The Second World War story of Jack Womer, Ranger and Paratrooper *
The inside account of one of the members of The Filthy Thirteen, fighting as a
spearhead of the Screaming Eagles in Normandy, Market Garden and the Battle of
the Bulge.
In 2004 the world was first introduced to The Filthy Thirteen, a book
describing the most notorious squad of fighting men in the 101st Airborne
Division who were the inspiration for the movie The Dirty Dozen. This is the
long awaited work of Jack Womer, one of the squad’s integral members, and
probably its best soldier.
Womer was originally a member of the 29th Infantry Division and
selected to be part of its elite Ranger battalion until, after a year of
gruelling training under the eyes of British Commando instructors, they were
suddenly dissolved. Bitterly disappointed, Womer asked for transfer to another
elite unit, the Screaming Eagles, where room was found for him among the
division’s most miscreant squad of brawlers, drunkards and goof-offs. Beginning
on June 6, 1944, however, the Filthy Thirteen began proving themselves more a
menace to the German Army than they had been to their own officers and the good
people of England, embarking
on a year of ferocious combat at the very tip of the Allied advance in
Europe.
In this work, with the help of Steven DeVito, Womer provides an
amazingly frank look at close-quarters combat in Europe, as well as the almost
surreal experience of dust-bowl-era GI’s entering country after country in their
grapple with the Wehrmacht, finally ending up in Hitler’s mountaintop lair in
Germany itself.
Throughout his fights, Jack Womer credited his Ranger/Commando
training for helping him to survive, even though most of the rest of the Filthy
Thirteen did not. And in the end he found the reward he had most coveted all
along; being able to return to his fiancée Theresa back in the
States.
