The Men of World War II

by Stephen E. Ambrose

  • • •

  Lt. Buck Compton stayed in public service jobs, so he became more famous than rich. He was a detective in the Los Angeles Police Department from 1947 to 1951, then spent twenty years as a prosecutor for the district attorney’s office, eventually becoming chief deputy district attorney. In 1968 he directed the investigation of Sirhan Sirhan, then conducted the prosecution. In 1970 Gov. Ronald Reagan appointed him to the California Court of Appeals as an associate justice. He and his wife Donna have two daughters, one granddaughter. His reputation is that he remains the best athlete in the company; he is said to play a mean game of golf.

  • • •

  Sgt. Mike Ranney took a journalism degree at the University of North Dakota, then had a successful career as a reporter, newspaper editor, and public relations consultant. He and his wife Julia had five daughters, seven grandsons. In 1980 he began publishing what he called “The Spasmodic Newsletter of Easy Company.” Some samples:

  March 1982: “The Pennsylvania contingent got together at Dick Winters’ place for a surprise party for Harry Welsh. Fenstermaker, Strohl, Guarnere, Guth had a great time.”

  1980. “The reunion this summer in Nashville is shaping up as one of the great turnouts in E Company history. A partial list of the attendees—Dick Winters, Harry Welsh, Moose Heyliger and Buck Compton from the officers; Chuck Grant, Paul Rogers, Walter Scott Gordon; Tipper, Guarnere, Rader, Heffron, Ranney, Johnny Martin, George Luz, Perconte, Jim Alley, and no less an personage than Burr Smith.”

  1983. “Don Moone retired from the advertising business and now lives it up down in Florida. He and Gordon and Carwood Lipton had a reunion in New Orleans.”

  With only a couple of exceptions, these men had no business or professional connections. None lived in the same town, few in the same state (except Pennsylvania). Yet they stayed in touch. In January 1981, Moone wrote Winters to thank him for a Christmas present and to fill him in: “It was great news that Talbert was finally located. I called him immediately and after an exchange of insults, we talked. I’ve always been fond of Tab. He took care of me in the old days. On New Year’s Day at 6:00 A.M. my time, Tab called to wish me a good new year. He was bombed but coherent. He admits that he had a bottle problem, as we suspected, but was ‘on the wagon’ except for special occasions. Guess New Year’s Eve was one of those ‘specials.’

  “Don Malarkey called me at 3:00 A.M. on New Years Eve morning and he too was well on his way.”

  Ranney retired to write poetry and his memoirs, but in September 1988 he died before he could get started.

  • • •

  Beyond Heyliger, Martin, Guarnere, and Toye, a number of men went into some form of building, construction, or making things. Capt. Clarence Hester became a roofing contractor in Sacramento, California. Sgt. Robert “Popeye” Wynn became a structural ironworker on buildings and bridges. Pvt. John Plesha worked for the Washington State Highway Department. Sgt. Denver “Bull” Randleman was a superintendent for a heavy construction contractor in Louisiana. Sgt. Walter Hendrix spent forty-five years in the polishing trade, working with granite. Sgt. Burton “Pat” Christenson spent thirty-eight years with the Pacific Telephone and Telegraph Company, installing new lines, eventually becoming a supervisor and teacher. Sgt. Jim Alley was a carpenter, then worked on high-dam construction on the Washington State–Canada border. Eventually he had his own construction company in California.

  Beyond Leo Boyle, a number of men went into teaching. After a twenty-year hitch in the Army, Sgt. Leo Hashey taught water safety for the Portland, Oregon, Red Cross. He became director of health and safety education. Sgt. Robert Rader taught the handicapped at Paso Robles High School in California for more than thirty years. Capt. Harry Welsh got married immediately upon his return to the States, with his bride Kitty Grogan wearing a dress made from the reserve chute he wore on D-Day and carried with him through the rest of the war. He went to college, taught, earned an M.A., and became a high school counselor, then administrator. Sgt. Forrest Guth taught printing, wood shop, electricity, electronics, and managed the sound and staging of school productions in Norfolk, Virginia, and Wilmington, Delaware, until his retirement. Pvt. Ralph Stafford writes: “Graduated in 1953 and started teaching the 6th grade in Fort Worth. Taught for three years and was elementary principal for 27 years, and dearly loved it. It was truly my calling. I was elected president of District V, Texas State Teachers Association (Dallas–Ft. Worth, 20,000 members).

  “In 1950, I went bird hunting with some guys from the fire department. I shot a bird and was remorseful as I looked down at it, the bird had done me no harm and couldn’t have. I went to the truck and stayed until the others returned, never to hunt again.”

  Sgt. Ed Tipper went to the University of Michigan for a B.A., then to Colorado State for an M.A. He taught high school in the Denver suburbs for almost thirty years. After retirement, he writes, “I went to Costa Rica to visit one of my former students. There I met Rosy, 34 years old. After an old-time courtship of about a year, we married in the face of great opposition from most everyone I knew, Dick Winters excluded. It was hard to disagree, especially with the argument that marriage to a 61-year-old man probably meant sacrificing any hope of having a family, a major consideration for Latin women. Our daughter Kerry was born almost ten months to the day after our wedding. Rosy went to medical school in Guadalajara and in 1989 got her M.D.”

  He has recently been operated on for cancer. “My wife, daughter and I have just moved into a new house. It may seem strange for a seventy-year-old to be buying a house, but our family motto is, ‘It’s never too late.’ ”

  Sgt. Rod Bain graduated from Western Washington College (now University) in 1950, married that year, had four children, and spent twenty-five years as a teacher and administrator in Anchorage, Alaska. He spends his summers “as a drift gillnetter, chasing the elusive Sockeye Salmon.”

  Ed Tipper sums it up with a question: “Is it accidental that so many ex-paratroopers from E company became teachers? Perhaps for some men a period of violence and destruction at one time attracts them to look for something creative as a balance in another part of life. We seem also to have a disproportionate number of builders of houses and other things in the group we see at reunions.”

  • • •

  Pvt. Bradford Freeman went back to the farm. In 1990 Winters wrote him, saying that he often came South to see Walter Gordon and would like to stop by sometime to see Freeman’s farm. Freeman replied: “It would be a great honor for you to come to see us in Mississippi. We have a good shade to sit in in the Summer and have a good heater for Winter. About all that I do is garden and cut hay for cows in summer and feed in Winter. Fish and hunt the rest of the time. We have the Tombigbee water way close and I watch the barges go up and down the river. Sending you a picture of the house and cows. I have a good place on the front porch to sit. Here’s hoping that you will come down sometime.”

  Winters did. They had a good visit. He asked Freeman to write an account of what he did after the war, for this book. Freeman concluded: “What I wrote don’t look like much but I have had a real good time and wouldn’t trade with no one.”

  • • •

  Maj. Richard Winters also wrote an account of his life after the war: “On separation from the service on November 29, 1945, Lewis Nixon invited me to come to New York City and meet his parents. His father offered me a job and I became personnel manager for the Nixon Nitration Works, Nixon, New Jersey. While working, I took advantage of the G.I. Bill and took courses in business and personnel management at Rutgers University. In 1950 I was promoted to General Manager of Nixon Nitration Works.

  “I married Ethel Estoppey in 1948. We have two children. Tim has an M.A. in English from Penn State and Jill a B.A. from Albright College.

  “I was recalled to the army for the Korean War. At Fort Dix, New Jersey, I was put on the staff as regimental plans and training officer. After discharge, I returned to Pennsylvania, to farm and to sell
animal health products and vitamin premixes to the feed companies. In 1951 I bought a farm along the foothills of the Blue Mountain—seven miles east of Indiantown Gap. That’s where I find that peace and quiet that I promised myself on D-Day.”

  This is typical Winters understatement. He lives modestly, on his farm and in a small town house in Hershey, but he is a wealthy man who achieved success by creating and marketing a new, revolutionary cattle food and other animal food products.

  He is also the gentlest of men. In July 1990, when he finished telling me about practically wiping out an entire German rifle company on the dike in Holland on October 5, 1944, we went for a walk down to his pond. A flock of perhaps thirty Canada geese took off; one goose stayed behind, honking plaintively at the others. Winters explained that the bird had a broken wing.

  I remarked that he ought to get out a rifle and shoot the goose before a fox got her. “Freeze her up for Thanksgiving dinner.”

  He gave me an astonished glance. “I couldn’t do that!” he said, horrified at the thought.

  He is incapable of a violent action, he never raises his voice, he is contemptuous of exaggeration, self-puffery, or posturing. He has achieved exactly what he wanted in life, that peace and quiet he promised himself as he lay down to catch some sleep on the night of June 6–7, 1944, and the continuing love and respect of the men he commanded in Easy Company in World War II.

  • • •

  In one of his last newsletters, Mike Ranney wrote: “In thinking back on the days of Easy Company, I’m treasuring my remark to a grandson who asked, ‘Grandpa, were you a hero in the war?’

  “ ‘No,’ I answered, ‘but I served in a company of heroes.’ ”

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS AND SOURCES

  IN THE FALL OF 1988, the veterans from Easy Company, 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment, 101st Airborne Division, held a reunion in New Orleans. Along with my assistant director of the Eisenhower Center at the University of New Orleans, Ron Drez, I went to their hotel to tape-record a group interview with them about their D-Day experience, as a part of the Center’s D-Day Project of collecting oral histories from the men of D-Day. The interview with Easy Company was especially good because the company had carried out a daring and successful attack on a German battery near Utah Beach.

  When Maj. Richard Winters, an original member of the company, later company C.O., finally C.O. of 2d Battalion, read the transcript from the interview, he was upset by some inaccurate and exaggerated statements in it. He wanted to set the record straight. In February 1990, Winters, Forrest Guth, and Carwood Lipton came to Pass Christian, Mississippi, to visit Walter Gordon. I live in the village of Bay St. Louis, across the bay from Pass Christian, so Gordon is my neighbor. He called to ask if the Easy Company veterans could do a follow-up interview. Of course, I said, and invited them to our home for a meeting and dinner. We spent the afternoon in my office, maps spread out, tape-recorder running. Later, at a roast beef feast prepared by my wife, Moira, the men sketched out for me their experiences after D-Day in Normandy, Holland, Belgium, Germany, and Austria.

  They had all read my book Pegasus Bridge, which the Eisenhower Center gives to every veteran who does an interview for us. Winters suggested that a history of Easy Company might make a good subject for a book.

  At that time I was working on the third and final volume of a biography of Richard Nixon. Winters’s idea appealed to me for a number of reasons. When I finished Nixon, I wanted to go back to military history. I intended to do a book on D-Day, but did not want to begin the writing until 1992 with the intention of publishing it on the 50th anniversary, June 6, 1994. I have reached a point in my life where, if I am not doing some writing every day, I am not happy, so I was looking for a short book subject on World War II that would have a connection with D-Day.

  A history of E Company fit perfectly. I knew the story of the British 6th Airborne Division on the far left flank on D-Day thanks to my research and interviewing for the Pegasus Bridge book. Getting to know the story of one company of the 101st on the far right flank was tempting.

  There was an even more appealing factor. There was a closeness among the four veterans sitting at our dinner table that was, if not quite unique in my quarter-century experience of interviewing veterans, certainly unusual. As they talked about other members of the company, about various reunions over the decades, it became obvious that they continued to be a band of brothers. Although they were scattered all across the North American continent and overseas, they knew each other’s wives, children, grandchildren, each other’s problems and successes. They visited regularly, kept in close contact by mail and by phone. They helped each other in emergencies and times of trouble. And the only thing they had in common was their three-year experience in World War II, when they had been thrown together quite by chance by the U.S. Army.

  I became intensely curious about how this remarkable closeness had been developed. It is something that all armies everywhere throughout history strive to create but seldom do, and never better than with Easy. The only way to satisfy my curiosity was to research and write the company history.

  • • •

  In May 1990, Drez attended the company’s reunion in Orlando, Florida, where he video-recorded eight hours of group interview. That same month I did three days of interviewing with Gordon in my office. In July, I went to Winters’s farm in Pennsylvania, where I did four days of interviewing. On the fourth day, a half-dozen men from the company living on the East Coast drove to the farm for a group interview. Later in 1990 I spent a weekend at Carwood Lipton’s home in Southern Pines, where Bill Guarnere joined us. I flew to Oregon to spend another weekend with Don Malarkey and a group of West Coast residents.

  I interviewed a dozen other company members over the telephone and have had an extensive correspondence with nearly all living members of the company. At my urging ten of the men have written their wartime memoirs, ranging from ten to 200 pages. I have been given copies of wartime letters, diaries, and newspaper clippings.

  In November 1990, Moira and I toured Easy’s battle sites in Normandy and Belgium. I interviewed Frenchmen from the area the company fought over who had been living there at the time. In July 1991, we visited the scenes of Easy’s battles throughout Europe with Winters, Lipton, and Malarkey. Winters, Moira, and I spent an afternoon with Baron Colonel Frederick von der Heydte at his home near Munich.

  Mrs. Barbara Embree, widow of Pvt. David Webster, gave me copies of his letters to his parents and his book-length manuscript on his World War II memoirs. Webster was a keen observer and excellent writer. His contribution was invaluable.

  Currahee!, the scrapbook written by Lt. James Morton and published by the 506th PIR in 1945, was also invaluable. Don Malarkey gave me a copy, most generous on his part as it is a rare book. Rendezvous with Destiny, the history of the 101st Airborne, written by Leonard Rapport and Arthur Northwood, provided the big picture plus facts, figures, details, atmosphere, and more. Other sources are noted in the text.

  • • •

  When I wrote Pegasus Bridge, I decided not to show the manuscript to Maj. John Howard, the C.O. of D Company, Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry, or any other of the thirty British gliderborne troops I had interviewed. I was working on a deadline that made it impossible to take up the months that would have been involved. The veterans had frequently contradicted each other on small points, and very occasionally on big ones. Not one of them would have accepted what I had written as entirely accurate, and I feared that, if they saw the manuscript, I’d be in for endless bickering over when this or that happened, or what happened, or why it happened.

  I felt it was my task to make my best judgment on what was true, what had been misremembered, what had been exaggerated by the old soldiers telling their war stories, what acts of heroism had been played down by a man too modest to brag on himself.

  In short, I felt that although it was their story, it was my book. John Howard was unhappy at being unable to suggest
changes and corrections. Since the publication of Pegasus Bridge, he has convinced me that he was right, and I was wrong. Had I had time and allowed John and others to make corrections, criticisms, and suggestions, it would have been a more accurate and better book.

  So I have circulated the manuscript of this book to the men of Easy Company. I have received a great deal of criticism, corrections, and suggestions in return. Winters and Lipton especially have gone through it line by line. This book is, then, very much a group effort. We do not pretend that this is the full history of the company, an impossibility given the vagaries of memory and the absence of testimony from men killed in the war or since deceased. But we do feel that, through our constant checking and rechecking, our phone calls and correspondence, our visits to the battle sites, we have come as close to the true story of Easy Company as possible.

  • • •

  It has been a memorable experience for me. I was ten years old when World War II ended. Like many other American men my age, I have always admired—nay, stood in awe of—the G.I.s. I thought that what they had done was beyond praise. I still do. To get to know so well a few of them from one of the most famous divisions of all, the Screaming Eagles, has been a privilege. It is my proud boast that they have made me an honorary member of the company. As I am also an honorary member of D Company of the Ox and Bucks, I’ve got both flanks covered. Truly my cup runs over.

  STEPHEN E. AMBROSE

  Eisenhowerplatz, Bay St. Louis

  October 1990–May 1991

  The Cabin, Dunbar, Wisconsin

  May–September 1991

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  STEPHEN AMBROSE was born in 1936 and grew up in Whitewater, Wisconsin. His father was the town doctor. Ambrose attended the University of Wisconsin, and was initially a pre-med major, with plans to take over his father’s medical practice. But, inspired by a great professor, he changed his major to history, realizing then that writing and teaching would be his life’s work. He went on to Louisiana State University to earn his master’s degree and then returned to the University of Wisconsin to complete a Ph.D.