Whatever their legitimate complaints about how life had treated them, they had not soured on it or on their country.
They came out of the Depression with many other positive features. They were self-reliant, accustomed to hard work and to taking orders. Through sports or hunting or both, they had gained a sense of self-worth and self-confidence.
They knew they were going into great danger. They knew they would be doing more than their part. They resented having to sacrifice years of their youth to a war they never made. They wanted to throw baseballs, not grenades, shoot a .22 rifle, not an M-l. But having been caught up in the war, they decided to be as positive as possible in their Army careers.
Not that they knew much about airborne, except that it was new and all volunteer. They had been told that the physical training was tougher than anything they had ever seen, or that any other unit in the Army would undergo, but these young lions were eager for that. They expected that, when they were finished with their training, they would be bigger, stronger, tougher than when they started, and they would have gone through the training with the guys who would be fighting beside them.
“The Depression was over,” Carwood Lipton recalled of that summer of 1942, “and I was beginning a new life that would change me profoundly.” It would all of them.
First Lt. Herbert Sobel of Chicago was the initial member of E Company, and its C.O. His executive officer (X.O.) was 2nd Lt. Clarence Hester from northern California. Sobel was Jewish, urban, with a commission from the National Guard. Hester had started as a private, then earned his commission from Officer Candidate’s School (OCS). Most of the platoon and assistant platoon leaders were newly commissioned graduates of OCS, including 2nd Lts. Dick Winters from Pennsylvania, Walter Moore from California’s race tracks, and Lewis Nixon from New York City and Yale. S. L.
Matheson was an ROTC graduate from UCLA. At twenty-eight years of age, Sobel was the old man in the group; the others were twenty-four or younger.
The company, along with Dog, Fox, and Battalion HQ Companies, made up the 2nd Battalion of the 506th PIR.
The battalion commander was Maj. Robert Strayer, a thirty-year-old reserve officer. The regimental commander was Col.
Robert Sink, a 1927 West Point graduate. The 506th was an experimental outfit, the first parachute infantry regiment in which the men would take their basic training and their jump training together, as a unit. It would be a year before it was attached to the 101st Airborne, the Screaming Eagles. The officers were as new to this paratrooping business as the men; they were teachers who sometimes were not much more than one day ahead of the class.
The original NCOs were Old Army. “We looked up to them,” Pvt. Walter Gordon of Mississippi remembered, “as almost like gods because they had their wings, they were qualified jumpers. But, hell, if they knew how to do an about-face, they were ahead of us, we were raw recruits. Later, looking back, we regarded them with scorn. They couldn’t measure up to our own people who moved up to corporals and sergeants.”
The first privates in Easy were Frank Perconte, Herman Hansen, Wayne Sisk, and Carwood Lipton. Within a few days of its formation, Easy had a full complement of 132 men and eight officers. It was divided into three platoons and a headquarters section. There were three twelve-man rifle squads plus a six-man mortar team squad to a platoon. A light infantry outfit, Easy had one machine-gun to each of the rifle squads, and a 60 mm mortar in each mortar team.
Few of the original members of Easy made it through Toccoa. “Officers would come and go,” Winters remarked.
“You would take one look at them and know they wouldn’t make it. Some of those guys were just a bowl of butter. They were so awkward they didn’t know how to fall.” This was typical of the men trying for the 506th PIR; it took 500 officer volunteers to produce the 148 who made it through Toccoa, and 5,300 enlisted volunteers to get 1,800 graduates.