Filthy Thirteen

by Richard Killblane

  POLICING THE DEAD

  After we came back from Carentan, Tom Young and I ordered a croissant in a little village. That was dairy country down there. There were thousands of cattle killed by bombing and strafing and a jillion dead Krauts and paratroopers were just laying all over the place. That ground was just covered with them and maggots were climbing out of their guts. We could hardly take a step without sliding down because of the maggots. It got to where one could not hardly stand the stench of it. I would be eating a can of K Rations and look down and there would be fourteen flies.

  So Browny told Tom and I to go down in that one area and clean out those dead bodies; all of those cows, Germans, paratroopers, and civilians. Anything that was dead we were to get rid of. So Tom and I went down to a village and found two of those Frenchmen in that little ole village who had ox carts. We told them that we wanted to put all those people that we found in those bomb holes. There were these great big bomb holes all over Europe. They could have anything they wanted off the corpses except the dog tags. Tom and I collected the dog tags off of every paratrooper and Tom had a helmet full of them. We reported what we had done to intelligence since airborne units did not have graves registration people.

  The Frenchmen loaded the bodies up in the ox carts and hauled them over and threw everything—the cows, the paratroopers and the Germans—in the same bomb holes. Of course they were glad to get all that clothing, money, watches, and rings. We just kept them busy down there. It took them all day to clean that mess up. Some time after that we began to move back to the landing to get ready to return to England.

  [Tom Young remembered:]

  Jake and I were the only ones at this apple orchard. Captain Brown came up and asked us to gather up all the dead bodies. He said there were some trucks coming up later that we could load them on. He told us there will be a cholera outbreak if we did not. He told us to load up all the Americans first. I went down to a town and found a Frenchman who spoke good English. I told him we needed some help and asked if he had about five men who could gather up the bodies. He said, “Yes.” We told them not to touch anything on the Americans but they could have anything they wanted off of the German bodies. The Germans had some good boots. Jake and I did not touch a body. The Frenchmen loaded up all the American bodies in the trucks. He asked, “What do you want us to do with the Germans.” I said, “I don’t know.” I thought there would be some trucks to pick them up later. The Frenchman said, “I know where there is a big cistern, where we can dump the bodies.” That is what they did.42

  There was a PX set up there for soldiers who were exiting. I bought me a big ole box of Copenhagen. I had been without Copenhagen for thirty-six days. We also had a mail call and I received two or three packages from my brothers and sisters and mother and dad. They all had Copenhagen in them. I sat down on the back steps of these German barracks that we had taken. I packed my head just as full as I could get it. I just thought I was in hog heaven. In about two minutes I was so dizzy and sick that I could not see. I hung on to the stairs until I could not stand it and then I laid out on the ground and just puked my guts out. Afterwards I took a little chew of it and started working back into it. It took me a couple of days before I got to where I enjoyed it again.

  WHAT HAPPENED TO THE OTHERS

  When we finally came out of there, I had five men out of the original thirteen left. After we hit the silk, I did not see Joe Oleskiewicz, Max Majewski, Chuck Plauda43 nor Jack Womer until I rejoined my company. Jack Agnew was the only one of the thirteen who fought with me on the bridge. Many of the guys never lived to see the sun come up.

  [Jack Womer remembered his experience:44]

  Jack Womer jumped as the sixteenth man in the stick. He landed in a deep ditch of the swamp and nearly drowned, but the “wind of the Lord” caught his chute and pulled him out, then dragged him into shallower water. He could hear Krauts screaming all around him. He figured that they were evidently more scared than the paratroopers.

  Jack moved to high ground but ran into wire. He then retreated back into the swamp where he met up with a lieutenant and nine other paratroopers. Since he had been out of the swamp they asked him to lead them down a road where they might link up with somebody else. He walked point. When a twenty-millimeter cannon opened up on him, Jack walked back and told the lieutenant that a drainage ditch would give them protection. They decided to continue down the road with Jack about twenty yards out in front of the scouts. A voice warned him, “What are you doing out there?” So he jumped into the ditch. The others came up and the lieutenant decided to flank the cannon. About that time the Germans sent up a flare. The paratroopers froze as they had been trained, then the twenty millimeter killed nearly half of the party. The rounds sprayed dirt on Jack’s head. When the flare burned out, Jack ran out into a wheatfield with three other guys. He was crawling on his hands and knees when a mortar round landed right next to him. It blew him backwards. When he checked himself, to his amazement, the explosion had only singed his left sleeve.

  At daylight, he found a bunch of 501st guys walking up the road. He warned them about the twenty millimeter, then wanted to go and check on the wounded up the road. A captain told him instead to go back down the other way to find others. As he started walking back a voice again warned him not to go down that road. He stopped just in time as the enemy fired down the road. He then continued in the same direction and passed a paratrooper with a broken leg. He asked for a medic and Jack assured him that he would return with one. As Jack continued he came across a bunch of paratroopers waiting in a ditch. He asked if any of them were from the 506th. He felt it would be safer to have some company moving through the countryside. About a dozen men stood up and followed him to a house where a captain had established a defensive position. Jack then put his men on line.

  Jack found a medic and headed back to the paratrooper with the broken leg. As he jumped over a drainage ditch he looked back and the medic was gone. About halfway through the woods he ran across a man wounded in the arm and leg. He found other paratroopers, only to learn that the man with the broken leg had been killed. He then led that group of paratroopers back and recovered the other wounded man. He placed them in a defensive line, then assumed responsibility for the 506th men at “Hell’s Corners” near la Barquette. On one occasion he was sniping on German positions from a tree. Suddenly an eighty-eight shell narrowly missed him but knocked him from the tree.

  On the second day, the 1st Battalion of the German 6th Paratrooper Regiment approached unaware of the paratroopers. The Americans held their fire until the Germans were close, then they surprised them with an ambush. Over a hundred Germans surrendered. The Americans herded the Germans out onto a road along the dike. They had them strip off the camouflage smocks which they wore over their blue uniforms. About that time a German mortar barrage landed among them but the Krauts could not run because GIs were dug in all around them. The mortars killed nearly all of the Germans. Jack saw one wounded German who looked fourteen years old. He read the fear in his eyes so Jack picked him up and took him back to the house for treatment. When others asked why he was out on the road, Jack just told them he was the runner.45 The wounded were still lying everywhere moaning.

  After six or seven days of fighting, an officer came over and told Jack that the 506th was coming up to relieve them. The officer said he had kept a record of what Jack had done and that he could go back with them for a rest instead of going right back into action with his unit. Jack followed the 501st back.

  Lieutenant Mellen was the officer who took us in. Someone reported to Regiment that he had been wounded as many as three or four times because he had lived long enough to bandage his wounds. Joe Oleskiewicz had seen him before he was killed. Another boy said he died trying to knock out three machine-gun nests, which was not very good odds. They found his body the next morning.46

  Baran was hit very soon in Normandy. The Germans shot him in the head with a wooden bullet. They were made of hard wood th
at would splinter easily. They could shoot someone right between the eyes with one and it would not kill them but the splinters would go all through the head. The red, green, and black dyes in them would cause a heck of an infection that required a lot of care. The Germans used them to occupy ten men for every wounded man.

  Baran was hit in the temple right above the eye. It just shattered and went all over his head. That green dye stayed with him forever. It looked like someone had taken a tattoo needle and jabbed him all over his face. It was still visible after the war was over.47

  Peepnuts Hale had jumped out with the second half of the stick. He was killed attacking his third machine gun nest. He wore a size four and a half boot. Before we jumped into Normandy they issued everyone of us a brand-new pair of jump boots. The quartermaster would not issue one boot of an odd size like that. Instead they would issue six pair at a time. Peepnuts received six good pair of size four and a half boots and the rest of us only received one pair. He was killed and I wore my one pair all through the war. I wore the soles out and had to stuff paper in it.48

  I found out about the others from some people who had seen them. The stories got out from graves registration and filtered back into the company. Nobody knows what happened to Googoo Radeka.49 They just found his body. I do not know what happened to Baribeau either. I was surprised Baribeau did not last any longer than he did because he spoke fluent French. He was tough. I figured he would come through that whole show without a scratch.50

  All anyone ever found of Ragsman Cone was his dog tags. Back then the army designated one’s religion with a letter on the tag. “H” stood for Hebrew, “P” for Protestants, and “C” for Catholics. I guess Cone did not want to get caught with that “H” hanging around his neck.

  [Cone related his story:]

  Cone jumped in the middle of his stick and landed in the hedgerows with another paratrooper from his squad. The two fought off Germans armed with machine pistols. During the fight, the Germans sprayed the hedgerow and hit Cone below the right shoulder, breaking his arm. One round hit the other paratrooper in the head killing him instantly. Wounded, Cone could no longer fire his M1 Garand so he made his way out of there to a French farmhouse. Afraid the Germans would kill him for being a Jew, he pushed his dog tags into the ground. After Lieutenant Alex Bobuck turned in Cone’s dog tags, he was listed as killed in action. His parents even received payments on his insurance policy.

  Cone had the farmer hide him. After two days the farmer turned him in to the Germans. They treated his arm, then transferred him to a prison camp. A fellow prisoner was released and informed the army that Cone was still alive. His family gladly returned the insurance money. Cone spent the next eight to nine months in three different prison camps. The Russians liberated the American prisoners at the Kristin camp. Most of the Americans fought with the Russians hoping to link up with the Americans. The Russian offensive had stalled. Cone had struck up a friendship with another paratrooper. After a week fighting with the Russians they decided to make their way back to American lines on their own.

  With Polish money they had picked up from the prison camp, they made their way through Poland and Rumania and finally reached Russia. Without any identification papers, the Russian authorities put them in jail until the American government sent word to release them. They sailed through the Dardanelles on a British ship to Port Said, Egypt, where they reached an American air base. They were thrown in jail because of a report that a mutiny had occurred on the British ship. A lawyer arrived to question the two and cleared them of any charges. They made their way to Naples, Italy, then on to Boston. Cone was sent to Fort McPherson, Georgia, where they took the bullet out of his arm. He went down to Fort Benning to make one more jump to keep his jump pay and was finally discharged on October 7, 1945. Until he called Jake McNiece on June 5, 2002, none of the men of the 506th knew he had survived the war.51

  Rasmussen survived. Those C-47s always had a pilot, a co-pilot, and a crew chief. In flight, the crew chief looked at Rass’s flamethrower52 and asked, “What are you doing with that thing? Are you going to jump with that thing on your leg?”

  Rass said, “Yeah, I’ve got a cotter pin here.” It was tied to a rope which was attached to his belt. “When the chute opens I’ll just whip that key out of there and it will drop down to the end of that rope. That will take that hundred and five pounds off of me as I land.”

  Rasmussen pulled the key out and showed him how it worked, then he tried to put it in. He had so much crap on that he could not. So the crew chief said, “I’ll put it in,” but he put it in backwards.

  When Rass jumped out and that chute opened, he tried to release that flamethrower but he could not pull out the cotter key. So he landed with it on his leg. He sprained both of his ankles. To walk he had to balance himself with both his hands outstretched. He was trying to work his way out of there to a ditch and there were Krauts all around him just shooting up a storm. One bullet hit him in the elbow and it ricocheted down to his belly.

  He and Trigger Gann landed together. They were about four miles from where we landed. Trigger poured a whole bunch of sulfur powder on his arm. Then he told Rasmussen, “Rass, I’m going out of here. I’ll give you a couple of shots of morphine and I’ll come back. I’ve got this job to do and need to get out of here.”

  Trigger went off to fighting around there and the Krauts just pushed him in and out of every hedgerow in there. By the time it quieted down he headed back to take care of Rass but he never could find him.

  To this day Rasmussen hates Trigger Gann with a purple passion because he feels that Trigger deserted him, which I do not think is the truth. Trigger was a boy from Birmingham, Alabama, about six foot one. He was not afraid of anything. They called him Trigger because he was a hair trigger. If you said the wrong word he would just bust you in the mouth. Trigger told me, “Jake, I went back and tried to find him.”53

  Rasmussen did not join back up with the company for about four or five days.54 He told someone that he had this bullet in his belly and it was hurting, not all the time but if he made a quick move or he sneezed or coughed or hit the dirt quickly it was pretty painful. He said, “I would like to see this officer who is examining all these wounds. I would like to get that thing cut out.”

  They asked him how it got into his belly and he told them, “I don’t know.”

  We had this doctor who was out of a field hospital about two miles south of us. Rass told him about that bullet in his belly.

  He said, “Let me see your belly.”

  Rass pulled his shirt apart and the guy looked it over. He said, “I don’t see any bullet holes, son. I don’t even see any discoloration.”

  Rass said, “I got hit in the elbow.”

  The doctor asked, “How did it get in your belly?”

  Rass said, “Look, I’m not a medical man. I don’t know. It’s right there. You can feel it.”

  The doctor then asked, “Is it getting too tough for you up here, son?”

  Rass answered, “I want to tell you, you son-of-a-bitch, if it was too rough for me up here you wouldn’t be around asking me any questions. You would have been long gone. It ain’t too rough for me. I’ve got this bullet in my belly and I would like to get it out. It’s painful.”

  The guy said, “I’m going to send you back to the field hospital. They’ve got X-ray equipment down there and you had better have a bullet in your belly.”

  Rass said, “That’s no problem. Just get me down there to where I can get it taken care of.”

  They took him down there and X-rayed him. They could see scars and bruises on these bones up his arms and into his shoulder. It stopped down there in the wall of his stomach. They told Rass, “The bullet’s there. We can operate and take it out but if we do, this will cut a bunch of nerves and muscle tissue. You might have trouble with it the rest of your life. If you just want to leave it in there, if it is not too painful, probably in another three or four weeks you won’t even know you’ve go
t it.”

  Rass said, “If that’s the medical analysis, I’ve got to take your word. I don’t know.”

  They sent him right back to duty that very day. He never missed a day of combat and still has that bullet in his belly to this day.

  Wilbur Shanklin had gone all through Normandy. He was a good soldier. He had taken a horse from somewhere. He had a bunch of prisoners and they told him to take them to a POW pen somewhere for interrogation.

  When we got out of there and back to our barracks in Littelcote, he was cleaning his rifle. We had been laying in that mud and water for thirty-six days. He shot himself through the foot. They were going to court-martial him. They thought he did it on purpose but Shanklin was not afraid of anything. He did not make the next jump because his foot had not healed up enough but he rejoined the outfit and soldiered good.

  Out of the Regimental Headquarters Company, Maw Darnell was captured along with Burl Prickett, George Smith, James “LaLa” Leach, and Lieutenant Carl Bedient. The Germans took them clear up into Russia.

  RETURN TO ENGLAND

  July 13, 1944

  We had stayed in France for thirty-six days. When we got back to England, Division issued us new clothes and decorations.55 We had two months’ pay coming along with all the loot we had stolen in France. They gave each one of us a seven-day pass for which they had an ulterior motive. They knew we were going to be parading all over Piccadilly Circus with these medals hanging on us advertising parachute operations. The airborne divisions needed a bunch of replacements and they wanted to show off paratroopers and get other people excited enough to volunteer for it. We had lost over 65 percent. We needed troops real bad.

  They had these six-by trucks driving right up and down the wharves where these people were loading boats to join the fighting in France in about two days. They drove up with big bullhorns saying, “Anyone on that boat who wants to transfer to the 101st Airborne just tell your commanding officer and come down the cat walk.” Airborne had the highest priority for troops in the army at that time. Of course they had preplotted and planned it with the naval people. It worked. Men just started piling out of those boats like drowned rats.