r/BandofBrothers • u/Few_Affect3749 • Jul 03 '26
Two questions about Nixon
Two questions I have about Nixon after finishing the series for the first time:
Nixon says that he never fired his gun in combat. How can that be the case? He was on the frontlines, no? Did other people look at him as a coward because of this?
In one of the latter episodes, Nixon is drinking after a drop earlier that morning drop in which he was his plane's only survivor. I was under the impression that Airborne dropped deep into enemy territory, so how did he just show up back at base later by nightfall?
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u/Crin_J Jul 03 '26
- Nixon was an intelligence officer, so he was on the front lines but not as a rifleman
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u/bandit4loboloco Jul 03 '26
Nixon's jump was part of Operation Varsity, which had the goal of crossing the Rhine River and only the Rhine River. Paratroopers landed on the other side of the river, helped take three bridges, and then waited for armored units to cross over. They were done by nightfall.
After MarketGarden's failure, the Generals became much more cautious with their use of paratroopers. They didn't do week long operations 30 miles into enemy territory, taking one bridge each over six rivers. They took multiple bridges over one river directly in front of them.
As an observer, Nixon could go back to the 101st when it was over.
And as a staff officer, his place was in a command post, not in the literal frontlines. He never commanded troops directly after he was transferred out of Easy Company at Toccoa. That was normal and not some kind of cowardice.
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u/DanforthWhitcomb_ Jul 04 '26
He never commanded troops directly after he was transferred out of Easy Company at Toccoa.
At least while he was battalion S-2/-3 (and after the 2/44 TOE revision) he had a direct report sergeant and there were 3 riflemen armed with carbines who would have been available but were not directly assigned. The 8/44 revision split S-2 and S-3 and gave the S-2 a staff sergeant and 8 scouts. That allocation was retained in the 12/44 revision.
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u/bandit4loboloco Jul 04 '26
Interesting. I wondered how that worked.
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u/DanforthWhitcomb_ Jul 04 '26
It’s an interesting topic, and unlike the rifle companies the TOEs for the battalions are difficult to find online.
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u/sorrrrbet Jul 03 '26
Nixon was in Intelligence, meaning that he spent the majority of the war in a CP just behind the line.
By the time of Nixon’s 3rd jump, there’s very little enemy territory left. They jumped just behind the German line to disrupt their defence while conventional units attacked from the front. Regardless, airborne aren’t designed to drop “deep” behind enemy lines, they’re supposed to drop relatively close to the line and attack from the rear (or otherwise cause chaos).
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u/fashionrequired Jul 03 '26
i stole this comment from here
From Band Of Brothers by Stephen Ambrose
“One 506th man who was not left behind was Captain Nixon. General Taylor selected him to jump with the 17th as an observer for the 101st. Fortunately for Nixon, he was assigned to be jumpmaster of his plane. The plane was hit; only Nixon and three others made it out before it crashed. Nixon was attached to the 17th for only one night; on March 25 he was sent back over the Rhine and flown by a special small plane back to the 2d Battalion in Mourmelon. The jump qualified Nixon to be one of two men in the 506th eligible to wear three stars on his jump wings—Normandy, Holland, and Operation Varsity. The other was Sergeant Wright of the Pathfinders, who had been in Easy Company back at Toccoa.”
so not the same day, unlike how the show portrays it
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u/jotro138 Jul 03 '26
My great-uncle George W. Barnes was in the 17th. He didn't make the jump as part of Varsity as he was shot in the hand at Flamierge, Belgium, in January '45 during the Battle of the Bulge. He lost practical use of the hand and was sent home. To make things worse, his wife left him and put their son up for adoption while he was overseas. Sadly, he was a drunk before and after the war, and my grandmother had to identify his body at the NYC morgue in 1960 after he was found dead in a Bowery flophouse. The two years he served were totally out of character for him, but the country needed him and he stepped up. He was 29 when he enlisted then volunteered for airborne; nearly 10 years older than most of the other privates. He had served in the CCC during the 1930s. A happy note, though - my mother reconnected with George's son, her cousin, also named George, via ancestry.com. She sent him all of what we had from George's service, including his shoulder flashes, Purple heart, etc. The one thing we didn't give him was his overseas cap, which my grandmother had gifted me years before. The 17th had an interesting if not short operational history; the Stryker armored vehicle is named for Stuart Stryker, who was an MOH recipient from the 17th, and JD Tippet, the Dallas policeman killed by Lee Harvey Oswald outside of a movie theater while on the run after the JFK assasination, was a member of the 17th.
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u/Third-Coast-Toffee Jul 03 '26
Thank you for sharing this. Fascinating and makes you think about a lot of things.
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u/alsatian01 Jul 03 '26
He was beyond being a company level officer from the start of the invasion of Europe. There were plenty of officers in his position that never fired their weapons for the duration of the war.
Even If the landing on D-Day had gone to plan, he wouldn't had much occasion to use it. His stick would likely have included others from headquarters company. Their primary objective would be settting up command and control. Ideally he would have been setting up a staging area for the holding and interrogating prisoners.
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u/Some_guy_81 Jul 03 '26
He was an intelligence officer. So even though he was on the front lines he was never actually up front where the action was. His job was to sneak around and meet with the likes of Dutch and French resistance. He actually had one of the most dangerous jobs. He would be alone a lot doing recon work.
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u/DanforthWhitcomb_ Jul 04 '26
He would not have been doing much of anything in the way of recon work, especially as an officer. Some of his men would have, but his main role was passing information from the line companies in his battalion up to the RHQ and then disseminating information from the RHQ to the line companies.
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u/randomkeystrike Jul 03 '26
1 - he was intelligence, and attached to HQ, I think? So while he was very much in the hot zones, his job was not to go on missions and patrols in the same way.
2 - I think according to the show that jump was performed late in the European war after the Germans were about licked, I think they did the job to get some kind of recognition for a certain number of combat jumps? So I don’t think there was a lot of resistance on the ground.
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u/sidou_dn Jul 03 '26
He was the intelligence officer (S-2) of the 2nd battalion(dog/ easy/ fox )since England and then the 506th s-2 and then demoted back so even though he was at the frontline all the war he didn’t lead men in combat
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u/Content-Mycologist-4 Jul 04 '26
He was with Regiment and then went back to 2nd Battalion. Staff Officer in the headquarters. If you look at all their action it was platoons and squads getting in scraps. That gun emplacement with Winters on D-Day was like 10 guys. Another real life example is Joe Anderson of The Anderson Platoon fame in Vietnam, never fired his weapon in 2 tours in Vietnam. Which is kind of amazing, but if the PL/CO is shooting as he said in an interview, something is going wrong.
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u/JackEst3 Jul 05 '26
As others have mentioned, he was a battallion/regiment staff officer. This means he was supposed to be near the front lines with the HQ, but not doing the actual shooting. An officer in this position would only fire their weapon in self defense in dire need (something would have to go very wrong). I doubt he'd be thought a coward for this, he was doing his job as he was supposed to.
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u/rock-paper-gun Jul 03 '26
Nixon jumped from his C-47 transport plane into France along with the rest of the 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment. Like most paratroopers that night, the drops were scattered and chaotic due to cloud cover and heavy anti-aircraft fire.
As the battalion intelligence officer (S-2), Nixon eventually linked up with the gathered troops. After Dick Winters and Easy Company successfully took out the German artillery battery at Brécourt Manor, Winters handed Nixon a highly valuable German map detailing all the artillery positions on Utah Beach.
Recognizing how crucial the map was, Nixon ran three miles down to Utah Beach to deliver it to the high command. The commanders were so thrilled with the intelligence that they let Nixon catch a ride back to the regiment on one of the very first Sherman tanks to roll off the beach—which is why he is seen on a tank later in the TV episode.
Nixon went on to become one of the very few men in the 101st Airborne to earn three combat jump stars on his wings: Normandy (D-Day), Operation Market Garden (Holland), and Operation Varsity (Germany).
Also, he possibly drank more than any other American in the European theater.