The “Thirteen” was an unofficial unit (in fact consisting of up to 18 men) within the 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment, 101st Airborne Division. It was parachuted into France hours before the D-Day landings to take and hold a bridge over the Douve river, in a bid to prevent German reinforcements from moving into Normandy.
The group derived its nickname from the fact that they showered just once a week and never washed their uniforms — as well as from their insubordinate attitude to authority. “We were absolutely undisciplined,” McNiece recalled. “We did not greet the officers and we did not speak to them by saying the traditional ‘Sir’. We used to call them by their nicknames.” Following the example of McNiece, whose mother was a Choctaw Indian, the men prepared for their mission by shaving their heads into Mohican haircuts and smearing their faces with war paint.
Shortly after midnight on June 6 1944, McNiece and his men parachuted behind enemy lines. By the time dawn broke, they had destroyed two bridges and had taken up positions on the bridge over the Douve. They held it against German counter-attack for three days until the structure was bombed, apparently in error, by the US Air Force. “I was submerged by anger,” McNiece recalled. “We had kept this bridge despite all opposition! And it’s our aircraft which bombed it!”
McNiece and his men subsequently joined the main invasion, and on one occasion were on the winning side of a firefight that saw 700 German soldiers killed in just 20 minutes. Paratroopers did not take prisoners, as he later explained.
McNiece believed that the group had been selected because their task was regarded as a “suicide mission” and, as notorious troublemakers, the men were seen as expendable. “The average lifetime of a paratrooper was one and a half jumps,” he recalled. “They gave you one day’s food supply when you left the plane, and they figured you wouldn’t eat all of that.”
By the time McNiece returned to Britain after 36 days of fighting, all but three members of his unit had lost their lives. Yet there were some compensations: the survivors “got two months’ wages plus everything we stole in France”.
Lee Marvin played McNiece’s character in Aldrich’s 1967 film, though McNiece objected to the portrayal of him and his men as murderers and psychopaths when in reality they were “misfits” who had done nothing worse than violate military regulations. Asked how he had managed to survive when so many others lost their lives, McNiece replied: “ The Lord had two places for putting people, heaven or hell. He was afraid to put me in either of them because he was afraid I’d goof them up.”
The ninth of 10 children of a small farmer, James Elbert McNiece was born on May 24 1919 in Maysville, Oklahoma. When the family’s farm burned down in 1931, they moved to nearby Ponca City. Jake dropped out of school aged 12 to help his father during the Depression, but he was lured back by an American football coach who had managed to get him a job as a fireman. He eventually became captain of his school team.
At the Fire Department, McNiece became an expertise in demolition explosives, but at the same time won a reputation for being handy with his fists. During a drunken brawl in 1942 he almost killed a man and, rather than face criminal charges, he volunteered for service as a paratrooper.
At his first camp, McNiece shared a tent with four other men, who became known as the “Five Bastards” due to their generally filthy appearance. “We often went Awol,” he recalled. “We never took care of our barracks or any other thing, or sanitation, and we were always restricted to camp. We stole Jeeps. We stole trains. We blew up barracks. We blew down trees. We stole the colonel’s whiskey and things like that.”
On September 5 1943, he and his colleagues boarded the Samaria for England, where they took up poaching and, encouraged by the lower standards of hygiene that prevailed, became, if anything, even more filthy and disreputable.
On September 17 1944 McNiece and his unit, their numbers swelled by replacements for those who had lost their lives in Normandy, parachuted into Holland, where they fought alongside other airborne troops for 78 days. Subsequently McNiece was locked up after taking an unauthorised five-day break in Paris.
To escape further retribution he volunteered for the Pathfinders, the elite paratrooper unit that provided logistical help to Allied missions — and suffered a casualty rate of 80 per cent. Parachuted into Bastogne, Belgium, during the Battle of the Bulge, he led a unit operating beacons which guided in 6,000 aircraft carrying vital supplies.
His last jump, on February 13 1945, was near Prume, Germany, to resupply General George Patton’s 3rd Army.
McNiece admitted later that his exploits on the battlefield had been somewhat overshadowed by his unruly reputation, as a result of which promotions to sergeant were quickly followed by demotions back to private. But in the eyes of his men McNiece could do nothing wrong. “We all did what Jake did because we had total faith in him,” Jack Agnew, a fellow survivor, recalled. “He was utterly fearless and working with him was an honour. He never asked his men to do anything he wouldn’t do himself.”
Back in the United States after the war, McNiece got a job as a fireman on the Southern Pacific Railroad, but was sacked for drinking. Then, after a stint working as a builder in California, he returned to Ponca City where, in 1949, he married Rosita Vitale, a young widow with a daughter. There he stopped drinking and became a “good Christian”. After Rosita’s death from cancer three years later, in 1953 he married Martha Beam-Wonders, another widow with a son.
In the early 1950s he got a job at a post office in Tulare, where he remained for 27 years until his retirement.
McNiece was decorated with four Bronze Stars and two Arrowhead Bronzes for his bravery during the war, and last year he was appointed a Knight of the French Legion of Honour.
He is survived by his wife, by their son and daughter, and by his two stepchildren.
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