After he finished with me I was put back in the stockade.
JUMP SCHOOL
When we walked into training, the cadre tried to put us through the ropes. They would drop us for twenty push-ups and we would ask them if they wanted another twenty-five. Up to that time they had only trained recruits. We were the first regiment to go through jump school as a unit. We had had our physical weeding out process before we got there. When they saw what the score was they immediately sent us to the packing shed. Each one of us had to pack one chute by ourselves. After that we went right into jump training. We qualified as paratroopers after five jumps. It was a great day when we received our wings. We felt like we were top dog. Afterwards they gave us a short furlough.
Deacon Salinas was the only guy we lost out of our section at Jump School. He froze in the door on his first jump. Well, anyone who refused to jump, they usually just kicked them out immediately. Salinas begged and pleaded for them to let him go up for a second time. He said, “I made a contract with the army that I would make a jump from an airplane. Let me do that and I will then quit.” They allowed him to go up a second time and he jumped. He landed bad and was bleeding from head to toe. He said, “Okay, I kept my vow,” and we never saw him again. He was a good honorable kid.
BARRACKS BRAWL29
[Jack Agnew recalled how the section capped this phase of their training:]
Of course, we knew it was getting near time to go overseas. It just so happened that the medics had a party. The medics got to feeling pretty good and two of them started fighting. When one was knocked down, he would get up and knock the other down. “Dirty” Johnson was a tough little ole guy from a lumber company out in Washington. Johnson could not figure it out. He said, “Boy when we knock a guy down, you stomp him and don’t let him get up or he’ll beat you again.”
So the next thing we knew, a lot of the fellows were carrying beer back to our barracks and they got to feeling pretty good. As a matter of fact they started throwing dish pans up and down the steps to the latrine. Communications platoon was downstairs and demolitions was upstairs.
Armando Marquez30 had started to feel pretty good. He thought we were going to Japan, so he took his knife out and was cutting the pillows all up. There were feathers all over the place. Somebody hit his brother, Mike, as he came out of the shower with a pillow and he had feathers stuck all over him.
Someone else suggested throwing a bunk down the steps and everybody was pushing this bunk. Jake had seen Lieutenant Sylvester Horner coming. So he said to the guys, “Hey don’t do that.” But Jake was the instigator in the first place.
So Horner started coming up to raise Cain. Somebody was about to pull a knife. Kennedy had a pitcher of beer and pulled back to throw it on this guy but hit Horner right in the chest as he came up behind him. The beer was all over Horner and he raised all kinds of heck. He said, “I don’t care if you guys are up to two o’clock in the morning. You are going to have a white glove inspection and clean this place out.”31
So everybody was throwing buckets of water on the floor and cleaning the walls up but it was running down on top of communications. So they were getting mad. So the next thing we knew, we ended up in another fight. That all turned out to be part of the training.
CAMP MACKALL, NORTH CAROLINA32
February 26, 1943
We completed our five qualifying jumps at Fort Benning, then moved to Camp Mackall, North Carolina, right outside Southern Pines. That is where we became a part of the 101st Airborne Division. There we began some really serious tactical training as demolition saboteurs.
They named this camp after the first American paratrooper killed in North Africa. His name was John Mackall. They told us the demolition platoon was going to make a big jump to dedicate the field to him. They would have a bandstand set up with his family and several high-ranking military people there. We were supposedly going to land on that dirt. It should have been sodded but was not. It had been finely ground up with manure about an inch deep. They had some big runways there.
That morning when we woke up, the wind speed was about twenty-five miles an hour and just kept increasing. By the time they had us ready to jump, it was up to forty miles an hour. Since all these dignitaries and the kid’s mother and dad were there they were going to go ahead with it anyway.
So we bailed out of those planes. I was lucky. On the ground I collapsed my chute immediately. Just bingo, I had her down flat. But I saw the wind drag men two hundred yards. It skinned and peeled the men and dragged them through this dusty manure, if they did not land on the runway. It wore out their reserve chutes until one could see the rayon threads. I had never seen such a debacle in all my life.
SECOND ARMY TENNESSEE MANEUVERS NO. 1
June 6, 1943
The Tennessee Maneuvers resembled any regular war maneuver. We were always considered the enemy unit and they used us for the element of surprise and checked whether or not we could accomplish the assignment that we had been trained for. We needed to leave proof of identification for everything that we destroyed. We made a total of four jumps in four weeks. The first week they dropped us on the west side, next week on the east side, then the north and south. Some real funny things happened down there.
Back in the hill country there were a lot of hillbillies. This one paratrooper was oscillating as he came down. He had no control of his chute and hit a chimney on a house that must have been about a hundred years old. There was hardly any mortar left in it. Well, he knocked that chimney clear off the building and it crumbled up in a heap down there. Boy, here came this hillbilly out of that house with that shotgun and demanded payment right then and there. Well, the guy did not have a penny in his pocket so the hillbilly was about to shoot him. The paratrooper talked and pleaded with him until some lieutenant came by and assured the man he would be paid, but not on the spot.
There was another kid who landed on the tongue of a wagon while an old man was cultivating with a pair of mules. Those mules ran away and he was still caught on it.
They had a lot of beehives in that country. Harold Scully landed on a beehive and knocked it over. His canopy then engulfed both him and the bees. He got stung hundreds of times and they took him to the hospital quick. They said he swelled up as big as a log. It was so bad that he was never able to return to parachute duty.
One time we were on a mountain so steep that one had to put his legs around something to hold his position. I looked over to where Lieutenant Leach was laying and there was a coral snake on a limb just about a foot from his head.
I said, “Leach, if I was you, I would move pretty slow over to my left. There is a coral snake right over your head.”
He slid over and was just looking eyeball-to-eyeball with this snake. When he got himself to a safe position where he thought he could do it, he flung himself away from there. The snake never did strike him.
Tom Young and I went AWOL33 into Nashville. Of course, we became drunk and were jaywalking and this and that. I staggered out in the street after dark and was hit by a city street bus. I bet it knocked me thirty feet. Of course, I was drunk and as loose as a dish rag. I rolled and tumbled. So the driver began to slow her down to a stop. I was already up chasing him. I ran up and beat on his door. It did not have a handle to where I could get in to him. So when he saw that I was still navigating he took off. He burned it out of there.
Tom and I went into a joint. I do not know what the deal was there but it did not take long before the bartender and I got into it. Then he said, “I’ll just call the cops.” He picked that phone up.
Tom, like me, always carried a heavy pocket knife. He had one of those big ole Cases with a four-and-a-half-inch blade on it. He just reached over and grabbed that phone line, doubled it up and cut it in two then handed the bartender his end of it.
We would steal a jeep or something out of a headquarters area, and drive it off and leave it. We did not have any business with a jeep in an “enemy position” where we were
outnumbered a hundred to one. We had a lot of fun down there.
[Jack Agnew and Herb Pierce, who were in a different section at that time, remembered:]
One day an officer came in and asked for volunteers from the demolitions platoon, saying, “You, you, and you.” Brincely Stroup and Joe Oleskiewicz were also volunteered. Ed Pikering was the medic for the operation. They had twelve planes to jump about fifteen men. Each plane kicked out five or six door bundles with parachutes as dummies to give the impression that the opposing army had dropped in an entire battalion. Their objective was to cause as much confusion behind the lines as possible. Brince and Jack served as scouts for the demolitions section. They cut their way through brush to a small barn on top of a little mountain. There they captured a communications jeep and its crew. With the radios they learned all the enemy’s movements and sneaked down to capture vehicles out of the motor pool or at least steal the rotors out of the ones they left behind.
Herb Pierce asked the referees for permission to impersonate officers. So the demolitions men borrowed their bars and went down that night and lied their way into the command tent. They then sat in the back while the officers held their meeting. All the while a suspicious lieutenant kept staring at seventeen-year-old Herb. When the meeting was over, he came up and said, “You are too young to be a lieutenant.” With that Herb figured it was time to do something. The men had spread out around the room and he told everyone they were captured. The major was mad as hell.34
FORT BRAGG, NORTH CAROLINA
July 23, 1943
After the Tennessee Maneuvers we went to Fort Bragg, North Carolina, to get ready to ship over to England. We spent the time getting our supplies and all the while we were training every day. We made about ten more practice jumps.
Down there, the authorities came around and said everybody had to get a GI haircut before we shipped out. Well, most of us did not want a GI haircut. We had one little ole kid in the company named “Maw” Darnell. He had just transferred in from a chemical warfare outfit and they stuck him into my section. He was tongue-tied and a real Georgia Cracker. He was almost difficult to understand. Someone would ask, “Where did you come from Maw?” He would say, “Fow Fow Too, Chemico Wo-fare.” He was illiterate. He couldn’t read nor write. I wrote his folks for him.
He did not care what his head looked like. He would buy him enough Brown Mule chewing tobacco to last him a month when he got paid. Then the rest of it he would gamble off. He liked to gamble. When they put out this order, we had only two company barbers, a fellow named George Underwood and I think Frank Pellechia. So I got me a chair and an orange crate and set up a barber shop there. I sat Maw Darnell in that chair and started cutting his hair. Boy, he looked like a Halloween pumpkin. I was nearly through when Top Kick came by. Someone had told him what I was doing.
Top Kick said, “What in the hell are you doing?”
I said, “You want everybody to get a burr haircut. I’m just trying to help you all I can, Top.” I said, “There’s nothing I won’t do for the company, you know.”
He looked at that kid and said, “I’ll tell you, it will cost you five dollars to get your hair straightened up. McNiece, if you cut hair off of another head anywhere while you’re under my command, I’ll send you to prison.”
I did not get any punishment out of that. He just chewed me real good. I thought I would give them all a burr haircut.
STOLEN TRAIN AND BLOWN--UP BARRACKS
Service Company ran a short school that taught us every minute detail about operating and disabling tanks, trains, dozers, and stuff like that. They figured if we came across any equipment like that behind enemy lines we should know how to operate them.
Trains only had two gears. If a man would just watch the temperature and water level then all he would have to do was go forward or backward. But one had to be awful careful. The engine had a fire sheet in there that the engineer kept red hot. If the water dropped to where that sheet was exposed, the next time that the engineer shot water in there it would blow that thing a million miles high.
They taught us if a train was in motion and hit a torpedo (kind of like a firecracker with a band that would crimp around a rail) it would indicate that there was another train on the track or that trouble was ahead, a bridge was out or something. The engineer would have to slow the train down to a caution speed. After he hit two of these then he would proceed a little further and see a flare, kind of a Roman candle. The flare had a spike that would stick down in the wood.
Well, they taught us this to avoid collisions behind the enemy lines or our own lines. I think they issued each one of us three of those torpedoes in Normandy. I kept mine in my musset bag and placed them on any track that I came across. It was a deterrent but not effective for firepower. It would delay a German train so they would have to send a group of men out ahead to see what the danger was. This would allow other American troops to destroy the train.
While we were down at Camp Mackall, I had gone into town one night in Southern Pines and got hooched up. They had those two- and-a-half-ton trucks or six-bys that would come into town and make a shuttle back and forth out to our barracks. All the trucks had left out of town and I had missed my ride. There was a cafe down at the railroad yard. So I thought I would jump down there and get me some drinks and eats.
I kept watching these goats (that is what they called these small engines that work inside the yards) trying to figure out what was happening there. Those firemen and engineers and brakemen were in and out of there all night eating. Those guys would park their engines and come in and eat a sandwich and drink some coffee. They would just leave a spot fire. At that time all locomotives had a big fire plate on the bottom and the water would be under it boiling for propulsion. They had put what they call a spot fire on that plate which kept the steam from reaching a certain level. When they were ready to take the goat out of there, they had enough steam to move with. They would then crank that burner up and build up a good head of steam.
So I kind of watched this and became familiar with the operation, and then this engineer and fireman came in. They ordered a pretty good-sized meal. I then went out to look the engine and throttles and everything over. That locomotive was a very simple piece of machinery. It just had the throttle and release and the gauge there on the oil burners.
So I climbed in there, cranked her up and threw that throttle, whipped her down to the end, threw the switch and took off out of there about thirty miles back to camp. Away I went.
I did not know if I was on the right track or not but they had a box of safety equipment there. It had flares and torpedoes. I did not want anyone to get hurt so when I stopped I walked out and put out these poppers on the track up and down there and in back of it. Then I put flares out just like I was taught.
So when I got back to Camp Mackall, of course, the railroad people were already sending out messages and alerts for other people on that track. Of course, the next morning there was hell to pay. Boy, they were mad. Our officers were questioning every one of us and particularly they were questioning me. I just denied any knowledge of it all together.35
They put my company under arrest of quarters and we had to stay in the barracks. We could not go to a show or anything. This was just before we shipped overseas. It did not bother me but a lot of the guys’ wives, mothers, and dads and relatives had come in to enjoy a few last days with them. The guys could not talk to their mothers and daddies or anything. Boy, they were a mad bunch of soldiers. They were ready to revolt. I thought, “Well, this warrants a little activity to see if we can change that line of thinking.”
In the demolition platoon everyone of us stole explosives, caps and detonators, primer cord and everything else. Everyone of them had a foot locker full of it or they hid it up under the barracks. The front of the barracks was at street level and the back of it was on a grade about four feet down from the floor of this barracks.
So I was sitting out there on the back steps of my barra
cks and they had a guard just walking. I kept watching and timing him and this and that. There were some big ole pine trees around the camp that were about a foot and a half in diameter. So I went in and asked the men for explosives and rigged up a big charge on the opposite side of this tree from where this guard walked so it would fall away from him. The bulk of the trunk would protect him from danger. Then I made me a trip wire like we had done before.
Boy, he came through that area right on schedule. He must have been mechanical or something because his timing was perfect. He came around there and hit that trip wire. When he did, that charge went off like a clap of thunder. It cut that tree down. That ole boy was scared to death but he was not hurt. I made a run into the barracks and told the other guys, “You better get in your bunks.”
In just a minute here came that, “Ten-shun!” Everybody rubbed their eyes and looked around and yawned. We got up out of our bunks. The officer said, “All right. Which one of you blew up the tree?”36
Nobody knew anything. He said, “It’s funny that you all could sit within twenty feet of that tree and be sound asleep when we’ve had calls from Southern Pines wanting to know what was happening down here.”
I said, “It’s probably because you all work us too hard with this fatigue.”
He said, “McNiece, you were awful close to that tree when it blew up.”
I said, “I was in here asleep.”
So they just raised Cain but they never could prove it on me. Each individual was later questioned by Lieutenant Charles Mellen,37 Staff Sergeant Earl Boegerhausen, and Platoon Sergeant Johnson. They interviewed and interviewed and interviewed, and finally Lieutenant Mellen asked me, “Would it be plausible that noncommissioned officers could have been involved in this?”
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