That statement from the Times summed up well my father’s life. He was a good leader, consistently dependable, and later became one of the more recognizable members of the group.
Flamethrowers and Rabbit Hunting
C. Carwood Lipton was born Jan. 30, 1920, in Huntington, West Virginia. There were actually three Clifford Carwood Liptons: my grandfather, my father, and my brother. My grandfather was known as Cliff, and my brother was always known as Cliff, so to distinguish himself, Dad went as Carwood.
My grandfather’s name was actually Clifton Carlwood Lupton, but he changed it. Dad said it was because people called him “Mr. Lipton” whenever they saw his signature, which doesn’t explain why he changed his first and middle name, too, but I’m not aware that he changed his name to disguise ethnicity or anything like that. They were Scottish, originally landed in North Carolina, and proud of their heritage.
Dad was a bit of a hell-raiser as a young boy, inquisitive and resourceful. He told us stories about the crazy stuff he and his brother did.
Once they went rabbit hunting. Dad didn’t have a shotgun, but he found a piece of pipe that was just big enough to drop a shotgun shell into. The lip of the shell held it at the pipe’s end. They went out hunting, and Dad hiked around with this piece of pipe on his shoulder with his brother behind him. A shell was loaded in the pipe. His brother carried a block of wood with a nail driven through it. The plan was that whenever they saw a rabbit, the brother would bang the block of wood against the shell, fire it, and shoot the rabbit. Fortunately, rabbits were scarce that day, and they never got a chance to actually fire it—probably would have killed them both.
The heat in their house came from open flames in those old ceramic grates. One winter day, his mother had company over, and the kids were told to make scarce. Dad and his brother went out onto the porch and looked for something to do. They found a piece of metal and pounded the end into a flange. Disconnecting the heating grate outside on the front porch, they hooked up the gas line into their device. Basically, they built themselves a flame thrower. Dad held it, and his brother lit the end. Flames shot all the way across the porch.
Years later, Dad described the experience: “We weren’t sure how to shut it off, so I kept moving this thing around so the house wouldn’t catch fire. I couldn’t let it stay in one place for very long. My brother ran downstairs and turned off the gas main, because that was the only way we knew to stop the gas. Then my brother and I had to sneak around the house and relight all the pilot lights on the heaters. The company was still visiting with my mother, and it was winter. So once the heaters went out, you needed to get them lit again quickly.”
Growing up wasn’t all fun. My grandfather was killed in a car wreck when my dad was ten. Dad was the older brother and wound up as the man of the house. His mother worked. His parents had been interior decorators and had run their own decorating shop in Charleston, or perhaps it was in Huntington. Back in the 1920s they decorated the governor’s mansion in Charleston. So my grandmother continued the decorating business and always kept boarders with rooms she rented out.
Dad continued on with his adventuresome ways. When the war hit, he wanted to join the Army Air Corp to be a fighter pilot—that was his first choice. But right out of high school he had worked at a nickel plant in Huntington and had gotten a chip in [one] eye from a metal lathe, so his eyesight wasn’t good enough to be a pilot. The second most dangerous thing he could think of was being a paratrooper.
Dedicated Soldier
Dad was one of the few married paratroopers. He met my mother, Joanne Eckly, on a double date just before the war. They weren’t with each other on the date, mind you, they were each with the other person. But they liked each other, and began dating after that. They were married in 1943.
Dad had joined the Army in 1942 as a private. He was one of the original Toccoa men, was promoted to company first sergeant within a year, and was one of the noncoms who participated in the mutiny against Captain Sobel in Aldbourne.31 Dad never talked about the incident with Sobel. He mentioned that Sobel had gotten them lost on maneuvers, and that he was concerned about Sobel leading them into battle. That was about it.
He was known as a dedicated leader and jumped into Normandy with his men on D-day. He landed in a walled-in area in the city of Ste. Mère-Église, joined up with some members of the 82nd, and then with Guarnere, Malarkey, Toye, and Wynn, then shortly thereafter with Winters. He fought with the men when they disabled the guns at Brécourt Manor.
Dad didn’t talk a lot about the war and the military when we were growing up. I think it was an experience he wanted to forget, but he wrote two pieces describing two battles he was in. The first, of Brécourt Manor. The second, of Carentan, where he was wounded. Portions of his writings are as follows:
Brécourt Manor
We had two officers, Lt. Winters in command and Lt. Compton; two platoon sergeants, Guarnere and I; and nine men, and we had two machine guns, a 60mm mortar, and our individual weapons.
The entire group was stopped by the sound of German artillery firing from a wooded hedgerow area off to the right of the road that we were on. Lt. Winters was called to Battalion and was ordered to take and destroy those guns with his company. None of us had been in combat before that day.
Winters had no time for a reconnaissance, but from his initial observation he decided that there were several guns, manned and defended by probably at least 60 men, and that the guns were well dug in and camouflaged and that there was probably a network of trenches and foxholes around them. We learned later that he was right in all these estimates, and that the German forces included a number of paratroopers from the German 6th Parachute Regiment.
A frontal attack against those positions by 13 men could not succeed, but Winters confidently outlined to us his plan to deceive and defeat the German forces and to destroy the guns.
His plan was to concentrate a double envelopment attack on one gun, the one on the German left flank, and after capturing it to hit the other guns, one by one, on their open left flanks. He sent Compton and Guarnere around to our left to hit the Germans on the first gun from their right front. He sent Ranney and me around to our right to put fire into the German positions from their left flank. He set up the two machine guns in position to put heavy continuous fire into the German positions from their front. He then organized and led the rest of our men in a direct assault along the hedgerow right into the German positions.
With fire into their positions from both flanks, heavy machine gun fire into their front, and Winters leading an assault right into their defenses the Germans apparently felt that they were being hit by a large force. Those defending the first gun broke and withdrew in disorganization to a far tree line, and that gun was in our hands.
Our attack continued to each gun in turn from its exposed left flank. Winters blew out the breeches of each gun as soon as we had it with blocks of TNT. In all, the Germans lost 15 men, 12 [more] were captured, and many wounded. In E Company we had one man killed and one wounded.
Carentan
I don’t remember any officers in the 3rd platoon in Normandy. Lt. Schmitz did not make the jump, and Lt. Mathews was killed early in the fighting, so I had command of the platoon. I set up outpost positions in the fields toward Carentan and patrolled the area to our front, visiting the outposts with Talbert or Taylor each night we were there. There was no enemy activity against us, however, while we were there.
Our part in the attack began on June 11th, D plus 5, when we were ordered to move out with the rest of the Battalion to the highway and, attacking to the right of it, to outflank Carentan from the West and South. This attack would cut the two highways leading into Carentan from those directions and a railway.
We moved out to the highway after dark and began our approach march with other units of the Regiment leading. There had been major fighting over the route we were following. The area was strewn with bodies, American and German, weapons and equipment, difficult to see clearly in
the dark. We knew nothing about what to expect ahead of us, but we were not at that time receiving enemy fire.
We moved in column, well spread out, with connecting files maintaining contact between units. We reached the railroad and, as I remember, stopped there for a while, beginning to set up a defense, then moved out again to occupy the road leading into Carentan from the South. We reached it after daylight and were told that we were to prevent any German reinforcements from being brought into Carentan along it. I don’t know the disposition of the rest of the Company or the Battalion, but the 3rd platoon was astride a road, which could have been a smaller connecting road instead of the main highway.
I had one bazooka in the 3rd platoon and [Ed] Tipper was the bazooka-man. We were told to expect German armor, and the only place I could find to put Tipper and his bazooka was at the bend in the road down over a bank from where he would find it almost impossible to withdraw if we were overrun. As he and I looked at it I knew that he was seeing that it was a do-or-die situation, but that there was not another good position. I said, “Tipper, we’re depending on you. Don’t miss.” He said, “I won’t.”
After a short time, though, less than an hour as I remember, we were again ordered to move, this time to attack and clear Carentan.
As we reached the outskirts of Carentan we started getting German rifle and machine gun fire. The houses in this area were somewhat like row houses except that there were enclosed stairways leading up to the second floors from the outside. I thought that we were getting sniper fire from one of the upstairs windows. Buck Taylor and I were working as a team at this point, checking and clearing the buildings and area as we went, so I told him that I would go up the stairway to that room and that after he had given me enough time to get to the top he should throw a grenade through the upstairs window. I would then jump into the room and finish off whoever was there.
I ran up the steps and stopped outside the door. I heard the grenade thump into the room through the window and its explosion. I threw open the door and leaped into the room, my rifle thrust forward ready to fire. I couldn’t see a thing! The room was filled with dust and smoke from the explosion. If there had been a sniper there and he had been able to shield himself from the grenade he would have had me silhouetted in the door, but the room was empty.
We continued to check buildings and work our way toward the town center. The rifle and machine gun fire against us seemed to decrease somewhat as we moved farther in, but mortar and artillery fire increased. Men were getting hit.
Someone yelled that Tipper was hit across the street from me. I ran over. He was lying there conscious but hurt seriously. A medic was bandaging his face and his eye was obviously gone. He had major wounds in one arm and one leg. I told him he would be well taken care of and moved on.
I came to a major road intersection, nearer the town center. There was small arms and machine gun fire coming down the street from the right, across my front. Across on the other side of that street, on the continuation of the street I was standing on, were several E Company men. There were explosions up on the walls of the buildings on the left side of the street that they were on, and they looked to me like German 5cm mortar shells fired at a low trajectory so that they were coming in somewhat horizontally rather than dropping in vertically. I was on the right side of the street I was on, against a building on my right, and I did not think that the fire could get to me, but I started yelling to the men on the other side to move farther along. I thought that in the noise and confusion they might not realize that mortar fire was being directed at them.
In the middle of my yell a mortar shell dropping vertically, a 5cm I believe, landed about 8 feet in front of me, putting shell fragments in my left cheek, my right wrist, and my right leg at the crotch. I can still hear my rifle clattering to the street as it dropped out of my right hand when it was hit.
It didn’t knock me off my feet, but I dropped to the street to check how badly I was hit. I put my left hand up to my cheek and felt quite a hole. At first my big concern was my right hand as blood was pumping out in spurts. Talbert was the first one to me, and my first words were, “Put a tourniquet on that arm.” The tourniquet checked the bleeding.
I felt the pain in my crotch, and when I reached down my hand came away bloody. “Talbert, I may be hit bad,” I said. He slit my pants leg up with a knife, took a look, and said, “You’re okay.” What a relief that was. The two shell fragments there had gone into the top of my leg and had missed everything important.
Talbert threw me over his shoulder and carried me into the barn nearby that was being set up as an aid station. There I was bandaged up and given a shot of morphine, which knocked me out completely. When I woke up it was dark. They put me in an ambulance with another man whose shoulder was practically gone. He died on the way to Utah Beach, where I went into a tented field hospital for the rest of the night.
The next morning I was taken on an amphibious truck out to LST 512. Its ramp was down, and when the truck reached it, it drove right up the ramp into the LST, which took me to Southampton, England. From there I was taken to a US Army hospital in England for a six-week stay before rejoining E Company at Aldbourne.
Dad had healed up enough to jump with the company into Holland for Operation Market-Garden.
During the battle of Bastogne, Dad basically became the unofficial leader of Easy Company when it was under the command of first lieutenant Norman Dike, widely considered by the men to lack strong leadership qualities.
In Hagenau, Dad was wounded again, this time in his neck and cheek by a mortar shell. He went to the aid station, got patched up, and rejoined his unit the same day. A day after that, Winters awarded him a battlefield commission to second lieutenant. Dad talked to us about that. Of his whole life, I know that that was his proudest moment.
Dad continued on to the end of the war with Easy Company. In Berchtesgaden, Dad became acquainted with Ferdinand Porsche, the famed Austro-Hungarian automotive engineer who created the Volkswagen Beetle and many of the Porsche automobiles as well as having designed several of the German tanks. He was in a POW camp nearby. Porsche could speak English, and they sometimes ate meals together.
We met a bunch of the guys over the years, Winters, Guth, Walter Gordon, the machine gunner—he was my dad’s best friend.
A Lot of Drive
I think my father adjusted to life after the war okay. It didn’t seem to bother him much. He saw his life as being more than a paratrooper. He had a lot of drive.
Dad attended Huntington College in West Virginia on the GI Bill, majoring in physics and minoring in industrial engineering. He started college before the war, stopped, then finished afterward, stopping for a while for financial reasons when my brother Cliff was born. Three sons were eventually born: Cliff in ’46, Tom in ’48, and me, born in 1950. I think my oldest brother was born nine months to the day after my father returned from overseas. Dad was the first in his family to finish university. He remained a great believer in higher education, and instilled in my brothers and me the importance of a good education.
Dad’s first career job was as an industrial engineer with Owens Illinois, a Fortune 500 company that makes glass container products. He stayed there for thirty years, maybe thirty-five, and rose to the rank of vice president of the International division, back when a title like that actually meant something.
Even though he was really busy with his job, he took the time to be a family man. He was my baseball coach for a couple of years. We played golf together, Dad and I and my brother Tom. Dad went to work early in the morning, then came home from work; we ate dinner as a family, then he spread out his work on the table and worked well into the night, reading reports and doing homework for the company. This instilled a good work ethic into us as kids.
He had both a wood shop and a metal shop in his basement. His hobbies were myriad, but he loved to do metal finishing and woodworking. He made furniture and machine parts. He liked anything mechanical. When he w
as in his early eighties, he rebuilt a player piano just for fun. The dining room furniture that’s still in the family today was my great-grandparents’ furniture that my father refinished. It’s gorgeous stuff.
My father’s job took us a lot of places. The family moved to Spain in ’66. Cliff was already out of the house by then. Tom had just graduated from high school, so he spent just a summer there, then went back to the States to go to college. I had two years of high school to go. My parents spent seven years there, then moved to London for several years, then to South Africa for several months on loan to a company down there, then to Geneva, and spent the last twelve years of his career living there in Switzer-land. Essentially, his job was to sell American glass-container technical assistance to European companies. So he travelled all over Europe and North Africa visiting companies that Owens Illinois had contracts with.
My mother was a housewife, raised us boys, and volunteered with the Red Cross. Sadly, she died in 1975, very young, at age fifty, of a heart attack. My mom kept everyone together. My parents were living in Switzer-land when my mom died, and my brothers and I were living in various places in the States. Keeping everyone together after that was not my dad’s forte.
Dad remarried in 1976. His second wife’s name was Marie Hope Mahoney. When Dad retired in 1983, they settled in Toledo, Ohio, and later in Southern Pines, North Carolina.
The Elephant’s Typewriter
We knew Dad had a lung ailment and had studied up on it. I think, in his case, it came from the environment he worked in all those years. He had spent a lot of time around the glass bottle machines where there are particles of hot molten glass in the air. I think that damaged his lungs.
I had blown my ACL out from playing softball and had surgery to repair it. I was well on my way to recovery, but then I was carrying something downstairs to the basement, missed the bottom step, fell and broke my kneecap in half. That happened two weeks before Dad died of pulmonary fibrosis in 2001. I was laid out and unfortunately wasn’t able to attend his funeral. I really missed being able to do that, but it couldn’t be avoided.
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