They refused to bathe. They refused to salute. They poached deer from an English lord's estate and used their washing water ration to cook it.
The night before D-Day they shaved mohawks and painted their faces like warriors.
Then they jumped into Normandy on one of the deadliest missions of the invasion.
This is the story of the Filthy Thirteen..🧵1/7
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Officially they were the 1st Demolition Section of the Regimental Headquarters Company, 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment, 101st Airborne Division.
Nobody called them that.
They earned the name the Filthy Thirteen while stationed in England before the invasion. The story goes that they refused to waste their weekly water ration on bathing or shaving. Instead they used it to cook the game they poached from the land around their base, including deer taken from a nearby estate. They went around filthy, unshaven, and unbothered by what anyone thought of them.
They drank hard. They fought. They went absent without leave. They ignored almost every rule the Army had except the ones that kept them alive in combat. Their officers were driven to despair trying to discipline them.
But there was a reason the Army put up with them. When it came to the actual job of blowing things up and fighting behind enemy lines, there was no better squad in the regiment.
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At the center of them was a sergeant from Oklahoma named Jake McNiece.
McNiece was the son of an Irish father and a Choctaw mother. He was the one who could not be broken or tamed by Army discipline. He was promoted and busted back down so many times that despite being one of the most capable soldiers in the division, he barely held a rank for long. His own men nicknamed him McNasty.
On the night before D-Day, McNiece had an idea drawn from his Choctaw heritage. To psych the squad up for their first combat jump, he had them shave their heads into mohawks and paint each other's faces like warriors going to battle.
An Army Signal Corps photographer captured the moment. In the most famous frame, a paratrooper named Clarence Ware is carefully painting the face of another named Charles Plaudo.
The photograph ran in Stars and Stripes and helped create one of the most enduring images of American airborne culture.
A few hours after it was taken, the men in it jumped into the dark over Normandy.
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Their D-Day mission was as dangerous as any handed out that night.
The Filthy Thirteen jumped with the 3rd Battalion of the 506th. Their orders were to destroy two bridges over the Douve River and to secure a third, to help control the crossings and stop German reinforcements from reaching the invasion beaches.
The drop scattered them across the Normandy countryside in the dark. Roughly half the unit was killed, wounded, or captured on the jump or in the fighting that followed. McNiece later recalled the brutal cost of those first hours in his own blunt way, saying that he jumped in with around 20 men and came out with about two.
The survivors pressed on and accomplished their mission. So many of the 3rd Battalion's leaders had been killed that headquarters lost contact and assumed the whole effort had failed, eventually ordering American aircraft to bomb the bridges the squad had fought and died to hold.
The Filthy Thirteen also helped take the town of Carentan in the days that followed.
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There was no rest for them.
In September 1944 the demolition men jumped again, this time into Holland for Operation Market Garden. They were assigned to defend three critical bridges on the canal at Eindhoven. German bombing of the city killed or wounded about half the platoon.
The unit kept bleeding men. They were promoted, reshuffled, and folded into other jobs, guarding the regimental command post and protecting communication details. At one point the handful of survivors were simply handed rifles and used as an ordinary infantry squad to fill out an understrength company.
After Market Garden, McNiece went absent without leave to Paris. When he came back he did something that should have meant a quiet end to his war. He volunteered for the Pathfinders, the specialist paratroopers who jumped in ahead of everyone else to mark the drop zones. He figured he would spend the rest of the war safely training in England.
He figured wrong.
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In December 1944 the Germans launched their last great offensive in the Ardennes. The 101st Airborne was surrounded in the Belgian town of Bastogne, low on ammunition, food, and medical supplies, in freezing winter weather.
The trapped division could not be resupplied because the weather was too poor for aircraft to find the drop zones. Someone had to jump into the encircled town and set up a radar beacon to guide the supply planes in.
McNiece volunteered to lead that pathfinder jump. Half of the surviving original Filthy Thirteen went with him. They expected to lose almost everyone, with casualty estimates as high as 80 to 90 percent.
They jumped into Bastogne and set up their beacon. It guided in the airdrops that helped keep the 101st alive long enough to hold the town until relief arrived. Of the roughly 20 pathfinders who made that jump, only one was lost.
It was one of the most important small actions of the entire Battle of the Bulge.
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Jake McNiece made four combat jumps in the Second World War. Normandy, Holland, Bastogne, and a final jump on February 13 1945 near the German town of Prüm to guide in a resupply drop. Almost no American paratrooper matched that.
He fought through some of the hardest battles in the European war, led men through all of it, and ended the war as an acting first sergeant, even though his record of discipline problems meant he never held high permanent rank.
After the war he went home to Oklahoma and worked quietly for the United States Postal Service for nearly 28 years. He died in 2013 at the age of 93, one of the last surviving members of the Filthy Thirteen.
In 1967 a film called The Dirty Dozen filled cinemas with a story of misfit soldiers sent on an impossible mission. The men of the Filthy Thirteen were part of the inspiration for it. But the real squad were not convicts. They were filthy, undisciplined, hard-drinking paratroopers who happened to be some of the bravest men in the 101st Airborne.
The next time you see that photograph of the men in war paint, you will know who they were.
This was the story of the Filthy Thirteen.
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