Battle of the Bulge veteran Vincent Speranza died on Wednesday, August 2, 2023. He was 98-years-old.
Speranza was just a kid from Hell’s Kitchen when he enlisted in the Army, and after attending Basic Training at Fort Benning, Georgia, he was assigned to the 501st Parachute Infantry under the 101st Airborne Division.
“We were just a bunch of kids, right out of high school, a lot of us like me, children of immigrant families,” Speranza said in a 2017 interview. “Our parents were so proud of this country. My father was a patriot like you wouldn’t believe. They expected their sons to defend the country, and we did.”
Speranza earned a Purple Heart and a Bronze Star for Valor, but it was a small favor he did for a wounded friend that made him famous.
In December of 1944, Speranza and the rest of the 101st Airborne Division were in the Belgian city of Bastogne when — on direct orders from Adolf Hitler — the German army turned and surrounded the city. Speranza was visiting with his wounded friend Joe Willis in the ruins of a church that was being used to house injured personnel, and Willis asked for a drink.
Speranza reminded Willis that they were surrounded, but went looking for a drink anyway — and as luck would have it, he found a tapped barrel of Belgian beer in a nearby tavern. There were no glasses, however, so Speranza resorted to delivering the beer in his helmet.
He went back to the tavern several times for more, but was met on his return from one such trip by the regimental surgeon — who scolded him, noting that drinking beer could be fatal for any soldier suffering from intestinal trauma.
Without a word, Speranza saluted and put on the helmet, which was still full of beer at the time, and made a quick exit — and thus the “Airborne Beer” was born.
“After being a machine gunner at the Battle of the Bulge, winning a Purple Heart and a Bronze Star and (spending) two decades as a public school (history) teacher, Airborne Beer is what I’m famous for,” he would joke in later years.
Speranza was one of the few American soldiers who saw the inside of Hitler’s famous “Eagle’s Nest” in Berchtesgaden, where he said he saw the German dictator’s plan to divide up the globe with the other Axis powers — Italy and Japan — when the war was over. “If anybody ever doubted why we had to fight that war, there it was on the wall,” he said.
Speranza was discharged from the Army in 1946, and became a history teacher. For decades, he returned to Bastogne for anniversaries and memorial events. He even continued to jump, celebrating his 98th birthday in March, 2023, with a tandem jump from the World War II-era “Tico Belle.”
When I met PFC Vincent Speranza, both of us had just stepped off a transatlantic flight. I was en route to Bastogne for the 75th anniversary of the Battle of the Bulge — and it soon became clear that he was as well.
I was standing near the baggage claim at the airport in Brussels, Belgium — and amid a cacophony of other languages, I could hear two men arguing in plain English.
Speranza, who would have been 94-years-old at the time, was animated — punctuating his thick New York accent with his hands in a way that made his Italian-American heritage undeniable.
Seated on a motorized cart, he was talking to a younger man who I quickly recognized as Ken McAuliffe, great-nephew of General Anthony McAuliffe — the American general who refused to surrender and held Bastogne until General George S. Patton arrived.
As the story goes, on December 22, 1944, the German commander sent a letter to McAuliffe under a white flag, informing him that the city was entirely surrounded (it was) and the Americans were grossly outnumbered (they were) and demanding that McAuliffe — and most of the 101st Airborne Division — surrender.
McAuliffe, according to the history books — and a letter he sent his beleaguered troops on Christmas Eve — sent the German commander one word in response: “NUTS!”
But Speranza, who was in Bastogne at the time as a member of the 501st Parachute Infantry, told the younger McAuliffe he didn’t buy it.
“I know that’s what they had to say to print it in the papers,” he said with a wink. “But I always thought that maybe, in private, he said something with a little more teeth.”
McAuliffe said no, explaining that wasn’t the general’s style. “When my great-grandmother — the general’s mother — got word of what had happened and heard that ‘NUTS!’ hade been his reply, she just laughed and threw up her hands. ‘That’s our Tony,’ she said.”
And so I watched, in awe, as a veteran of one of the bloodiest campaigns of World War II argued — three-quarters of a century later — with the great-nephew of his own commanding general about what that general did or did not say while in the grips of one of the most desperate moments in history.
RIP Vincent Speranza, 1925-2023