unconscious, then carried him to the regimental guardhouse and turned him over to the provost sergeant. When he revived, the provost sergeant beat him until the blood ran.

  Sink came to company HQ. He strode in and asked Sergeant Carson, “Where’s Speirs?”

  “Up on the second floor, sir.”

  Sink went up and got the facts from Speirs. It took the better part of an hour. Sink left, and Speirs came down.

  “How’d it go?” Carson asked.

  “Pretty rough.”

  “Well, what did he say?”

  “He said I should have shot the son of a bitch.”

  That he did not is remarkable. One explanation I got from a number of men was that Speirs must have had some doubt that the arrested man was the right man. When I asked Speirs about this, he replied, “As to the Sergeant Grant shooting you have it right. There must have been doubt in my mind, because summary action never troubled me.”

  But I wonder if there was not another factor at work. Speirs was not the only man who had a chance to shoot the coward. Grant had an opportunity in the initial encounter. The man who found the I Company drunk could have shot him on the spot, and nearly every man in the company interviewed by me said he wished it had been done. But many of them were at company HQ when he was brought in, wearing pistols, but only one of them actually tried to kill the man, and he was being held back by four others.