Sobel looked him up and down. “I’ll tell you what I’m going to do, Burgess. You’re gonna wear your blouse over your fatigues all week, you’re gonna sleep with it on every night.”
Burgess wore his blouse during the day, but he figured Sobel would not be checking on him at night, so he hung it on the edge of the bed. The following Saturday he went to Sobel’s office to get a pass to go to the dance. Sobel looked him over. “Burgess,” he said, “that blouse don’t look to me like you slept in it all night.” No pass.
They were in England to prepare for the invasion of Europe, not to dance, and the training schedule was intense.
Malarkey thought he was back in Toccoa. Six days a week, eight to ten hours a day, they were in the field. They made 15-
, 18-, 21-, and 25-mile hikes, went on night operations, spent an hour daily in close combat exercises, did some street fighting, and got training in map reading, first aid, chemical warfare, and the use and characteristics of German weapons.
They made a 25-mile hike with full field equipment in twenty-four hours, then a few days later a 25-mile hike with
combat pack in twelve hours. There were specialized courses on booby traps, removal of mines, communications, and the like.
Once a week or so they went out on a two- or three-day exercise. The problems were designed not only to give them a working knowledge of the mechanics of combat but to teach the most basic thing an infantryman has to know: how to love the ground, how to use it to advantage, how the terrain dictates tactics, above all how to live on it and in it for days at a time without impairment of physical efficiency. Their officers stressed the importance of such things, that it would make the difference between life and death, that the men must do it instinctively right the first time, as there would not be a second.
So the men of Easy got to know the English countryside. They attacked towns, hills, and woods. They dug countless foxholes, and slept in them, learning how to do it despite rain and cold and hunger.
In early December, back in the field again, the company dug in around a high, barren, windswept hill. The platoon leaders told them to dig their foxholes deep, difficult in the rocky soil. Soon an armored combat team of Sherman tanks attacked. “They roared up the hill at us like primeval monsters,” Webster wrote in his diary, “stopped, turned, and passed broadside. One charged at me. My hole wasn’t deep enough for a single tread to pass safely over me, so I yelled frantically, ‘Straddle me! Straddle me,’ which he did.” Carson’s entry read: “It was the first time a tank ran over me in a foxhole, scary.”
There was a lot of night work, Gordon recalled. “We would cut across country and crawl over fences and through gaps and go through woods and wade creeks.” In the process, the members of the squads and platoons, already familiar with each other, grew intimate. “I could see a silhouette at night,” Gordon said, “and tell you who it was. I could tell you by the way he wore his hat, how the helmet sat on his head, how he slung his rifle.” Most of what they learned in the training proved to be valuable in combat, but it was that intimacy, that total trust, that comradeship that developed on those long, cold, wet English nights that proved to be invaluable.
They were jumping on a regular basis, in full gear, learning how to use their risers to guide themselves to open, plowed fields rather than come down on a hedgerow, road, telephone pole, stone wall, or woods. In the C-47s in the cold, damp English air, their feet were numb by the time the green light went on, so that when they hit the ground the feet stung and burned from the shock. A major purpose of the jumps was to learn to assemble quickly after landing, not so easy to do for the 2nd platoon of Easy on the first jump, as the platoon came down 25 miles from the drop zone.