FROM THE ARCHIVES: How Two South Philadelphians Faced D-Day
In honor of the 64th anniversary of D-Day, we offer this excerpt from Robyn Post’s June 2001 article “Veterans’ Day,” about two South Philadelphians, Bill Guarnere and Edward “Babe” Heffron, whose lifelong friendship was forged during World War II when they met as members of Easy Company, an elite unit of paratroopers in the Army’s 101st Airborne Division whose exploits were dramatized part of the renowned HBO series Band of Brothers. The article later led to a joint memoir, co-written with Post, called Brothers in Battle, Best of Friends (Penguin, 2007).
Two days before D-Day on Normandy — Easy’s first combat mission — Guarnere was sitting on the toilet and happened to pluck a letter out of his jacket pocket that was addressed to his friend, Sergeant Martin. He’d mistakenly grabbed Martin’s jacket, but he decided to read the letter anyway. It was from Martin’s wife. It said, “Don’t tell Bill Guarnere, but his brother was killed in Cassino, Italy.”
“I felt like the floor fell out from under me,” says Guarnere, who was one of seven sons. “I became crazed.” The trained warrior, preparing to lead four dozen men into battle, now had a personal vendetta against Hitler’s army. “I went into Normandy with one goal: to leave no German soldier alive,” he says. In his first enemy encounter, he shot everyone he encountered with his pistol. “Easy as squashing a bug,” he recalls. “No remorse. But that’s war. The war is no joke. The war is a son of a bitch.”
His fury contributed to the destruction of a German battery of guns looking down on Utah Beach (where the Americans were landing) and a unit of 50 enemy soldiers. “He was a wild man,” Heffron says, pointing to his best friend. “When the platoon would hunker down in foxholes, he would stand straight up. He’d run at bullets and yell, ‘Come on, come on, they couldn’t hit the side of a barn, let’s go!’”
“I’m lucky to be alive,” says Guarnere. He takes a puff of his cigarette and taps it against a red, white and blue-striped ashtray with an eagle on it. “The man upstairs must have had his finger on me.”
Read the complete “Veterans’ Day” in our archives.
