May 5th, Easy Company took Berchtesgaden. We were the first ones in, with the rest of 2nd Battalion following us. French forces came in after us, along with other American units. We had no resistance. The place was crawling with SS, so we had to be careful of any radicals. But most of the resistance we got was from the residents when we looked for houses to stay in. Winters had to order the people out.
There were a lot of beautiful homes in Berchtesgaden, especially the Nazi officials’, with wine cellars and luxuries. I can tell you there was a lot of looting and drinking going on. The Eagle’s Nest, Hitler’s home, was very beautiful. It was right on the border of Austria in the Alps. The scenery was the most beautiful I’ve ever seen. When we got to the Eagle’s Nest, we had to secure it, and then we went in, and everybody took what they wanted. The house was elevated, and the room where all the booze was—downstairs—was where all the guys wanted to go. We could have stayed there for twenty years. Hitler had enough food and booze to last twenty years. We did some drinking there. I didn’t drink much, it was all wine and champagne, which I don’t drink, but I had some champagne on Hitler. The one who really took advantage of the booze was one of our lieutenants, Lewis Nixon. The guys called him Blue Beard, he needed to shave two times a day, but he never did. There’s a picture of him in Band of Brothers that shows him the morning after he got ahold of Hitler’s wine.
We were only in Berchtesgaden a couple days, but we had a lot of work to do. We set up a main line of resistance and put guards out. Thousands of Germans were surrendering and we had to direct them to POW points, get their weapons, and keep order. The German soldiers were all in step, they tried to stay in step, they were proud. They went in as soldiers and they were going out as soldiers. Most of them didn’t look at us. They kept their heads down. But a couple looked over and gave a weak smile. They were glad it was over. They were going home to their families. We were hoping that was really the end of it.
I was guarding a crossroads, on roadblock, directing vehicles and prisoners of war where to go when a big, black new model German car pulled right up next to me, with a German colonel in the passenger side. There were no women, no other cars. He said, “I have a general here, General Tolsdorf, he wants to surrender to someone of equal rank, and we would appreciate it if you would get someone.” I thought it was strange that the general was driving the colonel. I said, “Tell him to get out of the car.” The general was a big, strapping guy. I said, “Kommen Sie hier!” He got out, and he came up and saluted me, and I did not return the salute. That made him mad. But I didn’t care about him. I lost buddies. I ain’t hand-saluting that son of a bitch. I found out later it was General Theodor Tolsdorf, commander of the army we were fighting in the Bois Jacques woods.
I said, “You want to see someone of equal rank? Good.” I wanted to get my hands on the keys and clean the car out, see what was in there. One of our lieutenants was across the way. I called him over, and said, “I have a German general who wants to surrender,” and he took him to Colonel Sink. They walked away, and I got in the car and stripped everything out that I thought was valuable. There were maps, a German Luger, Iron Crosses, and five hundred obscene photographs. It wasn’t your ordinary pornography. It was human sexual organs shaped into furniture. Dirty pictures of furniture! Couches, chairs, beds. The couch arms were carved into the shape of a penis, the middle of the couch was shaped like a vagina. Five hundred pictures like that. I heisted most of the stuff I found and took it home, the Luger, the pictures, and the Iron Crosses. Afterward, I leaned against the car and thought, Wow. A kid from South Philly, a private first class from South Philly, having a German general surrender to him. Not bad.
That happened May 7. On May 8, the war was over. Second Battalion was sent to Zell am See, while the other battalions waited back at Berchtesgaden to be relieved. We stopped at Saalfelden, and stayed there at least a week, overseeing thousands of DPs from all over Europe.
We needed places to stay and the Austrians didn’t want to give up their houses. They were meaner to us than the Germans were. They were big into Adolf. Winters went around and ordered them to get out of their houses. He said, “These men aren’t going to sleep in the ground again. You will get out, or we’ll take further measures.” He’d have thrown them all in prison. Winters was laid back, but if you got him burned up, he was something to see. You didn’t mess with him. If you didn’t take care of his men, he’d see that it happened.
The Austrians all had swastikas in their houses, and we really did some looting there. That’s where I got some good stuff. I took a gold sword with a swastika on it, it was encrusted with stones. I figured it was worth something.
After about five or six days, we got transferred to Kaprun, where we stayed for a few months. Our job was to go house to house flushing out German soldiers, and taking over homes. You had to watch yourself. Every night we had guard duty. That the war was over didn’t mean nothing. You had the radicals. Austria was SS country. The whole time in Germany and Austria, I never saw one SS surrender. I seen them getting killed—they were defiant. Every ten to fifteen feet the SS were lying dead. We assumed the French got to them.
The entire 506th occupied the northern part of the country—in Saalfelden, Kaprun, and Zell am See. Headquarters was in Zell am See. We stayed on occupational duty, guarding and overseeing the displaced persons who were freed from work camps, and guarding weapons depots where all the German guns and vehicles were being stored. You had to guard them so the SS didn’t break in and take them; we kept them under lock and key. We never knew when something was going to start up again. We had more trouble with the Austrians than anyone else. They didn’t want us there. They treated us worse than the Germans did. But we had no sympathy for them.
As soon as we got there, I took some men on a patrol, and Ralph Spina tagged along in case some SS troopers were still in the mood for a fight and we needed a medic. My patrol hit a house, and an elderly man greeted us at the door and told us he needed help, because his wife was very sick. Ralph went upstairs with the man and I took the rest of the men to the back of the house and the cellar to check the place out. Ralph hollered for me to come upstairs, and when I got there, he was holding the woman by the wrist. I made a bad joke; I said to Ralph, “Are you running with that broad already?” He said, “What’s the matter with you, Heffron. The woman is dead.” The man wanted a priest to give his wife last rites. His son was saying in German, “We need a priest, we need to get a priest!” I told the man he had to take his wife out back and bury her. We didn’t know what she died of, we couldn’t take any chances, and I wasn’t going to let anyone go running around to find a priest. My orders were that dead bodies had to be buried immediately. I made like I was shoveling, I said, “You bury her.” We didn’t stay to see if they buried her, we assume they did. Being a Catholic myself, I felt awful, I felt like a louse, but orders outranked my personal feelings. I told him he could do what he wanted when the war was over. I imagine later he gave her a proper burial.
I spent my twenty-second birthday, May 16, on occupational duty. I didn’t even know it was my birthday, every day goes into the next. In war, you don’t know what day it is, or where you are most of the time. But like that girl back in the hospital in Belgium said, I was old. I felt old. That’s what a year and a half of combat will do to you. I also had a relapse of something around that time. My throat was all inflamed, and they traced it to my tonsils. I felt like I was on fire. So they took care of it as best they could and told me to get my tonsils taken out when I got home, which I never did.
The DPs in Kaprun were mostly Polish, French, Hungarian, and Russian Jews, and they thought we were the greatest thing since the wheel. We had a nonfraternization policy with the German and Austrian civilians, but we could go with the DPs, so we spent a lot of time with them. Talk about happy people. They had potato booze buried in the ground. They called it schnapps, and it was good stuff. We stayed in Kaprun for a few months. We helped them get situated in
Austrian houses, but a lot of them wanted to just sleep outside on the ground. “No more locks and beatings,” a little Polish girl named Annie said to me. She was cute as a button, short, with blond hair and big blue eyes. “We are free like butterflies,” she said. Boy, there were some beautiful girls in that camp, and once they got cleaned up, you had the best companions in the world. Many of the troopers found women to be with, a couple of guys married them. I ended up lying with Annie, and we would spend hours talking and laughing. She was only eighteen. We were both young and both had seen death and destruction all around us. She said to me, “Eddie, it’s been a long time since I laughed,” and it made me wish I could drop her and the other DPs in the center of the good old U.S. to show them how great it is to live in a free country. They loved hearing stories about Philly, New York, and Chicago. The French DPs were moody and stuck to themselves, but the Russians and the Polish people loved to drink and dance. We held dances in the village many nights, and these people were so joyous, it was the most fun I ever had in my life. Funny thing was, you never saw the Austrians around. They resented the way we catered to the slave laborers. We wanted to give them some joy after all they had been through.
We got a lot of downtime in Austria, some peace of mind, a bed. They had indoor plumbing—you didn’t find that in Holland, or Belgium, or France. The scenery was beautiful, the mountains, and the lakes, and the forests. Some of the guys went hunting. A fella named Lampis, who was sergeant of the mortar squad, he took me hunting with them one day. I saw a mountain goat, I said, “What the hell is that?” It had big curved horns on it. They were all over the place. I said, “Well, I’m not going to kill the son of a bitch, but I ain’t letting him near me, either!” I never went hunting again.
We were there two and a half months when the Austrians started coming around and talking to us. They started to like us. We never hurt nobody. We gave the kids candy. Like I said, you can’t blame the children for the sins of the father.
Things were pretty peaceful until one night, we got word that Chuck Grant got shot in the head by a crazed, drunk American soldier. Right away, we all went up to the area to try and track down the guy who shot him. Sure enough, one of the squads got him. We all wanted to string the son of a bitch up. Nobody wanted him to get back to the States because he’d get twenty years or something and be let go. When I saw the guy, he was half drunk, pleading innocent. They took him into a room, and everybody was trying to crowd in. They were going to kill him on the spot. One of the troopers said, “We’re going to shoot him or hang him.” Then an officer killed the whole thing. He said, “We got to make sure it’s the right man.” That’s the American justice system. No one seen him shoot Grant, so they had no proof. This guy was a crazy son of a bitch. Raped a German girl, killed an English major to take his Jeep, and shot Grant.
Chuck’s squad got him to an Austrian doctor, who did a hell of a job on him, saved his life. But he was left with some brain damage. It was terrible, one of those strange things that happens. Chuck was one of the best guys and one of the best soldiers in the platoon. Loved life. Loved women. Sharp as a tack, too. But that all changed after he got shot. He was in the hospital for a while, and they sent him home. He came to a couple of our reunions, but life was hard for him, it was tough to see him like that. For that to happen after the war was over was hard to take.
Our training schedule started up again because it was assumed we were heading to the Pacific. Rumor was that we were getting a thirty-day leave, and then heading over there. None of us were happy about it. At the end of July, we boarded a train for Joigny, France. It was a forty-and-eight, so it was open at the top, didn’t move very fast. Annie got there when the train was leaving, she had a little suitcase with her, and she started chasing the train down the tracks, yelling, “Eddie, Eddie!” Ralph Spina and a couple of the guys grabbed me and hung me upside down out the boxcar by my ankles. Someone had me by the belt buckle, and Ralph had me by the boots, and was yelling, “Here’s Eddie! Here he is!” She ran after us for a while, and then she gave up. I kind of missed her for a year or so. She was cute as a button.
We were on garrison duty in France for about a month, and in August, we got great news: we weren’t going to the Pacific. The U.S. dropped a bomb on Hiroshima, the Japanese surrendered, and the war was over. We were so relieved. It was the greatest thing that could have happened. Somebody once said to me that the bomb was the worst thing that ever happened, that the U.S. could have found other ways. I said, “Yeah, like what? Me and all my buddies jumping in Tokyo, and the Allied forces going in, and all of us getting killed? Millions more Allied soldiers getting killed?” When the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor were they concerned about how many lives they took? We should have dropped eighteen bombs as far as I’m concerned. The Japanese should have stayed out of it if they didn’t want bombs dropped. The end of the war was good news to us. We knew we were going home soon.
We were in Joigny, and I just got back from a ten-day leave to London. Dick Davenport, Eddie Stein, and me were playing Jew Pinochle on a cot, and Ralph Spina said “Babe, did you see the bulletin board?” We all went out to look. On the board it said that to stay on jump pay, we had to jump one more time. You didn’t have to jump, but if you didn’t, it said you’d be taken off jump pay by October the 5th. This was the latter part of September. I walked back in to talk to Stein and Davenport. They didn’t know if they were going to jump. Ralph decided he wasn’t. I said, “I’m doing it because I want to, I’m not letting them get the best of me.” After all we had been through, and after all of the kids we left behind on the battlefield, they’re going to take away our jump pay for not doing one last jump for posterity with only a couple months left to go? The guys who didn’t want to jump but needed the money to send home to their families, those are the ones I felt bad for. They earned the right never to jump again. But that’s the Army. All for fifty dollars a month jump pay. I get burned up just thinking about it. But I also liked jumping. I came in a jumper, I was leaving a jumper. A couple hours later, we were lying on a bunk in our quarters and Ralph said, “Hey, Babe, I changed my mind.” He said, “It’s my birthday, I’m jumping.” I said to the guys, “If Bill Guarnere would see that bulletin board, he’d have torn that paper off, walked in the barracks, and said, ‘Every goddamn one of you guys are gonna jump! This is Easy Company! If the Army can be that lousy, we can fight right back.’” All the time, I thought of Bill, and what Bill would say or do in different situations. He always came through.
It was a day jump, the last jump I ever made. We were jumping at two-thousand feet, so if the chute had any trouble, we’d have time to open our reserve. I was concerned about my hands going on me. I just hoped everything went well. I was number seven in the stick, and the guy in front of me froze in the door. When you freeze, you’re gonna hold the whole stick up and go over the drop zone. I drove my static line and drove both my arms under his and I got him out the door. But that put me in a bad body position. When I left the plane, I thought, I’m in trouble. I was facing the motor, instead of the tail. My neck was pushed down to my chest and my lines were tangled. I started saying Hail Marys. Then I twisted my feet, and suddenly my chute popped. That was a relief. When I got on the ground, there was a truck waiting for us, and I told the guy who hesitated that he gave me a bad time. He said, “Did I hesitate?” I said, “You had time to paint the goddamn door!” We kind of laughed it off, but I was still a little shaken. I was just glad I didn’t have to use the reserve. After that Ralph and I went out and celebrated his birthday with a few beers.
I got discharged from the Army in December 1945 and left for home on a troop ship. Oh, that ride was bad. The waves were forty feet high, nobody was allowed on deck. A couple guys had their rosary beads out and were saying prayers. We all said, “Hell, all the shit we went through and we’re going to die on the boat ride home!” We were sick as dogs for the entire ten days, but the ship made it safely to New York, and we were happy as hell to be
home.
9
BACK HOME IN SOUTH PHILLY
BILL
We landed in Presque Isle, Maine. It was a holding place for the men before going home. They gave you anything your heart desired. Who wants oranges, who wants fries, who wants ice cream? They asked me what I wanted and I told them, “I’m just happy to be alive, happy to be home, I don’t need anything.” Everybody’s eating ice cream, steaks, hoagies. The Andrews Sisters were on the radio singing “Rum and Coca-Cola,” and I’m lying there, and I said, “What the hell, give me some rum and Coca-Cola.” They brought me six of them. I drank two or three and poured the rest all over my body, and passed out.
There were five or six hospitals on the Atlantic City boardwalk where veterans were sent. I went to Haddon Hall, where Resorts International Casino is now. I was there about a year with Joe Toye. Joe had his leg amputated below the knee in England, and when he got to the States, they amputated above the knee. Poor Joe had holes and scars all over his body. Tough as nails, Joe. He never complained.
My sister, and Frannie, and Mom and Pop came to see me. They had no idea about my leg. Just before I got home, Mom got an Army postcard—I still have it, a yellow postcard dated February 3, 1945—that said, “I am pleased to inform you that on 25 January 1945 your son Sgt. William J. Guarnere 13113070 was making normal improvement. Diagnosis: Fracture of the left leg, condition not serious.” It said, “not serious,” so that was all they knew. They were absolutely stunned when they saw me. They were crying, they couldn’t believe it. It was just a year since they lost Henry, too. I told them, “I’ll be fine, I’ll be okay, they’ll give me a wooden leg, I’ll be fine.” I knew I would be fine. I had it in me, I knew what I had to do. I never once thought otherwise.
Brothers in Battle, Best of Friends Page 21