Read Online "I Heard You Paint Houses": Frank "The Irishman" Sheeran & Closing the Case on Jimmy Hoffa by Charles Brandt - Free Book Online
Authors: Charles Brandt
Tags: United States, Fiction, General, Social Science, Biography & Autobiography, Mafia, LABOR, True Crime, Business & Economics, Criminology, Criminals & Outlaws, organized crime, Gangsters, Mafia - United States, Hoffa; James R, Teamsters, Sheeran; Frank, Gangsters - United States, Teamsters - United States
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months later as a private. They gave me combat promotions from time to time, but then I’d have my fun and get busted back down. All in all I had fifty days lost under AWOL—absent without official leave—mostly spent drinking red wine and chasing Italian, French, and German women. However, I was never AWOL when my outfit was going back to the front lines. If you were AWOL when your company was going back into combat you might as well keep going because your own officers would blow you away, and they didn’t even have to say it was the Germans. That’s desertion in the face of the enemy.
While I was waiting to be shipped overseas they had me at Camp Patrick Henry in Virginia, and I gave some lip back to one of those Southern sergeants, so they put me on KP (kitchen patrol) peeling potatoes. First chance I got I bought some laxative at the PX and put it in the giant coffee urn. Everybody wound up with bad diarrhea, including the officers. Unfortunately, I was the only one who didn’t report in sick at the infirmary. They had that caper solved before they put in a requisition for extra toilet paper. Can you guess which brilliant criminal ended up on his knees scrubbing bathroom floors?
I set sail on July 14, 1943, for Casablanca in North Africa, assigned to the 45th Infantry Division as an infantry rifleman. While you couldn’t choose your division, you could choose a particular company in the division if they had an opening. A company is about 120 men. Our church in Philly put out a newsletter keeping tabs on where all the neighborhood boys were stationed, so I knew Diggsy was with the Thunderbird. I asked to be in his company and got it. That didn’t mean I’d end up in his platoon of about thirty-two men or end up in his eight-man squad in his platoon, but I did, and we stayed together in the same squad. ”
In the fall of 1942, while they were still being trained for combat in the States and had yet to go overseas, General George S. Patton addressed Diggsy and the men of the 45th from the stage of a theater in Fort Devens, Massachusetts. General Patton told the impressionable boys of the 45th—boys away from home for the first time, about to be sent overseas to fight and die—that he had a special role in the war for their division.
As reported by Colonel George E. Martin, chief of staff to the commanding officer of the 45th Infantry Division:
[General Patton] had much to say, all interlarded with shockingly coarse and profane language…. He was telling of occurrences when British infantry moving forward to attack would bypass enemy pockets, only to find themselves engaged by this enemy to the rear. Then when the British turned to mop-up, the German soldiers would fling down their weapons and raise their hands in surrender. If this should happen to us, said General Patton, we should not accept their surrender; instead we should kill every last one of the bastardly S.O.B.s.
We were then told that our Division probably would see more combat than any other American division, and he wanted us to be known to the Germans as the “Killer Division.”
In a follow-up speech on June 27 in Algiers, North Africa, as reported by an officer of the division who was present, Patton told the men of his “Killer Division”:
…to kill and to continue to kill and that the more we killed the less we’d have to kill later and the better off the Division would be in the long run…. He did say that the more prisoners we took the more men we would have to feed and not to fool around with prisoners. He said that there was only one good German and that was a dead one.
Another officer listening to the speech reported Patton’s position on the killing of civilians: “He said something about if the people living in the cities persisted in staying in the vicinity of the battle and were enemy, we were to ruthlessly kill them and get them out of the way.”
“ After I got my foxhole dug,
While I was waiting to be shipped overseas they had me at Camp Patrick Henry in Virginia, and I gave some lip back to one of those Southern sergeants, so they put me on KP (kitchen patrol) peeling potatoes. First chance I got I bought some laxative at the PX and put it in the giant coffee urn. Everybody wound up with bad diarrhea, including the officers. Unfortunately, I was the only one who didn’t report in sick at the infirmary. They had that caper solved before they put in a requisition for extra toilet paper. Can you guess which brilliant criminal ended up on his knees scrubbing bathroom floors?
I set sail on July 14, 1943, for Casablanca in North Africa, assigned to the 45th Infantry Division as an infantry rifleman. While you couldn’t choose your division, you could choose a particular company in the division if they had an opening. A company is about 120 men. Our church in Philly put out a newsletter keeping tabs on where all the neighborhood boys were stationed, so I knew Diggsy was with the Thunderbird. I asked to be in his company and got it. That didn’t mean I’d end up in his platoon of about thirty-two men or end up in his eight-man squad in his platoon, but I did, and we stayed together in the same squad. ”
In the fall of 1942, while they were still being trained for combat in the States and had yet to go overseas, General George S. Patton addressed Diggsy and the men of the 45th from the stage of a theater in Fort Devens, Massachusetts. General Patton told the impressionable boys of the 45th—boys away from home for the first time, about to be sent overseas to fight and die—that he had a special role in the war for their division.
As reported by Colonel George E. Martin, chief of staff to the commanding officer of the 45th Infantry Division:
[General Patton] had much to say, all interlarded with shockingly coarse and profane language…. He was telling of occurrences when British infantry moving forward to attack would bypass enemy pockets, only to find themselves engaged by this enemy to the rear. Then when the British turned to mop-up, the German soldiers would fling down their weapons and raise their hands in surrender. If this should happen to us, said General Patton, we should not accept their surrender; instead we should kill every last one of the bastardly S.O.B.s.
We were then told that our Division probably would see more combat than any other American division, and he wanted us to be known to the Germans as the “Killer Division.”
In a follow-up speech on June 27 in Algiers, North Africa, as reported by an officer of the division who was present, Patton told the men of his “Killer Division”:
…to kill and to continue to kill and that the more we killed the less we’d have to kill later and the better off the Division would be in the long run…. He did say that the more prisoners we took the more men we would have to feed and not to fool around with prisoners. He said that there was only one good German and that was a dead one.
Another officer listening to the speech reported Patton’s position on the killing of civilians: “He said something about if the people living in the cities persisted in staying in the vicinity of the battle and were enemy, we were to ruthlessly kill them and get them out of the way.”
“ After I got my foxhole dug,
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