Easy Company Soldier (12 page)

Soon Winters was yelling at me again. Cleveland Petty had taken a bullet in the neck. Winters wanted me on the
machine gun between the first and second German guns. I fired that gun for almost an hour, shooting at German positions on the farm road along Brecourt Manor. Then Winters had me move west to disrupt any German infiltration coming in behind us. It was a lonely job.

Once, I heard German voices from the opposite side of the hedgerow. I threw five or six grenades down the hedgerow as far I could. Later, I saw two Germans crossing the west end of the field and fired a couple of rounds that probably scared them, but didn't hit them. My only wounds were from nettles—a far better option than German bullets.

“Malark, pull back to the trench!” yelled Guarnere after a while.

As we left, I threw a fragmentation grenade down the barrel of the first gun to put it out of commission. We returned to the road we'd been on before the attack. I found the mortar tube I had left there—the base plate and bipod were back where I'd landed—and fired a dozen rounds in the direction of the Germans near the manor. When I finished firing the mortar, it was almost completely buried because of the force of its being fired. I was trying to unearth the tube when I looked up to see the oddest sight—a Frenchman, an older gentleman, using a shovel to help me dig it out. I nodded thanks to him. He nodded back.

After a few hours of fighting, we'd knocked out three guns but couldn't get the fourth. A stalemate was reached, though Lieutenant Speirs and three men from D Company knocked out the last gun. We withdrew, unable to get reinforcements or more ammunition to us so we could clean up some machine-gun nests. Those who tried to reach us had either been killed, wounded, or driven off. Of our men, four had been killed and two wounded. The Germans had lost
fifteen men. We'd taken twelve prisoners, scattering the rest. But Winters had a plan to finish what we'd started.

Joe Toye noticed a barn and we sauntered over for a little shut-eye; we hadn't slept in nearly two days.

“Where the hell's your helmet, Malark?” said Toye.

“Left it back under that gun.”

With that, I nodded off to sleep. But not for long.

“Malark, Toye!” It was Dick Winters. “Let's go. Hang tough!”

Winters had secured four Sherman tanks coming inland from Utah Beach. We went back to Brecourt Manor with them and had them fire everything they had to knock out the remaining machine-gun nests. The tanks broke through the hedgerow with Guarnere, Joe, and me running alongside them. There was no German opposition. The enemy was quickly overrun, some fleeing, most dead. More than a dozen horses had been killed. Smoke from small fires rose in the air. Finally, it was all quiet, save for a few moans and groans from the wounded.

I recovered my helmet, which was good because I had a photo of Bernice tucked inside it. We reached the causeway that had been secured. Set up defensive positions for the night. And finally got ourselves some sleep in some bombed-out village. It was about 8:00
P.M.

War, I was beginning to realize, was like a deadly athletic contest whose score you seldom knew even while you were playing the game. War was fought without context; you seldom realize how your piece fits into the larger puzzle. Only later would we learn that taking out those guns had probably saved scores of lives of soldiers coming ashore at Utah Beach. That as confusing as D-day had been for the airborne troops and as many foul-ups as we'd had—of the thirteen howitzers
the 377th Parachute Field Artillery Battalion dropped that night, the Germans wound up with twelve—it was even more confusing for the enemy, because we'd dropped over such a wide, scattered area we were tough to pin down. Lots went wrong in our air operation that day. But one thing went right: Because we took care of business on the ground, our boys had an easier time getting inland, and the Germans couldn't get reinforcements near the coast.

For his efforts that day, Winters received the Distinguished Service Cross. Along with a handful of others, I won a Bronze Star with Oak Leaf Cluster, my Luger-fetching incident having conveniently been overlooked by Winters. As I told Dick years later, “We were luckier'n hell at Brecourt.” His response? “Whataya mean, Malark? We were
effective.
” He also pointed out that he hadn't called me an “idiot” when I'd run after what I'd thought was a German Luger. “I called you a
stupid
idiot.” (Decades later, Winters would say in his book,
Beyond Band of Brothers,
that he chose me, Compton, and Guarnere for one group because we were “soldiers who instinctively understood the intricacies of battle.” That meant a lot to me.)

Decades later, I would be a guest of the de Vallavielle family, who owned Brecourt Manor, and learn how the Germans had appeared at their door in April, two months before the invasion, and told them they would need to leave. An artillery battery was being placed there. The Germans allowed the family to keep running their dairy operation, mainly because the Germans wanted the milk. On D-day morning, those guns started pounding the Normandy coast about 7:00
A.M.
, before we arrived. After the battle, one of the farmer's sons, twenty-four-year-old Michel, emerged from the outbuilding where the family had been staying. He saw the dead bodies. Dead
horses. Shattered carts. Then an American paratrooper saw him. Mistaking him for a German, the soldier fired five shots at him. Looking closer, the soldier realized he'd mistaken a civilian for the enemy.
My God!
Michel was rushed to an aid station on Utah Beach. He would live, but spent eight months in an English hospital—and literally decades wondering what had happened that day at Brecourt Manor. Not until talking face-to-face with me—not the soldier who shot him, by the way—would he find out the full story. He did not hold a grudge for being shot. Instead, Michel de Vallavielle would one day establish and maintain the D-Day Museum at Utah Beach in honor of men like those in Easy Company who'd liberated his homeland.

Normandy, France, was beauty and the beast. The sprinkling of land unspoiled by war was the beauty. We, the soldiers, were the beasts. I'd see miles and miles of fields and orchards that, in places, reminded me of spots I'd seen in the Willamette Valley while hitchhiking from Astoria to Eugene back in Oregon. Then, suddenly, I'd see the remains of a horse splattered by artillery, the legs here, the head there. In some places, a breeze would bring the smell of grass and trees; in others, the rancid odor of death. Germans. Americans. Civilians. Animals. Whatever got in the way of war. One of the biggest problems we were having was taking care of our dead—getting them buried. Some of our Graves Registration guys resorted to getting drunk to do their jobs.

In the States, just as we were all coming of age and getting comfortable with school, girlfriends, jobs, along came a war. In France, just when we were all getting comfortable with war, along came reminders of home. Truth is that, lately, we hadn't been able to get comfortable with either.

Pvt. Alton More came to me a few days after D-day—we were waiting for orders—and suggested we go into Ste.-Mère-Église. More was a rugged John Wayne type, the son of a saloonkeeper in Casper, Wyoming. He had married his high school sweetheart, and their first child was born soon after we'd arrived in England.

“Malark, I hear there's a pile of musette bags full of chocolate bars just waiting for a couple a guys like you and me to save from melting.”

Frankly, there wasn't much chance of chocolate melting; Normandy was unseasonably cold and wet, for summer. The mosquitoes were thicker'n anything I'd seen in Oregon, where they can be plenty bad. And I was uneasy when I heard the bags had belonged to our soldiers who'd been killed. But we were bored and headed into town, the first liberated French village. We found the rumored bags in a vacant lot and emptied them upside down, looking for candy bars, rations, money, whatever.

Suddenly, More dropped to his knees and, in a voice almost inaudible, said, “We gotta get the hell out of here, Malark.” I looked over at him. He had broken down and was crying. Then I looked at the musette bag he'd just opened. Inside were a knitted pair of pink baby bootees. Not another word was said. We put the stuff back and left. Humbled. And, I think, a tad ashamed at the disrespect we'd shown to our fallen comrades.

Near Carentan, a town of about four thousand people, E Company was hunkered down, prepping for a final assault to capture it. Carentan lay astride the main road running to Cherbourg at the tip of the Cotentin Peninsula. The Germans wanted to keep the town; we needed it to bridge incoming troops from Omaha Beach and Utah Beach, north and south. We were camped on a roadway leading to the Douve River estuary when, about 2:00 a.m., a terrifying siren screamed in the sky. I buried my head in a roadside ditch, thinking whatever it was, it was headed straight for me. The sound faded in a few seconds. But it came back, and this time I stood and watched. It was a Stuka dive-bomber strafing Carentan. I never saw another one the rest of the war, and I'm convinced that, as a psychological weapon, it did the trick. I reminded myself,
Never relax, Malarkey.

The next morning, we were sent to the west side of Carentan. Winters had made me mortar sergeant of the 2nd Platoon. Compton was the platoon leader. We reached an orchard. Buck sent me up a tree to see if I could give sighting instructions on a machine gun unleashing harassing fire through the attack zone.

Ah, yes, Bomba the Jungle Boy back in action. I headed up the apple tree—far easier than the firs and hemlocks of Astoria—and turned around to give a sighting to the gunner. Suddenly, as I looked down, my legs went wobbly. I grabbed the tree in a death grip, fearing I would fall. Slowly—and trying to hide my fear from the other guys—I slid down the limbs and trunk. Goodness, if I suddenly had a fear of heights, how was I going to handle our next jump?

On June 12, on the edge of Carentan, the 506th's 2nd Battalion, of which the 2nd Platoon was part, was walking down a road, readying for our all-important attack. It was dawn. F Company was on our left flank, D Company in reserve. Suddenly, all hell broke loose. One or two German troopers came out in the middle of the intersection, pouring machine-gun fire up and down the road. Mortar fire joined the barrage. So did tanks. They virtually stripped the hedgerow and we clung to the earth, cussing and praying in equal measure. The enemy fire split our platoon; the Germans were in a perfect position to wipe out not only our platoon, but the entire company. We scrambled to the ditches along the road, next to hedgerows, so panicked we were all but digging foxholes with our fingers. You had the feeling if you popped your head up, it'd soon be gone. It was almost as if the Germans were mowing down that entire hedgerow to get to us. It was the heaviest fire I would ever experience in war. Period.

“Move out!” Winters yelled.

Nobody moved, as if pinned in the ditches.

“I said, ‘Move it!' Let's go!”

Still, nobody went.

Finally, Winters got hotter than I've ever seen him, and we got the idea: We reluctantly headed forward—early-game nerves, I suppose. When someone tossed a grenade to take care of the machine-gun nest, we had the intersection under control. The Germans withdrew. Knowing our positions, though, they rained mortar fire and machine-gun fire on us from afar. Guys around me were going down right and left. Winters took a hit in the lower leg.

It had been a fast and furious attack. At the end, amid moans of wounded soldiers and occasional shots, I heard the
oddest thing: “Hail Mary, mother of Jesus, full of grace …” Over and over. Not the panicked voice of a wounded soldier, but the stoic, almost calm voice of someone else. “Hail Mary, mother of Jesus, full of grace …” I glanced up and there was Father John Maloney, holding a small cross in his hands and walking down the center of the road, administering last rites to our dying. Never seen anything like it, a priest administering last rites with bullets bouncing around his feet. Takes a hell of a lot of conviction, and faith, for a man to do that. Later, he'd be awarded the Distinguished Service Cross for his courage under fire.

Throughout the night, the Germans fired occasional shots. Were they going to mount a full-fledged counterattack at night? Needless to say, few of us slept well. What made it worse was Floyd Talbert getting gored by one of his own guys. He'd gently tapped another soldier to wake him, and the guy had, in a panic, turned and bayoneted Talbert. We weren't sure he'd make it, but he survived.

At dawn, we readied for what we hoped would be a final attack to drive the Germans from the outskirts of Carentan. Winters would later call it the “tightest spot” Easy Company found itself in during the war, though I thought plenty of others qualified.

We rained down everything we had on the Germans; they did the same to us. At some point, E Company was the only force holding the line; units on either side had fallen back under fire, leaving us out there like sitting ducks. We had a flooded area to our right flank, and nobody on our left.