Imagine you’re a paratrooper with the 82nd airborne Division during D-day, you’ve been mixed up along with the rest of the paratroopers and have joined up with a ragtag assembly of soldiers from the 101st heading towards Ste. Mère-Eglise. Your group sees a German squad of 4 wagons and roughly 10 soldiers, you set up in your position and aim your rifle. But you can’t bring yourself to pull the trigger, after all, you’ve never killed a man, before you can think a second thought Bill Guarnere has jumped out from cover and taken out the entire unit. He’s never killed a man before today either but it doesn’t seem to bother him. You ask him how it felt and he says “It was as easy as squashing a bug”.

William “Wild Bill” Guarnere was a 101st Airborne paratrooper during the Second World War. He was born on April 28, 1923, in South Philadelphia. The youngest of  Joesph and Augusta Guarnere’s ten children. 

From the beginning of his Military journey, Bill Guarnere was fearless, he joined the Citizens Military Training Camp at 15 when you had to be 17 to enter. When the war in Europe started he had an exemption as he already worked at a factory job producing tanks for the Army, but Guarnere decided not to accept his exemption and enlisted in the military despite not being required to. 

After completing all the training necessary to become a paratrooper and right before his division was set to make the jump for D-day, Guarnere got a letter informing him of his older brother Henry’s death at Monte Cassino in Italy fighting the Germans. 

This fueled Guarnere with more hatred for the Germans than anyone could conceive, once landing in France he would quickly earn the nickname Wild Bill. Killing upwards of 10 Germans, and executing a few more with “No remorse” when they tried to jump his unit, on D-day Wild Bill was fearless.

He continued this trend far into the war when he was struck with shrapnel, fracturing his right tibia and sidelining him from the war effort. Guarnere was sent to England to recover from his injuries, after only 2 weeks of recovery he tried to escape the hospital to rejoin his unit and the war effort. He was still in a cast and could hardly walk but told them he would just keep escaping if they didn’t let him go and join back with his unit. So just 3 weeks after being bombarded with shrapnel and breaking his leg, he was back on the front lines fighting with the 101st again. Guarnere would again be injured on the front lines while trying to rescue a fellow soldier who lost their leg. He would also lose his leg, ending his time in the war.

He would remain fearless off the battlefield, living the rest of his life with only one leg and at times using an artificial leg so that he could work a job. Once he was granted full disability pay he quit his job, threw out his artificial leg, and lived out the rest of his days on crutches. 

Guarnere would go on to write a book detailing his time in the war titled Brothers in Battle, Best of Friends: Two WWII Paratroopers from the Original Band of Brothers Tell Their Story. He and fellow South Philadelphia native Babe Heffron would stay best friends after the war and the two are immortalized forever by way of a statue in South Philadelphia.

Wild Bill and Babe Heffron would remain best friends until both of them passed in 2014 at the age of 90 after multiple recounts of their time in the war, trips to France, and countless retellings of their stories. 

All in all, William Guarnere was indeed wild and fearless in every aspect of his life up until the very end. He accomplished more than most ever will and fought bravely for his country until he couldn’t anymore. Richard Winters his commanding officer said that he “was a natural born killer”.