Filthy Thirteen

by Richard Killblane

  JUMP COLLISION

  While in England we made three or four more practice jumps. When we jumped, the air force flew those C-47s in nine plane formations. Every three planes would fly in a “V” formation and the three “Vs” would form a larger “V.” The whole demolition platoon would jump in three planes, each section to a plane. It was easy to observe what was happening all around us. So we had a contest to see which section could empty their plane the quickest.

  One time we were shuffling to the door and Oleskiewicz was right ahead of me. I was pushing him and pushing him and crowding him. I had got up even with him so that he and I went out of that door side-by-side. The door was right behind the propeller. That prop blast would shoot a man like a bullet right under the tail. Consequently, the pilot would usually drop the nose down just a enough to raise the tail to give us a better chance of making it without our chutes tangling on it. When we went out of there, that prop blast hit both of us. I was a little bigger than Joe so it had more of me to grab hold of and it shot me on past him. Our chutes opened and collapsed. Then his opened again but he was tangled up in my shroud lines about halfway between me and the canopy. So he was slipping my chute to one side and I was losing air over on my opposite side. Boy, we were coming down like a bullet and we were not jumping from very high. My chute also began to steal air out of his canopy which began to wilt and fall down all around us.

  Joe hollered, “Jake, what’ll I do?”

  I said, “Hell, take your jump knife real quick and cut yourself loose.”

  He said, “Like hell I will!”

  So we fell together and I landed on a rock fence line. I just slammed into it like a ton of bricks. The minute my two hundred and fifty pounds13 were released from the pull of his chute, Joe, who probably was about ten feet off of the ground, came down easy and just walked on in.

  In May 1944, our division practiced an invasion rehearsal. My section conducted a night jump to secure a bridge. We lost fifteen percent of the division to injuries. We normally jumped at 500 feet under combat conditions but we were flying over rolling hills, kicking some of the guys out at 200 feet. Corporal Stroup broke his ankle and would never jump with us again. I promoted Jack Womer in his place.14

  FIGHTS

  The guys would fight at the drop of a hat. It was their way of having fun. There was an ole boy who had started out in Regimental Headquarters Company named Chuck Cunningham. He was constantly fighting. He was kicked out of Regimental Headquarters Company over some AWOL situation or a fight or something. After he wound up in a line company, he kept trying to retain his original relationship with us in Regimental Headquarters Company.

  Well, they had a little ole shack maybe five hundred yards from our Quonset huts where Sir Ernest Wills used to entertain guests. It was a pretty nice little place. We used it for our own pub. We kept it stocked with beer and whiskey and stuff just for our own entertainment. We even took women in there.

  One night we had a big blast of a party. I do not know what happened between Cunningham and Baribeau, but they got into a heft of a brawl. Cunningham cut him up pretty bad. I went looking around trying to find Baribeau but I could not find him. I knew he had gotten cut up pretty bad so I went back to the barracks. I found him there loading up his M-1.

  I asked, “What are you doing?”

  He said, “I’m going to kill that son-of-a-bitch.”

  I said, “Well, that would not be very smart. I don’t see anything wrong with it except that it is not very smart, Baribeau. You’re liable to get in a bunch of trouble. We’re going to get the medics and get you patched up.” He was as drunk as nine hundred dollars.

  “Well,” he said, “I guess you’re right.”

  So I got him over to this doctor and they fixed him up.

  I said, “You get to bed and we’ll figure out a way that Cunningham gets what he needs.”

  He then crawled into the sack. I then went back to the party. When a bunch of us left, Cunningham came out and stomped off to our barracks with us. He was mouthing off and telling us how tough he was.

  I said, “I want you to do something for me, Cunningham. You get your ass out of here. We need some sleep. We’re not going to get it while you’re standing here raving. You get on out.”

  He kept jabbing, “I am tough. I can whip any man in this Quonset hut.”

  I said, “I’ll tell you what. There are thirteen of us in here. You pick one. Pick any one of us.”

  He chose Agnew and Agnew whipped his ass, then threw him out on the asphalt walk along those barracks. He continued to whip his ass until it was pathetic. Then he put a choke on him. Cunningham was a reddish-blond-haired type. His damn face was turning blue and I said, “Jack, you can kill him if you want to but there is probably not much profit in it. I have never tried to clear out a murder case. Why don’t you turn him loose and drag him off to the side.”

  So Jack got up and drug him off to the side. The next morning Cunningham was gone. I never did see him again. He was just a brawler. If he had gone to a Catholic mass, he would be in a fight before he had gotten out of there. That is the kind of guy Cunningham was.

  [John “Dinty” Mohr recalled how Jake was considered the toughest man in the company:]

  Jake McNiece was the sergeant in our hut in Liverpool, England, and I had gone on a three-day pass of some kind and I left a towel on a bed and he took that towel and threw it in the stove. I asked him what happened to that towel and Jake said he threw it in the stove. I met him the same day down in the latrine and I says, “So ya threw my towel in the stove, huh Jake?” and he says, “Yea, Dinty I did.” And he grabbed me and there was a big long pee trough there and he tried his best to throw me in that pee trough, and he was supposed to be the number one guy in our company to fight, and he had me a certain way but I couldn’t get ahold of him very good. He had me up too high or too low. He couldn’t throw me in there. I finally got my arms down where I could get ahold of him and then I had him over a barrel and I had more strength than he did. But then he quit, and I shouldn’t have let him quit. I should have throwed him in that pee trough.15

  While back in Toccoa, Georgia, I was in a joint one night with two other guys and three girls. This one paratrooper had a bitch with a soup jockey who was serving our table. That paratrooper was rank and foul. I told him, “Look trooper, I know you’re a little teed off, but get it out of our booth. I don’t want you talking like that in front of these young ladies.”

  He said, “I guess you’re going to have to stop it.”

  I said, “Yeah, I imagine I can.”

  So I stood up and busted him right in the puss and knocked him clear across the room. It was a small “hole-in-the-wall” cafe with a jukebox and beer and that sort of thing. The minute he bounced off of that wall, I had him by the throat just beating him to death. About that time two other paratroopers bailed in there with him. One of them was a first sergeant from up in F or G Company. Then two more joined in. So those five went to work on me and these two idiots that were with me took the women and left. Those five boys really put a bunch of ugly on me and whipped my butt pretty good. Since my section was assigned to 1st Battalion and they were in the 2nd or 3rd I never did see them again in the United States.

  When in England, I went into this London pub one night and recognized one of those guys who had piled in on me back in Georgia. I walked over and looked at him. He and his buddy had two of those English “split-tails” [girls] with them.

  I said, “Hey, why don’t we step outside here. We’ve got some unfinished business to settle.”

  He looked at me kind of funny, then he recognized me and said, “Let’s don’t have any trouble. That was probably wrong the way you were treated but let’s forget it.”

  I said, “I won’t ever forget that. Come on and let’s get outside. It won’t take but a minute. Let’s get this show on the road.”

  He would not do it. So I just kept drinking beer and whistling around there. I missed two dozen w
omen while keeping an eye on him. I finally saw him and the girls get up to go out. When they did then I filtered right on out too. I started beating him and kicking him and stomping him on that cobblestone. I could hear all this racket and noise as a pretty big crowd gathered around.

  Lieutenant Gordon Rothwell had just walked up and said, “Private McNiece, if that soldier is badly injured we’ll nail you to the cross.”

  I said, “Hop to it, Rothwell. I have had my fun. You have yours.”

  He said, “One paratrooper doesn’t stomp another.”

  I said, “I never knew of five paratroopers whipping the butt off of another paratrooper except one time and it was this bastard and four others. Him and four other paratroopers ganged up on me while we were in Toccoa, Georgia. This is the first time I have had the pleasure of making his acquaintance again. You have your fun. I’ve had mine. He’s not injured. He is pretty badly bruised but he ain’t going to die from it I guarantee you.” So I just took on off. I never heard another word about that incident until we jumped into Normandy.

  Well, we were out on a field problem one day in England. Jack Womer had just made corporal and told Cone to do something. I did not even hear what it was.

  Cone said, “Blow it out. I ain’t going to do that.”

  They got to arguing back and forth and then Womer called Cone a Jesus killing son-of-a-bitch. When he did, the situation exploded. They started fighting like a couple of mad bulls. Both of them were just perfect physical specimens. Jack and Ragsman were really in a brawl out there. The minute one knocked the other down why he started putting the boots to him. Then one would get up and have the other down.

  We were in sheep country. Those sheep fences were pretty low, probably not over two feet high with one strand of barbed wire across the top. Those two fought back and forth over this fence. Their clothes were so torn up, they were almost naked. I believe Lieutenant Edward Haley, a lieutenant in another demolition section came by and asked, “What’s going on here?”

  I said, “Nothing.”

  He said, “What do you mean nothing?”

  I said, “They’ve had a disagreement and are trying to iron out some orders or something. There is a misrepresentation of the stated condition. They are kind of settling it and coming to a determination.”

  He said, “Well, they can’t fight out here. That’s a private fighting a corporal. So that’s against regulations. You’ve got to stop it.”

  I said, “The quickest and easiest way I can stop it is to tell you to get your butt out of here. They have a dispute going on here and they’re going to settle it. When we have a problem in this section we settle it right here. We never go outside on it. I want you to just get lost.”

  They fought, I guess, for thirty minutes. By then they were both so tired that one could not knock the other down. Neither one of them won nor lost but they were both cut to ribbons on that fence. And boy, their knuckles were bruised. They finally shook hands and went on back to their business. They fought side-by-side from then on.

  JAKE’S BAR AND GRILL

  They were feeding us slop. This was from the day we went in the army back in the United States until we got out. But that grub in England was the sorriest, filthiest grub that we ever had. We were having stewed tomatoes, brussel sprouts, and carrots for breakfast, dinner, and supper. It was terrible. I think they fed paratroopers in such a manner so they would be so mad when dropped behind enemy lines that they would attack anything that was available.

  Of course, I realized they were using a lot of their transportation for men, equipment, and supplies running back and forth to the coast. But I thought they could do better than this. It did not improve. It just continued.

  Sir Ernest Wills had a pasture with a fence around it about two hundred yards from our barracks. This pasture must have contained close to a square mile. It had around a hundred Silka and Fallow deer, which are pretty small. In England all the wildlife belongs to the king. Only the lords and ladies are allowed to hunt and fish on the manors. This did not stop us.

  At night I would go out there with a flashlight and walk in among those deer until I would pick out a set of eyes—then I would blow its head off. I would clean, skin, and dress him, then take him back. There was a big old hollow tree up near the camp that must have been three feet in diameter. Well, I would hang this carcass up in there and let it cure for a couple of days. Later we would eat it in our barracks. We were eating deer like you never saw.16

  We never did eat in the mess hall. Back stateside we just sneaked out of town or stole food out of the mess hall. We had a little pot-bellied stove in our barracks in England. I believe we were on a ration of one scuttle of coal a day but there were all kinds of dead trees in those hedgerows. One could gather up a truckload of burnable material. So we just cooked those deer on top of that stove with grease right out of the mess hall. We had one guy in there who had a tie-in with the mess hall where he could get all the bread and butter he wanted. He was providing the bread and the butter and I was providing all the meat. We ate right up there in our barracks all the time.

  I then found out that there were rabbits all over the place. They were great big rabbits nearly as big as Belgian hares. They were wild, not domesticated, but they fried up real good and real quick.

  I asked Maw Darnell, “Maw, did you ever hunt rabbits?”

  He said, “Yeah.”

  I said, “Well, let’s go get a bunch of rabbits.”

  He said, “All right.”

  We walked up where they had dug holes in those hedges. We did not take any guns. We just took clubs with us and clubbed those rabbits. If we missed one, it would run back in its hole.

  Back in west Texas, every Sunday, when we were not pulling cotton boles, eight or ten of us kids would get on horses and each one of us would take a piece of barbed wire that was ten to fifteen feet long. We would spread it open to where it would fork on the end. We would then roll it up into a six- or eight-inch coil. We would just hang it from our saddle horns then take off and run down those rabbits. Of course we had guns and if one would stop, well we shot it. Well, one could not hit very many of those jack rabbits on the run. If one ran in a hole why we just piled off of those horses and took our wire and uncoiled it. Then we twisted it real easy until it snagged the rabbit in its hole.

  I told Maw, “Let’s get out here somewhere and find us some barbed wire and we’ll get us some rabbits.”

  I don’t know where we found the barbed wire but I armed ole Maw Darnell with it. He was a patient fellow though. It never became too difficult to where he would quit. He would sit there and work and work and work and twist that thing whenever we had seen a rabbit run in a hole. Why, we returned with a whole sack full of rabbits.17

  So Maw Darnell and I went out there one day and I got to watching this creek. The River Kennet ran through Sir Wills’ big estate. Those little rivers over there were not even knee deep but as clear as tap water with rock bottoms. One could walk out there and not even discolor the water. There was not any silt in it at all. It rains constantly in England but never to the point to have a runoff which would muddy a stream with silt. This creek was full of salmon and trout.

  So I went down to the mess hall and stole myself two of those big aluminum forks that were sixteen to eighteen inches long with two prongs on them. I got myself a file and filed two barbs on each one of them. Afterwards I would go out there day or night, any time I wanted when I was not on some kind of assignment, and gig those fish.

  I went down there one day and someone told me, “Why don’t you get your fish out of the hatchery?”

  I asked, “What hatchery?”

  He said, “Over there on the other side of this house. He has diverted the water out of this creek and let it run through these two hatcheries and on down.”

  They really were not the kind of hatcheries where he raised fish. It was where he trapped and kept them. He had thousands in those two ponds. So I would go down there of an evening.
I wore a jumpsuit with all those big pockets. I would just gig until I had every pocket full of fish.

  Boy, that jumpsuit smelled and I never washed a pair of those britches either. We even slept in them at night with fish slime and blood and guts all over them. We were filthy but we ate good.

  There were also pheasants there all over the place. We tried to eat pheasants but they were not any good. They were tough as whang leather18 so we gave up on them.

  One boy would go in every night and get us a bunch of beer. We were just about a mile from the town of Hungerford. We also had another source for beer.

  The officers would go into the town of Swindon, which was about thirty or forty miles from our camp. I will never forget the name of the beer. It was Simon’s Brewery who put it out. Anyway, they would go in there and buy those little kegs for the bachelor officers quarters. I always found some way that we could steal one of their kegs of beer. We had a rack set up in our barracks with their beer setting right on it. Every man just served himself.

  Browny told me, “Jake, we have made a run into Swindon to pick up some beer. We’ve got a party coming up. We’ve got five kegs.”

  I said, “Why that’s real nice. Hope you enjoy it.”

  He later admitted at a get-together, “We had actually bought six kegs. I thought if I told you we had five kegs, you would come down and steal one and leave the rest of them alone.”

  He said, “The next morning that sixth keg was gone. I thought I had won a victory over you by making you not bother the five I told you we had.”19

  We were having beer and deer and rabbit and after I got all this fish we really had us a good supply. That is the way we lived there. We had good food and beer all the time.

  The 9th Troop Carrier Command was just a little ways from us. If we had an opportunity we would kill those deer up there in their pasture. We would then throw the heads and horns and all that stuff over on the air force base. We knew a “day of reckoning” was coming because the size of the herd was going down pretty fast.