Damariscotta Paratrooper Enlisted at 16, Jumped Into Europe

In his 88 years, U.S. Army veteran Dean Ness, now of Damariscotta, has seen and done a lot – he fought in Europe during World War II, studied under renowned psychologist Carl Jung in Switzerland, and rode the rails with tramps in the 1950s.

This article is the first of a two-part series on Ness, outlining some of his experiences serving in the United States Army and afterward.

Ness was born on Dec. 24, 1925 in Minnesota, and came into the world weighing 13 pounds.

“The doctor came in a sleigh, 14 miles in a snowstorm, and he gave up on me, and my grandmother was a midwife and she said that no boy that big is going to die, and here I am, thanks to her. Old pioneer lady,” Ness said.

“My dad got so excited he tipped over the kerosene lamp and started the cabin on fire. It was a tumultuous Christmas eve,” he said.

At around age 3 or 4 Ness’ family moved to Aberdeen, S.D., which he described as a beautiful small town. He grew up there and graduated high school at 15½. At age 16 he enlisted, his parents signing for him as a 17-year-old.

“I was 6′ 2″ and weighed 180 pounds. I was in damn good shape. I could have gotten away with being a lot older,” Ness said.

Ness started his basic training at Camp Blanding, near Starke, Fla., where he trained for 12 weeks before volunteering for the Army’s Airborne School, where he became a paratrooper.

“I volunteered for the airborne, and the only reason I went in the airborne was $50 extra a month, and $50 extra a month in those days was a lot of money,” Ness said. “You’d get a shot and a beer for a quarter, you’d get a pint of moonshine for 75 cents.”

Ness’ final five weeks of basic training were at Fort Benning, Ga., which he said was hot and had “every kind of bug you can think of.”

“It was a hellhole. I’d rather go back through combat than go through basic training there again,” Ness said.

Ness recalled the first time he met Gen. Matthew Ridgway, the commanding officer of the 82nd Airborne Division, during his training at Fort Benning.

Ness was walking with a canteen cup full of cocoa and some food outside one night along an unlit path.

“I bump into this guy in the dark, well it was a great deal of profanity. I tell him what I think of him, a stupid SOB who won’t let somebody know he’s on the path. I got cocoa all over me, and the lights came on,” Ness said.

“It was General Ridgway and his staff, and he said to me, ‘I think, soldier, if you went back down to the kitchen, they’d give you another setup.’ I said, ‘Yes sir,’ and I turned and wheeled and went back down again. That was my introduction to Matt Ridgway,” Ness said, with a laugh.

It wasn’t long before Ness had another run in with Ridgway. Via New York, Ness traveled with 15,000 other troops on the Queen Mary on a 5½ day trip to Northern Ireland.

During the voyage, Ness was berthed in a hammock one deck above the engines. In the companionway, a portable shower was set up for the men to use, one at a time.

“The guys would goose me as they’d come in from the shower, so I tied up a bunch of magazines that were there, tied them with string and I made a cudgel. I’ve got it laying along side of me. I’m going to nail the next guy that gives me a goose.”

“I get nudged, and I didn’t look. Did you ever see the captain of the Queen Mary with his hat down around his ears? I did, and behind him, Matt Ridgway,” Ness said. For the remainder of the voyage, Ness was assigned duty guarding the ship’s garbage grinder.

The Queen Mary, which traveled with no convoy, was not originally supposed to head for Northern Ireland, Ness said.

“We were supposed to go to Liverpool, but [the Germans] had subs on both ends of the Irish Sea, so we made a speed run after two days in port in Ireland and went into Scotland,” Ness said.

Overseas

“Beautiful country. I never forgot the color of the grass. Especially in Ireland,” Ness said. “That was my first introduction to fish and chips. Boy, were they good. Wrapped in the London Times.”

By convoy, Ness traveled to Algiers and eventually to Tunis, Tunisia, where the regiment was staying in a tent city in an olive grove before the invasion of Sicily.

Like Fort Benning, Tunis “was a hellhole,” Ness said. “We were begging to get into combat, it was that bad. Anything to get out of there. The flies, you can’t imagine the flies.”

Ness recalled himself and other soldiers selling mattress covers for eggs, which they would scramble in their steel helmets.

It was after they had jumped into Sicily Ness was in a foxhole with his “back partner,” “Red” William Kerr after several days without anything to eat.

“I said, ‘Weren’t those eggs good Red?'” Ness said of the eggs they had traded for in North Africa.

“He said, ‘They sure were.’ He didn’t talk too much. He said to me, ‘Did you ever see a chicken?’ And to this day – I have talked to a lot of guys who were in North Africa, and not one of them saw a chicken, and we don’t know what kind of eggs we were eating, but they were sure good.”

Ness, who made all five of the combat jumps the 82nd Airborne made during the war, described the invasion of Sicily in 1943 as “a little hairy.”

“They only told us there was Italians on the island, they didn’t tell us there was Germans and there was – the Hermann Göring Division,” Ness said. The 82nd had a hard time for several days after the jump, and the Navy’s destroyers were the only thing that saved them, he said.

“There were paratroopers all over southern Sicily from the drop. It was a screwed up mess, as usual,” he said.

Ness made the jump into Salerno, Italy, as well, and while assigned to the 504th Regiment he served as a “ground pounder” in Anzio. Both he and Kerr were wounded in Anzio, and both were sent back to England.

Both Ness and Kerr volunteered to become pathfinders, advance troops who helped guide in larger airborne invasions. They went to pathfinder school, were assigned to the 505th Regiment, and eventually jumped into Normandy, France, the night before D-Day on June 6, 1944.

Ness said he jumped in at about 12:30 a.m. and landed in a field, apart from the other members of his nine-man team.

“It was a mess. There was fog, a mist in the air. We came in and there was a lot of gunfire and everything,” he said.

“I was all by myself, scared to death. I’ve never been so frightened in my life. I could hear machine gun fire, I could see ack-ack [anti-aircraft] and cannon fire in the distance, but I was all by myself.”

“I slammed a mag into my Browning Automatic Rifle I carried, and I sensed, instinct from combat, I sensed there was something watching me close by, and I turned around and here’s this great big white cow,” he said, laughing.

“She just stood there and looked at me, as much to say ‘Where in the hell did you come from?’ That was my first experience in combat in Normandy, was with a cow.”

It was several days later while on patrol that Ness heard a groan rise up from the other side of a hedgerow.

“I thought, ‘Oh my God, it must be a wounded GI over there.’ So I found a shell hole in the hedgerow, and I crawled through and here was a young girl having a baby, and I became an OB at a very tender age – knew nothing about female anatomy,” Ness said. “I got her on my shelter half and it was a baby boy, thank God.”

“I crawled back through the hole and I got a litter jeep, and they came through with a litter and put her on that and took her away and I never saw them again,” he said. “I wonder how they turned out, and I think about it a lot. But war is terrible for kids, kids and women.”

One thing Ness said stands out in his mind more than anything else was the Falaise Pocket, an engagement where Allied forces surrounded the over-extended Germans at the end of the Battle of Normandy.

Ness described it as 26 miles of dead Germans, dead horses and cattle, and dead tanks.

“The 9th Air Force just wiped them out. They were retreating, they were trying to get back to Germany,” he said.

“You can imagine the smell, and the flies,” Ness said. “They’ll never make a war movie worth a damn until they can put the smell in.”

Later, after jumping into Holland, Ness was wounded in the leg and captured by the Germans. He was taken into Germany and eventually to Poland, to Stalag Luft III.

“I’d been in a boxcar, 40 and eight [a boxcar designed to hold 40 men or eight horses], no medical treatment at all, and nothing to eat,” Ness said.

(Read more about the life and exploits of Dean Ness in the next edition of The Lincoln County News.)