#clancy lyall

[bleedingcoffee42]

In the Footsteps of the Band of Brothers

[pastlivesandpurplepuppets]

Clancy Lyall has a different spin on the Norman Dike story. Lyall, who along with Lieutenant Jack Foley was “right next to Dike,” said their commander had been shot in the right shoulder. That wounding was what caused Dike to stop, not panic, as depicted in the miniseries. “People who saw this movie think the man was a coward because he was hollering, but he got shot in the shoulder,” Lyall said. Lyall said he mentioned Dike’s wounding to Winters at the film’s premiere, saying the filmmakers “shouldn’t do that. The man wasn’t a coward.” “The man has grandkids, and what are they going to say? ‘My grandpa was a coward’? If he was or wasn’t, you don’t do that shit,” Lyall told me. Lyall said what other veterans say about Dike “is their business,” but he feels the movie’s treatment of Dike was unfair. “I don’t care if the man was scared or whatever,” he said. “You don’t go telling everybody. Christ, he was there. That’s more than almost everyone else in the world was, right? Every one of us who was there was scared, and if he says he wasn’t, he’s a damned liar or he wasn’t there. That’s the truth.”

~ Larry Alexander

[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

[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 ]

[bleedingcoffee42]

Silver Eagle

[bleedingcoffee42]

Silver Eagle

[bleedingcoffee42]

Silver Eagle