Filthy Thirteen

by Richard Killblane

  It is actually crazy to believe but paratroopers really had the advantage right there in the middle of the enemy. The Krauts could employ only so much back in the rear. If I was going to kill more Germans, it would be with the paratroopers. Anywhere a paratrooper looked he would have targets. If the Germans tried to pursue a paratrooper they would pursue him right past another little old squad or section of paratroopers. So really and truly we had the advantage. It was our personal ability pitched against that of the Krauts. We would not get bombed from ten thousand feet or gas thrown on us. So that is why I wanted it.

  I signed up down there and the recruiters gave me twenty-four hours to report back in before we left for Fort Sill. So I came on back home.

  CAMP TOCCOA, GEORGIA—BASIC TRAINING

  Manual Cockeral and I were sent to Fort Sill in 1942. He was from Tulsa, Oklahoma. When we got down there to process in, they sent in these officers from different special forces. They addressed the whole auditorium full of enlisted and drafted people to give them their sales pitch about the advantages of the Rangers and airborne. Manual and I had talked some out there in camp and I told him that I was going into the airborne. Well, we talked back and forth and he said, “That sounds interesting. I believe I’ll go in too.” So he also volunteered for it.

  We had to wait there a total of six days until we had seven volunteers for the airborne. Two or three of the boys were from up in northern Oklahoma. Because of my age they put me in charge and gave me meal and train tickets and all the stuff that goes with transportation. I saw that we were going to have a short stopover in Tulsa so I asked Manual if he wanted to see his family one last time. He said yes and I told him to call them and have them waiting at the terminal at the time on the tickets. When we got there they were waiting for us with lots of food and cakes. We were well treated.

  We then took off for Toccoa, Georgia.3 When we arrived, they put Manual in Regimental Headquarters Company, I think in the communications platoon. He goofed up in some way and they transferred him down to F Company. I did not see him again until the night we jumped into Normandy. We would remain at Toccoa for six months of basic training.

  THE DIRTY FIVE AND THE WARSAW SEVEN

  I went straight into the demolition platoon of Regimental Headquarters Company of the 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment, the day that I arrived. A demolition platoon had three sections, each assigned to support a battalion during training or a mission. They made me the acting staff sergeant for the 1st Battalion Section. Jim Davidson was the sergeant of the 3rd Battalion Section. Second Lieutenant William H. Leach was assigned as the officer of my section and First Lieutenant Gene Brown was our platoon leader.

  They had regular army NCOs scattered over the regiment filling the top positions. Our first sergeant was Albert H. Miller. “Top Kick” Miller was one of the finest men that I have ever met. He had been in the regular army for twelve years. Times had been tough all over during the Depression and an awful lot of those Southern boys went into the army just to have a job. That is what Top Kick had done. He was real Georgia Cracker. He had also been in the original airborne test platoon that trained down in Panama. Afterwards they took the NCOs out of the test platoon for cadre for the 506th. I think every company had a man out of the test platoon.

  He was a hell of a soldier and a hell of a man. He was a prince of a man both physically and spiritually. He had good morals but he had one vice. He loved to gamble. He also drank but outside of that he was great. He did not have much education but was smart, just shrewd. He knew human nature. If he saw some trouble growing, he could get in there and talk the man out of it. He defended his men against anyone up to Colonel Robert Sink.4 If he thought they had a just cause or if recommending stressful punitive measures would be bad, he would just come right out and say so. Colonel Sink and our regimental executive officer, Lt. Colonel Charles “Uncle Charlie” Chase, would call him right in on their meetings and question him about how he would deploy men under this situation or how he would attack. They relied a lot on his advice. All the old regular army men were close.5

  Leonard Leonitus Johnson was also regular army. He was my platoon sergeant when I first went into boot camp. He was a big ole heavy boy from northern Oklahoma and he had a speech impediment. One of the great sayings in the airborne was “Be Alert!” Well, he could not say “alert.” He would say, “Be Alurk!” He was not real bright so we called him “Truck Horse.”

  When we first went into our basic training we were assigned alphabetically to five-man tents. It was the rainy season in Georgia. The tents did not have any floors in them. Our stuff sat on the ground and of course it was impossible to stay clean. We did not even try to stay clean. We were not disciplined at all. I had enlisted to fight Germans. The others began to call my group the “Dirty Five.” It consisted of Charles Lee, Louis “Loulip” Lipp, Martin “Max” Majewski, and Frank M. “Shorty” Mihlan.

  Charles Lee was a nice guy. He was a pretty quiet guy who would go to town with the four of us and drink and party. He washed out sometime after I was thrown in the stockade for I never saw him again.

  Loulip was a German boy from somewhere up in Illinois. He was a big man, probably six feet one and real intelligent. He was so flatfooted he looked like a duck. He walked like this, clomp, clomp, clomp. You would think he was crippled the way he walked, but boy he was ahead of the class on anything that was physical. He could make a twenty-five-mile field march with full gear. He would never complain and was as happy as could be. He was a prince of a man and loved his whiskey.

  Max was tough as a boot. He was one of the best football players we had in the regiment. He would fight anything that showed up but he was not aggressive or obnoxious. He just stood his ground anywhere.

  Shorty Mihlan was not more than five feet four and an ex-pug6 from Cleveland, Ohio. Boy, he was also tough as a boot. He was one of the oldest ones in there. Mihlan was a total blackout drunkard though. He stayed drunk all the time. He would always manage to get hold of some whiskey. Our regimental commander, Colonel Sink, made him his orderly. They were both alcoholics.7 Shorty and I became and stayed good friends.

  There was another group of guys in our demolition platoon called the “Warsaw Seven.” Most of these boys were Polish and spoke the Polish language real fluent, although they were all born in America. They all had buddied together and were a pretty hard-headed bunch of kids to get along with. They adopted me as one of their own.8

  Corporal Eddy Malas was a regular army man. He had tried to get me to do something stupid under orders one day but I told him to kiss my ass. He kept telling me that his rank was made permanent by Congress. I told him, “Look, Congress doesn’t have a hell of a lot to do with me. I’ll whip your ass right here and now.” He answered, “You can’t talk to me like that.” He then took off.

  They sent him out as cadre to train new recruits. They made cadre out of a lot of the regular army people at that time. They would train us to a certain point then they would ship out somewhere and end up in a whole new outfit. Malas was a book soldier—he did everything by the book.9

  Most of these Polish boys were pretty smart kids. I think this kid named Edmund Lojko went into the S-3 (Operations). Frank Palys also was transferred up to the S-2 (Intelligence). There was another kid named Salinas. We called him “Deacon” because he was very religious.

  George Baran was a young Polish kid from up in the Adams, Massachusetts, area. He was a coal miner and a bull of a man. He had lots of guts and was a good soldier. He was one of the original Warsaw Seven but he did not stay with us. I did not want him. He was not aggressive enough. One has to be the aggressor in combat. Anytime a soldier becomes the defender he has had it. He was just a little bit slow on reacting. Another Pole was Joe Baranosky. I did not think he was much of a soldier either. He transferred to another stick.10

  Joe Oparowski and Joe Oleskiewicz were two of the eight seventeen-year-old kids who enlisted in our company. Oparowski was killed during training. We
were setting up a live-fire course to get the men accustomed to the noises of combat. We had a bunch of machine guns that were tied down set to fire live ammunition. We would get a bunch of guys started through there, then we would open up on them. We had nearly all the crossroads and bridges mined with trip wires. When they ran out into the timber behind us, we would blow the tops out of the trees just to give them the feel of combat.11

  Oparowski was setting charges and laying out trip wires. He had taken the insulation off the trip wire and made a loop, then threaded it through the loop of another one. If anyone touched that thing it would pull the two loops together and Bang! He was up in one of those big pines down there in South Carolina. It was pretty windy that day. Oparowski had his charge all lined up. The wind started blowing that pine tree while he held the charge under his arm. The tree moved over far enough and pulled those wires together. It just blew his whole chest up.12

  After Oparowski died, the rest of the Warsaw Seven were going to have a Catholic Mass up at the chapel. They invited me to go along because I was close to all of them. I told them I did not care for it much. Those things happen and it seemed like a big deal to go through all that ceremony. Of course, I did not know anything about mass.

  I looked around and they were dragging out their bottles of whiskey and wine. I asked, “What are you going to do with all those bottles?”

  They answered, “Well, we’ll do some drinking at mass. That is part of our worship service.”

  I said, “Why, I’ve got a bottle of whiskey.” So I went along with them.

  When Joe Oleskiewicz came into the outfit, he was seventeen. He was just a kid. He came from a large family and was the youngest of about thirteen children. There were eight recruits that were just young kids. Herby Pierce was another one of them but Oleskiewicz was the best soldier in the whole bunch. He just had the guts for it. He never hesitated on anything. If you said you were going to charge into a building, he was step for step with you. He was kind of a short kid and he was a good physical specimen. Everyone of them Poles were good physical men.

  Joe was a faithful Orthodox Catholic and attended the services all the time. Of course he drank some, but he was not much of a boozer. He was a big gambler though. Boy, he could rattle them bones. He could throw more passes with a set of dice than you could get grapes off a grapevine. He loved it. He would clean up every month on payday, four or five hundred dollars, then ship it right home. He would not touch a card, however. He did not know anything about cards. Joe was a first-class soldier. I made him a corporal and one of my squad leaders. I became very fond of him.

  I got along pretty good with the Warsaw Seven. I had four sisters and two brothers who did not go to war. They and my parents would send me one or two boxes every week. Every box had the same thing in it: sardines, crackers, and Copenhagen. Every one of those guys got to know what the other was getting. Every package these Polacks received had kielbasa. It was one of the best Polish sausages that I have ever eaten in my life. I would swap with them some sardines for sausage. We always shared what we had.

  We began to form into squads and platoons and companies and battalions. They put the Warsaw Seven in with my group. So the Dirty Five and the Warsaw Seven combined to form the 1st Battalion Demolition-Saboteur Section of the Demolition Platoon. I stayed with that platoon throughout the war.

  My attitude was all wrong for the army but I was able to get work out of the men. When another sergeant had a paratrooper who was rebellious or did not give a hoot about courtesy or discipline, why he would stick him over in my section. The company segregated them so their attitude would not contaminate the rest. They would then be with others of a similar attitude and I could control them as far as I wanted to. I was grateful for them. Nearly everyone of them was an excellent combat soldier. The meaner the man, the better soldier he was, in my opinion.

  The first six weeks of boot camp consisted of tough, tough physical training to weed us out. We got up every morning at 4:30 to run up the Curahee Mountain. After breakfast we went into physical training all day long. In the morning we carried and passed big logs around. We would fool around with those logs for about an hour.

  Then we would run down to the obstacle course. We ran everywhere. There was no walking. We had obstacle courses that would nearly kill a man but we made a contest out of it. It crossed a river three times—on rope ladders, poles, and a swing. We would swing as far as we could, then hit belly first and scoot onto the bank. There were also ten-foot scaling walls. Each wall had a twenty-five-foot rope hanging from a beam that we had to climb hand over hand. At the very end of it was a half-mile sprint.

  Other times they would divide the company in half and form a circle with a fifteen-foot diameter. When the whistle blew, a man from each side would charge in and have to throw the other out. When one was thrown out, another from that side would run in and take his place.

  We also conducted two twenty-five-mile forced marches with full field packs each week. If the officers were mad at us we did three a week. We began our physical training from early morning and did not stop until midnight. They told us right out that the purpose of the training was to weed out the weak. If a man ran until he passed out, they would let him try again the next morning. If he quit in any part of the training then his ass was out the gate. This weeded a lot of those who were not physically fit.

  Besides the physical training, we took technical training on demolitions and sabotage and various aspects of our field. We, being demolition saboteur people, had a large amount of primer cord. We had enough explosives of all kinds in our foot lockers to blow up the Empire State Building. We were supposed to turn it in but the ordnance people could not keep track of thirty or forty men out there.

  Most of the demolition platoon wore primer cord around the shoulder of their coveralls just so people would know who we were. It was not regulation. We just did it. I imagine it started when someone came in one evening with it still on him when he had been setting explosives.

  WHIPPING THE MESS SERGEANT

  The first bit of trouble I got into was whipping a mess sergeant. I was only in the army about a week. They fed us slop, absolute slop. It was not just ill-prepared, it was ill-quality. They had fifty tables set up in a building attached to the mess hall. Then they would run the men through, a company at a time. We went in there one evening and sat down. I do not even like butter but our butter plate was on the table and empty. So this one kid said, “We need some butter.”

  So I hollered over to one of the KPs13 for butter. He said we had had butter already. I said, “No, we have not had any butter. Just give us a stick of butter.”

  He called the mess sergeant and I told him, “Get us a stick of butter out here.”

  He said, “You’ve already had one.”

  I told him, “We have not even had a smear of butter. That was left on the table by the KP from the previous feeding.”

  He said, “That’s a damn lie.”

  I jumped up and made a run at him but he got out of there. It was so crowded that one could hardly walk. We were ass-to-ass with everybody. Two nights later I saw him over at the PX. I whipped him. I just beat him like a dog. That was the first trouble that I got into.

  Right after I whipped this mess sergeant, Colonel Sink was down there observing the obstacle course to see how the guys were coming along through it. I was always right in the first four or five people to finish the course. I was the first one to complete the course that day and Colonel Sink told me, “That is real good time. You did a good job.”

  I said, “Shit, that ain’t nothing. If you’d given me a little butter, I don’t know how fast I could have run this.”

  Of course he was very aware of the butter incident. You do not whip a staff sergeant without it going up the ladder. Sink just shook his head and I walked on off.

  SMOKIN’ THEM OUT

  They decided to put me on extra duty, close-order drill, and all that for punishment. I went down the third nig
ht to do my close-order drill. Jim Davidson was the Charge of Quarters. I walked in and he said, “Okay, McNiece, I guess you’re here for your close-order drill.”

  I said, “That’s right.”

  He said, “You’re the only one on extra duty.”

  I said, “That’s okay. Come on, let’s get this show on the road. I’ve got things to do.”

  Davidson said, “Okay, you just get out there and march up and down that street. We’ll tell you when two hours are up.”

  I said, “Come on.”

  He asked, “What do you mean come on?”

  I said, “You’ve got to have someone marking time all the time that a person is in close-order drill.” I told him, “This is pretty good. This is one-on-one.”

  Davidson was just like me—sick of the army. He said, “Oh no, that’s not right.”

  Ole Top Kick Miller said, “Davidson, that’s right. You don’t have to march with him but you have to mark time.”

  It was pretty cold. This was October at Toccoa, Georgia, up in the mountains. He said, “I’ll tell you what McNiece. You build us a fire here in our stove and we’ll use that as your punishment for extra duty for the day.”

  They were burning coal in those pot-bellied stoves.

  I said, “Okay, I’ll do that.”

  I got some newspaper and went over to get me a scuttle full of coal. I put a couple handfuls of that real fine dust in there. I found some sticks and made some kindling. I put that newspaper in under it and put the sticks in there, then I poured all that dust on top of that. I placed my coal on it, then I took another piece of that paper and stuck it up in that stove pipe. Boy, when I struck a match to that thing, it just blossomed up like nothing before. That paper and that dead wood really set off a charge. I jumped right out of there and ran across the street and crawled under a tent. You could hear them coughing, then the windows opened and smoke just poured out. The door opened and they were all cussing me.

  One used to be able to beat those stovepipes with a broom handle or stick or get up on top and punch up and down to clear them out. Well, they were beating that pipe to pieces. They had one man up on top with a big long rod. He was poking and jabbing. They began cussing and calling for me. I laid there just dying from laughter but I never did get to build any more fires for them.