Herbert J Suerth Jr was born in October 28, 1924 in Chicago, Illinois. Herb was the only son of Herbert Sr and Lillian Suerth. His dad was a veteran of the World War 1. He made lifts.

In June 1942, he graduating from De Paul Academy, he was 17 years old. Then, he began at Marquette University as a mechanical engineering. But the war caught up with him, at age 18 years old, Herb Suerth reached the age to be engaged. Herb Suerth quit school and decided to enlist.

On Dec. 8, 1942, he joined the U.S. Army and the Engineers Corps. He was sent to Fort Belvoir, Virginia, for basic training as a combat engineer.

What Suerth disliked the most was training in deactivating land mines.

Fortunately, Herb Suerth got a break, although a temporary one, when the Army put him in the ASTP program and sent him to college at the University of Pennsylvania. The respite didn't last that long, though, when the ASTP program folded.

Herb Suerth first went back to basic training, and then did several months in New York City, training in electrical engineering.

The next big move was overseas on the Queen Mary, and he landed in July of 1944, just after D-Day, in Scotland.

Herb Suerth ended up in a replacement depot with about 1,000 other engineers, some of whom were anything but eager to get into the fighting.

Herb Suerth, on the other hand, was ready to go. When he and his buddy Chase saw a posting that they were taking applications for the airborne divisions, they immediately went to their company commander.

The following Monday morning, though, all the replacement engineers were mustered for an announcement. The colonel told them all the replacements they were all infantry replacements.

It turned out the Army had a greater need for people toting rifles than people toting slide rules. For Herb and his friend this was the ticket to assign to the Airborne. Chase ended up in the 82nd and Herb in the 101st.

The commanding officer at Chilton Foliat was Captain Sobel, who was made famous in the Band of Brothers book and television series at a martinet who was hated by his troops.

The sergeants who ran the jump school, though, did make an impression on Herb Suerth.

Herb remembers one Major who did a bad roll in jumping off the 15 foot tower and ended up with a mouthful of sawdust. He spit the sawdust out, an act the sergeant in charge didn't like.

On some training days, the volunteers were forced to do as many as 500 pushups in an eight hour period.

Herb Suerth stuck it out and made it through his first practice jump.

The rest of the 101st, which was stationed nearby, went to Holland in August, 1944, as part of Operation Market Garden before Suerth got his third jump in. In the end, he did his five jumps and got his wings, and he did a couple more just for the experience.

Right around Thanksgiving, Herb was sent to France to join Easy Company of the 506th Parachute Regiment of the 101st Airborne. The division was licking its wounds and resting at Camp Mourmelon near Reims after the tough fighting in Holland.
Replacements were generally not treated well by the veterans, these guys had been living in death and destruction and lost some buddies in the last 102 days. They were not ready to welcome new people into their outfit. These men all trained together since early 1942, and they were not really ready to begin to take other people into their group but Suerth said he had no problems.

Herb Suerth had reported to his platoon leader, Lt. Ed Shames, and he announced himself with his complete name, including the "junior" at the end. Shames immediately tagged Herb Suerth as "Junior" and the nickname stuck throughout his brief stint with Easy Company and through all the reunions since.

“Everybody had nicknames like OneLung McClung, NoShoulders Mellet, Popeye Wynn. The nicknames were important when we crawled in the dark and asked: “who is that”. We used our nicknames so we were sure there were no Germans.”
Herb Suerth said the 101st needed recuperation after Holland.

Herb Suerth recalls that one day at Mourmelon, soon after the 506th had returned from Holland, a general inspection was called. The men were not happy about it, and one of the unhappiest was McClung, known to his comrades as one of the best soldiers and perhaps the best shot in Easy Company. But McClung was not a spit and polish guy.

Easy Company took it easy during the first weeks of December. Suerth even put in for a pass to Reims on Christmas Eve so he could go to the cathedral there for services. It never happened.

Most of the men were simply not prepared to go back into combat. There was no ammo dump at Mourmelon, and the men only had what ammunition they had brought back from Holland.

Herb, and some others, spent the night sewing extra blankets to their sleeping bag to increase their warmth.

“I knew that those army sleeping bags were no good for sleeping in when it gets below 10-15 below zero. So I started to wind it with extra blankets and the guys said to me: “Junior what are you doing.” I explained them why I did that and told them what I knew about the weather in France and most of them started winding blankets around their sleeping bags as well. That moment was a mark for me. I gained a lot of respect from the guys and they started to know me as a guy who was thinking ahead.”
He even had a new rifle, but he had never fired it.
The men were loaded into large grain trucks.

The company spent 18 hours in the trucks, heading for a destination unknown. 

On the morning of the 18th, the trucks stopped just short of Bastogne, a small city in Belgium where most of the highways in the area came together. The men could hear small arms fire not far away.

The first thing the airborne troops encountered, though, were not Germans but Americans. As the 506th marched up the outside of the road, the troops who had taken the brunt of the German onslaught staggered down the middle.

Herb had a couple of bandoliers of rifle ammunition and grenades strapped to his uniform, but he still had his unfired weapon. The next day, his sergeant set up an electrical wire reel as a target and let Herb zero in his M-1.
The platoon marched through Bastogne and headed up the road toward Foy. The Germans were coming in the opposite direction down the same highway.

The first night was spent in farm country, and the men burrowed into a haystack with just their heads sticking out to stay warm.

The next day E-Company headed to Foy.

Herb Suerth and Frank Sobeleski were on the extreme flank of the company's position, near a machine gun emplacement.

The snow was cumulating to 20 ft. They finally found a bunch of gunnysacks that were used together with pine needles to keep their feet dry and warm.

The German shelling was fairly constant.

An attack came on Christmas Eve.

Most of the fighting was on the other side from where Herb was dug in. When it was over, he surveyed the battle scene.

The Germans were pumping most of their heavy artillery into Bastogne.

Herb battled with the frozen ground for a couple of hours, and was finally relieved by another GI who finished the grave.

In the second week of January, Easy Company left its foxholes and advanced to the east to where a German position had been abandoned.

After the one-night foray, the men returned to their old positions.

Just before Christmas the weather improved just enough for C-47’s to drop supplies.

On Christmas, the Third Army broke through the siege and opened up Bastogne. For the first time since they had left Mourmelon, the men of Easy Company got hot food.
But the battle was far from over. On January 3rd, two men lost their legs in the shelling. Later, the company left the Bois Jacques woods and went to a new position outside a little hamlet. The night of January 9th, 1945, is rememberred by many of E-Company as a night in hell. Hell broke loose.

Herb was a company runner, and he was sent to the nearest collecting station to get stretchers for the two.

Apparently assuming that Herb was too badly injured to survive, the medics never even applied tourniquets.

Somehow, though, the shell fragment had missed the femoral artery, and when Herb didn't die, the medics finally picked him up and the put him across a Jeep.

The Jeep brought him to an aid station at a Belgian farmhouse. Herb was laid on a kitchen table, and the doctor came to examine him.

He was next taken to a field hospital in a convent. It was noon of the following day.

Herb woke up with a body cast from his rib cage all the way down. It was only about 50 degrees in the room and the wet plaster was cold. Still, Herb asked the nurse to take the blanket off his feet.

When he was able, he quickly wrote a V-mail to his mother telling her what had happened. He had never quite got around to telling his parents that he was in the airborne.

Herb never put a foot on the ground for the next nine months. He had to go through skeletal traction to allow the bones to mend together and not be pulled out of place by the body's muscles.

He also found out another little trick of the medical trade.

Herb had come over on the Queen Mary, and he went home on the Queen Elizabeth, another luxury liner converted to a troop ship. He arrived in New York City on April 13, 1945, the day that President Roosevelt died.

He was taken to Schick Hospital in Clinton, Iowa. He later convalesced at a hospital in Daytona Beach, Florida. After his nine months being bedridden, he was able to begin rehabilitation and spent an additional nine months learning to walk again.

Herb was discharged and returned home to Chicago in May 1946. He soon resumed his education at Marquette where he earned a degree in engineering. He met a nursing student named Monna there, and they were married in 1950.

The two had nine children and 15 grandchildren.

Herb worked for number of companies through the years including Westinghouse and General Electric. He was in sales and marketing where he could use his engineering background to good effect.
Eventually he ended up in Minnesota where he was director of Marketing and vice president for Lief Brothers, retiring in 1990. The family lived on Lake Minnetonka for years, and now the Suerths live near the lake in Wayzata.

Herb has been active in the Easy Company reunions, and is now president of the Men of Easy Company made up of the survivors of the company.