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By 2300 hours the battalion had covered 40 miles. Strayer picked the campsite, a bare, windswept hill devoid of trees or bushes or windbreaks of any kind. The temperature dipped into the low 20s. The men were issued bread smeared with butter and jam, as they couldn't get the field stoves started. When they woke at 0600, everything was covered with a thick layer of frost. Boots and socks were frozen solid. The officers and men had to take the shoestrings out of the boots to get them onto their swollen feet. Rifles, mortars, and machine-guns were frozen to the ground. The shelter halves crackled like peanut brittle.
The second day it took some miles for stiff, aching muscles to warm up, but the third day was the worst. With 80 miles covered, there were still 38 to go, the last 20 or so on the highway leading into Atlanta. Marching in mud had been bad, but the cement was much worse on the feet. The battalion camped that night on the grounds of Oglethorpe University, on the outskirts of Atlanta.
Malarkey and his buddy Warren "Skip" Muck put up their pup tent and lay down to rest. Word came that chow was ready. Malarkey could not stand up. He crawled on his hands and knees to the chow line. His platoon leader, Winters, took one look and told him to ride in an ambulance the next morning to the final destination, Five Points in downtown Atlanta.
Malarkey decided he could make it. So did nearly all the others. By this time the march had generated publicity throughout Georgia, on the radio and in the newspapers. Cheering crowds lined the route of march. Strayer had arranged for a band. It met them a mile from Five Points. Malarkey, who had struggled along in terrible pain, had "a strange thing happen to me when that band began to play. I straightened up, the pain disappeared, and I finished the march as if we were passing in review at Toccoa."
They had covered 118 miles in 75 hours. Actual marching time was 33 hours, 30 minutes, or about 4 miles an hour. Of the 586 men and officers in the battalion, only twelve failed to complete the march, although some had to be supported by comrades the last day. Colonel Sink was appropriately proud. "Not a man fell out," he told the press, "but when they fell, they fell face forward." Lieutenant Moore's 3rd platoon of Easy was the only one in the battalion in which every man walked every step of the way on his own. As a reward, it led the parade through Atlanta.
2 'STAND UP AND HOOK UP'
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BENNING, MACK ALL, BRAGG, SHANKS
December 1942-September 1943
Benning was, if possible, even more miserable than Toccoa, especially its infamous Frying Pan area, where the jump training went on. This was the regimental bivouac area, consisting of scrubby little wooden huts set on barren, sandy soil. But Benning was a welcome relief to the men of E Company in the sense that they were getting realistic training for becoming paratroopers rather than spending most of their waking hours doing physical exercises.
Parachute school was supposed to begin with physical training (A stage), followed by B, C, and D stages, each lasting a week, but the 506th skipped A stage. This happened because the 1st Battalion arrived ahead of the others, went into A stage, and embarrassed the jump school sergeants who were assigned to lead the calisthenics and runs. The Toccoa graduates would laugh at the sergeants. On the runs they would begin running backward, challenge the sergeants to a race, ask them鈥攁fter a couple of hours of exercises that left the sergeants panting鈥攚hen they were going to get past the warm-up and into the real thing. After two days of such abuse, the sergeants told the CO that the 506th was in much better physical condition than they were, so all the companies of the 506th started in immediately on B stage.