“Vinegar,” Uncle Herbert answered. “Want a taste?”
“Sure,” Dad said. He couldn’t remember ever tasting it before.
Uncle Herbert burst into laughter when Dad made a face and spit the liquid on the floor. “It wasn’t vinegar,” Uncle Herbert said. “It was piss.”
Dad was appalled and humiliated and “felt little remorse or sadness when [Uncle Herbert] died unexpectedly a few years later of a ruptured appendix.”
As a boy, Dad was gregarious and well liked, good in school, and a quick reader. He described school as “a daily adventure.” He looked up to his father, and they enjoyed a close relationship, although his home life wasn’t stable.
The family was poor. Not
poor
poor, but they certainly did not have much money in the family, or in the community. The Great Depression hit everyone hard. Dad described how the crops failed several years in a row, chickens died in the intense summer heat, and “great swirling clouds of grasshoppers ate everything in sight, even clothes hanging on the line.” The bank foreclosed on his grandparents’ farm. One summer his parents took him to a cousin’s house, said they were going away for the weekend, and left him for half a year while his father tried a new business venture. There’s a letter from the boy asking his mother to send him his baseball glove.
Dad went through junior high school in Jamestown. The family settled there for several years, then moved out west to Roseburg, Oregon, where his father had a new job in advertising. Dad started high school and became an athlete, proud and capable, playing football. He delivered newspapers every morning at five a.m. and made friends with one of the country’s most distinguished gunsmiths, who taught him how to shoot. The family ran out of money again and moved back to the Dakotas where they boarded with relatives. In high school and summers, Dad participated in the Citizens’ Military Training Corps, a predecessor program of ROTC. You didn’t get paid other than five cents per mile travel allowance to get to and from the camp. He hitched rides, got reimbursed for mileage, and pocketed the difference. Dad made twenty-five dollars over the summer, a huge amount then. He tried boxing as a sport and became the camp’s lightweight champion by a knockout.
Dad attended the University of North Dakota for one semester as a mining engineering major, then dropped out when his father became sick. He was needed at home to help run the family printing business. By the start of the next summer his father felt well enough to return to work, so Dad hitchhiked west and worked in a copper mine. He went back to university in the fall and continued scrambling along, doing odd jobs, playing football, and living in the football house for free, just trying to keep himself together financially.
Pearl Harbor was attacked and the world turned upside down. Dad wanted to join the Air Force and become a pilot, but his eyes weren’t good enough. His father objected to any enlistment, believing he would be deferred if he stayed in college. Dad caught a bus to Fargo where he enlisted anyway. He was sent to Fort Snelling for processing while waiting to be assigned elsewhere. He met a recruiter who told him the paratroopers were the best damn outfit in the Army, plus you made an extra fifty bucks. “I was offered the two most powerful appeals: glory and greed,” Dad wrote. “I signed on the dotted line right then and there.”
In the Company
Four days after enlisting, Dad rode a train to Toccoa, Georgia, to the then-named Camp Toombs (later renamed Camp Toccoa), where the 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment was being formed. He described the town and the camp:
Our train pulled into a little town stuck in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains. Somewhat prophetically, I thought, there was a coffin factory alongside the tracks near the depot, and I was reminded that duties of a paratrooper involved jumping out of airplanes into battle. A truck waited for us and we piled in and headed for the camp five miles out of town.
The camp was a collection of tarpaper shacks huddled along a hillside. It had served as a summer camp for Georgia National Guard units. Looming over it was a mountain called Currahee. That blooming mountain was to play a central role in our training. All eight of us [on the truck] were dispatched to W company, the holding unit for recruits pending assignment to an individual company.
Dad was soon assigned to Company E led by “Captain Herbert M. Sobel: big-nosed, swarthy, tall, lanky, and called simply, The Black Swan.” Dad was assigned his gear and quickly made a sergeant and squad leader because of his previous military training.
With Easy Company filled to its roster strength of about 145 officers and enlisted men, our full-scaled training began—nightmarish runs, journeys through the obstacle course, and the military training, endless long marches and night problems. Each day was a physical survival test beginning with the Currahee run to the top and back, round trip, 7 miles. Time en route, under one hour. Twice during the 13 weeks I twisted my ankle in the ruts on the road and spent about 10 days in an army hospital outside Toccoa.
We ran everywhere with and without full field packs and various personal and squad weapons. We ran as individuals and as units of various size. Mixed in with the physical training was regular basic training—weapons, close-order drill, squad, platoon, and company field problems, marksmanship, and shooting at the rifle range.
Throughout the basic training we interjected early parachute training, learning how to jump and land from modest heights without getting hurt, flinging ourselves out of airplane fuselages 30 feet in the air. It was a masterful training program to overcome the basic fear of jumping into space. The system worked.
Just before Thanksgiving 1942, the men marched from Toccoa to Atlanta, about 118 miles. It took three days.
We headed away from Camp Toccoa in a light rain. Our route took us over unpaved back roads of red Georgia clay, and we slipped and swore up and down the hills. As the blisters formed and we weakened, we shared packs and weapons. Late [the first] night we pulled into our camping spot, put up our pup tents, ate, then crawled into our tents and collapsed. We’d covered 40 miles and it was still raining.
That night it froze. I’ll never forget the morning agony of trying to cram my swollen feet into those frozen GI shoes. Somehow I did, along with 600 other guys, and that day we covered another 40 miles, now with much attention on us. We had a good public information officer, Lt. Jim Morton, who had worked on one of the Atlanta papers. He was getting us national publicity for our march. The Japanese marched tremendous distances at record speeds, and now an American army unit was demonstrating that it could travel farther and faster than the Japanese. It was just the stuff the nation needed.
The night of the third day we straggled into the outskirts of Atlanta to the campus of Oglethorpe University, beat, exhausted, and the darlings of the city. We weren’t too tired that night to put on our dress uniforms for a city seeking to honor fighting men. That night we couldn’t buy a drink, meal, or anything else in Atlanta. I went into a liquor store and a stranger offered to pay for whatever I wanted. I took two bottles of bourbon and gave him my thanks. It was a helluva night.
The next morning somehow we got most of the company formed up and headed down Peachtree Boulevard for a civic reception in the heart of the city. Dozens of bands were interspersed between our platoons, and the music, the welcome, and the whole event lifted our spirits. We were able to swing into downtown Atlanta in good order as we marched on to the rail depot for Fort Benning.
Fort Benning and parachute school proved easier for the men after the tough training they’d already received. They ran everywhere and did pushups all the time, but they proved fitter than their new drill instructors.
Five jumps were required to graduate and get their wings. The men learned how to pack their own chutes and practiced jumping from two hundred-foot towers. The first real jump came soon. Jumping was always optional, but a refusal to jump meant six months in the stockade. Dad described his first and following jumps:
I flung myself out the door, the chute opened with a snap, and a second later I was tumbling on the ground. Actually it was a little more like a minute before I floated down from 800 feet.
The rest of the jumps passed quickly. There was always just a little anxiety, and usually we looked up quickly after the opening shock to see if any of the chute’s 26 panels were blown and if the chute was filled properly.
Dad received his wings and a ten-day pass home. He returned to his parents’ house in Fargo, “swaggering through all the parties and nightlife in that part of the state.” Quickly, the leave ended and he returned to Benning, then was transferred to Camp McCall where more training occurred.
Dad became a first sergeant for the 3rd platoon, but found it too administrative and asked to be transferred to 1st Platoon as platoon sergeant. The company went on maneuvers in Tennessee during summer 1943, then was transferred to Fort Bragg, North Carolina, for more concentrated training.
In September 1943, the 506th was transferred to Camp Shanks, New York, then boarded the
Samaria
for the voyage across the Atlantic.
The
Samaria
was a miserable ship, crammed with bunks jammed into the old cabins. We slept in shifts. The food was absolutely atrocious, so vile that Salty [Harris] and I made a deal with the cooks of the Royal Marine gun crew, who had a mess on the boat deck, to feed us. It was a tremendous improvement over going down three decks into a mess hall that always smelled of boiled mutton.
The voyage itself was uneventful, dull, long. The highlight of it for me were the endless crap games in the corridors, and the fact that someone threw over the side the bags containing all the gear and personal items of our unloved first sergeant [Bill] Evans, who had replaced me in that post. I spent most of my time on deck, and perhaps that helped me avoid seasickness.
We arrived in Liverpool on a bright, sunny day in late September. As we sailed up the Mersey River to dock, all of us were craning our necks to see as much as we could of that land. As I peered around to see everything, a dive-bombing seagull scored a direct hit on my cheek. Welcome to England!
The men were sent to the little village Aldbourne, about 80 miles due west of London. Dad slept in a stable in Aldbourne that had its own stove, which he described as “singularly comfortable accommodations.”
He celebrated his twenty-first birthday nearby at the home of the Blakes, “a warm-hearted, gregarious family” who had known his father during WWI. A public swimming pool was nearby, and a seventeen-year-old neighbor girl offered to take him swimming. Dad dove in, thinking he would show this young English lass what a fine swimmer he was. She splashed past him with “a tremendous burst of speed” and handily beat him to the far end. Only then did she explain that she was the United Kingdom’s freestyle swimming champ.
The role Dad played in the mutiny against Captain Sobel has been widely discussed.
16
We have a letter he wrote home in November 1943 to his mother that reads simply:
Dear Mom,
Due to circumstances, etc. and to expedite communication between you and I, my address is now Company “I.” And don’t ask me why! This company will be all right although it is a helluva change from the old after 14 months. The new Joes are very friendly and I’ll be all right. No more news of note, so I’ll close.
Love and Kisses,
Your son
Myron
In his new company, Dad was going to be trained as a pathfinder, but immediately before the Normandy invasion he contacted Dick Winters and said he really wanted to be back with E Company. About June 1, 1944, five days before the Normandy jump, Dad’s orders came through and he was transferred back to Easy Company.
Normandy Invasion
Easy Company gathered its gear and was transported by trucks to an airbase under tight security. The men were shown maps and models of their invasion area and drop zones on the Cotentin Peninsula in Western France. A key objective was to take the city of Carentan, a major transportation center and link between the Omaha and Utah beach landing areas. Easy Company was scheduled to land a few miles north and west of the city.
The evening of June 5 found us out at the plane again, loaded down with individual and squad weapons, ammo, grenades, morphine syrettes for wounds, and Benzedrine to keep us awake for the first critical 72 hours. This night the signal was “go.” Most of us were so heavily loaded we had to be pushed and pulled up into our planes. In addition to my personal gear, I carried six rounds of bazooka ammunition in a parachute bag strapped in front of me.
The planes took off, formed up, and headed south and west. During the flight, I got a glimpse of the thousands of ships in the invasion fleet dotting the moonlit sea. We swung east and I watched the tracers thrown up by Germans who occupied the British-owned channel islands of Jersey and Guernsey. I saw the dark mass of France as we crossed the [peninsula] before jump time. A minute later we were ordered to stand up and hook up, attaching our parachute connectors to the cable along the roof of the plane.
I was end man on the stick [18 men], waiting to jump while standing on an elevated wooden platform between two 50-gallon drums of aviation gas carried as reserve fuel. Our plane started getting hit. Sounded like someone pounded on a great brass plate at high speed.
[P.F.C. Roy] Cobb, the fellow immediately in front of me was hit and fell on the floor groaning. While I was seeing how badly Cobb was hurt, the green light came on and Lt. Harry Welsh led our stick out the door. The plane was lurching as the pilot took evasive action against the fire from the ground. Our orders were to jump unless severely wounded. I had to unsnap my connector to the cable, move it around in front of Cobb’s and head for the door of the plane. I could see the green light swinging in front of me. The conduit holding the light fixtures had been torn loose from the wall of the plane. I pushed it aside and dove out the door.
My chute opened with a solid, jarring, slamming pound, and I looked around. I could see some buildings on fire, one plane going down in flames, and a few tracers, but none very close to me. I landed hard in an orchard with my chute draped over an apple tree. I was all alone.