‘Filthy 13’ leader, model for ‘Dirty Dozen,’ dies in Chatham
Jake McNiece was gone before we even knew he was here.
His name might not resonate with you. It didn’t with me until I
heard that he had died. After that, it didn’t take long to learn
Jake’s story. It’s worth learning. In a nutshell, he was the
real-life model for Lee Marvin’s character in the 1967 movie “The
Dirty Dozen.”
Jake, 93, died in Chatham on Monday. A couple of months ago, he
and his wife, Martha, moved to Chatham from Ponca City, Okla., to
live with son Hugh, a math professor at Lincoln Land Community
College, and his wife, Mary Ellen.
“We got them to come the Wednesday before Thanksgiving,” says
Hugh. “We enjoyed almost two months together.”
The actual group of WWII soldiers the
movie is based on was called The Filthy Thirteen. They were
rounders — not murderers and psychopaths, as Hollywood portrayed
them, but brawlers and no respecters of authority.
“Well, we often went AWOL,” Jake said in
an interview with Public Radio International. “We never took care
of our barracks or any other thing, or sanitation, and we were
always restricted to camp.
“But we went AWOL every weekend that we
wanted to and we stayed as long as we wanted till we returned back,
because we knew they needed us badly for combat. And it would just
be a few days in the brig. We stole Jeeps. We stole trains. We blew
up barracks. We blew down trees. We stole the colonel’s whiskey and
things like that.”
That’s why they were chosen for the job of parachuting behind
German lines just before D-Day. It was regarded as a suicide
mission. These guys were the original expendables, and Jake, a
demolitions expert, set the tone for them. He was part-American
Indian and had his men shave their hair into Mohawks and put on war
paint before that pre-D-Day mission. A famous picture of it was
printed in “Stars & Stripes.”
Hugh says his dad did not have much interest in “The Dirty
Dozen.” He never met Lee Marvin. Jake said the movie was OK, but
not all that factual. It was a time in his life when he didn’t
really talk about the war to anyone but friends and family.
“In the 1960s,” Hugh says, “Dad was really not ready yet to be
promotional about things. Part of it was respect for the families,
his buddies. In his mind, it wasn’t time to make a big public deal
out of things.
http://www.sj-r.com/bakke/x1578915240/Dave-Bakk…