Filthy Thirteen

by Richard Killblane

  One day Troy wanted to get a great big fish. He believed there had to be some big ones down in that deep water. We had always fished in the shallow water. So I rigged a ten-pound charge with a thirty-second fuse. I thought that might give it enough time to reach the bottom. It would have been better if I had used a forty- or fifty-second fuse. When it blew, it raised a bubble as big as one’s living room and just as high. Those boards on that boat started flapping. Mopey was standing right there on the front of that boat as usual and it scared him.

  Right after that ten-pound charge went off, we did not see any fish float to the top. Then we saw something white under the boat. I reached down with an oar and pulled it up. It was a four-foot-long grass pike. It was four inches wide from the head back to the tail. We cut the tail off and kept it for ourselves, then traded the rest.

  From that day forth when I dropped in a charge, Mopey would run and hide under the cowling. The minute he heard the explosion then he came out and stood on that gunwale. We did not fish that way too much longer for we found a trap up there and started getting our fish out that way.

  We discovered the Austrians had cheese houses back up in those mountains. They had cakes of cheese probably two feet in diameter and six to eight inches thick, just like a disc. The oldest cheese was the best. It had a crust of black mold an inch thick. Of course, we had plenty of it so we did not care how much we ate or wasted. We just trimmed all that black off of it and it was the best cheese that I ever ate. We also had opportunities to butcher all the meat we wanted. Once again we ate well.

  REROUTE RIVER

  They had a heck of a rain up there one day. The river that ran around the town had flooded and the water ran right down through the middle of the town. The burgermeister called regimental head-quarters to ask if there was anything the military could do. Willy asked me what we could do about it.

  I said, “We have some Composition C-2 and some TNT. Let’s go down and see what the situation is.”

  We saw that the river had steep embankments and had flooded into a gully at a fork. It formed into two rivers, one that went into town and another that went around it. If we could collapse enough of one embankment then we could redirect the river around the town. This was up in the mountains and the embankment was all rock.

  Willy asked, “How much explosive do you think we should use?”

  I said, “Let’s use all we’ve got, except some of the TNT in case we need to blow the other embankment.”

  We dug into the embankment about two or three feet, set our charges and blew that thing. It closed that gully off and the river shot around that town like a bullet. I saw that if I collapsed the other embankment it would seal it off real tight. Well about that time the mayor of the town came running up there and asked what we were going to do. I told him we were going to blow the other embankment with the rest of the TNT.

  He said, “Nein, nein! You’ve broken every window in the village. We will be better off with the flood.”

  ACTING FIRST SERGEANT

  They started shipping guys home on the point system. A man received so many points for a medal and so many for a period of time overseas and so many for being wounded. They figured it out that when the war ended, they would go through all the records and pick out the guys who were going to come home early.

  Top Kick Miller was the only first sergeant I ever had. I served with him for three and a half years. Top Kick had enough points from medals and wounds so he got an early release to go home right after VE Day. He shipped out and went back to the States in June. I had more points than he did, but the army was showing preference to the regular army people. When they shipped him out, Captain Brown called me in and made me the acting first sergeant of Regimental Headquarters Company. He gave no explanation why. Browny and I always got along well together. It was funny that he would not promote me to PFC but he made me the acting first sergeant.8

  FOURTH OF JULY9

  As the first sergeant, I just kept records and handled company food and quarters. I later received a message to secure rations and quarters for 125 athletes. The division was going to hold a big Fourth of July celebration at Zell-am-See. We had a baseball game with about four or five teams. They also had a track and field competition. I had requisitioned hotels and resorts for quarters.

  I was going to participate in a water jump demonstration. About ten of us went down to Salzburg, Germany, to get a C-47 to fly across the Alps where we planned to bail out into that lake. Zell-am-See was fed by mountain streams. Of course we were drunk and so was the pilot. He liked to never have found the lake. He finally located it and we jumped.

  By the end of the war the army had come out with a new quickrelease parachute harness. When we got within ten or fifteen feet of the water each of us turned our little ole buckles, slipped out of the harnesses and plunged into the icy water. There were supposed to be other paratroopers in boats waiting to pick us up. Well, these guys in the boats were all drunk and not paying any attention. We nearly froze, but after a while they finally found us.

  Goering was a collector of fine horse flesh and we had borrowed his horses so our guys could have a rodeo and horse races. Most of them were city boys from New York, Chicago, and Philadelphia. They did not know anything about horses. They ran those horses until they got to lathering, then they ran them out into that ice-cold water to cool them off. The horses just dropped dead as soon as they hit the water. I will bet those guys killed about ten million dollars worth of racehorses that day.

  HOTEL FIRE

  I was going with a pretty little ole Austrian girl named Media Feistower. Her father had been the commander of the Hitler Youth movement and she had been in the Hitler Youth all along. He owned a big four-storied hotel. They had turned it into a hospital for the German soldiers wounded in Italy and Germany.

  One day Media asked me for some kerosene. I thought she wanted gasoline, so I filled up a glass gallon jug full of gasoline. I had been drinking when I carried it in. I went through and bumped the door with that glass jug and it spilled all over the place. Well, Media’s apartment was on the second floor. There was a stairwell that went right up to it. I told the little ole slave laborer, “Clean that up.”

  I went up and walked into Media’s apartment and told her, “Media, I spilled that gasoline and I’m going to go help that girl clean that mess up.”

  When I opened the door, here came a wall of flames. It sounded like a tornado going up that stairwell. So I ran over to jump out of that second story window. This was directly across the street from our mess hall where the guys were eating. The officers came pouring out of the mess hall. The army was pretty tough on fraternization with civilians. When I looked out there and saw those idiots, the patients were jumping out of those second, third, and fourth story windows. I stuck my head out and yelled, “Come on in here you cowardly SOBs and help me save these poor people.” Then I began to find ways that I could get out of that building.

  Media’s older sister tried every way in the world to stick me with a war crimes atrocity so our government would pay for the building. She claimed that I had done this on purpose. The army had moved in the Allied Military Government (AMG) to occupy countries and protect the civilians. It was made up of civilians and some army people. We had one right there in Zell-am-See. They generally accepted an officer’s recommendation. The officers were real good about protecting a soldier who they thought was halfway honest. So they hushed it right up. They never did prefer charges.

  JOE OLESKIEWICZ

  Sergeant Johnson and I were sitting there drinking one day. We were getting drunk and he said, “Jake, I’m going to tell you something you’ve wanted to know for a long time.”

  I said, “What is that, Johnnie?”

  He said, “Naw, I’m not going to tell you. You’ll be mad.”

  I said, “No, I won’t be mad.” I thought it was something he had reported or ratted on and got me into trouble. Back when I blew up the barracks, he was the guy who sugge
sted they include “acting NCOs.”

  We were sitting there getting drunker and he would get a little looser and say, “I’m going to tell you something you’ve been want ing to know a long time.” His tongue was as thick as the sole of a shoe and about as flexible.

  I said, “Johnnie come on. What are you talking about?”

  He said, “No, you’ll get mad.”

  I said, “Johnnie, I don’t care what happened. Just let it alone.”

  “So, Jake,” he said, “I’m going to tell you now. You know how you had hunted and hunted and sought to find information about Joe Oleskiewicz.

  I said, “Yeah. Have you all heard anything?”

  He said, “Well, I’m going to tell you what happened to Joe.”

  I said, “Okay, tell me.”

  He said, “When we got into Veghel, you know, we did not know what the situation was. So we got through the town in pretty good shape and then we ran into those tanks and their supporting infantry. Me, Oleskiewicz, and Speedwack [Stanley Spiewack] were fighting that tank there and he was firing directly at us with the eighty-eight. It got pretty rough on us. We made a run to get down inside one of those foxholes. That foxhole had been run over two or three times by the tracks of those tanks. It had caved in filling up a lot of it. There was only room for two of us to get in and three of us were running shoulder to shoulder for it. Me and Speedwack got down in it but Joe did not make it. So he stood up to run for the ditch. Them tanks were ten or twelve yards from him. One lowered that barrel down and hit him with an eighty-eight right in the guts.”

  I said, “Well, I ran right past the same spot and I saw the trunk and legs laying there but I did not have any idea which one of the boys it was.”

  He said, “I never have told anyone because at D-Day I had a little difficulty and got mixed up in things. I’ve always felt badly about it. I’ve always had a complex and I did not have guts enough to tell you what happened to Joe, afraid you’d figure I had ushered him out of the way and beat him to the foxhole.”

  I said, “No way. I just appreciate knowing what happened to the kid.”

  I still have a lot of nightmares about seeing his body there.

  When we had jumped into Normandy we had a company commander named Captain Edward Peters. He and a stick of demolition men had got into some heavy machine-gun fire. So Captain Peters took these paratroopers and attacked those machine-gun nests. Tom Young, Sergeant Bill Myers, and a couple of other guys with Captain Peters charged in on one machine-gun nest. They threw a grenade in and put it out of commission. Peters turned around and held up three fingers to show he had killed three of them and knocked the gun out. He no more than got them up than a Kraut shot him right in the temple and just near tore his head off.

  When they had charged in, Truck Horse Johnson kind of slowed down. He really did not charge in like he should have. For a moment or two he lost his composure. Had he not, he might have saved the captain’s life. No one can ever tell. At least he would have done something. All the guys who went in on the charge had witnessed that Truck Horse kind of chickened out. When a guy exhibits that characteristic, people never feel real confident with him. Everybody else learned about it and it gave him a complex. Nonetheless, he turned out to be a good soldier. I never did see him waver after that. But he always had a little bit of a complex about it through the rest of the war.

  WRITING THE FAMILIES

  At the end of the war, Captain Browny said, “Jake, I have been getting letter after letter from the families of all those boys killed in the Filthy 13. I really don’t know what to tell them.”

  I said, “You know about as much about it as I do. You were as close to them as anybody.”

  He said, “If you would write each one of the families a letter I will censor and mail them. When you get them written just bring them down and you and I will review them.”

  He knew that I was kind of the platoon lawyer. I represented the men and helped them through their problems. I had written letters for this guy and that guy over problems they had back home. So I wrote each one of the families. Anyway, a peculiar thing happened.

  Just before we went overseas, Loulip had come up and said, “Jake, we’re going to ship out pretty quick and I have a fiancé at home that I would kind of like to bust it up with. I would like to send her a ‘Dear John’ letter. Could you compose me a letter to this young lady and make her feel real good?”

  I said, “Sure I can.”

  So I composed a nice letter to this young lady telling her that he loved her so much, that it would be absolutely unfair for him to keep her on a string for six months or two years when there was only one chance in a million of him even returning. He could not bear to think that she was going to wait there and be faithful to him for that long. As much as he loved her he could not do it. So she should not let any opportunities go by. He considered the relationship as over. So Loulip copied this letter and sent it to her. She accepted it very graciously. She even wrote him back saying she still loved him very much but she would defer to his decision.

  Lou later asked me, “Jake, do you care if I keep this copy? I might want to do this two or three more times.”

  I said, “No, go ahead and keep it. If the situation changes, I’ll come over and borrow it from you.”

  After I wrote a letter to his folks, I immediately got a letter back from his sister. She said, “Jake, we got Lou’s personal effects box after Normandy.” Before paratroopers jump into combat, they leave a personal effects box with stuff going to whomever they so desire. It had Lou’s knife, wings, and other things.

  She said, “In it was a letter that had been composed by you. It was identical to the letter Lou had sent to his young lady. We had no idea before who had composed the letter. After we got your letter, I recognized the handwriting the minute I saw it.”

  Well, I have a kind of a peculiar handwriting. It is not necessarily pretty but it is real different. I kind of write backhanded and print letters instead of writing them. When it comes to dotting something I just make a circle.

  Well, she said, “So you are the one who wrote the letter for Lou. Now I would like to ask you to do me one more favor. Would you mind writing that young lady a letter and give her the details of Lou’s death? She is still as bereaved as she was the day it happened.”

  I dropped his sister a line and told her I’d be happy to. So I wrote the letter. It was a crazy war.

  SCHROEDER

  Around August, Browny shipped back to the States and Bruno Schroeder was made a captain and acting company commander of Regimental Headquarters Company. We served together from that day on and he hated me. He was a rat, a total rat.

  Little Shorty Mihlan asked him one time, “Schroeder, would you recommend me for a Good Conduct Medal?”

  Well of course, Shorty had been busted. He was an alcoholic but had soldiered all the way from Normandy clear through that war. So it was not going to break the government to give him a Good Conduct Medal.10

  Schroeder said, “I would not recommend you for getting it. You’re a scum bum.”

  Little ole Shorty looked up at him and said, “I’ll tell you one thing you son-of-a-bitch, I would hate to be one of your kids.”

  That was the end of the conversation. Schroeder went back home to Austin, Texas, after the war where he refereed the Texas-OU foot-ball games and the Cotton Bowl games. He had three children, two boys and a girl. His fifteen-year-old boy committed suicide. About a year and a half later the other boy committed suicide. About four or five years later, Schroeder also committed suicide. I will bet that when the boys started committing suicide, Schroeder remembered many times what that little ole drunken bum had told him.

  Schroeder’s wife was one of the sweetest ladies you would ever meet so we invited them to our get togethers after the war. He had always attended but no one really made friends with him. One day he was drinking and said, “Say, McNiece, let me ask you a question.”

  I said, “Go ahead.” />
  He asked, “Why did you represent the enlisted men? How did you know what the men had in their minds?”

  As the platoon lawyer I always spoke up for the men. If a man had a problem he usually came to me. Browny answered for me, “That’s easy. Whatever they had in their minds, McNiece probably put it there.”

  BLACK MARKET

  I had promised my mother and dad that I would take them on a tour of the United States when I returned. I would need a lot of money to do that. A person could sell a carton of cigarettes for two hundred dollars. One could sell an overcoat for two or three hundred. Those Austrian people had money but they did not have any produce to buy except from the American GI. I made enough money to last me about a year after I got out.

  Nearly every place I went I had boots on. I always kept that money in my boots but did not flash it around. Paratroopers did not steal valuables from other paratroopers. I could leave a roll of hundred dollar bills on my bunk for a week and it would still be there when I came back. Now if it was something useful for combat it disappeared the minute I turned my back. I had no trouble getting that money back home.

  FINAL DAYS IN SERVICE

  PARIS ONE MORE TIME

  It must have been August when we moved from Zell-am-See, Austria over to Auxerre, France. I did not know it at first but they were getting ready to disband our division. Well, I probably had more points than anyone in the company but I could not leave early. As the acting first sergeant I had to clean up the records and get the company organized so they could ship out. We were the next bunch to go. We were going to leave on September 12 and go down to either Chesterfield, Camel, or one of those other cigarette camps.

  So I gave all of the guys who were going to be shipping out the next day a midnight pass to Paris to let them do the town one more time. I furnished them a truck and driver and they took off. I had just a little bit of book work left to do. I was finishing that stinking paperwork because the next morning we were going to the disembarkation area. I finished my work up to snuff or as good as it could be arranged by about 3:00. So I got out and hitchhiked into Paris. I knew everyone of those guys would go right straight to Pig Alley.11 I just figured I would run into one or two of them there and have me a ball one more time before I came home. I got in there and started drinking and carousing around.