On the other side of the hedgerow, one of our guys was wounded and lying in a ditch, and we were withdrawing, so I ran over to throw him over my shoulder and put him on a tank. Then I heard Sergeant Ranney’s voice come from the tank: “Leave him, Heffron, he’s dead.” When I laid him back down, I saw he had a hole through his left temple. Then I saw his face. It was Miller, the guy I told a few days before that he would get through the war without a scratch. I didn’t want to leave him, and we always brought our dead back, but Ranney had given the order. Maybe there was no room on the tank, or maybe someone got him later. I know they had to take his dog tags and personal things, they had to report him dead. But boy, seeing Miller hit me like a ton of bricks. I had to sit there for a minute. I didn’t even know his first name. When a replacement got killed and no one knew his name, you described him: “The little skinny guy that came into the outfit as we were leaving.” I always tried not to get close to anyone because it hurt like hell when they died. I think about Miller a lot. He was just a kid.
BILL
During the fight, one of our sergeants, Denver “Bull” Randleman, got caught between a burning tank and the Germans and was missing in action. We didn’t know where he was, so after we pulled back, I said to the men in Bull’s squad, “Let’s go find Bull.” Bull was in 1st Platoon with Johnny Martin, a great soldier. A great squad leader. You didn’t mess with the Bull. He was a big man. Tough on the outside, but a softie on the inside. His men loved him. In Easy Company we had the best NCOs in the Army. The best.
Everyone went out looking for the Bull, not just Easy but a couple of other companies, too. You’d never see that happen in any other regiment but the 506th, everyone out searching for one man. By the next day, we had Bull back. The krauts had him in a barn. I don’t know who did what or how we got him back, but we were lucky, and boy, were we relieved. We looked out for each other, and the impossible became possible. We’re able to say that no man in Easy Company was ever taken prisoner.
We took cover in Dutch houses, set up our machine guns and mortars from there, to try and push those krauts back. They had us zeroed in the whole time, and were shelling us. We went house to house looking for Germans, and throwing grenades. We blew apart a lot of Dutch houses. We didn’t know which houses had Germans in them, and we couldn’t take any chances. I noticed at the doors of the houses they had those little miniature silver spoons, the kind you find in souvenir shops. There was a spoon on the wall for every family member, each one had a name and birth date on it. Like a history of the family on the wall. It was sad. All those Dutch houses, destroyed. You felt bad because you liked the Dutch people. At the time we couldn’t think, we had a job to do. Later, I thought, What the hell did I do? And then I realized, I’m alive. And we’re here to liberate these towns. Wouldn’t you rather be liberated and have no house than the other way around?
BABE
The Germans ended up pushing us back. We had to fall back and regroup. There were more of them than there were of us. Before we left, Winters wanted someone to penetrate German lines and get a prisoner. Toye volunteered and he needed two more to go with him. I wanted to go but Toye wanted me on the machine gun, so he picked Siles Harrellson and James Campbell. Brother, talk about being in with the enemy. We were surrounded and they were hitting us from everywhere. It was so bad, we had to withdraw, and there’s Joe and his patrol going right in. They got fired at, but Joe pressed on, and sure enough, came back with a prisoner. No one could believe it. Later I asked him, “How in the hell did you pull that one off?” He said the kraut was on guard, dozing off, so he got behind him, put his hand over the kraut’s mouth, and put a knife to his throat. The kraut dropped his weapon and walked back with Joe. Why Joe didn’t get a commendation for that one, I’ll never know. The prisoner was a fresh one, too. Kept telling us in broken English we were going to lose the war.
BILL
We were no match for German artillery. They had those Tiger 88 tanks. Our Sherman tanks and the Brits’ Cromwells were pussycats, didn’t hold a candle to kraut tanks. Everything the Germans had was superior. When the war started, the Germans knocked out the French in less than a month with the Tigers. We weren’t prepared for them either. Those Germans were technologically advanced. They were fighting and perfecting their arsenal for decades. Think about it. Fighting since World War I. Their tanks were superior, and the MG-42 blew away any guns we had. They had a lot of firepower. The bullets go brrrrrrrrrt! Four hundred bullets come out at once. American machine guns went bap-bap-bap-bap-bap! The best weapon the Germans had was the 88. They had them on the tanks, they could blow a house to pieces. We had the 75mm on our tanks, and headquarters had the 81mm mortar—the biggest piece of artillery we had. The Germans had the 105mm howitzers, they were at Brecourt, and the 270mm railroad gun that was like forty freight trains and nineteen semis all at once. It was so big, it needed two tracks to support it. They fired them in Holland and Belgium. Nobody ever knew where they were; they were a son of a bitch. You thought there was an earthquake when they fired it.
That night, we could see from where we were the krauts were bombing Eindhoven. They kept their word. Damn krauts bombed the shillelagh out of it. The railroad station, everything. All you saw was fire and smoke in the sky. The krauts were infuriated at the welcome the Dutch gave us. They wanted the Dutch to stay in their houses and keep the German flag flying. They also figured we’d still be there. We would have if the Dutch underground didn’t warn us. We marched back into Eindhoven the next day, the town was in shambles. Over two-hundred Dutch people dead, and eight-hundred wounded.
The civilians kept getting caught in the middle. They’d see us coming and put up Dutch flags. Then the Germans would knock us back and put up German flags. All along Hell’s Highway, same thing every day. The Germans would cut the road, we’d open it, they’d cut it, we’d open it, that’s how it kept going. We couldn’t let them take the road, somebody would get trapped—the 82nd, the British troops, the Guards Armored Division, the 501st, 502nd. Too many to take a chance.
BABE
The Dutch underground warned of an attack in Uden, so we moved with our trucks and tanks through Veghel to Uden. On the way, the Germans cut the road between Uden and Veghel, and about nine of us got cut off in Uden from the rest of the platoon. The rest of them were in Veghel. I was with J. B. Stokes, another trooper named Mauser, and one of our officers, who I won’t name because he was an idiot. Bill yelled at him in Neunen, gave him holy hell, because he wasn’t doing his job. The same officer gave Mauser a few rounds of armor-piercing ammo and told him to put them in his rifle and stay put in a nearby building. He told Mauser, “If you see any tanks, get off some good shots.” We looked at each other. Was he crazy? A rifle against a tank? The only thing that will take out a tank is a bazooka. And only if it’s aimed perfectly. The officer didn’t know what the hell he was talking about. You always worried someone incompetent could end up giving orders and getting men killed needlessly. Soon after that, the same officer shot off his own hand, I’m pretty sure on purpose, and we were glad to get rid of him. Made me appreciate that I was fighting alongside the best soldiers in the Army, and the likes of that officer were few and far between.
Luckily for us, the Germans never attacked Uden. But we could hear a lot of heavy shelling nearby. J. B. and I found a church with a good, high belfry, and churches were always suspect, because the belfry was a nice high spot for a German sniper to hide out. So after checking it for krauts, I left my machine gun at the bottom of the ladder, and we climbed a ladder to the belfry to try and scout out the rest of our platoon. We saw Germans coming toward us, and next thing we knew, the Germans must have seen the glint of the gunmetal from J. B.’s rifle, and they started shelling us. The shells told us they had us zeroed in, and we flew down the ladder as fast as we could, and into the backyard. There was a huge cemetery back there, full of graves of early World War II fighters. We stood by a wooden gate for a minute in awe of this graveyard and more
rounds started hitting the church. J. B. shouted, “Let’s get the hell out of here!” We didn’t get twenty yards away before a shell landed on the wooden gate and blew it to pieces. One of many close calls.
The men trapped in Veghel finally got relieved, and we got our troops back. We didn’t know what happened to them. I looked at Bill and the guys and I couldn’t believe what I saw. They had a look on their faces like I’d never seen before, a dead stare. Distant. Like they’d seen a ghost. I don’t know. I still can’t explain it to this day. It was scary. I asked Bill, “What the hell happened?” He said, “Babe, you ain’t never ever seen such artillery fire in all your life. You couldn’t come out of your hole, you couldn’t do anything. They were hitting us from planes, with 88s, everything. It was bad.” I tell Bill once in a while, “In sixty-some years, I still have never seen a look on you like that day.” The Germans had all their artillery there, and they used it.
A couple days later, I found out my buddy J. D. Henderson was hit in Veghel. He was in 3rd Platoon. He was one of the guys I made a pact with, he and Johnny Julian, that if one of us buys the farm the others have to go see the parents. But J. D. was going to be okay. He was evacuated back to England, spent forty-five days in the hospital, and came back to Easy Company.
BILL
The krauts attacked Veghel instead of Uden, and when they cut the road, they had the entire 506th surrounded. It was raining like hell out, and we got caught in bad artillery fire. The Luftwaffe bombed us from the air, the SS shelled us from the ground, the tanks hit us with 88s. It came from all sides. We couldn’t get a shot off, we couldn’t do a goddamn thing. All day, all night they shelled the shillelagh out of us. They weren’t sparing those 88s either. You never exposed yourself. They’d fire an 88 at one man running across the field. Those damn 88s blew craters into the ground. There was no cover to move out. Most of the time we were hiding in an orchard in foxholes that we dug so fast your eyes would spin. If we could have dug thirty feet down, we would have. When there were breaks in the shelling, we returned the fire, otherwise we sat there with four feet of water under our ass.
After a few days, we heard the Typhoons above our heads, the English air force. They could see the German positions from overhead. They started strafing the hell out of the Germans and gave us air cover so we could get out. The British Armored also came in and pushed the Germans back, and opened the road, so we were able to get back to Uden. That was a bad one. We lost a lot of men.
To be in an artillery bombardment is hell. Beside the fear—fear is something you feel every second in combat, I don’t care who you are—when artillery starts flying, it’s worse than anything else you can imagine. Machine-gun fire is bad, but when artillery starts coming in, you’re going to see some gruesome things. It’s those things only a combat veteran knows, that’s what bonds you for life, because no civilian could ever understand. In ordinary life, a man will never see his buddy’s limbs blown off into the trees, or a person explode into thin air, nothing left of him. This is not something you ever forget, or you can put into words. When you think about it, it makes you sick. All of us out there saw the same damn thing. It’s one of the worst things a soldier sees in war. But if you couldn’t handle it, you couldn’t be a soldier. You had no choice but to ignore it. You hoped you had the next day to look forward to, and every day after that. It made you appreciate every day that you were still alive.
We met the rest of the platoon in Uden, and they sent us right back somewhere near Veghel with the entire 506th, in the pouring rain. The 502nd was there, and the 501st was in a hell of a battle nearby, maybe worse than where we were. I noticed every windmill we passed was blown apart. The Germans used them for sniper points and artillery, and the British planes destroyed them.
BABE
In the morning, we were outside of Veghel preparing for an offensive, waiting to get the word to attack, when we noticed a Dutchman kept riding past with a kid on the back of his bike. Five minutes after they’d ride by, we’d get shelled with heavy artillery. We had quite a few casualties, and by the third time, we started to think it was a little too coincidental that every time they rode through, we get shelled. Someone said, “Grab that son of a bitch,” and an Easy officer, a replacement no one liked, stopped the guy. Sure enough, under the seat was a two-way radio. The officer took the kid, the man, and the radio to headquarters, and we never saw them again.
We started our advance, and we had to go through an open field. Winters was in front, I was in back with first squad. Second Platoon was leading the attack. All of a sudden, automatic-weapon fire came at us from the right flank. It was going over our heads and it looked like they were trying to get a bead on us and were lowering the trajectory of their machine guns. Winters hollered, “Bring your guns up! Fire into those woods!” I said, “Lieutenant, they sound like our thirties.” He said, “I think you’re right.” Here, Fox or Dog Company got trigger happy and opened up on us. Winters ordered someone to send up a smoke pot, and as soon as it went up, the firing stopped. If Winters hadn’t made the call to send the smoke pot, a few of the boys would’ve bought the farm. In a tight spot, Winters always thought quick. He always used his head. Shows you how nervous and confused everyone was. And tired.
BILL
The Germans started firing at us, and Malarkey got on the mortar and I gave him range and direction and we blasted a machine-gun nest. We were good on the mortar in practice, but when we got to combat, we were at our peak. We could hit any target. We had tanks with us, and the krauts took a couple of them out, we had to pull back. That’s where Babe came in. The machine gunners covered us when we needed to pull back or advance under fire. You can’t do it without the machine gunners.
BABE
At one point, we were caught in a ditch, the krauts were firing at us, and Joe Toye wanted me to return the fire. He told me to throw my gun up on the ridge. As I went to put my head up out of the ditch, Bill kicked me in the left shoulder and knocked me back down into the ditch. He saved me from taking a shot, while he stayed right out there in the middle of it. I learned pretty quickly what kind of soldier Bill Guarnere was. He made good snap decisions, and he was watching our every move. He expected the same dedication out of us that he put forth. He was wild, yes, but in the paratroopers you needed the fearless ones who were willing to do whatever it takes. They didn’t call him Wild Bill for nothing. He’d stand up when everyone was crouched down and run straight into enemy fire, yelling, “Let’s go, let’s go, they couldn’t hit the side of a barn!” It’s true, the krauts were pretty piss-poor shooters. He was always straight up, never hugging the ground. Joe Toye, too. They were stand-up guys in more ways than one. Nothing scared either of them. If you couldn’t find Bill, you asked, “What the hell platoon is under fire now?” That’s where you’d find Guarnere. He’d run back and forth, and we’d get irrigated, because we had our trouble, too. But never as bad as 1st Platoon, they were always in a bad firefight.
BILL
Nighttime, we sat in foxholes in the rain. Malarkey and the mortar squad fired back and forth with the krauts. Usually at night, things quiet down till daybreak, then all hell breaks loose. The 502 was attacking the krauts, too, from a different area, so you heard shelling all night. When they saw we had them from all sides, the krauts retreated.
We did our job on Hell’s Highway, so they took us off the line. We needed it. It was ten days we were on the front lines.
We got good news. Mail got through. When you heard “Mail call!” oh boy, you ran. Perconte did the mail. He called out names and kept throwing letters. When you got one, the whole war stopped for you. You crawled into a hole someplace and you read it. Everyone perked up. Frannie and I wrote a lot of letters. Everyone knew I wanted to marry the old gal. We V-mailed each other. Victory mail. We didn’t have e-mail, we didn’t have fax! With V-mail, they turned the letter into a tiny film the size of your thumbnail, and blew it up to normal size when it got to its destination. Some people sent regula
r letters, but V-mail saved space, helped the war effort.
Mail call had its sad points, too. Like when we’re standing around getting our letters and suddenly there’s only seven or eight letters left and twenty of us standing there. You looked at each other, and you hoped it was for you, but you hoped it was for the other guys, too. A lot of them never got letters. So after you read your letter, you sat down and gave the other guy the letter to read, too. Even if it wasn’t for them, they liked hearing what was going on back home. It made us feel better that normal life was happening somewhere. Gave us hope. The letters back then were simple and clean, no hanky-panky like today. Somebody got a little package sometimes, they’d share whatever was inside with the guys—cookies, a candy bar. Nobody was selfish. In Easy Company, we all shared everything we got even before we got to combat, even in the States. Little things like that were even more of a big deal when you didn’t know if you’d live to see tomorrow.
In Holland, guys got more sentimental because we didn’t expect what the Germans were throwing at us, and who knew if you’d be going home. That’s when I thought of Frannie a lot. I carried her picture with me all through the war. The picture of her in a grass skirt. I’d keep it in my pocket, in my helmet, in my musette bag; I kept moving it to keep it safe. I knew she was there with me, that’s all. And I hoped she was waiting for me. Who the hell knew? But I didn’t talk about her much. As soon as the kids got real sentimental, I told them, “Knock it off! You can’t afford to be sentimental. You’ll get killed, you hear? You got to concentrate on what you’re doing now. If you get sentimental and soft, before you know it, bang, you’re hit, you’re dead. Stay on your toes.”
Brothers in Battle, Best of Friends Page 13