Easy Company Soldier by Don Malarkey

Author:Don Malarkey [Malarkey, Sgt. Don; Welch, Bob]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-312-37849-3
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Published: 2008-10-10T16:00:00+00:00

We moved onto the “Island” on October 2,1944, by truck. In the night. Our new mission was to fight the Germans on a three-mile-wide swath of land—farm fields below sea level, surrounded by dikes with narrow roads on top—between the Lower Rhine River on the north and the Waal River on the south. The Germans occupied the east half; we had the west. They wanted it all—now—and launched an offensive to make it theirs.

Easy Company was rotated to the intersection of the dike and the elevated north-south railroad between Driel and Arnhem. The position was a platoon assignment with a fifteen-hundred-yard gap on one flank and two thousand yards on the other. Two contact patrols worked their way each night to the adjoining units to compensate for the lack of troops. The Germans controlled the railroad dike, which required everyone to stay out of view of the railroad during daylight hours. Virtually all movement was done at night.

It was to be a five-day mission. Instead, we’d be stuck here until late November, the longest time Easy Company would be in the same place. The weather was cold and rainy. We started calling it Hell’s Corner.

Dick Winters had been promoted to executive officer of the 2nd Battalion, meaning no more combat duty, replaced by 1st Lt. Fred “Moose” Heyliger. Winters liked him. I liked him. He was mortar guy, like me.

On October 5, Easy Company caught an attacking German unit in a field. It was one of those fish-in-a-barrel moments that was both exhilarating and sad. As the soldiers fled, they were picked off right and left, though some returned fire. David Webster got his “million-dollar” wound that day, and William Dukeman, a guy who’d been with us since Toccoa, died. Eleven Germans surrendered.

Later, a German “King” Tiger tank came into that area from Opheusden to the west of us. We had an antitank gun set up at the junction of a farm road, and as the tank neared, our gun opened fire. It was like a peashooter against a dinosaur; I doubt our gun did much more than give the German crew inside a headache. But after it was hit about twenty-five times, it started backing up. The left-side tread slid into a ditch and the tank couldn’t move.

Shortly after the incident, I came across our crew that had done the firing. Had anyone gone up to the tank? I asked. Nope. I did and discovered the tank was empty. I believe it had some sort of escape hatch in the bottom. The next day I came back with a screwdriver and ripped off the manufacturer’s plate, thinking it would be a good souvenir. I sent it home, just one of many items that my folks would leave behind when they moved from the cabin.

On October 23,1 was called in by Heyliger for an unusual mission. Technically, it would be known as Operation Pegasus, though we all just called it “the rescue.” A British paratrooper, Col. O. Dobey, also known

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