![]() ![]() I kept a sling on my rifle during the war, but I never used the sling to shoot in combat.īest I remember they didn’t give us much practice shooting. I don’t even remember if I used it or not. I don’t remember if we were required to use the sling when firing or not. The sling does make it steadier while target shooting. And they taught us how to shoot with the sling wrapped around our arm. They taught us to shoot from the prone position, the kneeling position and the standing position. I always gripped it with my hand so I had more control of the trigger pull. One thing they taught us, was instead of putting your right hand around the stock over the trigger, they wanted you to stick your right thumb out to the right and let it lay along the stock. It took a while to get used to using the six o’clock hold. All my life, when shooting a rifle, I’d been used to putting the sight post on the center of a target. The ideal thing was to get a triangular pattern from your marks on the paper.įor the sight picture on the M1, you put your sight post on the bottom of the target, a six o’clock hold. Then you say “up” or “down” and he’d move it up or down until he got it right and you’d say “mark.” You’d do that three times and then he would check the paper. He would move it real slow and when he got it where you wanted, you’d say, “stop” and he’d stop. The one doing the sighting would say “left” and the other guy would holler for the guy on the box to move the disk left. His job was to tell the other guy which way to move the disk. The third guy, would be beside the guy doing the sighting, was kind of his helper. And he would take a pencil and mark in the center of that disk in the hole, on a piece of paper that was tacked to the box he was sitting on. When you thought you had the disk dead on you would tell him to mark it. From then on he would sight the rifle without touching it and the guy on the box would move that little disk around. He wouldn’t touch the rifle he just had it pointing at the box. As for The other two guys, the one that was doing the dry firing would be lying on the ground and he’d have the rifle laying across a sand bag. He had a little round disk on a stick and that disk had a hole in the center of it. We had a little stool like box and one person would sit on that, I guess maybe twenty yards away, not very far. It usually took three people for one person to dry fire. We took turns practicing aiming and dry firing. We spent about a week there doing rifle training. I’m not sure, but I believe the targets were set up at 100 and 300 yards. They had a good firing range there, a known distance type range. I guess it was 10 to 15 miles from Toccoa we walked over there. But, we didn’t do it on the Toccoa base, we went over to, I believe Clemson College. We did dry firing at Toccoa and we also did our qualifying there. They were brand new M1 rifles and we had to clean the cosmoline off of those too. We were issued rifles within the first week or two we were there. As we took them apart we would clean the parts and lay them out so we could put them back together. We had a Sergeant there watching us, but he didn’t stay around long. Of course, before that I’d never seen a machine gun. One of the first details I was on, me and two or three other guys was cleaning the cosmoline off of some machine guns. I stayed in third platoon throughout the war. When I got there they were filling third platoon and that’s the platoon I was in. They would fill up the first platoon, and then they’d start with the second platoon down through the third platoon. When I came in I was assigned to Easy Company, which is what they were filling up at the time. As we came in they would fill up the companies. The 506th was actually formed down at Toccoa. Not long after the war ended he was discharged from the Army from his home state of Virginia. He was at home on leave when the atomic bombs were dropped on Japan. Injured in a vehicle accident while in Germany, he spent time in various hospitals until being released from a military hospital in Nashville, TN in the summer of 1945. He also fought in the “Battle of the Bulge” around Bastogne and into Germany before the war ended. Powers made combat jumps with Easy Company into France on June 6th 1944 and into Holland on September 17th 1944. After intensive training in the US, the 506th moved to England and continued to train for the invasion of Europe. The Regiment became one of the three infantry regiments assigned to the 101st Airborne Division during World War Two. The story of Easy Company has been described in Stephen Ambrose’s excellent book, “Band of Brothers” and in the HBO miniseries of the same title. where he was assigned to E Company, 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment. He volunteered for the Paratroops and was sent to Camp Toccoa, GA. Darrell ”Shifty” Powers enlisted in the U.S. ![]()
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