Brothers in Battle, Best of Friends

by William Guarnere

  We were attacking at dawn at a Y-intersection, you had to go left or right. Houses and buildings were on both sides. The Germans were no dummies, they had the high ground. Once you control the high ground, anyone who attacks has got big trouble. They called the Y-intersection Dead Man’s Corner. A lot of men from the 101st Airborne got killed there, and they piled them all on top of each other, right at the crossroads. It was kind of a warning to you—if you got down to the intersection alive you were lucky. We knew we were on low ground and were going to attack on high ground. We waited in ditches on the side of the road for orders. Second Platoon was attacking on the right. We had to run down the road in the open to get to the buildings, then do house-to-house fighting to flush the Germans out. Winters gave the order to go. Lieutenant Welsh ran out with a few men from 1st Platoon behind him, and all hell broke loose. The Germans opened up on us with an MG-42 straight up the road. Everybody froze in the ditch. We were pinned down by the machine-gun fire. If you lifted your head it would get blown off. Winters didn’t care, he wanted everyone to move out, he wanted us right behind Welsh. He was yelling “Go! Go! Go!” but no one budged. He ran into the middle of the road, bullets flying by his head, hitting at his feet, he’s hollering, and waving his hands, running from one side of the road to the other and back, screaming and yelling like a lunatic, trying to get us to move out. Everybody was looking at each other saying “Is he friggin’ nuts? He thinks we’re going to get up?!” I never saw Winters that mad in my life. I think we figured Winters was going to get himself killed, so we better get the hell up. We ran right through the machine-gun fire, and I think Welsh took out the main gun with a grenade.

  At some point, Shifty Powers picked off a couple snipers. When there was a sniper, you sent Shifty in to take him out. Shifty was a damn good soldier in 3rd Platoon. He was from the mountains in Virginia, born and raised with a gun in his hand, not like us city slickers. He was like an Indian, lived off the ground, was very observant, was in tune to nature. He could pick out movement a mile away.

  Rifle and machine-gun fire was coming from the windows and doors, and we paired off and ran house to house. You threw a grenade through a window or open door, kicked down the door, and ran inside to kill anyone left alive. At one point, I was paired off with Lipton—he took the upstairs and I took the downstairs. You don’t shoot unless you see somebody. You don’t want to give away your position. Then we got split up and Lipton got hit by sniper fire in the groin and was evacuated. I got my kills, but I was also running around giving orders, telling my men where to fire. It was a bad battle, but we got the Germans flushed out pretty quick. They got the hell out of there. Problem was, they had us zeroed in from another location, and started pounding us with mortars and 88s. They shoot those 88s and the ground explodes and blows out everything above it. Best weapon ever made. Everyone was running, you had no idea where they were going to land. There was smoke everywhere. It was chaos. Everyone’s screaming for medics. Father Maloney ran around giving last rites. He was the chaplain for the 506th. He was awarded the Distinguished Service Cross for his action in Normandy. He had no weapons on him, just carried a cross. He was all over like a ghost, running in and out. If you were fighting and not hurt, you didn’t pay attention to what he was doing at the time, but if you got wounded, and you didn’t know if you were going to survive, his presence was important. Thinking back, he inspired the men, it was like having the Lord himself come down to visit you. You know you’re not alone, someone cared for you. Even the rabbi came, he would bless you, too. Religion made no difference. When Father Maloney died twenty years ago, I went up to New York with George Vanderswick, who was also from E Company, and we helped bury him. I had flowers made up into a Screaming Eagle, three feet high and two feet wide, and put it by his side. We painted a helmet gold, and put the Distinguished Service Cross on it with his name. The chaplains and the medics were the real heroes.

  The shelling stopped, and we had about a dozen men hurt. Winters got hit in the leg, and got treated. We got orders to clear the Germans out of Carentan. We tried moving out and there was so much chaos—the Germans were firing at us, we were firing at them, and our battalions were firing at each other. We dug in for the night to hit the krauts at dawn.

  The sergeants are in motion before the battle starts. You go back and forth with the company commander and headquarters. They map things out, coordinate the mortars and machine guns of every company. You look at a big booklet with a grid, and the grid gives you distance, you can see where every company is, where their mortars and machine guns are, where the Germans are, what the ranges are, and where you want the men to fire. It changes minute by minute so you gotta think fast. I coordinated a lot with headquarters on the fire. Not every sergeant did it, some did. I ran back and forth. Headquarters had the heavy artillery and mortars, so in a battle you called them for support. I knew them, they were former E Company guys.

  As soon as it got light, both sides were waiting, right away all hell broke loose. We were firing back and forth, machine guns, lobbing mortars and grenades, and then all of a sudden, their tanks rolled in. Once the tanks roll in you’re in trouble; we didn’t have any armored with us. They were shooting 88s. The earth was shaking. We were getting the hell beat out of us. Everyone was screaming for medics. The NCOs were running back and forth hollering at the men to fire at everything they could—“keep shooting, keep shooting, keep shooting!” The forward observer calls the range, and you run around making sure the guns are trained right, the men keep firing, and the Germans stay pinned down. I ran back and forth not just watching my platoon, but also 1st and 3rd. You have to make snap decisions, change positions, get new ranges; it’s continuous action. Meanwhile mortars and 88s are hitting around us, and you can’t even see through the smoke. We were losing men left and right—and getting our kills in, too—but we couldn’t let the Germans take Carentan. Too much at stake.

  This was hedgerow-to-hedgerow fighting and we were at a constant disadvantage. They were ten feet high, for crying out loud. They would gouge you, too. We had to climb under the damn things. We climbed over them, but you risked getting your head blown off. The Germans were no dummies. They waited for you to come out of the hedgerows, come over them, come around them—every corner was a tanker with a machine gun waiting. They hid right in the hedgerows. They’d come busting through and surprise you. The Germans were good on the defensive, bad on the offensive.

  John McGrath and Lieutenant Welsh set up their bazooka and knocked out a tank that was headed right for us. The bazooka was the only thing we had that could take out a tank. Twice the size of a mortar, but lighter. Then we heard the Sherman tanks. Our own 2nd Armored Division coming in with dozens of tanks. Those tanks made a racket, clanking away, but when it’s your own, it’s like music. Since I worked at Baldwin Locomotive before the war making Sherman tanks, I could identify them real fast. You still don’t want to stick your nose up if it’s your own tanks. You don’t know if the gunner will mistake you for a kraut.

  Our tanks started blowing away the Tigers and everything else. We were shooting, our tanks were shooting. We boxed those Jerries in and shelled the shillelagh out of them.

  Thank God 2nd Armored was with us. Not only did they have tanks, but tank destroyers, too, heavy stuff. They massacred the krauts. We were able to hold our ground long enough for them to get there, and they finished the job. You see, they put us against the panzer (tank) division, and the German paratroopers—we loved fighting against them, that’s the elite of the German army—and we whooped their goddamn asses!

  We got extreme confidence right away in Normandy. When you meet the Germans face-to-face, you see they’re not superhuman. A German soldier puts his pants on just like you, he’s a man just like you. Once you lick them, you figure you can lick the world. You had that feeling, like you could lick them all. They were good, but we were better. We could thank Sobel for that.

  We took Carentan, and got relieved, and were billeted in st
ables, and the men went on a looting spree. We were raiding houses and taking liquor. They had a lot of cognac and Calvados, those Frenchman. That stuff will straighten you right out. Heavy duty. When someone found some, they took a swig and passed it around. We passed bottles around all the time. Good thing it wasn’t poison!

  The civilians were hiding, sometimes in the cellar; they were never out in the open. The entire time in France, I never saw a French civilian. Some guys said they had contact with civilians, I never saw a one. They didn’t want any part of us. Years later when I went back to France, and they asked me for a passport, I said, “You didn’t ask me for a passport on D-day. I never saw one of you then.”

  We were in Carentan for about two weeks, and there were dead horses and cows and dead bodies everywhere, and they were rotting and starting to stink. They were mounting up and weren’t being buried fast enough. The smell was unbearable. Made us all sick. You can’t close your nose and not breathe! The Graves Registration Team, they were part of the army, their job was to come after the battle and bury the dead, even if they got relocated later. They had the worst job of all. I don’t know how the hell they done it. I tried to find them after the war. I wanted to thank them for the work they done; they didn’t get any recognition. But I never found them.

  We went back to the line after a few days and dug in. Winters asked for volunteers for a patrol to check out some farmhouses nearby. They knew the Germans were in the area, but they wanted more info. So he asked for volunteers and like I said, my policy is never volunteer. You don’t know what the hell they’re going to throw at you. No one volunteered, so Winters picked me to lead the patrol. They briefed me, gave me a map, and I took the patrol out with Albert Blithe, Maxwell Clark, Joe Lesniewski, and Eddie Joint. I made Blithe point man, put Lesniewski behind him on the right, Clark in the rear. We crouched down and advanced toward the farmhouse, along a line of hedgerows. Now like I said about those hedgerows, those Germans were waiting around every corner. Just when we got past the hedgerows, when we could see the farmhouses, bam! A sniper fired at us and hit Blithe in the back of the neck, and he dropped to the ground. I yelled for covering fire so we could get to him, and someone yelled for a medic. His wound had what looked like red wooden splinters in it, like they hit him with wooden bullets. We seen clips of wooden bullets around Brecourt. Who knows what the Germans were doing with wooden bullets? Maybe they thought it was better to wound a soldier rather than kill him; his buddies will try to retrieve him and they could get a few more kills. Normally, if the guy is shot bad, and Blithe was, you leave the man there and get the hell out. But we never left a man. We went and got him and tried to patch him up. Lesniewski tried to stop the bleeding with a handkerchief. Then we grabbed Blithe and got the hell out of there. The krauts fired at us all the way back, so Malarkey got on the mortar and blasted them. Blithe was evacuated back to England and never saw combat with us again.

  We called Blithe Alby for short. He was in 1st Platoon. The movie portrays him as scared, everybody was scared. But he was a good soldier, that’s why I put him on the point. I think he ended up back in combat in the Korean War.

  At the end of June, we went in reserve, somewhere around Utah Beach. We got our first showers and sleep, and our first real food. The K rations that were supposed to be breakfast, lunch, and dinner were enough to gag a maggot, and just enough to survive on. You got a little box with four cigarettes, chocolate bars, stale crackers, a can of eggs and cheese, or Spam and cheese, or just cheese, some coffee and a fruit bar. Same thing every day for a month. Luckily, you never worried about eating in Normandy. It was all farms, there was always something—a potato, a head of cabbage. You survived. We shot a cow over there and ate it, too. I don’t know who shot it, but Brad Freeman, who was in the mortar squad, was born and raised on a farm and he told us he would dress the cow, which meant cut it up. I’m a city kid, I don’t know, I thought he was going to put a dress on the cow. I thought, This guy is nuts. We cooked it and ate it, ate around the shrapnel. Another thing we could always find in Normandy was liquor. The French enjoy their liquor.

  After it’s all over, when you’re back in garrison, or you get time to rest, which is almost never, then you start to think. When I first got to Normandy, every day for a week I got up and wanted to kill as many Germans as I could. I took chances you had to be stupid to take. I didn’t care. You don’t know what tonight brings, what tomorrow brings. It was terrifying. There’s so much uncertainty. Every day I thought I might die tomorrow. When I lasted one day, I thought okay, maybe I’ll last two. And every day you make it, your drive to live gets stronger. I got a taste of making it through six or seven, then I thought, Jesus Christ, how lucky I am. Then I planned to get out alive. But combat happens so damn quick it makes your eyes spin. You can’t think. You must be callous to death. It’s all around you. It’s war. It ain’t no damn picnic. The enemy is waiting for you around every corner.

  There were times after a day or week of combat when I thought about the guys killed and said to myself, You crazy bastard, look what you done. I called the shots for my men, I felt responsible. But you can’t second-guess. You don’t know if you done it some other way, or ten other ways, if it would have been worse. So why question? It was sad when one of our guys got hurt or killed, but you didn’t have time to cry. Some guys did. You couldn’t let yourself get soft. I kept telling the men, “You can’t think. If you do, you’re dead. Just keep moving forward.” When you lose your buddies, it makes you go forward with more vengeance. The guys talked to each other about the men we lost, and what we’d done, the close calls we had. After three weeks of fighting together, we were bonded in a different way than before. We saw and experienced the worst things humans can see or experience. We saved each other’s lives. It was give and take. The bond really came out. These are the same guys you entered training with, the same guys you survived Sobel with, the same guys you spent every day with, and slept with every night. Then in combat, it’s life or death, it bonds you even more.

  You learned over and over your body could take more than you thought. At night, you sat down and thought, What the hell did I do? Jesus Christ. You reflected on what you done, and you said, That can’t be me, I gotta be nuts, I can’t believe that was my day. In combat, your body just responds automatically, and then your brain catches up later and goes, How in the hell did I do that?

  We found out that Captain Meehan and eighteen Easy Company men were killed on D-day when their plane went down. Most of them were from company headquarters. That was very sad.

  We left Normandy on the LSTs, about mid-July, and we saw the armada of ships, like we saw coming in on D-day. Thousands of ships with Allied troops and artillery. I thought, I hope they get out of here alive. We were leaving, but those guys were just going in! But then I wondered, What the hell’s going to happen to us next?

  Johnny Martin said, “Jesus Christ, we just jumped here a month ago and half the men are gone. We just started. None of us are going to get out of here alive.” We figured we better go back and have the most fun we can have because tomorrow we might all be dead.

  4

  ENGLAND: GARRISON DUTY AND PICCADILLY LILIES

  Mid-July to Mid-September 1944

  BILL

  Aldbourne was like a homecoming. The civilians were happy to see us, and we were happy as hell to be alive. As soon as we got back, we got seven-day passes, new uniforms, all our back pay. I got about two hundred dollars, a lot of money for a kid from South Philly. I always sent most of my money to Mom and kept the rest. The Army took out allotments, sent them wherever you wanted. It wasn’t much, but it helped.

  The men were all fired up. Most took off for London. We were the first GIs back from combat, and we went all decorated with our ribbons and medals. In London, everyone knew you were just in combat. Nobody wanted to mess with you. They were afraid. They knew you killed people.

  The Americans made three or four times what the English soldiers made, and para
troopers got that extra fifty bucks jump pay every month, so we went to the pubs and threw our money away. We’d slap a ten on the bar, we looked like big spenders and it impressed the girls. The English soldiers made much less, and we’d take their girls, so we got into a lot of brawls. A lot of their soldiers hadn’t come back yet, so we benefited there, too. We drank, danced, binga-da, banga-da, bonga-da. A lot of sex. We raised Cain in London. Oh boy, did we have a ball.

  First thing me and Johnny Martin did, we went to Edinburgh, Scotland, and got tattoos. We were drunk as sixteen skunks. Woke up the next morning and looked at our arms and said, “What the hell is that?” We had matching tattoos of a paratrooper coming down from the sky. If I was sober, I’d never get a tattoo. But I figured if I had one, I may as well have three. So I got two more in London—an eagle, and a skull and crossbones.

  We were on pass for a week, and one night, it was late and we couldn’t find a place to sleep, so Johnny said, “I’ll get us a place to sleep.” We went to a USO club, but there were no beds left. So Johnny said, “Watch this.” He went to the door and yelled, “Fire!” Everybody ran out. We ran in, got under the sheets, and went to sleep. No one said a word. We would have killed them. We were crazy kids.

  When everyone got back to Aldbourne, we got stars put on our jump wings. When you made a combat jump, you got a star. We never knew about it until after the fact. So we wanted to do more combat jumps. It sounds crazy now, that we’d risk our lives to get a star on our wings, but it was true. I got a real nice honor, too. Captain Winters recommended me for a Distinguished Service Cross for my actions at Brecourt. He told me about it after the battle. I was awarded the Silver Star instead because the Army didn’t give too many DSC awards. Only two of us in the company received the Silver Star, me and Buck Compton.