Easy Company Soldier (15 page)

A few of us went to Winters or Compton—can't remember which—and said there was no way Jackson was ready for duty again; the guy should be back in a hospital. Winters checked him out, agreed, and read the riot act to regimental medics who'd given the thumbs-up for his return. Jackson was returned to Oxford. But he'd recovered, and here he was, ready to go again. Ready to fight. I looked at him
and just mentally shook my head in amazement. What an amazing bunch of guys.

Spirits were high. We were well rested, and no longer being hounded by the likes of Sobel and Evans, God rest his soul. Winters had replaced the unreasonableness of these two with a sense of compassion and fairness. It was clear and sunny over Holland, a rarity around here. High noon, September 17, 1944. Time to get this war over with, maybe by Christmas.

As I neared the ground, the thousands of parachutes near and far looked like so many jellyfish floating in the Warrenton boat basin back home. Compared to Normandy, landing in Holland was a breeze, the biggest concern being hit by falling equipment or a glider. No hedgerows. No flak. No darkness. We quickly assembled in a nearby wooded area, the Zonsche Forest. Suddenly, I heard a sickening sound in the sky: Two gliders had collided and, with a sort of pathetic quiet, fell to earth.

We moved east to the Son-Veghel highway, then headed south for our first objective: capturing the small town of Son and, more important, a bridge over the Wilhelmina Canal, just south. Capturing Son was a cakewalk—the Germans had fallen back—and now we needed to capture the
bridge. But less than a kilometer from the bridge, our column was pounded by German 88 artillery and a machine gun, both coming at us from straight down the road.

Nobody got hit, but we were under serious attack. And that allowed the Germans to finish the job of wiring the bridge with explosives to blow it, a strategic move that would slow the Allied march considerably. Covering the east side of the road, Easy Company pushed forward, firing rifles and lobbing mortar shells, finally silencing the Germans. But not until they'd exploded the bridge. That night, we lashed a bunch of small boats together and crossed in the darkness. We would attack Eindhoven the next morning, E Company entering the city from the northeast.

As we approached the city of about one hundred thousand, civilians and partisans were eager to point out locations of holed-up Germans, having been under the Nazi thumb for more than than five years now. The Dutch, showering us with shouts of “Nice to see you” and gifts and invitations for food and drink, were far more helpful in this regard than the French. In fact, so many Easy Company guys had been sent to follow leads like this that Buck Compton and Bill Guarnere couldn't spare any more men.

But I was told to go with some other E Company men to check out one report of German soldiers holed up in a basement. I was packing a tommy gun. We yelled for them to come out, and lo and behold, they filed up like model prisoners—ten to fifteen of them. I was surprised at the ease with which they gave themselves up.

Meanwhile, others in Easy Company didn't have it so good. Lt. Bob Brewer was leading a patrol on the outskirts of town when a sniper caught him right in the throat with a bullet. He went down like a man who would never get up. The
guys around him—I was elsewhere—saw the blood pouring from his neck, saw him writhing on the ground, and with no medic around gave him up for dead. But, when the skirmish was over, a Dutch farmer raced to Brewer, stopped the bleeding, and most likely saved his life. When medics came across Brewer, he was still very much alive. They claimed that without the farmer's help, Brewer would certainly have died. Instead, he was shipped out to England and went on to live a fruitful life, spending a good part of it in the CIA.

We met little resistance and had Eindhoven in our hands by late in the day, then awaited the Brits and the U.S.-made Sherman tanks they were driving. They soon arrived. At this rate, I figured, I'd be in Astoria for Christmas. At daylight the next morning, Dutch women moved through the fog, delivering cookies to our foxholes. What service! These Dutch were wonderful. But our walk in the park was about to turn bloody.

As we pulled a U-turn and swung back north, in pursuit of a tiny village called Nuenen, we moved through and were just on the outskirts when it happened. All was quiet. But, then, German machine-gun fire broke out from both flanks. A German panzer unit had formed a half-moon defense.

“Kraut tanks, kraut tanks!” soldiers were yelling. Apparently a panzer brigade, stationed just to the east in Helmond, had arrived with fifty tanks. We'd never seen an offensive like that. One of the tanks fired on a British tank and hit it dead-on. Flames burst into the sky. The panicked crew popped out, the gunner last. With no legs. The tank, on its own, kept moving forward, threatening to run over our own guys, who had to slither toward the enemy to avoid being squashed, the results of which we'd seen in Normandy. It wasn't pretty.

A second British tank emerged. It, too, got blasted. Two more went up in smoke. Two others turned and headed back to Nuenen. Easy Company fell back with them, bullets adding insult to injury on our retreat.

A handful of guys went down. One was Buck Compton, taking bullets in his butt. A handful of us made our way toward him.

“Get the hell out of here!” he said. “Leave me!”

We ignored his pleas. Eugene Roe, our medic, crouched to give him some help. Bullets flew around us.

“Let the friggin' Germans take care of me,” Compton said above the sound of machine-gun fire and more. “Take care of yourselves.”

Given the way we were being pounded, it seemed like a good idea, but no way were we leaving Buck. His size—he was 220 pounds—almost meant he'd get his way by default. But then someone thought fast: We ripped the door off a farm outbuilding and Guarnere, Toye, Babe Heffron, and I all but lashed him to it and dragged him to a roadside ditch until we could slide him on a tank, facedown since his wounds were on his backside.

I was always amazed at how black humor showed its face amid the horror of war. Carwood Lipton looked at Compton and laughed, having heard that the bullet had gone in one cheek and out the other. “You're the only guy I saw who got hit with one bullet and got four holes in him,” he said. Compton didn't think it was as funny as Lipton and calmly threatened to kill him if he ever got off the friggin' tank.

Around us, guys were going down like bowling pins. Chuck Grant took a hit. Some guy—can't remember who—turned to jelly amid the hail of machine-gun bullets. Just curled up in a ball against some rock wall and tried to will
himself back home or something. We'd lost four men; eleven others were wounded. One had gone nuts. So we did the only thing we could do: got the hell out of there—as in retreat. It felt rotten.

The Germans had Holland and weren't about to give it back. We wanted to continue heading north to Nijmegen on what we'd started calling Hell's Highway. Ultimate goal: Germany. Their goal was to get through to the highway and split our forces. They hadn't done it at Nuenen, but would try again. And succeed.

Near Veghel, we'd been called to an armored column of British tanks and vehicles en route north. For the first time in Holland, we were in trucks. We'd got reports from the Dutch underground that a panzer attack was headed northwest toward Uden, another town just north of Veghel. Suddenly, a German panzer task force slammed through our column, splitting Easy Company in two. One group, headed by Winters and including Skip and Toye, ended up in Uden. A small group of others, about eight of us, headed by Guarnere, were pinned down in Veghel, about three miles southwest. The Germans had circled the town with tanks and were shooting the living hell out of everything. Bullets zinging. Walls exploding. Guys screaming. The worst we saw in Holland. Pure hell.

Guarnere and I talked it over. We needed to locate the F company commander and explain our dilemma. Tell him we could, if he wanted, join up with his group. The officer told us to keep under cover; he'd let us know if we could be of use. We wound up in the cellar of a house packed with Dutch family members and neighbors on the north fringe of
the battle lines. Outside, shells, bullets, mortars, and grenades had turned the quiet town into another stop on Hell's Highway. The noise and pounding wouldn't stop. We thought we were goners. Men and women were sobbing. Praying. Children were crying. The works. Not that we soldiers weren't about to pee our pants, too. For all we knew, the rest of our company had been blown from here to hell's half acre and before long the front door would get busted down and we'd all be learning our Heil Hitlers. Or worse. Later, we learned that the others in our company had assumed the same thing about us: that we were all goners.

The pounding went on for hours. Overnight. Wait and wonder. Minute by minute. Hour by hour. Would we ever get out of here alive? And what about the rest of Easy Company? Were they even still alive?

In the afternoon, things quieted down outside. Guarnere came to me. “Come with me, Malark, we're going to do some sightseeing.”

We put on our helmets and went up the stairs. Slowly, Bill turned the handle of the door and swung it open. We crept outside, taking cover wherever we could. You didn't have to be Einstein to know we were surrounded. An occasional round of machine-gun fire tattered in the distance. A shell kaboomed a block away. A bullet pinged here and there. Safer, yes, but still not safe. Then I saw one of the most amazing things I'd ever seen in war: a British tank crew parked in the street, enjoying their four-o'clock tea.

Finally, some British planes—Beaufort tank busters—started diving on the German tanks on the perimeter of the town, and with help from British tanks and 506th infantry, the Germans were driven off. We survived, though we were fairly sure the rest of the company hadn't fared as
well. Later, after we'd left the cellar and holed up in an orchard, we'd learn Winters and his guys had dodged death's bullet, too.

Behind enemy lines, Winters had stood in the belfry of a church in Uden, observing the battle in Veghel several miles away, fairly sure we were either dead, wounded, or POWs. Both sections of Easy Company came out nearly physically unscathed, but emotionally taken to our limits. When we met up, both platoons thinking the worst had happened to each other, it was a rare moment of relief, a moment that reminded us to never take each other for granted. We'd cheated death on that day, but we wouldn't be so lucky in the future.

We hunkered down in a drizzle. It was cold. The guys who'd been with Winters at Uden dug shallow foxholes. Those of us who'd just had the daylights shelled out of us dug so deep that we hit water. We pulled our raincoats over our shoulders and tried to sleep.

For now, the Germans hadn't been able to hold Uden and Veghel. I thought about those British officers stopping for four-o'clock tea beside a tank, a skirmish being fought in the distance. But after those tank busters saved our butts, I wasn't about to bash the British for tea-drinking amid war. On that day, they saved my life.

Several days later, a German force cut the road again north of Veghel. E Company was intact, just north, in Uden and was sent out to attack the panzer unit from the east. We were working with British tanks and had reached a pine thicket several hundred yards off the Veghel-Uden highway. Suddenly, from west of the road like a shark half-hidden in the shallows, a Tiger tank emerged, with just its turret and 88 barrel showing.

We had five Sherman tanks, being run by the British, attached to our company. Someone ran for our British tank commander and took him to a sandy knoll, where the Tiger could clearly be seen through a small opening in the trees. He radioed for one of our tanks to come up. It spun its tracks so its 75 mm cannon could get a bead on the turret of the Tiger. That done, the commander suddenly did a tactical about-face, saying he didn't want to fire from that position.

“He'll get only one shot from here, and if he misses, the Tiger will take him out,” he said.

No, he had a better idea. He had the five tanks line up about a hundred yards to the south, in a narrow strip of pines. They'd move through the trees and open fire from the edge of the trees before breaking into the sandy field. We, the 2nd Platoon, would space ourselves between the tanks for an assault across the field to the Veghel-Uden highway.

It proved to be a terrible mistake. The Tiger had seen our tanks in the thicket and picked off each of the five—
boom, boom, boom, boom, boom
—like a state-fair shooting gallery. When the first one was hit, a big chunk of hot metal hit me in the side of the leg. It tore a leg pocket but didn't hurt me. Meanwhile, the tanks were ablaze, and guys inside screaming. With help from others, I climbed the turret of one and pulled out a couple of guys from the panicked British tank crew, not easy since a couple of them were on fire. The commander's hands had been blown off. We threw blankets and sand on them to douse the flames and left the men for the medics. Their future didn't look good.

We headed out into the open, machine-gun bullets tattering the sand. One of our guys, a lieutenant, went nuts and
just buried his head in the sand. Froze up completely. Scared to death. Sgt. Bill Guarnere was screaming at him to get his act together.

“You're supposed to be leadin' the damn platoon!” he yelled. When it was over, Winters got that officer right out of there in a hurry. He was later seen at an aid station, shot through the hand, the wound suspected of being self-inflicted.

I found some cover and started launching mortars at a German machine-gun position. 'You got it!” yelled Winters. “Great shot.” In the distance, the Tiger, having made quick work of the Shermans, pulled out. We might have been mowed down like fish in a barrel, but its machine guns were useless because the crown in the road blocked his line to us. Sometimes in war, your life is spared by strange things—in this case, by a Dutch engineer who crowned a road for drainage.