Shifty's War

by Marcus Brotherton

  Even Captain Sobel loosened up a bit. Or maybe it was just how I approached him after I became a real paratrooper. We went from Benning to Fort Bragg, North Carolina, for more training. One weekend I went home, borrowed Dad’s car, and took it back to Bragg with me to run around in. I was in camp one day going through base and ran a red light right at an intersection. Shoot, it was right in front of the generals’ quarters. Well, here came the MPs and pulled me over. “Now, I hate to do this,” the MP said, he was really apologetic about it, “but I’ve got to report it. If this was anywhere except in front of the generals’ quarters I wouldn’t.”

  The next day I got a message from Captain Sobel: “Shifty Powers, report to the commanding officer.”

  Now, my brother had come down that same day to pick up the car and bring it back home. So I walked in the door, saluted Captain Sobel, and said, “Sir, my brother’s coming here today. I’d like to have the rest of the day off.” I don’t know exactly what came over me, but it was the first time I’d ever spoken my mind openly to the captain like that.

  You could see Captain Sobel’s face go red. He said: “Private Powers, I called you in here to chew you out—and you’re asking for time off?!”

  Well, he gave me the time off. Musta had a good streak in him somewhere.

  Fort Bragg was where I first met a fella who’d become one of my best friends, Earl McClung, an American Indian from the Colville Reservation up in Washington. He had done his jump training at Fort Benning and then been sent to us. Most of the fellas in Easy Company didn’t think too much about a man if he didn’t start with us at Toccoa, but there was something different about McClung. To begin with, that man could shoot. He and I talked rifles and ammunition, hunting and fishing. His father had an old World War I–era 30–40 Krag that McClung learned to shoot on. Most boys are thirteen or fourteen when they get their first deer, but McClung was eight. While growing up, he trapped muskrats, beavers, and coyotes. The boy could practically see in the dark and knew everything there was to know about the woods. I knew McClung and I were going to get along real fine.

  From there we went to Camp Mackall, in North Carolina, for more training. The camp was named after Private Tommy Mackall, the first paratrooper to die in World War II, and seeing the name of that camp brought back to me the seriousness of what we were preparing for. Then we went on some more maneuvers in Tennessee and Kentucky. Everything was more serious now—longer tests, six or seven days out in the open. The tone was changing. Men wore different expressions on their faces. They joked less. Home was becoming a thing of the past, something tucked further back into the corners of your mind, you know. I was able to travel home once during that time to Clinchco, and Bill Kiehn came home with me. It felt funny, mixing the two worlds like that for the first time and having a buddy from the service come home and all, but it worked out okay.

  You got to realize, the Army doesn’t tell you about nothing. Just after Bill and I went home, we came back to camp, then they shipped us to a new location: Camp Shanks in New York. Shanks was near the Atlantic, and they told us to get set to board a troop ship and head overseas. That meant one thing. They wouldn’t be putting us on a ship in the Atlantic if we were going to fight Japan. We were going to fight the Krauts for sure.

  5

  FACES SET LIKE FLINT

  They called this one the SS Samaria. Popeye and me and the rest of the fellas chewed donuts and swallowed coffee and walked around the pier the morning of September 5, 1943. We were all waiting, gawking at the size of the ship before us. The Samaria wasn’t too large as far as ships go, I guess, but it was gonna be the largest ship I had ever set foot on. Only ship, for that matter. An offshore breeze tensed my shoulders, and it was hard to believe I’d been in the Army for more than a year.

  The pier smelled of ropes and creosote, that black tar pitch put on wood to keep salt water from rotting it, and I nursed a headache this morning. The strong smell and my headache weren’t a good mix. A lot of other fellas probably felt the same way. An enlisted man had laid hold of a cache of whiskey the night before, our last night in New York, and we had all passed the bottles around. I was no stranger to beer, but still unfamiliar with the ways of whiskey.

  “You okay?” Popeye asked as I kneeled by the side of the dock.

  “Yeah. Maybe I shouldn’t have eaten that second donut.”

  “Nah.” Popeye was more skilled in these matters. “It’s good to have something in your stomach. Comes up easier that way.”

  I wiped the corners of my mouth with a handkerchief and stood up just as we got the go-ahead. We hiked up the gangplank, lugging our barracks bags and weapons. It takes a while to get some five thousand men on board a ship, and the rest of that day we hung around on deck, the ship still unmoved from the harbor. We leaned against the rails and killed time, whistling at the pretty girls waving to us from onshore. As the sun set, New York gradually grew dark. Next morning, little tugboats strained at the ropes. Our ship was towed from her berth, and we lined the rails to wave at the people on the passing ferries. I got a lump in my throat as we steamed past the Statue of Liberty as she slowly slipped by. After that, it was all open ocean. I’d never seen a world so vast or bright or blue.

  Fellas were crammed everywhere on the Samaria, many more than it was built to hold. A bunk was available only every other night, as bunk space was rationed, so Popeye and a bunch of fellas and me slept out on the deck. The showers ran salt water only, and only cold, so a lot of fellas chose to just stink up the joint. Socks and armpits mixed with the awful stink of that chow. I didn’t know what was worse. The Samaria was an English ship, and I guess the English crew didn’t know beans about good eating. Two meals only were served each day, and your mess kit might hold boiled onions and tomatoes, fish soup and Brussels sprouts, bread sliced thin as paper. The thought of finding something good to eat occupied much of my day. Some guys lived on Hershey bars. I ate mostly cookies—breakfast, lunch, and dinner. No, wasn’t no squirrel on board. I’d’ve given anything for some good squirrel stew.

  We had duties on ship, calisthenics, nothing worth remembering. Most guys whiled away their hours playing poker. I played a bit, but mostly just yakked with the other guys. Twelve days later we landed in England, climbed on this train with the windows boarded up, and they took us to a little town called Aldbourne. A few hills clustered around it, not as tall as the hills around Clinchco, but even these little hills helped me feel more at home. We were billeted in a bunch of locations around town, some men in stables, some in these little buildings call Quonset huts, some officers with families in the area.

  Right away, I liked the British people. Everyone I met seemed sincere, strong-willed, and earnest, relieved we were there. They had caught their share of bombing in the bigger cities, see, and every face wore an anxious look, even through their smiles. Folks in Aldbourne were preparing to be invaded by the Germans, you know, so they had hidden food out in the woods and practiced defending themselves against German soldiers. But I was shocked to see that all they had to fight with were their garden tools—pitchforks, shovels, rakes, and hoes—no guns or rifles. I guess their government had made it almost impossible for the average citizen to own a real weapon. I thought about what a massacre it would be if the German paratroopers ever landed in the English countryside. Those Krauts were heavily armed with burp guns, mousers, hand grenades, machine guns and would have wiped that village out.

  Months went by in Aldbourne and we trained more, fine-tuning what we knew. We went on longer field problems. We hiked through woods. We learned new combat exercises. Night operations. Hand-to-hand fighting. Map reading. First aid lessons. Chemical warfare training. We dug foxhole after foxhole throughout the cold, rainy winter.

  We jumped, too, on a regular basis. Full gear now, learning to use the risers to guide ourselves so we didn’t hit trees or walls on the way down. Easy Company lost our first man during a night training jump. Private Rudolph Dittrich was his name. His parachute never c
aught the air and he hit the ground hard. I never knew the man personally, but we were all real sobered about the loss. I felt sad for his family, and it caused me to remember the seriousness of what we were doing.

  Winter went. Spring came. We picked up a few replacements, guys coming into our unit from elsewhere. I tried to be kind to the replacements, maybe smile at them, but you’ve always got things to do as a private—potatoes to peel, guard duty to pull—so it’s hard to get to know every new guy who comes in.

  One replacement, Joe Lesniewski, took a real ribbing from a few guys, maybe because of his slight Polish accent. Joe got in a couple fights and seemed to hold his own pretty well, but he was always alone. One day he was in a room where a fellow was playing a guitar. Joe had learned some Western songs back in the states, and he started singing along with those good old Western tunes. That’s when Skip Muck ambled over. Skip was real kind to everybody. Back at Fort Bragg, Skip had befriended another replacement, Alex Penkala, and he was doing really well now. Alex’s folks had thirteen kids in their family, and his mama had died when he was real young, so I guess Skip had taken Alex under his wing, you know, showed him the ropes. That day in Aldbourne, Skip Muck went over to Joe Lesniewski and they start singing together. They sounded real good. Alex Penkala came over, too, and they had a bit of a musical group going now. I think making that one good friend made all the difference for Joe, because he didn’t have any problems from then on.

  Me and Earl McClung were getting to be better and better friends, too. In Aldbourne we went out on the rifle range, twice I remember. A few newer guys were having trouble qualifying, so McClung and I compared notes and got on either side of a guy, then fired at the other guy’s targets. Sometimes a guy would know it, sometimes he wouldn’t. Maybe the guy would just pull back his target and there’d be a new bull’s-eye in it, and he’d think he’d done it himself. These were strong, hardworking soldiers, mind you, younger guys like us, but just city kids who needed some help aiming. I found myself looking cross the range at McClung a couple times when that was happening and thinking, this guy’s really a fine friend, you know.

  We privates were down on the low end of things. Not much respect for a fella at the bottom. Food was scarce in England, and our cooks, I don’t know what they were doing with our food, but it wasn’t worth the salt you shook on it. One day I fussed about the food and a cook heard me. I stepped outside the mess hut and that cook hauled off and hit me in the eye. Five other cooks stepped out, and I was all alone against them, so I figured I’d just go my way without saying much.

  A day or two later came my chance. I was halfway through a dozen tubs of potatoes along with this other fella, might have been Jim Alley, don’t quite remember. It wasn’t much fun, that’s for sure, and that same ole cook came in and fussed at us for being so slow. When he left, I stood up and stuck a trench knife into the wall, right near the door so he’d see it, but a good distance away from me, too, maybe twenty-five feet. Then, when I heard the cook walking up again, I threw a potato against the wall so it made a loud thump. Well, that cook heard the thump all right, ’cause he came inside the hut, stared hard at the knife sticking out of the wall, and must have figured I’d thrown it there, real accurate just as he was about to come in, which is exactly what I wanted him to think about what I could do if I was aggravated enough. That cook turned on his foot, hurried back outside, and never once fussed at me ever again.

  Seems there was unfriendliness going around other places, too. But this fussing had a much more serious bent. The trouble with Captain Sobel all came to a head in Aldbourne. It wasn’t that the man couldn’t lead Easy Company during our training exercises. It’s that the man had no head for combat. When it came to walking through the woods, the man was louder than a tank. When it came to reading a map, the man got us lost. When it came to aiming a rifle, well, the man couldn’t throw a rock into a lake and have it come out wet.

  Fellas grumbled at first, but then the noncommissioned officers, the real backbone of the Army, concluded that if a man like Sobel was left in charge, more fellas than not would be coming home in a pine box. Captain Sobel had put in for a court-martial on Lieutenant Dick Winters, and the matter was pushed past the breaking point. The complaint was over something stupid, too, not inspecting a latrine on time. Lieutenant Winters had inspected the latrine on the hour he was ordered to, but Captain Sobel had switched the order by fifteen minutes. An order Lieutenant Winters never received. Certainly nothing to lose a fine leader over.

  Well, I didn’t hear the ins and outs of how the mutiny went down until much later, but it seemed that all the NCOs in our company wrote a note, all resigning their posts. It was a serious offense, up and quitting like that, and could have meant facing a firing squad. But it also sent a clear message for Colonel Sink to see what the men truly thought of Captain Sobel.

  Mind you, the colonel wasn’t happy about what the NCOs did, seeing how a huge invasion was right around the corner. He chewed them out something fierce for writing the notes, busted one or two of ’em down to privates, and shipped another or two out to other companies. But in the end, the colonel also saw the smarts of the plan, for he reassigned Captain Sobel to be a jump instructor someplace else, put Lieutenant Winters back in his same role, and brought in another company commander to lead us: Lieutenant Thomas Meehan from Baker Company. Lieutenant Meehan was everything Captain Sobel wasn’t—fair and respectful—and I reckon under Lieutenant Meehan we became a normal company again.

  A number of other leadership shakeups occurred around then. Lieutenant Walter Moore was our leader for the Third Platoon. He was an excellent man, a lot like Winters, but one day Lieutenant Moore was giving an explosives demonstration over in a school nearby, and one of the devices he was handling exploded prematurely. It messed up his face, his hands and eyes, and put him out of the service. He would have been a good man to follow. Lieutenant Fredrick Heyliger became our new platoon leader. He was married already and had a baby son, Fred Junior, born the day we had set sail across the Atlantic on the Samaria. The guys called our new platoon leader Moose, on account of his size, I guess. He was strict but fair, and the fellas all liked him lots. As a hobby, Lieutenant Moose Heyliger enjoyed bird-watching, and he could name every tree, plant, and shrub he saw. I was happy to follow such a man into combat.

  That March, 1944, I celebrated my twenty-first birthday along with Popeye, Skinny Sisk, Jim Alley, Bill Kiehn, Earl McClung, and a few other fellas. Over beers, we talked about how we’d all developed the same hitch in our craw. We’d been in the Army for nearly two years now, all training, training, and we were anxious for the real thing. Any time we had an off hour, we went to bars in Aldbourne, sometimes caught a train up to London or Swindon, and we were always raring to go. More drinking. More fighting. All symptoms of our anxiousness. It grew to almost a fever pitch among some of the fellas, though we had no idea of what truly lay ahead.

  On May 29, we received our release. They ordered us into trucks and we said good-bye to Aldbourne. Chills went up my spine: we were finally on the move. They trucked us over to another camp near an airstrip at Uppottery in southwestern England. It was about ten miles from the coast and I heard seagulls squawking as they flew past. Security was tighter than usual, armed guards surrounded the camp, and everything was real secretive, nobody talked to nobody about nothing.

  They crowded us into these big rooms and had us study sand tables, they called them, big maps that showed every bridge and fence along the Kraut-occupied Normandy coast. The Allied Army’s mission was to hit the beaches of Normandy full force. We’d throw everything we had at the Nazis. Our specific part of the plan as paratroopers was to come in ahead of time. In the hours before the coastal invasion, we’d land in the countryside and loosen up the enemy, making sure they didn’t pour hell down on the boys storming the beach. It seemed simple enough, particularly with all the preparation they gave us. Colonel Sink urged us to strike hard. He promised it’d only take us three days of h
ard fighting to get the job done. No problem, I thought, a man can survive any hardship as long as it’s only for three days.

  On June 4, 1944, we got word this was it: the invasion was set for that night. We blackened our faces, got into our gear, and filled out a life insurance form for ten thousand dollars. A few of the men shaved their hair into Mohawks. A strong wind started blowing that afternoon, and I thought it might be difficult for our planes to fly.

  Our gear was really something else. A paratrooper needs to carry everything he needs with him into combat, see, so we had big pockets and crammed enough food into them to last three days. K-rations, they were called. Tasted like sawdust, really, but kept a man going. Everything else went into our backpacks, called musette bags. In there, we’d put our rain poncho, a blanket, cigarettes, maybe half a pup tent, our mess kits, a toothbrush and razor, maybe a candy bar or two, maybe an extra K-ration if you were a chow hound.

  Then you wore an ammunition belt. Strung on the belt were two lines of ten clips of M1 rifle ammunition. Each clip had eight rounds, so you had eighty rounds of ammunition total. That felt comforting to me. Also attached to that belt you’d have your entrenching tool to dig foxholes, your canteen full of water, your bayonet, your gas mask, and a small first aid kit with a morphine syrette and a bandage or two.

  You wore suspenders, each with a metal ring, and from each ring hung a hand grenade. Strapped under your left shoulder was a holster with a .45 sidearm. You’d keep a trench knife down in your right boot. Next to your collar you had a zippered pocket where you carried a switchblade. If you jumped and got hung up in a tree, you couldn’t reach down and get the knife out of your boot, so you’d get your switchblade and cut the cords. You strapped a compass on your right ankle, and strapped a British Hawkins mine on your other ankle. It was a pressure plate mine, not very explosive, you know. It wouldn’t blow up a tank, but it’d knock the track off one. If you put two or three of them together, then you could cause some damage.