Three stories, and a rabbit hole
Nick Paciullo's squad, a medic in Normandy, and Lieutenant Tarr's platoon
Story 1: A Simple Question
“And what was your rank?”
“I was a private, Pfc., corporal … private, Pfc., corporal,” Nick Paciullo, a Marine veteran of Iwo Jima, said. “I was a little bad in the service. I was with two gentlemen — two Marines, I should say — from Chicago, Pudlo and McDowell. They were two crazy guys and I joined them, too. And they were in my squad, and we had a lot of fun. We were always in trouble. But we got away with it.”
I was interviewing Nick, a neighbor of mine in New Jersey at the time, after we met at a Memorial Day picnic im 2001. I was about to learn a lesson about the roller coaster of life and death in World War 2, with a little known bit of history that was recently spotlighted in the news sandwiched in between.
“You and Nat (a veteran of the Merchant Marine who was also at the picnic, but who moved before I got a chance to interview him) were reminiscing about Swabbies and the Shore Patrol,” I said. “Is that who you got in trouble with?”
“Yeah, little bit, in San Diego,” Nick said.
“Tell me what kind of trouble you would get into, if you can with your wife here,” I said.
“No, it wasn’t dirty or anything else like that,” Nick said. “I’ll give you an incident, what happened one night. The three of us — in fact, there were about five or six of us, walking, and we see this big door [that was] open. Big office. We walked in. We’re taking the pencils, and I took a chair with rollers on it, and I put one of the guys on the chair and we were rolling him around in San Diego. All of a sudden I’m pushing and I can’t go nowhere. They had my duty belt. It was an MP Marine, oh god, where’d these guys get this stuff? And oh, we had a court martial. And we got away with it, because we didn’t rob anything. All we took was pencils and that one chair, and we were having a good time. But we got away with it. In fact, the following week we went from Camp Lejeune to California. And then just before we get to California, they were having the zoot suiters terrorizing California.”
“Zoot suiters?” I asked. [The timing may be a little off as Camp Lejeune is in North Carolina, so Nick likely already was in California, but after more than 50 years, timelines are often prone to such glitches]
“Yeah, the Mexicans, that’s what they were called,” Nick said.
“Terrorizing?” I asked.
“Yes,” he said. “And when we got to California in what, Union Station, is that in California? Well, ‘Everybody put on duty belts, rifles and bayonets!’ What the hell is going on? At the time, we didn’t know what was going on, and we were ready to clean out the streets. And then something must have happened, and instead of fighting the Mexicans they took us to Camp Pendleton.”
“There were like riots?” I asked.
“Rioting, and they were doing a lot of crazy things. Zoot suiters.”
(The reason the Zoot Suit riots were in the news lately is because it was one of the few times American military troops were deployed in American cities, an action which has been in the news lately for all the wrong reasons)
“And then Camp Pendleton, and we spent there a couple of months,” Nick said. And in ‘43, I think ‘43, we hit the Marshall Islands. The first time a fresh Marine division ever hit an island from the States to the enemy. It was the first time.”
“What were your thoughts crossing the ocean?” I asked.
“I didn’t have much thought. I was, I didn’t think nothing of getting killed, shot or anything. I was very, we all talked and had a good time. We didn’t say ‘You’re gonna die’ or anything like this ... (thumbing through a book on the 4th Marine Division) ... this is my buddy.”
“Richard D. Anderson?”
“Yeah, that story. I don’t want to say that’s …
“…gallantry and intrepidity at the risk of his life above and beyond the call of duty,” I said, reading from the Medal of Honor citation, “while serving with the 4th Marine Division during action against enemy Japanese forces on Roi Island, Kwajalein Atoll, Mariana Islands, Feb. 1, 1944. Entering a shell crater occupied by three other Marines, Private First Class Anderson” — were you one of the Marines? I asked. Nick sort of nodded, which I took for a yes, as they were in the same squad — “Private First Class Anderson was preparing to throw a grenade at an enemy position and it slipped from his hands and rolled toward the men at the bottom of the hole. With insufficient time to retrieve the armed weapon and throw it Private First Class Anderson fearlessly chose to sacrifice himself and save his companions by hurling his body upon the grenade and taking the full impact of the explosion. His personal valor and exceptional spirit of loyalty in the face of almost certain death were in keeping with the highest traditions of the U.S. Naval Service. He gallantly gave his life for his country.”
“By the way, our last reunion, a couple of buddies of mine, they live in Washington State, Anderson lives in Washington State, and he was buried at Kwajalein. And they took his body and brought it back to Washington State where his family is. They did it about a year or so ago. Which was very nice.”
“Now, was he in your platoon, you had trained with him and everything?” I asked.
“My squad, yes. And he was the fourth guy that we used to go out with. Very nice guy. Pudlo was killed on Iwo, and McDowell lost his leg on Saipan. I almost lost my eye on Kwajalein, right after that.”
And there you have it, like an entire plotline of a movie packed into one snippet of an interview. For my full interview with Nick and three other veterans of the Pacific Theater of World War 2, check out my book “Semper Four,” available at amazon in print and for kindle.
Nick Paciullo:
Story 2: A Medic in Normandy
Ed Madden was a medic in the 90th Infantry Division. I interviewed him briefly at a division reunion in Charlotte, North Carolina, in 2000. He rescued a young girl in Normandy who went on to become an icon of the Normandy invasion. This is an excerpt from the interview.
After the Normandy peninsula was cut off, they put us into a holding position and we were put onto this farm. We were there for almost two weeks, in a holding position. And one day, July the 1st, the Germans decided they were going to put some artillery into the place.
There were two girls who lived on the farm. One was 14 or 15, and her sister was 16 or 17. They were out in the field, milking the cows at about 5 o’clock in the afternoon, when the Germans put the shells in there. The shells landed real close to them, and a couple of the cows were killed, and some of the shrapnel went through the older sister’s heart and killed her. And the younger girl had both of her legs taken off below the knee, both of them, and one of her arms was pretty badly shattered. And I went out and picked her up and brought her into their house. I treated her, then I called and had her evacuated back.
The very next day we moved out, and I never heard anything about her until later on in the year, in December or so, the Stars & Stripes came out and there was an article in it showing her with Air Corps people. And what they did was they came in, and they built a landing strip right near the farm. They found out about her, so they went back to the Army hospital that they had her in, and the Air Force took her out of there – with permission – and they brought her back to the farm and they built a tent for her. They had their doctors take care of her, and eventually they ended up buying her prostheses for her legs.
When the Air Corps – these were fighter planes, P-47s – moved forward to keep up with the infantry, they were able to carry her in their planes because they got written permission from General Eisenhower to take her with them. And she met Eisenhower, he came over and talked to her.
I sent the article home, and I didn’t think anything about it.
Then in 1985, when I was going to go to Europe, I wrote to Henri Levaufre [a Normandy historian who has assisted many 90th Division veterans] and I told him about her and asked him to find out if the woman is still alive. He wrote back to me and he said, yes, he found her, that she lives only a few miles from where Henri lived. So he said when you get to the hotel – we told him what hotel in Paris we were going to be at – he said he would leave a message for me so I’d know where she lives. So when we got into Paris we got a message stating that her daughter – without the legs but with the artificial limbs, she married a lawyer, and she had one daughter, and the daughter was going to come by in the morning and pick us up and take us to the big hospital in Paris where they take care of the people. So they took us over and we met for the first time. And she didn’t know that it was the infantry that was stationed at her farm – she didn’t remember that it was infantry, she thought there were artillery people, and she didn’t know who I was or that I had taken care of her until I explained to her; I told her that one day one of our officers was going through their barn, and he moved some hay aside and he found a German motorcycle that her brother had hidden, that he’d stolen from the Germans. I told her about that and she said, “Oh, my god, you were there, on the farm.”
And I said, “Yes, I was the one that took care of you.”
Well, with all of this the Air Force had adopted her and they’ve had her come over to some of their reunions. And if you ever go to the Airborne Museum in Ste. Mere Eglise, they have a whole display about her there.
I met her in 1985, and then when I went over in 1994 we stayed with her at her home for a few days and she took us around and she introduced us to the curator of the museum at Ste. Mere Eglise.
Her name is Yvette Hamel. Incidentally, there’s a book, one of the fliers, he’s a doctor now, his wife met her and his wife wrote a book about her called “Sunward I’ve Climbed,” and it’s been translated into French, too. It’s an interesting book. I’ve got it. She sent me a copy, signed and all.
For more of Ed’s story, A Medic’s Story is available at Amazon in print and for Kindle.
Story 3: Lieutenant Tarr’s Platoon
When my father reported to the 712th Tank Battalion in Normandy in late July of 1944, he was to replace the first lieutenant in the battalion to be killed.
That lieutenant was George Tarr. After I learned his name at the first reunion I went to I would always ask the veterans of A Company what they could tell me about him. Lieutenant Jim Flowers, who was in C Company, described seeing him shortly before he was killed when platoons from the two companies came together on a road. Jule Braatz, Tarr’s platoon sergeant, provided a vivid account of the platoon’s first day in action, which resulted in the death of Lieutenant Tarr and a crew member in another tank, Russell Levengood. I don’t recall if it was the first or second reunion I attended, but I asked retired Colonel Cliff Merrill about Lieutenant Tarr, and he told me about a train ride from Fort Jackson in South Carolina to Camp Myles Standish in Massachusetts from where the battalion would ship out. He said Lieutenant Tarr had just had a baby boy and he didn’t want him worrying about his wife and son, so he looked for something for him to do. He told his executive officer, Ellsworth Howard, to assign Lieutenant Tarr to count the men on the train. “Count noses,” is the term he used. When Lieutenant Tarr protested that he had done that already, Merrill, or perhaps Howard, reminded him that the battalion was headed for combat and you didn’t know that someone just might jump off the train, so Tarr went and took an inventory and came back and reported, and he had it completely organized, down to how many men were in each car. “We laughed about that” when reminiscing, Colonel Merrill said.
Then he told me that while he was in the hospital in the States recovering from wounds he sustained in Normandy, his first sergeant, Charlie Vinson, would write to him and keep him updated on the progress of his company. The letters would be censored, he said, and you couldn’t say flat out if someone was killed, so in order to get around the censors, Vinson would write that “so and so joined Tarr’s platoon.”
Years later, Colonel Merrill’s wife, Jan, gave me a photocopy of the letter in which Vinson mentioned Tarr’s platoon. It was written shortly after the Battle of the Bulge and some of the events took place in Oberwampach, where A Company withstood between seven and nine armored counterattacks over the course of two days.
The rabbit hole
There is a great deal of heroism in that letter from Sergeant Vinson to Captain Merrill. (I had to take a screen shot of the letter and the signature wouldn’t fit on the page.) But a few years ago when I was looking at the letter, one phrase in particular jumped out at me. I don’t know who “Grumpy” was, likely one of the non-commissioned officers, but anyway, the phrase that struck me was “Grumpy says that he is too busy to write, but to check on those horse piss blonds for him.”
The Internet has changed over the years, but when I did a search on horse piss blond(e)s about 15 years ago, several entries came up explaining that horse urine was a method of lightening hair going back to medieval times. All pretty innocent stuff and a bit of fashion history if you ask me. However, in light of the current extremely serious threat to the very democracy the World War 2 veterans I’ve met sacrificed so much to defend, I immediately thought of the current sorry excuse for an attorney general of the United States, and christened her “Horse Piss Blondi.”
Which is when I discovered how drastically the Internet has changed from its innocent early days. When I googled “horse piss blond” this time around, my browser regurgitated about a dozen pornographic videos; apparently there is a whole subcategory of pornography centered around horse pee! There was even a Tik Tok influencer who called herself Horse Piss Girl. Well, that’s about as far down the rabbit hole as I dared to venture, but it was far enough!