The (Absolutely True) Legend of Vincent Speranza and his Epic Beer Run

Stories.?The more they’re told, the more they have a way of getting around.?That’s especially true when it comes to stories that emerge from wartime experiences.?Often they can become the stuff of legend.

One war story that has assumed such legendary status is told by a 98 year old veteran of World War II named?Vincent Speranza. ?

Vincent Speranza was born to a large immigrant Italian family from Sicily on March 23, 1925, in Hell’s Kitchen, New York.?He grew up on Staten Island, and was drafted into the Army at the end of 1943. He did his basic infantry training at Fort Benning, Georgia, and was assigned to the 87th Infantry Division.?

After seeing an airborne training jump demonstration at Fort Benning, he immediately volunteered to become a paratrooper. He and his fellow paratroopers sailed to the United Kingdom aboard RMS?Queen Mary—a British ocean liner.?

They joined the fight as replacements for Soldiers who had fought in the the disastrous Operation?Market Garden (“Bridge Too Far”)?in September 1944.

On December 16, 1944, Germany launched a surprise counteroffensive against the Allies through the Ardennes, and encircled the town of Bastogne that was being held by surprised and undersupplied American troops. In response, and in a rush, the 101st arrived from France on trucks without the necessary winter gear.?Speranza was one of those men dispatched to help save Bastogne.?It was his first combat action.?

On the second day of the battle, Speranza’s good friend, Joe Willis, was hit in both legs by shrapnel and was taken into the town where the wounded were being cared for in the ruins of a church.?

“The Germans had slipped around and they had surrounded the town and we had no place to put the wounded,” Speranza said. They used a bombed-out church as a small, makeshift field hospital. Most of their medical supplies and personnel had been captured during the German attack. ?

The wounded were laid out on the floor, wrapped in curtains and bedspreads that had been scavenged wherever they could be found.

The next day, during a lull in the fighting, Speranza was sent back to town by his platoon sergeant for some batteries for the company radios, and he stopped by the church to check on his friend Joe Willis.?He found him there, lying in the ruins. Although he wasn’t badly wounded, he also wasn’t ready to be sent back out to the front lines.?

Speranza asked Willis if he could do anything for him before he headed back to his unit. Willis asked Speranza if he could find him a drink. Speranza politely reminded him that their unit was surrounded, that there were no supplies coming in, and that he was doubtful he could find any alcohol of any kind in the middle of a siege.

Still wanting to help Willis, though, Speranza searched the local abandoned taverns in town. The first one was utterly destroyed, and dry.?Eventually, climbing over debris in the second tavern, he stumbled upon a still-working beer tap.?When he pulled the nozzle, the beer flowed!

And yet, there were no intact glasses anywhere—all had been destroyed in the bombing and artillery fire.?So he took his helmet?– the same one he would use as a foxhole toilet on the frontline – filled it with beer, and carefully rushed back to the hospital in a kind of duck-walk, the beer sloshing loosely, doing his best not to spill any enroute.?

Speranza returned to Joe Willis at the church and showed him his helmet full of beer. His friend was both surprised and grateful.?Speranza passed the helmet along to his other wounded comrades, whose spirits were immediately lifted.?He would make two more trips, bringing beer to the wounded.?In turn, they took sips from his helmet and smiled, often for the first time since they'd been wounded.

Finally, the regimental surgeon—a major—noticed Speranza, and asked what he was doing??Caught red-handed at the doorway with a helmet full of beer, Speranza replied innocently, “Giving aid and comfort to the wounded.”

“You stupid bastard, don’t you know I have chest cases and stomach cases in there? You give them beer you’ll kill them,” the major scolded him.?

Speranza rapidly saluted, donned his helmet—causing the remaining beer to cascade down on on his uniform--and he ran back to his foxhole on the frontline.

Speranza’s comrades never forgot his happy, larger-than-life personality from Hells Kitchen, who was willing to risk his career, even his life to improve their own lot.?

In the final stages of the war, Speranza participated in the liberation of the Dachau concentration camp, witnessing the horror of what the Nazi forces had inflicted there.?Ultimately, he made it to the Eagle’s Nest at Berchtesgaden, and there he found a color-coded world map there with different parts of the world divided up between the Axis powers—Germany, Italy, and Japan. It was at this moment that he realized clearly what they had been fighting for all through the war.

For his service, he received two Purple Hearts, two Bronze Stars,?and other medals to include the French Croix de Guerre.

After the end of World War II, Speranza stayed in France and the Netherlands,?until December 1945.

He returned to New York, once again on board RMS?Queen Mary. After the war, he graduated from Wagner College on the GI Bill, and became a history teacher at?Curtis High School in Staten Island. ? For years, he didn’t think about the war.?

“For years, I completely buried the military, all the killing and loss of lives. I pursued my profession in education and concentrated on helping kids,” he recalled.

Speranza married Iva Leftwich in 1948, and they would have a son and two daughters.

“End of the story, right?” Speranza asks, rhetorically.?Not quite.?And this is where Vincent Speranza’s story becomes one for the ages.

At the age of 85, while in a shop in Florida, Speranza met a Belgian woman from Bastogne and struck up a conversation with her.?He disclosed that he’d fought in Bastogne during World War II.?She encouraged him to return there to see for himself that the locals still remember what the 101st did for them during the war.?

“You have not been back?” she asked. “You must. The people of Bastogne have never forgotten the 101st?Airborne Division. The men and women put on uniforms and reenact the battle. You must go back. They’ll want to honor you.”

So, in 2009, Vincent Speranza and his daughter traveled to Bastogne for the 65th anniversary of the Battle of the Bulge. It was the first time he’d returned to the battlefield after the war.?There, Speranza was treated as a VIP—attending the commemorative events in the city of Bastogne, including visiting the museum dedicated to the battle. There, in a memorabilia shop, they met two young soldiers — one a Belgian tank commander and the other a Dutch Army officer. They took them to the former battlefields around the city. ?

In advance of Speranza’s visit, a historian had made a sketch of the location of foxholes and took him to the one where he had burrowed with his machine gun 65 years earlier.

Speranza was shown the outline where their foxholes were once dug into the ground. There, he searched for the foxhole that bore witness to frigid temperatures and terrible artillery fire they had sustained during the battle.?A stream where Speranza broke the ice to fill his canteen had been covered with grass. ?

Walking the ground there, his memories—that he’d largely suppressed up to that time—came back to him in technocolor.?

Stopping for lunch, they ordered three bottles of wine, and there, the stories flowed. Eventually, Speranza got around to telling them the story of his helmet full of beer.

The soldiers looked at one another, and were incredulous. They asked if Speranza was the actual GI who gave beer to the wounded??Speranza, momentarily confused, replied—“Well, yes.”

“Don’t you know that you’re famous in Europe?”, the Soldiers exclaimed. The story of the G.I. bringing beer in his helmet for the wounded was well-known in Bastogne, they explained.?The story had always been widely known not just among troops, but also among local Belgians. But up to that point, everyone assumed it to be a mere legend.?Decades later, the story would spawn the “Airborne Beer,” brewed in Bastogne by a local brewer.

The Soldiers turned to the waiter, and requested he bring four bottles of “Airborne Beer” to the table.

Speranza was surprised by his newly realized fame, but was even more shocked by what the waiter brought them: a local dark Belgian Ale called “Airborne Beer” served in clay helmets to officially commemorate the story.

“The waiter comes with a tray, and he’s got four bottles of beer and four ceramic bowls in the shape of a helmet,” said Speranza. “The label on the bottle shows a paratrooper with beer going like this,” he said, in reference to how he once carried his helmet full of beer.?

Depicting a smiling American GI marching gleefully with a helmet full of beer, the beer is ritualistically served in a ceramic miniature American helmet.?

The story doesn’t end here either.?To this day, Speranza continues to inspire and lead by his own example.

“After 65 years of non-involvement,” Speranza said, “I started talking to my daughter…and we discussed my writing a book.”?In 2014, he published his book,?NUTS!: A 101st Airborne Division Machine Gunner at Bastogne.

Vincent’s wife, Iva passed away in 2017 after a battle with Alzheimers.?“We were married for 70 years and she was the most magnificent woman.”

The dad of three, grandfather of nine and great-grandfather of five reveals most of his family resides today in New York or in Auburn, Illinois, near Springfield.

Vincent Speranza’s story is replete with a full variety of indelible leadership lessons for anyone who listens closely.?Here are five of them: ?

The Advantage of Morale.?While the 19-year-old could not provide the makeshift aid stations with what they desperately needed— supplies and medical staff—he knew he could bring comfort to the wounded and despondent under desperate conditions.?Speranza’s actions in Bastogne proved to be an enormous morale booster for the wounded and besieged troops of the 101st Airborne Division during that terrible, prolonged battle.

The Power of Stories.?Vincent Speranza had no way of knowing that his clandestine beer reconnaissance patrol during one of the worst battles of WWII would become a notable piece of wartime history, and of local brewery legend.?It continues to inspire, nearly 8 decades later.

The Importance of Training. ?“Pay attention to your training,” Speranza says. “In Bastogne, there were 12,000 American troops next to 56,000 German troops. The Americans had 73 tanks. The Germans had over 1,000. Our food was rationed. We didn’t have what we were supposed to have. But when you are well trained, your brain tells you what to do. When you train and train hard, you have already proven to yourself what you are capable of. That kind of training makes all the difference in the world.”

The Challenge of Resilience.?Vincent Speranza often shares a hard lesson he learned during his wartime experience: “Freedom isn’t free. Someone will always have to pay a price.”?Yet the outlook that sustained him and his comrades throughout the war was also something Speranza frequently relates: “No matter how tough things get, there’s always something to look forward to. In a terrible situation, there’s always some way to find the bright side, to bring out the best in everything.”

Finally, the Influence of Legend. ?

You can still order an “Airborne” beer in Bastogne, as well as many other taverns across Belgium.