Descending from the Clouds: A Memoir of Combat in the 505 Parachute Infantry Regiment, 82d Airborne Division

Preface

The first time I went up in a plane I jumped out of it. It was late September 1942, and I was seventeen years old. I had lied about my age when I joined the military, so I had already served two years when I earned the right to blouse my trousers as a graduate of the Parachute School at Fort Benning. During most of World War II, I was a member of Company F, 505th Parachute Infantry Regiment, 82d Airborne Division, in which I served from July 1943 to August 1945 in the European Theater of Operations (ETO), where I made three of the regiment’s four combat jumps, dropping in Italy, Normandy, and Holland.

Unlike the 101st Airborne and all other airborne units, the 82d had to develop very quickly under the pressure of crucial training directed at its early combat operations in Sicily and Italy. The training, tactics, organization and everything else that had to do with parachute troops were completely new, and we could not afford the time to perfect procedures before heading off for combat. The United States had no doctrine about airborne warfare, and the Army had never written anything about parachute operations: we wrote the book as we went along, and we added, changed, and deleted as we matured.

From the time I was assigned to the regiment in July 1943 up to VE-Day, the Allied victory in Europe on May 8, 1945, I was a rifleman in the 1st Squad, 3d Platoon of F Company, 2d Battalion, 505, where I moved up from private to squad leader, platoon sergeant, and platoon leader. Historians, biographers and generals have chronicled the proud history of the 505 and the 82d Airborne, their leaders’ lives, decisions and military strategies, and I think it’s fair to say that not many of these works have escaped me. More recently, a number of excellent books have at last begun to communicate the reality of the rank-and-file on the line, including memoirs by soldiers themselves. But to date, these memoirs have most often portrayed the experience of a single campaign. Never, to my knowledge, has anyone sat down to trace his evolution as a front-line parachute infantryman throughout the entire course of the war. This is what I have attempted to do in this memoir.

To the extent that my story is representative, it is the story of how the rapid evolution of airborne warfare during World War II shaped and was shaped by front-line parachute infantry soldiers. In showing how I fared through all the campaigns of the 505 from Sicily through the Ardennes, I’ve tried to convey the day-to-day reality, thoughts, hopes, fears, and fates of fellow paratroopers, as well as the abundant sense of irony and black humor present at the front. I felt it was especially crucial to show how we adapted and developed our fighting skills, and how we were transformed as individuals and human beings under the pressure of extensive periods of combat. On this ability to quickly adapt depended our survival, as illustrated by an epitaph in the mock cemetery at Fort Benning:

Here lie the bones of Lieutenant Jones

A graduate of this institution,

He died on the night of his very first fight,

While using the school solution.¹

No matter how well we learned this lesson, facts beyond our control enormously influenced our casualty rates. Today almost nobody remembers that the practice of individual rotation did not begin until the Korean War, when the Army started developing a one-year policy that even included R&R leave. I first heard the word rotation in 1944, after I had been overseas for nineteen months straight, most of it on the front. For the entire 2d Battalion 505, the quota for our new so-called rotation policy was only two men. Based on statistics from November 1944, just 6 percent of all U.S. Army personnel in the ETO were riflemen, and yet we suffered most of the casualties. Think of it: there were 2,588,983 U.S. Army personnel in the ETO at the end of November 1944, but only 152,280 were in rifle platoons. We made up 68 percent of the total authorized strength of an infantry division, but our casualty rate was an incredible 95 percent. Few of us were lucky enough to survive, and every year fewer of us who did survive remain to tell the tale. This has added urgency to my desire to give another perspective, a bottom-up historical account of airborne warfare in the ETO.²

There is, of course, the problem of memory. Combat is an odd experience. Your point of view may differ from that of the person right next to you in the squad or even your fire team. One unit may have a much tougher time than another unit right next door. Experiences vary, and trying to reconstruct and articulate them so long after they occurred only complicates the problem. Rarely as a lowly private—or as a squad sergeant or even a platoon sergeant—did I have the full picture of what was going on. Our objectives were immediate: stay alive, assemble after a jump, get on with the duties at hand.

I do not pretend to recall all of my wartime experiences on a day-to-day basis. Yet I cannot get over the vividness of the experiences I do remember, and the way they remain so firmly fixed in my mind, as if they had happened only yesterday. During numerous reunions of the 505 Regimental Combat Team, I discovered friends and unit members often remembered the same events just as vividly, but very differently than I do. So where, I’ve so often asked myself, is the truth, the real definition of the experience? Surely, it is in the eyes of the beholder.

Then there is the problem of long silence. It has often been noted that most World War II veterans do not talk about their wartime experiences. This is the second reason I have undertaken this book. Immediately after the war, I was overwhelmed with a feeling of anger that probably had its roots in my first day of combat, grew until the last shot I fired, and then kept right on going. This anger, and the terrible sadness about what we had seen and done were typical of combat veterans immediately after the war. Long after we had made the transition back to civilian life, these emotions still made it stressful even to get into a discussion about the war. We all wanted to forget the experience.

Although it took me many years, I finally concluded that this inability or refusal to talk about the war amounted to a kind of collusion. My silence had deprived my children of a vital part of their heritage, and they had a right to know.

But how could I find the words to covey the unnameable? Combat veterans do not like to talk about their experiences because they mostly believe that no one who has not had to undergo combat can ever understand what it is like to be on the front line. We were different from all other soldiers; for us, killing and staying alive was not an emergency situation of limited duration, it was a full-time occupation for weeks or months on end. Among ourselves, at reunions, the talk is free and fast. Although the conversations are often humorous, they do get serious. It is when outsiders move in that combat veterans become silent.

This memoir, then, is written for our children. It is also written to honor the many soldiers who died on the line, and in the hope that other survivors might find themselves in my story.

Chapter 1

Enlistment and Premobilization Training, 112th Infantry, Pennsylvania Army National Guard

The first time I thought about joining the Army was in tenth grade chemistry class, when I spied a classmate reading a machine gun manual. I showed interest, we talked, and the outcome was that I went to the Armory and joined up. I don’t know if I talked it over with anyone, or if I just went and did it. I’d turned fifteen a few months earlier, on December 19, 1939. The legal age for enlisting was eighteen, so of course I had to lie about my age. I gave my new birthday as April 2, 1922. I figured I could remember 2/22, and hoped I’d remember April, the month of my enlistment.

I enlisted in the Pennsylvania Army National Guard on April 19, 1940, in my hometown of Erie, Pennsylvania. I discovered that eight or ten students from my school, for the most part underage, were already in the Guard. We were in Company H of the 2d Battalion of the 112th Infantry Regiment in the 28th Infantry Division. This was a heavy weapons company consisting of two platoons of water-cooled .30-caliber machine guns: the antitank platoon and the 81mm mortar platoon. The battalion antitank platoon was supposed to have .50-caliber machine guns as their antitank weapon. I mention this only because it’s so ridiculous.

I had always been interested in the military, and World War II was starting to heat up. I remember poring over books about the Civil War at my Great-aunt Myra’s in Kennedy, New York. Aunt Myra’s relatives had fought in that war, and her library was full of first-person accounts. When England and France declared war on Germany in September 1939, I spent study hall and any other free time I had reading Time, Life and Newsweek. Following the course of the war in my high school library, I thought we would soon become involved.

Because my mother and father were divorced, I guess I was seeking something to anchor my life as well as the spirit of adventure. My sister Vangie and her husband Ronnie, with whom I was living, weren’t too happy with me for enlisting. My older brother Vern wasn’t around at the time. My dad didn’t object, because the Guard was paying us a dollar for every drill. That amounted to $12.00 to $14.00 a quarter, a significant amount of money for a fifteen-year-old in 1940, when the average laborer was earning $15.00 to $20.00 a week. When my mother found out, she was very upset. She either visited the Armory or wrote a letter to the battalion commander, Lt Col Momeyer, protesting my enlistment. No one told me about this at the time; I only found out long after the fact.

The distance from my sister’s home to the Armory in Erie was at least eight miles, and I walked or hitchhiked to and from drills, which took place on Friday evenings. Guards received all their training from the instructors within their parent company. My first sergeant for my first two years was Sergeant Rohaly, who looked to me like a grandfather. I think he was of Russian origin—at least we called him the mad Russian behind his back—and his vocabulary was very limited, except for military terms. He was quite a character, a real hard-nosed first sergeant.

We didn’t receive the best training. In addition to drilling two hours a week, we went to the Armory for unpaid range firing. We used .22-caliber rifles for marksmanship training and a sub-caliber firing device that we attached to the .30-caliber water-cooled machine gun to enable it to fire .22-caliber ammunition. This allowed us to fire on a range in the basement of the Armory. We also received instruction in close-order drill in the basement, and attended classes on basic military subjects taught by a sergeant or corporal who had probably been trained a couple of years earlier under the same conditions.

I remember parading in Erie wearing the old Class A uniform. The only part of it I ever liked was the spiffy campaign hat that looked like the hat worn by Smokey the Bear. Running around the brim was a bright blue cord, the color of the infantry, with a couple of doodads hanging from it. I shelled out $14.00 for that hat, a fortune for a kid like me, but our uniforms changed before I had the chance to wear it.

In the very beginning, we had wrapped leggings. They were nothing but ribbons about an inch and a quarter wide that you had to wrap around your legs. Next we were issued leather leggings originally designed for the cavalry, because there weren’t enough canvas leggings for the entire infantry. We did eventually get these and OD (olive drab) woolen trousers that we wore with a woolen coat or blouse, but the uniform was hot and uncomfortable. During parades, we’d march over to State Street, up to the stadium, over 26th to Parade, and then back down to the Armory at 6th Street. It was a matter of fifty-two long blocks, a good six miles, quite a march for part-time civilian soldiers sweating in heavy wool.

Shortly after I enlisted, we were told that the 28th Division would participate in field army maneuvers at a base camp near Ogdensburg, in upstate New York. Annual training time was extended to three weeks from the usual two. We were billeted in six- or eight-man tents laid out in company streets. I was impressed with what I saw: the horse cavalry units, many large artillery guns, observation balloons, and Army planes. As I was only fifteen and had never been away from home for so long, I did feel homesick. The song Sierra Sue still sticks in my mind and reminds me of those days: Just like the song, I was full of sadness and loneliness. I went to town once but quickly returned to camp because the soldiers were so thick I could hardly walk on the streets.

I sometimes wonder if the Army maneuvers of 1940 weren’t undertaken just to publicize the shortage of weapons and training. When we went on maneuvers in August, our only real weapons were the .45-caliber pistols we carried as individual weapons, and .30-caliber water-cooled machine guns dating from World War I. The antitank platoon built wooden mock-ups of the .50-caliber machine gun, and the 81mm mortar platoon carried lengths of stovepipe or steel pipe with a wooden base plate to simulate actual weapons.

Mobility was also a real problem. The machine gun platoon had a two-wheeled cart for each machine gun squad, with rubber-tired wheels and a draw bar so two men could pull the cart. We mounted the tripod on the cart, mounted the gun on the tripod, and then lugged away. If we were lucky, we got to pull the cart along a road; if we were unlucky, we would have to hand-carry the gun across rough terrain. This meant we had to carry either a 51-pound tripod or a 33-pound water-cooled gun or two 20-pound ammo boxes—quite a load for a kid like me at 5 feet 8 inches and 128 pounds. We also carried heavy-walled steel water cans used to cool the barrel of the .30-caliber machine guns. Once the guns started firing and heating up the barrels, the water moved from the jacket around the barrel into the water can and recirculated.

Thus was our condition when we participated in a parade of division-size or larger, where the honored guests were the President of the United States, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and the Prime Minister of Canada. We marched a good number of miles to the parade grounds, all the while lugging those damn machine gun carts in the August sun. We were in our old Class A uniforms—wool trousers, khaki shirt, heavy blouse, issue shoes, canvas leggings, and World War I helmets—the round type seen in the British Army up into World War II. We must have looked downright silly marching in review in this get-up with relics and painted sticks for weapons, especially when we tried to perform the order eyes right while pulling a machine gun cart.

As for our training, the situation reminds me of a remark by a soldier I later had under my command, who was pretty dull about learning. The major general commanding our division dropped in on our training exercises and asked this soldier exactly what he thought he was doing. He replied, Well, Sir, I think I’m just following them there fellers. That was about what a lot of us were doing in the Army maneuvers of 1940—just following them there fellers. Very seldom, if ever, did we understand the tactical situation or the types of maneuvers in which we were involved.

During this time, I was also learning (or not learning) how to handle my full-blown adolescent rebellion. I could not tolerate what I considered to be unfairness or stupidity on the part of my superiors. This regularly earned me the opportunity to reconsider the wisdom of my fifteen years while performing extra work details. One incident had to do with the garbage pit. The Army was leasing the land for maneuvers from private owners, and the leases protected the owners’ rights. Each company had a garbage pit five to six feet deep, and one of the stipulations was that no solid matter would be buried in the ground above a certain depth. Once when we were cleaning camp, we threw some excess blocks of ice in the pit and covered them with dirt. That day, the owner came with a long metal rod, checking for buried solid material. He sank the rod into the garbage pit, and of course he had to hit an ice block. He just would not believe it was a chunk of ice. I got on the work detail to dig up the whole damn sloppy mess, while he stood over us and looked on. By the time we’d finished, I felt like burying him in the pit with the ice.

I also vividly remember the huge 30-gallon piss cans that were set up in the company street after dark, with an oil lantern marking each location. Every morning, a work detail carried the brimming, sloshing cans to a latrine dug some distance from the end of the company street. It was a bad duty, especially if some of the older men had had a beer party. The carrying detail served as punishment for soldiers who got on some NCO’s list. I managed to get that detail a couple of times too.

My life, however, was soon to change in a very big way. When the draft bill was passed in 1940, Congress gave the President the authority to call up the National Guard and bring it into Federal service, and FDR issued mobilization orders. I think all Guardsmen would have been called up sooner, but the Army had no camps or billeting areas for them, and hadn’t yet developed the logistical support base to enlarge rapidly. As a result, the Guard divisions and some smaller units were ordered to active duty as the housing became available. Initially, soldiers were to serve one year on active duty, then return home to inactive duty status. In a popular song, a soldier sang farewell to his sweetheart. The lyrics were sad enough, but the idea was that he would be back in a year. I thought of those lyrics many times while soldiering throughout 1942, 1943, 1944, and 1945.

I quit school the day before I was inducted into the Army. My induction took place on a cold, blustery February 17, 1941. We fell into company formation, Sergeant Rohaly called the roll, and we each took one step forward and answered Here! At the end of roll call, we all raised our right hand, an officer read the oath of office to us, and we all repeated it. And so we went from being a National Guard unit to a unit of the Army of the United States.

Quitting high school to go into the Army as a sixteen-year-old was completely in keeping with my private circumstances and the larger social context. In those times, one did not plan the future in terms of years—high school, college, career, and so forth—but in terms of days, weeks, and months. We were in a long and hard depression; jobs were scarce, and young men went into Civilian Conservation Corps camps to send money home to feed their families. The percentage of youths completing high school was low because children had to quit school to help support their families. Only the rich could afford to send their children to college. Even families that maintained strong family ties and loyalties had difficulty keeping themselves together.

I had not been part of a family group for years; I had been living with others, more or less as an intruder. I mean no criticism of my sister or others who took me in; the fact is, I felt like a perpetual outsider. My brother Vern, who was three years older, was off in Florida much of the time, searching for our mother. He was having a hard enough time scrounging up jobs to take care of himself alone. He finally joined the Navy just to get something to eat, enlisting for a six-year stint in December 1940.

These were the bleak facts of my family life. Because of them, I might have romanticized the Army. The restlessness of youth and the possibility of being recognized as an individual certainly played a part in my enlistment.

The entire 2d Battalion, 112th Infantry, was stationed at the Armory in Erie, which is still in use at 6th and Parade Street. Everyone had to take a thorough physical examination to make sure he met the standards and didn’t hide any defects or history of illnesses. An Army formation call, short-arm inspection, was also my introduction to sex education. The uniform was raincoats only. A medical officer inspected our private parts for VD, body lice, and crabs. I had never heard of VD or body lice before this.

Once we were in the Army, all the underage soldiers were especially eager to prove how adult we really were by indulging in excessive drinking. In civilian establishments, no one wearing a uniform was ever asked to show an ID. We could buy alcohol at any store that sold it, or step right up to a bar and be served. The surge of assurance this gave us made us think that drinking was one of the main benefits of enlisted life. Starting with our first days at the Armory, for many of us underage soldiers drinking simply became synonymous with fun.

In the beginning, of course, it didn’t take much alcohol to make us lose control. I remember one underage friend going to the PX for a drink. The entrance had a landing with six to eight steps. Coming out, he tripped on the first one, rolled head-over-heels to the bottom, got up, dusted himself off, and wobbled back to the barracks. I know he didn’t have more than one beer. It is said that God looks after drunks and babies, and we were living proof that this is true.

Not long after we were inducted, we moved to Indiantown Gap, Pennsylvania, where the new military reservation was still under construction. I arranged for my father to pick up a girl I’d been dating and bring her to the station so we could say our good-byes. My dad did pick my girlfriend up, but in the turmoil and commotion we couldn’t find each other. I was bitterly disappointed as we re-formed ranks and loaded onto the train. We had Pullman sleepers and were riding first-class now that we were in the Army, and I shed a few tears in the loneliness of my bunk that evening as the train made its way toward Indiantown Gap.

Chapter 2

Mobilization, Basic, and Small Unit Training

We arrived at Indiantown Gap Military Reservation the next day. Big packages in cardboard boxes were stacked in snowdrifts outside our barracks. These, we discovered, were our bunks and mattresses. Before we could go to bed, we had to break them out of the piles of snow and ice and set them up. We also had to make a fire, but we hadn’t had much experience with coal-fired hot-air heating systems. It took a few days to get the technique, and we spent some pretty cold nights before we got the hang of it.

We immediately started on basic training, as if we’d been freshly inducted. At 5:00 or 5:30 A.M., we fell out for reveille, while the regimental band marched up and down the street playing snappy tunes like Roll Out the Barrel and You Are My Sunshine. The reveille gun, a 105mm cannon on the top of a big hill, boomed out every morning, but First Sergeant Rohaly was usually into the squad rooms long before, blowing on his whistle to shock us out of bed.

Our training area was on a high point, Gobbler’s Knob. We formed up in the company streets, marched out into a battalion column, and on past the band. Indiantown Gap still lacked sufficient accommodations to conduct large classes indoors, so regardless of snowstorms and blizzards, up the hill we marched to huddle together in the freezing weather to listen to basic training lectures on military courtesy and customs of the service. Literally shivering in our boots, we learned when to salute officers, how to request permission to speak to the company commander, who should walk to the right or left in a group of mixed rank, and other such items of vital combat interest.

Many of our officers and NCOs were inexperienced, and we suffered from the lack of qualified instructors. And so I discovered field manuals. These were issued for every training subject, and I found I could get better information by studying on my own. Before long, I got the reputation of being a little smart ass. This didn’t bother me. Maybe I wasn’t too diplomatic in correcting my instructors, but afterward they hit the manuals themselves. I thought that having to learn the wrong way was twice as bad as learning the right way, because first you had to unlearn before you could learn.

After our morning lectures, we engaged in training until 5:30 P.M. At the end of the day, we always stood retreat, an honor ceremony conducted while the national colors were lowered. Preceding this, we underwent strict personal, uniform, and weapons inspection, during which we were often asked questions on military subjects. Some of the slower men had trouble remembering their serial numbers. The platoon leader always asked me: Have you shaved today? Being only sixteen, I didn’t have a beard; let’s just say I was a little fuzzy. The first time I answered, No, I didn’t think I had a beard, Sir. He instructed me to shave daily, whether I needed it or not. And so I came to grow a heavy beard in my youth.

It was a pretty full day for a sixteen-year-old. Many nights I went to bed around 8:00, and slept through until 5:00 the next morning. In addition to two heavy wool blankets, they issued us a good quality, single-size comforter. We did manage to sleep warm, after we got the knack of maintaining a good, hot fire in the coal boilers, but we experienced so many respiratory diseases that we were often placed in quarantine. Finally, we erected shelter halves between bunks in an attempt to block the spread of germs from coughing and sneezing. Treatment did not include antibiotics; penicillin was yet to come as the wonder drug of the future.

Part of our basic training was learning to perform interior guard. This is the type of guard seen in movies, where the soldier marches back and forth with a rifle on his shoulder. Among the duties was guarding prisoners in the regimental guardhouse. Confinements lasted up to twenty-four hours while a prisoner’s punishment was decided. Every regiment had a couple people who thought they knew everything about the military judicial system. We had one of these guardhouse lawyers in Company H who maintained that if a prisoner escaped from an interior guard, the guard would have to serve the prisoner’s term.

I had a good scare about this early on when I was guarding a prisoner in the regimental area. I had an urgent call of nature, and informed the prisoner I was going to the barracks. I told him to stay close, and he gave me his word. I do not know why I did not take him in with me. I was certainly too pressed to go through the correct procedures, which required putting the prisoner under lock-and-key before going to the latrine, or calling for the corporal-of-the-guard. This would have meant hollering out, Corporal-of-the-guard, post number five, then waiting as the guard at each post passed the call all the way up to the guardhouse, and the corporal came running to see what I needed.

When I came out of the latrine, my prisoner was nowhere in sight. I almost panicked; I was sure I would have to serve his sentence. As it turned out, he’d noted my inexperience, and decided to hide as a joke. Fortunately, he came out before I called the corporal-of-the-guard. This experience taught me two lessons right from the start: never trust a prisoner, and follow regulations.

I also pulled kitchen police duty. This was a very tough proposition. KP meant reporting to the mess hall at 3:30 or 4:00 A.M., and often working until 8:30 or 9:00 P.M. How bad it was depended on the mess sergeant, and ours was inexperienced and difficult. Being young and a bit of a rebel, I got into heated discussions with him. One day, in retaliation for some lip, he gave me the filthiest job of all, cleaning the grease trap for the kitchen sinks. This was a metal box about two and a half feet long, a foot and a half wide, and a good two feet deep, that caught all the greasy drainage from the kitchen.

It was a dirty, stinking job—and he ordered me to clean it out with my bare hands. I rebelled and said I wasn’t about to do it without a tool. When he retorted that he didn’t have any tools, I said that in that case, they’d better call the first sergeant to escort me to the guardhouse. So they called Sergeant Rohaly, and a compromise was reached. I was provided with a long-handled dipper and was allowed to wear my gas mask. I didn’t make many friends in the mess hall.

We trained from Monday morning until Saturday noon. When we started small-unit training, we added one or two periods of night training a week. Saturday morning was usually reserved for a thorough inspection of the barracks, grounds, weapons, and vehicles. Some inspecting officers wore white gloves and ran their hands over window sills and beams to find the smallest bit of dirt or dust.

In good weather, we marched out to an open field with full field packs, set up our pup tents in a row, and displayed our equipment in front of them. Even mess kits had to be laid out with knife, fork,