BILL
It was a beautiful day when we jumped into Holland. Absolutely gorgeous. Nothing like Normandy. This jump was so beautiful you might have thought the war was over. The people from the town of Son saw us before we saw them. They waved orange flags from their windows and doors and came running out of their houses to greet us. They knew they were liberated; it was a celebration in the streets. They hugged us and kissed us, gave us food and drinks—beer, milk, apples, honey. They didn’t have much themselves, but they shared what they had. They were so grateful. Some of the men got caught up in the fun. Broads were grabbing them, kissing them, it was a den of iniquity! I was ready for the krauts to surprise us any minute. The drop was quiet, but you knew the krauts were around. The Dutch called them Boshe. Might have been code for “German.” As we advanced, they were trying to keep us informed. They kept hollering, “Boshe, Boshe!” Let me tell you about the Dutch: I thought they were the most beautiful people alive. They were so friendly. Couldn’t do enough for us. They spoke English. They were so appreciative that we’d come to help them. Not like the French. I didn’t see a Frenchman anywhere. Somebody told me before we jumped in Normandy, “Don’t turn your back on a Frenchman.” That was good advice. A lot of them liked the Germans a little too much.
As we went through the crowds, I piled a bunch of green apples in my pockets, and hoped I didn’t accidentally throw one at a kraut instead of a grenade. You’re not going to stop a Nazi with a piece of fruit.
Things were fairly quiet moving toward the bridge at Wilhelmina. Just as we were about a half mile in front of the bridge, the krauts woke up from their little nap. A machine gun and German 88 fired at us. One of the shells hit a big department store window, and the impact threw Babe across the street, knocked him out. He was shook the hell up, that’s all. Then just before we got to the bridge—bam!—it blew up right in our puss. Big chunks of debris flew everywhere. We hit the dirt and fired back at them. Nobody got badly hurt. Damn krauts were waiting for us. The problem was, the planes dropped us eight miles away. Too much time passed by the time we jumped, got together, got through the crowds, and got to the first bridge. If they dropped us right on it, we would have beat the Germans there. But that’s hindsight, kid.
Babe and the other machine gunners laid down cover fire and pushed back the Germans. Some of the men tried to get a makeshift bridge up so we could cross the canal. We got resourceful, tore down barn doors, whatever we could find heavy enough to get everyone across. Later, the engineers came, they built something stronger to get the tanks over.
BABE
We spent the night in Son, sleeping on the ground. You made a hole for yourself and stayed there. In the morning we had orders to move out and take Eindhoven. As we marched, everyone was spread out. You always spread out. If you bunched up, and an 88 came in, it would take everyone out at once. Lt. Bob Brewer walked ahead of us as lead scout, when suddenly sniper fire came from a church and hit him right in the throat. We had to keep advancing. Outside Eindhoven, we had to regroup, because we lost some men and we lost Brewer (he ended up surviving), a lieutenant. So we sat on the steps at St. Katrina’s Church for an hour before moving out again.
Before we jumped our orders upon landing were to find any thing with wheels to help carry our supplies. A Dutch woman gave me an old baby carriage. So there I am pushing a baby carriage with ammo, weapons, and supplies. As I’m pushing it through the streets, crowded with people partying and singing, my mind went to South Philly. Four blocks from where we lived was the Delaware River. Ships would bring coal and the coal would be transferred to trains that ran along Delaware Avenue. My family was poor, and my mother would send my three brothers and I down to Delaware Avenue with my sister’s baby carriage to pick up any stray pieces of coal we could find. It meant we’d have heat from the coal stove. We’d fill the carriage with the coal and push it home. If there was snow on the ground, we used a sled. This wasn’t easy. There was a mean railroad dick we called Duckfeet. Everyone in South Philly has a nickname and this man walked like a duck. He wouldn’t hesitate to shoot anyone he caught stealing coal. I don’t know if he’d have shot us four little kids, but we were scared of him. Pushing the stroller down the streets of Eindhoven, I wondered what mean old Duckfeet would have done to the krauts if he was so quick to shoot someone pocketing coal. Believe me, I would have given anything at that moment to be back in Philly with Duckfeet.
Popeye Wynn threw his weapons in my baby carriage. I said, “You do the pushing then.” I picked up my machine gun and hoisted it over my shoulder and gave him the carriage.
BILL
The next morning, we marched through pastures and fields into Eindhoven. Now we thought Son was a celebration, but Eindhoven was a sight to behold. The streets were so crowded we could barely push our way through. It was one giant party. Civilians grabbing and kissing us, giving us food and beer. One woman was shoving an autograph book in our faces, saying “Sign, sign!” We had a war to fight and she’s looking for autographs! We scribbled in her book “John Wayne,” “Cary Grant,” “Kilroy,” “The Andrews Sisters.” We just wanted to get the hell away from her.
You know why the Dutch were so aggressively friendly toward us? I mean aggressive. It’s because they never knew what it was to be occupied. They weren’t in World War I. They were a peaceful people, always neutral. After five years of oppression, we came and liberated them. They were so grateful. One Dutchman said to us, “Can you define freedom? You can’t,” he said. “Because you don’t know what freedom is until you lose it.” I’ll never forget that. Babe was there, too, when he said it.
There were women who collaborated with the Germans, they were kissing us, too. But the Dutch didn’t waste time taking care of the traitors. Right away, they rounded them up, grabbed the men right off the streets and killed them. The women got what was due them, too. The Dutch threw them into the middle of the street, ripped off their clothes, shaved their heads, beat them, publicly shamed them. They deserved it. What should you do, kiss them? They were sent off like homeless lepers. We saw them wandering in the countryside and we didn’t say a word to them. We knew what they were, what they done. Someone probably killed them eventually.
BABE
We were the first platoon in the city, and we secured the bridges over the Dommel River and set up outposts. I had orders from Bill to set up my machine gun by a footbridge going over a small canal next to a set of row homes. I’ll never forget that spot, and actually when I went back to the spot ten years later, and asked someone about the footbridge, the man said, “You have a good memory. The people have moved now, but yes, there was a footbridge there.”
We set the gun up and had it facing a secondary road on our right coming into the town. We had the larger roads coming out of the woods already secured. All our guys were in place and we were waiting for a counterattack, and one of the heads of the underground—they wore an orange band on their arms so we knew who they were—came over and said to Compton, Toye, and Bill, “We have a horse and wagon coming up the road with about eight German soldiers, and a large artillery piece on the back of the wagon. Would you give us the pleasure of taking them out, instead of you?” We looked at each other and Compton said, “If anyone deserves to take them out, it’s the Dutch.” They suffered through five, six years of occupation. So we said, “Go ahead.” They hid on the side of the road in a doorway, and when the horse and wagon made a move with the artillery piece, the Dutch opened up and killed all of them. All except one, a tall blond-haired, blue-eyed kid who was badly wounded in the left shoulder. He was holding his shoulder, moaning in pain, and they marched him over toward us so headquarters could get some information out of him. We were all hollering, “Suffer, you son of a bitch!” when an old Dutch woman in her eighties came out, and asked him in Dutch, “Where does it hurt?” It looked like she was going to help him. He pointed to his shoulder, and she started hitting him over and over with her pocketbook right on that shoulder, screaming somet
hing like “Moffe! Moffe! Moffe!” She’s screaming at him, and he’s screaming in pain. Turned out the woman had put a brick in her pocketbook. She made my day, she made everyone’s day. We asked around what the woman was yelling and found out there was no translation for it in English, but it was something like “evil.”
BILL
The Dutch underground found us right after we landed. Told us where the Germans were, what their plans were. They hated the Germans, wanted to get in on the killing, too. They gave us accurate info, became part of our combat team. One of them was John van Kooijk. A good Dutchman. A good source for us. He pointed out who the collaborators and the rat finks were. Told us everything. He stayed with us, and fought the entire war with 2nd Battalion. I think they put an Airborne uniform on him, too. The Dutch women sabotaged the German telephone lines and communications, we found out later.
The days after we secured the bridges, word came from the Dutch underground to get the hell out of town. The Germans were planning to bomb Eindhoven that night. We didn’t have the fire or air support to do anything about it. As we were marching out, we felt like hell. The people in Eindhoven must have felt like we abandoned them. But what could we do? There was no way we could have spread the news fast enough. Put it this way: Eind means land, hoven means farms—land of farms. There were green pastures as far as the eye could see. Everything was too spread out. If we stayed and tried to inform the people, we would all be dead. We sat in our foxholes and felt terrible.
The next day, the nineteenth of September, I went out looking for Able Company to find my buddy James Diel. I found a couple kids from Able, and asked where he was. They said “You just missed him. He was on the road and a shell hit him, cut him right in half.” It was a shock. He was my sergeant back in training, and he was a good buddy of mine, but I couldn’t stop to think about it or I’d be buried there, too. When someone got killed, you just got more fired up for the next battle. Somehow I ended up getting his dog tags, I have no idea how, but after the war, I gave them to his family.
BABE
One of the men in 2nd Platoon, Stephen Grodski, who we called the Brow because he looked like the character from the Dick Tracy comics—he had one big eyebrow across his forehead that looked like it was drawn on with some grease paint—he would make us the last hot meal I remember having for seventy-some days. We were in the middle of an apple orchard, and he made a stew out of everything we could find. He put it all in a helmet and cooked it with a Bunsen burner.
In the morning, we had a forced march to Neunen. Some of the guys piled onto the British Cromwell tanks moving with us into the village. We heard there was nothing there, and it was pretty quiet as we came up to it, except for some Dutch civilians cheering us on from their windows or the streets. There were beautiful buildings, old country inns, and farmhouses. We took a secondary road in, but all the land was flat, it was all farmland, so we were in plain view. The roads were raised a few feet off the ground, too, which made you more conspicuous, and along both sides of the roads were drainage ditches. Those ditches ended up being an advantage and a disadvantage, depending on whether it was us or them hiding in them.
We led a frontal assault, and luckily we were on the flank, in a wooded area, because suddenly, we heard the rumbling and clanking of metal, and it wasn’t our tanks. German tanks came rolling out from behind the trees about four hundred yards away and let loose with a barrage of 88s. There were dozens more tanks behind them. We only had about four or five. We dove into the ditches just as our rear tank got blasted.
Johnny Martin saw a German tank hiding in a hedgerow with its gun pointed right at one of the British tanks just waiting for it to advance a few feet. I covered him, and we ran over to warn the tank driver. Martin jumped up on the tank and pointed to where the German tank was hidden and said to the driver, “Shoot him! Shoot him!” But the Brit wouldn’t listen, he couldn’t see the tank. Boy, they were laid back, those Brits, even with 88’s exploding all around them. He was more concerned about his orders not to destroy property. We hightailed it away from him, not a minute before the German tank let loose and blasted him, and then blasted another one of our tanks behind him. The crew from the first tank escaped, but the gunner, he got both his legs blown off, all that was left of him was a torso. Our regimental chaplain, Father Maloney, ran over and pulled him from the tank, laid him down in the ditch, and gave him his last rites before he died.
Let me tell you about Father Maloney. Now he was a hero. As spiritual guide for the 506th, he had twelve rifle companies to worry about, not counting regimental headquarters. He went from company to company holding Mass, giving last rites and spiritual aid, wherever he was needed. He risked his life going onto the battlefield to save someone’s soul. His job was saving souls, not lives. He didn’t carry a gun, only his chalice, crucifix, and sacramental stuff. I imagine he enjoyed meeting his maker, because that’s the way he treated people and that’s the way he served. He went out of his way to make someone feel better. He got the DSC in Normandy for courage.
One day when I came to a confession, he said, “I don’t see many of you guys when there’s no fighting.” He said, “The Catholic faith is the hardest to live by but the easiest to die by. When you meet your maker it’s all forgiven.” That thought helped me through every day.
Neunen was overrun with German soldiers and tanks, firing at us with everything they had. Mortars, pistol fire, MG-42 fire, and 88s. You couldn’t see through the clouds of dust and smoke, and there was debris flying everywhere. A machine gunner from Dog Company got hit. He yelled, “Son of a bitch, I’m dead!” and he dropped dead. It was the strangest thing to see.
We were pinned down in a ditch, trying to advance and staying low, when clouds of heavy smoke came wafting down the ditch toward us. The Brow yelled, “Gas! Gas!” We went to grab our ankles for our gas masks, but most of us left them in the plane. Usually they were right above our knives, which we had on our right ankles, unless you were left handed, then it was on your left ankle. We’d taken them off, along with our reserve parachutes, to lighten the load before jumping. Those things were big and bulky, not like gas masks today. We never figured the Germans would actually use gas, even though the generals and higher-ups expected them to; we even had gas-impregnated jump jackets. At that moment, we were scared as hell, cursing ourselves for being so stupid. We were sure we were going to die. Then Joe Toye yelled, “They’re smoke pots!” When the air finally cleared, we could see it was smoke from a burning English tank that the wind carried down the ditch. What a relief! We’d have all been dead if it had been gas. Bill was pissed. He shouted, “Who the hell hollered gas?!” but nobody would rat. Under our breath we were calling the Brow a dumb son of a bitch; he scared the hell out of us. Bill would have given him holy hell.
Tanks were burning all around us, and the kids inside were dead, so the tanks kept rolling on their own, and would stop only when they rolled into ditches. While I was in the ditch manning the machine gun, one of the tanks rolled into the ditch on fire. I couldn’t go running out, or even raise my head, the place was like a hornet’s nest. I would have got my head blown off. I was pinned down. Getting a shot off was out of the question. I don’t know how I escaped that burning tank, but somehow I did.
We never succeeded in pushing the Germans back, and we were ordered to withdraw. It’s hard to take when you get that order to pull back. You feel defeated. But you do what you’re told, and we had full confidence in any order Dick Winters gave.
I was providing cover fire for the rest of the platoon, when I felt something hit my leg hard. I thought I was hit. But it was Buck Compton’s head. He fell across a wheelbarrow right at my feet. A sniper got him right in the backside. He looked up at me and said, “She always said my big ass would get in the way.” He had four holes in his rear end. He was a strapping guy, too heavy for anyone to drag, and we were being bombarded with heavy machine-gun fire. I tried to help Buck, but he told me to leave him there for the Germans. (B
ill adds: “When Compton got shot, he wanted us to leave him there to die. He didn’t want anyone else to get hit trying to save him. He was no midget. Six-foot-two, two hundred forty pounds. I told him he was going to get shot in the ass because he was too big to run fast. Our company medic, Gene Roe, tried to patch him up, and we had to get him out of there. Malarkey, Babe, Joe Toye, and I and some others tried to lift him, but it was like picking up a damn elephant. We had to rip a door off a barn, make a stretcher out of it, and get him up onto a British tank. He was mad as hell that we were trying to help him. Mad as hell. Cursing us all. He wanted to kill us. But Compton was lucky. He got four holes in his rear end from one bullet, and I’m saying he was lucky. It was a fleshy spot, they could fix it bing-bang-boom, so he was lucky.”)
That was a pretty amazing feat that Bill, Malarkey, and Toye pulled off. They did it in that open field with machine fire coming from every direction. Especially considering we were the only platoon there, the others were off to the flanks.
To get beyond the German fire, I had to climb over a six-foot hedgerow. These damn things were four feet wide. You ran at them, trying to get over, and bounced off. And I was bogged down by my machine gun. John Sheehy yelled from the other side, “Come on, Heffron! Give it a running start!” I threw my machine gun over the hedgerow to Sheehy, but to get a running start, I had to move back into German fire. My heart was pounding. It was like you see in a movie. Bullets were kicking the dirt up next to my ankles and whizzing by my head. As I ran, my rosary beads flew off my neck, but I jumped the hedgerow and Sheehy grabbed my jump jacket and yanked me over. I didn’t want to leave without my rosaries. I thought I wouldn’t come out of this war alive without them. “To hell with the rosary beads,” Sheehy yelled. “Let’s go!” I stooped down to pick up my helmet, which had fallen on the ground, and the rosaries were right inside the helmet. Lying right in there. By some stroke of luck, the rosaries had come over the hedgerow with it. If Sheehy hadn’t waited for me and helped me that day, I never would have made it. I never forgot what he did.
Brothers in Battle, Best of Friends Page 12