Filthy Thirteen Read online

  Jake grew up in rural Oklahoma, where not only was hunting and fishing every boy’s birthright but almost an obligation. Food came from the land, not the store. He developed skill with a rifle and had tremendous peripheral vision. Later his wife, Martha, told how driving down the highway he could spot a deer up on a hill without taking his eyes off of the road. Farm life taught him to kill and prepare meat for the table. Field craft became a way of life. Rural living made young men dependent more upon themselves than others.

  During the 1920s, the McNiece’s lived well for sharecroppers and had the respect of the community. His parents were good Christian folk. Elihugh did not drink or smoke. Although not very well educated, they were very intelligent. Elihugh was a terrific farmer. In addition to his skill at raising crops he would also buy mules for next to nothing and have his sons break them. They would then resell them for a considerable profit. Elihugh’s successful businesses allowed him to purchase the materials to build a ten-room house in 1928. By that year he had also put two sons through college. In pursuit of the American dream his hard work allowed his children the opportunity he had not received himself.

  Just as things looked their best, disaster struck the next year. First, the McNiece’s home burned down. The stock market crashed, causing many banks to close their doors. A chain reaction of events left no one untouched. Consequently, the owners of farms could not borrow money to buy seed for their tenants to plant. As sharecroppers in Oklahoma, the Depression of 1930 hit the McNiece family hard. While the McNieces descended into poverty, others shared the same misfortune. The Depression toughened Americans. Everyone knew they would have to work hard and work together to pull through the time of economic crisis. This experience fortunately brought families and people closer together. The McNieces remained very close.

  Elihugh did not choose to migrate to California like other Oklahoma families. There were still ways to make money but they required the whole family to pitch in. Both parents and children cut broomcorn around Maysville, July through August. Elihugh then loaded the family in his Dodge car and packed the furniture in a four-wheel trailer to head for west Texas to pick cotton from October through December. Afterwards they cut maize and hi-gear corn until January. A season on the road earned enough money to survive the rest of the year in their rented home in Maysville. Consequently, ten-year-old Jake had to drop out of school in 1929 to pull his own share of the work. Boys had to grow into men. This migrant life cost the children their ticket to success—education.

  Jake had lost two years of school until the family moved north to the oil town of Ponca City in 1931 to seek stable work. Ponca City provided the home for the Continental Oil Company (CONOCO) refinery and headquarters. The bust in the economy had also reduced the revenue people had to spend on gas. Consequently, the oil-driven economy of Ponca City likewise suffered. Elihugh was able to work out a deal with a farmer to clear his land of blackjack timber. Out of every two ricks they gave one to the farmer and sold the other at $1.50 a rick. Unfortunately, few employers wanted to hire a fifty-five-year-old man. Instead the McNiece children went to work to help.

  At the age of twelve, Jake began driving delivery trucks. And fortunately, he was able to go back to school. He completed the ninth grade and demonstrated talent as a young athlete. Coach Jack Baker asked him to try out for the high school football team during the spring season. Jake informed the coach that he planned to drop out of school so he could work full time to help his family. His brother, Sidney, had already quit school to support the family since the other two brothers were gone. Football was huge in Oklahoma and the small Jake did not have confidence that he would even make the team. Ponca City had recruited some big bruisers and had some star talent. Wadie Young had just graduated Ponca City in 1935 and would make All-American out of Oklahoma University.

  Coach Baker provided an incentive. He said if Jake could make the team he would find him a job. Jake had the speed, skill, and agility, and his toughness made up for his small size at the positions he played. True to his word, the coach found Jake a job in the evenings and weekends with the fire department, earning $35 a month. This good wage made Jake the major provider for the family. In the course of recruiting the coach found a number of players or their fathers jobs in the community. The fire department became a major employer of football players. One year as many as nineteen football players worked for it. In this sense high school football was semiprofessional.

  In those days teams were so small that the players played the entire game without a rest. Jake played both offensive and defensive end his first two years. He was a natural leader. In his last year, their star quarterback graduated and C. L. Snyder came up from junior high. He was highly skilled at passing, kicking, and handling the ball, but lacked the experience of high school football. The team elected Jake captain so he switched to offensive center in order to call the plays. He was fast and extremely athletic. What Jake lacked in size and weight he made up for in toughness. A man who had followed Jake’s football career, Mike Landauer, said Jake “was not afraid of the devil and was always doing the unconventional thing.” Jake would spit on the ball and when the opposing center picked it up to wipe the tobacco juice off, Jake would tackle him. The traits that Jake developed on the football field were those that he would need in the upcoming war.

  As soon as Jake went to work with the fire department, Sidney moved out. Only a student in high school, Jake shouldered the responsibility of providing for his family. Fortunately the job paid enough for him to purchase the lumber so that one of his other brothers, who was a carpenter, could come back and build his parents their home.

  While Jake had been baptized at the age of thirteen, his work on the weekends prevented him from attending church. He practically lived at the fire station. It was then that he picked up his three vices: drinking, fighting, and chasing loose women. Actually, Jake was not a bully. In school he would stand up for the underdog. “Honkytonking” was the favorite pasttime for men in Oklahoma. One thing would always lead to another when drinking until a fight broke out. Jake, not one to back down, fought to win. Despite his size he won by getting in the first punch, knocking his victims to the ground where he could stomp them, or as he would say, “Put the ugly on them.” Jake learned in fights that to hesitate was to lose.

  Nonetheless, Jake was one of the most popular boys in his class. The smile that always spread across his face and his athletic prowess made him the kind of young man everybody liked. His nonchalant and friendly nature immediately put people at ease and made people feel like they had known him all their lives. He always wore overalls to school and thereby started a trend among his friends.

  His reputation as a hell-raiser detracted from his better traits. He was mischievous but never malicious. He always played tricks while he worked at the fire station. Although he had a quick wit and great sense of humor, he did not play tricks on anybody at home. He considered himself not very well educated but he was a natural leader blessed with a great amount of common sense. He had the ability to find unconventional solutions for any problem. Friends said he was smart and did not have to study to get good grades. He was also very close to his family and loved old people. Graduating from Ponca City High School in 1939, he worked another year for the fire department. By this time Jake had refined the last traits needed for close-quarters combat in the years to come.

  With war imminent, the mobilization created a wealth of government contracts and enough jobs to snap the nation out of the Depression. Elihugh found employment with CONOCO as a security guard, while most of the older children grew up and left home. The McNieces had survived the Depression. With his parents financially stable, Jake could pursue his own interests. He left for Houston, Texas, to work as a foreman in the shipyards. Five or six months later he picked up a job as a firefighter for the War Department in Little Rock, Arkansas. He then heard about a construction project in Southern Pines where he oversaw the construction of sixty bomb storage bunkers with Lumi
nous Construction. Then on December 7, 1941, the United States entered World War II.

  Jake participated in America’s great experiment with paratroop units. He enlisted to have fun and participate in an adventure. He had no intention of being a hero. He liked to fight and the army was going to pay him to fight Germans. Unwittingly, he would create a legendary unit that would find itself involved in several of the most critical events of the Second World War.

  In his narration, Jake hardly mentioned airborne training as a challenge but only as a chance to excel and prove himself the best. His officers recognized his skill and his peers considered him the toughest man in the outfit. Through a process of natural selection, Jake surrounded himself with twelve men nearly as tough as he was and who mirrored his own nature. The Filthy 13 would grow into a legend through the oral tradition of the war that leaked into the press. It was the smallest unit of reputation shaped around the personality of its founder to come out of the war. The stories of all the other famous outfits—Merrill’s Marauders, Darby’s Rangers, Frederick’s Black Devils, Carlton’s Marine Raiders, and Pappy Boyington’s Black Sheep—have already become known to the public. Now, over half a century after World War II, the story of the last of the great legendary units can be told.

  Jake always had a great sense of humor and a gift for storytelling that could make almost any event entertaining. He jokingly remarked that since nearly all the others are dead, he can tell the story of the Filthy 13 anyway he wants. With that remark, I will let his words speak.

  1

  CREATING A LEGEND

  ENLISTMENT IN THE PARATROOPS

  September 1, 1942

  I was never really interested in the war until after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. At that time I had been working as a firefighter for the War Department for quite a while. Then after Pearl Harbor there was a big project at Pine Bluff Perkins about sixty miles south of Little Rock, Arkansas. The Luminous Construction Company was con structing pretty near sixty long, storage arsenal buildings out there.

  They would be fined $10 a day if they did not finish on time and they were falling behind. They had about 250 men from Arkansas, Louisiana, and southern Missouri working for them. The contractors could not get any work out of those boys or at least with any regularity. So my brother-in-law, Cam Steele, called me figuring that I could make due progress and asked if I would come out there and be a gang pusher for the project. I said I would.

  Once there I kind of worked on the problem and changed the payroll to Wednesdays instead of paying them on Friday night. Before, the men would go out and stay drunk for three or four days and half of them would wind up in jail. Consequently, they would not show back up for work on Monday. After I changed their payroll, when time for a real tight-shoe night1 came along on Saturday, they were broke. So they just kept coming back to work on time. I worked down there until I completed that project.

  I had a total exemption from the draft because I was a fireman but I began to feel uneasy about not offering my services, whatever they might be. So I went back to Ponca City, Oklahoma, to visit my mom and dad for a few days. Then I got into some problems down there at the Blue Moon Tavern on South Avenue.

  I was out carousing around one Saturday night doing the town up in good shape and fashion. Of course, I was drunker than nine hundred dollars and looking for trouble. There was one particular individual that I wanted to put the ugly on. Thad Tucker and I had always had lots of difficulties. Well, I wanted to whip him real good one more time, but I knew the minute that I stepped inside his joint he would call the cops. So I got a friend of mine to go down with me in his good clothes. He owed Thad quite a bit of money. Well he went in with a cock-and-bull story that he had just married an Osage squaw and wanted to pay him off.2 He asked Thad to come on out to the car a bit. He would give him a big shot of whiskey then pay him.

  Well, when Thad came clear out into the driveway, I walked up and went to work on him. I knocked him down and was putting the boots to him in that gravel driveway. I was so drunk that I lost my balance. When I lifted my foot to kick him, I kind of staggered back. He then jumped up and made a run for the front door of his joint. When he did, I scooped up a big rock about the size of a baseball and threw it at him. I was still in good shape and could throw pretty straight. I hit him right in the back of the head and it just peeled his skin. It nearly scalped him. He went down but by then I could already hear sirens blowing all over the place. Squad cars were coming in from every direction. So I thought, “I’ve got to get out of here.” Then I took off and ran across the street.

  This was back in 1942 and there were not many dwelling places on the north side of South Avenue. That was where the Hearst brothers had a big corral. So I made it over into that horse lot and tore out across the field. It had been raining. The mud and horse manure were just like soup, about ankle deep all over the place. In the dark I could just see the light-colored horses. While I ran I could miss the bays and the whites and the grays but I hit one of the black ones and tumbled down in that crap. I finally escaped out of there and went on home.

  The cops had already pulled up in our driveway and talked to my mother and dad trying to get a fix on me. My parents said they did not know where I was so the cops left. My parents figured something pretty serious was wrong and were still up waiting for me when I got home. I watched them from the window. They were in the living room listening to the radio to see if they could hear any news. So I decided I would just sneak in through the back of the house, get in their bed and retire for the evening.

  Well, Dad finally said, “Becky, we might as well go to bed. We might hear something tomorrow.”

  I had horse manure and barbecue all over me. One could smell me a quarter of a block away. So they had just come back into the kitchen, next to where their bedroom was, when Dad stopped and said, “Becky, I think Jake is home already.” He smelled me.

  The minute I got up the next morning, why I jumped up and beat a hard track straight for Oklahoma City. I knew if I could get signed up in the army, the local cops no longer had any jurisdiction over me, anyway except to detain me.

  I had grown up in Maysville, Oklahoma, the home of the famous Indian pilot, Wiley Post, and had seen him make parachute jumps back in the late 1920s. So I wanted to enlist for parachute duty. That was the type of service for me.

  It would be close-in, hand-to-hand combat. A paratrooper would look a man eyeball-to-eyeball fighting behind the lines. I did not mind the risk but I just did not want all that hanky-panky; policing up cigarette butts around the area or that close-order drill. I never saw any benefit in it. Well, the longer I live and the more people I talk to who were in the military, I can now understand and see some reason for close-order drill. It taught discipline to a lot of guys who perhaps needed to follow an order without any questions. This kind of discipline has some points that are good and it has some that are bad. In paratroop service, I thought it was absolutely futile and useless, because we were disciplined to act on assignments and orders in the absence of officers. So I never did go for that crap. I just did not want any of it and this would be the source of my problems in the army.

  So I told the recruiter, “I don’t want the infantry or tanks or artillery. I want to go straight into paratroop service.”

  This sergeant was not very encouraging. He said, “Well now, wait a minute. I want to tell you something. Not an awful lot of people are making it. A thousand men volunteer. We select a hundred out of them who are physically fit and ten become paratroopers. In the event you are not one of the ten, you will go into the infantry.”

  I said, “I don’t have any doubts or qualms about being physically able to become a paratrooper, so sign me up.”

  He said, “You know they have an age limit on paratroopers. How old are you?”

  I said, “Twenty-two.”

  He said, “If they catch you lying about your age, they will not accept you. They’ll kick you right out into one of those other branches
of service.”

  I said, “I’m not lying about my age. I’m twenty-two.”

  He said, “They have a limit of twenty-eight.”

  At the time I had already lost a lot of hair and had all these scars on my face and head. He said, “You may be twenty-two but your head looks like it has been used as a live hand grenade court and has used up three bodies already.”

  I told him that was the only deal I would accept.

  So that is how I volunteered into the parachute service back in September 1942. It just kind of appealed to me. This was the kind of fighting that I preferred. I would not have to walk a hundred miles to get started. I would fly first class in a C-47 and jump right in the middle of them. It was more or less individual ability whether I was a success or a failure.

  It was not like some of these ground troops that moved up. The higher headquarters would bring a division or regiment up about ten miles behind the lines. They would hold them there for a few days where they would see a few graveyards. They would then move them up another two or three miles where they would start seeing the live wounded and the hospital and the operating table. Then they would gradually work them up to see the shock of combat. This would kind of climatize them. In the meantime they would still be ten miles behind the lines when some Kraut threw an eighty-eight shell right there in the middle of them. There was no defense against an eighty-eight dropping in your shorts. The Germans would locate them bunched up in a group that size and then bomb and strafe them. Those infantry guys were pretty defenseless. I felt that if a guy wanted to kill me, I wanted to look him in the eye. That is why I enlisted in the paratroopers. I would be right there with them—eyeball-to-eyeball.