#clancy lyall

[bleedingcoffee42]

"David Webster had the same amount of points I had. He said, "I wanna go home!" . Well, there is a story itself. Harvard educated. He didn't want to get promoted. He stayed a private and didn't want to be a PFC and he had a little journal with him in which he took notes all the time. So we started to make up stories and lie to him because he was always getting on our nerves with questions like 'did you do this?' or did you do that?'. And so when the war was over he went home and started to work for a magazine. The Websters were very wealthy people and his had this sailing yacht. One day he went out on the ocean to fish by himself. He fell overboard and a shark ate him! Can you imagine that? Going through all that crap and then that happens to you?"

--Clancy Lyall from his book "Silver Eagle"

[pfctipper]

i do actually do things other than dig around in archives for easy company stuff

but @bleedingcoffee42’s post about clancy lyall running into his dad in military hospital in england sent me down a rabbithole 

and i knew that lyall lied about his age and was actually sixteen when he jumped on d-day (no wonder tab called him his younger brother) but i did not expect his dad to be born in 1913

[pastlivesandpurplepuppets]

[...]airborne outfits that go into combat are supposed to be relieved within three to five days. But it never happened; not with us, anyway. Normandy was thirty-four days combat. Holland was seventy-four days combat. When we got to Mourmelon, it was right into battle again. By the time we got into Bastogne, we were all flaky to start with. Then we were forty days combat in Bastogne. If it wasn’t for each other, I’m sure a lot of us would have gone crazy. That’s where the cohesion comes in. We were brothers.

Me and Mike Massaconi were in a hole in the Bois Jacques woods. Snow was all around, and I saw a goddam bird stick his head out the side of my hole. I told Mike to look at it, but there was no bird there really. Mike gave me a hug and brought me down. That’s what I’m talking about. You’re flaky after all that combat. Crazy. One little thing sets you off. I swear to Christ I saw that bird. He opened his beak and all. The Germans were shelling the living crap out of us at the time. I’m scared like everybody else. If it wasn’t for Mike I would have charged the light brigade or something. But he calmed me down.

After that I was fine—actually, I wasn’t fine, I carried that with me for many years. I got to a point after the war where I started drinking a lot. When you drink you forget your nightmares. But then you wake up and you have to go worship Mother Hopper and you’ve got a damn headache and you still remember it. So it took me a long time to get out of that.

I’m telling you—in Bastogne I got so calloused I could sit on a frozen corpse and eat a K ration. But after the war I used to have these dreams—I was afraid I’d roll over in bed and strangle my wife. The dream I remember most is of the bayonet attacks. Running headway at the enemy, rifles out, and they’re running at you. I can see their faces. I remember the blade going into a man. I had nightmares about the concentration camps we saw in Germany, too. There was the stench of it, the skeletons walking around—they come up to you and hug you, I’ll never forget the reality of those experiences as long as I live.

~ Clancy Lyall

[winnix85]

David Webster (only recorded what he saw. No comments)

“Why is that girl’s head shaved?”

“She made love to German soldiers.”

###########

Buck Compton:

But I never actually witnessed anyone getting her head shaved.

###########

Bill Guarnere:

The women got what was due them, too. The Dutch threw them into the middle of the street, ripped off their clothes, shaved their heads, beat them, publicly shamed them.

They deserved it. What should you do, kiss them? They were sent off like homeless lepers. We saw them wandering in the countryside and we didn’t say a word to them. We knew what they were, what they done. Someone probably killed them eventually.

(I have to say this made me very uncomfortable. These women probably slept with German soldiers for the same reason the refugee girl Annie slept with Babe——you’re the occupation army, carrying gun, and you have food)

############

Clancy Lyall:

The thing that bothered me most in Eindhoven was that some people of the resistance took the women, who had been collaborating with the Germans, out to the streets and shaved their heads.

You’ve got to eat! A woman by herself ... well, you do what you have to do to get something to survive.

I didn't appreciate what they did to those women one bit. So I gave one of them some of my K-rations.

I would imagine that some who did the shaving have probably shagged with the enemy now and then too!

[searchingforacircuitbreaker]

This is where we had some problems - they called it The Island, but it was really two dikes. We set up a defensive line. In front of us was a dike much higher than ours, where the Germans were. If you got up on your dike in daytime, they killed you, so we couldn't do hardly anything in the day. Just bayonet charges. But that was kind of silly. There was this one charge we made where the OP [outpost] had seen a whole bunch of Germans in the high grass, so we were going to rout them. We ran maybe three hundred yards toward the Germans, hollering, screaming, shooting, doing some good. We were smack dab in the middle of the two dikes when we saw another huge bunch of Germans coming toward us like ants over a hill. It was maybe ten against one. That was the first time I ever heard Lieutenant Dick Winters cuss. He said, "Oh, shit."

- Clancy Lyall [We Who Are Alive and Remain: Untold Stories from the Band of Brothers by Marcus Brotherton ]

[shiftyskip]

Eugene E. Jackson

Eugene E. Jackson

The real Eugene E. Jackson:

Eugene Edward Jackson was born July 29, 1922 to Mabel and Edward Jackson in Pennsylvania. His mother was 17 at the time of his birth. His father was around 25. They had gotten married the year before when Mabel was 16.

He had an older sister Dorothy, who was 2 years older than him. He would later have a younger brother, Robert H., and sister, Elizabeth. He also had a brother William, who died as an infant in 1929. Even later, his mother must have remarried (for she undergoes a name change and has a step son). In total, Jackson had 10 siblings.I don’t know when his mother remarried. According to a genealogy website, Mabel and Edward had six children, out of the ten related to his mother. This must be adding Frances and Margaret. (Also could’ve been William)

Not much is known about his childhood. I can only give what a news article talking to his sister Margaret. Here is some quotes from the article, “She remembers Eugene and his brother, Robert, walking up the hill from their home in Valley Camp to the one-room schoolhouse in the Valley Heights section of New Kensington. They’d walk home for lunch and then back up the hill to school afterward. The boys liked to play ball at a large field near the railroad tracks in Valley Camp, Adams said. “They used to play a lot in the evening, kick the stick or whatever, and sometimes they would build a fire and roast potatoes,” she said. “It was a fun time for them.””

The article also quoted his brother Robert. It states: “Robert Jackson, 92, of Upper Burrell couldn’t say why Eugene wanted to be a paratrooper but noted his brother was adventurous. He swam several times across the Allegheny River with its dangerous currents. “He always was a daredevil,” he said.”

What I can tell you is that Jackson enlisted on October 7, 1940 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He was 18 at the time of his enlistment, contradictory to the fact that Band of Brothers states in the show that he enlisted at the age of 16 by lying about his age. I have no idea where half of that comes from, but Jackson was born in 1922, making him two years under 20 when 1940 comes around.

According to Winters, Heffron, and Ambrose, Jackson joined Easy Company late in the action. Jackson had joined Easy as a replacement before the Holland jump. But according to his serial number for the Army and the Easy Company roster, Donald Malarkey’s story is accurate. 

Don Malarkey states in his book, Easy Company Soldier, that Eugene Jackson had been seriously wounded in Normandy. Jackson got hurt by a large fragment from mortar to the head. He lost half his ear and had a 6-inch gash in his head. Before they went to Holland, he returned to Easy Company, ready to go again. He showed up for duty, still in his bandages. Compton (possibly Winters, Malarkey cannot remember) said that Jackson was not ready for duty yet and sent him back to the hospital. The hospital took him back, let him recover more, and Jackson returned again before they could jump. 

Jackson jumped into Holland with the rest of Easy. Although he survived the Battle of the Bulge, he is improperly marked on the Belgium memorial for those died in the Foy and Bastogne. This is pictured below, where he is marked to have died in December of 1944 which is not accurate. He’s listed along with Skip Muck, Penkala, Hoobler, and others, all of which died during this time. His name remains here, inaccurately, because it is the only Easy Company memorial to have his name. 

Jackson is considered the final combat death of Easy Company. He died due to his wounds on February, 15 1945 in Haguenau, France. 

His death is portrayed in Band of Brothers, in which Webster narrates the episode. Webster, however, was not there. Forrest Guth was. 

Forrest did not see what happened to Jackson, but he did not remember the grenade being thrown into the building first. This was what was shown to happen in the movie and in Winter’s plans. He assumed Mercier did throw one. He didn’t see what grenade shrapnel hit Jackson, if it was German or his own, but he states that everyone knew Jackson was dying as they dragged him and the prisoners back to Easy. He died before he could be evacuated to a hospital. 

Malarkey remembers Jackson’s death like this: “Eugene Jackson got hammered by the wooden handle of a potato masher. Poor Jackson. He’s the guy who’d taken a large fragment from a mortar in the side of his head in Normandy, then shown up before the Holland jump as if nothing had happened. Now, he was fighting for what little life was left in him. They’d dragged him across the river, into our headquarters house, but everybody in the room knew he wasn’t going to make it. And he didn’t. He kept calling over and over for his “mama” to help him. He died as they tried to get him to a military hospital. Of shock- that’s what I heard. He was only nineteen, among those soldiers so anxious to get in that he’d lied about his age back when he was sixteen.” 

Clancy Lyall states in his book: “Sadly we also lost two of our guys over there. One of them was Eugene Jackson, whom I mentioned before. He got hit by shrapnel from a grenade during one of the patrols over the river. A German, who was on the first floor of the outpost, dropped it on him just as they wanted to take that building. This patrol was led by Sergeant Kenneth Mercier. In the TV series they show it was Jackson’s own grenade that exploded in his face but that’s not true. Eugene died of his wounds before they could bring him to an aid-station....”

In Ambrose’s version, it states: “Mercier continued toward his target, eight men following him. When he got close enough to the German outpost, he fired a rifle grenade into the cellar window. As it exploded, the men rushed the building and threw hand grenades into the cellar. As those grenades exploded, Mercier led the men into the cellar, so close behind the blast that Pvt. Eugene Jackson, a replacement who had joined up in Holland, was hit in the face and head by fragments of shrapnel...As the explosions outside increased, Private Jackson, who had been wounded on the patrol, began screaming, “Kill me! Kill me! Somebody kill me! I can’t stand it, Christ I can’t stand it. Kill me, for God’s sake kill me!” His face was covered with blood from a grenade fragment that had pierced his skill and lodged in his brain...Jackson continued to call out. “Kill me! Kill me! I want Mercier! Where is Mercier?” He was sobbing. Mercier went to him and held his hand. “That’s O.K., buddy, that’s O.K. You’ll be all right.” Someone stuck a morphine Syrette in Jackson’s arm. He was by then so crazed with pain he had to be held down on the bunk. Roe arrived with another medic and a stretcher. As they carried the patient back toward the aid station, Mercier walked beside the stretcher, holding Jackson’s hand. Jackson died before reaching the aid station.” (Band of Brothers, 239)

He was 5 months short of turning 23 when he died, making him 22 when he died. Stephen Ambrose, however, quotes Webster. “”He wasn’t twenty years old,” Webster wrote. “He hadn’t begun to live. Shrieking and moaning, he gave up his life on a stretcher.” However, according to his birthdate, he would’ve been over 20. He also would have been around the same age as Webster, who was born in 1922 as well, around a month before Jackson. 

Below is Jackson’s funeral service pamphlet: 

He is buried in Greenwood Memorial Park in New Kensington, PA. 

According to an article written by Jodi Weigand, published on May 29, 2016 (just past 71 year anniversary of his memorial service), “Robert Jackson was a soldier in Italy when his older brother died. Eugene was buried in a military cemetery in France until his body could be returned to the U.S. three years later.“It was a sad day,” he said of his brother’s funeral in May 1948.The family has a tradition of keeping mementos and photos. Eugene’s fill the dining room table at Robert Jackson’s home.They have 11 of the badges and medals he received, including the Bronze Star and Purple Heart. Also included are his Army jacket and hats, rifle score book and soldier’s handbook. The family kept the dozens of letters he wrote from overseas. They also have photos taken while he was in the service and several childhood photos and drawings.While the Jackson family is proud of Eugene’s service, they want others’ service and sacrifice to be recognized as well.Jackson’s nephew, Barry Jackson, 66, of Upper Burrell said: “Our family wishes to convey to any man or woman who has served their country in any capacity that they all belong to a Band of Brothers.” 

May Jackson be remembered and his life celebrated by those who served in the Band of Brothers. Currahee.

[pneumasprings]

The Official Biography Of Band Of Brothers Ebook

The official biography of Clancy Lyall, member of the “Band of Brothers”, made famous by Steven Spielberg's and Tom Hanks' 2001 TV-series and Stephen Ambrose's book bearing the same name. It's Clancy's story in his own words about World War 2. Visit: https://www.pneumasprings.co.uk/book-category/non-fiction/biography/

[winnix85]

AGREE! Speirs was a complex person with many aspects of personality:

Speirs to Clancy Lyall: “ Don’t worry about it, you’re dead already. You just keep on moving. If it’s your time, it’s your time. “

**** 50 years later ****

In a letter Speirs to Winters: “I was scared to death and never thought I would survive the war.”

one thing that's confused me after watching BoB is why speirs is always perceived as this stone-cold, emotionless dude in fics? like, I get the whole thing of it being an act but...we see so many moments of him around different people acting hella soft?? in fact, he's probably one of the most emotive guys in easy, it just so happens his main reaction is anger. anyways, this is my plea for more soft speirs in fics please and thank you

[atlanticcanada]

Calais residents show mixed reaction to Tuesday's mid-term elections

Election signs from Tuesday's mid-term elections are still visible on roads in Calais, Maine.

A busy street lined with local businesses --- including the Mercier Hair Salon.

Owner Ralph Mercier moved here six years ago after living in Washington, D.C. for 40 years.

He says the city he left has become fragmented.

“By somebody I believe isn't fit to hold that office,” Mercier said. “It's been proven time and time again with the fear and the rhetoric towards folks of different colour, different ethnicities, and different religious beliefs. It's not the country I know.”

These mid-term elections have been described as a referendum on Donald Trump's presidency and residents in Calais seem to agree with that assessment.

"I would have liked to have seen more change occur,” said Calais resident Bob Neuman. “I can't believe that people actually listen to Trump and all his garbage and actually believe it.”

Others here have been turned off of politics altogether.

“It was pretty much what I expected,” said Calais resident Matthew Clancy. “I see both of the parties are pretty much the same thing. They both love the war, so I don't see much of a difference between the two.”

Democrat Janet Mills won Maine's governor race. It’s a historic win as she’s set to become the first woman to serve in that role in the state.

“I do hope this election sends a powerful signal, a message to the women and girls of Maine, of any age, there is no obstacle you cannot overcome. None," Mills said in her victory speech.

But in Calais -- feelings about the future are mixed.

There’s both hope and pessimism from Americans now living in a new political landscape.

With files from CTV Atlantic’s Laura Lyall.

from CTV News - Atlantic https://ift.tt/2Qo4sYw

[gemfyre]

more photos from Silver Eagle by Ronald Ooms (with Clancy Lyall)

[bleedingcoffee42]

From Silver Eagle- Clancy Lyall's story

Obsessed with this image of Clancy Lyall just wandering up to Speirs and just asking whatever the hell he wants.

"We went to Captain Speirs and asked if we could take the booze down and he gave us his okay."

"Captain Speirs gave the okay to go ahead and liberate the place."

"Well, that was the biggest thing you see, because I knew him the best, Roy Cobb was given to me to take care of. When he got drunk he was a bastard first class, right? And one day he got so drunk and was starting to tick off Captain Speirs. I was pretty sure Speirs was going o kill him so I dragged Cobb by the arm and took him away from him. 'You own that son of a b., Lyall! I don't wanna see his darn face again unless he's straightened out!' Speirs yelled at me. I said, 'All right, Sir. Understood, sir."

"And about the rumors surrounding Captain Speirs, they were exactly what they were: rumors. About the sergeant he supposedly shot in Normandy because he was drunk: that was a lot of baloney. He fired his weapon but he didn't shoot the guy, he shot in the air. But I don't know about those 20 POWs in Normandy. They said he shot them after he gave them cigarettes. We did ask him that question but he said : 'Don't believe all you hear.'"

[pfctipper]

16 & 22 for the violence ask!

thank you anon these are such good ones!

16 you can't understand why so many people like this thing (characterisation, trope, headcanon etc)

obviously i understand why people like it but i don't read self-insert or ofc fic! which is not a slight at all as lots of it is incredibly high-quality and well-researched. but one of my favourite things about fic is how it lets me explore chearacters i already know further (which imo enhances the porn).

also i have never really read or written it, or frankly any m/f ships, in any fandom. even as a twelve-year-old i was like oh no draco/reader or harry/hermione for me thank you i would exclusively like to read about oliver wood kissing percy weasley in the quidditch locker room

so i was definitely surprised by quite how popular it is in hbo war!

22 your favourite part of canon that everyone else ignores

this is stretching the definition of canon to encompass actual history lmao but easy company beyond the key players we focus on each episode! both in the sense that e.g. babe and roe don't feature much in crossroads but were there, so you can have fun filling in the blanks as to what they were up to during mourmelon (this was also when lip interrupted the nco pillow fight haha), and also that if you read e.g. web's book he basically experiences the war with an entirely different group (mccreary, christenson, vd, tiny baby clancy lyall, burr smith). i like finding out more about them and it tickles me when they pop up.

also i love moose heyliger (who was with easy originally at toccoa!). it is criminal that there is not a single moose fic on ao3

[likeshadowsinthenight]

"All in all, what a company. What a bunch of people, truly a band of brothers" Clarence Odell “Clancy” Lyall enlisted in the Army in November 1942; when Pearl Harbor hit he was only 16 but he was big for his age so he told the draft board he was 18 and was accepted. He received basic training at Camp Blanding, Florida, then moved to Fort Benning for parachute training and in March 1944 he was transferred to Headquarters Company, 2d Battalion, 506PIR, heavy weapons platoon. He jumped into Normandy and on June 13 he was bayoneted in the stomach while fighting in Carentan and was evacuated to England for recovery. "As we rushed around with the grenades I ran around the corner pf a building and was stopped flat by a German. I plowed straight into his bayonet. We were both frozen—I think he was as scared as I was. I shot first. As he fell backwards he pulled his bayonet out of my stomach." When Clancy healed, he was reassigned to Easy and became a machine gunner alongside Mike Massaconi with David Webster as their ammo bearer. One time in Holland they were low on ammo so the two of them hollored at Webster to bring more, but he did not move out of his foxhole. After numerous shouts Clancy took out a grenade and threw it right in Webster's foxhole "Of course the pin wasn't pulled out but Webster didn't know that, he jumped in the air and went up the dike so fast with ammo you didn't see him coming." In Holland he was wounded for the second time in the leg, he was evacuated to a hospital in Brussels and then rejoined his company in Mourmelon, just in time for the Battle of Bastogne. During the fighting there he was wounded a third time in the head, the day after Christmas. He lost his good friend Donald Hoobler. He took part in the fighting at Hagenau and was among those who took Hitler's Eagle's Nest in Zell am See. Clancy was stationed in Germany while the Nuremberg Trials took place, during this time he provided a stamp book he had found in Berchtesgaden, which listed names of those who joined the Nazi party. 1946 he married his first wife Violet.  He made two combat parachute jumps during the Korean War and in 1954 he jumped into Vietnam during the French Indo-China War. In the late 1950s, Clancy was reassigned back to the reactivated 101st Airborne Division at Fort Campbell, Kentucky. Clancy retired from the service in 1959 with the rank of Master Sergeant. During his military career he made four combat jumps and earned 25 decorations and citations. After leaving the service he worked for Carvel Ice Cream as a marketing director and remarried in 1971. In 2005, Clancy was recognized as Native American by a chief of the Cherokee Nation and given the name "Silver Eagle." In 2008, he traveled to Kuwait with several other fellow E/506 veterans to show their appreciation for the US troops serving there. He died in the morning of March 19, 2012, at age 86. "Serving with Captain Winters was one of the highlights of my life, I have never heard that man raise his voice one time while giving orders, not even in the heat of battle. He is my mentor."

[winnix85]

Clancy Lyall: ”Talking about drinking, Lewis Nixon drank a lot but not in combat. He had a little flask that he used to carry around with him. 

There was this man who went all through the whole darned war and he never fired one round because he was with Intelligence you see - he had three combat jumps - one of the few, let me tell you that. The pathfinders had three. 

He had a case of good brandy or whatever and there was where he stayed. 

He and Dick Winters were very good friends. He wasn't a drunk as they wanted to depict him. He was a real fine intelligence-officer.”

[winnix85]

And we saw a dead squirrel laying over there at the side of the road. So I picked it up, put it into a condom and then we paraded with it around the roundabout while making a lot of noise, hollering and screaming..…he(Winters) looked at us with compassion in his eyes. He told us as long we were in England, every day we had to do a job. So when we weren't out training or on manoeuvres we had to clean out the cans in the outhouses. They were called honey buckets back then.  So we had to clean them until they were shining.——Clancy Lyall

When you think about kids like that, and you realize the weight of your responsibility and do something about it, you soon become old beyond your years. In three years, I had aged a great deal. Still only twenty-six years old, I felt that the simpler times of my college experience and the days of civilian life when I did as I pleased, were long past. It must have been a dream, a small and short but beautiful part of my life. Now all I did was work—work to improve myself as an officer, work to improve my soldiers as fighters, and work to develop them as men. The result was that I was old before my time; not old physically, but hardened to the point where I could make the rest of them look like undeveloped high school boys; old to the extent where I could keep going after my men fell over and slept from exhaustion, and I could keep going as a mother who works on after her sick and exhausted child has fallen asleep; old to the extent where if it was a decision or advice needed, my decisions were taken as if the wisdom behind them was infallible. Yes, I felt old and tired from training these men to the point where they were now efficient fighters. I hoped that the effort would mean that more of them would return to those girls in the States than otherwise would have made it back to the comfort of their families and friends.

-Beyond Band of Brothers: The War Memoirs of Major Dick Winters 

[bleedingcoffee42]

Okay it doesn't mean much other than it's just damned funny, but when Webster's book was first published Winters had no idea who the hell he was. Can you imagine going into the bookstore and picking up a book on Parachute Infantry and realizing the guy who wrote it is writing about your company and was one of your guys?

So he calls Lipton and asks if he knows him and Lip doesn't know either and has to call around to find out?

And Winters asked Speirs later on too. Webster writes about all these interactions with Speirs and HE doesn't remember him either. (Which is taken with a grain of salt because Speirs just doesn't have time to bother with details like that.) "Webster rings a bell, but not very loudly. Where did I know him?"

But Clancy Lyall remembers him. Remembers his diary. "We'd tell him lies like hell, and he'd be writing it down."

All boils down to this one question:

The Ghost Cart. Does it appear in anyone else's memoirs other than Websters? Fierce Valor references it from Web's book because it has to draw so heavily on everyone elses' accounts because Sparky was Sparky.

Was this a like of BS they fed Webster or does someone else talk about a haunted horse cart following the company across Europe?