A Company of Heroes (37 page)

Mary and Alex Sr. moved to Taylor Spring, Illinois, in 1910 where he worked as a coal miner. A few years later, around 1918, they moved back around South Bend, where he worked for Studebaker. He wasn’t well educated and had only a third grade education. Obviously, their original language was Polish. I remember my grandfather: his English wasn’t that great, even late in life.

Mary began having children soon after they were married and gave birth to thirteen children over the next twenty years, nine girls and four boys. My uncle, Alex M. Penkala Jr., was born August 30, 1924, the tenth of the thirteen children. Even to this day the family refers to him as Junior. My mother, Evelyn (her married name is Tatay), was born in 1921 and was one of Alex’s older sisters. Today, my mom and the youngest girl are the only ones still alive from the thirteen kids in the family. My mother is eighty-eight. My Aunt Rose is eighty-two.

In 1928, Mary died in childbirth with her thirteenth child. The child, a boy, survived and was given to relatives to be cared for and raised under another name. After Mary died, the dad and the older daughters raised the family.

The family was devoutly Catholic. Sometime in the early 1920s, the family lived in a house near Notre Dame University, where Alex Sr. worked. As the girls got older, they went to work at Notre Dame in various jobs. Alex Jr. worked at Notre Dame also, when he came of age. During the Depression, the family wasn’t rich by any means, but they were better off than a lot of people because of the steady work. All the kids spoke Polish first, then picked up English outside the home and at school. All of Alex’s brothers and sisters were bilingual.

I have talked to people who knew Alex Jr. when he was young. He was a muscular, active kid, but not really talkative. He loved sports and played football and baseball, and was built on the shorter side, like the rest of the males in the family, about five-foot-seven.

Notre Dame owned a farm close to the campus. Alex and his friends would sneak to the farm and climb up the hayloft. A friend of Alex’s told me they would build tunnels and forts out of hay bales. “We used candles and matches,” the man said, “it’s a wonder we didn’t burn ourselves up.”

When I was growing up, there were a couple of aunts who lived within walking distance of Notre Dame, and I used to play in the same barn that Alex Jr. played in when he was a kid.

Alex Jr. attended South Bend Catholic High School. My mother says he was a junior in high school when he enlisted, but his papers said he had only one year of high school. It wasn’t unusual in those days for guys to go to high school for a semester or a year, then, if money was needed or if they got bored, they dropped out or worked for a year, then went back. So Alex could have easily been an eighteen-year-old sophomore in high school when he enlisted. I don’t think high schools were very particular of a kid’s age in those days.

His papers, which I got a copy of, read that he enlisted on February 27, 1943. For his civilian occupation, it lists “motorcycle mechanic or packer high explosives, munitions worker, or tool room keeper, or stock control clerk, or stock clerk.” I’m not sure that’s all the things he did, or if they put in a number that fit all these occupations. I know he did some work for Notre Dame, but other than that, I’m not sure exactly what.

Alex Jr. went through basic training, although I don’t know where, then was assigned to cook school. All the daughters cooked in the family, not the sons, so I doubt it was due to his cooking ability. I think that was just where the military stuck him.

We have a number of letters that Alex wrote to my mother during that time. Alex wrote that he didn’t think much of cook school, and wrote of his devotion to his girlfriend, Sylvia:

In cook school he made some friends who told him about an elite unit called the paratroopers. He and two friends tried out. The two friends washed out, but Alex made it.

He wasn’t a Toccoa man. I think he took his paratrooper training at Fort Bragg, but I haven’t confirmed this.

The first picture of Easy Company I’ve seen with Alex is at Fort Bragg. He was one of the first replacements into the company. I have another picture of him and Skip Muck at Camp McCall. That’s the only picture I have of those two guys together. Everyone I talk to said they were very good friends.

Alex wrote often—short, cheery, breezy letters, saying he was doing well, asking about family members, wondering if she had sent box candy because he didn’t receive it, telling he had received her letters, promising to write again soon. One letter home, written in scrawled longhand, is dated March 30, 1943, and was probably written when Alex was at Camp McCall.

Regarding Skip Muck—the guys I talked to said he was the heart and soul of Easy Company. Everyone just loved him. I’ve asked Eileen O’Hara, his niece, why she thinks Alex and Skip might have become such good friends. They were both Catholic from large families, and had a lot in common that way. Skip was the mortar man and Alex was his assistant. Skip carried the gun sight and tube; Alex carried the base plate and bipod. I’m sure that base plate weighed thirty or forty pounds, so it wasn’t much fun to carry that around. But everyone I’ve talked to said that Alex was muscular enough and carried it no problem.

Airborne vets have told me that whenever they jumped and went out on a mission, many of the guys carried four mortar rounds in their packs. The first thing they did after jumping was give all their rounds to the mortar squad and then deploy. It was a 60 mm mortar they used, smaller, but basically the mortars were their only weapons other than machine guns that could really reach from a distance. From all indications, both Alex and Skip were very good mortar men.

We know that Alex sailed for England September 15, 1943, aboard the troop ship
Samaria.
Sometime before that, Alex came home for the last time on leave. My mom still talks about the big party they had for him at their house. Alex seemed sad, mainly because he was leaving his family, and the men knew they were going overseas. He seemed to really like the paratroopers and talked about how much he loved jumping out of airplanes. I don’t know if he ever actually landed in an airplane—I think he jumped out of every airplane he went up in. He never smoked before he went into the Army, but he was smoking at the party, my mom said, so he had developed that bad habit and they were all worried for him. Not about the smoking—they knew he was going in harm’s way.

He wrote home just after arriving in Aldbourne:

Like the other paratroopers, Alex Jr. simply did what he had to do. The men trained in England from September 1943 to June 1944. I talked to Frank Perconte, who stood next to my uncle in roll call because their names were close together. Frank said that one day they got a three-day pass. The big thing was to go up to Aberdeen, Scotland, and he and Alex went. Alex was helping a woman with her luggage, and Frank was trying to talk Alex into chatting her up. But Alex said, “Oh no, I can’t do that, she’s married.”

Alex wrote more short notes over the fall, winter, and spring saying it had been constantly raining and how much he hated the weather in England, asking his sister to send him some candy bars and T-shirts, size thirty-six, and a pair of work gloves, size nine, and saying how much he missed not seeing his family over Christmas. He often talked about food. On December 5, 1943, he wrote:

Sometime when Alex was in England, his girlfriend back home in South Bend sent him a Dear John letter. The breakup didn’t seem to devastate him too badly, because he had another girlfriend in England pretty quickly afterward. It might have even been simultaneously, but knowing Junior, it was probably afterward. He was a pretty straight-arrow kind of guy. After the breakup, still in England, Alex wrote on April 10, 1944:

Easy Company vet Joe Lesniewski joined E Company in England. It wasn’t easy to come in as a replacement, and Joe said the first guy who ever talked to him was Alex. They got to be pretty good friends because they could both speak Polish. They hung around together with some other Polish-speaking guys, and Joe taught them all how to sing country and western songs.

Now, a lot of the details of what happened to Alex, from about D-day onward, we really don’t know. The only information we have is what Ambrose put in
Band of Brothers
.

We know that Alex jumped on D-day and landed in Normandy on the roof of a barn. He climbed down. That’s basically all we know of D-day. How he got back to his outfit, we don’t know. That story is lost.

One of the vets, Les Hashey, talked in the miniseries about how he joined the squad with Corporal Penkala. We never knew my uncle was a corporal, so the first thing I did when I met Les was ask about that. Les remembered him as a corporal, but he said it might have been an acting corporal. In the squad Alex and Skip were in, they were the only two from that squad who weren’t killed on D-day. So after D-day, they basically had to make up a new squad.

After D-day, June 6, 1944, the men fought in Normandy for about a month, then returned to England for a while. Alex wrote home after the fighting on July 22, 1944.

And once more, still in England, on August 20, 1944. The poignant line from that letter is:

A few years back, Joe Lesniewski showed me a pilot chute—the one that comes out first and pulls out the main chute—that Alex had signed after D-day. I was really happy to see that. Sometime later, Joe asked if I wanted to have the chute. I said, sure, I’d love to. So I’ve got that.

The men jumped into Holland for Operation Market-Garden in September 1944. Alex made that jump as well. I contacted a woman in Eindhoven through the Internet who said a soldier named Alex Penkala signed a ration book she had when she was a child. We have one letter after that, made just after the Holland jump, where Alex mentioned everything was okay. That’s the last letter home we have. As far as we know, Alex and Muck were the mortar squad all through Holland. Then came the Battle of the Bulge.

The way my uncle was killed in the miniseries was supposedly exactly how he died for real. It was January 10, 1945. The men were just outside of Foy, Belgium, in the Bois Jacques woods. They were being shelled heavily, and a shell landed directly in the foxhole where Skip Muck and Alex Penkala were, killing them both instantly. We’re not really sure what they were hit with. It was probably a 105, but it may have been an 88. I think most artillery barrages were 105s. So that’s probably what it was.