A Company of Heroes

by Marcus Brotherton

  The evening of June 5 found us out at the plane again, loaded down with individual and squad weapons, ammo, grenades, morphine syrettes for wounds, and Benzedrine to keep us awake for the first critical 72 hours. This night the signal was “go.” Most of us were so heavily loaded we had to be pushed and pulled up into our planes. In addition to my personal gear, I carried six rounds of bazooka ammunition in a parachute bag strapped in front of me.

  The planes took off, formed up, and headed south and west. During the flight, I got a glimpse of the thousands of ships in the invasion fleet dotting the moonlit sea. We swung east and I watched the tracers thrown up by Germans who occupied the British-owned channel islands of Jersey and Guernsey. I saw the dark mass of France as we crossed the [peninsula] before jump time. A minute later we were ordered to stand up and hook up, attaching our parachute connectors to the cable along the roof of the plane.

  I was end man on the stick [18 men], waiting to jump while standing on an elevated wooden platform between two 50-gallon drums of aviation gas carried as reserve fuel. Our plane started getting hit. Sounded like someone pounded on a great brass plate at high speed.

  [P.F.C. Roy] Cobb, the fellow immediately in front of me was hit and fell on the floor groaning. While I was seeing how badly Cobb was hurt, the green light came on and Lt. Harry Welsh led our stick out the door. The plane was lurching as the pilot took evasive action against the fire from the ground. Our orders were to jump unless severely wounded. I had to unsnap my connector to the cable, move it around in front of Cobb’s and head for the door of the plane. I could see the green light swinging in front of me. The conduit holding the light fixtures had been torn loose from the wall of the plane. I pushed it aside and dove out the door.

  My chute opened with a solid, jarring, slamming pound, and I looked around. I could see some buildings on fire, one plane going down in flames, and a few tracers, but none very close to me. I landed hard in an orchard with my chute draped over an apple tree. I was all alone.

  Dad wrote only sporadically about his involvement in the fight in Normandy. He planned to write an extensive description of the fight someday, but died before he got it done. We know from other sources he was involved in the assault against Brécourt Manor. He wrote of various men and how they died, including his good friend Salty. In his memoir he described the combat in Carentan simply as “very heavy fighting.”

  The men’s invasion duties ended in mid-July 1944. They were marched to Utah beach, where they boarded a naval landing ship for return to England. Dad described it as a “delight” to find showers, oranges, and milk on the ship.

  One Shot

  The men jumped into Holland on September 17, 1944, for Operation Market-Garden. It was part of a joint effort and they were technically under British command. Under the attack plan, three airborne divisions—the American 82nd and 101st, and one British unit—were to drop into Holland and seize and hold the seventy-mile corridor from central Holland across the Rhine, while a heavy British armored attack would race up the corridor, cross the river, and charge into Berlin for an early end to the war. In the course of the attack, the airborne units would capture and hold all essential cities and bridges along the road.

  The plan backfired, and all divisions took heavy losses, particularly the British at Arnhem. In spite of the death all around him, strangely, he wrote:In Holland I somehow began to feel invulnerable, as though no German bullet or shell could ever touch me. I could move easily through heavy small arms fire and never get hit. I began to feel almost immortal. Winters came to rely on me to handle more and more responsibilities: setting up gun positions, coordinating attacks.

  Two weeks into the Holland campaign Dad was recommended for a battlefield commission. But Dad never became an officer. After the fighting in Eindhoven settled down, the regiment was transferred north along the corridor. They were set to replace a Canadian division, but the move was stalled because they were engaged and couldn’t break off the fighting. The opportunity was used to brief all NCOs on the position they were to occupy. About twenty of the men sat on the ground listening to an intelligence officer spell out the situation with the help of a large map. Pat Christenson was seated next to Dad in the bright October sunshine. As the officer talked, Dad cleaned his .45 caliber pistol.

  I field-stripped the gun and carefully cleaned the individual parts before reassembling it, something I could do almost blindfolded. When the reassembly was finished, it ended with the slide of the automatic in the rear position. Without thinking, or perhaps distracted by the lecture, I inserted the magazine of bullets and pushed the slide release, and the slide slammed forward. Now the gun was loaded and cocked. Since a cocked gun isn’t normally carried that way, I pulled the trigger to let the hammer down.

  There was a tremendous POW. I’d forgotten it was loaded. I [shot myself] just below the knee in my left leg. Immediately a great sense of shame overwhelmed me. Somehow I had let down all my buddies and Winters. Christenson slipped some morphine into me before the pain even began to develop. Thank God I hadn’t shot someone else; there were other troopers sitting on both sides of me and directly in front.

  A jeep arrived almost immediately and transported Dad to an aid station, and from there to a medical center in Brussels, Belgium, where he spent a few days. Although he had nearly blown his leg off, he described how he felt crushed in spirit more than anything. He had left behind his buddies, who were just about to face fierce fighting on the Island just south of Nijmegen. Dad’s war was over that day in Holland, October 2, 1944.

  From Brussels, I was flown to a military hospital in England where they began repairing my leg. The bullet had penetrated my calf and then hit and broken my shinbone, which deflected it down into my ankle. The bullet had done a fair job of ripping up my leg.

  There were several operations to put the shinbone back in place and to take out the bullet fragments. The doctors were puzzled because the fragments they were getting out didn’t weigh up close to the 500 grains. It wasn’t until the third or fourth operation that they located the main body of the bullet, which had broken up and was now lodged in my ankle. They’d been taking X-rays higher up, close to where the bullet had entered my calf. The recuperation would take some time and a full recovery much longer. I was sent home to be discharged.

  Dad left England on December 1, 1944, on the hospital ship St. Olaf, which arrived in Charleston, South Carolina, seventeen days later. He was in a cast and on crutches, but able to move around. He spent Christmas 1944 next to the radio, listening to the news accounts of his buddies’ fight in Bastogne.

  In the new year he was assigned to an Army hospital in Topeka, Kansas, then transferred to Camp Carson, Colorado, (it had been converted to an army hospital then to handle overflow patients from the war) in February to finish his recuperation. He got involved in war bond drives and writing news releases for GIs for hometown newspapers. He gave speeches at defense plants and civic luncheons throughout Colorado. Mostly, he wrote, “there wasn’t much to do.” He was officially discharged on April 24, 1945, when Easy Company was on occupation duties in Austria. Dad still felt conflicted.

  For the first time in more than two and a half years there was no one ordering me to do something.

  That night I caught the train [from Colorado] to Fargo. As I stepped off, there were Dad and Mom and Jiggs [his dog] and Betty [an old girlfriend]. My friends and buddies were still fighting, or wounded, or lying under white crosses in Army cemeteries, but I was home. It was a little frightening.

  A Remarkable Time

  After the war, Dad returned to the University of North Dakota, joined the Theta Chi fraternity, and worked part time at a restaurant and bar. He wasn’t a super-strong student at the time.

  Drinking was our primary occupation. Most of us had money from savings, or working, plus the allowance the government provided through educational programs for veterans. I had about $6,000 in the bank when I was discharged. Settling down and going to school wasn’t
quite where it was, just then. Visits to the bars seemed to continue with unceasing regularity. Without realizing it, I was probably in pretty bad shape.

  One bright point in his first year back is when he met our mom, Julia Hutchinson, who was vivacious, super-smart, and a journalism major. They soon started dating, and Dad switched from engineering to journalism. They got married in the summer of 1946, one of many thousands of postwar couples who did, then returned for their final year of college.

  That particular period was a rather remarkable time to be alive, with its sense of renewal. The war was over, the enemies defeated. We still hoped for a harmonious relationship with the Communist world, since the Cold War hadn’t begun. The work of rebuilding nations was just in the planning stage, and most people, at least in this country, seemed to be devoting their entire energies to making up for the time lost during WWII.

  The University bulged with returning servicemen, some still [wearing] bits and pieces of their uniforms. Campuses frantically put together housing for married students who were eager to start their families while they began or resumed their educations.

  There was an almost paranoid scramble back to normalcy, and a demand for the goods of normal times—cars, gasoline, cigarettes, silk stockings, sugar—all these things that had been rationed or impossible to find during wartime.

  Five daughters were born into the Ranney household: Kathy, Christine, me, Laura, and Beth. I think Dad missed never having a son. He was a real man’s man and took us girls camping military-style with knapsacks and no pillows or pajamas. “Just roughin’ it,” as he called it. He had a lot of whining to put up with.

  Dad was a good father in many ways. He was very charismatic, a great storyteller, and could be tremendously fun. He never enjoyed structured times. He hated crowds and detested going to places like Disneyland. He loved being outdoors with his family, just going on picnics, or finding a watering hole somewhere we could all jump in. On Friday nights we often went to a nearby park where Dad barbecued. We took wax paper potato chip bags and slid down the playground slides, and Dad pushed us on the swings.

  He was always a big smoker. Turning off the bedroom lights, he performed fabulous light shows with his cigarettes, blowing smoke rings as we lay back in bed. When I was about eight, he made up a whole series of stories about a three-legged horse named One Two Three Stump, who had a wooden leg for his fourth leg. Dad made up a sound effect, sort of a hand smack, which he made whenever he said, “One Two Three Stump.” This horse got into all manner of predicaments: his wooden stump got stuck in a gopher hole and a gopher chewed on it; the bees made a hive in his stump. The story continued for many nights and held us in great suspense.

  When I was nine or ten I remember working on his car with him, holding the lights in the evenings. I liked being one on one with Dad. He talked a little then about the service.

  All the daughters (along with twelve grandchildren now) ended up spread across the United States. Kathleen taught at the University of Alabama and is retired now, Christine teaches at Cornell in upstate New York, I’m a high school physics teacher and live in northern California along with Laura, who works in the accounting field, and Beth, who is a fifth grade teacher.

  Ups and Downs

  The Ranneys moved a ton, mostly due to Dad’s career and his constant ambition. He never seemed satisfied. There was always something better around the next corner. Dad worked his way up on newspapers in Red-field, South Dakota; Sioux City, Iowa; Minneapolis, Minnesota; then finally at the Chicago Tribune where he was a sports reporter, then moved out to California in 1959 to work for a public relations firm, which paid more. He worked most of the rest of his career in public relations, either for a firm or out on his own. Dad was always thinking about making his company bigger and better. He handled some large corporate clients in San Francisco. For the last years of his career, he went back to journalism and worked with several smaller papers in California.

  In many ways he led a challenging adult life. His father passed away in 1947 of a stroke, about a year after Dad and Mom got married, and was sorely missed. Then, when Dad worked as a newspaperman, journalists in those days had the reputation of being “hard-nosed, two-fisted drinkers, which I had to maintain,” he wrote. He was ambitious and talented, and at one time was the youngest newspaper publisher in the state of South Dakota. He often worked nights at the various newspapers, not exactly prime family-man hours.

  There were huge financial swings in the family. When I was growing up we were fairly well off. We had a nice house with two horses and an airplane. I remember playing with Susan Finn, Burr Smith’s daughter, when we were kids. We attended an Easy Company reunion in Las Vegas. My dad had his plane then. For some reason none of my other sisters wanted to go, so Dad flew my mom and me out to the reunion where we stayed at the Stardust Hotel and Casino. Dad was a big spender in those days and set up the hospitality suite for the men. I had charging privileges and enjoyed all the Shirley Temples and lemonades I wanted. Susan and I had a great time running around the pool.

  By the time Mom and Dad got divorced in 1971, all the money was gone. I was in high school then, and he and Mom had been married for twenty-four years. Dad didn’t pay child support, and creditors and tax agents began to call Mom. She had been Phi Beta Kappa in university and could have done anything, but when they divorced she had no outside career to fall back on. After the divorce, Mom got a job as a teacher’s aide, went to San Francisco State University at night to get her teacher’s credentials, and also worked at Montgomery Ward at night. Having them both gone was very hard for the family. I think my two younger sisters took more of the brunt of it. I was not happy with my dad during that time.

  Four years after their divorce, Mom and Dad remarried and moved to Minnesota because Dad had a new job offer. Things didn’t work out as planned: the job never materialized, Dad got another job where he wasn’t as happy, and Mom got a job at an optician’s business in town. She moved my two younger sisters out there, and they were in a fairly stable high school experience for a time.

  Two years later, Mom and Dad divorced again. They never could quite hang together. Dad did a quick deed sale on the house and moved back to California. Mom moved back a year later. Mom never regretted either of her marriages to him. She said she’d do it all again, and never said a bad word about him.

  Dad never liked authority much. He was sure of himself and liked to be his own boss. When you’re doing public relations, you bring ideas to your client. If the client likes it, fine, but if not, then you redo your presentation. Often Dad disagreed with clients, and he lost several this way.

  Some of his financial challenges also stemmed from continuing health issues. In his mid-fifties he was diagnosed with diabetes, and the disease was already quite far along. He had suffered one downturn in finances by then, and then ended up at the VA hospital when he was diagnosed with blood clots, which really affected his ability to work. His business collapsed. He endured complications from his leg injury his whole life.

  Dad never really had an upturn after being diagnosed with diabetes. He struggled along for the next fifteen years, not quite being able to provide for himself or his family, yet surprisingly optimistic. It was always about how he could swing the next deal. Sometimes the deals would last a while, and sometimes not.

  Bright and Full of Promise

  I think Dad grew sweeter in his old age. Though I wasn’t happy with him for a few years, I made peace with him toward the end. He had five grandsons in a row and was quite pleased about that. In his later years, he had a very dear friend, Elaine. They took a wonderful trip to Africa several years before he died.

  My dad had many flaws that showed up right about the time I didn’t want them to, in my early teens when I was trying to figure out who I was. Those flaws seemed big at the time, but I’m a little wiser now and his flaws don’t seem that big at all. I look at the positive side of his life. He was a truly caring man, although caring might not be the exact w
ord. When I look at all his writings, how he spoke about the men of Easy Company, I can see that he truly cared for others.

  In his later years he had several silent heart attacks, which can go on unnoticed for some time and cause a lot of damage. He was in and out of hospitals, but always kept a certain undeniable joie de vivre. He joked that the nurses didn’t know his true age. He had an octuple bypass in April 1988 and recovered from the surgery, but never fully. Too much damage had been done. He passed away in September 1988, far too young.

  I have chosen a very safe life on purpose, so I don’t have many risks. I’ve been a high school teacher at the same school for thirty-two years. But Dad was much more a risk-taker. I give much credit to him for that. He really put himself out there. That was his philosophy in life: drive hard and never settle for mediocrity. If you’re going to be in the military, or a journalist, or a media representative, or a high school teacher—whatever you’re going to do—be the absolute best at it.

  The philosophy helped him stay positive and resilient through many rocky years. I think of a quote from another letter Dad wrote to Dick Winters, this one written a few years before Dad died. Dad’s words sum up his life and personality well. He had experienced a number of financial, health, and relational setbacks by then, but still found the courage to write:At the ripe age of 61, I find myself blessed with good friends, warm memories, more serenity than I’ve ever known, and hundreds of ambitious dreams for the future.