I Love Shifty Powers
February 2024
My father was a paratrooper of the 101st Airborne Division, 506th Regiment, 3rd Battalion, India Company. He told me on several occasions that he knew of a few men from the more famous Easy Company in 2nd Battalion. He heard about the young officer, Dick Winters, and while I am not sure if he ever met a gent named Shifty Powers, I know he would have loved him. I certainly do.
Have you met this sharpshooter from rural Virgina? I have. I met him in a book, written by bestselling author, Marcus Brotherton. Shifty’s War took me on the amazing journey of this epic yet ordinary American life, from the near-mystical tales of learning to listen to the forest while hunting squirrels with his father to the dark days of firing rifle rounds into the flesh of other men.
Dick Winters called Shifty one of his “killers” because he fought with decisiveness, skill, and ferocity, but he was by no means a man who relished unleashing the wrath of his weapon against another human being. On his 22nd birthday, Shifty made the following promise:
“I had killed eight men. Eight that I was certain of, eight that I could plainly count. That information was stuffed deep within my gut, and if anyone ever asked if I killed someone during the war, particularly if a child ever asked, I vowed I’d shake my head no, that information was never coming out.”
In 1942, the war was underway and Shifty was working in the Portsmouth, Virginia Navy Shipyard. When Shifty and his pal, Popeye Wynn, heard that their work was going to be listed as “essential” they knew it was time to move. Once the work was categorized in such a way, they would be frozen into their jobs for the duration of the war. “We’d never get called up to fight.” It was time to enlist.
After reading a Life magazine article about a new kind of soldier, called paratroopers, Shifty and Popeye decided this was for them. They were a bit nervous when they heard how tough the training was, so they made a wager. If one of them quit, then he would have to pay the other guy $10. Then, Shifty learned that he would get paid $50 extra each month once he won his jump wings, “so that sealed the deal for us, right then and there.”
Shifty was one of the Toccoa men. He was there from the beginning when the concept of building a division of soldiers who would stick together from training ‘til the end of the war was first implemented. These were the men of Easy Company, the famous Band of Brothers.
Now, my father was also a paratrooper of the 101st Airborne, but he was not of the Toccoa lineage. He joined in a later wave and was sent to Ft. Benning, Georgia to earn his jump wings. The Toccoans were the founders or the plank owners who were set apart, and they often carried themselves in such a way.
My dad burned with pride over the fact that he served as a Screaming Eagle, but he knew that the Easy Company dogfaces were the measure. They were the first, and they were the ones who ran up Currahee every day while my dad and his peers were relegated to singing the song that memorialized the famous hill.
“I climbed the mountain to the top,
the top of Currahee,
and forty pushups after that was too damn much for me.”
Regardless, Currahee was, and remains, in the 101st Airborne DNA, and my father’s heart still stirred when he sang of the tradition of that lone mountain in northern Georgia. A few years back, I made a pilgrimage, along with two of my daughters, to visit and climb it. It was clear that the spirit of the boys of Toccoa had successfully made its way into the deep warrior cult of the Screaming Eagles. It resonates, still, in that place.
Among the young bucks from Toccoa, Shifty stood out for his rifle skills. He and a good friend, Earl McClung, were probably the best shots in Easy Company. Shifty from learning to listen and notice the rhythm of the woods and then picking up the slightest dissonance to locate squirrels; Earl from his life as a young American Indian growing up on a reservation. Shifty’s sharpshooting and his keen awareness of his surroundings made him uniquely skilled to be a rifleman, and it did not go unnoticed. He ended up serving as a sniper, offering covering fire, and as point on some of the toughest patrols.
Both my dad and Shifty jumped on that fateful day of June 6, 1944. They were not together and did not give one thought to the other, but they were both there. Two young men very close in age, one from the woods of Virginia and the other from a small town in Central Pennsylvania.
Their unique paths of march across the European continent are something to behold. My father was captured in short order while “Shift” marched all the way to victory at Hitler’s Eagle’s Nest. Not only was Shifty Powers one of the few Screaming Eagles to make it all the way from D-Day to Germany, but he was also the only one in Easy Company who was never wounded.
My father was not far past Carentan and only a few days or hours ahead of Shifty who fought to liberate that key town early in the campaign. Later, during the Battle of the Bulge, Easy and India linked up to take the village of Foy. It was at Foy where Lt. Speirs made a mad dash through enemy lines, and Shifty killled a menacing sniper with a precise killing shot. By then, my father was spending his energy trying to escape from a German POW camp. His inability to fight at the Bulge was a bitter memory for him.
The author of Shifty’s War, Marcus Brotherton, made a daring move by writing the book not in his voice, but that of Shifty himself, and it works! The story reads as if one is listening to Shifty tell his tales. You can see him sitting on his deck in Clinchco, that cigarette cupped in his hand, and his beloved Dorothy next to him. He regales us all with his great adventures in a vernacular that makes it all seem so ordinary, and at the same time, mythical.
Despite his blessed long life filled with the love of Dorothy, it was not easy. He learned to keep the nightmares and gruesome memories deep inside and always carried some pain. Shifty Powers was a happy soul, though, who loved his wife, his kids, his God, country, and the familiar woods of his beloved Virginia.
My dad fought like hell to escape and engage in the fight again. He wanted that before coming home. He too lived a blessed life and always wondered how it was that he got that chance, while so many of his friends died in faraway places. He literally carried that with him to his last breath. Like Shifty, he was devoted to his wife and grateful for the gift of a long life, but his brothers from a war fought long ago were always there with him. Both men knew the value of the blessings in their respective and connected lives because they also knew a great secret; the price of such things must often be paid in blood.