“They’re ours,” I said. “Looks like guys from the 502nd.”
Sergeant Taylor nodded. “Let’s see if they need help.” He took the lead now and signaled to the group. They gave a little start, but recognized the signals and our paratrooper uniforms right off, then went back to whatever they were doing. Sergeant Taylor approached the officer in charge, talked with him a few moments, then came back to Bill and me. “They were dropped in the wrong place. He’s already got a bazooka man set up, ready to blast anything that moves on the road.”
It was only a minute or two later when I heard the rumble of a truck coming toward us. It was far in the distance at first. I nodded to Sergeant Taylor and he signaled the officer in charge. We could all hear the truck’s engine by then and knew it wasn’t one of ours. We hit the ditches to take cover. The truck came into full view and swung up the road toward us. It was filled with German soldiers. The officer from the 502nd barked orders at the bazooka man, and he put one in the pipe and blasted it toward the truck. A tremendous blast of earth, fire, and smoke blew up. He’d scored a direct hit.
With our weapons aimed, we headed toward the burning truck. No resistance came on the Germans’ behalf. The men from the 502nd got there ahead of us. I walked to the edge of the wreck and paused. A uniformed German lay in front of me, one leg bent near his knee, the other leg extended straight. One of his arms was flopped over his chest, his other arm ended in a bloody stump. The man’s eyes were open, but he wasn’t breathing. Another German lay a few feet away, facedown, the top of his skull opened. Blood oozed from what was left of his head and pooled around his neck. I tried to take in what I saw. As I shifted my weight, my boot squished against something and I looked down. I was standing on a piece of a man’s foot.
Sergeant Taylor moved closer to where I was standing. “C’mon, Shifty,” he said. “Let’s get going.”
I stood unmoving, my face focused ahead. They train you for this, you know. They train you.
“C’mon, Shifty,” he said again.
Dead and wounded Germans were scattered all over the road. Some men yelled in pain. Others just sat. I shook my shoulders and caught my mind again. Sergeant Taylor was right, and I understood more what he was telling us to do. The officer from the 502nd outranked him. He had his platoon with him already. We were outsiders. He’d be ordering us to stand guard over the prisoners and wounded for the rest of the Normandy campaign, and we’d come too far already for that. Sergeant Taylor found the officer and told him we were going to head out and keep trying to find our unit. The officer didn’t object, so we kept moving down the road.
A breeze blew now, rustling the leaves, and we kept walking, walking. The breeze was making it harder to distinguish movement, and I kept my eyes peeled, my ears open. Sometimes we saw more troopers, but none were from our unit. They might walk with us for a while, but they’d soon veer off again and try to find their own. We walked and walked.
Off to our right, we saw a glider crashed in a field. It was one of ours, and we figured somebody might be hurt or need help, so we hiked over. Wasn’t a soul around, but that glider had a jeep in it as cargo. The jeep was stuck fast and reared up on its back wheels, making a corner to the ground. Sergeant Taylor nodded. I had an idea what he was thinking, but I wanted him to suggest it first. Sure enough, he did. “Let’s go get that jeep,” Taylor said. “We’ll ride it to the beach.”
I grinned. Well, the jeep had some braces attached to it that were holding it stuck. We wrestled with the braces a bit, but it was no use, so Taylor said, “You know, fellas, if we put a little charge on this here brace, we can blow that loose.” We were all trained in explosives, so Kiehn took out a chunk of C-4 and put a cap in it. We ran for cover, and Kiehn hit the charge. It went off with a big kaboom.
“Damn,” Kiehn said.
“Hmmmm,” Sergeant Taylor said. He had one hand on his chin and looked real intent on studying what lay before us.
“Maybe that jeep was leaking gasoline,” I said.
“You think?” Kiehn said. “It’s a good thing Captain Sobel wasn’t here to see it. He’d make us pay for it.”
Well, when we blew that charge, everything caught fire, see. So the glider was now burning. And that jeep was now burning. And we weren’t riding anywhere. That was for sure.
The afternoon shadows grew longer and we kept walking. Evening approached, and we neared the beach. It might have been more than seven miles that we had walked, but I didn’t want to say nothing out loud. We walked on for some more time still, then it grew dark. Off to our right we spotted a little bombed out building. We figured it might be good to hole up there for the night. If we came upon the beach at night, we’d probably draw friendly fire on us. So we pushed back the boards and went in. We ate a K-ration or two and closed our eyes. I don’t know if I actually slept. First light we got up and kept going.
When we got to where we needed to be at last, Lieutenant Winters was one of the first people we saw. “Where you been?” he asked. It was a friendly comment, not critical, though he clearly expected to see us earlier. He pulled Sergeant Taylor aside and said he had some news for him. I wandered over and started seeing familiar faces. A lot, I recognized. A lot of others were from different outfits. Men were trying to get loose ends together and mobilize, getting ready for the next attack we’d make.
Fellas started comparing stories. Everyone had been through different things. Some had landed in trees, some had landed in water, some had been fighting the Germans, some hadn’t seen any at all. In the days that followed, we learned that Earl McClung had jumped into the middle of a hailstorm of flak and landed in the town square of Sainte-Mère-Église. He’d fought with some guys from the 82nd for a while but they were never able to successfully take the town, mostly because the Krauts had nine tanks inside the city. He’d received a new nickname during that fight. Because of his scouting skills, the officer in charge had repeatedly sent him back into the city to see how things were. Time and time again, McClung went back and forth, crawling through ditches on patrols. One morning after he had been out on patrol all night, McClung lay down by some bushes, exhausted. Jim Alley and Paul Rogers were with him, and an officer came along and called for the services of a machine gunner. When the officer turned his back, Alley and Rogers lay their machine gun next to McClung, then pointed to him when the officer turned around again. I guess McClung wasn’t too happy about waking up and suddenly being made a machine gunner. Rogers wrote a funny poem about it with a line that went, “Who hung the gun on One-Lung McClung?” So the nickname stuck.
It wasn’t all fun and games. Far from it. We learned that Ed Pepping, the kindly medic, had been badly hurt and was soon out of the fight. Lots of men weren’t around yet, and we wondered where they were. Shortly after arriving where we needed to be, Sergeant Taylor came back to us and pulled me aside. Kiehn had disappeared somewhere into the group of fellows and wasn’t around just then.
“No one’s seen Lieutenant Meehan,” Sergeant Taylor said. That was our company commander. “He’s missing along with Sergeant Evans and all the headquarters staff in their plane. We think it went down. Probably no survivors.” He turned his head away for a moment. I didn’t know what to say. I just had a lump in my throat. They were fine men, all of them. Even Sergeant Evans.
“Lieutenant Winters is now acting as our company commander until we can verify things,” Sergeant Taylor added.
I was glad about that.
Sergeant Taylor shook his head as if he had more to say. “Shifty, before we arrived, the fellas led an attack at a place called Brecourt Manor. They broke up the Kraut guns, and their actions helped save a lot of our boys on the beach. But four of our men were lost in the battle. Don’t think you knew them. Two more were wounded. Popeye was one of them. He’s alive, Shifty. Been evacuated to a field hospital. I don’t know how bad he got it. But I thought you’d want to know.”
Well, I took all that news with me and headed off to a broken building and jus
t sat a spell. I thought maybe I’d eat something, you know, but I wasn’t hungry. I thought maybe I should sleep awhile when I had the chance, but I wasn’t sleepy. I wondered how that bullet felt for Popeye. Maybe it hurt him real bad. Maybe he was scared. We had just got here, you know, to the shooting part of the war, and things were happening all around me that I didn’t know how to put into words. So I sat. Then I put my head in my hands. Then I got up and joined the rest of the fellas in my outfit.
7
ORDERS
All us enlisted grunts sat on top of a hunk of concrete, smoking cigarettes. It was a few days after D-day, maybe June 10, June 11. Couldn’t tell you exactly what town we were near. We shaded our eyes against the glare, laid back, and baked in our uniforms. Sure enough, the lull didn’t last long. An officer barked orders to look sharp and move out, and the air filled with the rattle and clink of men picking up weapons and musette bags. Man, those Chelseas tasted like cardboard. They came with the K-rations. Lucky Strikes, my usual brand, carried a certain sweetness with the burn. What I wouldn’t give for a pack. I stubbed my smoke and stood up.
We were still regrouping. Guys were coming to Easy Company from all over the peninsula. Some reached us just as this new order came, and they didn’t get any rest at all. Just come in, say hello, and get going. We started our march. Couldn’t tell you exactly where on the map we were heading, other than to this city that the Krauts had clenched their fists around. Carentan. It was near an important crossroads. Orders were to take it back at all costs.
I guess a lot of other towns had been retaken over the past several days by other outfits. Afternoon turned to evening and we saw fires in the distance. Random rifle shots were heard and faraway bursts from machine guns. We passed blown up vehicles and a bunch of smashed equipment by the side of the road. The man ahead of me stumbled and cursed as we hiked. I looked down and saw he had stubbed his foot on the carcass of a dead horse. Its belly was bloated and it stunk like the back of a slaughterhouse. A short time later the same man ahead of me stumbled again. This time it was over a Kraut. The man lay on his back with one arm sticking up, eyes open, his corpse frozen in place.
Lieutenant Dick Winters was leading the company, and First platoon was out in front ahead of Second and Third, with Lieutenant Harry Welsh leading the First. The lieutenants were both fine men and good leaders, but Lieutenant Winters was receiving his orders from somewhere higher up, and that might have been the problem, for it was a lot of stopping on this march, digging foxholes, setting up machine guns and bazookas, then moving out again and hiking some more, only to do the very same thing a short time later. Darkness set in, and you had to crouch down every so often to glimpse the man ahead of you in silhouette against the somewhat lighter sky, otherwise he’d vanish and you’d be lost. Mosquitoes flew up in a frenzy and we slapped our necks against their swampy bites. All that stagnant water was still lying on the land after the Germans had flooded all those fields. I felt a little aggravated, but I wasn’t fussing out loud. I was glad we were all together again, most of us in the company anyway, and I felt confident we could handle whatever lay ahead.
Come dawn, I guess we finally got to where we were going, because the order came to stop and take cover behind a little hill. Just before I crouched, I looked down the road and saw the outskirts of a city. Signs were in French, and a sloped road with ditches on both sides led into town. Trees and field grass were motionless, almost too quiet, and word was hushed along in the morning air to us to get ready to attack.
Funny what you remember that happened in the lulls. A fine officer, Lieutenant George Lavenson, hiked out into the field because he had to do his business, you know. I had talked with him several times. He was the battalion personnel officer and dreamed of owning a canoe camp for kids one day. Well, he was squatting in this field with his pants down and a rifle cracked from out of nowhere. In that same second, Lavenson lay sprawled on his side with blood leaking out of his thigh. A medic ran over, and I crouched and scanned the distance but didn’t see no movement, so that Kraut sniper must have known what he was doing. Another order came quick. We needed to press forward. It was maybe six in the morning.
We locked and loaded and started double-timing toward the city, you know, when I heard someone yell a long “Look o-o-o-u-u-u-t!” and a machine gun fired up the road toward us, long bursts, birrrp-birrrp-birrrp-birrrp-birrrp. Rock and dirt spat up near my face and we hit the ditches and flattened out and kept our heads down. Those bullets kept flying, and I found out that when a bullet goes by your ear real close it makes a little popping noise. The ground rained upward, and Winters hollered at us to “Keep moving! Keep moving! ” and charged out of his ditch with those bullets still snapping and glancing all around him. We figured he knew what he was talking about, so we got up and starting running toward the city with him in the lead. I think it was Lieutenant Welsh and his team that threw grenades at the German machine gunner.
More fire spun in at us. I couldn’t see where from. Bullets zinged and zanged and we kept running, running. Everything was cussing and men shooting back. I fired my weapon at the buildings in front of me and kept running and fired again and kept running and it aggravated me that I couldn’t get a clean sight line on anything. A body lay on the ground and I dodged it while trying to think on the run. I guessed that the Germans were running back into the city, or maybe out the other side. I pushed past the wooden gate of a fence and I was in the city now. Gray buildings loomed up on both sides. The firing started up again. All was shooting and chaos and Dewitt Lowrey took shrapnel to his head and went down. In my mind flashed pictures of Lowrey working his father’s farm near Atlanta. Hunting and fishing were his favorite pastimes, just like me. He had carried that little stray dog we found on the march from Toccoa to Benning. After he was hit, I never knew what happened to Lowrey.
I kept running, running, past a little chicken coop right there in the city, and somebody was yelling, and bullets flew all around. Ahead, I glimpsed bursts of fire coming from the upstairs window of a warehouse. I pushed my shoulder against a wall to stop running, crouched, glanced around the side of a building, pinpointed the window with smoke, then ducked back. The shot was mine. I held my breath, glanced around the building again, fired, then ducked back again. Blasts came from another window. Shards of brick sprayed past the corner of the building in front of me. I’d got the sniper. Our guys ran forward past me to the next building. One of our men threw a grenade toward the other window. It exploded off the side of the building in a hail of debris. “We gotta take that warehouse!” someone yelled across the street. “Shifty! Shifty! You okay?!” I hadn’t moved since I’d pulled the trigger and ducked for cover, but suddenly I found my feet again and surged forward.
Sergeant Taylor yelled at me to hammer some windows, so I blew them out, then grabbed some cover near a building while more of our men ran up. “Tipper, take Liebgott and start clearing these buildings!” another sergeant ordered. The houses were built in rows, you know, and Tipper ran to the first and threw a grenade through the window while Liebgott kicked open the door. They disappeared inside, then Liebgott ran out and on to the next house. Tipper emerged, his rifle smoking, and paused on the doorstep. A mortar whistled in, and he exploded, or so my eyes told me. Bricks flew everywhere, and when I could see again through the smoke, Tipper was still standing, still holding his weapon. I remembered Tipper wondering on the first day of our training if we’d hike up Currahee by the time we finished Toccoa. He was a fine athlete and a good man. Right now blood poured from where his right eye had been. His head looked swollen like a watermelon. The clothing on his right arm and both legs was torn up. Blood soaked his uniform. More mortars came in, one right after the other, landing all over the street. Kaboom! Kaboom! Kaboom! Liebgott reached Tipper first. He hollered for a medic, helped Tipper sit, and cradled him in his arms.
Everything flew at us now—mortars and machine guns and artillery and the blown up sides of buildings. Clancy Lyall ran a
round a blind corner straight into the outstretched bayonet of a German soldier running the other way. The weapon stuck fast in Lyall’s gut. The two men both looked so shocked, I think neither knew what to do. Lyall got his rifle up first and shot the German out of him. The German fell backward and pulled the bayonet out of Lyall as he fell. Lyall was a goodhearted farm boy from Texas. A medic ran over and jabbed him with a morphine syrette. Another of our men blasted the side of a building with a bazooka. A huge hole opened up and a German soldier staggered out. Our man pulled a pistol and shot the German in the face.
Sergeant Carwood Lipton and Sergeant Taylor were acting as a team, leading some of us in Third Platoon up a street. Sergeant Lipton took the right side, hugging the buildings as he ran. He paused and yelled at us to move further along. Middle of his yell, a mortar dropped vertically, landing eight feet in front of him. Smoke and brick blasted up. Lipton flew backwards, maybe ten feet, his whole body airborne. He crumpled to the street, landed, and shook his head as if dazed, blood running from a cut under his eye and a hole in his thigh. Lipton was a dependable leader, one of the few married men in the company, and I had talked with him often about rabbit hunting, which he enjoyed as a boy. Tab Talbert, one of the best soldiers in the company, reached Lipton first, checked his wounds, and threw him over his shoulder to carry him to an aid station. As we ran through a covered alcove, I noticed the body of Albert Blithe crumpled near a wall. Blithe’s face was ashen and he was still alive, but his eyes stared into space, as if the man wasn’t in his own body anymore.
Another lull came, a longer lull. We ran through the rest of the city, blowing out windows and searching buildings. No one seemed to be around anymore. Our running slowed to a walk. I guess the city was secured, and we had done our job maybe. At least the Krauts were gone. I didn’t feel like yelling in victory. Didn’t feel like celebrating at all. I had shot at men for the first time ever, shot and killed them, and those thoughts swirled inside my head with no place to land. Just had to keep going. Keep going was all.
Shifty's War Page 9
