"I Heard You Paint Houses": Frank "The Irishman" Sheeran & Closing the Case on Jimmy Hoffa (10 page)

“
We marched into Rome without a fight. Rome was what they called an open city, which meant neither side would bomb it, but there was a little bombing. Rome is the first time I ever saw a sidewalk café. We’d sit there and relax, eat our lunch, and drink a little wine. I saw my first blond Italian women in Rome parading by the cafés. I had a few adventures. It wasn’t hard to do. We were issued chocolate bars and tins of cheese and chopped eggs in a can. That’s all it took. The people had nothing so you can’t judge them on morals. Fraternizing with the local women was against regulations, but what were they going to do, send us to a combat unit?

We fought the Germans in Italy for a while, and then we got put on landing craft for the invasion of southern France called Operation Dragoon on August 14, 1944. We had some resistance as we landed. It was more harassment than real fire power. But fire is fire. Two shots of fire is still bad.

Running up out of the surf on to the beach at St. Tropez I thought I was shot. I looked down and saw red all over my uniform. I hollered for the medic and Lieutenant Kavota from Hazelton, Pennsylvania, came running over to me and shouted, “You son of a bitch, that’s wine. You ain’t shot. Get up and get going. They shot your canteen.” He was a good Joe.

We finally drove the Germans back and we entered the Alsace-Lorraine region, which is part French and part German. I had a pal from Kentucky that we called Pope. He was a damn good soldier. You can’t say such and such a guy is a coward. You can only absorb so much. In Alsace-Lorraine I saw Pope stick his leg out from behind a tree to get a million-dollar wound so he’d be sent home; only a heavy round came in and took his leg off. He survived and went home with one leg missing.

Another way I saw guys snap a little bit is when it came to taking prisoners. Here these Germans were shooting at you, trying to kill you and blowing your pals all to hell, and now you’ve got a chance to get them back, and they want to surrender. Some people take that personally. So maybe you didn’t understand what they were saying. Or if you did take them alive and you took them back behind your own line, maybe they tried to escape. I don’t mean a massacre. If you had a load of prisoners you took them back, but with a handful of Germans or less you did what you had to do and what everybody else expected you to do. The lieutenant gave me a lot of prisoners to handle and I did what I had to do.

In a fire fight in the Alsace, Diggsy got hit in the back halfway up a hill. The medics got him and started bringing him down the hill. I didn’t have much emotion left by this time in the war, but I have to say seeing little Diggsy hit on that hill and I was emotional. I saw his rifle on the ground where he fell. They didn’t want you to lose your rifle over there. I must have snapped or something. So I called for cover from the other guys, and I crawled up and got Diggsy’s rifle for him. When we all crawled back down the hill, Digs said to me, “You got to be nuts. You could have been killed for this friggin’
M-I
.” I said, “Ah, the Germans didn’t know they had us outnumbered.” It was the second time I had seen him get shot.

In Alsace-Lorraine we heard that the Germans had launched a desperate counteroffensive up north through a forest in Belgium to halt our advance after Normandy in what they called the Battle of the Bulge. The Germans were advancing in a bulge and so Allied troops were needed to be sent from our southern front to reinforce their northern front. Our company was left to cover the division’s whole southern front, which meant 120 men were covering a front that might have been covered by a full division of 10,000 or 15,000 men.

All we did was retreat. We walked the whole night New Year’s Eve of 1945. We watched the French people of the Alsace pulling in the American flags on their houses and start putting the German flags back up. But soon reinforcements came in, and we built up our strength and pushed back into the German part of the Alsace.

From there we fought our way to the Harz Mountains. The Germans occupied the summit. One night we intercepted a mule train with hot food for the Germans on top. We ate what we wanted and soiled the rest with our waste. We left the German women alone. They were like our WACs. They had prepared the food. We just left them there. But the mule teams were driven by a handful of German soldiers. We had no intention of taking them back down the mountain, and we couldn’t take them with us as we advanced up, so we gave them shovels, and they dug their own shallow graves. You wonder why would anyone bother to dig their own graves, but then I guess you cling to some hope that maybe the people with the guns would change their mind, or maybe your own people would come along while you were digging, or maybe if you cooperated and dug your own grave you’d get a good clean hit without any brutality or suffering. By this time, I thought nothing of doing what I had to do.

From the Harz Mountains we made a right turn and kept on heading in a direct line south in Germany, taking Bamberg and then Nuremberg. That town had been practically bombed to the ground. Nuremberg had been the place where Hitler held all his big rallies. Every single symbol of the Nazis that survived the bombing was systematically destroyed.

Our goal was Munich in Bavaria in southern Germany, the town where Hitler had gotten his start in a beer hall. But on the way, we made a stop to liberate the concentration camp at Dachau.
”

The Combat Report states that inside the camp there were “some 1,000 bodies…. Gas chamber and crematoriums were conveniently side-by-side. Clothing, shoes, and bodies were stacked alike in neat and orderly piles.”

“
We had heard rumors about atrocities at the camps, but we were not prepared for what we were seeing and for the stench. If you see something like that it gets printed on your mind forever. That scene and that smell when you first saw it never goes away. The young, blond-haired German commander in charge of the camp and all his officers were loaded in jeeps and driven off. We heard gunfire in the distance. In short order all of the rest of them—about 500 German soldiers guarding Dachau—were taken care of by us. Some of the camp victims who had the strength borrowed our guns and did what they had to do. And nobody batted an eye when it was done.

Right after that we marched down and took Munich, and about two weeks later the war in Europe ended with Germany’s unconditional surrender.

All these years later and from stirring it up I started having dreams again about the combat, only the dreams were all mixed in with things I started doing for certain people after the war.

I was discharged on October 24, 1945, a day before my twenty-fifth birthday, but only according to the calendar.
”

 
chapter seven
 

Waking Up in America

“
By coincidence I ran into my kid brother, Tom, on the dock in Havre de Grace, France, in October 1945. The war was over and we were both shipping back to Philly, but on separate ships. Tom had seen a little bit of combat. I said, “Hi, Tom.” He said, “Hi, Frank. You’ve changed! You’re not the same brother I remember from before the war.” I knew just what he meant. That’s what 411 days of combat does to you. He could see it on my face, maybe in my stare.

Thinking about what my brother said to me on the dock in Havre de Grace makes me wonder if he was looking into my soul. I knew something was different about me. I didn’t care anymore about things. I had been through practically the whole war; what could anybody do to me? Somewhere overseas I had tightened up inside, and I never loosened up again. You get used to death. You get used to killing. Sure, you go out and have fun, but even that has an edge. Not to bellyache or anything, because I was one of the lucky ones to come out in one piece. But if I hadn’t volunteered for action I never would have seen any of what I saw or did any of what I had to do. I would have stayed in the States as an MP jitterbugging to “Tuxedo Junction.”

You step on shore from overseas and everywhere you look you see Americans, and they’re not wearing a uniform, and they’re speaking English, and you get a big boost in morale.

The Army gives you $100 a month for three months. The men who didn’t go seem to have all the good jobs and you just go back to where you came from and try to pick up where you left off. I went back to live with my parents in West Philly and back to Pearlstein’s to pick up where I left off as an apprentice. But I couldn’t handle being cooped up in a job after living outdoors all that time overseas. The Pearlstein family was good to me, but I couldn’t take supervision and I quit after a couple of months.

Many a morning I found myself waking up in America and being surprised to find myself in a bed. I had been having nightmares all night long, and I didn’t know where I was. It would take me awhile to adjust, because I couldn’t believe I was in a bed. What was I doing in a bed? After the war I never slept more than three or four hours a night.

In those days you didn’t talk about stuff like that. There was no such thing as war syndrome, but you knew something was different. You tried not to remember anything from over there, but things came back to you. You had done every damn thing overseas, from killing in cold blood to destroying property to stealing whatever you wanted and to drinking as much wine and having as many women as you wanted. You lived every minute of every day in danger of your own life and limb. You couldn’t take chances. Many times you had a split second to decide to be judge, jury, and executioner. You had just two rules you had to obey. You had to be back in your outfit when you went back on the line. You had to obey a direct order in combat. Break one of those rules and you could be executed yourself, right on the spot even. Otherwise, you flaunted authority. You lost the moral skill you had built up in civilian life, and you replaced it with your own rules. You developed a hard covering, like being encased in lead. You were scared more than you’d ever been in your life. You did certain things, maybe against your will sometimes, but you did them, and if you stayed over there long enough you didn’t even think about them anymore. You did them like you might scratch your head if it itched.

You had seen the damnedest things. Emaciated bodies stacked up like logs in a concentration camp; young kids barely shaving and lying about their ages to get into combat and then getting blown away; even your own buddies lying down dead in the mud. Imagine how you feel when you see only one body laid out in a funeral parlor; there you’re seeing body after body.

I used to think a lot about dying when I got home. Everybody does. Then I thought, what are you worrying about? You have no control over it. I figured everybody is put here with two dates already determined for them; a date for when they’re born and a date for when they go. You don’t have any control over either one of those dates, so “what will be will be” became my motto. I got through the war, so what can happen to me? I didn’t care so much anymore about things. What will be will be.

I did a lot of wine drinking overseas. I used the wine over there the way the jeeps used gasoline. And I kept it up when I got back home. Both of my wives complained about my drinking. I often said that when they put me in jail in 1981 it was not the FBI’s intent, but they saved my life. They only have seven days in a week, and by the time I went to jail I was drinking eight.

That first year home I tried different jobs. I worked for Bennett Coal and Ice whenever they needed me. I hauled ice in the summer—two cakes in the icebox—lots of people didn’t have electric refrigerators after the war. In the winter I delivered coal for heating. It was funny that my first job at seven was cleaning out the ashes that the coal leaves behind and now I had made it all the way up to delivering the coal. I worked for a moving company for a month. I stacked cement bags at a cement plant all day long. I worked on construction as a laborer. Whatever I could get. I didn’t rob a bank. I was a bouncer and taught ballroom dancing at Wagner’s Dance Hall part time on Tuesday, Friday, and Saturday nights. I kept that job for about ten years.