Currahee Military Museum

06/23/2026

https://www.facebook.com/share/1DHPywAhg6/?mibextid=wwXIfr

He was a Pennsylvania Dutch boy.
He stood for a photograph with 3rd Platoon, number 28 in the lineup.
Then he asked to do something even harder than what Easy Company was already doing.
He volunteered for the Pathfinders. 🕊️

His name was Carl L. Fenstermaker.
Born February 1, 1923, in Pennsylvania, likely in the same Pennsylvania Dutch country of Lehigh County and the surrounding region that produced Forrest Guth, with whom he shared a fluency in the Pennsylvania Dutch dialect, the language of German settlers carried forward through two centuries of inheritance in the inland counties of eastern Pennsylvania.
He was one of three close friends, Forrest Guth, Carl Fenstermaker, and Roderick Strohl, who spoke that dialect together in the barracks, three Pennsylvania Dutch boys who had found each other in the middle of a war and held onto the language their families had carried across an ocean.

He was officially recognised, in a United States Senate resolution honouring Easy Company decades later, as one of twelve native Pennsylvanians among the original 140 men who built the company at Camp Toccoa, Georgia, listed alongside Dick Winters, Thomas Meehan, Harry Welsh, Jack Foley, Joe Toye, Bill Guarnere, Forrest Guth, Babe Heffron, and Albert Blithe.
He was assigned to Easy Company, 2nd Battalion, 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment, 101st Airborne Division, with the rank of Private First Class.
A surviving 1943 photograph taken during the company's legendary 120-mile march from Toccoa to Atlanta, Georgia, captures him on a rest break with the rest of 3rd Platoon. He is identified by name as number 28 in the lineup, standing among men whose names history would later make famous: Mike Ranney, Shifty Powers, Paul Rogers, Buck Taylor, Ed Tipper, Carwood Lipton, Forrest Guth, Frank Perconte, Floyd Talbert, Walter Gordon, Kenneth Baldwin, and Lavon Reese.
He ran Currahee.
He completed the full 120-mile march alongside the rest of his Toccoa brothers.

At some point in his service, Carl Fenstermaker volunteered for the Pathfinders, the specialised airborne troops who dropped first, ahead of the main body of paratroopers, to set up the navigational beacons and marking systems that guided the larger formations down to the correct ground. It was among the most exposed and dangerous roles in the entire airborne structure, the first men on the ground, alone, with no strength of numbers to fall back on until the rest of the formation arrived.
His acceptance into the Pathfinders required his transfer out of Easy Company.
He left the friends he had trained with from the beginning, Guth and Strohl, the men he had spoken his grandparents' language with in the barracks, and went to serve in a role that asked even more of him than Toccoa already had.

The verified record on Carl Fenstermaker's specific combat actions, post-war life, and family details beyond this is thin. What is confirmed is his Pennsylvania Dutch heritage, his close friendship with Forrest Guth and Roderick Strohl, his place in the 3rd Platoon photograph from the Toccoa-to-Atlanta march, his official recognition by the United States Senate as one of Easy Company's twelve native Pennsylvanians, and his volunteer transfer to the Pathfinders.
Carl L. Fenstermaker died on June 30, 1988.
He was 65 years old.

He spoke Pennsylvania Dutch with his closest friends in a Georgia barracks.
He marched 120 miles from Toccoa to Atlanta and stood for a photograph afterward, one face among the men the world would come to call legends.
He was one of twelve Pennsylvania boys who built Easy Company from nothing.
He looked at what Easy Company was already being asked to do and volunteered to do something even more dangerous, going first into the dark so the rest could find their way down safely.
Carl Fenstermaker.
A Pennsylvania Dutch boy.
A Pathfinder.
One of the twelve. 🕊️🇺🇸🦅♠️♠️

This true story is based on historical records and shared for educational purposes only.

06/23/2026

https://www.facebook.com/share/1D3ojmc4wL/?mibextid=wwXIfr

He was a high school wrestling champion in Erie, Pennsylvania.
He took a serious head wound in Holland.
He went home, fell in love, and called his wife "Mama" for sixty-three years. 🕊️

His name was Edward John Bernat.
Born January 17, 1923, in Buffalo, New York, to Alexander and Mary Wrona Bernat. He had one brother, called Red, and three sisters, Helen, Elsie, and Annie. The family moved to Erie, Pennsylvania, when Edward was three years old, and it was there that he grew up, attending Academy High School, where he excelled at wrestling the discipline, the leverage, the patience required to outlast an opponent, finding his way into a young man who would soon need every bit of that same toughness for something far more serious.
On May 23, 1942, Edward Bernat enlisted in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and volunteered for the airborne.
He went to Camp Toccoa, Georgia.
He joined Easy Company, 2nd Battalion, 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment, 101st Airborne Division.
He earned his wings.
He crossed the Atlantic to England.

June 6, 1944.
Edward Bernat jumped into Normandy on D-Day as part of Operation Overlord, parachuting behind enemy lines in the opening hours of the largest amphibious and airborne assault in history.
He survived.
He fought through the Normandy campaign.

September 1944. Operation Market Garden.
He jumped into the Netherlands with Easy Company.
While engaged in combat in Holland, he suffered a serious head wound.
He was evacuated.
He spent the remainder of the war recovering in hospitals first in Europe, and then in Virginia, the long and uncertain road back from a head wound serious enough that the Army did not send him back to the front.
He was honourably discharged in March 1945.

He came home to Erie, Pennsylvania.
Shortly after his discharge, he met a young woman named Rose Stavana from Kane, Pennsylvania.
They married in 1946.
He called her Mama for the rest of their life together, sixty-three years of marriage, a private joke and a public habit all at once, the particular tenderness that some couples build and keep without ever needing to explain it to anyone else.
They had four children, Kathleen, Steven, Anthony, and Edie, all of whom settled and remained in the Erie area, building their own families around the father and grandfather who had jumped into Normandy and come home with a head wound and a wrestler's stubborn refusal to let the war define the rest of his life.
He retired from the R.M. Kerner Company.
He spent his free time fishing with his good friend John Oshlick, and deer hunting with his youngest son, Anthony, the quiet, ordinary pleasures of a long American life lived well after the war had finished testing him.

He was awarded the Distinguished Unit Badge with an Oak Leaf Cluster; two Purple Hearts with an Oak Leaf Cluster; the Bronze Arrowhead European-African-Middle Eastern Campaign Medal; two Bronze Stars; the American Campaign Medal; the World War II Victory Medal; and the Jubilee of Liberty Medal from France.
His wife Rose died in 2009, after sixty-three years of marriage.
His brother Red and his sisters Helen and Elsie preceded him in death.
He was preceded as well by two grandchildren, Brian Reed and Bobby Bernat.

Edward John Bernat died in 2016.
He was 93 years old.
He is survived by his four children, ten grandchildren, and twelve great-grandchildren, the family that grew, year after year, around a Buffalo-born, Erie-raised wrestler who had jumped into occupied France, taken a head wound in the fields of Holland, and come home to build sixty-three years of ordinary, hard-earned happiness with a woman he called Mama until the day she died.

He grew up wrestling in Erie, Pennsylvania.
He jumped into Normandy.
He was seriously wounded in Holland and spent the rest of the war recovering instead of fighting.
He came home, met Rose, and married her within a year.
He called her Mama for sixty-three years.
He fished. He hunted with his son. He retired from a company in the city that raised him.
He lived to ninety-three.
Twelve great-grandchildren carry forward what a head wound in a Dutch field could not take from him.
Edward Bernat.
Easy Company.
Still standing, in every face that came after him. 🕊️🇺🇸🦅♠️♠️

This true story is based on historical records and shared for educational purposes only.

06/22/2026

Enjoyed watching the Liberty Jump Team and Placid Lassie at the Military Vehicle Preservation Show.

06/22/2026

Our Historical Society President recently attended the Military Vehicle Preservation Show in Fishersville, VA. Enjoyed meeting new collectors, reenactors, owners of military vehicles and jump team members. Plans are underway for an exciting revamped Military Weekend October 1-4, 2026. Mark your calendars!

06/22/2026

https://m.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=873146029186662&id=100094738174535

We sadly received the update that Armando Marquez, Toccoa Man who trained at Camp Toccoa, proud member of the Regimental Demolition Platoon, the 506th and the 101st Airborne Division, made his final jump today.

We sent him some shout outs from Toccoa on his 102nd birthday but made the ultimate shoutout from his battlefield and memorial at Brévands just outside Carentan.

Armando and his brother Mike actually served in the the same squad at times during the war, making their story very unique.

We have Martha Marquez and the entire family in our prayers today.

May you Rest in Peace, Armando. Thank you for leading the way for all of us.

CURRAHEE! STANDS ALONE!

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06/22/2026

https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=122131888353139671&set=a.122108919537139671&type=3

He was born Jerome.
He enlisted in Tacoma, Washington, while living in Montana.
He died on the same fiery aircraft as Thomas Meehan, a Pennsylvania boy from a family that had moved
to chase work and a new life out West,
killed on the first morning of D-Day
before he ever touched French soil. 🕊️

His name was Jerry A. Wentzel.
He was born Jerome Wentzel in 1921, the son of Joseph and Margaret E. Wentzel, in West Pottsgrove, Montgomery County, Pennsylvania. By 1930, the family was still in Pottstown. By 1940, they had moved to Knauertown, in Chester County, Pennsylvania, the particular American restlessness of a Depression-era family looking for steadier ground.
At some point afterward, Jerry moved west, ending up in Park County, Montana.
On September 16, 1942, he enlisted in the United States Army in Tacoma, Washington.
He volunteered for the paratroopers.
He was assigned to Easy Company, 2nd Battalion, 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment, 101st Airborne Division, as a Technician Fifth Grade.
He trained at Camp Toccoa, Georgia.
He crossed the Atlantic to England.
He waited in Aldbourne with the rest of Easy Company for the invasion that everyone knew was coming.

June 6, 1944. 0112 hours.
Jerry Wentzel boarded C-47A serial number 42-93095, the aircraft carrying Lieutenant Thomas Meehan, Easy Company's commanding officer, along with sixteen other paratroopers from the company's headquarters section. Five crew members from the 91st Squadron, 439th Troop Carrier Group, flew the plane.
The aircraft took off from Uppottery, England, as part of Operation Albany, the 101st Airborne's D-Day airdrop into Normandy.
Over Sainte-Mère-Église, German anti-aircraft fire found one of the engines.
It burst into flames.
The pilot attempted to land the aircraft in a field beside Route Nationale 13.
A hedgerow in the dark.
The explosion.
The fire burned for three days.
Twenty-two men died in that crash: five crew, seventeen paratroopers, among them Thomas Meehan, Elmer Murray, Richard Owen, Carl Riggs, Murray Roberts, Herman Collins, Ralph Wimer, and Jerry Wentzel.
Jerry Wentzel never reached the ground in Normandy.

Back home, his family did not learn the truth right away.
He was first reported missing in action.
The Helena, Montana Independent Record eventually carried the notice that finally answered the question his parents listed in some records as Mr. and Mrs. Ed Allabaugh of Clyde Park, Montana, had been waiting weeks to have answered:
HEAR SON IS KILLED. Clyde Park - Mr. and Mrs. Ed Allabaugh have been notified that their son, Technician Fifth Grade Jerry Wentzel, who was previously reported missing in action, is now listed as killed in action on June 6 in France. He was a paratrooper.
He was twenty-two or twenty-three years old.

His remains, along with those of the other men aboard the aircraft, were eventually recovered and accounted for.
In August 2022, seventy-eight years after the crash, soldiers of the 101st Airborne Division gathered with German civilians near the crash site to honor the memory of the men who died there. More than sixty American and German soldiers attended. Colonel Mark A. Denton, a former member of the 101st Airborne, spoke at the ceremony, reminding those present that the HBO series Band of Brothers had carried a scene depicting the very aircraft Jerry Wentzel had died aboard.
"Today we take the time to honor those who fought here 78 years ago," Denton said.
Jerry Wentzel's name was among those read.

He was born Jerome Wentzel in Pennsylvania.
His family moved through Pottstown and Knauertown, chasing steadier ground during the Depression.
He ended up in Montana.
He enlisted in Washington State.
He trained in Georgia.
He died over Normandy before the sun came up on D-Day, in the same burning aircraft that took his company commander and seven of his fellow paratroopers with him.
His parents waited weeks to learn what had happened, then read it in a small Montana newspaper notice that could not have been plainer or more final.
Seventy-eight years later, American and German soldiers stood together near the crash site and said his name out loud.
That is what remains of Jerry Wentzel.
A name on a roster.
A family that crossed three states looking for a better life.
A newspaper notice that broke a mother and father's hearts.
And, decades later, strangers who still come back to remember him. 🕊️🇺🇸🦅♠️♠️

This true story is based on historical records and shared for educational purposes only.

06/21/2026

https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=122131879803139671&set=a.122108919537139671&type=3

Private John Joseph Caccese — C Company, 1st Battalion, 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment, 101st Airborne Division, United States Army. John Joseph Caccese was born on December 30, 1921, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, a city of row houses, churches, factory streets, immigrant neighborhoods, shipyards, and working families that sent thousands of its sons into World War II.

He was the son of Anthony and Helen Caccese. He grew up with brothers William, Anthony, and Francis, and a sister named Rita F. Caccese. Before the Army took him overseas, John attended college and worked as a carpenter apprentice. His life was still being built, one careful piece at a time, when the war called him away from Pennsylvania.

On December 21, 1942, he enlisted in the United States Army at Philadelphia.

He became a paratrooper with C Company, 1st Battalion, 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment, 101st Airborne Division, the Screaming Eagles. The 506th was the regiment forged at Camp Toccoa, Georgia, under the shadow of Currahee Mountain. Its men trained harder than most, ran farther than many, and learned to enter battle from the sky.

By the autumn of 1944, Caccese and the 506th were in the Netherlands. Operation Market Garden had begun on September 17 with high hopes of opening a road into Germany, but the fight did not end when the first bridges were taken or lost. After the advance stalled short of Arnhem, the 101st Airborne remained in Holland, holding the narrow Allied corridor and fighting along the dangerous ground known as “The Island.”

The Island was the low, exposed stretch between the Waal and the Lower Rhine. It was wet, flat, shelled, and watched by the enemy. Villages, dikes, orchards, roads, and railroad lines became front lines. The men who had jumped into Holland expecting a fast operation found themselves locked into days of patrols, artillery fire, counterattacks, and close fighting.

On October 6, 1944, C Company of the 506th was in the Opheusden area, where the Germans pressed hard against the airborne line. The fighting there was savage. The Screaming Eagles were no longer dropping from planes; they were holding ground like infantrymen, facing shells, machine guns, mortars, and the constant strain of a battlefield that gave little cover.

Private John Joseph Caccese was killed in action at Opheusden that day. He was 22 years old.

He was first buried at the temporary American War Cemetery of Molenhoek in the Netherlands. Today, he rests at the Netherlands American Cemetery in Margraten, Limburg, in Plot G, Row 2, Grave 1.

His record lists the Purple Heart.

He was a Philadelphia son.
He was a carpenter apprentice.
He was a paratrooper of C Company, 506th PIR.
He survived the jump into Holland, but gave his life on The Island at Opheusden. 🪂🇺🇸🦅

This true story is based on historical records and shared for educational purposes only.

06/20/2026

https://www.facebook.com/share/1bMZw13PYq/?mibextid=wwXIfr

"You're going to get me k**led, Lieutenant!"
He screamed it in the middle of the fight.
He fired anyway.
It became, in Stephen Ambrose's own words, the critical moment in the taking of Carentan. 🕊️

His name was John "Jack" McGrath, Sr.
Born February 16, 1920, in Carlstadt, New Jersey. He was drafted into the Army, and once there, volunteered for the paratroops.
He trained at Camp Toccoa, Georgia, under Captain Herbert Sobel. He trained further in Aldbourne, England. He joined Easy Company, 2nd Battalion, 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment, 101st Airborne Division, at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, as a rifleman and bazooka gunner in 1st Platoon, carrying an M1 bazooka and an M1 carbine into whatever the war was about to ask of him.
He made his first combat jump into Normandy on D-Day.

June 13, 1944. The Battle of Bloody Gulch, near Carentan.
German Sturmgeschütz III assault guns, Stugs, the men called them, were pushing forward in a counterattack against the American positions outside the town. Lieutenant Harry Welsh found McGrath. He needed the bazooka.
McGrath did not want to do it.
He said so, loudly, in the middle of the fight, with the particular honesty that combat strips away from men who might otherwise have performed bravery instead of simply doing it.
"You're going to get me killed, Lieutenant!"
Welsh had a job to do.
McGrath fired the bazooka anyway.
Together, he and Welsh knocked out the Stug. Richard Winters and his men provided covering fire as the two of them made it back to safety. When the American Sherman tanks arrived to finish the engagement, the skirmish was won.
Stephen Ambrose, writing Band of Brothers in 1992, gave McGrath's bazooka shot its own page, page 100, describing it as the critical moment in the Allied forces' taking of Carentan, France.
A frightened man, screaming at his lieutenant in the middle of the fight, had done the thing that turned the battle.
He was awarded the Silver Star and the Bronze Star Medal with clusters.

He went on to fight in Operation Market Garden in September 1944.
He fought in the Battle of the Bulge as well, though by that point, he had been moved to the Headquarters platoon, a position that kept him slightly removed from the most exposed combat roles his earlier service had required.
He went through the entire war, D-Day to the capture of Hitler's Bavarian outpost at Berchtesgaden, and came home without a single combat injury.
His friend John Mola later said McGrath joked that his good fortune during the war had cost him the Purple Heart.
He had earned the Silver Star instead.
He considered that a fair trade.

He came home to New Jersey.
He worked as a truck driver.
He became a volunteer firefighter with the Elmwood Park Fire Company No. 2, serving for more than 59 years, and serving as Fire Chief from 1970 to 1971, when the borough was still called East Paterson. After retiring as a truck driver, he continued to serve his community as the borough's part-time fire code official, a role he held until his retirement at age 90.
He had no injuries during his entire six-decade Fire Department career.
No injuries as a paratrooper.
No injuries as a firefighter.
Jack McGrath simply did not get hurt, not by German Stugs, not by burning buildings, not by anything the world put in front of him across more than half a century of putting himself in front of danger for other people.
He married Irene Blauvelt McGrath.
They were married for sixty-four years.
They had two sons, John Jr. and Jim.
He was, true to the description of his generation, humorously gruff, and he seldom spoke about what he had done in the war.
Stephen Ambrose blew his cover.
The book made him a small but permanent part of one of the most celebrated military histories ever written, and McGrath, by every account, simply went back to being a husband, a father, and a fire chief, exactly as he had always been.
His son Jim was asked, after his father's death, whether McGrath had been prouder of his war record or his Fire Department record.
"He was a husband and father first," Jim said. "All the rest came after that."

John "Jack" McGrath, Sr., died peacefully on April 24, 2012.
He was 92 years old.
He was portrayed in the HBO miniseries Band of Brothers by actor Stephen Walters.
He was a parishioner of St. Anne's Roman Catholic Church in Fair Lawn, New Jersey. He was a member of the VFW. He is survived by his wife of sixty-four years, his sons John of Basking Ridge and Jim of Seaside Park, four grandchildren, and six great-grandchildren.

He screamed at his lieutenant in the middle of a firefight and fired the bazooka anyway.
He earned the Silver Star for the shot that Stephen Ambrose called the critical moment of Carentan.
He went through the entire European war without a scratch.
He came home and spent 59 years as a volunteer firefighter, chief for 2 of them, and fire code official until he was 90.
He never got hurt.
He never talked about the war.
He was a husband and a father first.
Everything else came after that.
Even the Silver Star.
Even Carentan. 🕊️🇺🇸🦅♠️♠️

This true story is based on historical records and shared for educational purposes only.

06/20/2026

https://www.facebook.com/share/1H93W7LQji/?mibextid=wwXIfr

He was one of the Three Hillbillies.
He outlived both of the others
by more than thirty years. 🕊️

His name was William Alexander Howell.
Everyone called him Bill.
Born in Adams County, Ohio, raised in the same small-town world that produced Donald Hoobler and Robert Rader, the three boys from Manchester, Ohio, who became inseparable before the war ever asked anything of them.
On August 22, 1942, William Howell enlisted in the United States Army paratroopers at Fort Thomas, Newport, Kentucky, alongside Donald Hoobler and Robert Rader.
Three friends.
One decision.
They went to Camp Toccoa, Georgia, together, training in the red clay and the sweltering humidity, running Currahee side by side, becoming three of Easy Company's original Toccoa men.
They called themselves the Three Hillbillies.

He was assigned to Easy Company, 2nd Battalion, 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment, 101st Airborne Division, with the rank of Technician Fifth Grade, a skilled enlisted specialist, equivalent in pay to a corporal. His specific responsibilities within the company are not documented in detail, though a T/5 in a parachute rifle company typically served as a radio operator, a weapons or mortar specialist, a medic, or a demolitions and engineering specialist who also fought as a rifleman whenever the line required it.
He, Hoobler, and Rader were part of the same platoon structure fighting together, training together, surviving together, the bond from Manchester carrying through every mile of Georgia mud and every month of England's waiting.

June 6, 1944.
William Howell jumped into Normandy on D-Day, participating in the operations to seize key positions and neutralize German artillery that threatened the invasion beaches.
He survived.
September 1944. Operation Market Garden.
He jumped into the Netherlands, helping to secure the bridges and roadways the advancing Allied column needed to keep open.
He survived.
He fought alongside Hoobler and Rader through the Netherlands and into Belgium, the Three Hillbillies still together, still fighting in the same platoon, still carrying the friendship that had started in Ohio.

December 1944. Bastogne.
The three friends went into the frozen Bois Jacques together.
On January 3, 1945, Donald Hoobler, the friend who had wanted a Luger since England, who had finally found one, who had tucked it into his coat pocket while crossing a fence, was killed when the weapon discharged and severed his femoral artery.
The Three Hillbillies became two.
William Howell kept fighting.
He fought through the remainder of the Bastogne campaign and into early 1945; the record of his specific actions beyond this point is not preserved in detail, but his survival through Easy Company's final European campaigns is confirmed.
He walked out of the war.

He came home.
In the early 1950s, his family moved to Sandusky, Ohio, on the shore of Lake Erie. William Howell went to work at the Westvaco Papermill.
He stayed there for thirty years.
The Manchester boy who had enlisted with two best friends and watched one of them die in a Belgian forest built the rest of his life around steady, honest, lifelong work, the particular American answer to surviving a war that so many of Easy Company's men gave in their own way.

William Alexander Howell lived from 1947 to 1978; the record gives his lifespan as extending into 1978, with the precise birth year not confirmed in the available sources, though his death is recorded as having occurred that year.
He died in 1978.
He had outlived Donald Hoobler by thirty-three years.
He had outlived the war that took his friend by more than three decades, thirty years of work at the same papermill, thirty years of carrying forward what the Three Hillbillies had started together on a Georgia mountain in 1942.

He enlisted with two friends from the same small Ohio town.
He ran Currahee with them.
He jumped into Normandy and Holland with them.
He watched one of them die in the frozen Belgian woods.
He kept fighting.
He came home and worked at a paper mill on Lake Erie for thirty years.
He was one of the Three Hillbillies.
He was the one who got to grow old. 🕊️🇺🇸🦅♠️♠️

This true story is based on historical records and shared for educational purposes only.

06/20/2026

We can't wait to celebrate America's 250th birthday with YOU!! We are kicking off Independence Day celebrations in just 6 days!! 🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸

Join us from 10 AM to 4 PM for $5 admission into the museum. Swing by at 12 PM for FREE famous Sosebee's hot dogs (while supplies last). Finally, join us at 8:45 PM for a special showing of National Treasure under the stars. Bring your chairs, blankets, snacks, and the whole family!

In the event of inclement weather, we will move our movie showing to our event hall. We hope to see you here rain or shine!