I stayed in a house along the riverbank. One day I wrote my friend Tony Cirigilo a letter. I couldn’t say where I was because our mail was being censored, but the officer was kind enough not to decode our letters if we promised not to put our location. So I wrote, “As I am writing this letter I hear shrapnel hitting the back door.” I got a letter back from Tony a few weeks later that said, “Babe, as you are hearing shrapnel hitting the back door, all I hear while sitting in my parlor is the Number Five trolley going up Third Street.” Boy, that hit home. I thought of my dad, who got that trolley every morning to go to work up in Holmesburg, Pennsylvania. I knew that sound of the Number Five trolley going up Third Street. But also, I felt bad for Tony. He wanted to fight the war like the rest of us—the guy could street fight like a son of a bitch, but he was 4F, meaning he got a medical discharge for his perforated eardrums.
One night when I was in the house, there was a bang on the door. You know it’s not a kraut knocking on the door. They’d throw a grenade and blow the house apart, like we did. Someone hollered, “Is Heffron in there?” and it wasn’t familiar. It was a kid from Fox Company. He said Sergeant Green won’t be able make that date to Paris. I said, “Did he get wounded?” He said, “No, he was killed last night. He stepped on a land mine.” Green had told this kid, “If anything happens to me, go see Heffron in Easy Company, Tell him I won’t be able to make that date in Paris.”
A week after we got there, regiment wanted a night patrol across the river to get some prisoners. Every platoon was involved. Ken Mercier, one of our best sergeants, led one of the patrols. Mercier was a professional soldier. He was in the Army before the war; he knew his job, you didn’t have to tell him anything. One Lung McClung was lead scout. I was on my machine gun to provide covering fire, we had our guns aimed at the German outpost. Once they got the prisoners, they signaled us, and we started firing everything we had—rifles, machine guns, mortars, artillery, everything, and the Germans started firing back. It was a hell of a fight. When they got back, Eugene Jackson, who was on the patrol—he was the one who helped save Bill and Joe Toye—had been hit by a grenade. A German dropped a grenade from the third floor of a building, and it hit Jackson in the brain. He was screaming in pain, hollering, “Where’s Mercier! Get me Mercier! I want Mercier!” He knew he was dying. Mercier walked over and held his hand while they were carrying him away, and right after Mercier got to him, he died.
The patrol brought back a couple good prisoners, so Sink wanted another patrol to go out the next night. Winters told Sink he’d take care of it, then told the men he wasn’t sending anyone out, but they’d report they went out and couldn’t get any prisoners. Winters knew what he was doing. The krauts would have been ready for us. It would have been a disaster. He led by common sense, not standard operating procedure. He could have got himself in big trouble defying orders, but he was willing to take that chance to save a few lives. No one ever said another word about it.
After a few weeks, we were finally relieved. We had two and a half months of fighting, and we were sent back to Mourmelon by train, on forty-and-eights, these old World War I jobs, it had boxcars that were open at the top. When we got back, we were in a different section of Mourmelon than before, we were billeted in tents, but we got showers and new uniforms. We were beat the hell up but we felt like a million bucks. You really appreciate the simple things, like clean clothes and showers, when they’re taken away for a while.
We spent most of the time on training exercises with the replacements that came in. A couple weeks after we got there, we had a division parade. Nobody liked a parade, regardless of who was coming. You put a new tie on, you shine your wings and your boots, and you’re out there and it can be a hundred degrees or thirty degrees, and nobody wants to hear officers talk and talk and don’t say nothin’. But we were all hepped up because Ike was coming. The entire 101st was being awarded the Presidential Distinguished Unit Citation for our defense at Bastogne. We were happy we were getting the citation because we deserved that, I’ll tell ya, for our stand at Bastogne. We were the first division ever to get so honored. But we didn’t mind standing out there, not for the medal, not for the decoration, but for Ike. He was the coolest. All the guys loved him. (He got my vote twice when he ran for president; I think he might be the last guy Bill ever voted for.) We opened ranks, and we were all at attention—you looked straight ahead—and Ike walked down the line and congratulated some of the guys personally. He stopped and asked me where I was from. I said Pennsylvania. He said “What city?” I told him Philadelphia. He said, “That’s a beautiful city.” He wished me good luck, and walked on and spoke to a few more of the men.
At the end of March, we got orders that we were moving out. We had a Mass with Father Maloney, and we went up on trucks into Germany.
8
GERMANY: NOW I KNOW WHY WE’RE HERE
Spring and Summer 1945
BABE
We took up positions in the Ruhr pocket near Düsseldorf, guarding the bank of the Rhine River. The platoons took turns on outpost duty by the river, or went out on patrols. We stayed in houses, which was a nice change from a frozen foxhole. But the town was in shambles, it was heavily bombed by Allied forces because it was an industrial town. They produced a lot of steel, and it was one of their major seaports.
When we got into Germany, the Allied troops started finding forced labor camps the Germans had. The krauts had imprisoned people from Russia, Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, most of Eastern Europe. The Allied soldiers set them free and put them in camps for displaced persons until they could get them situated. Part of our job, in addition to guarding the Rhine, was to guard the DPs.
When we weren’t on outpost, we were searching house to house, flushing out the Germans, killing who we had to. Four of us were in a rural area and we came upon a house with a German farmer inside, and he must have seen us coming because he ran over to his potbellied stove and was trying to burn a book. I grabbed it from him. The book was Mein Kampf, which means “my struggle,” by Hitler. I took it; I still have it, and you can see the edges of it are frayed, and the German farmer had his name in it, too—Schmidt. He was defiant. You could see he must have been a veteran from WWI, because he was that old. We left him there because he didn’t try anything. If he had—and he was thinking about it believe me, he was going on about how great Hitler was, how wonderful Germany was, he was saying, “Heil Hitler!”—we would have killed him. But he was an old man. He was a loser. Let him dream.
Those Germans, they loved Hitler, boy. A German peasant said to me when we took over Düsseldorf, he said “Why shouldn’t we be good to Hitler when he gives us all this?” And he waved his hand to show me how beautiful the land was. And it was. The beauty of Germany was breathtaking. It was the most beautiful place I’d ever seen. But I knew some of it was at the expense of the people in France, Holland, Belgium, and Norway. The Germans were bringing in baby farm animals, produce, and slave labor from those countries. These people had to have known it was coming from somewhere.
One thing that happened in Düsseldorf, I’ve had nightmares about it for sixty-three years. About what could’ve happened, not about what did happen. I was leading a patrol with three guys from my squad. Our orders were to clean out one side of town. We were going house to house when we came across a bomb shelter. Standard operating procedure was to throw a grenade into the bunker, then kick open the door. A voice in my head told me Don’t throw that grenade! I told one of the guys I was with, a kid from North Carolina, to hold his grenade, and I held mine. I had a Tommy gun in one hand and a grenade in the other. I took a risk and kicked open the door.
What we saw took our breath away. A young girl about twenty years old was standing there, with two little toddlers holding on to her dress and an old couple standing behind her. They were scared to death. The mother was talking to the children in German trying to calm them. They must have heard us coming, and when I kicked the door open, they thought they’d be kille
d. We looked at them, and we didn’t say a word, but we threw some candy and chocolate from our pockets onto the ground, and we left. If we had followed orders and thrown the grenade, an innocent family would have been killed. Innocent children would have been killed. I have nightmares that I did throw the grenade.
Outside, me and the other troopers looked at each other. One of the guys said to me, “Jigger, what in the hell made you hold that grenade?” I said, “With the look on your faces, I know I did the right thing.” It left me wondering for days, What would I have been? What would have happened to me? Would I have become a vegetable? I know I couldn’t have lasted, I couldn’t have lived, after killing little children. Later that day, another Easy Company man said, “Aaaah, it’s war, what’s the difference, they’re krauts. If you did it, it was an accident.” I said, “No. No, not the children. I was told since I was a little boy that you can’t blame the children for the sins of a father.” I learned that from the nuns, and how true it is. He said, “You know, my parents used to say that, too.” I saw these babies and it didn’t matter who or what their fathers were. Even Bill said to me when I told him this story, “I couldn’t picture you being around after that, Babe.”
I didn’t even want to talk about this experience, but Bill wanted me to. Talking about what could have been. But you want people to know the hell and reality of this and how it affects you for the rest of your life. I hope the woman’s husband lived through the war and knew that an American soldier refused to follow orders and didn’t kill his children.
Bill and I talk about what made a good leader, and I was not a leader. Maybe I shouldn’t have been leading men, taking a squad. Winters said, “Babe, you went against the book, but I’m glad you did.” Luckily it all worked out.
Another day, Ralph Spina and I went out on a patrol, and we saw a house and went to check it out. Inside, a group of men, maybe eight or ten, were cooking and setting food out, and we hit the place, got them against the wall, searched them, and took whatever we found. They said “Please don’t take the food, this is the only food we have.” Spina spied a metal box, like you throw change in, and he said “What do you think’s in there, Babe?” and it was full of German marks, and I mean full, too. And this guy was trying to tell me it was the payroll for the people that worked there. We didn’t care about that. We told them to shut the hell up. We said, “You ought to be glad we don’t shoot you.” They were in civilian clothes. I don’t know if they were soldiers, but we didn’t have any trouble with them. We searched the whole house, went into the cellar—infantry procedure—and there was nothing there. So we assumed they were maybe ex-soldiers.
We took the payroll and went back to our quarters and sat on our beds and had a drink and tried to figure out what to do with the money. The next day was a Sunday, and we went over to the church in town and gave the money out to people coming out of church. We knew them, they were DPs that had just been liberated. We figured they deserved it. Of course we kept half of it for ourselves.
Things started to quiet down in the area, because the Germans started surrendering, about a few hundred thousand of them in the Ruhr pocket. But we had to be careful, because they were still fighting, there was still some machine-gun and sniper fire going back and forth. We continued daily patrols and outpost duty there for about a month, until the end of April. Then we got on forty-and-eights, and headed up to Bavaria, where Hitler’s Eagle’s Nest was. After a few days on the train, we boarded DUKWs, amphibious vehicles that move in water like boats, and then wheels come out and they can drive on land. They look like boats with wheels and they go about forty miles an hour. We went up to Bavaria on the autobahn. It was the most beautiful road I ever saw. Four lanes. Well paved. Very pristine. The men couldn’t get over it. The scenery, especially around Heidelberg, was breathtaking—winding mountain roads, beautiful villages, deep green forests and lush greenery everywhere, snowcapped mountains in the background. Everything was beautiful. I couldn’t believe how clean and pristine everything was. The Germans and the Dutch are the cleanest people I ever saw. Even during a firefight, you’d see them out sweeping their pavements.
We stopped for a couple days in the area of Landsberg. Somebody told us there was a concentration camp up there. We went up, and the scene was devastating. All we could do was look at each other with our mouths open. We couldn’t believe what we were seeing. It was bad. Hundreds of prisoners in black-and-white-striped uniforms. They were like skeletons. They could barely stand. There were piles of burned bodies all over the camp. The odor made us all sick. A couple guys were puking, some were crying.
This camp didn’t have ovens and gas chambers. Their death was to be starved and burned and buried alive in mass graves. Eddie Stein, he was my assistant machine gunner and my friend, he broke down next to me. He said, “Babe, can you believe what man can do to man?” He said, “They’re my people.” I said, “Ed, I know.” He had me crying. None of us had any idea. How the hell they endured that I’ll never know. I grew up with Jewish kids. I thought of them when I seen this—the Jewish people at home, and how lucky they were to live in America.
Ralph hollered, “Come over here.” We walked a few feet away from the camp, and there was an abandoned train. You could smell it before you got to it. The smell was overwhelming, sickening. Ralph slid the train door open and the inside it was stacked full of dead bodies. I said, “Why the hell did you have to show me that.” It was a sight I’ll never get out of my head. We knew it was all Jews from the concentration camp. We walked back to the camp. If any of the guys didn’t know why we were fighting the war, they knew then.
We had to wait for someone to come up and delouse the camp before they could open the metal gates and let us make body contact with them. The gates were locked. Before we got there, the Germans found out we were coming, locked them, and ran away. Eddie kept saying, “I’d like to kill those bastards.” Eddie wasn’t the kind of guy to look for a fight. A good guy. He was old for the paratroopers; he was twenty-four. We called him Dad and Pop, because we were eighteen, nineteen. I joined when Eddie did, but he was in a different barracks in jump school. He wasn’t as close to me as Julian and J. D., but we got closer in Germany when he became my assistant machine gunner.
There was a young Hungarian Jewish girl, she had her hands on the bars, and she was looking through at us. She was crying, and she kept saying, “You are my heroes, my angels, my God, we’re free, we’re free at last.” She had naturally curly, red hair down to her shoulders. She was beautiful. About nineteen years old. She should have looked fifty with what she’d been through. I couldn’t stop looking at her. I said to one of the guys, “Boy, she’s shayna” (German or Jewish for beautiful). A Polish slave laborer from a nearby farm heard me, and he looked at me and said, “Shayna, huh?” I said, “Yes, a beautiful girl.” He said, “She was the German officers’ favorite.” Oh, boy, that hit me. The German officers’ favorite. It got me sick. And Eddie, too, he started crying more. I thought to myself, imagine if that was your own sister, or your daughter. I can see her clearly today. She didn’t have the striped garb the other prisoners had. She had women’s clothes. She got treated differently.
That young girl really affected me, I never forgot her. Maybe because she reminded me of a beautiful redhead back home named Claire Wilhelm who I was in love with and would have liked to marry. I wrote to her during the war. I don’t even know if she would have had me—there were a lot of guys after her—but she died just after I got home. I didn’t realize it until later, but that might be one of the reasons I never forgot that beautiful Hungarian girl.
If anyone ever tells you the Holocaust didn’t happen, or that it wasn’t as bad as they say, no, it was worse than they say. What we saw, what these Germans did, it was worse than you can possibly imagine. It burns me up when I think about it, because lots of countries knew about it and let it happen. Jewish people tried to escape by boat, thirty-five-hundred of them, and they were turned away from every country they
went to, even the United States, and ended up back in Germany and were killed. Everyone in America, their families immigrated here so they could have better lives. It wasn’t fair.
We left there and headed south to Berchtesgaden, where Hitler’s Eagle’s Nest was. All Hitler’s top officers, the Nazi leaders and the top SS officials, lived there. We were all talking about outflanking the British and French to get there first. Everyone was trying to outrun each other.
I can’t imagine what the residents of the towns must have been thinking as we drove past them on DUKWs, and their own German soldiers were surrendering and walking down the middle of the road, just looking at us as we drove past. But this gives you an idea: At a town where we stopped for the night—I think it was Bad Reichenhall—a soldier from the 101st came running over hollering, “Get a medic! We need a medic!” We asked if one of our guys was hit; we weren’t encountering much resistance. He told us the Bürger-meister—the town’s mayor—killed himself, his wife, and their three children. He found them all dead on the couch. As we got closer to Bertchesgaden, thousands more German soldiers surrendered and were walking the streets. You saw a dead SS soldier here and there, and as we drove by a wooded area to our left, on the edge of the woods, we saw a bunch of SS on their knees, and the French soldiers were giving them each a bullet to the head. The French hated the Germans, even though they let the Germans have their country without firing a shot. They had every right to kill them. The SS were Hitler’s loyalists. They were Nazis. They started training to serve Hitler from ten years old. They loved him, they would rather die than surrender. We all looked over and said, “Kill the bastards!” We didn’t have to fire a shot, the French were doing it for us. The entire way up, we saw dead SS in their black uniforms lying on the ground. They fought right to the end.
Brothers in Battle, Best of Friends Page 20