(JULY 06, 2022) FOREVER IN OUR HEARTS — It is with a heavy heart that we share the news that Bradford Freeman, the Last Surviving Member of WWII's Band of Brothers,’ Dies at 97
The Easy Company veteran parachuted into France on D-Day and fought in major European campaigns during the last year of the war.
Around midnight on June 6, 1944, paratrooper Bradford C. Freeman parachuted into Normandy, France, with an 18-pound mortar base plate strapped to his chest. Landing in a pasture filled with cows, he helped hide a fellow soldier who had broken his leg during the jump before meeting up with the rest of his mortar squad.
After this successful D-Day mission, Freeman and the other members of Easy Company—a unit in the Second Battalion of the 101st Airborne Division’s 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment—fought their way across Western Europe, playing a pivotal role in the Allied advance on Nazi Germany. Immortalized in Stephen E. Ambrose’s 1992 book Band of Brothers and a 2001 HBO miniseries of the same name, the men’s wartime heroics resonate more than 75 years after the global conflict’s end.
A 19-year-old private assigned to a mortar squad led by Donald Malarkey, one of the central figures of the “Band of Brothers” series, Freeman was involved in virtually “every major engagement in Europe during World War II,” said historian Rufus Ward in a 2020 statement from the Columbus Air Force Base, which honored the veteran with a challenge coin in May 2021. He dropped into the Nazi-occupied Netherlands during Operation Market Garden in September 1944 and was shot in the leg during the Siege of Bastogne that December.
“They said I got shot by a ‘Screaming Mimi,’” Freeman told Allen. “You could hear it was coming, but you can’t get out of the way. They said it was a little boy who did the shooting.”
Per his Lowndes Funeral Home and Crematory obituary, Freeman rejoined his unit in time for the final stages of the war’s European Theater, participating in the Allied occupations of Berchtesgaden (a town in Bavaria) and Austria. He opted to return home after V-E Day on May 8, 1945 but was delayed for two weeks by a Merchant Marine strike. Settling back into civilian life in Caledonia, Mississippi, he married Willie Louise Gurley—“a girl [he] used to play with when we were five years old”—as he told Allen, and worked as a mail carrier for 32 years.