Captain Sobel, Meet Colonel Whitside

A tale of two mutinies

I have a confession. For years, I would ask people if they saw Band of Brothers. Then I would ask if they knew this scene or that character, and I would describe a parallel in one of my books. But the fact is, I never saw Band of Brothers. Until last night, when I began watching it on Netflix. So far I’ve only watched episode 1. But I did read the book when it came out, which was about thirty years ago.

I had just made some copies of a working manuscript of “Tanks for the Memories,” so it must have been around 1993, and I read about Captain Sobel. I remember him as Lieutenant Sobel, but he may have been a captain, thirty years is a long time ago.

In the mini-series, Sobel drives Easy Company so hard that his sergeants risk a firing squad by asking to be relieved of duty just as they’re about to go into combat; while the enlisted men discuss what kind of “accidents” might happen if they have to follow Sobel into almost certain death.

Wow, I thought at the time, this Sobel guy is just like Whitside Miller.

I had a whole chapter about Colonel Whitside, as he was known, in the manuscript. I had not yet read Band of Brothers, so I didn’t know about Sobel. I asked some of the veterans to read the manuscript. Les O’Riley, who was a company commander in the battalion, suggested that I remove the chapter about Colonel Whitside because his widow was still alive and it would be terrible for her to read some of the things the men said about her husband. (Actually Colonel Whitside was still alive at the time, although the men assumed he had passed away. He died on July 7, 1994).

The other veterans concurred, so I removed the chapter, although after I learned of the widow’s passing I added it to the expanded second edition.

So, what was so terrible about Colonel Whitside?

In the hospitality room at the January 1993 “mini-reunion” in Bradenton, Florida, I asked Jack Reiff, one of the battalion’s two medical officers, about Colonel Miller.

“He was an obsessive compulsive, extreme nit-picker,” Reiff said. “Like when we got to England, everybody in the battalion was a specialist. Medics, tank driver, gunner, tank mechanic. And he decides we’re going to have a 25-mile hike. I mean, none of those guys should have to walk a step in combat, and whoever drops out, his platoon sergeant has to carry his weapon and his platoon leader his pack, and the medics have to carry him. And having staff do something over on Sundays. Did you see ‘The Caine Mutiny’? Do you remember Fred MacMurray was the bumbling exec officer? Well, we had one of those in our outfit, Major Davis. He was very inept. But Colonel Miller bawls him out in front of all the troops.”

The next year, I was seated at a table with Forrest Dixon, the battalion motor officer, and Major Clegg “Doc” Caffery.

“Whitside was a very odd individual,” Caffery said.

“Odd? He was crazy,” Dixon said.

“Forrest went back to corps headquarters — did you see Middleton in person?” Caffery said. “Anyhow, Forrest talked to somebody back there and said that this battalion should be looked into.”

“Why I went back was I was being court-martialed,” Dixon said. “I and Baxter were being court-martialed for disobeying a direct command. I had already told Colonel Singer, who was the ordnance colonel, that I was told to put blackout drive lights on the tanks, and he says, ‘Captain, it can’t be done.’ I said, ‘I got the order from my colonel.’ He said, ‘To hell with your colonel. If you think you’re in trouble with your colonel for not putting ’em on, you’ll find out you’re in bigger trouble.’ He said it can’t be done.

“The order said GPW vehicles, which was general purpose [wheeled]. And Colonel Whitside didn’t know what a GPW vehicle was. He thought all vehicles were GPW. GPWs are jeeps and trucks. Ordnance vehicles are halftracks and tanks. And the order said for us to draw kits to change the blackout drive lights for all GPW vehicles.

“So we had a night problem. Here he sees the tanks. ‘Captain Dixon! Captain Dixon! I told you to put blackout drive lights on those tanks. You haven’t done it.’

“I said, ‘Sir, it can’t be done.’

“‘But you do it.’

“Then two weeks later we had another night problem. Here come the tanks.

“But first he chewed out Major Baxter [Davis] for something. and made him doubletime.”

“He made him doubletime in front of the whole battalion,” Caffery said.

“And then he saw the blackout drive lights weren’t on the tanks.

“‘Captain Dixon!’

“‘Yes, Sir?’

“‘You don’t have blackout drive lights on those tanks.’

“I said, ‘It can’t be done, Sir.’

“‘But I gave you a di-rect order.’ And he says, ‘I don’t have anybody that will obey me.’ He says, ‘I’m charging you. When we get back to camp, you and Major Davis are gonna be court-martialed.’

“So when we got back to camp, I checked out and went to Tidbourne, that’s ordnance, and I got in to see Colonel Singer. And Colonel Singer said, ‘You can’t be serious.’

“I said, ‘I am, Sir.’

“Then he sent his warrant officer with me up to General Middleton’s headquarters. We didn’t see Middleton, but we did talk with his G-1, and he said, ‘You know, I wouldn’t pay any attention to what you’re telling me, if yesterday we didn’t get a petition signed by a bunch of men of the 712th Tank Battalion telling us that they had a crazy colonel.’”

In the mini-series Band of Brothers, Captain Sobel is reassigned before D-Day. There are several more stories about Colonel Whitside — lest you think that simply being a strict disciplinarian isn’t an adequate reason for dismissal — but the upshot is that he, too, was reassigned and on June 6th, 1944 — the battalion would not cross the English Channel for another three weeks — Lieutenant Colonel George B. Randolph was introduced as its new commanding officer; both Colonel Whitside and Major Davis were reassigned. Captain Vladimir Kedrovsky was promoted to executive officer, and would take command of the battalion on January 9, 1945 when Colonel Randolph was killed during the Battle of the Bulge.

Despite their misgivings, there was an air of tragedy in the stories of both Sobel and Colonel Whitside. The mini-series at least credited Sobel with turning Easy Company into the best company in the parachute infantry battalion before he was relieved. Colonel Whitside’s demotion was a spectacular failure of someone with an impressive military background: His grandfather was Brigadier General Samuel Marmaduke Whitside, who founded Fort Huachuca in Arizona. His father, Archie Miller, received the Medal of Honor for his actions in 1909 during the Moro Rebellion in the Philippines, and later became a lieutenant colonel in the Army Air Service. He was killed in a plane crash in 1921 when his son was 14 years old.

In a lovingly written obituary by Colonel Whitside’s daughter, Janet Miller Simkins, she said that “during WWII, he commanded the 712th Tank Battalion with the 10th Armored Division, one of Gen. George S. Patton’s spearhead units into Germany. Later, he was attached to the 29th Infantry Division as a G-3 staff officer,” and that as “the oldest living graduate in the West Point Society of San Diego, he delighted members each year at the Founder’s Day dinner with stories of his Army experiences.” To reiterate, Colonel Whitside never saw a day of combat with the 712th.

Thank you for reading my first Substack newsletter. I’m just getting started with Band of Brothers and many other episodes from my 37 years of recording interviews and conversations with World War 2 veterans.

Wait, there’s more!

Here’s some more about Colonel Whitside, excerpted from the expanded second and third editions of “Tanks for the Memories: The 712th Tank Battalion in World War II”

Ed Stuever

Colonel Whitside wanted everybody to live according to the book. He created a lot of problems by yelling orders that didn’t go well with the men. Like when we were at the end of a trial run, the tanks were dirty and he wanted everybody to clean their tanks immaculately. He even put me on an inspection team to inspect the inside of the tanks, whether they were dusted clean, spotless. Most of them were, but there were always a few that didn’t have time to do it. I didn’t want to do it, but one time I said, “These three tanks here didn’t have a chance to get cleaned up ...”

“Well, they’re not eligible for a pass.” He was that type of man. So it made me look like a bad man in front of the men because I reported the tanks were dirty. But if I would say, “This tank is clean,” and he looked in it, then he would have put me on report.

I was so glad to see Colonel Randolph take his place.

Howard Olsen

We were in England, and we were supposed to make a night problem, pull up at night and get in position. And right behind my tank was Colonel Miller and Major Davis.

The colonel told him to go do something, and he started to walk away. The colonel told him to run. That’s when they started filing charges against Colonel Miller. And they got rid of him. I heard they busted him to a captain and shipped him back to the States. He was a West Point man. Of course, we don’t have a lot of dealings with the colonel unless you’re in the battalion headquarters. But he was right behind my tank, and I heard the whole thing. He told Major Davis, “You’d better doubletime.” You’re not supposed to do that. If you’re going to bawl out another officer, you do it in private, not out in the open where everybody can hear you.

He tried to get several of the officers to change their stories, and they wouldn’t do it. He’d have gotten us all killed in combat.

Dan Diel

Otto Krieg was my platoon leader, and I and some other guys go on this forced march. Ol’ Miller comes out there and is gonna go along with them. Well, we didn’t go a mile and a half and some of these guys are twenty or thirty yards behind.

“God dammit, Sergeant, get those men up there!”

I turned around and looked and I said, “I can’t carry them.”

He took off and boy, he got up there and he got hold of Krieg and said, “I told that sergeant back there to get the men closed up and he told me he couldn’t carry them!”

It was just a few days after that and he was gone. And, well, that probably wasn’t the right answer but that was as good an answer as I could come up with.

He was off his rocker. Nobody with good mental capacity would blow his stack about something like that. If a guy can’t keep up, what are you gonna do? You write him off, send him back to do something else. And I’ll grant you there were people that if they could, they would have found a way to slough off, there were a lot of them. But they weren’t all goldbricks, some of them just shouldn’t ever have been there.

Stan Freeman

Colonel Whitside was absolutely crazy. I was operations sergeant and in England we had a program one night, compass reading. They went out by platoons. He told me to go over to the finish point, and he said, “When the first man comes in and tells you that the first unit is coming in, come and wake me up.”

The first unit was of course recon, and they came in and told me that they were maybe ten or fifteen minutes from the finish line. I went over to the barracks and woke Whitside up, and he chewed my ass out for waking him up. And he had told me to do it!

When they took all the tank companies over in Wales to the firing range, I was left in headquarters. There were a few of the officers there, and the officers’ mess was adjacent to the headquarters. We were attached to an armored group, and I got a telephone call, someone at group wanted to talk to Colonel Miller, so I got up, took off for the officers’ quarters – which was all of maybe 20 yards from the headquarters building – I saluted and said, “Sir, you are wanted on the telephone.” And I stood there for the next ten minutes getting my ass handed to me for interrupting his supper. Then finally he came to the phone and whoever was on it had hung up, and I got another chewing out.

He was crazy. The first time I ran into him was in California. I think he was in the machine gun troop. We had a weekend pass to San Diego, and one of the favorite drinking and meeting spots in San Diego was a dance hall that had seven entrances, and when you went in any entrance you ran right into a bar. We were in there drinking at this bar, and he walked in and gave us a lecture on drinking. Then he sat down and ordered a drink.

Just after D-Day we were on the move in England and we ended up atop a hill where we waterproofed the tanks. We had scuttled Whitside, and we got Colonel Randolph as the commander of the battalion. We were out in the open, and we had a field kitchen. Headquarters Company came down to get in the chow line, and all of the officers were standing there in the chow line first. Colonel Randolph walked by, there was a little bank off to the side, and he said, “Gentlemen, will you join me?” They all went over and sat with him and the enlisted personnel ate first, then the officers ate. And I’ll tell you, that man earned one thousand points that day.

Red Rose

The first day Colonel Randolph came in, he was sitting on a truck fender, and two or three GIs were waiting for the mess hall to open up. They said, “Hey, right over there’s our new commander.”

So I leaned over and saw this old man. He didn’t look to me like an officer. He was just sitting there a few minutes. We’d waited there for an hour or two before the meal. Just about the time they got the meal ready, here come the officers. They didn’t have to stand on line. They just went in and grabbed what they wanted.

Randolph let two or three of them get their food. Then he jumped up off of that truck bed. He said, “Whoa. There will not be a damn officer,” I think he swore a little, “to eat until he sees that every one of his men is fed, and that’s the way it’s gonna be from now on.”

I knew Dixon and the other officers had gotten Colonel Whitside thrown out, and I said, “Oh boy, your ass is gone too!” But he came on and made a good enough colonel, didn’t he?