Fierce Valor: The True Story of Ronald Speirs and his Band of Brothers by Jared Frederick & Erik Dorr

Author:Jared Frederick & Erik Dorr [Frederick, Jared & Dorr, Erik]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2022-05-10T00:00:00+00:00

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General Patton beamed with satisfaction. The day of the Foy attack, he opined, “The attitude of the troops is completely changed. They now have full confidence that they are pursuing a defeated enemy.” Despite their recent hardships, the men of the 506th demonstrated equal optimism as they pressed north of Foy, near Recogne, and into Cobru, which was seized by the evening of January 14. Noville, a location long sought-after by the paratroopers, lay just up the encrusted road.66

The troopers exhibited no doubt of their unit’s ultimate success. Questions of individual survival were not matched with equal resilience. “I am not generally superstitious, but time after time I have seen men suddenly become quiet and withdrawn,” wrote Don Burgett. “Then they would announce they’d just had a feeling that they were going to get it. Some of them even forecast accurately the time, place, and manner in which they would die. It was eerie. All too often such premonitions proved to be only too true.” Based on his postwar testimony, Speirs also contemplated fate in such a manner. Death constantly loomed over him. He possessed private doubts of ever seeing Boston again.67

Art DiMarzio later reflected on the dehumanizing gloom that occasionally afflicted men at war. Outside Foy, Jumbo and some buddies searched houses and scavenged for loot. “We had caught a couple of Germans and I pulled my pistol out,” he remembered. “I was going to shoot him and he got on his knees and was crying.”

Fellow paratroopers yelped, “Go ahead, Jumbo. Kill him! Kill him!”

DiMarzio unsheathed his knife. “I was going to cut his throat,” the paratrooper recalled.

The German “was crying something like you wouldn’t believe.”

Brought to the brink of murder, Jumbo simply could not carry out another execution. “I put my knife away, took him to the front door, and shoved him out. There were Germans running up the road surrendering and I told him to go ahead and join that group.”

“Get out of here,” DiMarzio yelled.

“When he got down to the road, he turned around, looked at me, and waved at me,” DiMarzio closed. At that moment, the young American recognized the inner strength of demonstrating mercy to one’s enemy.68

Many tests yet remained. The regiment was slated to attack Noville at dawn on January 15. Speirs and his men spent an uncomfortable night in a derelict quarry situated above the town church. Men scraped into the solid ground, fortifying pre-existing pits with logs and rocks. Speirs had no time for sleep. Huddled in the early morning darkness, he conducted a pre-mission briefing alongside Dick Winters. Considering all that their men had endured over the previous weeks, neither was pleased with the assignment. “When word came down for this attack,” confessed Winters, “it pissed me off.” There was nothing he or Speirs could do to alter the overarching plan. Shivering side-by-side, the officers imparted instructions to their subordinate lieutenants and sergeants.69

Winters peered through his binoculars as he talked. “The ground in front of us forms a steep shoulder as it nears town.

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