Of course those boys on those boats had figured, “We’ll be fighting in there in twenty-four hours.” But they thought, “If we volunteer for paratroops, why it would take them a year or a year and a half to train us to make five practice jumps and then so many training jumps to learn their type of warfare.” To them it looked like they would have about a year of relief. So they just loaded up by the thousands and came out of there. The rest of us celebrated.
After about three days on pass in Piccadilly Circus, Majewski had a premonition that something was wrong so he went back to camp. He checked in and Lieutenant John Reeder stepped up to him and said, “Max, you’ve got a telegram up at the message center. Do you want to know what it is?”
Max said, “No, I don’t. I’ll go up to the message center and read it myself.”
So he went up and there was a telegram for him from the War Department. His wife had been killed in a car wreck about nine miles east of Phoenix, Arizona, at 9:30 in the evening. There was also a captain in the S-3, who had received a telegram that was almost word for word the same. His brother had been killed, nine miles east of such and such at 9:30 in the evening. If someone had just took the names off of the telegrams and handed them back to one another, they would have read exactly the same. So Max realized that his wife was out hanky-pankying with this captain’s brother back in the United States. The Majewski’s had a small child about two years old at that time. Max went downhill from there on and he never was the same after that.
FIRST SERGEANT RETURNS
Top Kick had jumped in right close to Colonel Sink and Uncle Charlie Chase, the bigwigs. He had just barely gotten on the ground when the Germans were on him with a machine gun and shot up his legs. They did not hit anything vital but he lost a lot of blood. The army had come in and picked him up on a stretcher, put him in an ambulance, and ran him back to a field hospital. So he was still in the hospital getting patched up when they gave us those seven-day passes. I had not seen him yet.
When my seven days was over, I still had a bunch of money and was not worn out or anything so I stayed and kept drinking. The next night I came back. I had overstayed and was AWOL. When I came in my Quonset hut I just walked over to my bunk and went to bed. The next morning a guy shook me and I looked at him. I did not know who he was. This barracks was full of guys I had never seen before. I had lost most of mine. They were all replacements who had just arrived from the States. This guy asked, “Are you Sergeant McNiece?”
I said, “Yeah.”
He said, “They want to talk to you down at the orderly room.”
I said, “I more or less suspected that they would. Yeah.”
I went down to the orderly room. It was a horse stable and I knocked.
“Come in!”
I recognized Top Kick’s voice the moment I heard it. I went through that door. That stable was just full of officers and noncoms who were replacements. I did not know a one of them. I stepped through that door and said, “Top Kick, it is good to see you back. How are you doing?”
He said, “I’ll tell you something, Private McNiece.” All those guys sitting around there were just ogling him, his purple heart, invasion ribbon, and all that crap he had on. “You have violated AR such-and-such and AR such-and-such and AR so-and-so.” And he just kept reading those army regulations off. “If you had been in the regular army, do you know what would have happened to you?”
I said, “Let me tell you about the regular army, Boy! You’re regular army aren’t you Top?”
He said, “Yeah.”
I said, “You were in twelve years before I got here, remember?”
He said, “Yeah.”
I said, “I’m just a little ole peacetime soldier from Oklahoma who came over here to fight a war. For the twelve years that you were in here, I was working my ass off picking cotton and cutting broom corn and bailing hay and anything that I could find to do paying taxes to support you.” (This was a lie. Nobody was taxed back in the thirties.) I continued, “You jumped in there the other day and you did not last thirty lousy-ass seconds. You never fired a shot. I jumped in there and fought for thirty-six days. I killed every German I could find and anyone standing close to him. If the United States was depending upon you regular army people to win this war, they’d be in a hell of a shape. So don’t even mention regular army to me ever again.”56
He said, “You get in your quarters, Private McNiece. You’re under arrest of quarters.”
I said, “Well, thank you. Why did you bother to call me in here to tell me that.”
Long after that, we were down at Tom Young’s ranch and sitting around chatting. Top said, “McNiece, you are a liar.”
I kind of grinned, “I ain’t a liar Top. I never told you a lie in my life. Every time I was caught at something I would just say yeah. I didn’t lie to you.”
He said, “Yes you did. Do you remember when you went AWOL there in England after the invasion.”
I said, “Yeah.”
He said, “You know, I ordered you to report to me there in the orderly room.”
I said, “Yeah, I did.”
He asked, “Do you remember what you said?”
I said, “Generally. I could not quote it verbatim. Yeah, I know what I said.”
He asked, “Do you remember telling me that I jumped in there and did not last thirty seconds and never fired off a shot?”
I said, “Yeah. That wasn’t a lie. That was the gospel truth.”
He said, “No, it wasn’t! When they put me on that stretcher, I throwed my Thompson over in the ditch. I took the clip out of it and just laid it right down beside me on the stretcher. When they got me up there at that aid station, I was laying around there waiting for treatment. You know those magazines are spring loaded. I flipped those rounds out of that thing. I just had seventeen rounds in there. I don’t know what I shot at and I don’t know what I hit but I fired off three rounds.”
I said, “Okay, Top, after forty years, I’ll apologize.”
It was forty years after the damn war was over but it had just bugged him and bugged him and bugged him.
VIRGIL SMITH
So they put me under arrest of quarters until they could decide what they were going to do with me. Someone told me, “There’s been a guy been coming in here hunting you all the time for several days.”
I said, “Who was it?”
They said, “I don’t know. He’s a lieutenant. He said he knew you real well.”
Well, Virgil Smith did not make the Normandy jump. He came over as a replacement. So I was sitting out there on the back of my Quonset hut under arrest of quarters, drinking lemonade and beer. I looked up and saw this guy on a “put-put” [motor scooter] coming up the company street.
I thought, “There’s ole Virgil.” So I hollered, “Hey, Muscle Head!” He like to tore that street up trying to get that thing stopped.
This little ole Shorty Mihlan said, “You really goofed up there. That is a lieutenant.”
I said, “That’s a muscle head from Ponca City. I’ve wrassled with him and played football with him for years.”
Ole Virgil jumped off and shook my hand. He said, “How long have you been gone? I’ve been coming over here for a week.”
I said, “I just got back here yesterday.”
He asked, “You want to go hunting? I’ve got a jeep. I imagine you’ve got plenty of ammunition and guns.”
I said, “Oh yeah.”
“Well,” he said, “I’m running this jump school over here. We’re getting in all these volunteers.”
He said, “I’ll tell you what. If you want to go hunting in the morning, I’ll come by and pick you up. We’ll then run back out to the base and pick up a couple loads of these volunteers and jump them. Then we’ll go hunting.”
I said, “Okay.”
Well, he had orders to jump those guys one jump a day for five days to qualify them as paratroopers. If the weather was too bad to jump one day he would jump them twice the
next. He was supposed to qualify every man who came through there in five days. So we went back over to the base and jumped these two loads of paratroopers. At about noon he said, “Let’s go in and eat.”
I said, “Okay.”
So we went right into the officers’ mess. Most of those officers did not know one or the other. If someone did not have rank showing, the others would not know what he was. Smitty was right ahead of me in line. This was on Sunday and everybody was in their pinkies57 with their girlfriends. The officer-of-the-day came up and said, “You’ll have to get out of those fatigues and get in your pinks and greens to eat in here.”
Smitty said, “We’re on work detail. We are not going to spend two or three hours changing clothes.”
This officer looked over at me. There I was, a buck private, AWOL, and under arrest of quarters. I said, “That’s right. We’re not changing.”
We just went right on through the line. Well, Virgil and I became separated. It was a new mess hall to me. I did not know the seating order of rank. When I saw a chair open, I just walked up and plopped down in it. I was right at the head of the table sitting with the majors and colonels. Virgil was down at the other end with the lieutenants. He knew that if it came down to a show, he was the guy they were going to sling a hammer at. So we ate and got out of there and then Smitty said, “McNiece, what the hell are you doing, trying to get us both put in Leavenworth?”
[Virgil Smith related his own version of the story:]
I heard Jake was back. He was in a Quonset Hut over there. I rode a little ‘put-put’ motor scooter over there. When I walked in somebody hollered attention. Jake said, “Aw hell fellas, don’t pay any attention to him.” They had their hands behind their backs. They had stolen the officers’ beer. Jake was taking up initiation dues from these new people and he would then give them a picture of Eleanor Powell. I do not know what he was charging them. He had a roll of bills.
That first time I took him to the officers mess, Jake sat down where the higher ranks were. I was just a second lieutenant at that time and I introduced him as Major McNiece from the 506th. He just started visiting with the officers before we were eating there at the table. You would have thought he was a general. Nothing bothered him at all. Jake got to where he liked eating over at the officers mess because it had better food than the enlisted had. I planned on spotting him just one time but he wanted to keep coming back. It was a wonder we did not get in trouble but nobody questioned it. We were getting a lot of replacement people in.58
Well, we went ahead and had a good hunt that afternoon. Over in England, all the livestock or anything that is undomesticated on a lord’s property belongs to him. They will not let anyone hunt or fish except the lords and ladies. So we just went out all over that country. We killed a whole jeep full of pheasants and rabbits, and those Bobbies on bicycles were trying to block us off but we never did stop for them.59
REPLACEMENTS
After Normandy, I just had the four of the original thirteen left: Jack Agnew, Joe Oleskiewicz, Chuck Plauda, and Jack Womer. George Baran had complications from his wound. Max Majewski was assigned to staff. I made Oleskiewicz corporal in charge of Peepnuts’s squad. So we needed eight more to make up a battalion’s demolition section. I got in eight more boys as replacements, six of whom came over as new recruits: a kid named Manny Freedman, William Coad, Clarence Furtaw, A. J. Bini, Richard “Dick the Raper” Graham, and Paul Zemedia. John Dewey and John “Dinty” Mohr60 had been with us in the demolitions platoon before Normandy. Dewey was kind of an oddball. They put all the oddballs in my outfit. The others were in the unit for such a short time that I hardly got to know them.61
Virgil Smith claims that I charged admission to join the Filthy 13 which was not true. I did not say they had to come into it. There was not anything I could do about it. They just came in. I was always the financial advisor. I handled the money and bought the booze. We spent the rest of our time getting ready for the next jump.
4
SURVIVING HOLLAND
OPERATION MARKET GARDEN
General Miles Dempsey was the three-star general in command of the British Second Army. His army had been driving north up the major highway that ran through Eindhoven, Holland. He was stopped short along with the Americans after they ran out of supplies. When supplies became available Dempsey and General Frederick A. M. Browning decided on a plan to jump the 101st Airborne into Eindhoven to take all waterways and crossings and highways and the city itself, then pursue northward to the next fairly large-sized city, which was Veghel. The 82nd would jump in north of Veghel and take the bridges at Nijmegen. The British Red Devils would jump in the farthest north at Arnhem and take control of the bridge over the Rhine. Dempsey gave these units six days to accomplish their missions so his army could cross the Rhine River into Germany.
The reason that Operation Market Garden had even come into consideration was that “Sonny Boy” Browning, who was the head of all English airborne forces, was a little ashamed because the British airborne had accomplished nothing and gained neither fame nor recognition from Normandy. In the first place, he used a very light contingent of his paratroopers and they jumped in areas that were not even defended by Germans. Afterwards he wanted to gain the glory like that achieved by the 101st and 82nd. So he came up with this wild scheme of dropping an airborne carpet all the way to the Rhine.1
At that time we had complete control of the air. We had sent reconnaissance planes all over Holland. They took photographs of everything within the area of where we were going to attack.
A British major [Major Brian Urquhart] in charge of their intelligence section, I do not remember his name, told them, “Hey, this thing won’t work. They’ve got a thousand tanks in there and no telling how many divisions.” He had aerial photographs of them. He took them in and showed them to Sonny Boy Browning and Eisenhower and anybody else who had a say in it. He told them this thing was impossible but they refused to believe him.
Browning claimed they were all fake tanks. The Americans had done the same thing. They had set up plywood and plastic tanks, trucks, and armored cars and this and that all around the beach opposite Calais to trick the Germans into thinking that we would attack right across from the white cliffs of Dover. Browning maintained that that was what the Germans were doing over there. They kept talking about it and kept talking about it but Sonny Boy Browning wanted to go ahead. So he held his ground and went ahead with the plan. When we jumped in, why those German tanks were the real McCoys, Tigers and all that.
WHITE BREAD TROOPS
When we got ready for the invasion of Normandy they told us, “This is going to be a pushover. You are going to jump in against ‘white bread troops.’”
Someone then asked, “What’re white bread troops?”
They answered, “Well that’s old men who are so old that they have lost their teeth. Having lost their teeth they can’t eat anything but white bread. They are so decrepit that they are practically invalids. They are just about nearly dead. About all we are going to have to do is cover them up.”
The briefers then went into the situation and said, “The success of an airborne invasion is the quickness and stealth of it. Jump in quickly and quietly. When you get on the ground kill all the Krauts with your knife, then seize and hold the high ground.” This became our standing order.
When we jumped into Normandy, it turned out we had landed right in the middle of the German 6th Parachute Regiment. I believe we were outnumbered. We fought those bastards until we nearly went blind. When we came out of that deal and got ready to jump into Holland, this ole boy named Tech-5 David Marcus in the S-2 gave us our orientation. He said, “We’ll be jumping into white bread troops. This is going to be a pushover. You won’t even know you are in a war.”
One of the replacements asked, “What are white bread troops?”
I said, “It’s the 6th Parachute Regiment of the German Army! They are the meanest sons-of-bitches that you ever saw.” I
told them, “We have heard this time and time again. I bet you a fifth of whiskey against a pound note that we will be in contact with the 6th Parachute Regiment.”
Marcus said, “Oh no, it’s not going to be like that. Be sure and do it quietly.”
I said, “You better have a grenade in each hand when you go through that door. Just throw it in any direction you can get loose from it.”
That is the way it worked out. We never did come out of a door that we were not shooting or throwing grenades. In Holland we ran into the 6th Parachute Regiment up around Veghel. We would later run into them again at Bastogne. Everywhere we went they were there!
HOLLAND JUMP2
September 17, 1944
Depending upon the type of mission a paratroop unit had, one would select his weapon. Whatever we asked for, most of the time they would give it right to us. For Holland, I asked for a Thompson submachine gun because it would be a daylight jump and our first objective was taking Eindhoven. I anticipated street fighting nearly all the way through it. We would have to fight from room to room, house to house. It was a good-sized city. So I knew I was going to be slugging it out through there for five to ten miles. I would have much more firepower with a Thompson than an M1.3
The Holland jump was on a Sunday afternoon, about 3:00 on September 17. Unlike Normandy, we could see what we were doing. In Holland anyone could have assembled a stick of men in under a minute and a half. They could have assembled a company in probably ten minutes. So we were fighting in groups, which was pretty comforting when one is in behind the lines like that. Plauda, however, had trouble with his chute and did not jump in with us. He rode the plane back to England and I never saw him again during the war.4
The 101st landed at Son, Holland, which is about eight or ten miles north of Eindhoven. We landed in a square-mile area and man, there were tanks thirty yards in any direction we looked. In fact they were so stinking thick in there that they really could not maneuver. They were fully armed and went to work on us. We immediately went to work on them. It took us probably two hours to clean out that whole area. It was pretty rough. We lost a lot of people to those tanks but we got organized after we knocked all of them out. That is where Lefty McGee5 was shot in the head. The 101st was really very, very lucky to come out of that fight.
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