The big red Nazi banner that Shifty got as a souvenir from Berchtesgaden is still around, stored in a box in the Powers family’s garage. Wayne Powers hung it in his dorm room as a college student.
The scene of Shifty talking with Major Winters was shown in the HBO miniseries but probably fictionalized. Shifty was asked in a newspaper article if the incident happened like that. “If it did, I was so excited I don’t remember,” Shifty said. “If I didn’t, I should have, because he was an outstanding officer.” [Douglas Durden, “Bringing the Toll of War Home,” Richmond Times-Dispatch, September 5, 2001].
The story about the men of Easy Company in Bastogne drinking creek water with human remains was recounted by Bill Guarnere and Babe Heffron in an interview with Valor Magazine, Adam Makos, editor (issue 15, volume 4, number 3, pp 13–14). Whether or not Shifty was in proximity to hear their conversation is imagined, though it’s probable and likely that he would have drunk the same water.
It’s verified that one man out of the four in the back of the truck died from wounds received during the head-on collision in Austria, although it’s not known if he was the man from D Company. I made that up, along with the description of what he looked like, to help put flesh on the man for the story.
Chapter 2
Most of the background information about Shifty in this chapter came from his sister, Gaynell Sykes, and other family members.
Shifty told me the story about shooting a dime. He said a good friend of his observed this, but he never mentioned specifically if it was Pete. I think it likely was.
A joke in Easy Company circles is that Shifty got his nickname from bootlegging moonshine whiskey in the mountains around Clinchco, meaning, as “an old hillbilly from the holler,” that he was always on the “shifty” side of the law. Shifty perpetuated the rumor to a certain extent as a participant in the joke, but clarified to several people that his nickname really originated from his basketball days and his ability to be “shifty” on his feet.
Shifty never was one to swear much, but his family noted that the one coarse word he frequently used was “shit.” That’s authentic.
Chapter 3
The information about the legends of Low Gap and Dave’s Ridge came from Cody Mullins, a lifelong Clinchco resident who had interviewed Shifty for a school project when Cody was in fifth grade, then kept in touch with him over the years. I wasn’t able to verify if these legends also existed when Shifty was a boy, but I liked the idea of a small town having these spooky stories that are passed down from generation to generation. Undoubtedly similar stories, if not these, were in place when Shifty was young. I used these legends to start this chapter because I wanted to show the difference between the imagined fears of boyhood that Shifty was just emerging from, and the real fears of war that he was about to head into.
Wayne Powers told me the story of the gang stopping Shifty in their car. According to Wayne, this line is spot on: I got no problem with taking you on. All I ask is that you come at me one at a time. I really like the grit it shows in Shifty. He wasn’t afraid of a fight, but he preferred to walk away from one if he could.
Chapter 4
Information about each man mentioned in Toccoa comes from either We Who Are Alive and Remain or A Company of Heroes. I don’t know if Shifty actually talked to all the men mentioned in this chapter on the first day in camp, but I wanted to give a brief snapshot of some of the real men and what they were like. We do know that he became friends very quickly with Skinny Sisk.
The information about the obstacle course came from pictures and text inside the 506th scrapbook.
Unfortunately, not much is known anymore about Shifty’s good friend Bill Kiehn. Whenever Shifty talked about him, it was only that he was a good friend and that he died in Haguenau. I was unable to locate any of his family members, but Buck Taylor recounted orally the story of Bill Kiehn coming into the company with a chip on his shoulder, and taking him out one morning for some one-on-one close order drill, which soon brought him around. Shifty mentions orally that Bill Kiehn came home with him to Clinchco once after they both received their jump wings.
Much of the detail and description about the hike from Toccoa to Benning I read in Mike Ranney’s unpublished journal, courtesy the Ranney family.
Chapter 5
Stephen Ambrose (Band of Brothers, p. 41) tells how an enlisted man located a cache of whiskey and passed it around just prior to the Samaria’s voyage, and that many of the men, while familiar with beer, were unfamiliar with the effects of harder alcohol. It’s unknown whether Shifty participated or not, but it’s likely that he did because he hung out with all the guys, and he wasn’t much of a drinker before enlisting. Ambrose notes that “the next morning, the air filled with the moans and groans of the hung-over men, the company marched down to the docks. A ferry carried the men to a pier, where hot coffee and doughnuts from the Red Cross girls helped revive the near dead.”
Shifty recounted orally on several occasions his memory of seeing the people in Aldbourne practice defending themselves with only garden implements. During some of his public talks after the war, he made a strong case for maintaining the legality of privatized gun ownership in the United States. This issue was about the only time he ever made a public political statement. Shifty believed that citizens had a right to own guns to defend themselves, while acknowledging that problems came if guns fell into the wrong people’s hands. Nevertheless, he stayed a strong proponent of personal gun ownership rights his whole life.
The story about Joe Lesniewski coming in as a replacement and being befriended by Skip Muck and Alex Penkala was told orally by Joe and mentioned in We Who Are Alive and Remain. When he told me this story over the phone, Joe “sang” a few bars of one of the old Western songs he and the boys sang. It was a very good moment. When Joe got to telling about Skip and Alex’s deaths, he found it very difficult to talk anymore. He was still very choked up about it, more than sixty years later.
Earl McClung told me the story about Shifty and him shooting at other men’s targets to help them pass their marksman tests. He still chuckled when he told it.
I mention the story of McClung receiving his nickname here, but it’s positioned slightly ahead of sequence. He rejoined the company during Carentan, some days later.
Chapter 7
Stephen Ambrose reported that Shifty and an unnamed friend found the wine shop and sampled the contents in Come-du-Mont, and that it happened before Carentan (Band of Brothers, p. 90), but Shifty swore it happened in Carentan after the bulk of the fighting was all over.
Don Malarkey and Alton More scrounged a U.S. army motorcycle and sidecar in their last few days in Normandy and received permission from Lt. Buck Compton to take it back to England. Malarkey told me it was probably More, not himself, who drove Shifty up to Worcester on the back. Shifty recounted the story of hearing somebody from a different outfit call his name. Although he never knew who it was, it cheered him greatly, Shifty said.
When I first heard the incident of Earl McClung shooting up the whorehouse while Shifty was upstairs, the location was stated as London, which undoubtedly made sense sequentially in the storyteller’s mind because London followed Normandy in the company’s experiences. But after reading this manuscript, McClung told me that the incident (while it most certainly happened!) could not have happened in London because they weren’t carrying their rifles when they went into the city on passes. Most likely, McClung said, the incident happened in Cherbourg right after the company’s fighting in Normandy was finished and just prior to the men boarding the ship to head back to England.
Chapter 8
Pat Christenson wrote in his unpublished journals that “many” of the Germans in the truck were hit by the men’s rifle fire, and doesn’t mention taking any of them prisoner. But when Shifty told the story, he said not a one was hit and that they were all taken prisoner. Earl McClung said that two Germans were shot. So there is some discrepancy in the numbers. Winters and Ambr
ose don’t mention the incident in their books.
Chapter 9
Don Malarkey wrote in his book that it was a fourteen-hour truck ride from The Island to Mourmelon-le-Grande (p. 149), but the 506th Scrapbook describes it as taking thirty-six hours. When the men first arrived, “their first look around was anything but reassuring . . . but there were beds everywhere so everybody crawled in and slept.” The Scrapbook mentions the Germans had used it previously as a tank depot.
I asked Buck Compton if he remembered any of the names of the players on the Champagne Bowl football team, but he didn’t. He said it was an extremely tough group of guys, though, as he was able to pick players from all three thousand men in the regiment, not just from the company. I mentioned Joe Toye watching the game in this section because, as the toughest man in Easy Company, on a good day, he probably would have been one of the players. I checked with Joe Toye’s sons. They had also wondered if their dad was involved with the game because he loved football so much, but they’d never heard him talk about it, and had always assumed the wounds their dad received in Holland precluded him from taking part in the game.
Chapter 10
Band of Brothers purists will notice a slight overlap between chapters 10 and 11 in the sequencing of some of the stories presented. For instance, the night of hard shelling that claimed the lives of Muck and Penkala happened just after Buck Taylor was wounded.
I included the story of Popeye telling a joke in this chapter because Shifty said that in spite of all the horror in Bastogne they occasionally found time to tease each other to lighten the mood and break the tension. Shifty said they’d sometimes shake snow from a tree branch down on a man just to mess with him, or tell stories or jokes. The incident of men urinating on their hands or rifles to warm them up is confirmed, although I don’t know if Popeye actually did this or not.
The story of Shifty being in the same vicinity when Don Hoobler fatally shoots himself in the leg with the Luger is shown in the miniseries, but I never found one instance of Shifty talking about it after the war. In A Company of Heroes, several men reported that it was a very significant incident to them, and the memory haunted them for years, so the absence of Shifty’s recollection makes me wonder if he was out on patrol when the actual incident took place. As such, I didn’t mention it in the book.
Chapter 11
Earl McClung tells the stories of being on a train, heading back to Haguenau, and getting a stove full of coal and shooting the locks off train cars to get food inside (see We Who Are Alive and Remain, pp. 163–164). Other still-living men from the Third Platoon don’t dispute the stories. Elsewhere, it’s said the men rode on trucks, so it may have been some combination of both forms of transportation.
Shifty told the account of shooting a sniper in Foy differently from how it was portrayed in the miniseries. This account reflects how he told it. C. Carwood Lipton wrote unpublished notes about a variety of the men from the company. He described the incident this way:One of the men in the 3rd platoon of E Company, 506th had excellent eyesight, and he was also an outstanding marksman with a rifle. He was Darrell C. “Shifty” Powers, a tall, part-Indian, from Clinchco, Virginia.
Shifty’s marksmanship paid off for us on January 13 when E company received orders to attack and clear the town of Foy. We moved around to the south of the town and attacked to the north into it. The Germans defended it strongly, and we had a number of men hit. At one point, several of us, including, Shifty, Popeye Wynn (Shifty’s closest buddy), Bob Mann, R. B. Smith, and I were pinned down by a sniper that we just couldn’t locate. R. B. Smith caught a bullet in the leg. Then Shifty yelled, “I see ’im.” And there was a rifle shot. We weren’t pinned down any more so we continued the attack.
When things had cleared up later that day I went back to see where that sniper had been. When I found him, Popeye had already found him. We stood there looking down at the dead German and at the bullet hole centered in the middle of his forehead. Popeye looked over at me and said, “You know, it just doesn’t pay to be shootin’ at Shifty when he’s got a rifle.”
How right he was.8
Chapter 12
The story of Skinny Sisk, one of the most incorrigible men in Easy Company, having a foxhole conversion during the shelling in Bastogne is one of those you hear every once in a while in Easy Company circles, but I wasn’t able to verify if the initial conversion actually happened in the foxhole or later on. For the first few years after the war, Wayne Sisk suffered extensively from flashbacks and PTSD, evidently choosing to cope by drinking. It’s verified that in 1949 he underwent a significant spiritual conversion experience, which he reported in a letter to Dick Winters. Evidently it did change his life fully and help him cope (Band of Brothers, p. 299). That same year, 1949, Skinny Sisk was ordained as a Baptist minister. His obituary, which you can easily find online, notes that he died July 13, 1999, in Charleston, at age seventy-seven.
In the miniseries, Shifty is shown going on the patrol across the river, but McClung confirmed that Shifty wasn’t on the patrol.
The miniseries shows Bill Kiehn walking along with a sack of potatoes when he gets hit with a shell, but that was a fabrication for story’s sake, said Paul Rogers, who was in Haguenau and saw Kiehn’s death when it occurred. Rogers’s experiences are recorded in the chapter. Still, I liked the story of the potatoes that HBO added and kept the reference to potatoes in the story only because it showed that men were dying over very small things by that stage in the war. Margo Johnson told me that Shifty had told her once (as an adult) that Bill Kiehn was an only child.
Chapter 13
Ambrose records the story of Shifty getting a new rifle that he hated (Band of Brothers, p. 236).
Chapter 15
For information on Fritz Niland, the real “Private Ryan,” see Band of Brothers, p. 59. For information about Skip Muck’s longtime friendship with Fritz Niland, see A Company of Heroes, pp. 272–273.
Chapter 16
The Powers family noted that the release of the miniseries and subsequent speaking engagements for many of the men featured brought Shifty out of the depression he was feeling on account of his declining health. They speculate that the series bought Shifty an extra few years of life.
Chapter 17
Shifty’s final words to various family and friends are all related as they remembered.
INDEX
Page numbers in bold indicate 101st Airborne Division’s organization chart.
Aldbourne (England)
Alley, Jim “Moe” (Sergeant)
Aldbourne (England)
Bastogne (Belgium)
Camp Toccoa (Georgia)
D-day
death of
Emmy Awards
Foy (Belgium)
German tank vs.
Operation Market-Garden (Holland)
Shifty Powers and
“alphabet” companiesh PIR
Alps
Alsace (France)
Ambrose, Stephen
America. See United States of America
ammunition shortage, Bastogne (Belgium)
Amos and Andy (radio show)
anger problems after WWII (Shifty)
antiaircraft fire, D-day
Ardennes Forest
Army Times
Austria
“ball crushers,”
Band of Brothers (Ambrose) mistake corrected in
Band of Brothers (HBO mini-series)
cameraman at Emmys
Easy Company and
Emmy Awards
gratefulness for veterans from
interview of Shifty Powers for
lives changed by
Peter Youngblood Hills as Shifty Powers
premier in Normandy (France)
Shifty Powers portrayed in
tours
basketball and Shifty
Bastogne (Belgium)
American soldiers retreating
ammunition shortage
Bois Ja
cques woods (Belgium)
casualties
conditions at
dead German soldier as insulation
death everywhere
dreams
feet problems
food shortage
foxhole safety
Foy (Belgium)
friendly fire incident
German POWs
German snipers
“hold the line at all costs,”
importance of
Jacqueline Bowers, thanking Shifty
listening outposts
memories of
morning routines
night shelling by Germans
“Nuts!” response to surrender demands of Germans
Presidential Distinguished Unit Citation
reconnaissance patrols
shell (dud)
shelling by Germans
sleep deprivation
suicide order
surrounded by Germans
victory at
visiting after WWII
warm clothes needed for
water and brains of dead soldier
battalions in 506th PIR
battle conditions, simulating
battlefield commission
Battle of St. Mihiel
Battle of the Bulge
See also Bastogne (Belgium)
Belgium
Noville (Belgium)
Rachamps (Belgium)
Shifty's War Page 25
