![]() They fought their way through Belgium, France, and Germany, faced overwhelming odds, liberated concentration camps, and drank a toast to victory in April 1945 at Hitler’s Berchtesgaden hideout in the Alps. They parachuted into Normandy on D-Day and later into Holland for Operation Market-Garden. After training stateside, the men rode the troop ship Samaria to Aldbourne, England, for further battle preparation. The Band of Brothers formed and trained at Camp Toccoa, Georgia, under the tough and controversial Captain Herbert Sobel. Shifty Powers was a soldier with the now-legendary Easy Company, 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment, 101st Airborne Division. Yet, despite this humble life, the world knows his name today.Ĭertainly much of Shifty’s notoriety has to do with his association with the Band of Brothers. He never chased any of the contemporary definitions of success-popularity, power, or position. ![]() After the war, he was never the boss of anything. He began the war as a lowly private and ended the war as a squad leader, never leading a group larger than 12 men. He enjoyed fishing, hunting, working in his vegetable garden, and shooting rifles at targets from his front porch. Shifty was a self-described mountain man, a hillbilly. Aside from a few years he spent working in California and his years in the war, he seldom traveled outside his tiny hometown. He was born, grew up, got married, raised his family, worked, retired, and died in Clinchco, a remote mining town in southwest Virginia. Darrell “Shifty” Powers was a soft-spoken machinist who never aspired to greatness.
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