In France, there’s always a bottle of wine on the table. I asked the man if I could pour him a glass. He said sure, and we kept talking. “You never knew how Doc Roe got there,” he said, “but as soon as a guy was hit, Doc Roe was immediately where you needed him to be.”
About three or four bottles into it, we were done with lunch, and it was time to get on the bus to Versailles. Neither one of us had eaten anything; we had talked and drank the whole time. Of course I passed out on the bus. I was twenty-seven years old at the time. He matched drinks with me and was just fine.
My generation really is still learning what these men went through. I know I am. Here’s the perspective I’ve learned over time. The fact that I can do what I do every day is because these guys busted their asses for me. The freedom I live with and enjoy was established in their blood. They didn’t even know me, but they were paying a debt for generations to come. That’s inspirational. That helps me remember it’s not all about me. It makes me want to be a better man.
That’s how I’d want people to remember my grandfather.
16
FLOYD “TAB” TALBERT
Interview with Robert Talbert, brother
First Sergeant Floyd “Tab” Talbert was born August 26, 1923, in Green-town, Indiana, a small community outside of Kokomo, where he grew up. He was the eldest of the seven of us children (five boys and two girls) born to Russell and Nellie Talbert. We had excellent parents. The bartering system became popular during the Depression, and our father often worked in return for goods such as coal. He was an electrician and did wiring jobs sometimes for a ton of coal. He planted large gardens (called “truck-patches”), and our mother canned, cold-packed, and dried food to set aside for the winter months. One task as a youngster was to assist our father in the gardens. We never went hungry and we never heard our parents complain.
Most children born in this era knew what it was to be taught to work hard at an early age. As the Talbert children grew, we all followed this tradition and were sought out by various area residents because of our reputation for being hard and conscientious workers. Tab did the usual lawn mowing and trimming that many young people did, bearing in mind that in those days the mowing equipment was not as sophisticated as today. You pushed the lawn mower with people-power and did the trimming with a pair of scissors. As Tab grew older he worked for various farmers during summers. This meant he had to rise early and either walk or ride a bike to the job site. Later, among other summer jobs, he was employed by a building contractor and did carpentry work and roofing. This was the era before child labor laws, and youths were often willing to work cheaply. It was not uncommon for young people to get involved in doing “man’s work” on a regular basis. Tab worked hard and became a very muscular young man.
Tab was an excellent athlete. He played on the baseball team and became an outstanding basketball player. He played four years of varsity ball and was noted for his long set shots.
By Common Sense
After high school graduation, Tab worked for a short time at the Haynes Stellite Division of Union Carbide, located in Kokomo, Indiana. In August of 1942, he joined the Army and volunteered for the paratroopers. He went to Camp Toccoa, Georgia, and followed the rigorous training and then marched to Fort Benning, Georgia, for further parachute training.
Three of Tab’s brothers also served in the military. Max was attached to the 17th Airborne Division, I (Bob) served with the 11th Airborne Division, and Kenneth served in the “Big Red One,” named for the insignia of the First Infantry Division.
Many things have been written about Tab’s experiences during the war. In the morning hours, right after the Normandy jump, he met up with four men from Easy Company, and they joined up with a larger group from the 502nd and battled the Germans near Ravenoville. Shortly after the battle of Carentan, Tab was bayoneted in the chest by Private George Smith after Tab woke him for sentry duty. It was a cold night, Tab had thrown on a German poncho to keep warm, and Smith mistook him for the enemy. Smokey Gordon and Paul Rogers immortalized the incident in a now-lost poem entitled “The Night of the Bayonet.” Tab returned to Easy Company in England, just before Operation Market-Garden, and fought until the end of the war with his unit. Near the end, he was promoted to company first sergeant. Ambrose describes him this way: “A genial man, Talbert was appreciated by the enlisted men because he ignored red tape and did things by common sense rather than the book.”22
I attended one of the Easy reunions and talked with Amos “Buck” Taylor. He told me a story about Tab and Smokey Gordon. The guys were always playing pranks on each other. Buck and Smokey were standing in a line waiting for something, and Smokey had a machete in his hand. Tab sneaked up behind him and goosed him. Smokey reacted by jumping and swinging the knife and slicing Buck’s leg between his thigh and his knee. When Buck related this to me, he was wearing shorts and he pulled up the leg of the shorts and showed me a scar he still carries.
Once while fighting in the bush, Tab spotted a German behind one of the trees in the forest. He said the German had his back to the tree, and Tab could see the shoulder of his uniform protruding from behind the trunk. Tab shot him with his M1, and the German spun around from behind the tree and attempted to retrieve his weapon. Tab shot him a second time and he died. When the area cleared somewhat, Tab rolled the German over and discovered he was very young, maybe fourteen or fifteen years old. He said it affected him deeply, but the battle picked up again and he needed to keep going.
We discussed situations like this, and Tab said that when they were in heated combat, the thing on the minds of most men was helping to protect their buddies and how to survive themselves. He often quoted General Patton by saying, “The object of war is not to die for your country, but to make the other bastard die for his.”
One of the Best
After Tab was discharged from service in 1945, he attended Indiana University. He accepted a different position with Union Carbide (Stellite Division) in Kokomo, Indiana, and became a purchasing agent. He bought a small farm outside Kokomo and lived there while working at Stellite. He met and married Arlene Hunt and they had one daughter, Linda, who now resides in Indianapolis. Tab became a member of Huck Finn’s Rhythmaires, a small dance band, and he played guitar with them after hours and on weekends. Tab had started playing the guitar while quite young and would spend hours plucking and picking at home. Sometimes his fingers would actually bleed from playing the guitar so much.
Tab loved to be outdoors. He loved to go hunting, fishing, or play golf. I used to fish with Tab often and we hunted and played golf together. We often went to his home, where I always asked him to get out his box of army pictures and data. We spent many hours looking at pictures. He talked about the men he fought with: Shifty Powers, Smokey Gordon, Carwood Lipton . . . and many more. He thought highly of all the men he served with and spoke with respect when talking about them. He worshipped Dick Winters and considered him not only his commanding officer but a friend. Winters also thought highly of Tab. He once said, “If I had to pick one man to go with me on a mission, it would be Talbert.” In his book, Winters stated that he considered Tab to be the best soldier in the unit.23 Our family is proud of that!
Tab left Union Carbide and acquired a farm near Alexandra, Indiana. After living there for some time, he moved to Marion, Indiana, where he became plant manager of the General Tire & Rubber Company. Later, he became involved in the automobile industry and became a salesman.
He moved to California and he and Arlene were divorced. He later met another woman and married her. They returned to Indiana where he was in car sales again. After some time there, his wife wished to return to California and they moved to Redding, California, near Lake Shasta. He loved that area because of the exposure to nature and the opportunities for his hobbies.
In 1969, Tab had a heart operation. They inserted a valve and he was advised to return and have it checked at intervals. He never went back. He continued to work and indulge in
his hobbies. In addition to car sales, he was involved in many other activities. He did carpenter and electrical work on ships in the harbors and went overseas to do such work at one time.
One of the war stories Tab never got tired of telling was how Ed Tipper basically came back from the dead, at least for his friend Tab. Easy Company member Ed Tipper had been seriously wounded at the battle of Carentan, and Tab was sure he did not survive. But Tipper was recuperating back in the States, and while doing so he visited our family several times. He normally stayed over a weekend. We were able to watch his recuperation process as he visited. He was always welcome, and my parents thought very much of him. I think he enjoyed my mother’s cooking. My mother tried to tell Tab in her letters that Tipper was visiting the family. Tab swore that he saw Tipper’s plight in Carentan and insisted that it could not be Tipper.
Later, when Tab and Tipper did get together, it was a great reunion. They went out on the town one night, met a couple of ladies, talked to them for a while in a lounge. Unfortunately, the ladies happened to be married. The husband of the lady Tab was with walked into the lounge and confronted them. Of course they ended up outside, and a fistfight ensued. Tipper wanted to get involved, but he simply could not afford to risk work they had performed during his rehab. Tipper told me that he was not needed anyway, that Tab readily took care of the man, and the fight was quickly over. There appeared to be a lot of fights during that time. Obviously there were a lot of vets around, and it seemed that they had to rid themselves of memories in that fashion.
The Record, Set Straight
Ambrose wrote in his book that at the end Tab became a drifter and a drinker, and even described him as a “mountain man.”24 Tab drank after his service years as many vets did, but he was never a drifter. I confronted Ambrose about this, and my brother, Max, also discussed it with him. He told us both that he was going on assumptions and perceptions from some of the other men in Easy Company and said he would change that language in his next printing. He died and it was never changed.
Tab’s daughter was deeply hurt when she read the book. We told her that we had talked to Ambrose and that he had acknowledged that he was merely going on the assumptions made by people he interviewed and was planning to change it. That seemed to satisfy her at the time.
Most of Tab’s moves were due to changed employment. He settled in Redding, California, and lived there for approximately ten years prior to his death in 1982. In 1981 he was contacted and attended the Easy Company reunion that year. Because he showed up in his somewhat used hunting suit (knowing Tab, it could have been a joke), someone tagged him with the mountain man title. If he was in dire straits and needed help or clothing, my brother Max or I would have been happy to accommodate him (which we both did from time to time). He was never a drifter or a mountain man, but by his own admission, he drank. Looking back . . . whenever he and I fished, hunted or played golf, we often enjoyed some liquid refreshment afterward. If people thought he drank too much, then so did I, for I drank along with him, and I never considered myself a heavy drinker.
Tab told me often that he was living life his way and was enjoying it. He was capable and had the ability to do almost anything. After his heart surgery, he lived one day at a time. The day he died, he and his wife went fishing in his camper. At one point, he told his wife he was returning to the camper. She said she wanted to fish awhile longer. When she returned to the camper, she found Tab lying on the floor where he had passed away. He died while doing what he loved to do. Linda, his daughter, told me that he “had his house in order” when he died.
17
JOE TOYE
Interview with Steve Toye, son
My dad, Joe Toye, was one tough customer. At the Band of Brothers premiere in France, I talked to Donnie Wahlberg (who played Carwood Lipton in the series) and Frank John Hughes (who played Bill Guarnere). They had talked to a number of the vets while filming to learn their characters. They said the veterans had all described my dad as “the toughest of the tough,” which is really something, considering that group of men. Babe Heffron summed it up in his interview with HBO: “As tough as a cob.” I think those were his exact words. I saw Frank Perconte at a viewing of the body of Hack Hanson’s son after he died. Just like my father, they’re all a little hard of hearing at this age from having all those 88s and 105s blow up so close to their ears. I sat down next to Frank and introduced myself; we had met before. At the exact moment as he spoke to me, the room quieted down, so everyone heard Frank say, very loudly: “Your father was a tough sonuvabitch, but he never had to go around trying to prove it.”
Growing up with my dad, he could make me or my brother or sister melt in a corner just by looking at us. A classic Joe Toye story is that back in the 1960s he was in a local fire hall and had a misunderstanding with his brother Fran. I guess all the men in the town used to hang out after work at the fire hall and drink. So Dad took off his leg and started swinging it around, bouncing on his good leg, using his artificial leg as a weapon. I don’t know if he actually hit anyone with it, but that’s the way Dad was—you had to quit fighting him or kill him, because he wouldn’t back down.
Intense and Tough
Dad grew up rough. He was brought up in the coal regions during the Depression, the youngest of nine kids, a big Catholic family. His father died when Dad was thirteen. He had to drop out of seventh grade to work. So that upbringing stuck with him a long time.
I think Kirk Acevedo, who played my father in the miniseries, did a good job of portraying my father’s intensity and toughness, but the initial casting bothered my family a bit. Kirk played our dad more like an Italian mafia guy from the Bronx instead of a hard-nosed Irishman from the Pennsylvania coal region. Dad was never portrayed in the series as a leader either, which was too bad because he was a squad sergeant and took leadership roles in many combat situations. To be clear, there are no sour grapes with HBO or Kirk Acevedo. My goodness, there were Easy Company men who fought from beginning to end and were never mentioned in the series. We’re not complaining.
Dad enlisted like everybody wanted to do back after Pearl Harbor. He was originally in the medic corps, which reminds me of a hilarious story—he always thought of himself as a bit of a doctor and did some things to us kids over the years that really made us wince. Once I got a little infection in my eye. Dad did a job on it, squeezed it, whatever. The next day I looked like a cyclops. “Ah shit,” he said, “I don’t know what happened.” He was a medic for the first bit of time in the service. He was stationed in Maryland then and looked on the bulletin board one day. It said: “Paratroopers wanted. Extra pay.” So that was enough for him. He joined, and they sent him off to Toccoa.
We’ve got a newspaper clipping that talks about the 120-mile march the men took from Toccoa to Atlanta. Apparently the day before the march, Dad and a buddy were involved in some sort of indiscretion and ordered to clean the company’s stoves as punishment. They worked all night. Then, during the three-day march, they were ordered to stay awake all night to keep the fires going. So for four days straight, Dad didn’t get a wink of sleep. But he endured.
Don Malarkey told me about when another soldier in Easy Company had thrown back a few too many and was in the barracks sitting on the side of his bed crying. He had just received a Dear John letter. Malarkey asked the guy what the problem was and he freaked out, pulled out his jump knife, and stuck it an inch from Malarkey’s gut. Two strapping arms came out of nowhere and lifted the guy from behind, spun him around, pinned him to the wall, and then grabbed him by the throat. My father glared at the guy and said, “Damn it! You ever threaten Malarkey again and I’ll kill you!” Malarkey told me later, “It scared the living hell out of the guy. And, for a moment, me!”
Dad was one of Major Winters’s favorites. Winters described him as “an American hero of the first order,”25 and the second best soldier in the company after Floyd Talbert .26 That’s pretty lofty company. He must have been damn good.
Da
d was with Winters’s group when they took the guns at Brécourt Manor. A grenade sailed in and everybody took cover. The grenade rolled right between my dad’s legs. Winters yelled, “Look out, Toye!” My dad rolled over, the grenade went off, and my dad “bounced up and down from the concussion.”27 Only the stock of his rifle was destroyed. Years later, Dad joked if it wasn’t for Major Winters yelling, he’d be singing soprano.
If Winters needed a volunteer, my father was often first on his list. Volunteering for these missions was often close to suicidal, but when called, there was no discussion or hesitation on my father’s behalf. Once, Easy was pinned down in ditches outside of Neunan, Holland. Their British tank support was being annihilated. Winters needed to find out what he was up against. He looked around and spotted my father and said, “Joe, I need a live prisoner.” My dad wordlessly left his squad, crept into no-man’s land, then came back with a German from the 107th Panzer Brigade.28 That was something my father talked about once or twice. When we asked him about it, he sort of scowled and said, “I don’t even know what they did with him.”
Babe Heffron tells about how in one incident in Holland, my father went out behind enemy lines on reconnaissance with Corporal James Campbell, and the next thing you know here comes my father running through this mushroom cloud with his body riddled with shrapnel and his uniform smoking. Babe ran up and said, “Where’s Campbell?” My father said, “He’s gone.” Babe said, “What do you mean, he’s gone—let’s go get him.” My father said, “No, you don’t understand. He’s gone.” Campbell had taken a direct hit from an 88.
A Company of Heroes Page 20