It was February 1945, and Second Lieutenant Henry Sweet Jones Jr. , barely out of training, was about to lead his first combat patrol, a raid across an icy river to snatch German prisoners. The goal was simple but dangerous: cross the fast-moving water under cover of darkness, split into two raiding parties, and bring back live captives for interrogation. For Jones, a fresh-faced West Point graduate known as Hank, this was the chance he had been waiting for—the moment to prove he belonged with the hardened veterans of Easy Company.
Jones was born in Buffalo, New York, on April 27, 1924, the son of Helen Susan Jones and Henry Sweet Jones Sr. His father had been a World War I veteran who flew with the Lafayette Escadrille, the French Air Force unit made up largely of American volunteer aviators, and he had reportedly engaged in combat against the famous German ace Baron von Richthofen, better known as the Red Baron. Henry Sr. was awarded the Croix de Guerre and the Legion of Honor, France’s highest order of merit.
Those were large shoes for any son to fill. Growing up in Erie, Pennsylvania, and Dunkirk, New York, the younger Jones developed an appetite for adventure. At one point, he even tried to join the French Foreign Legion, perhaps hoping to follow in his father’s footsteps, but his family rejected that idea. Instead, he set his sights on a military career and entered West Point.
He graduated on June 6, 1944, in the same class as John Eisenhower, the son of General Dwight Eisenhower. After West Point, Jones went to infantry school at Fort Benning, where he engaged in intense conversations about parachute troops. Believing it might satisfy his thirst for adventure, he transferred to parachute school. He and 31 of his classmates received a shortened and intensified version of the course, in the belief that they would be quickly shipped overseas.
After receiving his jump wings in late December, however, he and his classmates were sent to the 13th Airborne Division at Camp MacCall in North Carolina. There he was assigned to a glider infantry regiment, and it was not long before he proudly displayed his glider wings alongside his jump wings. His anticipation of being shipped overseas finally became reality in mid-January 1945. The 13th Airborne Division found itself with too many company-grade officers, so Jones and 15 of the classmates he had earned his wings with were sent to Europe to replace casualties in the 18th Airborne Corps.
He was assigned to the 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment of the 101st Airborne Division, more commonly referred to as Easy Company. He landed at Le Havre and arrived in Haguenau, France, not far from the eastern border, in mid-February 1945, after the Battle of the Bulge. As a replacement leader for the second platoon, Jones was wet behind the ears. According to Stephen Ambrose’s account, he was cocky, clean-cut, and likable, anxious for a chance to prove himself.
Still, it never looked good when new recruits straight out of training arrived after a major battle, as the contrast between the hardened soldiers and themselves was striking, and Jones was not immune to being dismissed by the others due to his lack of experience. He would quickly get his chance. Captain Lewis Nixon, the regimental S2, requested that a couple of Germans be captured and interrogated. Nixon asked his friend Captain Dick Winters to arrange the mission, and Winters picked Easy Company for the patrol.
The plan was to use rubber boats to cross a river and then split into two raiding parties, one led by the more experienced Sergeant Ken Mercier and the other led by Lieutenant Jones, who had volunteered for his first-ever patrol. The goal was to capture several live German soldiers and bring them back across the river for interrogation. The crossing was treacherous. One of the rubber boats capsized twice due to the river’s swift current.
It was Jones who ordered those men to abandon their efforts and go back, telling them to stay inside while the patrol went on. When the remaining men made it across, Sergeant Mercier went to a house not far from the riverbank that was believed to be a German outpost, while Jones and his group went into town in search of Germans to capture. He wisely allowed the more experienced Mercier to take the lead on executing the capture of German soldiers in the house where they were almost certainly located. Whichever group first captured Germans was to blow a whistle to signal both groups to return to the river.
When Mercier and the eight men with him got close to the house, Mercier fired a rifle grenade into the cellar window. The men rushed the house and threw grenades into the cellar, charging in so quickly that shrapnel from the exploding grenades hit Private Eugene Jackson in the face and head, piercing his skull and brain. Jackson would die in the hours that followed. Mercier and his men took three Germans prisoner, two of whom were unharmed.
They met Jones and his group at the river, and prior to making their way back across, they decided to leave the badly wounded German soldier on the riverbank. They crossed in the rubber boats, and some of the men pulled themselves across in the water via a rope that had been strung across and tied on each side to assist the boats. The prisoners were escorted back to Captain Dick Winters at battalion headquarters. According to Lieutenant Jack Foley, Second Lieutenant Henry Jones Jr.
had performed well on his first patrol. Within a week of the successful patrol, Jones was gone, having been promoted to first lieutenant and given a staff job at regiment. As cited in Ambrose’s book, some of the men were critical of how quickly he was promoted, but he was a West Pointer and a member of the protected class. With the end of the war fast approaching, it was rumored that West Pointers like Jones were being protected because they would be the ones who would staff the peacetime Army.
By the war’s end, Jones had handled himself well in combat. He earned three Bronze Service Stars, and while leading a patrol he was wounded but still managed to successfully complete his mission, for which he was awarded the Purple Heart. After the fighting stopped and the Allied Forces emerged victorious, he found himself with the 506th on the outskirts of Berchtesgaden, racing for Hitler’s Eagle’s Nest. With demobilization underway in the months that followed, there were plenty of shakeups in the ranks.
Jones was transferred to the 508th Parachute Infantry Regiment in Frankfurt, Germany. He spent a year there before being transferred to the 97th CIC Detachment Region 8 in August 1946, and he was promoted to the rank of captain. He was stationed in the Berlin region and became a field office commander. While in that role, Jones sustained injuries in a jeep wreck that happened in Heidelberg, Germany.
He was on his way to making a full recovery but had a minor difficulty that required surgery. When he felt healthy again, he went to the 279th General Hospital in Berlin to have the operation, after which he planned to return to the states. The doctors encountered complications, and Jones died in the hospital on the evening of July 21, 1947. Henry Sweet Jones Jr.
never made it home. He was just 23 years old. His time in combat had been brief, but he had crossed that river, taken the lead, and earned the respect of the men he served beside.
His life ended not in the chaos of battle but on a hospital bed in Berlin, a tragic end to a journey that had begun with a young man trying to follow in his father’s footsteps.