The company went into a defensive position south of Carentan. The second day in this static situation, someone came down the hedgerow line asking for Don Malarkey and Skip Muck. It was Fritz Niland. He found Muck, talked to him, then found Malarkey, and had only enough time to say good-bye; he was flying home.
A few minutes after Niland left, Muck came to Malarkey, “his impish Irish smile replaced by a frown.” Had Niland explained to Malarkey why he was going home? No. Muck told the story.
The previous day Niland had gone to the 82d to see his brother bob, the one who had told Malarkey in London that if he wanted to be a hero, the Germans would see to it, fast, which had led Malarkey to conclude that Bob Niland had lost his nerve. Fritz Niland had just learned that his brother had been killed on D-Day. Bob’s platoon had been surrounded, and he manned a machine-gun, hitting the Germans with harassing fire until the platoon broke through the encirclement. He had used up several boxes of ammunition before getting killed.
Fritz Niland next hitched a ride to the 4th Infantry Division position, to see another brother who was a platoon leader. He too had been killed on D-Day, on Utah Beach. By the time Fritz returned to Easy Company, Father Francis Sampson was looking for him, to tell him that a third brother, a pilot in the China-Burma-India theater, had been killed that same week. Fritz was the sole surviving son, and the Army wanted to remove him from the combat zone as soon as possible.
Fritz’s mother had received all three telegrams from the War Department on the same day.
Source:
Ambrose, Stephen Edward. “Move Out!” Band of Brothers: E Company, 506th Regiment, 101st Airborne from Normandy to Hitler's Eagle's Nest. New York: Simon & Schuster Paperbacks, 2004. 102-3. Print.
Further Reading:
Technical Sergeant Donald G. Malarkey
Normandy Landings / Operation Neptune / “D-Day”
[Easy Company, 2nd Battalion of the 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment of the 101st Airborne Division / “Screaming Eagles”](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E_Company,_506th_Infantry_Regiment_(United_States)
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