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[Note: There's not a single mention of Damian in this article! The article focuses on Wild Bill and Babe.]

The Philadelphia Inquirer
Inquirer Magazine
13 May 2001
by Tom Infield

Brothers born in battle

Bill and Babe, South Philly war veterans, meet Hanks and Spielberg, and their anonymous days are over.

Coming down the sidewalk in South Philadelphia in late 1945, Edward “Babe” Heffron must have looked like a short Babe Ruth. Barrel body. Stumpy legs. Delicate, dancer’s feet.

Back home after the war, Heffron had decided to scout out his old platoon sergeant, Bill Guarnere. As he marched from predominantly Irish Second Street to predominantly Italian 17th Street, the narrow blocks appeared nearly all the same: red, two-story rowhouses with tar-paper roofs; corner taprooms and groceries; a halfball game here and there among the scattered parked cars of the era.

Heffron had not talked to Guarnere since the previous winter, four months before Germany surrendered to the Allies. Their outfit in the 101st Airborne Division had been on the attack in the Battle of the Bulge. Heffron was on his machine gun, watching for an enemy advance, when a whole forest in Belgium suddenly had seemed engulfed with artillery fire. Guarnere’s right leg was blown off. The last Heffron had seen of his sergeant, he was lying unconscious on the back of a Jeep, which was racing away.

Babe Heffron rounded the corner onto Guarnere’s block. He recalls: “I found him playing craps in the street.”

Bill Guarnere looked up from the dice. He remembers: “I thought he was a cop.”

The pair went and had a beer. They’ve been inseparable ever since.

Few of us will ever have a friendship like Babe and Bill’s. Fifty-seven years have passed since they met at an Army camp in England. (Though from adjoining parishes in South Philly, they had never run across each other as kids.) They both married South Philly girls and raised families in the neighborhood (Bill has two sons; Babe, a daughter and a stepdaughter). Most of all, it is World War II that binds them – the comradeship that no one who was not in E Company of the 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment could ever share.

E Company, which leaped into combat on D-Day and fought in France, Belgium, Luxembourg, Germany and Austria, became the subject of a best-selling book, Band of Brothers. With the help of Babe and Bill, along with others among the fewer than 50 surviving company veterans who served as consultants, the book has been made into an HBO mini-series that will be shown in the fall. Babe and Bill have been back to Europe to watch the filming, and will soon return to Normandy, in France, for a lavish D-Day anniversary premiere. All of this has bound them even tighter to the war – and to each other.

After coming home from Europe, Bill had worked as a small-time contractor before retiring on an Army disability pension. He was the best man at Babe’s wedding, and he is godfather to Babe’s daughter Delores. Since Babe never learned to drive, Bill ferries him in his Ford Contour when he has to go uptown.

Babe, who worked on the South Philly docks, carries pens and an extra pair of reading glasses for Bill, who always seems to be losing things. “Nutsie,” Babe calls him.

“Them two are like husband and wife,” says Ralph Spina, of Texas. Spina, a former South Philadelphian, can get away with saying that because he served with Bill and Babe in combat. Another man who said it might be risking a fight.

Even at 78, these are probably not guys you would want to tangle with. Bill probably would come at you swinging those metal crutches of his. Babe, at 5-foot-4 – “and a half,” he insists for accuracy – would probably lower his head and bull-rush you. If the Nazis couldn’t stop them, are you sure you could?

Bill, half a head taller and jug-eared, is the louder of the two.

At home one day, as he sits on the couch smoking a Pall Mall, his phone rings.

“Your money!” he growls.

Nobody’s there.

“You son of a bitch!”

He slams the receiver.

“I hate them friggin’ phones.”

Some mornings, he says, as he walks to get his coffee at Cous’s luncheonette on Passyunk Avenue, he notices a kid staring at the pants leg rolled up in his pocket. He likes to pull the pants leg out and wave it. “You want to look?” he teases. “You want to look?”

Bill is gruff and profane. But it is all a bluff, Babe says: “He’d never hurt a fly.”

After all these years, Bill is still the sergeant and Babe still the private first class. But Babe, when he gets that bloodless, tight-lipped expression, easily holds his own. He cackles at Bill’s bluster and hurls insults of his own. Of the pair, Babe is the storyteller, the bar-rail poet. Case in point – his sparse, vivid account of his first day home after his discharge from the Army.

“Got on a bus. Came down Morris Street. Walked up Second. Seen some of the guys. The first to meet me was the numbers writer. ‘Hey, welcome home.’ Gave me a hug. Said, ‘Your old man’s in the bar.’

“I walked in the bar, and they were all there. ‘Hi, Babe.’ ‘Hi, Babe.’ My old man walked up, shook my hand and said, ‘Glad to see you home.’ That was the end of that.

“I went home. I was anxious to see my mother really. I walked up the street, only a couple of blocks away, and went in and saw my mother.”

The parents of America, the smart ones, never probed into what their soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines had done – had had to do – in the war.

“You kept your memories to yourself,” Babe says. Both Bill and Babe felt as anonymous as anyone else among the 16 million men and women who served in the World War II armed forces.

Sure, they had seen more combat than most – between them, from D-Day to the capture of Hitler’s lair in the Austrian Alps. And sure, they had been members of an elite, all-volunteer outfit picked for brains, stamina and courage.

But they felt no special claim on either public sympathy or praise. What about the Marines they knew? What about the guy from the neighborhood who had been on the Bataan Death March? They felt no different from them.

They could never have imagined that, more than a half-century after the war they had merely wanted to put behind them, their personal stories would be pulled from the fog of history and presented in detail to the entire world.

“Impossible,” Bill said, shaking his head. “No way.” It is one of the largest productions in the history of television, a $120 million venture on the scale of a blockbuster film.

Partly by chance, partly because of its reputation as a crack fighting unit, E Company has been singled out for the full Hollywood treatment. The 10-part mini-series Band of Brothers, which will appear in The Sopranos’ time slot on Sunday nights starting Sept. 9, is the largest project ever undertaken by HBO.

Two of the characters portrayed by actors in the series are those old pals from South Philly: Babe and Bill. They will also be seen as they are today in a companion documentary, We Stand Alone Together, to be shown before or after the series.

“They never expected anything like this – who could?” said Ivan Schwartz, coproducer for Band of Brothers.

It all came about because in 1988 the veterans of E Company – which never consisted of more than 200 men at one time, out of the three million who fought in Europe – held a reunion in New Orleans.

New Orleans happened to be the home city of Stephen E. Ambrose, a popular author and historian. Ambrose, by chance, was collecting oral histories of the Allied invasion of continental Europe on June 6, 1944. So he sent a researcher over to the veterans’ hotel to interview them.

Their stories were so good that in 1992 Ambrose came out with the book Band of Brothers, which followed E Company from its training at Camp Toccoa, Ga., through its landing in Normandy, to its capture of Hitler’s personal Alpine hideaway 11 months later – an odyssey in which 48 of its men were killed and more than 100 injured.

The book was thrill enough for the surviving veterans. But then came two of the biggest names in Hollywood, Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks. The pair, who had collaborated on Saving Private Ryan, picked up on Ambrose’s story. As executive producers of Band of Brothers, they provided the muscle that enabled the project to be financed.

All at once: “Boom, we’re doing a mini-series, and Babe and Bill are in it,” said Schwartz, who has become a fast friend to both men.

Last fall, Bill and Babe found themselves en route to Hatfield, England, where HBO was shooting Band of Brothers at an old aerodrome, the same one used for the filming of Private Ryan.

Bill, the old Second Platoon sergeant, had more or less become the den mother of the veterans’ group, keeping track of the old soldiers, now scattered from Oregon to Texas. He had been invited to visit the set and offer his opinions on historical accuracy. He had said he would go if Babe went along.

At Heathrow airport, they were greeted by Frank John Hughes, the Bronx-reared actor who had been selected to play Bill on film.

Hughes had been working on his South Philadelphia accent. He was wearing the uniform of the 101st Airborne, the “screaming eagles” – “scrimmin’ iggles,” as Bill would say.

“He was good,” Bill said. “Real good.”

Later, at the Hatfield aerodrome, Bill and Babe found a tank fight in progress. The English countryside looked so much like the watery lowlands of Holland, into which they had parachuted in September 1944, that it was unnerving.

The actors dropped their weapons and swarmed around them. They were covered in the mud of battle.

Robin Laing, 25, a Scotsman, thrust out his hand: “Hi, I’m Babe Heffron.”

Babe squinted. “No, I’m Babe Heffron.” It was like a TV episode of To Tell the Truth.

The actor and the old man laughed and shook hands. “I thought he’d be taller,” Laing said later. “I was,” Babe joked. “Guarnere made me a machine gunner and drove me into the ground.”

Bill and Babe are just two of perhaps 20 real-life men of E Company who are depicted on film. The actors all wanted to know: Am I getting my man right? They grilled their guests.

Conversation continued in London at a posh hotel. Bill could hardly believe that he had been authorized to sign the bar tab all night long and that the producers would pay it.

Laing, in an interview from his home in Scotland, recalled with amusement: “The one thing that disappointed Babe was my poor performance on the drinking front.”

During filming, Babe was invited to appear as an extra in a Dutch tavern scene. He was given what appeared to be a bottle of beer, but complained facetiously: “There’s water in this damn thing.”)

The veterans clearly were having a good time. But the actors could see beyond the bluster in both of them.

Said Hughes: “These guys are a comedy team. But the combat experience – it haunts both of them every moment of every day. I heard once, when a veteran was talking about World War II, he said, ‘I pray to God every night for the friends I lost. And then I pray for all the men I killed, because God loved them, too.’ “

Babe and Bill have not let the attention go to their heads. They never expected it; they don’t know how long it will last.

Next month, as E Company veterans from across the country gather in France at HBO expense, they may find themselves consorting with heads of state from former Allied nations. Later, there will be premieres in Philadelphia and other cities where the veterans live.

There will be accounts and pictures in the international media. Next year, if the Spielberg-Hanks track record is any indication, there could be Emmy nominations and, after that, awards. It is almost too much to comprehend.

Bill keeps his balance by talking for “the guys who can’t talk,” the ones who died in battle or have passed on since.

If fate, and HBO, have singled out E Company for tribute, then it should remember all of the men. Joe Toye. Eugene Jackson. Jim Campbell. All friends. All gone.

“The Greeks have an expression,” said Babe, a self-educated man. “If you keep a man’s name in front of the public eye, he will always be remembered and never forgotten if he’s a hero.”

For the first time in years, Bill has started dreaming about the war. He thinks it must stem from all the fuss leading up to the TV event.

“I was dreaming of Eindhoven last night,” he said, sitting in his living room opposite Babe. “I got lost in Eindhoven all night.”

Eindhoven, in 1944, was a city of 100,000 people. It was a key point on the map in the joint English and American offensive known as Operation Market-Garden. A road there is remembered by the 101st Airborne as “hell’s highway.”

“I’ve been dreaming all this,” Bill said. “Everything from the war is coming back to me. I couldn’t sleep. ‘You’re in South Philly,’ I tell myself. I go back to sleep – and I’m in Holland.”

It was not until that 1988 reunion in New Orleans that Bill, Babe, and other E Company veterans really started to sort out their memories of combat.

Only a diary, kept against regulations by their company commander, eventually helped them get the details straight.

Even among themselves they had always preferred to talk about everything except killing. The misery of foxhole life was always a favorite subject. (“You were picking bugs off your ears,” Babe recalls.) And the small things. (“Apples,” said Bill. “In Holland, our pockets were full of apples.”)

For Bill, combat began in the dark of D-Day morning when C-47 transport planes dropped thousands of paratroopers into the orchards and dairy farms of Normandy.

They were dropped behind Utah Beach, on which the Army was to land an invasion force. Their job was to cut off the two main roads leading to the beach to hinder the German counterattack.

Bill had learned days earlier that his brother had been killed in Italy. He took out his rage on the Germans. The HBO filmmakers have captured his actions that day just about right, he says.

“If you see the D-Day [scenes], then you’ll know why they call me Wild Bill. I’m killing horses, everybody. I’m just a born killer D-Day. I’d have killed you, if you were there.”

Just a dozen men from E Company, firing their rifles and throwing grenades, captured and destroyed a battery of heavy German artillery guns that might have wiped out hundreds of GIs on the beach. Bill, among others, won the Silver Star.

After the Normandy campaign, the 101st Airborne returned to England. That was when Babe, who had enlisted in the Army after Bill, joined E Company as a casualty replacement.

Capt. Richard D. Winters asked Babe where he was from. When Winters heard South Philadelphia, he put him in Sgt. Guarnere’s platoon.

Just being from the same neighborhood back in the States would not have been enough to cement Bill and Babe for life. Each quickly came to respect the other’s capabilities.

“Guts. That’s what he had,” Babe recalls. “The second word would be leadership. I can remember so many instances where everybody was hugging the ground and he was straight as an arrow, standing up. ‘Move on. C’mon. The Krauts can’t hit the side of a barn.’ “

Bill says of Babe: “He was good, very good. Dependable. That’s all you look for. Guys you can tell them what to do and they’re going to do it.”

After the fight in Holland, E Company got thrown into the Battle of the Bulge. On Dec. 16, 1944, the Germans mounted a surprise offensive through Belgium and Luxembourg. The Allies were thrown back in a panic. Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower sent forward his best fighters – the 101st and 82d Airborne Divisions – to plug the gap.

It was at Bastogne, in Belgium, that Bill lost his leg and was sent back to England for hospitalization. Babe soldiered on for the remaining four months until victory. He ended up among the first troops to enter Hitler’s abandoned mountain sanctuary at Berchtesgaden, Austria. He even had a German general surrender to him personally, a story his family never believed until the book Band of Brothers came out in 1992.

Both men, 57 years later, say the fight at Bastogne was the worst. The 101st was surrounded in deep snow. The wounded lay in the open. The cold was as bad as the shellfire, and most of the men ended up with cases of frostbite.

Bill: “My foot’s like a frozen apple.”

Babe: “I got three toes here that never moved since 1945.”

The thousands who fought at Bastogne, they say, will always remember, with some bitterness, hearing Bing Crosby dream of a white Christmas on the radio.

Every year, even now, Bill says, he can expect a call around Christmas from a maudlin E Company veteran somewhere in the country. Usually the man has had a few drinks.

“That’s kind of a sad time for me, too,” he said.

“Nobody liked Christmas,” said Babe.

For weeks, the 10th-grade U.S. history students at Kalama High School in Kalama, Wash., had been reading about World War II. Specifically, they had been studying Band of Brothers.

Every one of the 24 students in the sixth-period class had a paperback copy of the book on his or her desk. They had been reading a chapter a night and were now on Chapter 17, the story of Babe and his buddies capturing the Hitler lair.

When Jim Sutton, the Kalama superintendent, informed the students that Bill, Babe and another E Company veteran, Don Malarkey, of Salem, Ore., were coming to visit them, it was as if they had been told that Julius Caesar or Napoleon was on his way.

“The past two nights I couldn’t sleep, I was so excited,” said Joe Churchman, 16.

“We’re all kind of shocked that they’re here – that we’re talking to real people that were in the war, in the book,” said Krystal Young, also 16.

For Babe and Bill, too, it was a thrill. For all those years, working, raising families, they had been so anonymous. Back in Philadelphia, they had rarely been asked to speak at a school.

Sutton, 45, whose two uncles fought in Europe, had read Band of Brothers and fallen in love with its crusty characters. He had asked for permission several years earlier to attend an E Company reunion. There, he had gotten to know some of the veterans, and he now counted Babe and Bill as friends.

For three years, Sutton had been using Band of Brothers as a teaching tool. He had invited Babe and Bill to fly 3,000 miles, all expenses paid, to spend three straight days talking to all of the sophomore classes at his school of 325 students, perched on a bluff above the Columbia River, 35 miles north of Portland, Ore.

Bill and Babe had arrived the day before. As they always do on the road – Bill’s wife has died, and Babe’s does not go with him on war-related trips – they were sharing a room at the motel along Interstate 5, the only one in town.

At first the students did not seem to know what to make of the old men who had appeared before them – lifted from the pages of their textbook.

And Bill and Babe at first seemed hesitant to talk to the kids about the hard facts of war.

“By today’s standards, I’m a killer,” Bill had said before the trip. “Do they understand why I did what I did? If I don’t do it, I’m going to get killed. You understand? . . . That was an entirely different time than it is today.”

But, of course, the kids had read about the killing. They had no illusions. One girl said she had expected the veterans to be “mean.” She was surprised they were just like her grandfather.

And maybe that was the point. The U.S. Army of World War II was a “citizen army,” as Sutton pointed out. It was made up not of professional troops, but of ordinary Americans off farms and city streets.

Bill’s father had been a tailor, without a day’s education. Babe’s father was a Philadelphia cop. They were fresh out of high school when they enlisted in the Army.

The Kalama students could easily imagine themselves in Bill and Babe’s place.

“It was the greatest struggle civilization has ever had,” Sutton told them.

Afterward, the kids wanted autographs.

Joe Churchman, the boy who said he hadn’t slept, confessed that at first he had been a little disappointed in Bill and Babe.

He knew better, of course, but somehow he had been expecting the young, virile men of the wartime photos Sutton had given the students. He was a little disconcerted to see the men so weathered and creased by time.

“But you know what?” he said later. “You can tell it’s still them. It’s still in there.”