Shifty's War Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Introduction

  Epigraph

  Chapter 1 - GENERAL TAYLOR’S LOTTERY

  Chapter 2 - NO ORDINARY COUNTRY

  Chapter 3 - THE FUN AND THE FEAR

  Chapter 4 - BULLETPROOF

  Chapter 5 - FACES SET LIKE FLINT

  Chapter 6 - THE THINGS I HAD NO WORDS FOR

  Chapter 7 - ORDERS

  Chapter 8 - A BLUR OF BATTLES

  Chapter 9 - CRAZINESS

  Chapter 10 - ONLY SAFE UNDER THE EARTH

  Chapter 11 - FOY

  Chapter 12 - MAYBE WE’LL ACTUALLY LIVE

  Chapter 13 - AT WAR’S END

  Chapter 14 - THE DIFFERENCE AT HOME

  Chapter 15 - HOW A MAN WRESTLES WITH WAR

  Chapter 16 - THE BAND OF BROTHERS

  Chapter 17 - THE LAST GARDEN

  EPILOGUE

  UNDERSTANDING SHIFTY POWERS’S POSITION IN EASY COMPANY, 506TH PIR, 101ST AIRBORNE

  Acknowledgements

  INDEX

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

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  This book is an original publication of the Berkley Publishing Group.

  This work is a posthumous memoir that reflects the recollections of Shifty Powers’s experiences and the author’s retelling of those experiences in Shifty’s voice.

  Copyright © 2011 by Marcus Brotherton

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions. BERKLEY CALIBER and its logo are trademarks of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Brotherton, Marcus.

  p. cm.

  Includes bibliographical references.

  eISBN : 978-1-101-51465-8

  1. Powers, Shifty, 1923–2009. 2. United States. Army. Parachute Infantry Regiment, 506th. Company E. 3. Soldiers United States—Biography. 4. Shooters of firearms—United States—Biography. 5. World War, 1939–1945—Biography. 6. World War, 1939–1945—Campaigns—Western Front. 7. World War, 1939–1945—Regimental histories—United States. 8. United States. Army—Parachute troops—History—20th century. I. Title.

  D769.348506th .B757 2011

  940.54’8173—dc22

  [B]

  2010047531

  http://us.penguingroup.com

  DEDICATED TO THE 98 YOUNG MEN

  FROM DICKENSON COUNTY, VIRGINIA,

  WHO FOUGHT IN WORLD WAR II AND

  NEVER CAME HOME.

  INTRODUCTION

  Shifty Powers was a soft-spoken machinist who never aspired to greatness. He was born, grew up, got married, raised his family, worked, retired, and died in Clinchco, a remote mining town in southwest Virginia. Aside from a few years he spent working in California and his years in the war, he seldom traveled outside his tiny hometown. Shifty was a self-described mountain man, a hillbilly. He enjoyed fishing, hunting, working in his vegetable garden, and shooting rifles at targets from his front porch. He began the war as a lowly private and ended the war as a squad leader, never leading a group larger than twelve men. After the war, he was never the boss of anything. He never held public office. He never made much money. He never chased any of the contemporary definitions of success—popularity, power, or position. Yet, despite this humble life, the world knows his name today.

  Why?

  Certainly much of Shifty’s notoriety has to do with his association with the Band of Brothers. Shifty Powers was a soldier with the now-legendary Easy Company, 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment, 101st Division, an elite group of World War II fighters.

  The Band of Brothers formed and trained at Camp Toccoa, Georgia, under the tough and controversial Captain Herbert Sobel. After training stateside, the men rode the troop ship Samaria to Aldbourne, England, for further battle preparation. They parachuted into Normandy on D-day and later into Holland for Operation Market-Garden. They fought their way through Belgium, France, and Germany, faced overwhelming odds, liberated concentration camps, and drank a toast to victory in April 1945 at Hitler’s hideout in the Alps. Along the way they encountered horrors and victories, welded themselves into a family of soldiers, and helped swing the tide of World War II and, ultimately, the course of history.

  The company was first chronicled in 1992 by historian Stephen Ambrose in his book Band of Brothers. In 2001, Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg turned Ambrose’s book into a ten-part HBO mini-series by the same name. The series won six Emmys and numerous other awards, and still runs frequently on various networks around the world.

  Shifty Powers fit well into this group of elite soldiers. His paratrooper unit didn’t have snipers by name, but if a man was particularly handy with a rifle, he could qualify as an “expert marksman.” Shifty Powers was one of only two men in a company of 140 soldiers who initially achieved this designation. When it came to shooting rifles—and hitting what needed to be hit—he was the best of the best.

  Fellow soldier Earl “One Lung” McClung described Shifty this way: He was an excellent shot, as well as an excellent friend. On patrols, he knew exactly what he was doing—that’s why he was one of the very few old-timers in the company who was never wounded. He had the best ears of any man in the company. He could hear anything, including enemy sentries, better than most men, so he would often lead our patrols. Shifty Powers was a great man, one of the kindest people I’ve ever known. I’ve never heard him say anything bad about anyone.

  Despite his fame today, Shifty wasn’t portrayed prominently in the book or the series. He wasn’t a main character, such as Major Dick Winters. Shifty didn’t have a single episode in the miniseries that focused on him, such as Doc Roe did. You never heard Shifty’s interior monologue throughout an episode, such as you did with Carwood Lipton’s. So why has Shifty Powers become so well-known today? I believe for three reasons.

  First, Shifty Powers, played by actor Peter Youngblood Hills, was one of just a handful of men to be portrayed in all ten episodes of the HBO series. He’s seld
om seen in a main role, but he’s solidly (and perhaps strategically) placed in the background of many scenes. He was the rifle expert in Bastogne whom men asked to verify what kind of weapon was being fired at them. He could do it just by the sound. He was the sharpshooter in Carentan whom men called upon when they needed a particularly difficult shot taken. Shifty Powers was the type of quiet go-to man that others could always depend on. That’s admirable.

  Second, Shifty Powers (in real life, in addition to the series) was a gentleman. He was the good friend to everyone. For instance, when Private Walter Gordon is shown being ordered by Captain Sobel to run Mount Currahee alone as punishment for committing some minor infraction, Shifty is one of three men who voluntarily join Gordon on the run. Friends who knew him well say that he was exactly this sort of man in real life, one with a deeply altruistic and kind spirit. His granddaughter-in-law, Dawnyale Johnson, described him this way:You just fell in love with him. He had this warmth about him. He didn’t care what you looked like or if you had a PhD. He was very honest—what you saw was what you got. He’d be the same person to Tom Hanks as he’d be to the person working at Food City.

  And third, Shifty is well known today because his death on June 17, 2009, came at an arguably hero-starved time in American history. Reporter Mary Katherine Ham, praising the plethora of tribute websites for Shifty that sprang up almost overnight after Shifty died, noted that “sometimes, in between uploading videos of stupid cat tricks, sustaining the careers of such blights . . . as Lindsay Lohan, and obsessively critiquing Jennifer Love Hewitt’s bikini bod, the Internet community can up and do something admirable.”1 (See the epilogue for more of the story of how Shifty’s life continued to influence people for good even after his death.)

  Shifty is widely admired because his example helps us sort out what’s truly valuable in life. He was an ordinary man who trained to become the best and ultimately did extraordinary things. He did a difficult job well and didn’t call attention to himself. He came home from the war with his life intact and chose to live it in service to his family and community. Shifty’s life story is inspiring because it sounds so simple. It’s inspiring because it’s so rare.

  Shifty’s Story in Shifty’s Words

  Although I spoke with Shifty Powers several times over the phone, I never had the privilege of meeting him face-to-face. The information for this book came from several sources: face-to-face interviews with Shifty’s immediate family, friends, and hometown acquaintances; interviews with the men from Easy Company who fought alongside him; research from articles and what’s been written about him in other books; the phone interviews I did with Shifty before he died, for another book I wrote, titled We Who Are Alive and Remain; and recorded stories in archived audio and visual material in which Shifty told about his own life.

  These recorded interviews really opened up this book’s feel and tone for me. I had the rare opportunity to access about ten interviews, and spent weeks transcribing the recordings—literally allowing Shifty’s specific phrasings and word choices to pass through my ears and flow through my brain to my hands. That opportunity prompted me to write this book in an unusual, even controversial format.

  You’ll notice the book is written in first person (the “I” voice), as opposed to third person (the “he” voice) in which most posthumous memoirs are written. I need to state and perhaps overstate a clear caveat up front: Shifty Powers did not write this book. Rather, I am presenting Shifty’s voice as accurately as I can. This book is thoroughly based on fact, yes. It’s also an imagined memoir, yes. I chose this format because I wanted you to be able to picture Shifty sitting down in a room with you, telling his stories in his own voice. Your invitation is to bypass me as author and meet Shifty Powers directly. You can see his life through his eyes and hear things with his ears. I want you to be able to get to know him in the closest way possible through the pages of a book.

  The Powers family is in agreement with this choice. It was their love and admiration of their father, husband, and brother that led to this book’s creation in the first place. Shifty’s widow, Dorothy; his children, Wayne Powers and Margo Johnson; and his last surviving sibling, Gaynell Sykes, have all read and approved advance copies of this book.

  I used first person for another, more basic reason. Shifty talked like only Shifty could talk. He told stories like only he could tell stories. He spoke in a colloquial, Southern manner, and I wanted to capture that feeling and tone throughout the book.

  For instance, Shifty said the words “you know” after almost every sentence. He frequently described scenes using parallel sentence construction—he’d deliver a compound sentence, then he’d repeat the first part of the sentence but with a different ending. He often used past and present progressive tense with his verbs (a lot of “I am going . . . he was saying . . . I was shooting . . .”). He used colloquial phrases, such as “I’m studying this” to mean he was thinking about something. He was “aggravated” rather than angry. Often he interspersed his sentences with filler words such as “see” and “well.” Wherever possible in this book, I’ve used Shifty’s exact phrasing and speech patterns from transcriptions of his recorded words. I wanted you to hear and feel the words of Shifty firsthand.

  Peter Youngblood Hills described Shifty’s mannerisms as reflective of the man’s character. Shifty was a great man leading a quiet life, and he spoke from the overflow of a good heart. Peter said this about Shifty:His speech—it was like a song, how he talked. His speech patterns contained a depth of character—his voice was comforting to listen to—but it also contained a softness and lightness. He would often talk very slowly, often ending his phrases by letting his voice go high. But it wasn’t like the highness of a woman’s voice. The highness contained a quality of bringing you close. He’d say things like, “Well. . . now . . . I declare,” and end up very high on the last words. You almost need to say it out loud for yourself to know what I mean. He spoke as one sure of himself, but who didn’t want to speak without being heard.

  Shifty could be humble to the point of being self-deprecating. He called himself “an old hillbilly in the holler,” and he would understate almost everything he said—whether his own accomplishments or how horror-filled the war had been. For instance, he described the war to me by saying simply, “It wasn’t a good time.” Certainly Shifty sensed the gravity of what he had done and where he had been. But he understated things because he never wanted to be a person to blow his own horn. Although he was an ordinary man living through an extraordinary time, he never lost the sense of who he was at heart.

  Even in his old age, when I met him, Shifty walked with a spring in his step, as if well connected to the earth. He had Cherokee blood running through his ancestry, and his skin was smooth and contained a pale reddish tint. He asked questions of other people and spoke as if he was listening to you as much as talking. He was always listening to his surroundings, yes, whether what was happening up on the hill or out in the field. But he also talked as if listening to what you had to say. Shifty Powers wanted to bring you along in whatever amazing journey was happening.

  I like that last phrase a lot: Shifty Powers wanted to bring you along in his amazing journey.

  What follows is the story of Sergeant Darrell C. “Shifty” Powers, the legendary sharpshooter featured in the Band of Brothers. In the pages ahead, I invite you to meet this man, get to know him, and come to respect him deeply.

  —Marcus Brotherton

  August 2010

  “Dig your foxhole deep.

  Keep your head down.

  And make damn sure your rifle doesn’t jam.”

  —SHIFTY POWERS, AT AGE 81, WORDS TO A YOUNG SOLDIER

  1

  GENERAL TAYLOR’S LOTTERY

  Austria, 1945

  By my twenty-second birthday, you know, I had killed eight men. Eight that I was certain of, eight that I could plainly count. That information was stuffed deep within my gut, and if anyone ever asked if I killed someon
e during the war, particularly if a child ever asked, I vowed I’d shake my head no, that information was never coming out.

  Less than a month after my birthday, the war was declared over. Everybody drank a lot of champagne, then this weariness set in. Everybody just wanted to go home. I think it was weariness we were feeling, anyway. It was hard to rightly put the feeling into words. Frustration, maybe. Like everybody else, home is where I longed to be, but I wasn’t heading stateside soon. A man needed 85 points to be discharged from the army, and though I had trained at Toccoa as one of the original men in the company and served every day on the front as rifleman, scout, and sharpshooter in every campaign from Normandy forward, I didn’t have enough points. I was missing one piece of important battle experience when it came to Army thinking. Maybe it was a special angel looking over my shoulder, don’t rightly know, but I had dodged all bullets aimed my direction. Unlike most men in Easy Company, I had no Purple Hearts. In a company that suffered 150 percent casualties, I was an acute rarity. You see, I’d never been wounded.

  Wasn’t complaining, mind you, wasn’t talking to anybody about the trouble I felt. Come war’s end we was pulling occupation duty in Zell am See, a middling-sized town in Austria near the foot of the Alps. Fine country to be soldiering in. No one was doing much work no more, some running maybe, some drilling to keep us sharp. Was a beautiful place, truly, with that glassy lake in the center of town. Why shoot—compared to the aggravation we’d just fought through, the place we now stayed made a fellow feel almost lighthearted in spite of his weariness, as if he was relaxing on his front porch after a hard day’s work.