Jack Foley
Jack Foley
JACK
FOLEY
SOLDIER DETAILS
BIOGRAPHY
First Lieutenant Jack E Foley, of Pittsburgh Pennsylvania, served with Easy Company, 2nd Battalion, 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment, 101st Airborne Division. As a veteran of the Battle of the Bulge, Foley was a platoon leader featured in both the book and the series. Jack endured the horrors of Bastogne, captured the Eagle's Nest and saw first-hand the atrocities at Dachau.
After graduating from high school in 1940, he spent the next three years at the University of Pittsburgh, working toward a degree in political science and economics. By 1943, he and a group of Army ROTC brothers decided they could wait no longer to get into the war and enlisted. By November of that year, he was a lieutenant in the Coast Artillery Corps, guarding part of Puget Sound in Washington. He was later transferred to Texas and decided to become a paratrooper. He completed paratrooper training in 1944 and shipped off to Holland as a replacement to Easy Company. After seeing action in Holland, his unit moved into France, where Mr. Foley fell ill and was taken in by a French family. "I didn't want to go to Europe as a green second lieutenant. I wanted to do something special," Foley told the Post-Gazette in 2001, when he was honored at the Penn Hills Municipal Building. "The paratroopers were daring, unique. They were tough. They wore boots. That was where I wanted to be.". According to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette: "But like most combat veterans, he shared only the stories about camaraderie and tended to avoid the mayhem and death. Until "Band of Brothers," even his own family had never heard the details of his experience. Normally upbeat, he often grew depressed at Christmastime because of the memories of December 1944 in Bastogne, when German panzers encircled and pounded U.S. forces holed up in frozen foxholes." First Lieutenant Jack Foley returned to Pittsburgh after the war. Foley returned to Pitt in June 1946 and graduated that September at the age of 24. He went on to work doing advertising for various Pennsylvania and New York companies, including Alcoa, in Pittsburgh where he retired as an advertising executive in 1982. Jack Foley passed away on September 14, 2009 at the age of 87. He lies in rest at Mount Hope Cemetery in Pittsburgh Pennsylvania. Jack Foley was portrayed in the HBO miniseries Band of Brothers by Jamie Bamber.
"Courtesy WWII uncovered original description and photo sourced by Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, 506 Infantry website and Ancestry Databasetenant"