Edward Tipper

Did You Know?

• Tipper's parents were both immigrants from Ireland, and the family moved back to Ireland when he was three years old before returning to the United States.
• He graduated from a Detroit school in 1939 and worked at a department store.
• Tipper attended the University of Michigan before completing his master's degree.

Military service

When Tipper tried to join the Marine Corps after Pearl Harbor, they turned him down because of his overbite. So he signed up with the Army instead and chose the paratroopers. He ended up at Camp Toccoa in Georgia, assigned to Easy Company for training under Captain Herbert Sobel. Later, at Camp Mackall in North Carolina, Tipper became Sobel’s runner.

With Tipper’s help, Sobel managed to lose his maps, compass, and other gear at the worst possible moments. Tipper kept training with Easy Company in Aldbourne, England. His first combat jump came on D-Day in Normandy, where he linked up with fellow Easy Company soldier Frank Mellet and a few other paratroopers. They got into a firefight with a German patrol, then attacked and held Marmion Farm before rejoining their units.

In Carentan, after clearing a house, Tipper was standing in a doorway when a mortar shell exploded nearby. The blast destroyed his right eye and broke both his legs. Two other Easy Company men dragged him to an aid station. He was sent to a hospital in England, where doctors removed his right eye, and then he was shipped back to the United States.

Later life

After a year in army hospitals, Edward Tipper left the service in August 1945. He initially used a cane and an eyepatch. He remembered how civilians showed support for returning veterans, such as picking up his restaurant tab or giving him a free meal. Tipper earned a master’s degree in English from the University of Northern Colorado and became a teacher. In 1961, he received a John Hay Fellowship from the University of California at Berkeley. At sixty-one, he met Rosy, who was thirty-four, and they married on February 12, 1983. Their daughter, Kerry Christina Tipper, was born ten months later. Tipper passed away on February 1, 2017, at the age of ninety-five.