Easy Company Soldier

by Don Malarkey

  It had been twenty-one months since I’d arrived at Toccoa. We’d discussed how to attack gun positions, bridges, and causeways. We’d gone over equipment, from gas masks to knives, from guns to Mae West life jackets should we, God forbid, land in water. We’d sharpened our bayonets. We knew how to dig a foxhole, take out enemy artillery. We knew the “flash-thunder” passwords to make sure, when we hit the ground in the night, that guys were ours and how, as a backup, to squeeze our metal dime-store “crickets” to identify ourselves as friend, not foe. We knew that if a German police dog was suddenly sniffing the barrel of our tommy gun, we were to shoot the dog pronto.

  We’d examined and reexamined three-dimensional sand tables and maps showing exactly what the invasion of France was to look like. We were to fly over the English Channel and across the Cherbourg Peninsula. Specially trained teams of parachutists, pathfinders, would jump about an hour ahead of us. Their job was to set up special lights and radar sets to guide the rest of us in. Then, in early-morning darkness, we would drop about five miles inland from the Normandy beaches and make our way west toward Utah Beach. Our rally point was a little hamlet called Le Grand Chemin; we were to get there by 7:00 A.M.

  We’d learned that the Germans had flooded the low-lying ground just inland from the beach, forcing troops from the Channel to use only four causeways. Our job was to seize these causeways and get control of those exits so the Germans’ supplies couldn’t get to their troops near the beach and so our boys on the beach could get inland quickly. That might mean destroying the big guns we knew the Germans would have hammering the beach.

  We’d been issued ammo and $10 worth of French francs. We’d even taken out our $10,000 life insurance policies, laughing about it to each other but not to ourselves.

  The anticipation built to a sweaty-palmed pitch, then, as the wind started whipping around, crashed with a single announcement from General Taylor. Eisenhower had scrubbed the jump for June 5 because of a bad-weather forecast. Cheers pierced the air; even if we’d been anxious to go, somehow the thought of a nice hot meal and a movie instead of jumping into the unknown had a certain appeal. The movie was Cary Grant and Laraine Day in Mr. Lucky. Later, as we slept, the winds calmed. The next night, word came down: The jump is on.

  In the hangars, we got our packed chutes, which, I’ll never forget, had this shiny stuff on them, something new called fluorescent tape so we could see them in the dark. In those hangars we were each handed Eisenhower’s written message of encouragement. “Soldiers, Sailors and Airmen of the Allied Expeditionary Force! You are about to embark upon the Great Crusade, toward which we have striven these many months. The eyes of the world are upon you. … Good luck! And let us all beseech the blessing of Almighty God upon this great and noble undertaking.”

  Father Maloney, our chaplain, offered absolution to those of us who were Catholic. Skip had stuffed a rosary in his pocket that he’d keep with him until the end. It felt good to have a clean bill of health with God. Johnny Miller—he was from the South—was reading his Bible; he read that thing everywhere he went. Gen. Maxwell Taylor walked among the men, shaking hands and offering encouragement. There was talk of three days of hard fighting and coming home while the ground troops pressed on. Sounded good. Frankly, it sounded too good. But in the nervous quiet, I think a lot of us wanted to believe it could be true—even though I was thinking more like a year.

  We synchronized our watches. Trucks brought our gear to the airfield. Some guys had blackened their faces with charcoal or paint; our 2nd Platoon wasn’t among them. I grabbed my gear. I would be “jumping” all three parts of the mortar unit—base plate, tube, and bipod—all of it crammed in canvas bags and secured to me. Sixty-five pounds’ worth. Made you feel like the tuba player in a band. On top of that, you had to get in a plane with it on, then parachute out. No sweat.

  That and my regular gear, including entrenching tools, ammo, weapons, and food, meant I had nearly two hundred pounds on me as climbed into that C-47. It took four guys—two pushing and two pulling—just to get me in the plane. Years later, I met a guy back in Oregon who’d been there that evening, a ground soldier who was watching us get ready. He told me, “I watched all you guys loaded down with parachutes and stuff, willing to jump out of an airplane into the night and go fight, and I remember thinking, Where else do you find men like this?”

  The guys in our stick took their seats, backs to the fuselage, nearly knocking knees with the ten guys on the other side: Buck Compton, Bill Guarnere, Salvatore Bellino, Joseph Lesniewski, Dewitt Lowery, Johnny Plesha, John Sheehy, Cleveland Petty, Frank Zastavniak, Edward Bernat, Earl Hale, Rod Bain, Bradford Freeman, J. B. Stokes, Joachim Melo, Thomas Burgess, Robert Leonard, Richard Davenport, and Joe Toye. Skip was on a different plane. The pilot was Donald LePard. We were “chalk,” or plane, No. 70.

  You couldn’t help looking in each other’s eyes. Each of us, I suppose, was thinking something different. We were a pretty serious bunch at that moment. Those weren’t football helmets on our head this time, but army helmets, each stenciled with a white spade to identify us part of the 506th Regiment. But as I looked at each man, I figured if I had to go to war, I couldn’t be going with a better bunch of guys.

  If you want to be a hero, the Germans will quickly make you one—dead. Bob Niland’s words paid me a few last visits, interrupted by Lt. Buck Compton going guy-to-guy to hand out pills.

  “What the hell are these for?” I said.

  “Airsickness.”

  “Don’t need ’em.”

  “Take them, Malarkey.”

  “Buck, remember me? I’m from Astoria. I’ve bobbed like a cork over the Columbia Bar plenty of times and never gotten sick.”

  “Take the pills, Malark. That’s an order.”

  I think that was the only direct order Buck gave me the entire war. So I took the pills, though, looking back, I think they were more for our nerves than our stomachs. As the engines cranked up, I was already drowsy. At the moment, I wasn’t feeling anything profound, as if I was about to plunge into history or anything like that. All I was thinking was Let’s go. Let’s do this thing we’ve been training for seemingly forever.

  It was about an hour before midnight. Because of the British “double-savings time,” though, it was still light enough so you could see out. Not that it mattered. By the time the C-47 lifted off, I was fast asleep.

  7

  JUMPING INTO THE DARKNESS

  June 5-6, 1944

  Normandy region of France

  For what Easy Company would later remember as such an eventful time in our lives, it was an uneventful flight. At first. We spent a couple of hours in the air, and somewhere over the English Channel, I awoke. In the distance, you could see the wakes of hundreds of ships as our fleet headed toward Normandy. The boys on those ships would get their baptisms to war come sunup; ours would come a tad sooner. When we were over Guernsey Island, we first noticed some light enemy fire. Nothing serious.

  Compton stood in the doorway and looked at me. He winked and said loudly over the rattle of the engines, “We’re gonna throw a scare into those krauts tonight, Malark.”

  We headed east across France’s Cherbourg Peninsula and straight for Ste.-Mère-Église. That’s when all hell broke loose. Big guns thumped below. Searchlights rolled around the clouds, searching for the likes of us. Tracer bullets from antiaircraft and machine guns zinged through what was now darkness. Fires burned on the ground from planes that had already been shot down. For a split second, I was back watching those giant Douglas firs bursting into flames and heading toward our cabin on the Nehalem.

  Our plane—one of eighty-one that had taken off in England—was dropping, dropping, dropping some more. Ack-ack fire from the ground intensified. The plan was to fly in at fifteen hundred feet and go to six hundred when we were above the drop zone. But we were already below three hundred feet. And sitting ducks for the Germans.

  We didn’t know it at the time, but our pathfinders—guy
s who were supposed to jump earlier from a different plane and give us a signal to show us our drop zone—had gone down in the English Channel because of engine failure. We also didn’t know that, though the plane was to slow to about 100 mph for the jump, we were screaming along at more like 200.

  We stood and hooked up our chutes to the static line. Guts tightened. I don’t recall there even being a sound-off; everything was happening so quick. I was second or third in the stick. All I was thinking was Get the hell out of this plane, Malarkey. The ground, at this point, was our friend. The quicker we could get down, the better off we were.

  I was anxious, not fearful. With the noise of the engines, the darkness, and the flashes of light giving an eerie look to the clouds, too much was going on for you to concentrate on any fear that might have lodged in your gut. The light turned green and stayed green.

  “Go! Go! Go!” yelled the jumpmaster, screaming just to be heard above the din of the engines, the guns, and the wind outside. Compton jumped first. Then Toye. I was next, a thousand do-this-and-do-that thoughts interrupted by a fleeting thought of “Invictus”:

  Out of the night that covers me,

  Black as the Pit from pole to pole,

  I thank whatever gods may be

  For my unconquerable soul.

  Only later would I realize the amazing scope of the 101st’s contribution on this night: Nearly seven thousand soldiers were falling into the darkness. It had been suggested, long ago, that we shout the name of Maj. Gen. Bill Lee, commander of the 101st, when we jumped. I didn’t. “Currahee!” I yelled instead. And jumped into the Normandy night. One thousand one … one thousand two. I felt the jolt of the prop wash. The chute burst open. With a splash of moonlight on the ground, I could see a triangular piece of property to my left, between roads. I’d been floating for nearly thirty seconds. I caught a glimpse of what looked like a farm road. Not much else. Certainly not the elm tree I suddenly felt myself crashing into.

  Some paratroopers, I’d later learn, would die in such trees, target practice for the Germans come daybreak. Some didn’t even make it that far. In either shot-down planes or hanging limp from parachutes, with bullets in them, they were dead on arrival. But somehow I swung down on my risers, almost as if I were in a giant sling, like at Camp Mackall, and felt my feet touch the ground.

  Bomba the Jungle Boy in a Strange Land.

  I found my squad leader, Sergeant Guarnere, the guy whose brother had just been killed in Italy, in a field. I also found one of our assistant rifle-squad leaders, Joe Toye. But, initially, nobody else. Toye had jumped a leg bag, and when his chute opened, the rope that secured the bag released too soon. It was wound around his arm and forearm, then cinched down to his wrist, peeling off a thin layer of skin almost down to his hand.

  “Joe, we gotta get that patched up,” I said.

  “Hell, Malark, I’m fine,” he said. That was Joe Toye for you.

  Paratroopers, before anything else, are riflemen. So, with our semiautomatic M1 Garands in hand, we moved toward what we thought was the coast. With so few guys to help, I chose to take only the mortar tube and leave the base plate and bipod.

  Later, we’d learn that we’d been dropped several miles west of our drop zone, which might have been a blessing in disguise because our target area, we later found, was crawling with krauts. We had landed about three-quarters of a mile east of Ste.-Mère-Église, about five miles inland from Utah Beach.

  We walked across the farm road I’d seen from the air and looked through a hedgerow. I could see a group of people standing in an orchard, about a hundred feet away. I pulled out my cricket to start clicking. Blasted thing wouldn’t work. We were fairly certain they were our guys, so finally I just yelled at them and they responded that they were American paratroopers. Guys from the 101st, though 502nd Regiment, not 506th. We joined them; they had an officer who had taken charge.

  We started down a road toward the beach, looking for a road that paralleled the coast line so we could get to Causeways One and Two. Suddenly, we heard the sound of hooves and a cart behind us. We dove into the hedgerow. Out of the darkness came three horse-drawn carts and a handful of German soldiers, apparently hauling ammo toward the beach. We jumped them, rifles aimed at their faces. The horses got jumpy. Our guys were shouting; their guys were shouting. We took fifteen German prisoners. We marched them into a group, rifles at their backs.

  One of our guys spoke German fairly well, and we informed them that if we got fired upon, they were to remain standing in the road while the rest of us took cover. We hadn’t gone more than a quarter mile when exactly that happened. A German machine gun started firing. We hit the ditches. The German soldiers all stood in the road, as told. Except for one. He dove in the ditch. Guarnere promptly shot him in the back. We threw him on the cart and he died later than morning. From then on, we had no problem with prisoners standing up as we took cover.

  An hour before our boys in the air started the bombardment of the coastline, we reached the road that paralleled the beach, about a mile inland. We knew we weren’t supposed to penetrate beyond that point until after the naval and air force bombing had ceased so we held up. Fields. Orchards. Farms. The smell of wet grass and gunpowder. That’s what I remember as it started to get light.

  We could hear big guns shelling the beach from the sea, bombs bursting after having been dropped. We knew our guys were coming ashore. Occasionally, you’d hear the pop of a rifle, the chatter of a machine gun. We ran into a bunch more paratroopers who were halfway assembled and told them that a portion of the 2nd Battalion was about a half mile east of us. Guarnere, Toye, and I left the group and headed up a road where our battalion and part of our company was supposed to be. We hadn’t gone more than a couple hundred yards when I saw it for the first time: death. A sickening sight. The dead bodies of a bunch of American paratroopers scattered about, along with even more Germans dead on the road. It was strange because it looked as if both had been herded up and shot execution-style. The krauts had already been looted; I wanted a Luger, if for no other reason than to prove I’d gotten some revenge from the country that had killed my two uncles. But even if someone else hadn’t beat me to the punch, I don’t know if I’d have gone looking. I was too sickened by the scene.

  We walked on, eventually reaching our battalion, then headed up the road. A bunch of German prisoners, about twenty of them, were clumped to my right, just off the road. All standing up quite tall, as if out of respect.

  “Where the hell are you guys from, Brooklyn?” asked some wise guy in our company.

  “No, Portland, Oregon,” said a German master sergeant, just off my shoulder. What? I couldn’t believe it—that the guy not only spoke perfect English, but said he was from Portland (not Eugene, as the HBO miniseries Band of Brothers showed him saying, for reasons beyond me).

  “No kidding, Portland?” I said eagerly. “I’m from Astoria.”

  The company walked on. I hung back, amazed at this coincidence.

  “I worked in Portland until 1938,” he said, “and came home when Hitler called all loyal Germans to return to the fatherland.”

  “So where’d you work in Portland?” I asked.

  “Schmitz Steel Company.”

  “You gotta be kidding,” I said. “The owners of that company were friends of my family. And I worked for Monarch Forge and Machine Works right across the street.”

  By now, a few of my fellow soldiers passing by were giving me the eye.

  “Well now, what do you think about that decision now to return to your homeland?” I asked, scanning his POW pals around him.

  “I think I made a big mistake,” he said.

  “Malark, let’s go,” yelled Guarnere, peeved that I was fraternizing with the enemy.

  I nodded at the soldier. “You take care,” I said, and walked on. I’d only been at war a few hours, and already I was learning stuff I hadn’t been taught in training. Namely, that the guy trying to kill you—and that you’re trying to ki
ll—could be somebody who once worked in an American defense plant, across the street from where you later worked.

  Strange thing, war.

  Our column—about 160 men—moved on to a place called Le Grand Chemin. E Company was still scattered from here to hell’s half acre after the drop. Among the missing was our commanding officer, Thomas Meehan, whose plane, we later learned, had gone down. We had pulled together only twelve men, with two officers, two light machine guns, one bazooka, and my 60 mm mortar. The good news? One of those twelve men was Lieutenant Dick Winters, a guy we’d follow anywhere. We hadn’t been there long when we had that very chance.

  Enemy machine-gun fire broke out up front. Word got back to Winters through a D Company soldier, Lt. John Kelly, that a battery of 105 mm guns was hammering hell on our boys on Utah Beach, just beyond Causeways One and Two. He huddled with other officers, then came back to us. Col. Bob Strayer wanted E Company, or what we’d gathered of it, to attack the position. Some were skeptical; this Kelly was a boxer whose face was all beat up. Some wondered if he’d taken one too many blows, not the kind of guy you want telling you to go on a do-or-die mission to capture guns that were sure to be well protected by soldiers who’d been preparing for months.

  The well-camouflaged German guns—four of them, it turned out—were about two hundred yards up ahead, positioned opposite a large French farmhouse that, we’d later learn, was known as Brecourt Manor, about five miles inland. The cannons were hammering our guys on Utah Beach. We get those guns, maybe the tide changes; if we don’t, who knows what happens?

  The farm wasn’t a nice rectangular block; instead, it had half a dozen angles to it, flanked by hedgerows, thick earthen walls clustered with trees and grass. The angles were to our advantage because they gave us more options and the Germans more concerns. The German advantage? A well-thought-out trench system where we had no idea how many soldiers might be waiting, rifles ready. Later, we would learn a truth that I’m glad we didn’t know at the time: Fifty to sixty men were protecting those guns. We were taking about a dozen guys, meaning the enemy had a five-to-one advantage.